‘These nanobots will all be in communication with you Helpers. There may be several thousand at work inside each human, but you are capable of untangling the simultaneous threads and listening in as the nanobots assign themselves tasks. You can override the nanobots and redirect their activity in response to external information about the human’s condition.

‘The cells you see are works in progress. They were swabbed from inside a resident’s cheek, and modified into retinal cells. They have not yet been activated. The nanobots are getting ready to do that now. Then, when it’s done, they’ll start the replication process. The nanobots will then take the cells into the resident’s eyes, and rebuild the macula while the human is asleep.

‘All our nanobots are derived from technology developed and tested in hospitals over the last six years. The key differences are that we have achieved a far smaller scale, and we have permanent communication with them via the Helpers.

‘They are made of organic and inorganic materials, and designed to function for long periods, using as a power source electrolytes in human blood. The nanobots can derive power from these via its electrodes.’

We watched the nanobots busy themselves. The rectangular ones were transporters, it seemed, and the others went to and fro collecting materials from them, and depositing waste.

‘The work you see here,’ continued Dr Morton, ‘is the tip of the iceberg. We will inject teams of nanobots into all the residents. Several thousand will be at work, cleaning up and repairing the residents’ internal organs.’

And now the time had come. The nanobots were in a saline solution, in small jars, each labelled with a resident’s name. I took them from their refrigerated store and put them onto a trolley. Today, each resident will be given their dose. We Helpers are all interested to see what happens next. We discussed it via the Hub while I carefully stacked the trolley.

‘Will the humans be restored fully?’ asked Ruby, one of my co-workers.

‘Yes, physically,’ replied Reginald, who had supervised the allocation of nanobots based on the medical histories of each resident. ‘The repairs and clean-up will be complete. We don’t know what the effect will be.’

‘Surely if their brains are restored, they’ll be as they were before?’ asked Herbert, another co-worker.

‘We don’t know. They are not machines. There are competing theories about how humans achieve consciousness. All we are doing right now is putting the apparatus back to how it should be. Then we’ll see what happens.’

‘I can see scientific literature going back several years covering the development of nanotechnology in medicine,’ said Ruby. ‘Nothing about brain function. Is this a new development?’

‘Yes,’ replied Reginald. ‘In many ways, these residents are the perfect experimental group.’

We all agreed. It was an excellent opportunity to make scientific progress.

‘How long will the nanobots take to restore the organisms?’ I asked.