Nanowhere | Page 8

with
pitchforks, scythes, torches and Kalashnikov's--when they discovered
who'd been hiding out in their town all this time.
He wasn't terribly shocked that a team of highly equipped illegitimates
had discovered him. These weren't soldiers from the restored rightful
government. They wouldn't have sent soldiers. He'd have received
some sort of court summons and it would have been from guys in gray
suits with briefcases instead of black and gray camo and
assault-o-matics.
He tilted his head a little to catch a faint conversation, but he couldn't
make out the words over the noise.
These were Dr. Greenleigh's people, or some mid-level ex-SAC Board
commander who still had access to the old deathsquads and mobile
military hardware. Zoerner was gone, dead for three years. But even
after a tyrant is removed from power, it takes a long time to uproot all
the evil planted during his reign.
Dr. Straff continued counting absently while his thoughts played with

escape scenarios. One in particular. He had anticipated something, even
if it wasn't exactly this, and he had…sort of planned for it, but it would
take a week to play out, a week before he'd know if he'd live or die.
Until then, he'd count.
He had been hiding for as many days as seconds that had passed. He
hadn't shut himself off from the world, but the world from him. He
diligently read the blogs and newsfeeds. The Net was rife with Straff
sightings and inside stories of his escape from justice. They placed him
in secret Montana bunkers, masterminding worldwide extermination.
They blamed him for natural disasters and species deaths, everything
from producing destructive hurricanes to causing declines in penguin
populations.
He was the nanotech god after all. He could have changed his
appearance, his fingerprints, "his DNA"--as some of the tabloids put it.
He could be among us, selling your kids candy, mowing your lawn,
playing for the Oakland A's.
Straff snorted at the thought. (He was a Red Sox fan from way back).
He also knew who was still out there. He knew exactly who he was
hiding from. The really dangerous ones, not the public. All the public
would do was kill him speedily. Most would anyway. There were a few
million odd vengeful people who'd kill him slowly and feed his remains
to scavenging animals, but these were the more assertive members of
the public, and he didn't know their names.
Others he knew well, and in the past had been pressed into service by
them. They had deceived him, and he'd let himself be deceived. He had
done horrible things for them. Millions died because of what they made
him do. President Zoerner, the head of the Purists had gone to his death,
but the rest of his regime, without the head, remained intact: the
shoulders, the neck, the lower parts of the brainstem. Straff knew very
well who would want him alive.
Straff's stomach rammed into the roof of his mouth as the gunship
dropped from the sky, braked a meter off the pad and then landed like a

few tons of hot armor-plated machinery on concrete. A heavy door
rolled open. One of the soldiers snipped the ties, ripped the rough fabric
hood from his head, tearing away a few irreplaceable strands of gray
hair with it, and shoved Straff into the twilight.
Straff's body was bent as if he carried the accumulated weight of the
corpses he'd produced, millions of them by most estimates--and that
wasn't counting the ciphers, which was a Rost Institute specific project
that took the toll into tens of millions.
He kept the guilt at bay by keeping his mind busy. He had to keep his
thoughts in motion just to remain conscious, doing things like count the
seconds since they'd caught him. The burden of guilt stooped his
shoulders, buckled his spine and would crush him flat if he allowed it
out of his periphery and into focus.
He staggered a little, rubbing his wrists, straightened up as much as he
could, and walked away from the gunship between four of the troopers
who'd captured him. They towered over him, a moving wall of gray
camo rippling over muscles, escorting him up the walk.
Dr. Straff looked exactly as he had always looked. He was a short
stocky sixty year old, nearly bald, with a plump nose and fuzzy white
eyebrows. He looked as if he should be wearing glasses but he wasn't.
In his wrinkled blue labcoat he could have been an elderly small-town
GP from some past era, back when worried mothers rushed their kids to
the family doctor for sprained ankles, chickenpox and temps over a
hundred, and the doctor fixed everything with gentle concern, handing
out lollipops afterward.
That image of the charming family doctor had