Chapter 1

Life was always a succession of changes, but most changes were tiny, or predictable, or encouraged by the person affected. It could be a matter of new learning, or stubbing your toe on a rock, or having a pack of pills to get rid of a headache that comes on suddenly.

Each changes your life during that day, but you accept the changes, and continue as normal, for that is what life is all about; a continuation of your life experience. Every day is different, or so it seems to you. It matters not, as you are still yourself, able to function pretty well as usual.

For John Hunter, now High Chief John in an unidentified location in prehistoric Central America, it was completely different. His whole body had been altered in ways he was unclear about, and he was unsure what these alterations all meant. His muscles were changing, his strength was improving, but his balance was altered through all these changes that had been made while he slept, and may also be unfinished yet. He would need to walk slowly until his balance became normal for him.

He had no idea if his brain had been affected by the changes, but he dared to envisage that it had. Certainly he could now have a basic talk with the nanites, in simple childhood English terms, In what other way his brain had changed, he would eventually find out, but it might take time to show up.

Sexually, the nanites implied in his head that renewal of active sperm was occurring faster than before, and he was conscious that his todger stayed hard for longer, so the nanites were seriously engaged in furthering the expansion of his immediate family as quickly as they could.

That was their prime imperative, it was clear. He would have to be extremely careful when making love to his wives, in case he harmed them unintentionally in his movements.

His eyesight and hearing had both improved, he had already discovered, but night vision was also better. It was as if he was seeing slightly in the infra-red spectrum, for warm-blooded animals and humans showed up faintly in the night for him now. Faintly, suggesting that the enhancements to his eyes were not able to collect sufficient infra-red radiation to make a major difference, but even that would be helpful for night fighting in future, or night encounters with animals.

Finally, he wondered if the same sort of thing would eventually happen to his wives and others to whom he had passed on his nanites over the many months since he arrived here. Would the nanites consider that females should obtain the same body improvements of strength and abilities that he now had, or would they concentrate their activities on men only?

Female warriors with enhanced night vision would be a tremendous asset to his tribes in any conflict. There was not enough known about tribes further afield than a few days’ walk from the cave. Even through the contacts with travelling merchants, information on distant tribes was minimal. At least, these foreign tribes would know that some tribes had advanced in knowledge, able to produce goods that the merchants were able to sell extensively.

John wondered in wry amusement how long it would take for the concept of two-wheeled transport in the form of the bicycle to be adapted for the purposes of war. If merchants can carry more goods in a bicycle pannier than they could previously carry on their backs, then the same technique could mean an ability to carry additional arrows or spears for an attack on an enemy.

John reflected that it was ever so; new inventions being turned into war materiel of one kind or another. The invention of steam trains on rails quickly made it easy to move large numbers of troops, as in WW1 and later, and from then on the road truck assumed more of that load, especially for geographical conditions not suitable for rail lines. Rail still functioned well for moving tanks, armoured vehicles, and ammunition trucks to where they were needed. Tanks were not suited to long-distance travel.

Come to think of it, the massively increased size of shipping vessels also led to most of the world’s cargo being moved by sea. He wondered if that would happen with the northern-based time travellers he had met. Would they start a shipping service to Europe?

John then kicked himself. At this time? Around ten thousand years before his original present? Europe’s population was most likely even more backward than the natives here in Central America. Over there it was most definitely the stone age, the Neolithic, and it would be several thousand years before the megalithic structures were erected. As he recalled, the earliest builders in stone in what would become Britain began their work in the Orkney Islands, and it took hundreds of years for the concept of stone circles to make its way down the mainland to finish at Stonehenge, where the locals went for an ostentatiously massive structure, taller than Avebury but not as wide a circle. Avebury was probably the largest stone circle in the world, though one in Egypt was the oldest, dating to around 7,000 years before his original time.

Odd; he hadn’t been particularly interested in prehistory before, but obviously a few things had stuck, or his brain was now better at recalling fleeting memories. That might come in handy when he needed to recall facts.

His initial attempts at inter-tribal trade had worked out well, and it showed indications of expanding towards tribes that they had not heard of. Travelling merchants were a blessing in disguise, he realised. They were sources of intelligence as well as cheap carriers for their products. At the same time, they could unfortunately act as a leakage of information that he didn’t want spread around, such as warfare techniques and equipment, apart from the use of bicycles. It would be wise not to talk about such matters within the hearing of any visiting merchant. He must tell Numa and the other local Chiefs to keep important facts to themselves, and not talk about these even around new or visiting tribesmen and women. These people would probably talk about the tribe they had visited, speaking in all innocence, unaware of the value of this intelligence to a clever warrior in another place.

He stopped thinking for a moment. He had spent many minutes pondering things – life, the universe, everything – instead of paying attention to the needs of his wives and his tribes.

He stood up and walked back into the cave and its activities. As he walked, his teeth complained about something, and he probed with his tongue. He found the top of a tooth protruding from the previously vacant gum, and to his astonishment recognised that a new tooth was arising where he had lost one years before, removed by his dentist after an abscess immediately below had loosened his tooth. He never expected to have it replaced, for there was no concept of adults growing new teeth; but it seemed that the nanites had determined that a tooth was missing and started his jaw replacing it by growing a new one. It was only now, with it breaching the gum line, that he had felt the pain of a new tooth developing. He wondered if any other unexpected changes would be forthcoming. Would his excised foreskin be reinstated to his penis?

More to the point, had it already been done so? He stopped and opened his loincloth to have a look, and at a short glance, he appeared to have a new foreskin.

Interesting. If a similar short coma resulted in changes to his women, would they find their hymens restored?

What would be the point, he wondered, then chided himself. It was not what the point of it was, but simply the nanites ‘restoring’ what appeared to be missing. They did not care whether the missing tooth or the missing hymen meant anything to the owner; the nanites merely made the body whole again in accordance with whatever body plan had been given to them, probably through a DNA analysis. The nanites were minuscule enough to be able to use DNA as an information source. How they could do that was a mystery to John, for he had no theoretical or indeed practical knowledge of nanite technology to draw on. All he had was the basic principles that had percolated down to the general public. It left him with more questions than answers.

“John? Are you with us, John?”

It was Chief Numa’s concerned voice, still unsure what had happened to her husband.

John opened his eyes and faced her, his musings fading into the background.

“Yes, darling, I am back in the world; just confused. I have had my body altered by these invisible machines that are inside me, and also inside you and the others. I seems that just like any magic you can imagine, they have done the unexpected, and are acting by their own interpretation of the rules that they have been given.”

“How can they do that, dear? Do you not have control over them?”

“Numa, just as you have no control over what you see as magic, I don’t have control over these tiny beings. Remember that they are saving you from illnesses, and helping with problems like pain and injury, so they are not deliberately acting against us. It is simply that any rule you make can have several ways of interpreting the rule. If I say: you shall not kill, how does that apply when someone tries to kill, but does not succeed? Is the intention enough? Does the rule apply only to humans, or also to animals similar to humans, like monkeys; or to any life-form? The answer may be clear to you, but not clear to another person whose view of life may differ.”

“Oh, I see. So your nanites are looking at their rules in a new way?”

“Sort of. To them, it is not a new way, but they may be reading the rule differently to those who wrote the rule. It appears that they have been set to maintain the human body as near as possible to the ‘norm’. I find that they are trying to return my teeth to the original design, despite that fact that I have lost at least one tooth to a problem in my younger days. They are replacing it as part of their standard human design. I was pondering whether a similar thing might happen to you ladies eventually, when they will place you in a long sleep while they make changes. They might replace your hymen – the skin near the entrance to your birth canal; the skin that breaks when you first have sex.”

“But why replace it? I was happy to have it tear when we had sex, and be gone forever.”

“Because it was there as part of your make-up as a female, Numa; and the nanites regard it as part of the design they are trying to maintain.”

“That seems silly, John,” she declared.

“That is the point, dear. The nanites don’t know the concept we would describe as ‘silly’. They just act according to their understanding of the rules given to them. These rules are inevitably simplified. They do not have enough data storage space to give them a detailed rule book covering all eventualities. Instead, they must have been given the choice of how to interpret their instructions. That seems logical to me.”

“What is this data storage space, John? The words do not tell me anything.”

“Dear, the word data means information that you need. Storage space is how much space is needed for all this data, so in total it means that they are so tiny that their capacity for data is very limited. I suspect that they share data, so that I was not given just one nanite, but a large tribe of nanites, each of whom has some of the data. Between them all, they hold a lot of information, but still that is nothing compared to what you and I store inside our brains in our heads.”

“I am astonished, John, that such tiny beings should be able to store such a lot of information.”

“Numa, any time you got ill with a disease in the past, that was caused by tiny creatures too small to see, but they could cause you harm, right?”

She nodded to show she understood.

“Well, these tiny, tiny creatures held a whole load of information about poisons and used that to harm you. These are natural creatures, yet hold a lot of data. Our nanites are man-made tiny Makers that can do a whole lot more than the disease-causing creatures are able to do.”

“That sounds terribly complicated, John. I think we should leave everything about that to you, and perhaps to Raka if she wants to think deeply about invisible things.”

“If that is what you want, Numa, that is fine by me. Mostly I will discover truths by experiencing what the nanites are doing to me, for there are no books in our library about such matters. I might find something about nanites in an encyclopedia, to help me brush up on the subject, but I don’t expect to learn much more. It depends on how up-to-date the encyclopedia is. Print books are not often so good that way.”

“I thought your ‘print books’ were one-off,” Numa said wonderingly. “There can be more than one, can there?”
“My love, the idea of ‘print’ is of a machine that makes copies of the pages, over and over again.”

“But why would you want more of these copies? Surely one would be enough?”

“For a family or even a tribe, one would be fine, but what if each tribe wants to have their own copy? Making more copies enable that to happen. Unfortunately, we don’t have in our time the machine that makes copies, so it has to remain a matter of imagination.”

“Ah. More magic, except that we don’t have the means of making the magic?”

“If you want to put it that way, then yes. Every world, every tribe, has its own magic, if you think of special knowledge that only the one tribe has. We have a special way of making gourds into flavoured-drink carriers, right? That is one of our own tribe’s special magic techniques. Bicycles is another example.

Printing of books was just one of the techniques that my tribe, back where I came from, had available. We can devise more and more techniques as time goes on, and each new bit of magic makes us stronger as a tribe.”

Interesting though the discussion was, Numa was not very impressed with technology. To her, birthing a child without dying was enough of a marvel; and for this to happen with every one of John’s wives was an even greater wonder. It was marvellous when Noma’s birthing problem was solved without her dying. John put it down mainly to the nanites, though Sheila’s knowledge of herbs and ointments was another part of Noma’s survival.

Next morning brought another surprise. A trader arrived with a new plant in his pack, one which John had asked for. It was a round knobbly root from the high mountains in the southern continent. He presented it to High Chief John with a flourish.