The Flinkwater Factor by Pete Hautman Page A

the hallway.
    â€œShhh!”
    â€œWhat? There’s nobody here.”
    â€œI know. It’s kind of scary.” I grabbed his hand.
    â€œOuch,” he said.
    â€œOuch?”
    â€œYour fingers are digging into me.”
    Boys are weird.
    I said, “You know what would be exciting?”
    â€œA self-replicating nanobot?”
    â€œNo. The theater. With nobody in it. Except us.”
    â€œWhy would that be exciting?”
    â€œIt just would.” I pulled him toward the theater entrance. Rather to my surprise, he followed. I pushed the door open and we stepped inside. The door swung shut behind us.
    It was completely, totally black.
    â€œWow,” Billy said. “This is cool!”

    What I had in mind: the two of us, sitting cozily in an empty theater, looking up at the empty stage, with no sound but our own breathing. I thought it would be exciting in a romantic sort of way.
    Utter, mind-numbing blackness is not romantic.
    â€œI don’t like this,” I said darkly.
    â€œThen why did you drag me in here?”
    â€œNever mind.” I backed up until my butt hit the door and pushed back through into the hallway. “Come on,” I said. “Grey goo awaits.”

35

    Nanobots
    The Flinkwater High School nanotech laboratory was not a serious ACPOD-level research facility, but it was advanced way beyond an Easy-Bake Oven and a couple of test tubes. We had a sterile build-box with a digital electron microscope, and a set of computer-assisted hydrogen-fiber waldoes that could manipulate matter on a near-molecular level.
    â€œWhy is the professor working here at the school?” I asked. “Doesn’t he have access to the ACPOD labs?”
    â€œHe quit ACPOD a few months ago,” Billy said. “He said he didn’t like what they were doing to animals over in Area Fifty-One.”
    The door to the nanolab was locked, as usual. Billy pressed the buzzer. Nobody answered.
    â€œThat’s strange,” Billy said. “He told me he’dbe here.” He pulled something out of his pocket. It looked like a deck of miniature playing cards.
    â€œWhat are those for?” I asked.
    â€œKey cards,” he said as he sorted through them.
    â€œThat’s a lot of key cards.”
    â€œYou never know when you might have to open something. This one is the key to my dad’s office. And this one is the bank.”
    â€œThe bank ?”
    â€œYeah. Here’s the key to the police station, and this one’s the master key for all the school locks. Watch.”
    He swiped the key across the sensor. The nanolab door opened with a sucking, hissing sound. The high school nanotech lab might not be a serious research facility, but it still had some serious safety features—like negative air pressure and a pneumatically sealed door—to ensure that no rogue nanobots escaped.
    Inside the lab the air felt still and dead.
    â€œProfessor Little?” Billy called out.
    Silence.
    â€œWeird.”
    The build-box display was turned on. Billy sat down at the controls and zoomed in on the image—a glass petri dish containing a reddish, gooey-­looking ball no larger than a pea.
    The build-box controller had a seat largeenough to accommodate two people, like a love seat, only without the arms, back, and cushions. Okay, like a bench. I sat down beside Billy. Our shoulders were touching. He didn’t seem to notice.
    He zoomed in some more. “Look, they’re moving.”
    The surface of the ball of red goo was shifting and writhing in a most unsettling way.
    â€œThose are nanobots?” I asked.
    â€œYeah. Probably about a million of them.”
    â€œHow many would it take to remove a mole?”
    â€œIn theory, only one, because they’re self-­replicating. The idea is that you put a smear of bots on a mole. The bots recognize the abnormal flesh and start to absorb it while reproducing themselves. When they run out of mole