Nanobots, Murder, and Other Family Problems

“You’re absolutely sure he can’t read what I write when I’m not hooked on the leash?”

“Positive,” Evan says, shifting on the couch. “Like I told you, I write down all my thoughts, and I mean all my thoughts. If he could read back through my journaling, he and I would have had some very uncomfortable conversations by now.”

“Like what?”

He gives me a long look. “You really want to know?”

“Sure. How bad could it be?”

“Bad enough that he would have said something.”

“Right. What, you described all your fantasies of what you’d like to do with the lunch counter girls?”

He shakes his head. “I won’t deny that there’s some of that, but that’s not what I’m talking about.”

“Come on man, just tell me already.”

He laughs at my persistence, then glances around to make sure there’s no one else in earshot. The only other people in the common room are a trio of little kids playing a video game on the other end of the room, and they have the sound up high enough there’s no way they can hear anything we’re saying.

“Fine, but you can’t tell anyone. I occasionally think some pretty unflattering thoughts about our illustrious progenitor, and I capture them in explicit terms. If he’d seen any of that, we would have had some words, I promise. He only sees what you write while the cable is connected. I dug into the technical specs. The log storage is encrypted so that only you can access it. Some biometric security thing. Once it’s stored, it’s locked. He can only see the live feed before it goes into storage, and only when you’re wired up.”

I breathe a sigh of relief. A month of making it look like I was writing down every thought while constantly praising that murderous bastard has been the hardest part of this whole experience. When he dissects the training rig’s storage, all he’ll see about me is exactly what I want him to see: the perfect lost son come back at last to his father’s embrace. Stealing a few minutes to write my real thoughts in my journal at the end of the day when I could finally take the thing off was the only thing that kept me sane. Now I can finally be honest with myself again. At least, I can when I’m not in the lab.

“So what’s your beef with him?” I ask. “I thought everyone here worshiped at the altar of paternity.”

“I’ve got my reasons,” he rumbles. “But tell me how things went in there. You were in and out fast. Everyone else took days for the install.”

The abrupt subject change tells me that Evan isn’t going to talk about it no matter how much I press. I let it go for now, even though I’m dying of curiosity.

“He said something about the version I have being newer and safer. Apparently it’s faster to install too.”

“That’s cool. Where are your stitches? I want to see. Does he still go behind the ears with the new one?”

“Stitches?” I ask, feeling behind my ears. Nothing there. “He didn’t even cut me, I don’t think. I mean, I was out when he did the surgery, but I would have noticed by now.”

“Then how did he…”

He trails off, looking confused for a moment. Then he smiles. “Wait. He did the whole thing with the medical bots. The bots are the implant. You’re the world’s first human-nanobot hybrid. We gotta tell Louise about this, she’s going to love it.”

Medical bots? The nanobots come in different flavors? I have so much to learn about this tech. At least now I’m starting to get answers.