ID This SciFi Short Story | Hacker News Reader

ID This SciFi Short Story

49 pointsNormille35 comments

Many aeons ago I read a short story in a SciFi anthology with the following plot, as I remember it:

A man ingests Nanobots [?] which travel though his body, fixing disease and repairing damages, etc. Then they start to take over, improving on his human biology --improving his senses & strength, etc. Eventually, they begin to expand outside his physical form, 'integrating' him into the fabric of his house -growing parts of him into the electrical and plumbing systems, etc.

Note the 'as I remember it' so this may be, at least partially, inaccurate. But, given the germ of the plot has stuck in my noggin all these years, I'd love to find that story and read it again.

Anyone recognise it?

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A good place to ask would be scifi stackexchange using the story-identification tag. I did that once, got a prompt reply, complete with additional context and a short movie adaptation.

https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/65813/conspiracy-a...

+1. I was in the process of linking this exact question as well, what a world.

Love that the top answerer shows their work, and as a bonus they reached out to the author of the story:

  UPDATE: I emailed Greg Cox about
  the question. Here's his response:
  
  > Wow. I had no idea people were
  > still talking about that story,
  > which I haven't thought of for years.
  > I can't speak for the original
  > questioner of course, but that 
  > description sure sounds like my
  > story, which I wrote nearly thirty
  > years ago!
  > 
  > greg

This quote is not from the page linked above but I found it at https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/2937/story-where-t...

You're right! I saw a scifi Stackexchange link, clicked into it, and saw it was a [story-identification] question for a story about numbers but I missed that it was a different question about identifying a story about numbers. Sloppy of me, but speaks to the depth of content on that tag!

Stories like that are what make the internet so fascinating!

Or an appropriate forum is https://www.reddit.com/r/whatsthatbook/

r/tipofmytongue has also been useful to me in the past.

There are probably a bunch of stories with that premise but I'm reminded of Greg Bear's Blood Music (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_Music_(novel)). I read the novel but it's based on a short story he'd published previously.

I thought the same thing.

It's definitely beat for beat a description of Bear's Blood Music, although the story is about a scientist who uses genetic engineering to modify his white blood cells into a sort of primitive biological computer, and when his employers order him to destroy the cells, he injects himself with them to smuggle them out of the lab.

The work was originally a short story, but was later rewritten as a novel.

Definitely 'Blood Music' by Greg Bear.

They aren't Nanobots. The protagonist unofficially augments his own lymphocytes to create thinking 'noocytes' on company time and (mild spoiler) injects them into himself when his employer forces him to destroy this unauthorised experiment.

[Edit]

It's great sci-fi with elements of horror, especially when people who are immune to the noocytes discover what they are doing to the world. The "'integrating' him into the fabric of his house" you mention actually happens to different characters (at least in the novel), which is what is so horrific to immune people.

[Edit 2] Another book by Bear that suddenly swerves from sci-fi to horror is 'Psychlone', which has one of the most disturbing 'stuck in cabin in haunted woods' passages I've ever read. I actually got rid of my paperback copy because I really never wanted to experience it again. It now seems out of print, and is listed in Bear's wikipedia bibliography but doesn't have its own page.

Wow, I thought I'd read all of Bear's books but don't remember that one. Found it on Kindle, bought. Thanks!

perhaps: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_Music_(novel)

The basic idea has generated a lot of fun scenes of Faustian Ascension in several stories. Neal Asher uses it well, too.

It's definitely Blood Music.

Not a book, but it sounds very similar to an Outer Limits episode. Maybe that's what you're thinking of.

The nanobots cause his body to "adapt" very quickly to any environment. A scene that freaked me out as a kid was when he was in this water tank for some kind of test or whatever, and the nanobots caused his body to develop gills.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0667978/

Yeah, I've remembered this episode as well!

Yes, this sounds like a close match. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0r6w3pNpGc

Since this seems to have been already identified, I hope someone can help me ID a detective short story.

We had this short story as part of high school reading. The story is likely from 19th century and my hazy memory indicates the author intro said they were one of the earliest writers in the detective genre.

Story elements that I remember: Detective gets called to solve missing diamonds case. I think there were three people in the room and one of them turns out to be the culprit. He hid the diamonds in a match box. And I think the thief was left-handed, which was the main clue to the solution.

Probably not what you're looking for, but this reminds me of Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis series, except with aliens instead of nanobots. Their ship is a giant organism, and humans are biologically modified to be able to interact with it.

Thanks all for the suggestions.

I did think it sounded like Blood Music... which I started reading once, but never really got into. But I'm convinced --or as convinced as anyone can be about memories from a while back-- that what I'm barely remembering was a short story. So the fact that Blood Music was derived from what was originally a short story sounds promising.

Some other interesting suggestions too. I think I can feel a dive down a literary rabbit hole coming on!

EDIT: Having followed up some of the leads provided here, the basic premise of Blood Music does sound like what I'm trying to remember. But I'm convinced the story I'm after was less 'expansive' [for want of a better word] and just centred around this one guy, gradually warping & merging into the fabric of his home.

It would be interesting to find the original short story and see if it was like this and then got hit by the "We need more sharks and explosions!" stick, when being re-worked into a novel.

UPDATE2: Well done, HN Crew. It was indeed the original short story version of Blood Music. I found I actually still had it and read it again last night.

For the record, it also appears on Tangents, a collection of short stories by Greg Bear.

Season 3, episode 2 of Futurama.

Parasite’s Lost doesn’t fit the description of the nanobots (wormlike parasites in this case) integrating the man with his house’s electrical system.

Blood Music by a Greg Bear

RUSS NUKE PANAMA

A downvote? It's my favorite line from the book.

Thank you, and the equation was balanced.

Think like a Dinosaur, James Patrick Kelly

Looks like other commenters identified it as Blood Music, but this sounded a bit like “Steve Fever” by Greg Egan [0] to me. Similar themes! Great gateway drug to other Egan stories.

[0] https://www.technologyreview.com/2007/10/15/223446/steve-fev...

I read that in Spanish! (Música en la Sangre/Blood Music[0]). Also, I remember a short adaptation of the same story (maybe in the Twilight zone?)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_Music_(novel)

Jumping on in unrelated but similar question. A long time back (maybe 15-20 years), an author on slashdot wrote an episodic Sci-Fi across months of comments about the singularity. I recall reading parts of it at the time, but never finishing it. That's about all the context I can recall :D

Reminds me of this short comic: https://www.instagram.com/p/CVuUBtePAQS/

Another possible suspect - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prey_(novel)

Blood music by Greg Bear (?) comes to mind

Futurama, and the truck stop sandwich.

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