Apex Book Company

The core concepts behind Plague Year were easy. I grew up in northern California, at sea-level, and yet the San Francisco Bay Area is just a three-hour drive from the Sierra mountains. I’m a lifelong skier and backpacker. My friends and I didn’t ever want to go back to work. As a writer, I’m always looking for cool ideas, and I began to think, “What if we could never go home again?”

Imagine if the geopolitical map was squeezed up into the world’s highest peaks and everywhere else was a death zone. How would Earth’s nations react?

On the face of it, you’d think I must be deeply disturbed! It’s a dark idea. For me, though, the real thrust of the story has always been the grit, intelligence, and determination of the characters.

I’m actually a normal, happy person. My wife and I have two strong, intelligent children, she’s pretty great herself, and I enjoy what I do. Once you accept the basic premise of the story, unfortunately, things get ugly in a hurry, which is why I think the books have been so popular. It’s an impossibly hard question to ask yourself. What would you do to survive? There are very, very few animals or plants to eat above 10,000 feet, no shelter, no technology, and no fuel.

In a crisis, some people will fail — but there are always others who rise to the occasion. Any occasion. Human beings are the smartest, toughest creatures on the planet, and yet it’s given us a blind spot, too. It works against us. We’re the cause of nearly all of our own problems. To me, that’s fascinating.

When I first began writing Plague Year, the threat was a virus, but I couldn’t make a biological threat obey a barrier. It kept coming up over the mountains and killing everybody. There’s a book in that, too, I guess, but it would be a story without any hope at all, whereas if the danger was a machine plague it might have limits. You might even be able to turn it off.

Researchers are publishing a lot of eye-popping stuff in medical technology these days, and I was especially intrigued by the way they’re using primitive nanobots to target and destroy tumors.

Nanotechnology gets its name from a unit of measurement. A millimeter is one thousandth of a meter. A nanometer is one billionth of a meter. As a general term, a “nano” is something about the size of a virus! “Nanotechnology” is now being used to describe any sort of chemical or mechanical science being devised at the scale… and in the twenty-first century, it’s everywhere. You can find “nano-particles” of zinc or titanium dioxide in sunscreen that make the lotion clear instead of giving you a funny white face. There is “nano silver” in socks as an anti-odorant.

For a field that concerns itself with microscopic things, nanotechnology is incredibly vast and pervasive. You’re surrounded by it right now.

For the purposes of the book, though, the characters are mostly concerned with nanoscale machines. The Holy Grail of the most ambitious researchers in the field is to develop a high-level robot that can follow directions not only create more of itself — because one nanobot is basically useless, being so incredibly small — but to be able to construct or rearrange things at the molecular level.

In theory, nanobots like this could make gold out of dirt. Or food. Or medicine. Or a cold fusion reactor. Once you control the most basic building blocks of the universe, you can create almost anything.

We’re still a long way from this magic. Right now, what people are doing with nanotech is creating better sunscreen and socks and new optical fibers and microprocessors.

However, there are also remarkably clever people who are using crude nanobots to identify tumors in patients. Tumors are more acidic than healthy tissue, and people have manufactured nanoscale carriers that, when injected into the body, will react to that acidity and begin to release markers which are then used to precisely target the tumor in MRI scans.

All of this sounds great, right? Here’s where it gets scary. The problem with even passive nanotech such as what you find in sunscreen that doesn’t look white or socks that don’t smell is that particles of this size are impossible to contain. The junk in the sunscreen can be absorbed into your body, where, in sufficient amounts, it will disrupt hormone production. The stuff in your socks washes out and filters into the ground water, where it plays equal havoc with biological lifeforms, and I’m not just talking about frogs and fish. It affects people, too, because it returns to you in your drinking water….

And that’s just the beginning.

There are hundreds of private labs who aren’t publishing what they’re doing, some commercial, some military. You don’t even want to think about nanobots as a weapon. Even nuclear bombs are nothing to worry about in comparison to an invisible, worldwide blanket of nanobots that can disarm and disintegrate missiles before they’re launched. Or rip apart anyone who tries to object.

In Plague Year, I posit that there are research teams who have moved beyond “dumb” nanobots to active, “smart” machines that will find and remove malignant tissues inside their living human host.

For all we know, there are science teams who have already developed machines like this in real life. The researchers in the lab imagined in Plague Year are also some of those who aren’t publishing, not because they’re evil but because it’s proprietary information. The first group to come out with such a thing will make trillions of dollars, although money becomes a secondary concern at that point.

There’s an even better pay-off than being rich, because if you can improve your cancer cure by another level or two, you nearly have immortality — and you can smoke, drink, and eat donuts all day long besides! Machines like this could keep your lungs clean, your liver strong, and correct any and all failing such as diabetes or multiple sclerosis while also protecting you from AIDS, nerve agents, or even the common cold.

My characters are still in the early stages of creating their device, which they call archos, a Greek word meaning “master form.” Eventually, they hope to use the same prototype to accomplish all of the wildly complex aspects of maintaining the human body against age and disease. For now, however, they’ve taught the archos tech to use its host’s body heat as an energy source and they’ve taught it build more itself using the carbon and iron it would find in malignant tissues. That’s it.

That’s when it breaks loose from their lab during an act of industrial espionage.

There’s nothing anyone could do. The only thing in the world’s favor is that the archos tech has one weakness. The research team built a hypobaric fuse into their machine as of their controls. They planned to treat their patients inside a hermetically sealed room, and, when they were done, they’d drop the air pressure to 70% of an atmosphere, causing the nanotech to self-destruct, after which the patient would emerge, happy and cancer-free.

The bad news is that 70% of an atmosphere is about 10,000 feet up. This barrier fluctuates with the weather, but not by much, and there aren’t a great many places on Earth at that elevation. Below the death line, the uncontrolled nanotech devours all warm-blooded creatures, leaving only some insects, amphibians, and reptiles.

Mayhem ensues.

Jeff Carlson is the author of the internationally acclaimed sci fi thrillers Plague Year and Plague War. To date, his work has been translated into eight languages. Plague Year is also available as an audiobook from Recorded Books and Audible.com, and has been optioned for film. More than twenty of his short stories and nonfiction articles have appeared in venues such as Asimov’s Science Fiction, Boys’ Life, and the Fast Forward 2 anthology.

Currently, Jeff is at work on a new stand-alone thriller. He lives with his wife and sons in California, and welcomes correspondence at www.jverse.com, where readers can find free fiction, videos, blog, contests, and more.