Grey Goo by RubberMatt
Well it’s more of a pinkish hue goo :D
I’d just re-read Michael Crichton’s ‘Prey’ and wanted to do my take on the out of control nanotech scenario.In the book the protagonist notes that his wife (a gifted nanotech researcher) has lost weight and is starting to look supermodel gorgeous, later in the book the use of powerful magnets strip away the nanites to reveal the real woman who now looks like a terminal stage cancer patient, when the capacitors discharge & the magnets shut down the nanites re-engulf and re-take control of her, restoring her supermodel looks.
Before they do she begs him to kill her, because they are literally eating her alive.
I wanted my nanites to be a little less flesh hungry …..
So we have a containment failure in the research lab, alarms go off, various personnel running around trying to do heroic things, a timer counting down until the underground research levels are completely purged with chemicals & fire …. and then the out of shape, overworked, overstressed research manager who has sacrificed two marriages to this career manually activates the failsafes, the nanite factory is destroyed, contaminated areas and personnel are purged and the alarms stop sounding.
She reaches the main control room and contacts the upper levels, gives all the correct replies to the security questions and the voice analysis shows she is not acting under duress.
Cleanup teams begin suiting up in full NBC gear and the camera switches back to the control room, panning across to reveal that she is no longer entirely human, her posture and expression indicating that she is not an unwilling participant in this subterfuge, the frumpy overweight manager having been transformed into a much younger woman with a perfect body in exchange for manufacturing the crisis and then supposedly destroying all the rogue ’nanites’.
I only did this one pic from that whole story idea (plus an alt) because I saw just a few problems with it.
They’re not going to let her just walk out of there without testing for nanite contamination, and they’re bloody well going to find it.
So I shoved the idea on the backburner and left it for a couple of months.
An alt of the grey goo pic.
Crichton’s ‘Prey’ nanites engulfed their host, kidnapped their minds & bodies and slowly devoured them, using them as raw resources to create new nanites as the older ones died off.That struck me as somewhat shortsighted on the part of the nanites. Once you’ve devoured your kidnapped host to the point that they die then you become nothing more than a free floating swarm again.
My nanites are smarter than that, they integrate themselves into the host body & brain, using direct neural stimulation to cause intense pleasure and pain to break the hosts will.
The host will have to up their calorie intake, they’re eating for two now after all :D, but the ability to not only look normal when necessary but act like the host does make up for it.
Like I said on the previous pic there are flaws with the story I came up with so I put it in the backburner and came back to it a couple of months later …..