"This place is too normal," special agent Mark Ribowski said. "That's what's so suspicious about it."

   He watched the investigation in progress. Superstar professor Frank Lineman hadn't logged in for his classes last Sunday. Now specialists were searching his immaculate post-urban home for suspicious atoms.

   Local cop Tom Wesley chuckled. "We're wasting our time. So an eccentric scientist vanished from his completely secure home. He probably reinvented himself again."

   Mark pretended he hadn't heard. "They've been here," he said. "I can feel them."

   Tom sighed. "Not your nanoids again," he said. Mark's obsession had been mankind's biggest nightmare. "Everyone knows they're gone. The photon matrix is foolproof. It can destroy all forms of nanotechnology, even underground or inside human bodies. There isn't a single cubic millimeter where they can hide. Humanity has won the war against the living machines."

They entered the opulent living room. A picture window overlooked a simulated arctic bay.

   "The new ones are smaller, smarter," Mark said. "They propagate as plans hidden online, tantalizing forbidden knowledge. Lineman couldn't resist experimenting. Maybe he constructed only a single nanoid the size of a bacterium, but that was enough. There are only a few of them now, very hard to detect. Waiting for their chance, plotting underground. When they're ready, they'll strike everywhere at once. We'll never know what hit us."
   He gestured around. "Lineman's laboratory was right here. This space was filled by an illegal atomic synthesizer."

   Tom shook his head. "Those things weigh twenty tons. They can't just disappear. We'd have found traces."

   "The nanoids disassembled it," Mark replied. "They turned it into bits of the house, garbage, optronics, earth, sewage, air. They're good at rebuilding things. They're constantly destroying and rebuilding themselves. That's how they evolve."

   The two men stopped at a set of ornate chairs. Tom sat down in the largest, an antique early modern, mass about 70 kilograms.

   "Unlikely," he scoffed, leaning back. "But I admit you got me wondering what happened to Lineman."