E.N.D.A.Y.S. by Lee Isserow

might they make use of implants?”
    “Like mods?” Hayes asked. “Yeah. I have mods all over the place.”
    “And these 'mods', are they built to communicate with the nanos, do they function on their own, or do the nanos interact with them, symbiotically?”
    “Both, maybe? I don't fucking know, I'm not a tech.” Hayes grunted. “My job is mostly to shoot bad people and make sure they get shot a second or third time.”
    “Right...” said the professor, feeling uneasy, his eyes darting around Hayes's body for a weapon.
    “You're not a 'bad people', Doc. I'm not here to shoot you.” Hayes sighed, trying to be reassuring.
     
    Marcus Hayes had never quite been able to master the concept of 'reassurance'. Whereas the majority of human beings were wired for empathy, his empathetic circuits had been conflated by the action movie cliches that were stitched into the fibre of his very being. He was built more for walking away from explosions than telling someone their kitten had died of cancer after a car hit it with feline immunodeficiency virus.
     
    “Of course.” Parry said, shuffling to a workstation at the other side of the room.
    “What are you thinking?” Hayes asked.
    “Well. It's just a theory, but, I wonder if your 'techs' built in a redundancy system, in case of such an occasion.” the old man said, pulling out a draw and searching through it clumsily.
    “What kind of redundancy?” Hayes asked.
    “Ah ha!” the professor declared, returning to the counter near Hayes and laying out a scalpel and a handful of tiny metal cylinders, two millimetres wide by one tall. “Now, this eye implant of yours, is it running an operating system?”
    “I guess?” Hayes said.
    “Menu based, or is it something more, specialized?”
    “Menu, sort of. It's controlled by thought, but there are menus, sure.”
    “Would you place your right wrist on the counter?” the professor asked, taking the scalpel in his hand as Hayes rested his arm as instructed, facing his palm upwards.
    “What are you planning on doing with that?” Hayes asked.
    “It's just a theory...” the professor said, taking a stiff grasp of Hayes's ring finger. “But I hypothesize that your technicians have made the system menu-based in case of an incident such as this. I'm going to insert these neodymium magnets under your skin, and if you nanos are smart enough, and if this contingency scenario is in their programming, perhaps they will route them through to the lens controls.”
     
    All of the professor's assumptions were more or less correct. However, Hayes had spent his career making sure that he remained obstinately ignorant of why and how any of his technological accoutrements worked. Whilst the majority of Jump Division agents would have been able to answer Parry's questions with little effort, Hayes preferred to keep those parts of his brain full of information that he deemed more useful, such as how to shoot people in the face and make the biggest, prettiest splatters on the walls behind them.
     
    “Did you notice your sentence was mostly comprised of 'ifs'?” Hayes asked, as the professor dug the scalpel six millimetres into the right side of the top of his finger. “Fucking ow!” Hayes squawked. “A warning or painkiller would have been nice.”
    “I have none of the latter, and the former seemed unnecessary, given that I am holding a scalpel, and your finger.” Parry shot back, acerbically. 
    Hayes reached over for the whisky and knocked back a long gulp to wash down the pain, as the professor inserted one of the magnets into the hole he had carved, the nanos already starting to close the wound.
    “Remarkable!” said the professor, as he pulled the scalpel out, and made another incision a centimetre below the first, and inserted another magnet.
    As that healed, he moved to Hayes's thumb and sliced at the fleshy centre mass, inserting a third magnet. Parry then placed the scalpel on the workstation and watched the healing in