When the FBI came calling, Clive already knew what they wanted. He had guessed. They wanted help in tracking down his brother Andrew: the rogue nanotechnologist now on the Most Wanted list.
        "Don't do it," said Patricia.
        "What makes you say that?" said Clive.
        "Love," she answered, simply.
        She loved him? Of course. She was his wife, after all. His darling Patricia. So, naturally, she was afraid for him. And Clive was afraid for himself. But it would take more than fear to make him falter in his duty.
        "You told them yes?" said Patricia.
        "Of course," said Clive. Though, to tell the truth, it had been a near thing. The fear had almost mastered him, after all. "Someone has to stop him. He's already killed — what? Fifty people?"
        "They signed release forms," said Patricia.
        "Well, sure, but only a lawyer — well. I mean. After the first half a dozen."
        "Science isn't a risk-free world," said Patricia. "And. When he succeeds. Immortality."
        Immortality. Eternal youth. The eternal dream. She licked her lips, unable to hide her excitement. In fact, immortality was an impossibility, at least for the moment — the dead, heaped up in their dozens, were ample proof of that. But Patricia was still aglow with the glamour of the promise.
        Patricia. His darling Patricia. At moments like this, Clive really felt the age gap. When it had begun, their relationship had skirted the fringes of statutory rape. And even now, after all these years, Patricia was only 26. Whereas Clive — well, Clive was a solid 40. And he was from Boston, and Patricia was from California, and he was no longer convinced that this difference in genesis was a trivial matter.

        "Hear you're hunting for me," said Andrew.
        "No," said Clive. "The FBI, that's who's hunting for you."
        "Clive the Bloodhound," said Andrew, sneering.
        It was the voice Clive heard in his worst dreams. In his worst dreams of smash and panic. The bearded voice of Mr Testosterone whose iron-bar hands had cut off the air supply, had forced her blonde face underwater -
        "Still there?" said Andrew.
        "Did you kill someone?" said Clive, abruptly, unable to suppress the question.
        "Medical misadventure," said Andrew. "They signed release forms."
        "No. I mean — when we were children."
        "Why this question, little brother? Why this question, now?"
        "I just had this, like, memory-flash."
        "This, like, memory-flash," said Andrew, mimicking him cruelly. "You've been living too long with that California beach bubble."
        "You drowned her," said Clive. "You held her underwater and she drowned."
        "Recovered memory time?" said Andrew. "Maybe you're remembering something you did, Clive."
        It was a subtle thrust, the kind of thing which could conceivably make trouble for Clive if the FBI were taping this, which in fact they were.
        "Remember how you used to like killing dogs?" said Andrew. "How you'd roast them over campfires, alive?"
        "Some video you saw," said Clive, caught off balance by this cunning attack, and unable to instantly muster a firm defense.
        Killing dogs. It is the bad guy who kills dogs. Who hates dogs. In American iconography, the good guys may be known by the fact that they like dogs and dogs like them. But Clive had never killed a dog.
        "You're suppressing the memories," said Andrew, as if reading his mind. "Anyway. Have you got the message, little brother? You will quit this hunt. Now. Or suffer the consequences."
        "Consequences?"
        "There's a place called hell, Clive."
        "Oh, grow up," said Clive, more annoyed than alarmed by this amorphous threat.    
        At that, Andrew fell silent. And that smoking silence really alarmed Clive. Andrew was not too much of a danger when he was blowing his top: when his style was all affront and aggression. It was when he was silent that you really had to be careful. Clive had learnt that the hard way. In his childhood. The doctors had sewn the severed ends of the tendon together again, but the memories had not healed so neatly.

        The FBI can't help you. So send them away. Patricia? A liability. Go stay with your mother.
        Okay.
        All done.
        Here I am, Andrew. If you want me. Alone in the house. No guards, no nothing. So come and get me. Let's have this thing over with, okay? This is a rifle, this is a shotgun, you're going to need more than one zombie this time, big brother. Nanotechnology: the infinite promise. We were promised immortality, but what we got was zombies. Zombies and the dead.
        Dawn.
        No Andrew.
        Clive awoke, and picked himself up off the carpet, where he had fallen asleep. Painfully stiff. His own house looked normal. Prosaic. Utterly conventional. Hard to remember that it was a zone of potential danger. Nanotechnological devices, robots smaller than ants — Andrew was the wizard, if he wanted to invade the house he would.
        Prowling the house, Clive came to Patricia's spirit house. He was tempted. He had always hated that thing. Now was the time, maybe, for an accident to happen to it. Claim that prowlers broke in, demolished the thing.
        To think was to do. Clive took a crowbar and dealt the spirit house a demolishing blow, wrecking it into fractions. And discovered within a photograph. Patricia. His beloved Patricia. Naked. Tied to a chain-mesh fence. Her face a grimace of agony. On the fence, a sign with a logo — that logo! On the back of the photo, a note in Patricia's handwriting: "Today, the third time. Andrew the monster."
        Revelation! Andrew had raped her. And she, brutalized by the monster, had been shocked into terrorized worship. Had enshrined her enemy in the innermost sanctuary of her own house, in the innermost sanctuary of her Californian soul. Well, Andrew, you've gone too far this time. This time I'm going to deal with you.
        

        At the hospital, the CAT scan confirmed it. A web was building itself. A web like that which had been found in the brain of the zombie: Mr Smith of the IRS.
        "Can't you stop it?" said Clive.
        "What do you want me to do?" said Doctor Herizy. "Excise the brain?"
        The self-building threads were already woven through his vital centers, and were reaching into the areas where the higher functions of consciousness were located.
        "No, you can't leave," said Turk of the FBI. "Reasons of national security."
        Quarantine. They kept him under quarantine. So he could not infect others. That, at least, was their stated rationale. But Clive suspected a darker purpose. They wanted to stop him killing himself. And he would have killed himself. Given the chance. Because he could already guess what was coming.
        "I'm a guinea pig, right?" said Clive.
        "Really?" said Turk. "You look almost human to me."
        "You don't sound sympathetic," said Clive.
        "We know who killed Andrew," said Turk. "We just can't prove it in court, that's all. Don't expect too much sympathy from me, Clive."
        The web continued to grow. It grew in his dreams, too: the branching shadows of grappling nightmare. They showed him the CAT scans. The thing was fantastical, a coral reef within his brain. The doctors were wearing the space suits now: they were dressed up in the full quarantine rig, as if he was a carrier of Ebola fever. Turk would no longer even come into his room: instead, interviewed him through the bulletproof glass.
        "We found Patricia, if you're interested," he said.
        And he was, but the world swayed into darkness just before Turk could tell him about it.
        In the darkness: Clive. Alone.
        Then a voice.
        "Don't bother trying to argue," said Andrew. "This isn't me. The technology isn't sophisticated enough for that. Yet. This isn't me at all. This is just some of my ... behaviors."
        Then Andrew laughed.
        Going down beneath the water for the third time, going down beneath the rusty coils of barbed wire, bumping against the bloated dogs as he drowned down in the vomit for the hundredth thousandth millionth time, Clive heard that laughter, could not make sense of it, could scarcely remember his own name. He was, blissfully, starting to lose his own identity. Then came the hot red desert. And recovery. Yes, the iron teeth were torture, but he felt his identity might survive them. Possibly.
        And then the scorpions came.
        "I can't be immortal," said Patricia, a garish leather-and-blood princess riding atop the largest of the scorpions. "But I can still make it seem like forever."