Thank you, 'niph,' for those words of encouragement. I'll be announcing (finishing) quite soon now. Well, that was fun. Now . . . for the BAD news . . .

Can Magnets, Blurs, And Amber Be The Key?

House smiled as the masked man tightened the last nut on their carousel. Carousel du mort, indeed. The masked man had actually found four dead with non-squishy-seeming brains within an eighth of an inch of having identical strides, revamped the plans to work nearly exactly like a four-horse carousel, and assembled the pieces of wood, plastic, and metal cut by himself, House, and Wilson in a remarkably short time. Shortly, the installed helmets would be full, and the weirdest microscope ever conceived would be online.

The masked man sat down on a stool. House was staring again at the walking dead. The gym, connected to the lab now by a short hallway WAS a strange look, twenty dead men and women powering treadmills to generate electricity. "I no longer think it looks like a demented 'come as you are' party, or, technically, a 'come as you died' party. It looks like a public service announcement. 'Don't skip your cardio. Your hell will be the Undead Gym for eternity.' No Jacuzzi." The masked man actually glanced up and nodded. House suddenly looked up. "Well, we're ready for the horses, then, Mr. Quixote. Not a windmill, exactly, but she'll do!"

It was a matter of minutes for the masked man to manhandle the four premeasured dead with tiny, pre-drilled skull holes into the carousel's restraints, lock them in, and lower the helmets. From each helmet, a pair of lengths of tapered fiber optic cable in an insulated sheath with tiny moving fins stretched through multiple remote adjusting mechanisms to the central canopy. Four plastic pipes extended three feet upwards from the canopy, each riddled with more adjusting mechanisms, mostly sliding clamps for the cabochon lenses. Each pipe was capped with a digital video camera, wifi unit, and power station. House rapidly through four switches. "Lights—on; you know, without the dead it looked like da Vinci had met Fred Sanford and Tesla. This is much better. Much more mad scientist. MuAH-HAHAHAHA!"

Wilson silently shook his head, looking at the terminal in the corner. "These are going to be the fuzziest images of my professional career. Mad, indeed." He shook his head again.

"Don't worry, Wilson!" House looked ready to dance with joy, despite his leg, "These won't count as unprofessional; you're not getting PAID!" He limped over to the largest table, now covered with computer equipment. He started throwing switches, alternately glancing up at the multiple screens and down at the switches. Soon, four terminals each glowed with a different color: Deep red, powder blue, light green, and a brassy yellow. Vague, blurred, organic shapes began to swim by on each at a rate too sickeningly fast to watch. Then the images moved faster, losing resolution. Tables of ones and zeroes flashed by on yet another screen.

"That's it," said Wilson, "By my readings, all four should be past the corpus callosum and at the edge of the amygdala. At least, that's where the probes are if your calculations are correct. Too bad we can't get any meaningful images." He gestured at the monitors, filled with blurred curves and vague shapes. "I can't tell a dendrite from empty space."

"You can't YET, Wilson. The final edit from the software's baseline isn't finished." House studied the monitors for a beat longer. "But now we see if we can achieve hindsight from the hindbrain. Quixote? Your turn. Lateral search pattern. We're looking for any lightness change around the Circle of Willis. It would look like a tiny, tiny sparkle, like Tinkerbell in the woods at night a half mile off."

The masked man cocked his head. "What are you—"

"Whachoo talkin' 'bout, Willis! That diagram right there." He tapped a page torn out of a medical text. It had guesstimated measurements annotated in ink.

The masked man sat at the micromanipulators and slowly used a joystick, leaving the other three joysticks alone. "Why there?"

"One of two things has to happen to make a human body stand up independently and walk without falling over. Either the inner ear has to work, or there has to be an on-board gyro. Since the eardrums have decayed and the pressure's all wrong for the inner ear, it's got to be a gyro of some kind."

Wilson sat back somewhat heavily. "You DID say germs don't run gyroscopes."

"I did. Now a gyro pretty much has to be a circle of motion. The only thing even REMOTELY circular as a pathway inside the base of the brain is the Circle of Willis. It's the only thing that allows circular motion inside the brain without circling the WHOLE brain."

"And circling the whole brain is bad because—?" the masked man was barely moving his hands, eyes riveted to the deep red screen.

"Because if anything pierced the spinal column ANYWHERE, that fluid would leak out. We've seen lots of them moving with relative balance missing feet, legs up to knees, half a torso, you know—we know they work without an intact cerebrospinal fluid containment. But blood vessels would maintain containment by clotting.

. . . So, there pretty much needs to be something spinning around in the blood vessels INSIDE the brain. It just doesn't have to be blood anymore."

The masked man kept working. Wilson folded his arms to argue. "House? Don't you think the CDC would have found a GYROSCOPE?"

"Nuh UHH!" House did a reasonable imitation of a four-year-old, and the classic nanny-nanny-boo-boo pose. "There's two reasons they wouldn't have: First, they wouldn't have imaged them standing up, so it wouldn't have needed to actually work at the time they imaged it. Second, their method of imaging probably destroyed the gyro, at least temporarily."

Wilson shook his head. "A structure that can't be imaged just because it's not working? What kind of structure is that?"

"An electromagnetic one that only works when the head is upright. Every imaging tech lays down their subject! Using X-rays or other means to excite electrons would temporarily destroy such a thing, or at least scatter its works a bit. MRI's, cat scans, they wouldn't work. Visible light or MAYBE fluorescence would be the only way to go! There's a fair chance fluorescent microscopy will mess it up, too. The scale is amazingly small. What's wrong?"

One of the dead stumbled. It resumed walking.

"I'm not sure," the masked man said, "But I think I'm in."

House cocked his head at the red screen and nodded. "Just circumnavigate it slowly. Then move on to the next one. You won't see much of anything till the software's done anyway. Remember, the others won't be the same, and they're not level. Watch the walls and be gentle. Wilson? You have to think of this as a VIRTUAL gyro. It doesn't work by inertia. It works because the circle disrupted is detectable."

The masked man carefully fed the fiber optic cable all the way around the Circle of Willis, based on diagrams on his tablet and the diagram from the book. The second attempt, the blue one, didn't work out. The dead body collapsed and did not move again. House stepped up wearing goggles and an apron and cut the neck with scissor-style hedge trimmers for the masked man to shove to one side. The third attempt resulted in a snarled cable halfway around. The fourth began to amble off-center so badly it twisted partly loose of the cable.

"My turn," said House, picking up another remote. He flipped a switch. He flipped another switch. All three dead went slack for a moment, then began to stand again. The masked man shot to his feet. House nodded. He did it again. And again. He did it a fourth time. Each time the dead slackened and went limp for a moment before staggering up to their feet. He nodded, satisfied.

"What was THAT?" said Wilson, "You can turn the dead off with a switch?"

"Don't be ridiculous, Wilson, I can't turn off anything but their balance and some of their motion . . . . And it resets between one and two seconds."

"One point seven three seconds, allowing for visual error." The masked man turned to House.

Wilson turned, saw the chronometer reading to the ten thousandth of a second on the monitor closest to him and nodded. "I'm—sure that's close enough for now. How did you do that?" He stood and started walking toward the carousel.

House pointed to an unused crash helmet on the table between Wilson and the masked man. With blinding speed, the masked man seized it and turned it upside down to look inside. The masked man studied it for a moment as Wilson arrived. "You've wired an electromagnet to swap polar direction."

House nodded, staring at the carousel du mort.

The masked man shook his head. "A gyro disrupted by opposing electrical force? That's . . . interesting."

House nodded and continued staring.

Wilson smiled. "That's WONDERFUL! We could give everyone an MRI, maybe, to keep them from turning? Or shock them with defibrillators?" He held up his hands—

"No," the masked man said quietly.

"Why not?"

House shrugged. "Go ahead and tell him."

The masked man turned to Wilson and put a hand on his shoulder. "What the 'gyro' is made of is just too small. To destroy whatever's doing this it would have to remove all microscopic iron particles from the body and anything touching it. These gyros are assembled inside the body, super-small and that means it takes a larger charge to remove them. It would take an MRI what, nine Tesla? They've never made one that strong that I know of."

House shrugged, "Maybe stronger."

"Then the electric current. If you tried that instead you'd have to electrify every cell enough to permanently disrupt the assembly and not allow any electrical activity if the carrier ever found its way in ever again. Probably easier just to burn the body."

Wilson shook his head. "Anything else?"

"Electromotor force," said House, pursing his lips, "If every cell was subjected to a—I don't know, a nine-ton hydraulic jack at the right moment, maybe it would prevent ever rebuilding, but the body would be reduced to slime long before that. What you have here is a mechanism that is more persistent than the body it controls. No practical solution here."

"Then why do it?" said Wilson, "You don't seem like you're just playing around."

"We're still recording," said House, "The data will include timestamps for when I disrupted the gyros. If we're lucky, startup will give us better data."

The masked man suddenly turned to one of his computers, attached a flash drive, and turned to one of the castoff computers on another table. "I may have something else," he said, "Wilson? Hand me that monitor?" Wilson slid a monitor over to him. The masked man plugged it in, plugged in a keyboard and a mouse, and started an initialization program. "One of the hospitals had a large psych ward that turned quickly, and the doctor trapped in the office kept taking notes on them. Security couldn't reach him because it was a low-security wing, and the dead patients—" He started typing. "They were all between the entrance and the office. He had plenty of time and equipment to observe the process before they beat the Lexan loose from the office windows. Even better, he had their complete medical files. I downloaded it all."

He typed three keys, pulling up a spreadsheet. He scrolled down. He highlighted one block and called up a screenshot of a medical log form. After a moment he nodded. "The only patient to take longer than three hours to turn after death had extreme anemia and had refused their iron supplements twice out of the last three days. Not very useful, but maybe important somehow. Individual retention of iron in the blood can be a factor in how long it takes to start balancing and walking."

House nodded. "We have independent confirmation. Full chelation could slow the process too, if a patient was given low-ferrous plasma. It still wouldn't be enough to save them or prevent anything. Eventually enough iron would be collected."

Wilson nodded. "Okay. So tell me how this gem scope is going to matter?"

House motioned the masked man to go ahead.

"House spent some of his time on the software programming how structures that are essentially the same could be overlaid, allowing for differences, and show the same data. He spent some time programming in different ways distortion could affect the visual data and ways to allow for it, to show a more accurate image despite it, like how good facial recognition software can allow for a person making faces or being in a bad picture. The computer picked the distortion manner from the way the view of the helmet aperture looked during initial twist and entry. So it will try to overlay all four views onto one less distorted by interpolation over multiple timestamps. So what we'll see will be a computer reconstructed, interpolated, and overlaid . . . videonanograph. There's only one part of this I don't understand."

Wilson startled, "What's that?"

"Why we went around the loop in each one. Wouldn't it have been better to simply enter the loop for a good view?"

House handed the masked man a small vial as he limped past to a stool and sat down with a good view of the biggest monitor.

The masked man read the label. "Iron filings?"

"I peppered the helmet aperture with that. Our overlong magnifying glass extruded through it, wiping them on every surface. These dead have an iron halo inside them. Most of it wiped off, especially nearer the tip. That will do three things: First, it will cause the gyro to be more easily disrupted. Second, it will clear away any organic matter that isn't a part of this, maybe give us a better view. That one that failed? I think the gyro magnetized the cable briefly. The data from that point on would be different enough to exclude. Third, the halo gyro might be as big as a hair now instead of a few electrons thick."

He sat for another moment, studying the timer. He tapped a key on the nearest keyboard. The screen filled with large brown squares. He tapped several more keys. The screen clearly showed movement through a tunnel curving to the right for seven seconds and then pausing in view of a large, stark-white finned double cylinder smeared with brown fluid. "We're about to see what kind of 'gator lives in this sewer system." Then, in a blur, a white contrail formed as something zipped past. It went darker. The view repeated with greater distortion three times. The loop began again with the initial move through the tunnel. The three men watched the loop play twice more.

The masked man pointed. "Is that the pixel limit?"

House leaned forward. "No. It's off-axis." He punched a few more keys. The view magnified. There, in a part of the tunnel wall with even heavier distortion, something took shape. It was a hazy, wavy, picture of a tiny grid, nearly five by four. It disappeared each time the contrail did. House nodded. "I've super-sized it, but that's probably all we'll get." He limped to the recliner.

Wilson and the masked man looked at each other for a moment. "Okay?" said Wilson.

"Nanomachines," said the masked man, "What's next?"

"You take a record of this and find NORAD. We'll keep the lab. I'll trade you. You bring us any patients to cure and whatever other equipment we might need, and we'll keep it up for you. I would ask that you blindfold or gas them first. Our hideout."

"You could work on this," said the masked man.

"If you bring me the research. I don't know how to find it."

"I don't know anything about nanomachines."

House slouched in the recliner. "I know two things. First, a buckytube is not a seed pod from Ohio but an elementary nanostructure. I don't know how to make it, program it, or, more importantly, DE-program it. What we've seen here is apparently a rheostatic liquid. You magnetize it one certain pre-programmed way, and you get a grid-shaped nanorobotic halo gyro system capable of remarkably fast balance correction. Probably sends messages down the nerves the same way our own brains do. The difference here is that once the pathway is set, the nerve can decompose, which means there are signal stations too. Probably even smaller than what we've seen. While you're gone, I could try to get pictures of that, too. Surgically remove everything from the skull and spine except for one leg all the way to the little toe. Encourage the rot—"

"You said there were two things." The masked man was slowly walking toward House.

House startled. "Yeah! If you put in the wrong kill code, you might just start them assembling all the iron on the planet, killing us all in the strangest way possible. Or tearing apart all matter into molecular debris. Or maybe there's something worse. You do NOT want the wrong person messing with this. As it is we might be taking a chance not containing these and burning them immediately. When you find the pro tempore, your search won't be over. Likely that person will have authority and access, but no knowledge. The recording will let them know what needs to be done. I'm not saying I can't help you. I'm saying I SHOULDN'T help you till you bring me the kill code."

Wilson shook his head, "I've seen a movie with that molecular debris—thing. That's really possible?"

"I imagine it would only be able to take apart one element or compound. But the reason that nanomachines are dangerous is that you can't just turn them off or wait for the batteries to run out. They're probably powered by E. Coli mitochondria."

The masked man began pacing. "Of course if they have the kill code, they would have used it themselves."

"They may not know they have it. They might not know where it is. If you come back and bring me the original research, I'm more than willing to look at it. It sounds fascinating. When can you leave?"

The masked man startled. He pulled a Sharpie out of his toolbelt. He walked to the nearest wall, drew a circle, added a slash to turn it into a 'Q,' and then crossed the slash, making the slash into an 'X.' "Look for my symbol each morning. I'll make it as high and visible from here as I can. Under it will be a cache of whatever I can offer you. I'll check it again sometime in the next five nights. If it hasn't been touched, I'll check on you. Wilson? Leave the updated copies of your work at the same drop."

The masked man tossed Wilson a keyring. "The janitor's closet off the lobby has around a hundred MRE's in it. There's a rainwater and solar power system on the roof. Not enough for a Jacuzzi, but enough for one ten-minute hot shower every day. The drugstore's moved just down the hall. Stay alive."

He turned, leapt for the rope hanging from the ceiling, and went hand over hand out of sight.

Wilson called, "Does this have the key to get out?" He pointed at the locked door to the lab.

The panel was almost in place as the masked man called down, "The pass-through is removable. Push it sideways." The panel snapped into place.

Wilson looked at House. "Was it removable the whole time?" He started straight for it. House stopped him. "What?"

"He'll be expecting us to chase him. Get up to the roof and watch him leave. Then come on back down."

Ten minutes later, Wilson came back to the lab. "He left our lookout perch exactly as it was. He has a really odd—thing. He drives an odd—conveyance. What he drives is weird. I saw him get out at the intersection with the highway and pull something out of a wrecked car. He's gone. What have you been doing? Why is EVERYTHING on?"

House waved dismissively at the four charred bodies under a vent hood. "Cleaning up a bit and making sure he's not listening in. Come here, you'll only get one chance to see this." He limped over to the isolette in the corner. "He might be mad at us if he ever succeeds, and I want to show you why. By the way, this keepsake—" He shook the old medicine bottle. "Will normally be in my pockets. If anything happens to me, put it in and take it out of this Faraday cage—" He put it in. It was a live animal trap with six kinds of wire laced through it. "Several times around sunrise and sunset. It should act like an S-O-S if he happens to be nearby. Hand me that pill reminder box."

"He's got you more careful about overdosing?"

"No, I'm about to show you why the pro tempore won't be any help."

Oh, boy! What does House know that the masked man doesn't? Stay tuned; please read and review.