...buggy immortality

"Are we ready for human trials?" You recognize your boss's voice before you turn around. You lock your console out of habit as you swivel and stand to look the man in his blue eyes... he's fat, balding, fifty-something, and wearing a silk suit.

"No," you answer immediately, "we only just got the DNA to adult body modeling running within the nanite array, we've only had a single successful test in sim. We're nowhere near the stage for human trials."

"Look, I'm under a lot of pressure from the board..." he takes a breath.

"I can imagine," you jump in, "Complete body and mind backup and rebuilding, securely, and without the need for outside infrastructure?" You laugh, "It's a magic bullet for cancer, heart disease, old age, lost limbs... those board members want it _bad_. "

"But we did have a successful sim..." the man is trying to pin you down on that.

"*ONE* yes," you confirm, "but we're still at least a decade from human trials. We need to have the top hundred major variations in the human genome running successfully in simulation, secure an island to run the tests in case the nanites get out of control, secure permits, get the testing plan approved by the FDA, and so on."

"And the nanites themselves work OK?" He keeps pressing....

"Yeah. The imprinting machine does the job, makes the devices, successfully programs the write-once program memory, the self-replication works, and we've confirmed that the bindings and capabilities are all up to spec for the actual program... but we have that printer on a boat in the middle of the Atlantic ocean for a reason." You take a breath to continue...

...and the fat man jumps in, "So... theoretically... we could apply it to someone today?"

"I JUST said we're at least a decade away from human trials," you object.

"The board members don't have a decade."

You pause... that explains the functionally unlimited budget you've been burning, "How bad are they?"

"Doctors say 'months' for the worst-off," he takes a breath, "...and the best-off is looking at a few years."

You consider, "Well... theoretically... the sim came back clean. But that was exactly one of the couple thousand scenarios we plan to run in sim." You look the man in the eye, "It isn't safe. We cannot do real testing until all of the simulations come back clean, and we can't apply it to a diseased patient until healthy test groups do well." You take a slow breath, "I'm sorry, it sucks that the board members will die before this is viable, but people die daily and I am NOT going do anything that has a reasonable chance of _wiping out humanity_ if we screw it up."

Your boss hits you with a dart from a gun you hadn't noticed he was carrying, "I'm sorry you feel that way..." your boss shakes his head sadly as you feel a mild burning sensation spreading from the impact site, "...but you are right, we should test on at least one healthy person."

You pull the dart from your leg and look at the hollow tube, recognizing the silvery liquid still left inside before you lose consciousness.