Free What You Make It by Michael Marshall Smith Page A

kind of junk, the restaurants were good and some of the old, small hotels were attractive in a dated kind of way. Not as flashy as the deco strips on Old Miami Beach, but pleasant enough.
    Last night the circle was littered with burnt-out cars, and the up-scale pizzeria where we used to eat was still smoldering, the embers glowing in the fading light.
    We worked through our degrees and out into post-graduate years. At first I had a lot to catch up on. Sometimes Rebecca snuck me into classes, but mostly I just pored over their notes and books, and we talked long into the night. Catching up wasn't so hard, but keeping up with both of them was a struggle. Inever understood the nanotech side as well as Rebecca, or the computing as deeply as Philip, but that was probably an advantage. I stood between the two of them, and it was in my mind where the two disciplines most equally met. Without me there, it's probable none of it would ever have come to fruition. So maybe if you get right down to it, and it's anyone's fault, it's mine.
    Philip's goal was designing a system which would take the input and imperatives of a number of small component parts, and synthesize them into a greater whole – catering for the fact that the concerns of biological organisms are seldom clear cut. The fuzzy logic wasn't difficult – God knows we were familiar enough with it, most noticeably in our ability to reason that we needed another beer when we couldn't even remember where the fridge was. More difficult was designing and implementing the means by which the different machines, or ‘beckies’, as we elected to call them, interfaced with each other.
    Rebecca concentrated on the physical side of the problem, synthesizing beckies with intelligence coded into artificial DNA in a manner which enabled the ‘brain’ of each type to link up with and transfer information to the others. And remember, when I say ‘machines’ I'm not talking about large metal objects which sit in the corner of the room making unattractive noises and drinking a lot of oil. I'm talking about strings of molecules hardwired together, invisible to the naked eye.
    I helped them both with their specific areas, and did most of the development work in the middle, designing the overall system. It was me who came up with the first product to aim for, ‘ImmunityWorks’.
    The problem of diagnosing malfunction in the human body has always been the number of variables, many of which are difficult to monitor effectively from the outside. If someone sneezes, they could just have a cold. On the other hand, they could have flu, or the bubonic plague – or some dust up their nose. Unless you can test all the relevant parameters, you're not going to know what the real problem is – or the best way of treating it. We wereaiming for an integrated set of beckies which could examine all of the pertinent conditions, share their findings, and determine the best way of tackling the problem – all at the molecular level, without human intervention of any kind. The system had to be robust – to withstand interaction with the body's own immune system – and intelligent. We weren't intending to just tackle things which made you sneeze, either: we were never knowingly underambitious. Even for ImmunityWorks 1.0 we were aiming for a system which could cope with a wide range of viruses, bacteria and general senescence: a first-aid kit which lived in the body, anticipating problems and solving them before they got started. A kind of guardian angel, which would coexist with the human system and protect it from harm.
    We were right on the edge of knowledge, and we knew it. The roots of disease in the human body still weren't properly understood, never mind the best ways to deal with them. An individual trying to do what we were doing would have needed about 300 years and a research grant bigger than God's. But we weren't just one person. We weren't even just three. Like the system we were trying to