Questions have naturally arisen about the gem-based carousel-style videonanograph equipment, the 'gyro' the nanoevidence was found in, and the evidence itself. For anyone who wants to research these subjects, the reason for the incredibly expensive and arcane workaround is the reality of distortion. Lenses can only be so good. There are constants to be found in physics textbooks for calculations and tables that explain the higher limits of lens-based magnification. The 'gyro' is not a true gyro at all, of course, but a radial pattern of motion that might be used to detect 'tilt.' It might be allowed for at the speed of light, like any neural reflex pattern in a living person.

As an interesting note, rheostatic liquids have been discovered recently. It IS possible with modern technology to create liquids that, if you magnetize them correctly, will arrange into basic grids. Obviously we are not PUBLICLY so advanced as to reanimate ourselves just yet.

De-noue-macho, And Where Is He From?

House held out his hand, and Wilson handed him the weekly pill sorter. It was a septagonal, translucent plastic box with a lid labeled with a letter for each day. "Was his vehicle silver?"

"No, black."

House rolled his eyes. "THAT reference you miss? Did he say 'hiyo' to it?"

"Oh."

House shook his head. "You're slipping, Wilson." He spun the pill sorter on a finger. "Anywho, to work. Some calendars begin on Sunday, and some on Monday."

"What, do European calendars still begin on Monday? I mean, did they?"

"I've owned a few tasty ones."

Wilson grimaced at him. "I assume you mean tasteless ones."

"Po-tay-toe, po-taught-oe. We're beginning this calendar on Thursday."

"Do I want to know why?"

"If you like. Put your hands in there and open the vial labeled 'Thursday.' Careful of the others. I chose Thursday because of the 'T' for Triassic. It's also the only way Miocene lined up with Monday."

Wilson shook his head and put his hands in the manipulator gloves to handle the vials laid out in the sterile isolette. He opened the vial for Thursday. House set a kitchen timer for two minutes. "One syringe, injected into the torso, please." As Wilson injected the solution into the dead baby's torso, House started the timer.

"You knew it was nanomachines," accused Wilson.

"I figured it out. During my overdose. You pointed out I wasn't acting like myself. The idea of the supernatural had infected my brain like a germ. I realized that the germs weren't acting like themselves, so they must have caught something. Centrifuge next." He led Wilson over to the centrifuge.

Wilson frowned and paused. "You're saying you realized the bug had a bug. That actually makes sense. What are we doing here?"

"The Thursday over here gets precisely fifteen milliliters into the prep tube with the sample. Then we go back to the isolette. Wait for the chime, and then we do 'Friday.' That's the Cretaceous." House stared studiously at the dead baby inside the isolette.

"Alright. I guess Saturday is the Pleistocene?" Wilson began preparing the syringe.

"I don't remember. Somewhere around ninety-five to a hundred million years."

"I don't remember either. What's Sunday?"

"Fifty-five to eighty million years."

"I remember seventy million being dinosaurs."

"Some of them, yes. The last big ones, I think."

"You said Miocene for Monday? What was the Miocene period?"

"About forty million years ago. Interesting bug and plant life. I decided to include forward to thirty-three million years ago for convenience."

"Okay. We're playing fast and loose with geological time. What's on Tuesday?" Wilson put his eyes back on the timer.

"That's a grouping around twenty-three to eighteen million years ago. Don't remember the name of the period if there was one. It wasn't included in what he brought us."

Wilson glanced at the other vials and began counting.

House smiled. "You're noticing there are twelve Wednesdays. That took the most time to prepare." He held a clipboard up for Wilson to glance at, then read it to him. "Eastern hemisphere, forty-five to fifty thousand years ago is Wednesday, six a.m. Seven a.m. is forty-seven to fifty thousand years ago in the Western hemisphere."

The chime sounded. Wilson injected the Friday syringe into the dead baby's torso. House set the timer again. Wilson prepared the Saturday syringe and trotted to the centrifuge to finish Friday as House continued speaking. "We jump to ten a.m. with twenty-five thousand years ago, noon was twenty thousand, one p.m. was eighteen thousand years, two p.m. was fourteen thousand years ago, six p.m. was . . ." House droned on till the next chime sounded. Wilson continued the routine, but frowned. "So, what are all these solutions?"

"They're different samples of E. Coli and E. Coli ancestors. Before Saturday, E. Coli weren't necessarily recognizable. Those samples may have been a different species, but related. By the way, decomp rate for a human being IS slower, just like you thought. I didn't have the leisure to chart it until these last few days. I don't remember what it was before, but I'm sure it takes at least half again as long."

"So what does that mean, the E. Coli aren't as fast? They're overloaded with nanomachines?"

"No. Their power is partially drained. It's being pirated."

"Ah. So they're stealing energy. From the mitochondria?"

"That's it. Now of the ambrite, burmite, firmiss, resinite, rumenite, and simitite, most of the samples were fine. I had to ditch all the black amber he brought. He didn't read too closely. It's not the same stuff. He's no geologist. At least he didn't bring me any whale-made."

Wilson scrunched up his face. "Whale-made?"

"Ambergris. Amber was the term used for the plant AND the whale stuff."

"Ah. So, what are you doing? Trying to figure out a replacement strain of E. Coli?"

"That WOULD be an interesting project, but not very practical. Even if we put every infant in an isolette and gut-trained them with other stuff, the nanos would work their way in when they came out. Some E. Coli are airborne. Survives just fine without us. As it is, I couldn't be working on that without regularizing my data. I never asked him for a tandem van de Graaf accelerator for carbon dating more than fifty thousand years ago. And that would still only work on the dead stuff.

The rest of it I was able to compare with a process called glass transition. Not something I'm so familiar with, but it seems to work pretty well. Just uses a lot of heat and battery power."

"That's what you've been doing with the forge instead of making jewelry? Burning the amber?"

"I had to be sure how old it was. He knew about some of it. He thought that was what I used for the yellow stones in the microscope. That was topaz, by the way. Hard to find good topaz. The light diffraction was close enough.

Anyway, I figured out the signal problem."

"What signal problem?"

"Apparently the electrochemical signals involving eating are very similar between germs feeding and humans feeding. The signals being sent through the nano network to the E. Coli and the vivisected human brain are all about eating. That's why the dead bite. You must have wondered about that."

Wilson frowned. "I . . . did."

"Why a bite? It's not the bite. It's the combination of signals in the brain. We're lucky. If the signal activated for the dead grabbing for us, all they'd have to do is wave in our direction enough times and we'd turn. They have to wait for us to die. You know they don't actually digest any of what they eat. The bite just spreads whatever disease is convenient to kill us. We all already have the nanos inside us—they're inside the E. Coli! The dead bite anything that has living mitochondria. The nanos have to get their power from somewhere. Only people turn. I don't know how they sense the living mitochondria except by vibration frequencies carried to them through the air like radar. It's like hearing, but it's really just sensed motion of a producer of energy. Flux. Acceleration of energy, rather than mass. That's why fire draws them from a distance. Plasma is more or less just hyperaccelerated matter, a high-energy form. For the nanos, active plasma becomes indistinguishable from sound waves or motion stirring the air somewhere between arm's length and twenty feet. That's why they flock in circles—they're sensing breeze patterns."

The chime sounded. Wilson injected Saturday into the infant torso and prepped Sunday. He moved to the centrifuge to inject Saturday. He looked up. Wilson shrugged. "I give up, House. Why are we doing this?" House pointed at the isolette. Wilson turned and startled. The baby was moving.

Several minutes later, gasping for breath over a trashcan, Wilson shook himself. The mummified baby had been surprisingly sturdy. After decapitation, House had stabbed the baby's head four times to put it down. "So, what was that? In that syringe? Saturday?"

"Half denatured mitochondria and half diced E. Coli from amber samples from ninety to a hundred million years ago."

"That's not possible. Those E. Coli were dead."

"But perfectly preserved. So that means—"

"I don't get it. Why didn't—" Wilson straightened. "Wait—no that means . . ."

"That means that those rumors on the news about Operation Wildfire were a little misleading."

"A little WHAT?!"

"America has supposedly not been researching germ warfare for a fairly long time. E. Coli just piggybacked the nanos. The thing is, we might have triggered this working with E. Coli for a peacetime purpose. The masked man won't be able to provide the original research on the nanos, because it happened too long ago."

"Ninety million YEARS ago?!"

"Give or take. The nanos were seeded into the E. Coli somehow within twenty million years of the species formation. Then at some point recently, a signal went off. We've been doing research with E. Coli for a long time. This is the first time anything like THIS has happened, though. Most likely the signal consisted of an identifier of our DNA. It turned on this mode of action. They started building their nano army, and everywhere E. Coli were that hadn't been centrifuged or stored in amber or immersion oil or—well, some other thing—the nanos started turning every dead human they found. Or caused. Obviously whoever did this has living mitochondria too. Or something indistinguishable from them."

Wilson sat down on the floor a bit heavily.

"I've been thinking about the versatility and durability of the control system. The HUGE amount of pressure and electromagnetism it could come back from? That sounds to me like it was originally designed for something else. Like maybe life on a world with higher gravity. That would make more sense, actually. Someplace with a lot of humidity. Electrifying aerosolized water might carry more charge. Magnify it. Maybe halfway to a gas giant as an environment?" House nodded. He got up. He injected the rest of the samples into the correct pre-labeled centrifuge vials and started it up. "Later on, I'm gonna figure out if the specific gravity of the cells changed over time, or if the nanos just floated around not reproducing till now. Well, I'm all done here till after dinner. I'm gonna go get a shower and change clothes. Never thought how much I'd miss pockets." He pulled the keepsake medicine bottle out of the Faraday cage, limped over to the passthrough, as Wilson had left it ajar, stooped, and exited.

Wilson blinked. "Hou-ouse?" He stayed there for a bit, pale and shaken.

HHHHHHHH

Ann Gee's bosom rippled as she slowly stopped laughing. It had been an eventful shower with House, who had obviously missed her. Then he'd proudly told her about scamming Wilson with the ancient astronaut idea as they lingered, wrapped in an absurd number of towels on the queen-sized mattress. "Okay, I'm glad I missed the dead baby, but the look on Wilson's face must have been classic! So tell me what it all really means."

House's face went deadpan. "It COULD still be true. There's just no way to ever be sure. We're doing post-modern science with semi-medieval theft of formerly modern means with my memory and ingenuity. There are plenty of things I don't remember. The nanos can go anywhere, being submicroscopic, but places like deep inside amber. They were already in the isolette. Without the presence of nano-infected E. Coli AND human DNA, the reanimation doesn't occur. Obviously I couldn't keep them out without a fully sterile environment. It probably just got into the samples despite my best efforts. I had a feeling it would.

I CAN tell you that this is way past any published nanotechnology I've ever read about. Everything I told Quixote about messing with nanotech is true. Without the original plans for the stuff, we'd be stupid to ever mess with it. And that's assuming we'd ever figure out how to in the first place."

"So it could've been aliens?" Ann Gee shook her head.

"No idea," said House, "They're too small to check for a LOGO. There's no way to look for a manufacturer's date. Without speaking to whoever worked on it, if there WAS a human being who worked on it, we'll never know."

"Come on. You know SOMETHING." Ann Gee goosed him.

"We know it happened within the last hundred million years, barring an alien race already having E. Coli in their spaceship to seed Earth with. We know someone designed the nanotech to not move into this mode of action unless it was prompted. It must have been around long enough to spread throughout Earth before the outbreak, so—a minimum of a month allowing for air currents, water currents, soil seepage, what have you. Even if it happened before modern technology, that doesn't mean it was DEFINITELY aliens."

Ann Gee looked at him sideways. She raised an eyebrow.

"No, really! People can have ideas at any time, and it's not a crime to keep them secret. Sometimes people make advances, innovations, and the secrets die with them. Ancient astronauts could have come, but human beings might have been here and been nihilists."

Ann Gee looked blank. "Is that the guys that go around saying 'the end is nigh?' 'Cause they seem not so bright to me."

House blinked, then smiled lazily. "No, that's a different thing. Nihilism is when you want to destroy everything."

"What about the fossil record?"

"People act like the fossil record is a library. If it were, there wouldn't be missing shelves. You've heard of the missing link?"

"Yeah."

"In reality there's not A missing link. There's whole missing tons worth of chain! It wouldn't be that hard to erase all existence of humanity from the fossil record. It wouldn't even take very long. We could be humans mark SIX and never be the wiser. If the nanos were planted as a fail-safe, then we were just determined.

The signal to start reanimation could have been in any electrically recognizable form and come from anywhere on world or off. We could've done something in a lab that set it off automatically. There was a 'B' movie made once called 'Plan 9 From Outer Space.' This is essentially that. An ordinary radio signal could in theory have been picked up by nanotech receivers hidden in plain sight. Piggybacking on our own technology. Using our own antenna."

"You think it was aliens."

"Who would want to kill all people and leave some of the plants and animals? Klaatu?"

"Who?"

"'The Day The Earth Stood Still.' Good movie."

"Wasn't there a Bond film with the same idea?"

"Not exactly. This wouldn't have worked for spacefaring humans wanting to return to Earth unless the kill code was broadcast for long enough first. That film was only interesting for the minor villain coming around. I'm gonna go fiddle with the plumbing. Shower was eleven minutes plus. I'm wondering if I can get it to fifteen." House dressed quickly and limped out, whistling.

Ann Gee, not for the first time, wondered at House. He would have the sense to know she had been with 'Quixote' and Wilson, but would never bring it up to her. He cared too much about having sex to spend time on arguing like most guys would. Come to think of it, he had that in common with 'Quixote'—

How had he put it? He was "no longer the same person, so Quixote is as good a name as any." He had thanked her for seducing him and given her the relic of his former identity with the understanding that she would keep it hidden. He'd sewn it into the bottom of her go-bag on their last night together in such a way it wouldn't poke anything. The relic, the skill of its placement, and part of its function were as impressive as he was, symbolic of his ability to do violence when necessary, to protect when important, and to return someday. He'd shown her just once that it tended to loop around toward the thrower if it connected with nothing. She reached into her go-bag for a moment, fingering the relic hidden in the bottom seam, then got up, stretching like a cat. She got dressed, remembering the cool, sleek points and matte-black surface of the Bat-arang, and smiled dreamily.

Congratulations to 'niph,' as he was the only one to guess Quixote's former identity. He also guessed MacGyver, which partly fit with the new tactics. This is to be considered an alternate reality Batman where he was the only 'real' comic book character and where the plot didn't have it all start in Gotham, where no doubt, he would have stopped it before it was too late.

I've long understood, though many don't seem to, that people don't always publish their findings, that people sometimes surge past what their current level of technology dictates, and that anyone can have an idea at any time.

The ancient astronaut 'prank' would appeal to House, as he's been under the thumb of someone he didn't dare act against for way too long. He would have no way of knowing for certain whether he actually messed up sample sterility or not, with only one shot. That doubt would have to persist under the conditions the experiment was under. House's clouded memories, educated guesses, and calculations about E. Coli's ancestry are only a little bit off, as scientists mostly agree E. Coli emerged as its own species about 102 million years ago. Various strains have diverged and specialized ever since, the most recent divergence having been about 30 million years ago.

This has been a strange project for me. I don't normally write profanity, include implicit sex, or do crossovers. Fanfic feels new to me still, as normally I stick to writing my own fiction and occasionally contributing my side to Hairy's blog at .com. Thank you all for reading. Thanks especially to my reviewers and contacts for the encouragement and relevant contributions. Thank you to Sunni D for reminding me that hobby time is a requirement for continued sanity.