=Welcome, Kamala Shastri.= Silloin's voice came over the speakers with a
soothing hush. =You are ready to open your translation?=
Kamala bowed to the window. "This is where I take my clothes off?"
=If you would be so convenient.=
She brushed past me to the bench. Apparently I had ceased to exist; this
was between her and the dino now. She undressed quickly, folding her
clingy into a neat bundle, tucking her slippers beneath the bench. Out of
the corner of my eye, I could see tiny feet, heavy thighs, and the
beautiful, dark smooth skin of her back. She stepped into the fogger and
closed the door.
"Ready," she called.
From the control room, Silloin closed circuits which filled the fogger
with a dense cloud of nanolenses. The nano stuck to Kamala and deployed,
coating the surface of her body. As she breathed them, they passed from
her lungs into her bloodstream. She only coughed twice; she had been well
trained. When the eight minutes were up, Silloin cleared the air in the
fogger and she emerged. Still ignoring me, she again faced the control
room.
=Now you must arrange yourself on the scanning table,= said Silloin,
=and enable Michael to fix you.=
She crossed to the marble without hesitation, climbed the gantry beside
it, eased onto the table and laid back.
I followed her up. "Sure you won't tell me the rest of the secret?"
She stared at the ceiling, unblinking.
"Okay then." I took the canister and a sparker out of my hip pouch. "This
is going to happen just like you've practiced it." I used the canister to
respray the bottoms of her feet with nano. I watched her belly rise and
fall, rise and fall. She was deep into her breathing exercise.
"Remember, no skipping rope or whistling while you're in the scanner."
She did not answer. "Deep breath now," I said and touched a sparker to
her big toe. There was a brief crackle as the nano on her skin wove into a
net and stiffened, locking her in place. "Bark at the ferrets for me." I
picked up my equipment, climbed down the gantry, and wheeled it back to the
wall.
With a low whine, the big blue marble retracted its tongue. I watched
upper hemisphere close, swallowing Kamala Shastri, then joined Silloin in
the control room.
I'm not of the school who think the dinos stink, another reason I got
assigned to study them up close. Parikkal, for example, has no smell at
all that I can tell. Normally Silloin had the faint but not unpleasant
smell of stale wine. When she was under stress, however, her scent became
vinegary and biting. It must have been a wild morning for her. Breathing
through my mouth, I settled onto the stool at my station.
She was working quickly, now that the marble was sealed. Even with all
their training, migrators tend to get claustrophobic fast. After all,
they're lying in the dark, in nanobondage, waiting to be translated.
Waiting. The simulator at the Singapore training center makes a noise
while it's emulating a scan. Most compare it to a light rain pattering
against the marble; for some, it's low volume radio static. As long as
they hear the patter, the migrators think they're safe. We reproduce it
