Nano Nosed [FICTOID]

“It stinks in here.”

“It stinks everywhere,” Susan McGillicuddy said.

You’d think with a name like Susan McGillicuddy she wouldn’t be a geisha, but you’d be wrong.  Susan’s orphaned grandfather was adopted by a California couple named McGillicuddy after WWII.  He married another ethnic Japanese and their son married a Japanese immigrant.

Susan is a valley girl through and through but in her teen years became fascinated by geisha culture.  She went to Japan, enrolled in formal geisha training, then upon graduation returned to the United States to run a successful tea house for Japanese and Japanese-American business men long for a taste of their ancestral culture.

Happy ending, you think?  Guess again.  One of Susan’s clients was a Silicon Valley dweeb working in quantum sensory nanotechnology, a bunch of buzz words that boils down to giving humans the ability to sense things over great distances.

He told Susan about this as she poured him green tea one evening, whisking it with a bamboo brush.

“It sounds fascinating,” she said demurely.

“Let me show you what I’m working on,” he said, drawing a small vial out of his jacket with nanotech particles in it (the vial, that is, not the jacket).

“I don’t dare open this in here or else the nanobots might get out and start replicating.”

But one of the nanobots did get out as he was transferring them into the vial at the lab, clinging to the exterior of the cap.  Now in the tea house it floated free from and cap and wafted across the table to enter Susan’s left nostril.

Once lodged in it began replicating, interlacing with her olfactory nerves.

Of course the dweeb’s Silicon Valley lab was sloppy with their work and a few days later a massive nanotech -- how’s that for an oxymoron? -- lead occurred and a couple of gazillion nanotech particles got spread around the state, all of them sharing into with every other nanotech particle in California, including those in Susan’s left nostril.

Susan began smelling everything in California:  The warm salty foam of its beaches, the crisp sharp scent of mountain pines, dense clouds of marijuana smoke damn near everywhere, flop sweat running down an actor’s back and into his butt crack at an audition going very badly, the exhaust of a poorly tuned car backfiring on the 101, garbage rotting behind a cheap Mexican restaurant as a sick customer suffering from explosive diarrhea voided out from both ends in the restroom.

Not a pleasant experience.

Once she figured out what happened Susan sued and won a sizeable judgment but by the time the case wound through the court system the nanothech startup went bust, rendering her victory pyrrhic.

Still, she soldiers on as a geisha, using her hard earned discipline to mask the overpowering revulsion she feels when the nanobots in the Clippers’ locker room relay what it smells like when the team removes their sneakers.

© Buzz Dixon