Going Buggy

Another late night for the barber. The customers left hours ago, and he is sweeping and bagging the day's hair from the floor, the most tedious part of his day. The repetitive motion of the broom, back and forth, is starting to bother his lower back after all of the years he's been at it.

His trash hauling bills started getting out of hand when the new recycling laws took effect. His trash was considered organic waste and the city fathers said it couldn't be land filled. It couldn't be composted, either, because hair doesn't break down like yard waste. The barber is forced to bag it up for a special recycler to reclaim, who only visits the shop once a month. When he's done cleaning up tonight, he'll have to take the bagged hair to a storage unit he rented for just that purpose.

Finished sweeping and bagging, he slumps into his chair to watch the early evening news.

"Tonight in TechTalk, Channel 31 News brings you the latest developments from the USDA lab here in Peoria. Tiny robots that take care of one of your more tedious household chores."

The barber reaches for the remote, but pauses, because the image on the screen shows someone vacuuming their floor, with the station's TechTalk logo on top.

He watches in fascination while the director of the lab describes the biobots they've developed. First developed to eat a fungus that was threatening soybean crops, they've modified it so it will chew up and digest dead organic matter, and they've licensed it for distribution as a "perpetual floor cleaning system."

He's on the net within minutes of getting home, trying to find the distributor.

After some frustrating searching, he finds the distributors online store, and orders a pack they claim is good for 3,000 square feet, about the size of his shop and store room.

He gets an email a few minutes later, warning him his order will be delayed for 20 days due to a backlog. It includes an offer to be a field tester for their newest product, that has not been released for sale, if he agrees to complete a detailed journal on how he uses it, and what it does.

"What the heck, why not?" he mumbles to himself, and clicks 'ACCEPT.'

He goes into the shop the next day, and tells the other barbers renting his chairs to be on the lookout for a package for him.

He has to leave for a couple of hours in the afternoon, and when he gets back, the package is there - opened.

"Hey, what happened to the stuff in here?" he asks.

"Oh, we knew you were excited, so we got curious. Everything is back on your desk."

"Damn it, I said to be on the watch for it, not to open it."

The barber hurries to the back room that does dual service as his office and store room. Sitting on the desk he sees what looks like an oversized Ziploc bag filled with glittering sand, a small manual, an odd-looking marker pen, and a group of essay books under it.

What he doesn't notice is the piece of paper almost hidden under the bottom shelf of the rack next to the desk, a corner peeking out.

The manual, if you can call it that, explains that the bag contains several billion nano-robots that have been programmed to spread out in an even dispersal pattern, based on the lines drawn on the floor using the special marker. They will not consume any living organic material, or plastics, which is good.

He scans the little 6 page pamphlet front to back, and comes to the activation section. He has to expose the packet to a UV lamp, like a grow bulb used by indoor gardeners, for 24 hours to charge them up the first time, but they will operate after that from the combination of visible light and by metabolizing materials they ingest after that.

After his last scheduled customer, he goes off to the hardware store to get the bulb. Getting back, he picks up the marker, and gets down on his hands and knees, and starts drawing the line around his shop, bearing the snide remarks from the other barbers' customers as he does so. The line is wide, but nearly invisible.

The next day the barber is totally antsy about trying out these little robots, but he waits until the end of the day. His customers notice his nerves during the day, and make little comments about leaving their ears where they are.

The shop closes up, and he leaves for awhile to grab a pizza up the street, knowing he has a couple of more hours to wait before the bots will be ready. He's still just a bundle of nerves, wanting to try this out. But he wants it to go right, so he bides his time, calls his wife, fidgets with his soda straw...and time to go!

He gets back and reads the instructions. "Open the bag, and place all contents near the center of the room. Within 30 minutes the materials should be fully dispersed."

"Easy enough," the barber mutters to himself. He walks to what he thinks is about the middle of the shop, tears open the bag, and gently pours it into a pile on the floor. He goes back to his chair, puts his feet up and watches.

Nothing happens for the first few minutes, then the pile slowly grows ever smaller, until it appears it has evaporated. He looks down and around, but the little machines are totally invisible.

"Wow, that was weird," he says. "Now what?"

Looking thoughtful, he goes back to the stock room, and brings back one of the bags of hair he had swept up the day before. He dumps it in about the same spot where he'd poured out the bag of bots.

For a few seconds, nothing. Then he notices slight twinkling from the floor spreading out from the hair in a strange web-like pattern that becomes a sparkling ring contracting ever closer to the pile of hair.

The hair ball looks like there's something under it, making it heave and roil like a boneless Cousin It having an epileptic seizure, with a small purple thunderstorm living inside. It slowly grows smaller and smaller, and in a matter of minutes nothing remains but a pile of semi-translucent, twinkling sand. In a few seconds, even that is gone.

The barber whispers "wow, that was too cool" under his breath.

All goes well. Snip snip the hair falls to the floor. There isn't a visible repeat of the twinkling effect that had covered most of the shop's floor, but when the barber watches closely he sees a smaller display similar to it around each small lump of hair. The floor is immaculate.

And then one day, the female barber drops her electric shears on the floor in the middle of a cut.

Nobody thought anything of it, including the barber. That sort of thing happened occasionally, and the equipment was engineered to take the shocks. The shears fell into the small clump of hair that had been clipped.

She hesitates a few seconds to apologize to her customer for her clumsiness, then reaches down and retrieves the shears.

The crack in the casing is practically invisible, but several hair shavings have managed to get inside along with a couple dozen of the little robots that have already started chewing up the hair.

She goes back to clipping his hair, continuing the small talk conversation about the upcoming weekend and arguing who is going to win this week's baseball game in St. Louis.

Finishing their little meal in the clippers, the robots slip out of the crack to land on his scalp. Their little blue lights blink until they reach synchrony and they begin chewing at the base of adjacent hairs.

It's Saturday, and the barber does his normal weekly clean up of his office, and spots the paper that had slipped under the shelf.

WARNING

1. Untested around household pets.
2. Untested for allergen reactions.

Report any unusual or unexpected results immediately to the manufacturer. See Manual for contact information.

These nanobots can be deactivated using chlorine in a 2% solution. Dilute common household bleach 1:1 with distilled water, apply liberally to area.

"Strange warning," he thinks to himself.

Two weeks later, the customer returns for his routine trim. The usual small talk ensues, until the female barber comments on the bald patch he has on top of his head. "Funny, you didn't have this last time you were here," she says.

"What, let me see." She gives him her hand mirror and points to it, swiveling him around to the big mirror on the wall.

The patch is about the size of a silver dollar, very uniform in size, right at the crown.

"Dang, that's weird," the customer says. "I had quite an itch there for a day or so after my last visit, but that's been gone for over a week."

They continue on with his cut, and the barber overhears the customer laughingly talking about his old cat "Poor old boy is going bald and scratching like crazy. The vet told me to use some Benadryl on the red spots, but can't find anything wrong with him."

The barber thinks quickly. "Hey, uh, I heard that there's a little mite that can cause hair loss on cats. Mix up some bleach half and half with water, that kills 'em."

That night after he closes up, he wearily goes to the grocery, buys bleach and distilled water, and returns to slowly mop his shop.

In the midst of mopping, his thoughts keep coming back to the balding cat and the smooth skin on the customer's scalp.

Then he starts to wonder...what if...

He goes in the stock room, and finds an unopened box perm bonnets. The things are water tight, and he wonders if the littler marker pen he got can be used on one. He rummages through his desk, finds it, and carefully draws a line all around the elastic.

He gets out his vacuum cleaner, puts in a new bag, and carefully and thoroughly vacuums the shop. When he finishes, he dumps the contents in the zipbag within which the nanobots had originally been packed.

That night he studied the company's website about these little machines. He scratches down their toll free number to talk to them the next day about his idea. He calls his lawyer, just to make sure he is doing this right, and stops by his office on the way to his shop and picks up a secrecy agreement.

"Hello, Acme Development, how may I direct your call?"

"Well, I have this idea I want to talk to someone..." "Hold for legal, please."

The canned music nearly drives him insane while he waits. He sits at his desk, drumming his fingers, waiting, waiting.

"How may I help you?"

"Well, I've got this idea for a way to use these nanobots you guys shipped me, and..."

"Sir, we'd love to discuss it with you, where may I send our standard non-disclosure agreement?"

He gives the blunt-speaking woman his address and goes about his business for the next few days. He checks off and on to make sure that the bag is still locked in his filing cabinet, and is still just a bag of dust.

He gets the letter in the mail after a few days, and his attorney says it's all in order. The barber signs it and sends it back the next morning.

During the following week, the barber gets itchy to try out his idea. He writes it out, step-by-step, thinking through how the little robots work from what he's read and seen. "Simple enough," he thinks to himself, when he gets down five simple rules.

"I'm trying this," rumbles through is brain, his excitement turning his thought into a lumbering locomotive loaded with steel.

So that night, he takes out the bag of nanobots, scoops out half a cup, puts them in a baggie he keeps around for leftovers, and puts them under the grow light.

Whistling with self-satisfaction, he makes sure all of the locks are set and heads off down the street, a spring in his step.

He gets the call he's been waiting on from Acme. He speaks with someone he hopes is one of the engineers, but the voice on the other end of the line is rather evasive. "It might work," is all that registers on his mind, disregarding "but it needs to be tested in a controlled environment."

The barber locks up the shop for the night, and goes back to his office. He turns off the grow lamp, and sees the little twinkling within the baggie. He drops in a sprinkling of hair and watches as it disappears as if by magic.

Opening the drawer, he removes the marking pen, then pulls off his pants. Very carefully, he draws a line around his knee, just below the joint. He lays out a plastic trash can liner on the floor very carefully, making sure to smooth out any wrinkles.

Groaning as he lowers himself to the floor, he makes sure the spritzer bottle he had prepared earlier in the day is close enough to reach, with its bleach and water mix. Lying down, he opens the baggie, and sprinkles the contents on his lower leg.

At first, nothing. Then he sees the sparkles of purple light. The hairs on his lower leg move nearly imperceptibly, then slowly, slowly his leg begins to look smoother and smoother, with some loose hairs falling to the plastic under his leg. Within 30 minutes, his entirely lower leg is totally smooth, as if it has had a chemical depilation solution had been at work.

Against the dark background of the plastic bag, he doesn't notice the little twinkles of purple light.

Feeling satisfied with himself, he sprays the chlorine solution in a fine mist on his leg, sits in his chair and carefully vacuums the surface.

The fine bits of hair on the plastic liner, if they could have been seen by the naked eye in the first place, are swiftly being consumed.

Then - a small hole appears in the liner, while the barber admires the smooth skin on his leg. Standing up, he reaches down to pick up the sheet of plastic, and to his horror sees the hole in the bag. Grabbing up the spray bottle, he starts squirting the solution all over, hoping he has deactivated all of the nanobots.

Of course he can't see the few that have crawled onto his bare foot and are latched on to his skin.

He vacuums the area thoroughly, then empties the contents into the baggie with the larger stash of nanobots. "Whew, that might have been close," he says to himself under his breath.

He sleeps poorly that night, thinking about the vast wealth his new use of these little machines will bring him. A sports car, a house on the shore in Maine, a condo on the beach in Florida for the winter months.

And the little bots are slowly working their way up his leg, looking for their next meal, and finding it once they cross the now-washed-away line from the special marker pen.

They eat away the entire night on his hairy leg, slowly moving up up up as they clear another spot on his leg.

When he goes to shower in the morning, he first feels the strange line on his leg, then looks in horror to see a nearly straight line of smooth skin from his knee halfway up his thigh. He shrieks in horror. The bots wash down the drain, unable to maintain their hold against the water pressure.

The bots are deactivated within a few seconds of entering the sewage treatment plant, the combination of household chemicals having enough chlorinated compounds in them to serve the purpose.

The barber is terrified. What has he done?

He calls Acme as soon as their office on the west coast opens, three hours later, and relates to them what has happened.

"I'm sorry sir, but we did not authorize any experiments be conducted with our materials. Thank you for sharing your results, though."

Several weeks later, the barber comes across the brochure for a new hair removal treatment while going through his day's mail.