A dozen long wooden pews had been pushed aside for the scaffolding. The purpose of the scaffolding must have been to begin some restoration project, but there were cobwebs and maybe spiderwebs as well and dust everywhere, so it had been abandoned some time ago.
There was an altar, a two-step platform topped by a large rectangle decorated with lacquered tile. A wooden podium or lectern was tipped onto its side. Above the altar on the wall was a cross in rough wood, probably a fairly realistic reproduction of the original. Someone had gone to a great of trouble to climb up there and set beer cans at the ends and at the top. Two were green Rolling Rock cans and one was a dented Colt 45 Malt Liquor can.
Billy had hauled his bag inside and set it down on the altar. He searched behind it.
“We need Burnofsky tied up,” Plath said. She glanced around. There was plastic rope, neon orange. She and Keats sat Burnofsky on a folding chair and tied him to the scaffolding. The placement of the metal pipes of the scaffolding dictated an odd, asymmetrical arrangement that left one of the man’s arms stretched out and the other raised over his head. If he pulled hard enough he might just be able to pull the whole rickety structure down on himself, but they were too shaken and weary to think of any better arrangement.
“This is hardly necessary, I’m an old man,” Burnofsky said, not really putting much conviction behind it.
“Tape his mouth shut?” Keats wondered aloud.
Plath shook her head. “No. Maybe he wants to spill his guts.”
Keats grinned at her. “Seriously? Americans really say things like that? Spill his guts? That sounds very Law and Order.”
“That’s probably where I heard it,” Plath admitted.
“You two make a cute couple,” Burnofsky said drily.
“Beneath the altar,” Keats said, recalling the text from Lear. He joined Billy and the two of them tipped the altar over.
“There are stairs,” Keats said. “No light switch, though. I’m not keen to walk down there with nothing but the light from an iPhone.”
“Wait for Jin,” Plath suggested. “I’m going to see what the old man put on me.” She sounded tougher than she felt. She had come to more or less accept that nano-scale images of her own eyes or brain were simply a part of her consciousness, but traveling out over her own skin still held terrors for her. She would have liked to take a good long shower first at least. You never knew what microscopic monstrosities you might encounter.
“I can do it,” Keats offered, stepping back from the altar.
Plath shook her head. “Bad enough I’ve got you in my brain. I don’t need you crawling over my epidermis.”
“Then I’ll update Lear and Jin,” Keats said.
Plath motored her two nanobots around her own eye. From the massive Golden Gate Bridge cable–size nerve onto the eyeball itself.
The back side of the eye was very different than the front. If the front was a sort of eerie frozen lake with an awful black pit in the center surrounded by stretched chewing gum muscles, the back was an alien landscape of seemingly impossible constructions formed by nerves and muscles and surface veins like tree roots.
Or perhaps the veins were more like pythons. She could see the shape of the blood cells that surged and slowed, surged and slowed with each heartbeat. The platelets were a sort of slurry in the larger veins, then branched off into smaller veins, and capillaries where they piled up, single file like impatient children pushing in line.
It was impossible at this scale to see blood as liquid. They were objects, each cell tiny but distinguishable. Wet red stones being forced through a pale sausage casing.
Then there were the muscles, giant bundles of rubber bands that fused into eyeball and jerked incessantly, though at the nano level she didn’t so much feel the motion as see it when the slanting rubber bands would thicken in contraction, stretch out in release, endlessly adjusting as though somewhere there must be an absolutely perfect angle for the eye and the muscles were determined to find it. Plath’s biots came around into the light on the lower edge. Bottom eyelids move less and could be more easily climbed than the swift-rushing upper eyelid. The edge of the lid was a shoreline of tall bluffs topped by scaly, curving palm trees. Eyelashes.
The lower lid jerked and the line of palm trees shot toward her. The lid and lashes rushed with startling speed, slid over her and blotted out the feeble light. She jumped both of her biots simultaneously and caught the wet membrane above.
This movement she felt, the impact, as the eyelid suddenly reversed direction and swept her back and away. Now clinging upside down to the lid, the eyeball itself swept by above/beneath her.
She steeled herself for the next part as she climbed—upside down, but in the nano up and down mattered very little—to emerge in the line of eyelashes. There, face-to-face with her, a demodex.
In the m-sub—micro-subjective—the demodex was almost as large as she was. Its face was a crude spider’s mouth and two utterly blank Hello Kitty! button eyes. God only knew what it saw—surely not much. The demodex was calmly munching a dead skin cell that looked rather like a fallen leaf after a rain.
The demodex did not respond to her presence—nothing in a demodex’s evolution had prepared it for this—it just kept eating.
The shortest way forward was to clamber straight over the mite. With a shudder Plath sent her biots scampering across, through the scaly trees, and out onto broken ground.
In and out of desert ravines, past scattered balls of pollen in half a dozen different colors and shapes. The pollen grains looked oddly like an assortment of footballs and soccer balls left carelessly on a playing field.
On
to the cheek. Here the skin was smooth—no more ravines. Those would come no doubt with age—but for now her skin was a carpet of leaves, dead cells drifted onto a living substrata. As she watched a handful of dead cells broke loose and fluttered away.