Chương 119: Chapter 118 – Mood Music and Soft Lighting

"How's it going?" Mikale asked walking into the room. Alex pulled himself away from the telescope and sighed heavily.

"It's going, I'm just not sure if it is actually going in the right direction," he said, shaking his head.

"I have never seen anything like this before."

"May I?" Mikale asked, motioning to the microscope. Alex shrugged his shoulders and stepped away.

"By all means, feel free, maybe you can see something I can't." He folded his arms and shook his head.

"They seem to have some kind of exoskeletal system that prevents modification. I can't seem to locate any type of neurotransmitter to introduce any form of new coding.

"There has to be a port of some kind, like when you plug a USB into a computer. The fact that this is a genetic mechanical hybrid is making it appear far more complicated than it is," Mikale said, carefully examining the nanobot tech.

"You know if I wasn't so repulsed by these things, I would be thoroughly impressed." He slid away from the microscope and looked at Alex.

"Alex, what if we have been looking at this from the wrong perspective?" he said as he stood up from the workstation and began to pace.

"We have been letting the mechanical aspects of these things overshadow the biological." Alex looked at him intrigued by where he was going with it.

"Go on."

"If we took a cold hard look at them, they are not mechanical with biological components, they are biological with mechanical components." Mikale looked at Alex waiting for the pieces to fit, seeing they did not, he continued.

"We have been operating on the assumption that they are behaving like microscopic machines, so we have been looking for mechanical components. Look past the mechanics and what do you have? You have a living organism that eats, poops and reproduces. I'd be willing to bet that if we get that shell off we would find a genetically altered micro-organism." Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

"Come on Mikale, I think you're overreaching due to desperation," Alex said skeptically.

"Think about it Alex. They eat parts of the DNA of the host target, then expels the fragmented DNA back into the host causing a catastrophic breakdown of the hosts' rudimentary functions. What if the organism isn't building new nanobots but is already impregnated with them, then as they mature they are released to find a new host," he said excitedly.

"If we could get one of them into a high powered X-Ray, I bet we would see that under that shell there is a completely independent organism and the shell was created to protect it while it does its work. If my theory is correct, these are all female and we will need a male in order to inject the modified coding into the female organisms."

"So essentially you are saying we need a male to introduce the new coding to the immature nanobots living inside the mature female?" he asked, cocking his head to the side.

"Come on now, that seems a little far-fetched. You want to devise a male nanobot to what…"he paused, "mate with the existing ones to change the coding in their offspring?"

"That's exactly what I'm saying," Mikale said, raising an eyebrow.

"Okay, hot shot, supposing your theory is correct, how do we get a male? It's not like we can rustle some up from the nanobot farm," Alex said, incredulously.

"It's not like we can perform gender reassignment to one and cross our fingers. It needs to be a full fledged male."

"Again you are looking at this as one or the other, not both. These organisms are not completely biologic nor are they completely mechanical. We just need to modify one to have the workings of a male, you know an outie instead of an inny," Mikale said, looking down at his crotch.

"I'm sure that once we look at the workings you will see a spot designed to insert coding. They had to get programmed somehow," Mikale said, laughing.

"Then once we introduce a modified one, we put on some mood music, dim the lights and let nature take its course so to speak."

"So essentially, what you're proposing is a rudimentary gender reassignment that equips the existing nanobot tech with the functionality to insert the modified coding into the mature nanobot modifying, for a lack of a better word, eggs, before they mature and release and perpetuate the cycle?"

"A tiny strap on, if you will." Mikale laughed.

"It doesn't have to be biologic, it just has to be a delivery system to the existing nanobot."

"Well before we can do that, we need to truly see what is under that shell, we need to determine the size and shape of the port," Alex said, scratching his head.

"Never in my wildest dreams did I ever see myself developing a means to inseminate a nanobot." He laughed.