“Thanks for coming on such short notice, Laura. Would you get Mr. Farr prepared for a botscan while I get the instruments set up?”
Laura looked at the work table and said, “I’m going to fix a pad for this table, Mr. Farr. I’ll be ready for you in just a minute.”
She went to the emergency fire blanket which was mounted vertically in a long dispensing box by the office door. She grabbed the loop sewn to the blanket, pulled it free of the storage box, and draped it over her arm. Laura returned and folded the blanket into a long pad that she centered on the table.
“Just hop right up here, Mr. Farr,” she said, patting the pad. Jamie jumped up on the edge of the table losing his pants in the process.
“That’s alright, Mr. Farr, I was going to ask you to remove them anyway,” she said as she reached down and picked up his pants.
She handed them to Mary who folded them neatly and put them on a table next to her. Ben came over to the table with a cable in his hand. He took a thin package out of his top pocket, tore the side of the package off and peeled the backing off a self-adhesive gel-pad electrode. Ben placed the electrode on Jamie’s abdomen and said, “This electrode will allow my computer to communicate with the bots.”
He connected the cable to the gel-pad and returned to his seat at the console. “Jamie,” said Ben, “Do you know which sample you injected yourself with?”
Jamie felt uncomfortable talking about what he had stolen from Ben’s lab in front of him. Jamie replied in a low, embarrassed voice, “It was in the front of the refrigerator, marked with a number, 731, I think.”
Ben glanced at Laura and said, “Did you hear that, Laura? Would you go and check on the number for me?”
She nodded and returned shortly. “It was Series 731, Ben. The tube is almost empty,” she said handing Ben the tube.
Ben looked at the tube label, shook his head and laid the tube down beside the computer console. Ben stared at the console as the computer flashed a message that it had achieved linkage.
“The computer’s linked with the bots,” he said, “I’ll order a Ring 0 flush and terminate command………They’re not responding!…They must have reprogrammed themselves and given themselves a level thirty-one priority with Ring 0 privileges. I can’t override! I’ll try a NMI message………..Nothing! They’ve removed the NMI from their instruction set!….Jamie, there’s nothing I can do. They won’t let me take command of the job stack. All I can do is monitor their progress.”
He bent over his console rapidly entering commands. “I’ll have a population count in a few minutes.”
He waited patently for the computer to complete the census. “Good God!!,” he exclaimed as the figures were displayed. “This is incredible. I’d have never believed it if I hadn’t seen it. There are almost a billion bots in him. They must be attempting to repair every cell in his body. Let me query the job stack…………They are! They’re doing a complete DNA re-write. Wait……I’ve got a census update. The population is declining. Slowly, but it is declining. I’ll get an estimate of job completion time……….Two hours! The bots will be 99% completed in 2 hours and 14 minutes. I’ll try to make a spline plot of his age. Jamie, how much of the solution did you inject into yourself?”
“About 5 ml.”
“And when did you do it?”
“Thursday night, about eleven o’clock.”
“Mary, you told me over the phone that he looked like he was about twelve or thirteen this morning. What time was that? Try to be as exact as possible.”
Mary looked at her watch and said, “It was exactly one hour and fifteen minutes ago.”
“And how old do you think Jamie looks now?” Mary looked at Jamie carefully and said, “I’d guess he’s about eight, maybe nine years old.”
“Okay, then. I think I’ve got enough data to make a rough estimate. I’ve fudged a lot of data we don’t have, but at least we’ll have a ballpark figure. There it is. At the current population and rate of population decline, I estimate Jamie’s physiological age will be between six months to two years old when the bots finish.”
Jamie looked shocked at the news, he had never expected that Ben wouldn’t be able to do anything. “After all, the Bots are his invention,” he thought.