Fugitives of Time: Sequel to Emperors of Time (7 page)

“Plastic surgery from your own home?  I don’t get
it.  Who’s holding the scalpel?” Rose asked.

“That’s the point.  No one.  One of the big
breakthroughs was people starting to use nanobots to do all the work. 
Manufacturing synthetic tissue where it was needed, removing tissue and
imperfections where they were no longer desired,” Paul explained.

Billy frowned and said, “Wait…  nanobots?  I think
I’ve heard of them before, but…”

“Ah, right.  I keep forgetting how much is after your
time,” Paul said with a wave of his hand.  “Just really tiny robots. 
Basically invisible.  These days, there are all different types of
nanobots, but the ones used for this sort of thing are about the size of a
human cell.”

“And they can perform plastic surgery?” asked Tim, both
flabbergasted and creeped out.

“Yeah,” said Paul.  “It’s perfectly safe.”

“Have you ever had it done to you?” Julie asked.

“Nothing major,” Paul said with a laugh.  “Everybody
uses it to combat acne when they’re in their teens.  Nothing like a couple
hundred nanobots to wipe out an outbreak.  Of course, those are kind of
low-tech compared to the model you’ll be using.  They can do all the
standard stuff like changing your hair and eye color, even shading your skin
tone, but these are more advanced.  These can get to your vocal cords so
you sound like they people you’re mimicking, and they can muscle their way in
through the skin cells and get to the bone, because your face’s bone-structure
will have to be changed.  Only slightly of course.”

“Wait!  These things are going to be taking away my
bones?” Rose asked, alarmed.  “How is that something that can just be
changed back afterwards?”

“Well, we’d use artificial tissue again afterwards to put
everything back to normal.  You’re really not going to be able to tell
much of a difference.  It’s not that big of a deal.  I haven’t even
gotten to how they’ll change your body,” said Paul, pausing as he got another
anxious look from Rose.  “Which again, is not a big deal.  My nephew
picked people who were the same height as you all, or at least close enough
that no one will ever notice.  So it’s just a question of adding some fat
to some places, sometimes taking it away from others…”

He trailed off because it was at that moment that Hopkins
walked in.  As soon as he saw the generally appalled facial expressions
from the teens, he raised his eyebrows at Paul.  “I had them talk to you
because I thought you could make them feel better about having their
appearances changed.”

Paul was about to answer his relative when Rose beat him to
it, “He said he’s going to take away my bones!” she accused hysterically. 
Tim fought to stifle a laugh. 

He’d had some moments of high anxiety over the last few
days.  All the teens had. 

Hopkins gave his great-uncle another look.  “No one is
going to take away your bones.  They will only be altered a bit.”

“My point is,” Rose said,  not calming down, “that I’m
always going to have weird bones that aren’t all mine in my face, even when you
change things back.  ‘Cause you can’t put any of my bone back in there,
it’s just ‘artificial tissue’ or whatever.”

“Right, but you’re not going to be able to tell the
difference,” Hopkins said.  “Besides, once I reprogram all the Domini
Temporis, everything will turn back to normal, including your face.”

“Yeah…  but Rose’s face will never be normal,” Julie
joked.

Rose glared at Julie.  “What, so you’re just okay with
this?”

“As okay as I am with any of this.  We’re traveling
through time to save the future, so if we’ve got to change our faces to do it,
well…  whatever,” said Julie.  She looked around to Tim and Billy to
see if they’d back her up.

Tim shrugged.  “You guys know I’m in.  I just want
to go back to 1854.  I’ll let nanobots make me look like anything they
want if it means I get to travel back in time again.”

Rose sighed.  Tim knew she liked history just about as
much as he did.  “Okay, I hear you.  But it’s still just super weird,
right?”

Billy said, “I’m still going to be tall, so if there’s a few
artificial bones in my face or something, my height’s my only physical
characteristic I’ve ever really cared about.”

“Boys...” said Julie, with an eyeroll.”  “But
seriously, Rose, you’re in, right?”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m in.” Rose paused, then said, “But let’s get
to it before I change my mind.  How about we knock me out and get
started?”

Hopkins smiled, but raised his eyebrows at Rose.  “What
do you mean?  There is no need to put you under anesthetic for this
procedure.  The nanobots will administer localized anesthesia as they go,
but you will be awake throughout the entire process.  It should only take
about forty-five minutes.”

Tim thought it a bit maddening how laid back Hopkins sounded
as he explained this.  It may seem like no big deal to him, but he wasn’t
the one undergoing this weird futuristic version of plastic surgery.

Chapter 8

Paul’s
Story

 

After Hopkins had finished explaining the procedure, Paul
left the room and came back with a cart.  While the nanobots themselves
were very small, they would have to add a fair amount of tissue and fat to the
teens.  The raw materials for this took up most of the space in the
cart. 

According to Hopkins, the nanobots would carry tiny bits of
synthetic skin, fat, and bone from containers on the cart and fly it through
the air to the teens.  Assembly would be done on site, with the site being
the body of each of the four patients.  Though much of the work would be
done on the surface, like tweaking skin and hair color, the bots were also
small enough to get into the teens’ bodies through their pores.  Once
inside, they could do whatever they had to do to sculpt their bones into the
proper shape. 

The experience was no less weird than Tim had imagined it
would be.  It would have been freaky enough to go to sleep and wake up to
look in a mirror and see how much you had changed.  It was way weirder to
sit in one of these chairs that looked like it belonged in a dentist office and
wait while the nanobots went to work on you.

“So, like I said, no more than forty-five minutes to get
everything done.  Everything has been preprogrammed for all of you, so the
bots will do the work on their own.  There are enough bots that you will
each have your own team working on you at the same time.  Are you all
ready?” asked Hopkins.

Each of the four teens sounded some degree of nervous as
they confirmed they were ready to go. 

Hopkins had been right about one thing, though.  The
procedure was completely painless.  An odd tingling sensation visited
different parts of Tim’s body as the nanobots added extra bits of padding under
his skin.

At first, the teens talked to each other to try to get their
minds off what was going on, but they soon found that it was hard to keep
conversation going when you’re trying to imagine what weird things the nanobots
were adding or subtracting from your body.

So eventually Rose had the sense to ask someone who wasn’t
being operated on to carry the conversation.  “So, Paul, as you’ve
probably gathered already, Tim and I are huge history geeks, and July and Billy
have gotten good at tolerating that.  So I think you should tell us your
story.  How do you go from being an -- I assume -- normal kid in the 23rd
century to living in a huge underground bunker?”

Paul frowned thoughtfully.  “I guess I was fairly
normal in the beginning.  But I started to think things around me were
getting weird when I was about your age.  The world was changing.”

“How so?” Rose asked.  “Ew… wait.  If my eye feels
all weird and itchy, does that mean they’re changing my eye-color right now?”

“If by ‘they’, you mean the nanobots, then yes,” Paul said.

“Well that’s just gross,” Rose said.  “But continue
with your story.”

“It’d better be a good one,” Julie registered.  “I’m
about going out of my mind over here.”

“Well, fifteen years ago, 2262, the American Empire had just
declared war again.  War’s different than you’re used to in your
time.  Lots of digital components.  We were at war with Germany, so
there were long periods of time where any device connected to a network in
Germany was infected by a virus that made it incapable of doing anything but
play pro-American propaganda.”

The teens laughed at this.  Even if it they were
enemies with the people pulling the strings on the American government in that
war, they had to admit that was a bit clever.  Billy spoke up, “That’s
hilarious.”

“Well, not exactly,” Paul said.  “Just keep in mind
that even though we’re not talking about guns or bombs-- both of which were
also used in the war—that doesn’t mean people didn’t die.  Computers that
people relied on for controlling the heat in huge apartment complexes went out
in the middle of winter. The banks were broken, so even millionaires couldn’t
pay for food.  Electricity went out in most parts of the city, because the
major electric companies had huge digital components in their management
structure.  Refrigeration for food failed, and hospitals were sent back to
pre-industrial times.  Rioting was rampant.”

When Paul paused, Julie spoke up.  “Geez, so the
nanobots are on my eyeballs now, too...   Gross!” 

“Right, which is why we need to let Paul tell us his story
to distract us,” said Rose.  “So America was at war with Germany, then
what?”

“Well, the Germans resisted for a long time, even when the
Americans started to cut electricity to the rest of continental Europe, the
core of Germany’s empire.  Europe stuck together with the German empire,
guarded by hundreds of thousands of armed troops, until finally Washington
decided the European Empire was weak enough to go in with more conventional
troops, planes, and tanks.  Berlin fell in 2267, but by then, all of their
colonial holdings in Africa and Asia had achieved independence from Germany
because all their attention was on keeping control in Europe during the digital
blackout.”

“So they had territory in Europe and Africa and Asia?” Billy
asked.   When Tim glanced over at him, he noticed that Billy had
sprouted facial hair, though only in patches.  It seemed like the bots
were changing his face one bit at a time.

“That’s right,” Paul affirmed.  “The American Empire
had already controlled the Western Hemisphere, Australia, India and Northern
Asia…  basically the Asian parts of old Russia.  Until they were
conquered in this war, Germany controlled Europe, and that was their highly
developed zone, but they used Africa and Southeast Asia as secondary zones
where they would get their materials and cheap labor.  When America took
over Berlin, all of Europe was quickly integrated into the American Empire.”

“So then in 2267, the African and Asian colonies are
independent?” Tim asked.  He was having a hard time tracking the story
with the thought of what all the tickling sensations throughout his body meant
the nanobots were doing to him, but he was glad for the distraction.

“Right, but not for long,” Paul explained.  “The
territories in question had belonged to Germany for about a century in most
cases, from at least since the Chinese Empire fell in 2162, but suddenly they
were free.  Quickly, various fledgling states and confederacies were
popping up in parts of the world that hadn’t been independent in a long
time.  Some of them showed promise of developing into democratic
states.  But America quickly decided that the former colonies needed to be
part of the American Empire, which had been the plan all along. 

“Soon, America started putting out propaganda saying that
they’ve received hundreds of thousands of pleas from the locals in these places
asking for the United States to topple their failing governments and give them
American stability.  It was in 2268, I was just over the age you are now,
when I saw something disturbing enough that it finally pushed me into the camp
of those against the American government.”

“And it wasn’t the fact that they kept calling themselves
the American Empire even though they now controlled all of Europe and
Australia?” Tim asked.  “Because I’ve got to say, that’s the thing bugging
me most about the story right now.”

Paul gave a tight smile.  “The United States at that
time-- the original forty-eight, I mean, which still held special privileges
within the empire-- was divided mostly into ten metropoles where ninety percent
of the population lived, with the other ten percent farming the open
land.  I was living in Chicago at the time.   I was in
University, and I lived in a huge apartment complex with about ten thousand
people in it.  Anyway, one of the other men in my complex, he was a few
years older than me, but I had known him growing up, had recently finished up
his studies in journalism.  He found out, or maybe he just deduced it,
that the government was making most of these requests for American intervention
up.  He reported on it, and was quickly arrested.”

“Freedom of speech had pretty much gone out the window in
our timeline by the time we were around, too,” Rose registered regretfully, but
now her voice sounded funny and Tim noticed that her hair was brown.

“It gets worse,” Paul revealed.  “The government was
big into using symbolism.  He was charged with treason.  As any time
that the government started an unpopular war, there was a rash of treason
accusations.  Some of us… the government called them radicals… knew this
was the last step to a one world government.  So the government rounded up
the treasonous people across the country, anyone who had said anything publicly
against the government.  The number of treason accusations in Chicago was
something like a thousand, which given the city’s population of thirty million
made it a ridiculously small percentage of how many people actually opposed the
government.”

“So they killed them?” Julie asked.

“Yeah, of course,” Paul said, with a wave of his hand. 
“But the disturbing part, the dreadfully creative part, was how they killed
them.  It was advertised ahead of time that the problem with these
thousand treasonous citizens was that there was something wrong with their
heads.  They were defective, according to the government.  The
government had also been working on technology that could diffuse matter using
light and energy outside of the human vision spectrum, so that it would look
like the object just vanished out of thin air.

“They gathered the population into public areas.  This
was considered a patriotic event, so everyone was forced to go.  If you
didn’t, you were considered treasonous yourself.   I was in one of
the arenas, with fifty-thousand other citizens.  Each location got a
handful of the treasonous defectors sent to it.  It just so happened that
my neighbor was at mine.  They brought the five criminals out into the center
of the floor of the arena and chained each to a pole.  The guards got off
the stage, so it was just the defectors out there.  The crowd was invited
to see what the government did to people whose heads were defective.  And
then, in the blink of an eye, all five of the heads of the defectors were
gone.  Just vanished.  Of course, it was the new technology, but not
everyone in the crowd even knew such technology was being developed, and it was
disturbing even for those of us who did.  That was the intent, of
course.  And the thing is, most people were scared into behaving
well.  I, however, was motivated to seek out others who were disgusted by
the government and see what we could do if we didn’t get caught.”

“Wow,” Tim said.  “I can’t say that’s necessarily the
reaction I would have had.”

“Well,” said Paul, “you never really know until you’re put
into a situation like that.  Anyway, soon, I was done with college. 
They had trained me in hacking, what they called weaponized computing, assuming
that I would be a good asset against the resistance.  I managed  to
play double agent for a few years, and scored a good bit of useful intelligence
for the resistance.  That, and I tricked the computers at one of the major
banks into making a rather generous contribution to the rebel cause, through a
dummy account I set up.  Of course, I couldn’t do anything to stop them as
they took over Africa and the rest of Asia.  It would have aroused too
much suspicion, and I couldn’t have held them back for long anyway.”

“Well, this has taken my mind off the nanobots, but it’s
also super depressing,” Julie complained.

“Yes, well, imagine how I feel now that my grand-nephew has
told me how it’s all going to end.  Of course, we’ve known for a while
that we were living on borrowed time, and we’ve worked out strategies to make
sure we won’t be taken alive by the government, but I suppose if you succeed
with your plan, it will all be a moot point anyway,” Paul said.

“And speaking of our plan,” Hopkins said, breaking an
uncharacteristically long silence, “you should have noticed the odd sensations
have stopped.  You have completed your transformation.”

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