Nano Bots Convert

Ava drummed her fingers on the readout folder in her lap. She could see that her project would run out of money before getting any results, these results were just too nebulous.

"I suppose that we could cut back to one scan a week? Maybe do more interviews and be more selective." Alan said feeling the bad vibes in the room.

"Maybe if we just tried to isolate one thing, one emotion, instead of looking everywhere at once." Sarah's voice wavered a bit when she said emotion.

"Like love perhaps?" Jenn oozed sarcasm knowing that that was the only reason Sarah had joined the team. To figure out how to see that one feeling then get her ex to agree to a scan so she could ask how he had felt about her when they were going out. As if that would make any difference.

Ava put her hand to her temple and rubbed it hard. "Yes, one scan a week. The electric bill from that thing is killing the budget. But we can't pare back too much, we have no idea how different emotions interact and that is the ultimate goal here. Just seeing one spike doesn't tell us much, the human mind is too complex."

"I could turn the detector down a bit. We will miss weaker thoughts but that is 99% of the power drain. Showing images and playing audio can be done for practically nothing." Alan pulled out his phone and began typing on it.

"If we reduce the power of the detector by fifty percent we will only lose... twenty... at the worst thirty percent of the weakest signals." Alan didn't look up as he spoke.

Ava looked hard at him, she had never before thought about turning down the detector, after all, it was important to get feedback during a session. She remembered the first time she had talked Sarah into going over to her house to try her homemade version of the helmet. They had only started powering it up when it blew the circuit breaker.

Ava had then looked into getting a new heavier-duty circuit breaker box installed in her house. On their second attempt, they got 10 seconds of readings before the power went out again. This time though it was the transformer at the pole to her house that went. The workers that replaced it asked no questions but there was no way she could get that upgraded. So her home system was only good for making new scan sets now.

"Why didn't I think of that!" Ava said aloud.

"It will make interpreting readings a lot harder for one, and two, I am also a genius," Alan said, very proud that Ava seemed to love his idea.

Over the next week, Ava spent her every waking free hour on a new set of images and sounds for the helmet in her garage. She could never test it on subjects at the university but if she could get someone over to try it without turning the detector on maybe it would work.

Sarah had wanted a way to forget her ex-boyfriend. They hadn't even gotten a baseline reading from her to start. But since then Ava had been adding her own sets to her official work like the BU set that had told the test subject to break up with his girlfriend. A single command could be implanted in five minutes, but more complex orders would take far more time. Also, Ava believed that in the case of the BU set he had already been inclined to break up with her, he was a notorious player on campus. To get someone to do something against their nature would be harder, perhaps much harder.

She used the university AI to help her with the new set, set SM, for See Me. It was intended to cause people to ignore her scars when they looked at her. Instead, they would see the image of the face she implanted in their minds. Then they would treat her like a real human being and not some creature to be pitied. Ultimately she hoped to try it on a test subject that had never met her before and see what the results were.

While she worked on this she also had a rather sinister idea and made a second new set this one was set SS. The set wasn't intended to be used, if anything it was a joke. This set would test the limits of the technology, at least in simulations. It turned out that it was far more complicated and she allowed the AI a freer hand in its design. When she finished SM she still had much work to do on SS.

It had been a week since she finished SM and still she was working on SS. She asked the AI to run another virtual simulation of the new set and it predicted one hundred percent effectiveness in ninety-six hours or less. Four days was a long time, too long. She then set about making a new set, one that would cause someone to remain docile and compliant while the SS set completed its work.

After only three hours it was complete and she typed in the new set name and hit enter. The name of the set came out as 'set PD'. Ava frowned, that was not what she had typed in. She renamed it but again after hitting enter, the file name was set PD.

"What the hell," she said out loud, exasperated that the very final thing she needed to do to finish her work wasn't coming out right.

She began typing in her desired file name one more time but was interrupted by her doorbell. She looked at the clock, it was 10:22 PM. "What the hell," she said again.

Ava got up and headed to the front door. When she looked outside she saw Tina standing on her patio. She had on a thick coat over a bright red blouse and blue jeans and was carrying what looked like a wine bottle in each hand.

Ava opened the door grudgingly, "Yes," she said hoping Tina would just go away.

"Ava! So good to see you. I just finished up the latest stage of my project and wanted to celebrate." Tina waved a wine bottle at Ava.

"Aren't there other people you can celebrate with?"

"It's Friday night, you know how those students are. Too rowdy for me, I just want to sip wine and chat with a friend." Tina wasn't going to take no for an answer.

"Fine, I guess I can celebrate too. I just made a breakthrough of my own." Ava stepped back to let Tina inside.

An hour later the wine bottle that contained wine was empty, as were two more that Ava added to the party. They were both loose and tipsy but not drunk.

"The real reason I came here was to help you out. The truth is we are working on a new skin cream and it should remove your scars." Tina said conspiratorially.

"What?" Ava almost spit out her wine. "How is that possible, this isn't a blemish, this is eighteen years of scar tissue."

"Trust me," Tina said as she pulled a pair of very thick rubber gloves from the coat draped next to her on the couch. "This," she held up the second wine bottle, "Isn't wine, it is really my miracle solution. And from the tests I ran the last two weeks I am confident that it will work,"

She removed the ceramic lid from the bottle and produced a long applicator from her coat. After putting the applicator into the bottle and scooping out a blob of gel she approached Ava.

"Are you sure that this is safe?" Ava was more than a little worried, but if this worked it would be life-changing.

"Absolutely," Tina said as she dabbed some gel onto the very top part of Ava's scar, right behind her ear. She kept adding more gel and slowly worked her way down Ava's face and to her neck. It had been ten minutes and still nothing had happened. If anything the gel seemed to just sink into her skin with no effect. Tina frowned and began applying more gel, starting behind Ava's ear again.

Ava wanted to stop Tina, this was ridiculous and obviously wouldn't work. She was about to say something when she felt woozy. Her head started spinning and she felt like she would faint. Her mouth moved but no sound came out. Suddenly she began hearing a soft buzz, like thousands of bees, but she didn't think that it was her ears that were hearing the sound.

Tina was almost out of the gel and was beginning to worry. "Had she brought enough? Was there something different about this older gel that she had gotten the lab to send her? But it had regrown the mouse's paw."

She turned to set the empty bottle on the coffee table, dejected. Suddenly Ava grabbed the bottle from behind her and swung it down on Tina's head.

"Sorry it was the only way," she said as she picked Tina up off the living room floor and carried her to the garage. Once she had Tina strapped securely to the chair she sat down at her laptop. The box to rename the set file was still blank. Ava typed in 'set PD' and hit enter suddenly understanding what PD meant. The buzzing in her head told her that it stood for Pre-Drone.