When Peter Schofield woke up that morning there was a red icon flashing in his vision. That was unusual, he had programmed his implant to hold anything except family issues until after his first coffee. He triggered the icon and his vision filled with a rolling field of text. By the time he had finished reading it, he really needed that coffee.
As he sat with the freshly brewed cup, he reviewed the material in his virtual vision. It was a data dump from his grandmother’s nanites. According to the data she was dying. The very fact was impossible. Nanites kept people alive, that’s what they did. They were tiny, microscopic, molecular machines. Individually they were as dumb as a rock, but working together and networking occasionally with medical computers, they could destroy any threat to the body and repair anything short of major traumatic damage. Peter’s grandmother had been a senior figure in the team that had developed them.
Peter wondered why his grandmother had not already dealt with the problem. Maybe she hadn’t noticed somehow. She was old, he thought, too easily distracted. She had some strange ideas too. Recently they had discussed, argued if he was honest, about if it was possible to live too long. Well, perhaps he could do something about her current condition. He wasn’t exactly uneducated in the area.
It seemed strange, actually, to have something so important to do, so early in the morning. Normally nothing seemed too important. He’d just drift through the day, doing the barest minimum. After all, there was always tomorrow. Nothing seemed urgent until now. He’d trained in biology and was technically on staff of the Republic of California PD, leading a forensics team, but there just wasn’t the work these days, for some reason. Crime had been dropping over the last five decades. Most of what occurred these days was online in virtual environments where his skills weren’t needed. Most days he’d
