by Ann Christy
The long and short of it is duration. My nanites don’t replicate. I have to have infusions of new ones. Not too long ago, my doctor told me that they were working on a factory nanite for my type, but because it was a rare nanite, it wasn’t super high on the priority list. The highest priority nanites were those that many people needed. They create and design the factory nanites for the chronic conditions that impact the most people first.
There really aren’t that many kinds that have factory nanites yet, I don’t think. Some nanite types can’t even have factory nanites, though I’m not sure what the criteria is for deciding that. I didn’t know it before Fred told me, but the people here don’t need new nanites for most kinds they have. They make new ones in their bodies. They have factory nanites because they’re common nanite types.
He even lifted his shirt and showed me the tiny dot of a scar where something he calls “the gizmo” was inserted. I don’t know how much you truly understand about nanite construction, but it seems rather important now, so it’s worth explaining in case you don’t.
Nanites aren’t machines in the traditional sense. They do what they do primarily because of their shape or construction. They’re too small for programs. Well, most of them are. A good example would be the nanites for sickle cell anemia. The graspers on those nanites, which are so small they’re made of individual molecules strung together, are attracted chemically to red blood cells. Their shape means round blood cells won’t fit into the graspers. Only when the nanite runs into an incorrectly shaped blood cell can it grab it. Then, because it’s a digesting type, it destroys the cell. That releases the components back to the body systems for production of another blood cell. Hopefully, a properly shaped cell next time. That also uses up the nanite, which now needs to be replaced.
There are loads of different types, and the mechanisms are different for each nanite type, but generally speaking, it’s not like robots inside the body. They’re too small for that. There are two more stages to the nanite solution…and now, the nanite problem. The first of those are the factory nanites. They’re larger and simply produce more of the nanite needed. The second is the “gizmo,” which I’ve heard of but don’t yet have myself. The gizmo is basically a small unit the size of a fingernail which communicates and measures nanite loads. It’s basically the brains of the system.
In the case of sickle cell, a component inside the body—which Fred calls the gizmo—measures nanite loads in the bloodstream. When that gets low, it stimulates the factory to create more until the load is sufficient. Those new nanites go on to destroy more incorrectly shaped blood cells. Sickle cell is a chronic disease, so this process can go on indefinitely.
Like I said, I didn’t have factory nanites yet and the doctors told me there was a long list of other nanites that needed factories first. I had assumed there weren’t that many. While it’s true there aren’t that many types of factories, they’re the ones the most people needed. You can do that math. It’s not good math, is it?
Well, Fred shared the news that almost everyone here has factory nanites for the common types. Both he and Linda also have gizmos and he’s betting everyone else does too.
Unlike me, who will die when my nanites run out, they’ll be fine. Indefinitely. Which also means that they’ll be infected indefinitely. Eventually, we’ll find out if any of the nanites here are the ones that cause people to wake back up or change into crazed monster-people.
I did ask him if maybe we should cut out their gizmos, but he’d only shaken his head like that was a pipe dream. Apparently, they’re inserted so that they measure primary blood flow, which means prying them out would probably burst a major artery. They’re deep inside the body and out of our reach.
Maybe you know this. Maybe it’s three years down the road and you’ve stumbled onto an abandoned group of houses filled with racoons nesting in our old beds. Or maybe it’s only a week from now. I don’t know, and I have no way to know, but I’ll tell you this. What he said scared me. Badly. It means that it’s entirely possible that this nightmare will never end, that it will perpetuate itself via factory nanites forever.
In a way, I’m relieved I won’t be here to see what happens. I know that sounds terrible, but that doesn’t make it any less true. Grace was easy to kill at the moment I killed her, because I was scared. She’s haunted me since then though. I didn’t know her well before she became a FiRF. I’d only met her a few times when she visited her daughter on holidays and such. If she’s haunting me like this, her crazed face popping up in that moment before sleep or when I’m doing something mundane, then what would it be like to have to kill people I know? People I like?
I don’t want to know. Maybe, in a way, I’m the lucky one.
Day 21 - Early Morning
I promised to talk more about Grant, and I’ve been thinking of him a great deal, so this seems a good time. It’s barely daybreak and I’ve got my single, allowed cup of coffee at hand. The others won’t be up and around for a little while yet, so this is my time. Once the neighborhood wakes, I’ll be busy and working all day long.
When I bought this lot and watched the house being built, I met a good number of the neighbors. They were curious, which was understandable. They knew a woman in a wheelchair bought the lot and there was a two-story house going up, so I’m sure everyone had questions, even if they didn’t think it polite to ask. There were oblique questions instead. You know the kind I mean. Did I have a large family and when would they get a chance to meet everyone else moving in and, of course, the furtive glances to see if a wedding ring wrapped my finger.
I knew it was coming, so I tried to be as forthright as possible. No, I wasn’t married and didn’t have children. Yes, I would be living alone. Yes, two story houses are easily managed when one installs a stair lift and a ramp or two.
The only person who didn’t tiptoe around things was Grant. I met him only after the shell of the house was complete and the interior well underway. I rolled down the ramp the builders had installed on one bright and sunny day to find him at the end of the driveway, giving the house a cool once-over.
I knew who he was, because other neighbors had filled me in on the longest-term resident. Not in any mean way, but only to point out the various houses and tell me who lived in each one. That sort of thing. I’d waved to him and rolled down the ramp. We introduced ourselves and all that, but then he surprised me by nodding at my legs and asking, “Those legs aren’t real, are they?”
No one ever said things like that. No way. It was almost like most people felt they needed to pretend everything associated with my wheelchair simply didn’t exist. I answered truthfully, then he grinned a little. It was the first time I saw that devilishly mischievous side of him that I quickly came to like so much. Even then, I knew something was coming.
He’d leaned down a little and asked in a rather conspiratorial tone, “Let me ask you a question. What do you put down as your height on your driver’s license?”
It was so unexpected that I laughed, as in really, truly laughed. And thus, our friendship was born. If I could point to anything that would describe Grant well, it would be that initial meeting of ours. Unabashed, friendly, full of the good kind of snark. He’s also a bit of a Neanderthal when it comes to modern sensibilities, but he was raised during a different era, so I merely let him know when he’s being a caveman. I think he appreciated that. I acted as his personal interpreter for the world today, I suppose.
Going through things in his pantry and kitchen made me so sad, but also a little mad. Out of all the times of the year, he had to be gone when the world ended. I know that’s silly, since he and Bob find excuses to tool around pretending to do errands almost every day. Given the time of day it all started, he probably would have been shopping thirty or forty miles away anyway. Still, I wish he’d come back.
I just looked at the time and my coffee is now cold. Time to swig it down and get to work. We’re going to do more work cleaning up the mess left behind in
the houses.
Day 21 - Evening
Why do they keep coming? What exactly is drawing the monsters to our little group of houses? As the sun climbs, they come from the trees and right toward us. Paul thinks it’s the light. The forest is thick and dark, a typical mixed forest of this area. The light where the trees end abruptly might be drawing them. That’s his theory. For whatever reason, that sounds plausible to me, but I don’t know for sure. No one does. It’s a better theory than Marcy’s, who thinks it’s supernatural, or Fred’s, who thinks they can smell humans and it’s like food. I really hope Fred isn’t right about that one.
Everyone has been working on weapons today. We need quieter ones. They can use me and I’m handy, but I can’t kick everything to death. Gunfire works if you shoot them in the head enough times…once is almost never enough…but it’s so loud that more monsters come. Plus, since one bullet is never enough, we’ll run out of ammo eventually. No one wants to risk that.
No one here knows how to use a bow and arrow, but Martin found a crossbow in one of the houses, so people are taking turns with it. It’s a lot slower than I thought it would be. It’s too strong for most of us to load, so we have to use the lever on it. That takes the slowness to a whole new level. Doris can’t even load it with the lever. We need weapons that are light, fast, and effective.
They’re working on sharpening axes and everything else with a blade. Paul and Martin are crafting some traps, but I don’t think that will catch many of them. The monsters may not be entirely human anymore, but they’re smart enough to avoid a hole in the ground. I think they are anyway.
Doris had the idea of creating a spot in one of the houses that faces the field, a room filled with as much noise-absorbing padding as possible, and then shooting from that room. Maybe even remove a piece of glass like a shooting port. The idea is that it would cut down on some of the noise escaping the house. I don’t know enough about guns to know if that would work, but some of the others seemed excited by the idea.
It did bring up a good point, and the group addressed it right then and there. Smells. Are our smells bringing them? Or maybe bringing them those final yards once they get out of the forest? Because so many of us have solar, life has been going on fairly normally. Well, not entirely, because the water is getting weird and we don’t know how long it will be safe to use. Soon, I think we’ll be getting it from the wells that we have in the neighborhood, but in most ways, it’s the same. That includes cooking.
It’s normal to smell baking bread in the mornings, wafting in delicious waves on the breeze from one of the houses. Linda and Doris have almost taken over in providing us lovely fresh and warm loaves each morning. Light as air and full of delicious carbs. It’s also normal to smell meat on a grill…though that’s going to run out when our freezers empty. We’re all behaving normally in that regard. We’ve agreed that it’s got to stop.
We’re not yet sure how we’ll handle the baking issue, because honestly, I can’t imagine life without bread of one kind or another, but everything else can be cooked in ways that minimize smell. I don’t think I’m going out on a limb when I write that there were a few people relishing their new freedom to grill steaks without anyone harping about cholesterol or prices. I won’t say I saw pouting, but I saw slightly puffed out bottom lips. For sure. Not naming names…Fred, Martin, Doris.
Here’s a tip that won’t help you much, but we’ve all learned it the hard way. Don’t let daintiness about going into someone’s house stop you from being smart. I mentioned that a lot of the houses here in our little green community have solar, but a lot of them don’t. As we’ve started the process of entering these houses, we found freezers and fridges full of food that’s gone bad. As in, cover your face and run out the house to puke levels of bad. Such a waste!
Even in houses with solar, the fridges are full of expired food and leftovers gone fuzzy and green. It’s a shame. Knowing we’ve only got what we’ve got here within this small area has changed our metrics some.
A more useful tip for today is something I learned from Martin. He mentioned it during our pow-pow, but came back out of his house waving a tablet just before dinner. I guess he wanted to check his references or whatever.
He’s a writer, but not fiction or anything like that. He’s a science writer for a magazine and website. He even writes for the Post sometimes. Or used to, I guess. That means he’s full of knowledge that may or may not wind up being useful. And he has loads of this info on drives and sticks from the various bits of research he’s done. He says any smart news writer keeps all their references. I’m so glad he did.
The reference he found was a study, and I read only part of it because it was so densely worded it made my eyes roll back in my head. Martin very kindly gave us the layman’s version. He told us that the human nose and mind aren’t nearly as inept as we’ve come to think of them. We’re not like dogs in pure mechanical scenting ability, but there are some scents that we can home in on like a dog.
The longest distance and best directionality for humans is smoke. This makes sense since it’s a life or death thing from all the way back in our evolution. It surprised me that he said the second most powerful scent is baking bread or pastries. Apparently, humans can detect and find the source direction of that pretty well. Third is cooking meat over fire, like barbeques or whatever. I suppose that also makes sense. I can remember what I would do when I smelled the wonderful scents from the bakery downtown, that hint of sugar smell wrapped in the cloud of baking bread.
Okay, I have to stop that now. I’m going to start drooling. Donuts. Oh my gosh, donuts.
Anyway, Martin is going to make us a handy chart, but as he spoke, I could tell that others were thinking the same thing I was. If the Awakened—most of us are calling them monsters, because it’s impossible to kill them when you think of them as human—are being drawn to the edge of the forest by light, how far will we have to clamp down on life to avoid being smelled by them? And what does that really mean, if they’re smelling us like food?
Martin told us that up close, humans can distinguish the most amazing things about each other through scent, but we don’t always recognize that we’re doing it. Our behavior or feelings toward a person give it away if studied properly, but on a conscious level, we don’t realize we’re judging people by their chemistry.
Bear with me here, because this is complicated and I’m having a hard time getting the right words to come. Still, I think it’s important and it might help you. I have to detour to get to the right place. So, detours ahead.
We’ve all mentioned many times that the monsters act like animals, but sometimes…just sometimes, mind you…you can see the human inside. We don’t like to think about it, so discussion of this is always tentative. No one wants to validate that potential truth, because it would make killing them much more difficult. And we have to kill them. We do.
Anyway, I only see it in flashes and usually it’s pain that makes it happen. Or maybe it’s fear. Yes, they always seem rage-filled, and rage is usually a human emotion, but that doesn’t register as human. It’s only in that split-second when someone shoots one, or I kick it for the first time…but not hard enough to finish the job…or when a monster turns to run away.
And yes, we’ve seen them do that too. Turn and run. Something without thought wouldn’t do that.
I won’t say it’s only pain or fear or confusion. It’s more like a combination of all those things, but in a way that’s utterly transparent. I never had kids, but I’ve been around enough of them to recognize it. You know how a small child wears their emotions on their face? Ever seen one get hurt, like fall and skin their knee? Have you ever noticed that their entire thought process is right there on their face? You can see it happen in their expressions. First, there’s surprise, then fear, then hurt, then even more fear because of the pain. It’s fleeting, but there.
That’s what happens with the monsters. It’s like they become a two-year-old for a split sec
ond. It passes and the rage returns, but it’s there. I think maybe I see it more frequently because I engage with my legs instead of shooting them, which means I’m closer to them. If we do switch to axes and machetes and other close-in, quiet weapons, the others will have to see it more too. Even without that close contact, I know some of the others understand it like I do, mostly because of the way we don’t talk about it.
What does this have to do with baking bread?
It relates to what Martin said about humans and what we’re wired by evolution to smell and be drawn to. If it is our scents—whether it’s cooking or simply our homes with people inside them—then they aren't entirely monsters. They’re accessing their human preferences, even if only subconsciously. When combined with those fleeting looks of human emotion on their faces, I’m left with only one conclusion.
The monsters aren’t monsters. They’re humans who’ve been left unable to control their impulses, or perhaps given new impulses they can’t override. Deep inside them where we can’t reach, they’re still human.
And that makes all of this even more terrible than it already was.
Day 24
I couldn’t write over the last few days, and to be honest, I almost gave it up entirely. It seems so pointless. Maybe it is, or maybe it’s depression getting the better of me. I feel like I have to record what’s happening here, if for no other reason than that I have no other way to let the world know about these people. I can’t post the losses on social media, attend a funeral or vigil, can’t scream to the wind. I can’t send flowers or tell their family from far away how wonderful their loved one was.
All I have is this. And maybe…just maybe…you.
Doris died two days ago. Every single one of us who went out with the intention of using axes or whatever else to quietly dispatch our visitors got bitten, some of us more than once. Only Fred and Marcy remain unbitten, because they weren’t outside.
