The Buyer

‘It’s a necrotizer,’ the man said.

The other man nodded, making it look as though he knew what that meant.

‘Look.’

The man with the necrotizer led the other around the stall to the cage. Inside was a ragged and glum chimpanzee. The salesman explained: ‘They are our closest living cousins; 97% the same DNA don’t you know. So they make the best demonstration models. It is possible to use these new Synthiskin dummies, but there’s no real substitute for living flesh.’

At that, he pointed the necrotizer at the impassive chimp. It looked like a cooker-top espresso maker, but matt black, and with dials to set the firing radius and so on. The salesman pulled the trigger. There was nothing to see and no sound apart from a slight metallic hum.

The buyer raised his eyebrows at the salesman. ‘Keep watching,’ he said. The buyer did so.

The chimpanzee began to hop about, itching its right arm and side furiously with its left hand. A high-pitched bark came through its bared teeth. The buyer watched fascinated, any kind of purchaser’s uninterested air falling away, as the ape’s skin began to crater, big flakes of flesh dropping to the cage floor. Raw wounds opened up and spread outwards craggily, leaving blackened clumps of blood and muscle behind. The chimp screamed and screamed as its flesh disintegrated. The test model was silenced, however, as the encroaching wounds spread over its throat and chest. Soon, it was dead, a mound of unspeakable gore in the cage.

The buyer gaped for a moment then closed his mouth. The salesman took up his patter. ‘You see, the necrotizer signals every body cell in its range to go through necrosis, which is the most violent and rapid type of cell death…’

The buyer cut him off with a wave. ‘I don’t need to know how it works. I’ll make a starting order of fifty thousand for the field trials. If my client is pleased, which I’m sure he will be, more orders will be forthcoming.’ He handed the salesman his card.

The salesman smiled to himself, pleased at how the necrotizer sold itself. ‘Certainly, sir. Now, can I interest you in any other products?’

‘I’ll browse the other stalls for a while, thanks all the same.’

The buyer shifted away to continue around the show. There was plenty on offer, from stratospheric jets to shares in keyhole satellites to permanganate explosives. The buyer had a slight but poised frame, his age only showing in his white neat hair – his face was almost clear of wrinkles. He looked rather distinguished against the oily other buyers and the slick, sharp-suited salespeople. The necrotizer had shaken his cool somewhat, which was why he chose to move on.

The buyer rounded a partition clad with posters advertising consulting services, missiles and other arms expos, and came face to face with a hologram. The flickering, washed-out form was yelling, but the volume was muted: ‘Boycott these merchants of death! End mechanised warfare and crush the military-industrial complex!’ After the Frankfurt Accord, hologram was the only legal form of protest at this kind of event. Organisers had had enough of their clients being bombarded with eggs and insults on their way in and hired the best lobbyists around. Violent invasions were still often planned and had to be routed. The buyer swept around the hologram and approached the next stall. It was small by the expo’s standards, and had glass tanks stacked up with rats inside, rather than the more expensive but more impressive chimpanzees. The air holes at the top had grease smeared all around their edges. There was a tub of petroleum jelly atop one of the tanks to replenish it if necessary.

The salesperson was a small, earnest looking young woman, with hair that was slipping out of a bun. The buyer recognised this as a new start-up type affair. Maybe this was even their first time at an expo. The saleswoman was somewhat flustered and excited.  

‘Sir, can I interest you in the latest developments in nano-warfare? From the laboratories of the world’s most prestigious universities, I present the most advanced nanobots yet produced.’

The buyer smiled, since he’d heard that a number of times before, but he thought he may as well take a look. He had a certain soft spot for these small companies, run out of some PhD student’s bedroom, driven by just a passion for the science and barely a thought for the applications. After all, this was where the buyer had started out; after graduating top of his class, as they called it in the Ivy League, he joined a then-tiny group named simply Military Solutions, working on their cruise missiles, now laughably rudimentary. The company ended up folding in the wake of giants like A and A, but the buyer got in as a junior dealer with a noble militia in the far east. By now, he was their key buyer and chief advisor to the arsenal. He was kept busy; there was always some crackpot rebellion to be quashed.

‘Show me,’ he said shortly.

‘Ah yes, of course…’ she said, and fussed with the laptop behind her, which had a small signal broadcaster stuck into one of the ports on the side. ‘Look at tank two please sir.’

Tank two had sawdust on the floor, like the others, and a rat in the corner. The buyer leant in and saw the sawdust begin to tremble, as though a large speaker had been placed underneath it. The intensity of its vibration increased and then it began to move in little streams as if the sawdust was being slowly tipped and poured away. The streams converged on the rat, which hadn’t seemed to notice the moving flooring. Suddenly its twitching nose froze, and the rat simply melted like an ice cube having boiling water spilt over it. Only damp sawdust remained.

‘Impressive,’ the buyer said kindly. ‘Among the best I’ve seen. But tell me, how is the battlefield control? How reliable is the enemy recognition, and how much friendly fire can I expect?’

The woman shifted from foot to foot. ‘The product is not yet fully ready for market,’ she admitted. ‘We are here to secure further investment to fund our research.’

The buyer smiled benevolently. The saleswoman reminded him of his daughter; nervous but confident of her own intelligence.

‘My client may be interested. They do have a taste for the… exotic.’ The buyer touched the tip of his nose. ‘I’ll take your card.’

‘Thank you, thanks,’ she gushed, pressing the card into his hand. They shook hands and the buyer patted her forearm in a fatherly manner with the other hand.

He was just stepping away to continue browsing when there was a commotion from across the exhibition centre. A surge of people swept across the room, seeming to move slowly against the gigantic space.

‘Stop them!’ security guards shouted. Most people stepped nervously out of the way of the column of protesters; a rare successful live demonstration. They were all dressed in black, tight clothes; easy to move in. They wielded almost comical weaponry in the context: cricket bats and flash bangs, which went off occasionally as they moved across the hall. They were far enough away to not bother the buyer yet, but a few seconds’ assessment found the security staff wanting. Priceless prototypes and animals’ tanks and cages were wantonly smashed by the protestors.

The buyer stayed composed, moved with customary economy. He stepped around the panicking young woman, any nostalgic resemblance to his daughter banished from mind. He yanked the laptop from the nanobot stall, leaving the cable dangling. He fetched the tub of petroleum jelly and moved quickly, without running, across the hall, away from the protestors’ devastation.

He settled in a space between stalls, which were by now deserted by their salespeople. He couched on the floor, placed the laptop at his feet and proceeded to smear a generous moat of petroleum jelly around him in a circle. The buyer scowled as he wiped his hand on his expensive woollen trousers. He sat cross-legged in his unusual fortress and opened the laptop. The nanobot control program was still running, but the lines of code were difficult to comprehend. The buyer was by no means illiterate in programming languages, but he was out of practice. So this may take a few minutes, he thought.

Glancing up, he saw one protestor pull another away from a dead macaque, where he had been immobilised in horror at the mutilated body. The pair advanced on the nanobot stall next, swinging bats. As the buyer had predicted, it was inevitable. The protestors smashed all the glass tanks; there must have been twenty of them. Out of a couple, lucky surviving rats dashed. The buyer could not see clearly from his vantage point, but he pictured the sawdust swirling, then the glass of the tanks begin to shimmer like puddles disturbed by a drop of rain, then the concrete floor shift in a disorientating fashion, redolent of quicksand. What he could see was one of the protestors stop still, a look of utter terror on her face. The black-clad figure dropped first to her knees, the trouser legs now horribly empty, then face down. The other protestor could not move in his bewilderment as he saw her clothes hollow out, like a cruel optical illusion.

The buyer was scrolling back up through the code, looking for a likely ‘cancel all bot activity’ –type instruction. Around him, protestors, salespeople and customers alike were putrefying with barely time to call out. He tried a couple of lines of code, but the nanobots relentlessly carried on destroying all living tissue in the space.

He noticed the floor outside his circle of grease begin to quiver, like tarmac on a blazing day, but movement ceased at the edge of his protective circle, the nanobots mired in the sticky jelly. Eventually the buyer spotted a line further up the page of code with a likely looking ‘=abort’ term in it. He typed the full command at the bottom of the page and the floor stopped moving.

The buyer closed the laptop and stood. He looked around the exhibition centre. There were few survivors. Wet empty outfits were scattered on the floor like some weird art installation. He sighed, touched the tip of his nose, and fished out the woman’s business card. The buyer assiduously scraped the outside edge of the petroleum jelly border up with the card and smeared it back into the tub. With the laptop and tub tucked under his arm, the buyer stepped carefully over the remainder of the moat and headed for the car, the airport, and a satisfied client.