“I do, Colonel, I hope you know that I understand that, but …” he caught his breath, clearly struggling with a demon. Reining it in after a moment, his surface calmed again, and he went on, “Colonel, I have reviewed our plans for dispersion of the devices, I know we have to get about a hundred into a person for them to be effective, and I know that once a group of the cells reaches critical mass in a host the antigen will be able to start using our own immune system to start manufacturing duplicates of itself.”

“And no doubt you remember the timeline we are looking at?” asked the colonel. The captain nodded, so the colonel left the topic alone, he knew the captain was not really looking for resolution, only to air his fears. Barrett let him go on.

All of the team had been told that the tiny biomorphic devices worked by identifying the DNA of their host. Once that was identified, they essentially moved through the blood system rooting out foreign bodies and destroying them with a simple but effective cellular lance laced with toxins and a minuscule but relatively potent electric charge that caused the target body to disintegrate at the nuclide level, to be absorbed and reconstituted by the body. Assuming that nearly all communicable diseases were transmitted around the body via the blood, or at least could not effectively attack the host systems without access to the cardio-vascular network, a team of these minuscule bio-constructs patrolling your blood vessels would permanently immure you to everything from the common cold to rabies in about a day or two.

In order to maintain and grow their numbers, the incredible devices also entered and manipulated their host’s bone marrow with a virus of their own, turning immunized bodies into factories for further nano-device production. Within a week of infection, a host started turning out their own defenses, and infecting others with the super-cells. Along with the standard white blood that was produced in the bone marrow under normal circumstances, each human host could also produce enough of the ‘devices’ each week to infect at least one or two more people, who would also then start producing the panacea.

That meant that each week, each immunized group would roughly double in size: two, four, eight, sixteen … from the first infected person. Given enough time, the process would slowly but surely wipe away nearly every infectious disease known to man, while also inoculating us against the lethal virus the satellites had on hand. Given enough time.

But even with exponential growth, the infected group grows very slowly at first. It would take a single starting case eight months to spread to 5% of the population, even though it would then spread to the remaining 95% in just the following five weeks.