Post #257 May 17 2021 “Excerpt from The Farpool: Plague” At the beginning of April 2021, I re-started my original series The Farpool Stories. The new title is called The Farpool: Plague. So far, so good. I intend to make this available for download on or before Labor Day (September 6, 2021). Look for it. Most of the characters are new but the storyline picks up from the last Farpool story, The Farpool: Union. Below is an excerpt from this story: Chapter 1 Wright Memorial Hospital Scotland Beach, FL July 3, 2195 (Friday) Death would be a relief, Cory Everett thought, as he watched his wife Leah struggling underneath the bioshield. What was left of Leah was a shriveled, emaciated, bruised, convulsing skeleton of bloody skin and bone, consumed with late-stage effects of the Purple, an infection of unknown origin that had been sweeping the world in a global crisis for several years now. Her prognosis was grim, as there was no vaccine or cure of medbotic intervention that seemed to work. Nanoscale medbots had been suffused throughout her body for months now, yet the Purple bacteriomechs had been able to defeat or blunt them in every session they had tried. Cory closed his eyes, willing the imagery to go back to that closet in the back of his mind reserved for monsters and nightmares. He heard a door hiss open and looked around. It was Dr. Evan Wilshire. Wilshire was clad in a Level 4 biosuit, his helmet off. He carried a small capsule in one hand. Two technicians came in too. Cory knew them as Max and Elayne. “We’re going to try another session this morning,” Wilshire announced. As he explained what would be happening, Max and Elayne positioned the AMAD unit next to Leah’s bed, hooked up some tubes and lines and prepared to drop the shield. “We’ve been working with the Lab to tweak AMAD,” Wilshire told them. “New effectors, new probes, lots of new gear. It’s worked well in lab tests and simulations.” Cory glanced at the skeptical faces of his son Reuben and daughter Jessica. He knew AMAD was the Autonomous Medical Assembler/Disassembler. “Can it really make a difference now, Doc? Is there any real hope?” Wilshire forced an optimistic smile he didn’t really feel, for the truth was that Purple was an aggressive bacteriomech and every attempt they had tried with AMAD had failed miserably. “Cory, there’s always room for hope. We want to try everything that has a reasonable chance of working.” “Of course.” Wilshire always tried to be upbeat in sessions like this, even when there really was no reason to hope. “Let’s give it a shot, okay? You’ll all have to leave now. Go back to the waiting room. Have a doughnut and coffee. Let us do what we can here.” “Of course. I think we’ll just go to the chapel…and pray.” Max helped them through the door with a sympathetic smile. After the three of them were gone, he sealed the door, which hissed in response and snugged down his own helmet. Wilshire and Elayne did the same. Elayne then spent the next few minutes readying the AMAD cart while Max dropped the bioshield. A spray of light around the bed flashed. Wilshire loaded the new and improved bots into a nearby port on the cart. Finally, Elayne announced, "Okay, Dr. Wilshire… she patted down the incision she had just made in the side of Leah's skull. "Subject's prepped and ready." Max handed Wilshire the injector tube, attached by hose to the containment chamber. "Steady even suction, Doctor. AMAD ready to fly?" Elayne came back, "Ready in all respects." "Vascular grid?" "Tracking now. We'll be able to follow the master just fine. I'll replicate once we're through the blood-brain barrier." "Watch for capillary flow," said Max. "When her capillaries narrow, your speed will increase. And viscosity will stay up." "Like slogging through molasses. AMAD's inerted and stable…ready for insertion." The insertion went smoothly enough. A slug of plasma forced the replicant master into Leah's capillary network at high pressure. Wilshire got an acoustic pulse seconds later and selected Fly-by-Stick to navigate the system. A few minutes' run on its propulsors brought the Autonomous Medical Assembler/Disassembler to a dense fibrous mat of capillary tissues. The image soon appeared on Wilshire's IC panel. "Ready for transit," he told Max. "Cytometric probing now. I can force these cell membranes open any time." Max used AMAD's acoustic coupler to sound the tissue dam ahead, probing for weak spots. "There, right to starboard of those reticular lumps…that's a lipid duct, I'd bet a hundred bucks. Let’s try there, this time.” Wilshire steered AMAD into the vascular cleft of the membrane. He twisted his right-hand controller, pulsing a carbene grabber to twist the cleft molecules just so, then released the membrane lipids and slingshot himself forward. Seconds later, AMAD was floating in a plasma bath, dark, viny shapes barely visible off in the distance. The plasma was a heavy viscous fluid. Wilshire tweaked up the propulsor to a higher power setting and took a navigation hack off the vascular grid. "Ventral tegmentum, guys. Just past the mesoencephalic nucleus. Looks like we're in." Wilshire navigated AMAD through the interstices of Leah's brain for the better part of an hour. He had programmed the assembler to send an alarm when it encountered any kind of unnatural activity…especially assembler maneuvering or replication. If there were any remnants of Purple left in her brain, he wanted to be ready. "Hopefully, the last treatment finished them off," he muttered to himself. At 1824 hours, AMAD sent the alarm. The imager screen was at first murky, crowded with the spikes and cubes of dissolved molecules. Lumpy, multi-lobed sodium molecules darted across their view like shadowy ping-pong balls. Wilshire studied readouts from AMAD's sounder…something was there, hidden in the data traces on the scope. He fiddled with the gain on the imager, tweaking it, subtracting foreground clutter. Something approximately sixty nanometers in one dimension, narrow with a globe structure at one end…and scores of probes, effectors, cilia, whatever. Incredible mobility…triple propulsors beat an idling rhythm as AMAD closed in…. Max let out a whoop. "Will you look at that?" Elayne came closer, squinted at the vague, fuzzy outlines on the screen. "It’s Purple, all right. A whole colony of them. A welcoming committee, it would appear. Come to see what we're about." So that’s an excerpt from the first chapter. Look for The Farpool: Plague on or about Labor Day this year. The next post to The Word Shed comes on May 24. See you then. Phil B.