This Sci-Fi Story Takes You Inside the Human Body—Literally

Dustin (00:00:00 --> 00:03:04)
Dustin I'm Dustin Grinnell, and this is Curiously, when I was a kid, one of my favorite TV shows was the Magic School Bus. It first aired on PBS from 1994 to 1997 as part of the network's educational programming for children. The show embedded science lessons inside fantastical adventures all wrapped up in a neat 30 minute package. Each episode followed Ms. Frizzle, this zany, fearless teacher who turned learning into an expedition. Want to study the solar system, rocket the Magic School Bus into space and see the planets up close?

Curious about the weather? Fly straight into a hurricane and experience air pressure and storm systems firsthand. But one of my favorite episodes was when Ms. Frizzle shrank the class down and took them inside the human body to learn about germs and the immune system. That wild ride through veins, organs and cells and transformed a biology lesson into an unforgettable adventure. For years, I knew I wanted to write a fictional story about people miniaturizing themselves with advanced technology and venturing into the human body on a mission.

Last year, I finally gave it a shot. I imagined a device called a quantum manipulator, technology that reduces the space between subatomic particles, shrinking a person down to microscopic size so they can be injected into the body. I came up with two characters, Abby and Jackson, a married couple who had become early explorers of the human body through their touring business. It's science fiction, and as is often the case with me, I like to give my sci fi premises a little heart. So I imagine that Abby and Jackson's relationship weakened over time and ultimately broke.

Two years later, Abby receives a call from a wealthy client. He had hired Jackson to enter his body, travel to his brain, and carry out a dangerous mission. But something goes wrong and Jackson goes dark. Abby is asked to go inside the client's brain to rescue her estranged husband. Now, a quick note about style.

I wrote this story in free indirect style. It's written almost like a documentary. There's a lot of telling in the show, don't tell Sense. But within that telling, there's also showing. Scenes and dialogue are embedded within the narration.

I love this writing style because it feels like the way you might tell a story around a campfire. It has a sweeping quality, almost like folklore. And it felt like the perfect vehicle for a dramatic reading. For that performance, I chose Laura Neibauer, one of the voice actors who responded to my casting call through Sean Pratt, who joined me on my 2024 episode, Inside the Mind of a Master. Audiobook narrator.

Laura brought this story to light, beautifully capturing its emotional core with a dramatic yet understated performance while honoring every nuance of the language. And finally, a shout out to Massasoi Community College. I'm recording this in one of their studios as part of the radio and podcasting certificate program I'm taking through their media arts department. I hope you enjoy this story, and without further ado, here it is.

Narrarator (00:03:09 --> 00:32:01)
M micro. By 2070, the shrinking of objects had become an ordinary miracle. A person could enter another person's body the way their grandparents had once boarded airplanes. The technology was called micro exploring, and it had long since passed from the hands of scientists into the realm of weekend adventurers and the reasonably wealthy. You needed a guide, naturally.

The human body remained what it had always been a dangerous wilderness. The first explorers had been mapmakers, physiologists who descended into vessels and organs with the gravitas of conquistadors. They returned with images no one had seen before heart walls rippling like theater curtains, immune cells floating through blood like translucent jellyfish, nerve cells releasing their chemical clouds in bursts of communion. Soon came the medical pilots who carried stem cells to damaged organs and injected tumors at their source. Insurance companies made it cheap.

Pills became obsolete. Hospitals rebuilt themselves around the miniaturization bays. After that, micro exploring opened to anyone with means and nerve. Some micros, as they came to be called, bought their own machines, though this was rare as yacht ownership. Most people rented microships at facilities that ran shrinking sessions throughout the day, launching vessels into volunteers the way airports once sent planes toward distant continents, back before teleportation made air travel obsolete.

Though it wasn't technically illegal, certain regions remained forbidden. In the same way, skiing out of bounds was forbidden. Possible, but not meant to be done. The brain was too delicate. Its neural networks were too easily damaged.

One wrong turn could scramble vital structures. The lungs unfolded into mazes that had claimed many expeditions, their teams lost among alveoli like spelunkers in unmapped caves. The heart killed quickly. Several famous expeditions had entered its chambers and been crushed or flung into vortices, their vessels broken and digested by immune cells like bodies left on Everest before the mountain crumbled in the earthquake. Lost ships simply stayed lost, their crews absorbed into the body.

They'd tried to navigate or eliminated without the host ever feeling a thing. Rescue missions rarely succeeded. The government had tried for a time, but the rescuers often needed, uh, rescuing themselves, and the program was shut down. The few survivors were those who made it to accessible regions where. Where extraction teams could port in and pull them out.

For years, Jackson and Abby had gone where others would not. The married couple pioneered the body the way Shackleton had pioneered Antarctica. And their first ascents became legend. The lungs, capillaries, the kidneys, filtering nephrons, the full length of the digestive tract, earning them a kind of fame they hadn't sought or expected. They went part time at first, weekend warriors until they realized they could make a living from exploration itself.

Through body ventures, they guided paying customers through vessels and organs, showing them the interior country of themselves. For years the work was good. Then Abby left. Their separation became as famous as their expeditions, though no one knew exactly why they had split. Some said there had been infidelity, but anyone who knew them dismissed this.

They'd loved what they did and had loved doing it together. Everyone assumed they would grow old together and be buried in the same mountain grave. But something had changed and Abby walked away from Jackson and the business. Two years went by and Abby heard nothing from him. Then came the message from Spencer, an assistant to the billionaire inventor Charles Wheeler, saying that Jackson had been marooned in Charles brain during a dangerous mission.

The kind of mission only Jackson would accept. Prohibited, highly paid, nearly impossible. While the brain was largely unexplored. Some teams had gone bandit, as it was called, defying regulations. Ah.

The first team to enter a volunteer's prefrontal cortex had wandered, carelessly pushing through tissue, effectively lobotomizing the host who now required full time care. Most micros stayed away, but Jackson had never been cautious. Spencer said Charles had commissioned him for a burn mission to go into his hippocampus and wipe out the memories that haunted him. Memories that some claimed had left the old man crippled with grief. Abby had always admired Jackson's nerve, even as she suspected it masked something darker, perhaps an unconscious wish for obliteration.

Daily life seemed inadequate for him. He pushed boundaries compulsively, riding his motorcycle too fast on dark roads, taking expeditions into conditions that should have killed him. Yet his perfectionism had kept him alive. He worried over every detail, planned neurotically, never succumbed to summit fever. The adventurers who sweated the details, he used to say, lived longest on micro expeditions.

Jackson had sometimes pushed too far to give clients their money's worth. He once took a handful of tech entrepreneurs into the kidneys where the filtration process could trap and crush ships. Only his skilled, some even called it gifted piloting got them out alive. He told Abby afterward, joking that it would only have been an issue if he'd died. She hadn't found this devil may Care, attitude.

Charming. But she couldn't deny he regularly accomplished the impossible. In her Brookline condo, Abby set down her phone. After listening to Spencer's message. She sipped wine and considered situation.

Part of her felt Jackson could handle himself. He was a grown man who had chosen dangerous work. Another part wondered if he'd finally pushed too far. Spencer said Jackson's ship had gone dark after passing the blood brain barrier. Charles wanted her to find him and finish the mission.

He would explain everything when they met. It took two hours to reach Charles's estate in the Berkshires. Abby drove past manicured gardens where teams worked the grounds. A thin man with a pale, angular face opened her door and greeted her. It was Spencer.

He led Abby through the mansion, past a circular staircase into a study lined with books. In the center was a hospital bed. Charles Wheeler lay there. The old man had a wrinkled face and kind eyes, and he said he knew everything about her from his files. He would pay well if she retrieved her husband and completed the job.

Hearing someone call Jackson her husband felt strange after they'd been apart so long. Abby told Charles to describe the mission, and he explained without hesitation. He'd wanted Jackson to enter his hippocampus and burn away tissue containing memories of his late wife. A long life had given him many memories, he said, but one memory especially was too profound for his mind to carry. Abby had never been on a, uh, burn mission and tried to explain the science, the imprecision of memory, location, how memories distributed across neural nodes.

Charles waved a hand. His neurologist had identified the precise region. He wanted it gone. When Abby asked what the memory was, Charles shook his head. Too painful to share.

Abby, uh, said she was out of the game. Hadn't microed in a couple years. Charles snapped his fingers and Spencer crossed the room and presented a check for an amount Abby had never seen. She pondered for a moment, then agreed reluctantly. Not just for the money, though.

It would pay off her condo. She couldn't bear the thought of Jackson marooned in this old man's brain. On the ride home, Abby called Mitch, the best pilot she knew and one of Jackson's old friends. He rarely asked questions about a job. You told him where to fly, and he flew there.

He never negotiated pay either. For him, flying was its own compensation. The only question he asked was where Jackson was stuck. Abby said, charles brain, and Mitch was silent for a while and said he'd be ready for tomorrow. That night, Abby poured wine and decided to revisit the eight good years with Jackson before the split.

She powered on her living room's Nova device and asked Tessa, uh, her AI to project their photos as holograms. She requested their Patagonia trip. The room filled with 3D images of that day. A vast mountainous landscape stretched in every direction, with snow capped peaks visible in the distance. There was Jackson, slender and muscled, clutching his motorcycle as he pushed it forward on a long dirt road.

They'd been low on gas because Jackson wanted to reach the hotel before sunset. He loved sunsets and had made a resolution to see every one. That year. They were in the middle of nowhere, fuel running low, but Jackson looked thrilled. When they reached the hotel on fumes, Jackson stripped off his helmet, ran his hand through his hair, turned back and grinned.

That grin still slayed her. Abby raised her hand to touch his face in the projection, but her fingers passed through. She told Tessa to move on, and the next scene showed them in bed on a Saturday morning. Abby had brought up the subject he never liked to discuss. She was aging, approaching her late 30s.

If they wanted a child, time was running out. Jackson always said they had time, but Abby couldn't help worrying as the years ticked by. Eventually, Abby turned 40 and felt her reproductive window close when she left him, knowing it would never happen. She thought she might find someone else, but the few months of dating were unbearable. The men were polite, but had no edge.

They were simply nice, and it made her long for Jackson, who was difficult, but also fun, dark and cool. At 42 past her reproductive prime, she'd long since given up hope of having a child. The next morning, Abby drove to Charles estate with Mitch, a big, burly man whose beard seemed to have a life of its own. Spencer led them through the house about an hour later, past family photos showing Virginia, Charles's late wife. They reached a sealed metal door, and Spencer used a card to, um, unlock it.

They passed through hallways and emerged into a bay the size of a tennis court. In its center sat the enlarged microchip, sleek and metallic, vastly superior to anything Abby and Jackson had used. Mitch ran his hand along the hole. Without warning, the room suddenly flared with the harsh glow of emergency lights. They ran to the study to find Charles unconscious in his bed.

Spencer called for the house doctor, who said Charles had clearly experienced a neurological issue, likely due to something Jackson was doing in his brain. Abby said they needed to go in immediately. Spencer worked a panel behind thick glass glass while Abby and Mitch m. Climbed into the ship and strapped into the pilot seats. They gave Spencer a thumbs up. The air began to hum and vibrate, carrying a faint Metallic scent as the quantum manipulator hummed to life, controlling the fundamental building blocks of matter, shrinking the space within atoms.

A white sphere of light noiselessly emerged, wrapped around the ship, and then swallowed them. Abby's body tingled. Then the pressure hit, squeezing from every direction. Through the window, the room stretched impossibly wide. And then the sphere collapsed.

They were microscopic. A magnetic field drew them toward a capsule attached to a microneedle for injection. The ship surged forward as they were injected into Charles bloodstream and swept away. Through the window. There was a kaleidoscope of motion, cells flowing like a living river.

Abby noticed right away that something was wrong. The blood was dark red, a clear sign it was deoxygenated. That meant they were in the jugular vein, not the artery. They were headed for the heart. Not part of the plan.

As the bloodstream swept them through narrowing vessels, Abby thought about the challenge ahead. The G forces in the atrium would be mild under 1G, but the ventricle would be far more intense. Three to five G's. Abby handed control to Tessa for the entry. Few people could navigate the heart.

They strapped in and braced themselves. They sliced through the superior vena cava, a massive tunnel, and passed into the heart. The chamber was dim and cavernous, walls rippling, opening. Ahead was the tricuspid valve. Three sail like flaps that snapped shut behind them just as they slipped through.

They'd made it into the right ventricle. Tessa told them to hold tight. The ventricle contracted and the blood went from stillness to a jet stream. The ship rattled as it blasted through the pulmonary valve like a bullet. G forces spiked.

Four G's, then six. Abby, uh, let out a long breath, the kind she didn't realize she was holding. They'd made it through the heart without everything blowing to bits, but they weren't finished yet. The right side of the heart was responsible for sending oxygen, poor blood to the lungs through the pulmonary artery, where it picked up oxygen and sent it back to the left side of the heart. That would be the most violent part of the journey, and Abby would need her AI more than ever.

Moving into the lungs, they passed through pulmonary capillaries, where oxygen transferred from breath to blood. The walls were thin and translucent, barely white enough for red blood cells to squeeze through single file. As they made their way back toward the heart, Abby addressed Tessa, uh, hoping for a flight plan, maybe words of encouragement. But there was no response. She checked the computer.

Error message connection lost. They were approaching the left side of the heart without AI support. Abby paused and then an idea hit her. She switched frequency and sent out a distress Jackson. This was Abby.

If he could hear her, they were heading into the heart and could really use his help. For a moment there was nothing but static, and then a crackle came over the radio. A beat passed, then his voice Abby? What the hell was she doing there? She didn't have time to explain.

She said that her AI had failed and they were on their own. Mitch spoke up to say howdy, partner, and they didn't have the chops to pull it off. Copy that, jackson replied. Over the radio, Jackson guided them, confirming that the left side was almost easy compared to the right. The first chamber, the left atrium, he explained, would be the calm before the storm.

Wait for the mitral valve to open. When the ventricle is relaxed, feel the pulse drift in. Stay low, stay centered. When the ventricle contracts, you'll be rocketed out. As they were funneled back into the heart, the radio cut out, but Jackson's voice still echoed in her head as the left ventricle clenched and the ship shot forward.

The pressure slammed her into the seat, nothing she'd ever felt before. She was terrified, worried about the hole's integrity. But Mitch seemed to be having the time of his life, hollering a feral Yee haw. As they blasted into the brachiocephalic artery. On the way to the brain.

Tessa finally came back online, apologizing for the blackout. There had been an unexpected power surge, she said. Jackson's voice followed, adding that Spencer had knocked them offline. Spencer, in fact, was behind it all. He'd sabotaged Jackson.

Abby asked why he'd do that. Good question, jackson said. He didn't know either. Abby, uh, and Mitch passed through the circle of Willis, a looping network of arteries at the base of the brain. Through translucent walls, they there were flickers of light, neural pulses, brain cells firing, talking.

Suddenly, they reached the blood brain barrier, a reddish membrane. At Abby's command, Tessa aimed the ultrasound disruptor, focused. Sound waves loosened the tight junctions until a microscopic gap opened and they slipped through into protected brain tissue. It wasn't long before Jackson ship appeared ahead, scarred from collisions with countless structures. Park that thing and get in here, he said.

A few minutes later, Abby entered the docking station. The door swung open, revealing a lean man with a few days worth of beard, shadow, and tousled hair, still impossibly handsome. And that smile. That damn smile. He still smelled amazing, too, even after days of navigating, she realized as he hugged her.

Could they just fix his Ultrasound gun and get out of here. Jackson waved her into his ship. Did she want a drink? They weren't going anywhere for a while. Mitch wrapped his old friend in a big bear hug, then headed for the ship's blood pool to suit up and check on the ultrasound gun.

Jackson offered Abby a mezcal martini, just like the ones they'd had on their motorcycle trip down down Baja Strip a few years ago. She exhaled. Not exactly time for a drink. But she accepted anyway, knowing it might calm her nerves. So how had he messed up this time?

Abby asked. It wasn't his fault, Jackson said. Their ultrasound gun just went dead. He insisted Spencer had something to do with it. Twenty minutes later, Mitch's voice came through the ship's speaker.

He was outside at the guns. Tessa had helped him examine them remotely and found the problem. The frequency modulation had been altered, causing low frequency. Ultrasound instead of high. Low frequency could cause swelling and bleeding.

With Tessa's help, the guns were coming back online, charging fast. Jackson called Mitch back inside. There was a drink waiting for him. Just then, the air felt charged. A high pitched ringing tore through Abby's ears and the ground pitched beneath her feet.

Mitch yelled that the brain was hemorrhaging. The guns were working but wouldn't shut off. Debris flew in every direction. Abby screamed at Tessa to kill the ultrasound system now. Tessa said she'd tried to shut it down, but all the entry points in the code had been disabled.

Another voice on the radio. This time it was Spencer. He apologized for the malfunction. It wasn't his intention to hurt any of them. Jackson accused Spencer of sabotage.

Why? Because Charles mission was misguided. Spencer explained he wanted to burn out memories of Virginia because the pain was too great. Because he couldn't stop reliving the day she died. Abby said it was Charles's choice, but it was the wrong choice.

Spencer went on first. You can't just delete a memory a particular moment in time. Burn missions couldn't discriminate with that level of nuance. So you'd burn out the good with the bad. Like a. Ah.

Cancer therapy destroys healthy cells as well as cancer cells. If you accidentally torched that moment of Virginia, Charles might only remember her leaving and never coming back. Abby was just about to scream m enough. When the ship rocked violently, knocking her and Jackson off their feet. Scrambling on her hands and knees, she yelled that they needed to get Mitch in the ship.

She sprinted to the blood pool and saw a silver helmet breaking the surface. Mitch. She ran over and reached out. Their hands almost met when a metal table slid across the floor and struck Mitch in the face mask. His body went limp and sank below the surface.

Mitch, M. She screamed for Tessa to help deploy the arm. Anything. But nothing happened. Then a beat, and Spencer's voice cut through. He'd taken Tessa offline and Mitch was gone.

Jackson's voice crackled over the speaker, ordering her to the cockpit. Abby sprinted down the hallway. Blood seeped through the cracks in the walls. She burst into the cockpit, and an idea hit her. Jackson, start the ship's self destruct.

You want me to blow up my ship? She explained that Spencer had compromised his ship, but not hers. Got it, jackson said, initiating now. Five minutes. Go to the airlock.

Jackson helped Abby through the airlock. They ran to Abby's ship and sealed themselves inside. Jackson took the pilot's chair. They detached, and the ship jerked loose as they pulled away, Jackson's ship shook violently, holes forming in the hull. Suddenly there was a crack as the vessel crumpled inward, vanishing in a cloud of debris.

As they rocketed away, Abby mentioned she'd shut down the AI integration. No chance for Spencer to mess with them. But that meant Jackson had to fly the brain by hand. Not a problem. He shrugged, though they could use a moment to pause and think.

And sleep if possible. As he'd been up for two days straight, Jackson angled toward a capillary wall and fired the grappling anchors, latching onto the fibrous tissue. Abby, uh, said they needed to figure out how to get out. Not before the mission was done, Jackson shot back. The mission was over.

Abby pressed. Not for him. He'd been hired to do a job. Typical. Abby, uh thought Jackson had always been selfish.

Always putting himself first, always choosing to be alone rather than in a partnership. She yelled that he probably hadn't even cared that they'd been separated. Probably gave him time to focus on his adventures. Jackson rolled his eyes. He never could stand her nagging.

Not enough time with her. Too little interest in her friends and family. And then he hit her with the real reason she'd left. He hadn't wanted a baby. She'd agreed at first, hoping she could change his mind.

When she realized she couldn't, she left. Okay, fine, jackson said. He didn't think spending Saturdays hunting for baby formula and managing nap schedules was exactly cool. She said that had nothing to do with it. The truth was, he only cared about himself.

How could he possibly care about anyone else? Fine. He was a selfish bastard. He stormed toward the door, then paused. Where could he even sleep in this thing?

Abby led him to the main living room and pointed to a cot all his. Jackson asked for a blanket. Abby tossed a pillow at his face. Sleep well. Before she left, he asked if she had any.

You know. She huffed, disappeared into the bathroom, and came back with a bottle and chucked it at him. If anyone knew, the famous adventurer needed Dramamine to sleep on expeditions. The next morning, Abby brewed coffee while Jackson woke both making an effort to move past the fight from the night before. He brought up the time she'd accidentally spilled boiling water on his leg, leaving scars.

He lifted his ankle to show three faded marks. A little love memento from his ex wife. The word ex made Abby wince, and she quickly changed the subject to the mission Jackson wanted to finish. That was clear mostly because the payday was enormous, life changing. Abby had thought about it and agreed she'd help, partly because Spencer had pissed her off, but also because she felt for the old man.

After the mission, she explained, they'd make their way to the extraction point. An hour later, they were floating toward Charles's hippocampus. The brain's memory center loomed like a massive seahorse shaped structure. Jackson checked his tablet. Nero maps showed memories scattered across the structure.

They could port in and scan until they found the one Charles wanted erased. Jackson steered the ship and latched onto the wall. From the other chair, Abby, uh, extended the memory gauge until it touched brain tissue. The wire fanned out, splitting into hundreds of smaller wires, making tens of thousands of connections. Jackson fired up the projector and tapped the largest memory nodules.

The room filled with scenes from Charles's life that involved his late wife. First a, uh, young Charles and Virginia painting their first apartment light blue. They flopped onto a blanket on the floor. Charles poured champagne to the start of their beautiful life in a crappy apartment. Virginia giggled.

She wouldn't have it any other way. Next, Virginia straightening Charles bow tie before he received the Nobel Prize for discovering quantum manipulation. Her husband, the famous inventor. He'd figured out how to reorganize subatomic particles but still couldn't tie a bow tie. Next, Charles and Virginia dropping their son off at college.

Max looked nervous. Charles said everyone was going to love him just like he loved him. Max said he wished mom could be there. Abby realized that Virginia had died before Max had left for college. They were close to the memory, Jackson said and tapped the second largest nodule.

It m was a night scene. This is the one, he whispered. Abby and Jackson watched Charles fling open the car door and sprint toward the guardrail along a remote stretch of Road. Police cars and an ambulance cast flashing light across the scene. Tire marks led to a break in the rail.

Charles ran forward, yelling, no, no, no. And pet. Down the embankment. 50Ft below, a gray Mercedes was pressed against a tree, hood crushed. He screamed, Virginia.

And stepped down the slope, but tripped. Tumbling down. He pushed himself up and ran toward the smoking car. Firefighters worked the jaws of life on the driver's side door. Through the smashed windows, Charles saw Virginia's profile, hair streaked with blood.

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Oh, God.

Narrarator (00:32:02 --> 00:45:37)
Semi conscious, she said she was tired. Was it time for bed yet? Charles? She coughed blood. The fireman sawed through metal near the hood.

Sparks flew. Where did it hurt, sweetheart? She mumbled something, impossible to make out. She was almost out. Just had to hang on.

The saw screeched. The door was almost off. Flames erupted from under the hood. They needed to work faster. Dammit.

More sawing. The door was coming loose when flames poured from every crack. Charles clasped her hand through the shattered window. The fire spread along the side of the car and up the windshield. The firefighters shouted at Charles to back up.

They were going to hit it with water. They yanked him away. He fell, screaming, kicking, as they dragged him clear. Then the fire hit a fuel leak explosion. The car was swallowed in flames.

The screen went black. Jackson sat there crying softly. His fist was pressed against the button that had cut the feed. They both stayed silent, knowing exactly why someone might want to delete a memory like that. Abby, uh, rubbed Jackson's back.

Now she understood why Charles had sent him. When she asked why he was crying, Jackson said because he admired, even envied, Charles and what he had with Virginia. They seemed to live such a full, meaningful life while he was just a loner adventurer, flitting from job to job, unattached even while they'd been together. But that was just who he was. Abby, uh, said he needed adventure or he'd go crazy.

Jackson agreed and said that he'd lived an exciting life and was proud of his accomplishments. But what those two had raised, real commitment. Growing old together. Raising a boy into a man was an achievement of its own. A road he hadn't traveled yet.

He finally understood the appeal. He'd never had it when he was young. No model to follow. He needed images of something like this to help him invent it. Now he had them.

Abby had never heard Jackson this vulnerable, and it unlocked something in her. Did he Want to know what some of her favorite times had been together? The big adventures were great, of course, but the moments she'd liked most were the quiet ones. Sunday mornings she'd be reading on the couch while he sat at the other end with a map, plotting the next expedition. No phones, no email, no screens.

They'd pause to share ideas and chat. It was so nice. Sometimes she would look over and think that this was it. This was the good life. Jackson smiled.

It really was the good life. And maybe Spencer was right, too. If they erased this memory, Charles might only remember that Virginia had left and never came back. People could explain what happened, but would he believe them? Knowing she left and never returned would be its own kind of trauma.

A new source of grief. So was he saying they shouldn't delete it? He nodded. Maybe they shouldn't erase any memories, no matter how bad or traumatic. But what about the money?

He shrugged. He could go back to guiding. Find a wealthy client who wanted to tour the kidneys. So what now? He looked out at the swirling blood.

Get the hell out of there. Just then a sudden thud hit the ship's hull. Then another. Then thumping. All around.

An alarm blared. Red lights flashed. They ran for the cockpit. Something was wrong. Were they being attacked?

By what? Immune cells. That couldn't be right. The anti immune system was always running. It had gone down.

They'd be dead in minutes. Jackson checked a panel, his face going white. It was down. Abby pulled up the biochemical readouts. Charles was having a massive immune response.

CRP levels were spiking. Inflammation markers were the highest she'd ever seen. This was Spencer again. He must have injected Charles with something bad, causing a full cytokine storm. Another heavy thud sent snapped their attention to the window.

A spindly star shaped cell with long, probing arms pressed against the glass. More of them drifted behind it, sweeping the area. What were those things? Microglia, jackson said. The brain's security guards.

Immune cells on the hunt for intruders. And what were they doing? Trying to swallow them. Jackson pressed buttons. The tether retracted and the ship jolted free.

They needed to get out of the brain, but they couldn't get past the blood brain barrier without the ultrasound gun. They would have to find another way. As they sped off, cells smashed against the hole from all directions, like an icebreaker plowing through ice. Ahead, the blood brain barrier shimmered into view, a tightly woven wall. So what was the plan?

Abby yelled, gripping her chair. Jackson flipped switches and shoved the thruster forward. The ship lurched, accelerating hard. What was he Doing? They were going to crash.

The barrier was fortified. They'd bounce right off. Jackson started explaining what he was doing. Did she know his favorite books? Uh, the Odyssey and the Iliad.

Odysseus was wily, cunning, a great warrior. He'd faced a wall of his own once. Troy had been impossible to enter. Completely fortified. So how had they gotten in?

Ahead, a massive T cell loomed, all blobby and pulsating. Jackson turned the ship toward it. Abby panicked. Wasn't that a cell up ahead? He knew.

Good. So let's go around it. No. Their course was perfect. They were close now.

Turn. Jackson leaned forward, pressing the ship straight at the cell until they rammed its chest gelatinous membrane and burst through. They were inside a T cell. Jackson told Abby he was taking inspiration from the story of the Trojan horse. And then it clicked for her.

He wanted to ride the immune cell through the brain's barrier, just like soldiers getting into Troy by hiding in a fake horse. Brilliant. She wondered if Tessa would have thought of that. The impact. She shoved the T cell toward the barrier.

And then it struck something. Abby and Jackson were thrown back into their seats. The cell was merging with the barrier, taking them with it like a Trojan horse. The jostling stopped. He pushed the stick forward and blasted through.

They were out of the brain. As they passed into the jugular vein. The current swept them along. Soon they were over the spot where they'd entered. But the extraction device was gone.

Spencer must have removed the syringe. They'd have to find another way out. They discussed options. The digestive and urinary tracts would end with them dying in public. Water systems.

The lungs were useless. You couldn't ride the breath out. Abby said they should head north to the head. Multiple natural orifices. The mouth via saliva or nose via mucus.

Jackson voted for the mouth. He'd rather get coughed out than sneezed out. He pulled back on the stick, and the ship stopped. He twisted the wheel to spin around. What was he doing?

Going upstream, he said, eyes fixed on the objects outside the window. Abby had never heard of anyone navigating upstream. It was like driving into oncoming traffic on a highway. But Jackson did things nobody else had ever done. Abby held tight as they traveled up the neck, Jackson turning to avoid cells and debris.

They piloted through branches of the external carotid artery, winding toward the lower face, passing through smaller capillaries supplying the jaw and mouth. Suddenly cracking. Came over the radio. A voice. Tessa was back online.

Abbey felt a surge of relief. Don't try to Exit through the mouth, tessa warned through the static. Spencer had Charles intubated. If they went out that way, they'd end up in the tube, get sucked in, and break apart. So where were they supposed to go?

Spencer's voice boomed through the speaker. He'd closed all available exits. The mouth, the nose, the ears, and the digestive and urinary tracts. Suicide missions. Jackson leaned close and winked at her.

She knew exactly what he was up to. He jerked the stick and the ship shot forward. Abby, um, started engaging Spencer, asking him why he was so determined to prevent erasing the memory of Virginia's death. Spencer believed Charles shouldn't erase a memory just because it was painful. The memory of her death was only one among many, most of them happy.

He didn't need to dwell on that moment, but on the countless moments that had come. The maps showed them getting close to the tear ducts. Abby asked if Spencer could play some of those moments for them, for Charles. It would comfort him. Spencer agreed.

It would. Abby put on the headset, and the memories they'd seen began playing on the screen inside Charles's mind, painting the first apartment, the Nobel dropping Max off at college. Jackson told Abby they were at the tear ducts. Abby yelled to Spencer, show Charles the night Virginia died. She urged on the screen.

Abby saw it unfold, what was unfolding for Charles. Abby warned Jackson to get ready. He knew it was happening. Tears were forming up ahead, a bulge of liquid. Jackson propelled the ship straight into it.

They screamed as they merged with the droplet and rode it out of the duct, out of Charles body.

They learned later that Charles had woken to find himself weeping. Spencer had shown him memories, not only of Virginia's death, but the whole of their life together. And the old man had cried for hours, not from pain but from something else he couldn't name. Gratitude, perhaps, or the recognition that love and loss weren't separable things. Abby and Jackson didn't leave the estate right away.

Charles had invited them to stay in his guest house for a while, to recover with some of the best doctors. They talked late into the night for a week, figuring out how to be in each other's presence again. Some habits returned quickly. Others had to be relearned. The scar tissue of their separation would always be there.

But scar tissue, they knew from experience, was often stronger than the original flesh. Abby welcomed Jackson back to her Brookline condo. Eventually they sold Bodi Ventures to a larger outfit and promised themselves expeditions anywhere but the human body. They talked about the child they might have had. Jackson said that Perhaps he did have time to be a father after all, and that it might become the greatest adventure of his life.

Charles paid them, even though they hadn't completed the mission. The old man wrote a letter saying that failing to erase the memories had been a, uh, blessing, even if he couldn't explain exactly why. Abby and Jackson didn't press charges against Spencer. But Charles still had to let him go for what he'd done. Before that, though, he thanked him for saving him from what he now understood had been an act of self sabotage.

He lived another year and was at peace, though he was eager to rejoin Virginia and create new happy memories, finally letting the old ones go. Eventually, years later, Jackson and Abby returned to micro exploring, realizing it was what they were meant to do together. They were on an expedition in a volunteer's circulatory system, a standard tour for a client. When Jackson said he wanted to show Abby something while everyone else was sl sleeping, Jackson piloted them to a small blood vessel barely mapped, where cells moved slowly as planets. He cut the engines and let them drift.

Look, he said, pointing through the window at a cluster of cells clinging to the vessel wall, pulsing with bioluminescent light. Abby had seen such things before, but not like this, not with Jackson beside her in silence, both of them watching the tiny lights pulse in the dark current like stars in an interior sky. What were they looking at? Abby, uh, finally asked. He didn't know, jackson said.

He just wanted to look at it with her. They floated there for a long time, the ship carried by the current, neither speaking or feeling the need to. The body moved around them, its machinery humming, its billions secret operations proceeding without their assistance or understanding. They were visitors in a country they would never fully comprehend. And that was all right.

They were together. That was enough.

Dustin (00:45:42 --> 00:46:27)
Thanks for listening to this episode of Curiously. I hope you enjoyed Laurie Neibauer's reading of my short story Micro. If you liked this episode, consider sharing it with someone starting a conversation. If you enjoyed the story and and would like to explore more of my writing, you can check out my other work, perhaps the Empathy Academy or the Healing Book. And if you've got a minute, I've got a new survey up and I'd love your feedback on the show.

Just head to www.curiousleappod.com survey and tell me what you like, what you don't like, what you want more of, what you want less of. I'll read every response and there's a good chance your feedback will shape future episodes. Thanks again for listening and stay tuned for more conversations with people I meet along the way.