By the light of the moon

three letters.'
    'Hey, yeah. I was in maybe tenth grade. Our science teacher
showed us a picture of it.'
    'They photographed it with a camera hooked up to a powerful
electron microscope.'
    'But that was pretty much just a tiny sign, not a machine,' she
objected. 'It didn't do anything.'
    'Yeah, but platoons of researchers have been burning up a lot of
development funds designing nanomachines that will work.
Machines that already do.'
    'Teeny-tiny fairy machines.'
    'If you want to think of it that way, yes.'
    'Why?'
    'Eventually, when the technology's perfected, the applications
are going to be incredible, virtually infinite, especially in the
medical field.'
    Jilly tried to imagine at least one of the infinite applications
of teeny-tiny machines performing teeny-tiny tasks. She sighed.
'I've spent too much of my life writing jokes, telling jokes, and
stealing jokes. Now I feel like a joke. What
applications?'
    He pointed to the laptop screen. 'I've sourced up an interview
that Proctor did a few years ago. It's in layman's terms, easy to
grasp. Even I understood it.'
    'Why don't you condense it for me?'
    'All right. First, an application or two. Imagine a machine
tinier than a blood cell, composed of a handful of atoms, but with
the capacity to identify plaque on blood-vessel walls and the
ability to remove it mechanically, safely. They're biologically
interactive in function but fashioned from biologically inert
atoms, so your body's immune system won't be triggered by their
presence. And now imagine receiving an injection containing
hundreds of thousands of these nanomachines, maybe millions.'
    'Millions?'
    He shrugged. 'Millions would fit in a few cc of a carrier fluid
like glucose. It'd be a smaller syringe than Proctor used with
us.'
    'Creepy.'
    'I suppose when the first vaccines were developed, people back
then thought it was creepy to be injected with dead germs in
order to build up an immunity against live ones.'
    'Hey, I still don't like the sound of it.'
    'So anyway, these millions of nanomachines would circulate
endlessly through your body, searching out plaque, gently scrubbing
it away, keeping your circulatory system as clean as a
whistle.'
    Jilly was impressed. 'If that ever hits the market, welcome to
the age of the guilt-free cheeseburger. And you know what? This is
starting to sound a little familiar.'
    'I'm not surprised.'
    'But why should it?'
    Instead of answering her question, he said, 'Nanomachines could
detect and eliminate colonies of cancer cells before the tumor was
half as large as the head of a pin.'
    'Hard to see the downside to all this,' Jilly said. 'But we know
for sure there is one. And why're you being enigmatic? Why do you
think this should sound familiar to me?'
    In the corner, Shep said, 'Herethere.'
    'Oh, shit!' Dylan bolted from his chair so fast that he knocked
it over.
    'Herethere.'
    Closer to Shepherd than Dylan was, Jilly reached the kid first.
Approaching him, she didn't see anything out of the ordinary, no
red tunnel to California or to anywhere else.
    Shepherd no longer leaned with the top of his skull jammed into
the juncture of walls. He had taken a step backward. He stood
erect, head up, eyes focused intently on something that appeared to
be a lot more interesting than anything Jilly could see.
    He had raised his right hand again, as if taking an oath, but he
hadn't started to wave. As Jilly arrived at his side, Shep reached
in front of his face, to the point in midair at which he'd been
staring, and between his thumb and forefinger, he took a pinch
of... a pinch of nothing, as far as she could tell. When he tweaked
that pinch of air, however, the corner of the room began to fold in
upon itself.
    'No,' Jilly said breathlessly, and though she knew that Shepherd
often recoiled from contact, she reached in front of him and put
her hand atop his. 'Don't do this, sweetie.'
    Multiple segments of the tricolored stripes on the wallpaper,
previously mismatched only at the corner, now bent every which way
at radical angles to one another, and the corner became so
distorted that Jilly could not follow the floor-to-ceiling line of
it.
    At Shep's other side, Dylan placed one hand on his brother's
shoulder. 'Stay here, buddy. Right here with us, safe with us.'
    The folding motion halted, but the corner remained tweaked into
a surreal geometry.
    Jilly seemed to be looking at this small portion of the world
through an octagonal prism. Her mind rebelled at the spectacle,
which defied