By the light of the moon

the anatomical snuffbox.
    Jilly's mother read palms – not for money, but for hope.
Mom was never interested solely in the heart line, head line, and
lifelines, but equally in the anatomical snuffbox, the interdigital
pads, the heel of the hand, the thenar eminence, and the
hypothenar.
    Arms crossed on her chest, Jilly sat with her hands fisted in
her armpits. She didn't like having her palms read.
    Reading palms, reading tea leaves, interpreting Tarot cards,
casting horoscopes – Jilly wanted nothing to do with any of
that. She would never concede control of her future to fate,
not for a minute. If fate wanted control of her, fate would have to
club her senseless and take control.
    'Nanomachine,' Jilly said, reminding Dylan where they had been
interrupted. 'Scouring plaque off artery walls, searching out tiny
groups of cancer cells.'
    He stared worriedly at Shepherd, then nodded and finally met
Jilly's eyes. 'You get the idea. In the interview there on the
laptop, Proctor talks a lot about nanomachines that'll also be
nanocomputers with enough memory to be programmed for some pretty
sophisticated tasks.'
    In spite of the fact that all three of them appeared to be
living proof that Lincoln Proctor wasn't a fool, Jilly found this
chatter of technological marvels almost as difficult to believe as
Shepherd's power to fold. Or maybe she simply didn't want to
believe it because the implications were so nightmarish.
    She said, 'Isn't this ridiculous? I mean, how much memory can
you squeeze into a computer smaller than a grain of sand?'
    'In fact, smaller than a mote of dust. The way Proctor tells it,
with a little background: The first silicon microchips were the
size of a fingernail and had a million circuits. The smallest
circuit on the chip was one hundredth as wide as a human hair.'
    'All I really want to know is how to make audiences laugh until
they puke,' she lamented.
    'Then there were breakthroughs in... X-ray lithography, I think
he called it.'
    'Call it gobbledegook or fumfuddle if you want. It'll mean as
much to me.'
    'Anyway, some fumfuddle breakthrough made it possible to print
one billion circuits on a chip, with features one thousandth
the width of a human hair. Then two billion. And this was years
ago.'
    'Yeah, but while all these hotshot scientists were making their
breakthroughs, I memorized one hundred and eighteen jokes about big
butts. Let's see who gets more laughs at a party.'
    The idea of nanomachines and nanocomputers swarming through her
blood creeped her out no less than the idea of an extraterrestrial
bug gestating in her chest a la Aliens .
    'By shrinking dimensions,' Dylan explained, 'chip designers gain
computer speed, function, and capacity. Proctor talked about
multi-atom nanomachines driven by nanocomputers made from a
single atom .'
    'Computers no bigger than a single atom, huh? Listen, what the
world really needs is a good portable washing machine the size of a
radish.'
    To Jilly, these minuscule, biologically interactive machines
began to seem like fate in a syringe. Fate didn't need to sneak up
on her with a club; it was already inside her and busily at work,
courtesy of Lincoln Proctor.
    Dylan continued: 'Proctor says the protons and electrons in one
atom could be used as positive and negative switches, with millions
of circuits actually etched onto the neutrons, so a single atom in
a nanomachine could be the powerful computer that controls it.'
    'Personally,' Jilly said, 'I'd rush out to Costco the moment I
heard they were selling a reasonably priced teeny-tiny microwave
oven that could double as a bellybutton ornament.'
    Sitting here with her arms crossed and her hands in her armpits,
she could barely make herself listen to Dylan because she knew
where all this information was leading, and where it was leading
scared the sweat out of her. She felt her armpits growing damp.
    'You're scared,' he said.
    'I'm all right.'
    'You're not all right.'
    'Yeah. What am I thinking? Who am I to know whether I'm all
right or not all right? You're the expert on me, huh?'
    'When you're scared, your wisecracks have a desperate
quality.'
    'If you'll search your memory,' she said, 'you'll discover that
I didn't appreciate your amateur psychoanalysis in the past.'
    'Because it was on target. Listen, you're scared, I'm scared,
Shep is scared, we're all scared, and that's okay. We—'
    'Shep is hungry,' said Shepherd.
    They had missed breakfast. The lunch hour was drawing near.
    'We'll get lunch soon,'