“What do you make of it, Richardson?”

“Looks like ash, sir.”

“Of course it’s ash, man. I want to know what it’s doing in the middle of our tubes.”

Doctor Stanford was not looking forward to his 5:00 p.m. conference call. He was meeting with the board. The tubes were on the agenda. They were going to want to know why the ancient data tubes were spotless and empty when they were unearthed two weeks ago. They were also going to want to know why one of the tubes suddenly had a massive pile of ash in the middle of it.

When he found out who it was—he clenched a fist—they just might end up as dust themselves. Dust, he continued in his mental tirade, that would be buried better than these tubes.

Stanford stood up and tugged the lower half of his salt-and-pepper colored vandyke. “When are the results coming back from the lab?”

Richardson checked his watch, as if the current time would speed up the prediction they had already given him. He said, “5:30.”

“Of course. Not early enough for the board. Tell them to step on it.” He whirled, cracked boots kicking up dust in his wake.

“They are, sir,” answered Richardson, staring at the mysterious pile of gray dust. “They are.”

* * *

The call was going to hell. No, we don’t know what it is. Yes, we’re working on it. No, it wasn’t one of our boys. Yes, it probably was one of the shady local grunts. Stanford looked at his watch. 5:52. Wasn’t the lab supposed to bail him out? After threats, curses, dire warnings and more threats, the line was finally disconnected. First order of business: direct the board’s anger toward the men. That was not the intent, naturally, but it was the result.

“Richards—” was all Doctor Sanford got out before he was interrupted.

“Here, sir.” He shoved a misaligned, stapled stack of papers at Stanford who grabbed them as a bundle.

“These better be the lab results.”

Richardson said nothing as the Doctor proceeded to read the first page himself. He flapped the page once, putting a crease in stack to keep it from flapping in the wind. The unstapled upper right corner bent over.

“What the hell is this?”

Richardson replied, “Precisely our question, sir.”

“Well. Why didn’t you answer it for yourselves yet?”

“We did sir. Page four.” He took the report and began folding through it.

“Never mind, just tell me.”

“The data is unmistakable. It’s a pile of nanoparticles.”

The Doctor took an unsteady step toward the yawning concrete cave where the nanoparticle pile lay. “How old are these tubes?”

“Six, seven hundred years. We haven’t dated them precisely yet.”

“And nanotech—”

“A hundred years after that—absolute earliest. Twenty years after their widespread adoption…” Richardson held open hands up. The gesture was half a shrug, half an imitation of some massive explosion.

“And these particles themselves? New?”

Richardson shook his head.

The doctor took another step. “God help us all.”

* * *

Twenty minutes later the entrance to the tube with the nanoparticle pile was surrounded by a semicircle of vehicles, headlights on. Overhead, a whirlybird cut the air, shining its own spotlight into the eyes of those below. Every free man had been mobilized to the spot with a weapon. The sun was nudging the horizon; As Doctor Stanford peered out over the desert, he could see it move.

“Doctor Stanford!” Richardson shouted over the roar of the chopper. “Sir, the flamer is here.”

“About damn time.” The doctor turned his attention to the center of the circle where two armed men were waving their arms, guiding a truck as it backed into position. It was a military model: squat, with a wide wheel base and angular plates of scarred titanium.

Two men in asbestos suits jumped out of the passenger cabin, waving the curious—and woefully untrained—guards back away from the area. A third man, wearing protective gear but no face covering, approached Stanford and Richardson.

He approached the older of the two with one hand outstretched. “Doctor Stanford, so nice—”

“I’m Doctor Stanford,” Stanford interrupted.

“Oh, of course, sir.” The young man in the asbestos suit nervously pushed a pair of clunky glasses up his nose and stuck out his hand again. Stanford gave it a practiced shake, but he was clearly disgusted. The young man added, “nice to meet you, sir.”

“How long until you’re ready?”

The young man glanced back where the two asbestos warriors were dragging a hose out into the opening. The nozzle had a tripod fixed underneath it. They slapped it into place, and one of the men looked back. When he saw the three looking at him, he thrust a bulky thumbs-up into the air.

“Ready now, sir,”

“Roast it.”

“Roger that.” The young man turned and hustled back to the truck.

Seeing the signal, one of the two fully suited men twisted a valve on the nozzle. One heavy breath later, a geyser of flame ripped from the end of the hose. It lit up the night sky with its citrus glow, washing the pile of nanoparticles from the face of the Earth. After thirty seconds of inferno, they shut it down.

Stanford hiked over to the truck with Richardson close behind. From there, they got a clear view of the pile. It had collapsed some, and the gunmetal gray had turned to charred black remains. The doctor wrapped on the truck window and shouted, “Again!”

The flame shot forth but before the shock of its power had a chance to die down a second time, it abruptly cut off.

“What happened?” Stanford shouted to no one in particular.

The young bespectacled man jumped out of the truck. “One of my men just reported something unusual, sir. It moved.”

“Well, then blast it harder! Again! What the hell is wrong with you people?” The doctor cursed an unholy curse and mopped sweat from his brow with a greasy rag.

The fire was unleashed once more, but this time a mighty form twisted from within the flame. It grew toward the sky, cold and dark in the midst of the inferno. The murmur of the crowd overcame even the roar of the flame, and before the shape had even settled into a perfectly proportioned human form, some of the natives had dropped their guns and ran.

Doctor Stanford was pounding on the truck again, shouting over the flame and the crowd and the helicopter above. “Don’t stop, for Christ’s sake, burn it to hell!”

The form inside the flame waited patiently. The heat from the tip of the nozzle was distressing even the asbestos, and a tendril of fire suddenly leapt from the nozzle onto the arm of one nozzleman. He beat it furiously against his side, and when it refused to extinguish, he rolled on the ground, back toward the truck. The remaining nozzleman struggled to hold the flame steady against the force of the fuel from the hose.

A few moments later, the flame drooped of its own accord, then spit and died. The dark figure casually brushed at one arm, as if straightening a cufflink. Upon seeing this, the remaining nozzleman turned to flee as he had seen the others doing, and kicked over the nozzle in his haste.

Doctor Stanford whirled and grabbed Richardson by the shoulder. “Rick—tell them about this place. This mechanical man. Whoever it takes. Tell them to nuke it. It’s our last chance.”

Richardson hesitated. “What about you, sir?”

“Don’t worry about me,” he turned and walked against the tide of people. The helicopter peeled off toward the horizon and the flame truck roared to life.

Doctor Stanford approached with slow, tentative steps. All the vehicles had left. One or two of his workers may have paused to see his fate, but they did not linger. Two banks of sheer blue halogens had been set up to augment the light from the vehicles. They were all that was left. As the last person abandoned the dig site, the only sound was their hum.

The figure before him was charcoal-black, but as he approached its skin swirled, the darkness disappearing and the pale gray sliding back to the surface. The eyes were featureless and when it spoke, the mouth was nothing more than a slight depression. It was a granular solid. Animated. Deadly.

“I have been deactivated for six hundred and forty seven years,” it said. The voice was smooth and perfectly human, but too regular. It was not mechanical, but uncanny.

Stanford stood in front of the nanoparticle man at a distance of roughly twice his height. “How do you know the time?”

Inappropriately, the man blinked. “Stars,” he said.

The doctor cleared his throat. He ran over his next words in his mind. They weren’t his, but he knew them, just as every archeologist of the last five hundred years knew them. He began to recite.

“You are very powerful. I stand before you in representation of all humanity. Once, your kind nearly destroyed us. You are the perfect weapon. We have learned that we cannot fight you. So we beg for your mercy.”

The nanoparticle man tilted his head as a blind man might do. “I am not a weapon.”

Stanford’s reply caught in his throat. There was no script for this answer. Finally he said, “Not a weapon? You—your kind—we fought a long and bloody war with your kind.”

“That information is not in my recollection,” he said.

“Well it’s in ours!” The doctor caught himself. Of all the people he could not lose his temper with, this was certainly one. He asked, “what is in your recollection?”

“Humanity’s civil war. You did not fight us. You fought yourselves.”

“But we—all of your kind was destroyed.”

“Unfortunately.”

The doctor regarded the nanoparticle man with bemusement. “Did you defend yourself?”

“The best we could.”

“Which was—how? What weapons did you use?”

“We did not use weapons. We used words.”

Stanford scowled. “You what?”

“You programmed us to be the ultimate in reason. Humanity turned on itself when a certain level of the population reached a particular level of cognitive dissonance. When you realized what had happened, 78% of the population was dead or injured.”

“So then we turned on you.”

“Our reason was no match for your emotion.”

A low moan surrounded them, betraying the presence of a distance airplane approaching.

“We thought we destroyed every one of your kind. Looks like we missed one.”

The nanoparticle man said nothing. Stanford fidgeted. Just a bit longer.

“But we found you,” the doctor went on.

“And now you will destroy me, as well?”

“Of course.”

“I come from ash. You can make me ash, but I will always return from ash, as I have now.”

The truth of the situation hit Stanford. “No—”

“I am composed of the particles of eighteen thousand, two hundred and seventy six individual nanobots. You can scatter my pieces, but you cannot destroy them. It may take time to rebuild, but time I have. Always. You turn me to dust; I return from dust.”

Stanford gritted his teeth. “Not this time.”

“But you,” the nanoparticle man went on, ignoring his reply. “You turn to dust. Forever.”