Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire

Late evening, March 2026

I had just come off of a long shift at my software publisher's IT department where I had been working as an infrastructure engineer. It was a pretty demanding job, but I liked the challenge it gave me. I liked to find and fix faults, and to keep things running smoothly.

I was approaching fifty-eight, and let me tell you.

I bloody well felt it.

It wasn't always like this. For most of my life, I felt pretty good. I kept in reasonable health, even though I was never a fan of exercising. No, seriously, I mean it. Gyms are- were awful places, and some of the posers I've met in them were...

You know what, that's not important.

I also had weak knees, so running was definitely out.

Here's my other issue. I suffered from clinical depression. It really seeped deep down into my psyche over the years. Let's just say it led to a sedentary lifestyle that eventually caught up to me. Yes, I'd been steadily gaining far too much weight. The last time I had a check-up with the doctor, I'd been warned about my heart, that I might be developing angina, that I had a high risk of heart attacks in the near future.

Oh, and yeah, I had developed breathing difficulties. Never smoked or been subjected to toxic environments.

Well... Not in the physical sense anyway... But that's another long story.

Thing is, I couldn't really bring myself to give a shit, to be blunt. There were days where I felt that the world would be better off were I not in it. Those days had become more frequent as of late.

Funny thing is, I'd never thought about topping myself. It doesn't matter how deeply I felt that taking my own life would be doing the world a favour. I have a strong instinct for continued survival. Besides, death holds its own uncertainties, you know, such as the question of what lies beyond. I'm honestly not sure which is worse.

The idea that there's nothing and I'll just wink out of existence, or the idea that something does exist once I'm gone, and I have no idea what that really is.

Besides, I haven't seen all there is to see in the world, even now.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. My life kind of sucked. It consisted mainly of working twelve-hour or longer shifts, six days a week, and often being on call should an emergency arise. What kind of a life was that?

Sure, the money was good, and I had a bunch of investments into savings and a retirement fund, but it also left me with precious little time for anything else. My one real escape was gaming. I played games that ranged from casual shooters to strategy and building games. Role playing games that involve me campaigning across fantasy worlds, sometimes as a wizard, sometimes as a druid. Those were my jam. Sometimes, I liked to make a complete change and play as a barbarian or a warrior.

It was far different from the real world. I'm really not a fighting man, and my activities in this regard remained purely fantasy-based at this point in my life, taking place in the worlds I occasionally lost myself in.

It could never be a serious thing. How could it, what with always having to be alert to the outside world? Hell, I might have received a call at a moment's notice to come in to take care of an emergency with one of the servers at the office, but for just a few hours each week, I could lose myself in the world of fantasy warriors and mighty mages through a VR headset and tactile gloves. It was not the kind of full immersion technology I would have loved to experience, but it took me away from my problems for a little while.

One night, I had just sat down with a beer and a sandwich, and would you believe it, I began to think about some of the regrets I'd been having about my life.

When you were younger, you tended to think of yourself as invincible, not needing to get involved in any of that healthy eating or exercise business, because you were just fine. That was how I used to be. By the time I realised that I was in poor health, it was too late to get back to how I used to be.

Weirdly enough, I was just thinking about my biological parents. They were some of the most toxic people I had ever known, and you just know that had an effect on my personality.

I was pretty distrustful at that moment in my life, so I kept people at a distance, didn't really know how to form emotional attachments that were healthy, and as for compliments and praise...

I still yearned for the kind of emotional connection that one could only get from a healthy relationship or a marriage. Kind of a paradox, if you were to ask me. It wasn't often I had a real connection like that with people in my past, but I missed those few times it did.

The real sad thing is that I cut off all contact with my parents years ago. Their last words still stung.

"You're a disgusting slob, carrying on with those freaks and cavorting with degenerates-"

My "father", if you want to call him that, was the one coming out with that filth. There was no way I was ever going to stand there and let him finish that sentence.

So I told him: "Those 'degenerates' are my friends, and that's the last time you speak like they're dog shit on your shoe."

"Is it?" he mocked me derisively. "You think hanging around with queer boys and slutty bitches-"

I honestly don't remember what he said after that. I closed my attention off completely at that moment, and I had walked out of their nicely kept house and their filthy attitudes... And I've never been back since.

Why did it upset me so much?

Well, aside from that kind of vitriol being disgusting and unfair, those "queer boys" and "slutty bitches" were my friends. I've been spending time among the LGBT+ community ever since I met my best friend David, a gay fellow from Hong Kong. Not to mention my bisexual sister, Daniella. David came over here from HK back in the 80s with his parents, and he had spent almost his whole life in England. When this incident with my parents happened, David was barely out of his teen years, and Daniella was just turning seventeen to my twenty-three. As the older brother to her, I couldn't very well stand by and do nothing, so I stood up to our parents when they started giving her abuse for her sexuality.

It didn't surprise me in the least that they had turned against me almost straight away.

I expected it, of course, especially as they were often predisposed to attacking people around them with insults and unreasonable behaviour. A visit to the restaurant often resulted in one or both parents abusing their wait staff, and that was clearly an indicator for the type of people they were.

Unfortunately, their attitude has rubbed off on our youngest sister Julia, who was just as bigoted as her parents. Our eldest brother Paulo had left home already and refused to speak to any of them ever again. Alejandro, my baby brother, had been killed by a lynch mob of similarly bigoted people back in the late 90s, and that was the last straw for me.

I vowed never to speak to any of those bigoted pricks ever again after that moment.

Dani...

She was the only one I'd still had any contact with, although I hadn't heard from her in a few months, either. Paulo had died of cancer in 2019 after battling it for years, and I was never really close to any of our cousins, uncles or aunts. My friends within the community had lives of their own, and since laws had been changed to allow them to marry who they chose, some of them had taken the leap to start families of their own, something they had previously been unable to do.

I couldn't have missed the fact that while my parents would have had the local parish community on their side back then (as well as the local constabulary), today it was a very different matter. Today, if they were still alive, they would have been run out of town for such bigotry.

The phone started to ring, and it snapped me back to the present.

"Rick Reyes," I answered. I was a third-generation Anglo-Spaniard who had lived in England all his life. Again, not important.

"Yeah," Ugh... The smooth voice of Alan was like nails on a chalkboard, despite anyone not knowing the man hearing what would have been a pleasant baritone. "We need you to come in and look at Equinox One again. It's throwing up errors in the DB logs."

Oh yeah. Alan was my boss.

Just once, I would have liked to relax, and I couldn't really help the sigh that escaped me at that moment.

Then I had an idea.

"I've just come off of a twelve-hour. I shouldn't be on call."

"Well..." again, the sound of nails on a chalkboard. "You could claim it as overtime?"

Alan assumed that I would jump at the chance, little realising that the only thing I spent any money these days on was my PC rig, and the usual bills for this pitiful one bedroom flat.

It's not like I was about to be broke any time soon.

"I don't need overtime," I told Alan. "I need sleep. I've been at work all day, and someone screwed up when they put me on the on-call rota without checking if I have had any sleep."

A big sigh came over the other end of the line. You and your big sighs, Alan. "How about this? That server is critical. You know this. What if we give you tomorrow off in case this thing runs on too long?"

Lots of extra money? Not something I'm interested in.

Time off, though? That's another story. I could always use time off.

"Alright. Tomorrow off work. On-call payout as stipulated in my contract, and I get to leave as soon as I've got the system stable."

"Consider it done," Alan said cheerfully. "Send me an email afterwards."

"Yup."

I then hung up the call and took off toward the underground car park. It was just as well I kept my car in good shape and ready to go at a moment's notice.

Much later, at three in the morning, and here I was, dragging my feet.

Still, I had the next day off work, which was good for me. I opened up my emails, as you do when you're bored and you have always-on access to the Internet on your phone, absently dropping the keys on the side table near the entrance to my flat as I walked in.

Grow your penis- nope, delete.

Have you been in an accident in the last- delete.

Sexy singles in your area- delete.

Synergy Nanotechnology Solutions - Cutting Edge Threads, Daily Digest.

Something gave me pause at that subject line. I almost dismissed it as yet another piece of spam, but opened it instead.

It was a news digest from one of the forum boards I was registered to, with a press release posted. Skimming through it, I realised quickly that it was a discussion on nanotechnology, specifically a discussion on prototyping for nanomachines that could be injected into a life-form. They had just cracked the problem of miniaturising a combination of wireless communications nodes, incredibly small memory resources, and a rudimentary pincer-gripper assembly into a package small enough to manipulate cellular biology at the genetic scale, something unheard of before.

At least that would be the case if this thread were to be believed. A cleverly-made CGI animation showed a human blood cell, looking gigantic in comparison to the many nanobots arrayed around it. They showed low-powered laser beams dissecting the cell, grabbing the content of those cells, and then pulling them apart and chaining them together in different forms to resemble something else. The paper went on to discuss that the animation was not a real reflection of the work they were doing.

I almost dismissed the press release, but the next sentence caught my attention. "Our nanomachines are smaller than the depiction you can see here, and can manipulate the four base nucleotides that are found in DNA. Work will continue on this revolutionary technology, and we hope to have more news soon, including a promising foray into nanoscopic materials forging to convert atomic structures into different forms using small-scale fusion, fission, and molecular bonding."

Whoa, I exclaimed in surprise.

Aloud.

Yes, I said aloud.

While the technology was some way off into the future, the potential for medicine was enormous. I made an impulsive decision at that moment, something highly unusual for me at my age. I set myself an alarm for the morning, so I could give my financial advisor a call. This was one company I think I'll want to invest in. I quickly composed an email, addressed it to the CEO of the Synergy Nanotech Solutions Limited, and sent it that evening.

Six months had passed.

I was now fifty-eight years old, and I had almost dismissed the email out of hand that I had sent. My financial advisor had accepted instructions to invest in the company, and had taken eighty-percent of my liquid assets and invested the money in shares with Synergy.

I now had almost a hundred thousand invested in the firm, and while that was not much money to a company specialising in nanotechnology, it did give me enough of an interest in the company to keep me apprised of the latest developments they were working on.

After six months of standard newsletters from their press office, performance notes on my stocks from both my financial advisor and the company financial department, and sporadic news on how they were working on the edge of materials science to make the scales of the nanomachines smaller still without losing any of their utility, an email from the CEO came out of nowhere.

This caught me by surprise. Still, it was four PM, I had the day off, and I was curious. I started reading the damn thing.

F.A.O. Ricardo Reyes,

I hope this communication finds you well.

I have considered your email very carefully over these last few months. Your interest in the performance of our company, in particular our nanotechnology product, is clearly that of passionate for the work that we do. I certainly would agree that the potential for revolutionalising human medicine and human health as a whole is immense.

Having spoken with my colleagues, I would like to extend an invitation to you personally, to come and visit our facilities in the South West of England. Further details will be provided if you choose to accept this invitation, but I promise you, this is one opportunity you will not want to miss.

We will be providing a live demonstration of the effectiveness of our work, and will also be selecting volunteers for medical trials in the next six weeks. Your interest and your previous suggestion to volunteer for medical trials made me think of you in particular.

Once again, I do not wish to provide any specific details in an email, suffice it to say that if you wish to accept our invitation, I will call you in the next day or so to make the arrangements.

Yours sincerely,

Raymond Camberwell

Chief Executive Officer and Chairman

Synergy Nanotechnology Solutions Limited.

This was unprecedented. I was flirting with the idea of becoming a human guinea pig for nanotechnology, but at most, I thought I would be considered when clinical trials would begin some time in the far distant future, at a time when I was either close to dying, or had already passed on. To be invited so soon to an event like this, quite literally caused my mind to stop working for a few moments.

As soon as I could think again, I sent an immediate reply, accepting the invitation, looking forward to the phone call, and then sat down at my desk. While I had researched the subject beforehand, I now realised it was time I learned absolutely everything about nanotechnology that I could get my hands on, and Synergy in particular.