by S. Hutson Blount

Mike McDougall’s gaze swept across the whole of creation contained within his basement.

“How do you feel, Mike?” asked Sophie. She had a notebook ready to record her husband’s thoughts.

“Amazing,” said Mike. “More than amazing. Rejuvenated. I can’t even tell that I had a cold. Time since the first nanite implantation?”

Sophie glanced at her diamond watch, a wedding present. “Twenty-eight minutes.”

“You’ve done it. We’ve done it, rather. We’re going to be rich!”

Sophie smiled at Mike as he took deep breaths, seeming to savor the taste of the air. She made more notes.

“And famous too, for what that’s worth,” Mike continued. “This is just the beginning for us. Cracking the viral code blocks is going to revolutionize everything. And once people realize how great they can feel, there will be no more limits for us! No more begging for funding handouts!” He did a few deep knee bends, ran in place as he kept talking. “The extra oxygenation alone is a marketable feature. I’m thinking more clearly now. In fact, I just remembered all the answers to my combinatorics exam from school-even the ones I got wrong. I can’t believe I missed any of those, it all seems so simple now.”

“Mike? Any remaining fatigue or congestion?”

“Congestion? Honey, we’re well beyond that now. Curing the common cold is the least of what I’ll do. What we’ll do, sorry. I can think of a dozen improvements for the next batch of nanites right away. And I’m more than cured, look! Look at my abs!”

Mike flexed, copying a bodybuilder pose. His previously-soft gut did indeed look flatter and more defined.

T+30min: Body mass rearranged, Sophie wrote.

Mike’s eyes were on the horizon, beyond the walls of the equipment-filled basement lab. “I’ve got to get to work. The people need the gifts I will bring them. They need me! They will live in a new golden age, and Mycroft McDougall will be their king! No, their Messiah! Say, does it feel hot in here to you?”

Sophie did not have time to answer her husband before he flushed red, then purple, and then collapsed. Before his corpse hit the ground, the first wisps of smoke had appeared. With a pop, his body imploded, leaving ash and a few embers.

T+31min: Thermal spike. Metabolic governor issues still.

“Oh, Mike,” Sophie said, turning on the vent hood fans to disperse the fumes, “you were cute. I’d so hoped you’d last longer than the others.” With a pair of forceps, she extracted the wedding ring from the pile of ashes and placed it in an envelope labeled “Experiment 14.”

With a sigh, she summarized:

Failure. Rapid expansion of mission goals beyond programmed directives, and attendant overrun of metabolic fuel consumption and thermal exhaust. Must refine AI, or fail-safes,or both!

After a moment, she added:

Note to self: re-run personals ad with the new dating service. Quality of jewelry improving.

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