Micromachines

Micromachines, equally known as nanites, are the vanishingly tiny mechanisms whose appearance altered the world permanently and ushered in what people call the Japanese Miracle. Their arrival set off enormous strides throughout industry and the sciences.

The list of what they accomplished reads like granted wishes. Innumerable illnesses were pushed into extinction, starvation ceased to be a threat, the smog smothering the largest cities was dispersed, and radiation vanished from devastated zones, even if the cleanup briefly endangered a few fragile pairs of lungs. The technology started modestly, meant to fix genetic faults in animals, and only swelled once cybernetics grew past being a mere add-on. Because nanotechnology could weld circuitry seamlessly into living flesh, it opened a road leading straight to the complete prosthetic bodies worn today; not one cybernetic component anywhere, whether a replacement limb, a cyberbrain, or an entire cyborg, could exist without them.

By now the machines are so widespread that almost every major company keeps a division devoted to them, and people quip that they outnumber the insects of the world; who first invented them, and who once held the patent, has mostly faded into forgotten record. A single unit measures one-millionth of a millimeter, fine enough to embed itself so deeply in someone's brain that pulling it out becomes impossible. The dead ones just occupy space, and since removing them would harm the neighboring cells, they are normally left alone. As for the ancient legends, the Fountain of Youth and the Philosopher's Stone, most observers now conclude that mankind, in these tiny engines, has at last laid hold of what it long chased.