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hurling the dirty one at the incinerbin. It vaporized in a flash.
    He sanitized his hands and turned. “How can I help you, Detective?”
    The man shook his hand, and the close-set eyes raked his face.
    “Uh, guess I better wash that too, eh?”
    “Fracas in the boardroom?”
    “Laboratory,” Juris said without thinking. He excused himself to use the facilities. The Ohume was leaving the laboratory on a gurney, he saw on his corn. When he returned from washing his face, he found the Dick perusing the plaques on his wall.
    “Can't find good techs these days,” he said. “Saw you on the neuro, workin' the Muceniek murder. High profile stuff. Detective Peterson, right?”
    “Undercover never appealed to me. I'm actually working three cases, Doctor Raihman, all with one common thread—nanochines.”
    “Didn't hear that in the news. What do you have?”
    “The first murder was a nine-story diving diva who left traces of proto where she jumped from. Second one was bilateral consumption from the feet up, left a puddle of proto. Muceniek was the third one. The Omale bled to death from anal injuries but it wasn't blood he left behind.”
    “Proto again.” Juris didn't need it spelled out. “The first one, you said she jumped?”
    “Yeah, well, that or she fell. I'm betting a fall.”
    “Seems clear. What do you need from me?”
    Peterson searched his face.
    I didn't do it, Juris wanted to tell him.
    “The chines didn't complete the first or last job. On the first, no evidence on the ground, only on the roof. On the third, a neat, nine-inch deep, three-inch round bore hole where Valdi Muceniek sodomized him.”
    “Selective disintegration,” Juris said, his anus puckering.
    “Selective what?” The narrow gaze grew narrower.
    He'll be cross-eyed soon, Juris thought. “Nanochines can be programmed to expire along multiple parameters: distance, time, volume, molecular count.”
    “Hormonal profile?”
    His turn to narrow his gaze. “As a trigger? I suppose that's possible. An Omale retrieving an ovum from Justice Muceniek, right?”
    “You're familiar with the model?”
    “A motile tentacle embedded in the penis tip. Instead of ejaculate, the tentacle is extruded into the uterus to collect the ovum.”
    “His hormonal profile mimicked a fertile Bremale at the moment he was being sodomized.”
    Juris stared at the Detective. “Nanochine receptors can be designed to detect nearly any substance, and then programmed to activate at specific thresholds for each substance. You're saying Valdi Muceniek infected him? That his ejaculate was laden with nanochines?” The Doctor whistled softly.
    Peterson nodded. “But why three inches around? Why nine inches deep?”
    Doctor Juris Raihman frowned. “Why indeed?”

Chapter 5
    I got nothin', Maris thought as he left the building, Raihman's office and laboratory in a multistory business park, a hive of activity where nothing got done.
    Three murders tied by nanochines, no rhyme or reason in between.
    The scabbed sky was lacerated with cloud, sunlight bleeding onto the wounded wind. Whiffs of solvents wafted from a sterile street. Bins of refuse crowded ledges up the building sides. A lone, overworked garbage drone methodically hefted bin after bin into its maw, bleating a bleak complaint to a deaf landscape, other vehicles humming past insouciant. An indifferent industrial park churned out its product relentlessly.
    It'll continue churning when humans are long gone, he thought. We'll all be Ohumes by then, living in Organo-Topia.
    At ninety percent of the populace, Ohumes had nearly taken over.
    “Why indeed?” Doctor Raihman had said.
    Peterson put his head down, tucked his shoulders close, girded himself, and charged forward, unwilling to let a dearth of substance stymie him. He summoned a magnacar, hoping he didn't have to walk far.
    We're reasoning creatures in an unreasoning universe, he told himself. We want sense, order, logic to describe what's happening around