>>5497231"What's the matter?" You ask.
Sanig uses a pinching motion to zoom way out on the machine's touch screen, revealing a peak way out in the distance, away from everything else.
"That. That's the matter, literally and figuratively."
"What is it?"
"I have no fucking idea, but it's heavy. Even heavier than Duranium."
"...Super heavy matter? What the fuck is something like that doing in a pill?"
"Hard to say, but if i had to guess... well, i guess it would be easier to just look and see."
Sanig moves over to another machine, popping open another pill and placing a single crystal grain inside using a pair of tweezers.
You hear the hiss of a vacuum being formed, then the hum of capacitors being charged.
"What's this machine, old man?"
"It's a microscope. A really powerful one. Using this, we can see down to level of individual atoms..."
"Oh, a scanning electron microscope! Cool, we have those back on earth, too. They're way bigger, though..."
"Color me surprised. Next you'll tell me you rubbed some sticks together and made a working fusion reactor."
"...Well, we haven't quite gotten there yet."
"Hmph." Sanig chuckles smugly, still looking through the microscope's visor.
"But we're close. It's kind of a joke, that it's been 20 or 30 years away for decades... but we're making some real progress on it lately. I think we're pretty close to getting more energy out than we put back in."
Sanig pauses, sighs and then continues quietly with his work.
It takes him a while, maybe five minutes or so, but he seems to have found something.
"Damn, that's what i was worried about." He grumbles.
Stepping aside, he gestures for you to come over and look.
Looking through the visor, most of what you see is rough sheets of vague blobs, arranged in regular patterns. Is that the surface of the crystal?
But amongst all those blobs is something else. Something far larger and far brighter than the surrounding atoms, and it's moving.
A huge, snake-like chain of both large and small atoms that appears to move with intelligence, as if it's searching for something, almost like a bacteria.
"Is that... a nanomachine?"
"Not quite, kid. It's way too small to call it a nanomachine. Attomachinery, i guess?"
You can't help but just stare at it in amazement, but after a while the nagging question gets to you.
"How the fuck is it moving like that? How is it moving on it's own at all?!"
"I have no idea." Sanig admits.
"Okay... so what does this mean?"
"...Well, it's definitely Federation tech. Probably Grey in origin. As for what it does specifically, who can say. But you said you've seen the results, so i guess it doesn't really matter.
In any case, i've never seen anything heavier than duranium that wasn't some kind of warp metal. If anyone knows how they work, good luck getting them to tell you, kid."
So the drugs are just normal drugs, but they've been intentionally tainted with what Sanig is calling Attomachines.
