One was that she wanted to get back to work. After being emancipated from foster care, Pia always had work. First it was getting her high school equivalency and her chores at the convent. Then it was college, and finally medical school and her brush with death. After Pia’s sojourn away from civilization, it was Nano that dominated her life for eighteen months, and even after she started to have questions about Nano and what might be going on there, she remained totally absorbed by keeping her work separate from concerns of what other people there might be up to. She was absolutely sure that what she had been doing was honorable and ethical and might even serve to help her friend Will. So she wanted to get back to work. She wanted to find out what had happened with the compatibility experiments with mice: if the results had been the same as with the roundworms—that is, if her idea of incorporating the polyethylene glycol into the microbivores’ diamondoid outer shell had continued to solve the immunological problems.

On top of that was the flagellum issue. Had the programmers looked at her idea of writing code that would cause microbivores to tumble a flagellated bacteria over and over on itself, thereby rolling up the flagellum before the bacteria were drawn into the digestion chamber?

Pia was excited to answer these questions. But there was a problem, a major problem. When she was still in the hospital after the accident, Mariel had called Pia and told her that she would not be permitted to return to Nano even for a visit until she had been completely and totally cleared by her general surgeon, the hospital physical therapy team, and her orthopedic surgeon. It had not been a discussion. In her usual harsh manner, Mariel had told her not to show up or call until she was completely over the sequelae of the accident with letters from her physicians to that effect.

Even though Pia was used to being on her own and liked it, her forced separation from Nano bothered her more than she had expected, making her realize she was not quite the introvert she thought she was. She had come to count on the minor interactions she had with other people in the course of a regular day, a circumstance that without Nano had to be fulfilled by visits to her physical therapist. Unfortunately that didn’t do the trick. In her small, ten-unit apartment building, she knew no one by name and only a couple of the other residents by sight.