Dave Hutchinson - Sleeps With Angels

“All right,” said Rae. If she could believe in helicopter-flying trees, disappearing power stations were hardly out of the ordinary at all.

Pargeter got to his feet again and started to pace. “Hasn’t it struck you that there’s something incredibly English about this catastrophe?” he asked. “Doesn’t it all seem very cosy ? Not a single aircraft crashed during the Silence. No fires caused by people suddenly disappearing and leaving the cooker on. No car crashes. The countryside’s starting to look a bit scruffy, but after fifteen years it should be wildly overgrown. The cities are in good order. We still have water and gas. The toilets still work.”

“Someone’s running things,” said Rae.

“Someone’s running things for us ,” Pargeter corrected. “If you leave aside the fact that almost the entire human race isn’t here any more, things are actually jolly nice now.”

“Lieutenant Oak,” she said.

“I needed him, and he was given to me,” Pargeter said. “He was given to me by someone.” He rubbed his face. “Tell me about nanotechnology.”

“I’m not an expert, Mr Pargeter. My partner was an expert; I’m an English teacher.”

Pargeter inclined his head. “But you lived for a very long time with an expert; that makes you the closest thing to an expert that we have. You and your partner must have spoken about his work.”

“Well, yes, but twenty minutes on Google would tell you as much as I know about nano.”

Pargeter smiled. “You may have noticed that Google is unavailable. Whatever is helping keep civilisation running has not decided to extend its goodwill to the internet.”

“Mm. Good point.” She thought about it for a few moments. “All right. Well, Pete once told me that, at a basic level, all ‘nanotechnology’ means is ‘technology at a nanoscale,’” she said. “That could be anything from weather control to particle coatings on clothes to make them resist dirt. But what everyone means when they say ‘nanotechnology’ is nanocytes, and there are really only two types of them — effectors and assemblers. Effectors are the little machines that do the work; assemblers do just what it says on the tin — they sit there patiently putting molecules together to build stuff, including effectors. Assemblers have a short shelf-life, and they are never programmed to make more assemblers. That’s just a basic fail-safe.”

“Except the fail-safe seems to have failed,” Pargeter observed.

She nodded. “Certainly after fifteen years all the assemblers should have stopped working. No assemblers, no more effectors. Nanocytes are fragile; the effectors should all have become inert by now.”

“So how do you get assemblers in the first place?”

“They’re factory-made. You run off a batch, test a sample, then set them loose to make effectors.”

“The production lines could still be running, then.”

Rae thought about that. “They could,” she allowed. “That never occurred to me. But assemblers were made in secure conditions — there was a lot of very tight legislation; people were terrified of Grey Goo. And an assembler won’t do anything until it’s tasked. It doesn’t matter whether the labs are still running; without orders the assemblers would just hang around doing nothing until they degraded.”

“Perhaps someone is giving orders.”

“Yes, and perhaps Elvis will tour again one day.” She sighed. “If you’re one of the people who thinks this is The Rapture, I’m afraid this conversation is over, Mr Pargeter.”

“No.” Pargeter smiled sadly and shook his head. “No, I don’t believe in The Rapture. I think I may have some idea about bits of what happened, but not all of it.”

Rae looked at the little Englishman. “Well, we all have some idea about what happened.”

Pargeter tipped his head to one side. “Do you?”

Rae pulled a sour face. “All right. Fair point.”

“But you must have come to some conclusions, surely. Otherwise all this…” he waved a hand to include the room, the building, Oxford Street, London, Europe, the world, “…is just meaningless. Beyond meaningless.”

“That is pretty much the way I look at it, yes.”

Pargeter raised an eyebrow. “You’re an extraordinary woman, Ms Peterson.”

“I’ve never responded particularly well to flattery, Mr Pargeter,” Rae said tiredly.

“No, really. It’s human nature to look for reasons when outside events suddenly change our lives. That’s how we get conspiracy theories. It’s rare to find someone who just regards life as… chaos.”

“I would have thought it was the only sane way to respond to what’s happened.”

Pargeter leaned forward in his chair. “But what has happened? Let’s take that as our starting point, shall we?”

Rae shrugged.

“A large proportion of the human race — very nearly all of the human race — and a great deal of the animal life on Earth has simply disappeared. I think we can agree on that, can’t we?”

“I think I’d find it difficult to argue with you on that point, Mister Pargeter.”

“And if a very large proportion of the human race and a great deal of the animal life on Earth has disappeared, there must be a reason . Musn’t there?”

Rae rubbed her face. “Mister Pargeter,” she said, “I fell asleep fifteen years ago, and when I woke up I could do this .” She clicked her fingers and a motorcycle appeared in the corner of the room. A heavily-customised Harley-Davidson she had once seen on a television lifestyle show. She clicked her fingers and it disappeared again. “It’s taken a great deal of my attention since then just to deal with that, and I haven’t always done terribly well. I haven’t had the luxury of being able to look for reasons .”

Pargeter looked at the space where the motorcycle had been. “Have you ever wondered how you do that?” he asked.

“I do it by talking to the Dust,” Rae said. She raised her hands in front of her face and made tiger-claws at him. “With my radio fingers.”

Pargeter smiled. “What was that motorbike made of?” he asked, turning back to face her.

“The Dust. Nanoassembled molecules. Oh.” She stopped and thought about it. “You know, that never occurred to me before.” She remembered the big experimental assembly chamber at Peter’s company, filled with a solid fog of effectors and gaseous feedstock. It took hours to produce simple shapes like chairs and tables, days for more complex forms, with a dozen supercomputers running constantly to send instructions to the effectors. Nanoassembly had been a constantly-refining technique, but it had never been instantaneous. She’d just got used to it.

“We think that, to create something like that,” Pargeter waved at the corner, “the effectors must be working at close to lightspeed. Faster than lightspeed, possibly. This isn’t the Dust that your husband was developing, this is something quite different. And it must use a colossal amount of energy. Where does that come from? Where does it go?”

Rae looked at the corner and said nothing.

“There’s also the question of how you know how to build a motorbike,” Pargeter went on. “You just think ‘motorbike’ and click your fingers, and there it is, and I’m willing to bet that if we tried it the engine would work and we could just ride it down the street. How do you do that?”

“I don’t know.”

He clicked his fingers and there was the chick again, sitting in his palm, looking calmly around. “This is a real living thing, Ms Peterson,” he said. “Right down below the cellular level. I’ve lost count of how many of these little chaps we’ve autopsied, and there is literally no way to tell them from the real thing. They’re not automata. They even have DNA. Here.” He bent forward and let the chick step off his palm onto the floor. “There you go, little one. Off you go.” He made gentle shooing motions and the chick wandered off until it found something interesting on the floor to peck at. Pargeter sat up and clasped his hands in his lap and looked very seriously at Rae. “I’m classically-educated, Ms Peterson. Winchester, Oxford. I read Greek and Latin. What I know about biology you could write on the back of a postage stamp; I have no more idea of how to build a chick than I have about the interior processes of a star. So how could I do that?” He nodded at the chick, which was gradually pecking its way in little circles away from them. “How can I instruct the effectors if I don’t know what instructions to send?”