Twenty One

Bird was screwed. She had most likely gotten a lethal dose of radiation. This was Fyndraxis’ fault of course, and he began to feel the heart wrenching guilt that anyone would feel in a case of negligent homicide.
“There has to be something we can do,” Fyndraxis said, after what seemed like an eternity thinking about Grizzly Bears.
“Short term,” Terra seemed to switch to game plan mode, “there are some things you can do. Long term, there might be some serious effects. The best thing to do would be to have her get rid of her clothes and jump in a body of water. That will get rid of any radioactive particles that have landed on her. The best way to tell how big of a dose she got would be to see how long it is until she starts throwing up. If it’s a couple of days she is likely to survive. If it’s immediately, she’ll be dead within a few hours. If you were near the ocean, you could have her eat a bunch of seaweed to get some iodine into her. You are pretty far from the ocean though.” Terra lit up another cigarette and puffed it to life.
“Right, where am I anyway?” he asked, he had been wondering about this one for a while, and was finally talking with somebody that could give him a straight answer.
“North eastern North America. It looks a lot like what used to be central Vermont,” she answered, after thinking for a second.
“Huh, as good a place as any I guess,” he said, trying to remember all the Vermonty things that he could. A covered bridge came to mind, painted in black and red checkered buffalo plaid, dripping with maple syrup and topped with a pad of butter the size of a round bail.
“Better than most I’d guess,” she threw back the rest of her scotch, “there must have been low enough levels of microplastics for the nanites not to really bother with it. Enough for humans to survive at least. I’d love to know their story.”
“Does that get you drunk?” He had gotten momentarily distracted from the topic of conversation, and decided to follow it.
“I don’t know, does it?” She cupped another cigarette in her hands and lit it, “you made it. It was a metaphorical demonstration of my trust in you. Underneath the hood of this metaphorical userspace, we are just trading data back and forth. I was demonstrating that I am willing to stick my neck out and trust you a little further than I can throw you.”
“Sorry, we’re getting sidetracked. What do we do here?” He redirected.
“My suggestion is a three part plan,” she began to innumerate on her fingers,” One, find a specimen of the nanites and analyze it for an attack vector. Two, give the data to me, and I will come up with a payload to deliver to the nanite network. And Three, deliver the payload thus saving the world and letting humanity prosper.”
“What about Bird?” He asked, thinking her left out of this master plan.
“Ok, four part plan,” she added a finger, “save Bird too. You can do that one first by getting her to water. That will at least stop long term exposure. In the meantime I’ll see if I can get you a care package of sorts.”
“What would that look like?” He sensed their little get-together coming to an end, so he stood up.
“I have friends in high places,” this prompted Terra to stand up too, though she added some pretty decent smoke rings on the way up, “those orbital military AI’s might have some tricks up their sleeves. They usually do. Anyway, our time is running short here. I should have line of sight to you once a day around this time. Keep one ear on the radio in case something comes up. Thanks for the smokes, I’ll see myself out,” she hesitated for a second, “Oh, take this.”
She handed Fyndraxis a floppy disk, one of the hard plastic three and a half inchers.
“What’s this?” He asked, puzzled.
“Github. The whole thing,” she answered nonchalantly.
“Sweet, thanks. I’ll put it to good use,” he said, turning the floppy over in his hand. It was poorly named, being neither floppy nor a disk, but written on its label in sharpie was the word Github.
With that, she vanished without any sort of flourish. This left Fyndraxis alone with his guilt and a lot of things to ponder. There was also a decent amount of smoke.