Nanowhere | Page 7

to ask and unhatched plans. She understood that part
of it. Alex had his journal. She had her subnotebook. Why anyone who
had something worth writing didn't take it right to digital baffled her
though. Why waste your time making gray scratches on paper when
you could get the thing right into binary?
Kaffia sat at the edge of the skate bowl, face in her schoolwork,
ignoring the laughing of the other skaters, the occasional grunt and
scream of someone eating it, and then more laughing. She joined the

other skaters in glancing suspiciously up at the roar of some military
aircraft that cruised overhead, right above the treetops. The second to
go over in the last five minutes.
She managed to finish her trig homework, read a chapter on the early
battles of the First American Civil War and re-lace her skates, all
before looking up to find the sky had turned pale and the few skaters
and lurkers had all gone home. Alex was still hopping embankments
and rolling around in zigzags and sudden rotates like a marble in a
wobbling bowl. That's how he did his thinking.
She put everything away and stood, stretching her arms as she rolled
forward. The sun hadn't yet set, but was at that dim undecided point
where it tried to linger at the door, fingers clutching at the frame, before
night shoved it into the hall and locked it outside until morning.
Kaffia glanced at the sky through the trees and smiled to herself at the
thought that Alex wouldn't call this night yet.
She braked hard at the bowl's rim and spun her head around. She heard
the dull tap of wheels on pavement and someone chuckling. Kaffia and
Alex weren't alone anymore, and although the newcomers were smiling,
there was nothing friendly about them.

2
Doctor Death

LIKE A HARE on a quick trip to a predator's nest, Dr. Ernest Straff felt
one of his captors' fingers digging talon-like into his shoulder, shifting
every few minutes to regrip, pinning him to his seat. Straff fought back
the urge to wrench up his lunch.
They'd caught him so easily, went through his property defenses like a
cutting rain sheered the load-bearing threads of a spider's web. Caught

on his way to the kitchen for a cup of decaf.
"Damnation!" The word burst from his lips like overpressure from a
release valve, puffing out the black bag covering his head. So so easily.
"Prepared for…" He gasped something unintelligible. His head jerked
forward. His voice sputtered into silence.
He took a deep breath and let it out slowly, the heated gasses from his
lungs swirling around the bag's insides, eddying over his cheeks,
against his teeth.
"Against everything…"
He couldn't hear his own voice over the noise from the engines, just the
breath passing his teeth, his tongue ticking against the top of his mouth
as he formed the words.
"Ground forces with artillery…self-organizing aerosol networks with
toxic payloads." Intuition had always guided him toward the
infinitesimally small, some sort of nanodevice, his own creations used
against him.
Before they'd dragged the hood over his head, he had glimpsed four
geared-up troopers in black and gray, masked and bristling
communication and sense facilities. They'd dropped through his forest
canopy defense as if they could see through it, which shouldn't have
been possible.
He squeezed his eyes closed and shook his head. The rough bag
scraped his cheeks.
"Where were Walter and Wesley," he snapped in a hot disappointed
whisper. "When these…when these animals ripped off the front door of
my house?"
He twisted his lips in, puckering and chewing in fury. Can't blame them.
They'd gone off to the north end to inspect an intrusion. I told them it's

just kids on roller skates who'd worked their way around to the back of
the property, having been stung a few times trying the front road.
And then four soldiers stormed his house and mashed him into the floor
of his own dining room. The north end intruders were a diversion.
They'd known how to get him without much trouble. And then he was
in the air and out of state.
He had thought the airspace over his property sufficiently protected by
a clever bit of mimicry he'd developed to throw off high-res satellite
imagery. Apparently not.
On the other hand, this was not that far from how he'd expected to be
caught. Straff's eyes shot open and swung around the black bag. He
sucked his fury inside to simmer, and after a few hundred more seconds,
his face relaxed. There had always been the hope for more time, and
perhaps a well-deserved but dramatic end to his life, like something out
of an old Frankenstein movie, besieged by a mob of locals