Science is essentially the discipline of trusting reality over theory. This sounds simple, but it leads to a host of secondary problems, including my favorite, ‘what is reality?’

Consensus is that the best measure of ‘reality’ is the universe as experienced through your senses: what you can see, what you can hear, what you can touch, these are the foundations of science.

What I see, what I hear, are not good representations of the universe. Knowing that what I’m hearing and seeing, even thinking, are wrong, bad data, is not as helpful as you might think. I know the famous story of John Nash, who reasoned his way back to something approaching sanity; I guess all I can say is that, one, I’m no John Nash; but two, he was a mathematician, and I’m a chemist. Was a chemist.

Mathematics is all theory; when the theory and the universe disagree, a mathematician finds it easy to suspect the universe, but my discipline teaches me to assume that reality is definitive; as an old professor of mine said, when the microscope disagrees with the book, trust the microscope.

I was a chemist, until Schizophrenia snuck up on me in the long, dark night of the soul that is the Writing of the Dissertation and knocked me clean out of my life. It was easy; I had already alienated everybody I knew by ranting and raving about whatever I was writing about, and I guess it’s not all that unusual for doctoral students to just stop showing up to appointments with their advisor… I don’t know, it was a very confusing time for me.

There was the usual breakup madness with the Girl I Loved, the girl from the midwest who had come out to find herself in the big city on the coast and had found me, and lost herself in me, a little, even as I was losing myself. We took a break, as they say, To Be Resumed when I finished the dissertation and was ready to think about the future. She smiled, sadly, when She left, that last time, and said, “write quick, okay?”

Walking through the city, that morning, realizing that the bag that had been pulled over my head as I sat in that awful little apartment watching the words stop working together, the heavy curtains between me and the rest of the universe, whatever the metaphor it was gone, and I could see again, I also realized that there was just no way that this was a natural occurrence.

People just don’t “wake up” from Schizophrenia. There are medications that more or less work, sort of; they didn’t work very well for me, and I wasn’t very good at taking them. There wasn’t anything that would just… wash away the taint, like this. Leave me feeling exhausted and wrung out and naked and new, like the morning after a fever breaks. Nothing, that I knew of; certainly nothing I’d taken.

Believing that you’ve been secretly drugged with something that affects your mind is one of those classics of delusional folklore, so thinking that sort of automatically made me pause and reconsider everything, like maybe this whole episode was an elaborate delusion where I believed that I was sane; it took me a while to think that one through and realize that there was no way to disprove it, so I had to go with what I was experiencing rather than second-guess myself.

Trusting reality is a huge leap of faith for a Schizophrenic.

Ace Labs was a small independent laboratory that would more or less undertake any chemical work you brought in, but subsisted primarily on drug tests. It consisted of a small, old-fashioned waiting room with a counter along one wall; behind the counter was the lab. In order to place or pick up an order, you had to disturb the white-coated lab techs by ringing a small bell.

The lab was located down a small dead-end street, in a building whose outside declared it, in large, art-deco letters, to be the home of the US Naval Underwriters Laboratory. A small sign above the door read “Ace Labs” in a simple black sans-serif; but most importantly, a big window allowed people on the street to watch the lab techs at work.

I was not allowed into Ace labs, or even on the sidewalk outside. I was a disruptive influence. There had been incidents. I stood outside and made commentary on the techniques being employed by the techs; I came inside and passed on questions from my voices. Everyone involved with Acme Labs hated me.

However… however. Something had happened to me. I suspected that there was… something… some drug, some interaction… I was guessing, grasping, just stretching the reason I was suddenly able to use again, but it seemed likely to me that if there was something in my blood, I should probably get a sample of it, before it metabolized and was gone without a trace.

The tech’s back was to me when I walked through the door, but he turned at the sound of the bell attached to the top of the door frame. I looked up at the bell stupidly. Had it always been there? I never remembered a bell ringing.

So many things were always happening in my head that simple things going on outside my head sometimes just got ignored.

“No,” said the tech, “No, no, no, no, you are not allowed in here.”

“Wait,” I said. I realized, just at that moment, that I was probably filthy and homeless looking. Again, things that are easy to not pay attention to when your attention is being occupied by important things. “I am not the same guy, I swear to God. I just want to find out why I’m suddenly sane…”

“You are so full of shit,” said the tech. “If you don’t get out of here right this second, I’m calling the police. Do you remember last time? The police?”

No, not really, I thought. I remember that I wasn’t allowed in there, something happened…. I don’t know.

“No, seriously,” I said, “I need to take a couple of blood samples, before whatever is in my blood has a chance to metabolize anymore…” I stepped around the counter, into the lab space. “I don’t even need your help, I can do the work myself…”

“No, seriously,” said the tech, advancing on me menacingly, “Get out. I have had it up to here with your bullshit…” He lunged for me; I jumped back, and he tripped over the wheel on one of the flat steel tables; he fell straight forward onto the table top, nose-first, then bounced bonelessly to the ground.

I stepped quickly over to where I remembered seeing bubble-cartridge blood collection needles and grabbed a handful of them. I contemplated the prospect of shuffling off however many layers of clothes I was wearing, then just used an alcohol wipe to clean a patch on the back of my hand that had a promising vein.

The color of the clear patch was a noticeably different color than the rest of my skin. I meditated on that a bit as I filled one, two, three, four sample vials with blood. They were the interchangeable type, where you stick the needle in once and then swap vials, which I remembered having seen but never remembered having used; maybe they were new while I was crazy.

The tech groaned and got to his hands and knees. I was glad he wasn’t dead; I glanced his way quickly and moved on with my… I suppose you’d have to call it a plan, though it wasn’t really much more than an impulse with steps. I grabbed a couple of old-fashioned microscopy slides and some fixative and made a couple of slides of my blood.

As I was sliding the slide under a scope, the tech started talking: “Hey, what the fuck do you think you’re doing…” He started to move toward me.

“Raaawr!” I retorted, lunging at the poor man. He fell over on his ass, then scrambled to his feet and ran full tilt into the closed door, then pulled the door open and ran out into the street. I turned back to the scope.

The blood sample was a nightmare.

I’m not a medical professional. Strip away the dirt and the grime and the years of living rough, and peel away the psychosis and let’s even assume that I hadn’t picked anything else up along the way; and underneath all that, I’m a chemist, which means I know lab rituals well enough that I can use this equipment without breaking anything; but in terms of interpreting what I’m looking at, I would expect to need a couple of text books and a spreadsheet to figure out whether I was seeing anything.

With a simple examination like this, I’d expect to be able to get a simple red-and-white blood count; and I’d expect to (maybe) be able to see fungus, crystals, or bacteria, though not necessarily what kind it is. Like I said, mostly I was looking to be able to assert some control over my environment, to take some positive step and see it flower into a predictable, though largely useless, result.

The blood sample was a nightmare.

There were tiny machines in there. They were unmistakable; you couldn’t possibly see them as bacteria or fungi… they were tiny machines, tiny little… devices, robots, swimming around in my blood.

I didn’t freak out; I just stood there at the microscope staring at the things in my blood. There were basically two possibilities: One, I was experiencing a new and surprisingly coherent stage of my descent into total raving madness; or Two, I was seeing something new and unique: a nanobot infection.

I’d been ‘gone’ for enough years to feel like I was probably out of date, but… the fact that everyone had smartphones didn’t shock or surprise me; I knew who the president was, even though he’d been elected after I… descended; so I wasn’t completely cut off from the world around me. I would expect to know if someone had figured out how to create a nanobot plague.

The door burst open. “There he is, officers!” and then it was yackety sax around the lab with a two uniformed beat cops. Right up until that moment I’d been being very careful with the equipment; it seemed very important to me to act like a professional, but with these two bulls running around the china shop didn’t stand a chance.

I finally made my way out a back door I wouldn’t have noticed if I hadn’t been desperately running from the cops; it led to a nondescript hallway that looked like it’d last been redecorated sometime in the seventies. I pounded down the first stairs I saw, then tiptoed up the opposite staircase, listening as the bulls dashed out into the big basement under the building.

I walked carefully out the front door of the building, and lo a streetcar pulled to a stop in front of me and I boarded it, waving a random scrap of paper and claiming to be immune from fares. This usually worked, and it worked this time; the driver rolled his eyes and closed the doors and pulled away, into traffic, taking me away from the scene of the crime.

There are showers in the library. Not that many people know that. I didn’t know that until I showed up at the library looking for a book on blood microscopy and maybe to use a computer to look up the state of nanotechnology.

I felt exhilarated from the chase with the police, and I was still feeling like… like I’d been tasked, somehow, with finding out what was going on, but… well, the feeling of being tasked with a quest by a higher power; the sight of tiny machines in the blood… these might be signs that you’re the hero of a science fiction story, but in my experience they were simply signs that I wasn’t actually cured, I was just… differently crazy. So I wasn’t taking any of this too seriously. Far from freaking me out, the nano-machines in my blood reassured me that I was probably making this all up after all.

And that was very reassuring, in a weird way, because if you made a list of things that are more scary than losing your mind, a global science-fiction nanobot outbreak has to rate up there, yeah?