Albert decided to have his dinner before trying anything with the V-42, largely because he didn’t want to let himself get too excited.  It would be only too easy for him to try Walter’s idea and then sit and stare at whatever he threw together, hoping to see a change.  He wasn’t sure that he understood everything that Walter had been trying to communicate, but it seemed to him that, if bacteria and mold and yeast and the like could take food from their environments and make copies of themselves, it wouldn’t be entirely unreasonable for tiny, designed machines to do so.

Of course, he had to let himself accept that, even if Walter was right and the shampoo was actually a collection of numerous tiny devices, that didn’t mean they would copy themselves.  They might just be—what…programmed, designed?—to clean someone and smell nice and…well, and fix their appearance and health.  Even thinking about it seemed impossible, but he’d received so much positive feedback from people at work on his appearance, and Walter was also involved.  It helped him feel less that he might be going insane.

He ate quickly, despite his commitment to being patient, and then he got looking around his bathroom and then his junk shelf to find things he thought might be useful, based on Walter’s suggestions.  Fortunately, he had already recalled that he had a remote control from an old, defunct and dysfunctional DVD player—he had thrown the player away, but had never bothered to discard the controller—and he found this in short order.  There were even batteries still in it, and though he took the cover off these intending to remove them, it occurred to him that maybe that wasn’t necessary.  If the batteries still had some charge, maybe tiny machines could use that energy.

He almost laughed at himself.  He knew absolutely nothing about whether that was a clever idea or a terrible mistake.  He suspected that, probably, it would make no difference at all.

He intended at first to do the little experiment in one of the very small Dixie-style bathroom cups he used for rinsing his mouth after brushing his teeth.  However, though the remote from the old DVD player was small, it was quite a bit too big to be even mostly covered by water if one of those cups were used.  Instead, he got a larger, translucent plastic cup, with about the volume of a modest wine glass, and tipped the controller into that.  Then, remembering Walter’s idea about a paperclip, he looked for one of those.  Failing to find one readily, he instead took an extra screw from an Ikea-style piece of furniture he’d bought and put that in.  Then, he thought about Walter’s mention of silicon.  He thought that silicon was part of most microchips, and there would be one in the remote, but maybe that wasn’t enough.

Wasn’t sand mostly silicon?  He had an old, cheap, souvenir sand-sculpture from a long-ago trip to Virginia Beach, which he’d kept just because there had never been any reason to throw it away.  It certainly wasn’t anything he would give to someone else.  He remembered where it was, thankfully—this was one of the advantages of living by himself in a small space—so he got it out and, not-too-gingerly, he took a pinch of the sand from the top, disrupting the layered colors, and scattered it into the bottom of his cup.

Now he added some tap water, filling it nearly to the top.  About a quarter of the remote control still stuck up above surface of the water, but Albert didn’t have any bigger cups that were very sturdy.  All his fancier glassware had gone with his ex-wife, and he had never minded the loss before that night.

Finally, and a bit hesitantly, he went to the shower and retrieved the bottle of V-42.  He looked it over carefully one more time, trying to find some hidden marking he might have missed that would indicate its origin.  He even tried to see the backs of the labels from the opposite sides of the bottle, but as far as he could tell, they were simply blank, white, adhesive-covered surfaces.

He looked at the front label.  As before, it read “HoG” at the top, then below there was a larger font that spelled out “V-42”, and below that, in faux-cursive, the addendum, “extra body”.

Now that he had heard Walter’s notion about The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, he had to admit that he could at least understand how the thought had sprung into Walter’s head.  Even so, it was ridiculous, and he had to put it out of his mind for fear that it might convince him that he shouldn’t do anything Walter suggested.

Turning to the sink, on the side of which sat the cup with the remote and the screw and the bit of sand, Albert popped the top of his shampoo bottle—maybe that wasn’t the right term, now that he thought of it—and brought it over the cup with its bizarre contents.

He hesitated before tipping it.  If this really was the only sample of the stuff in the world, or at least the only bit on which he would ever get his hands, it felt like a shame to waste it.  He should treasure it.  He should use it only in the tiniest possible amounts.

But what difference would that ultimately make?  If there was only this bottle and no more, then he could make it last maybe a week longer than a bottle of shampoo would usually last him.  After that, it would be gone, no matter what.

If Walter was right, on the other hand…

Albert very gingerly leaned the top of the shampoo bottle over the surface of the cup, as carefully as if he were attempting amateur bomb disposal.  He didn’t want to waste any, and he had already given some to Walter to examine.  If the “self-replicating” notion was right, surely there wouldn’t be any need for much of the stuff.

He finally coaxed a little, sticky dribble, like a drop of slightly-too-orange honey, to ooze out of the top of the bottle.  Even that small amount gave off its pleasant odor, and Albert took an extra sniff, just to enjoy it.  He had never had allergies, but he couldn’t help wondering if taking the stuff into his lungs might be correcting damage that he’d done to himself by smoking for so many years.

He forced himself to stop thinking such things.  For all he knew, Walter’s allergies had not been helped by the shampoo, it had merely been a placebo effect.  He knew about that phenomenon, at least.  Of course, he couldn’t claim that his own improvements in appearance and health were placebo-related, since he had never had any reason to imagine such things happening until they did.

He watched the little drop fall into the water, where it seemed to act just like shampoo should, spreading a little on the surface, its color oozing out from the center of contact, gradually losing its distinction from the water around it.  The cup was more or less see-through, so he was able to watch from the sides.  He continued to watch for a few minutes, wondering if anything obvious would start to happen, but all he saw was a cup of what was indistinguishable from pure tap water, in which some misguided fool had submerged a screw, some sand, and most of a remote control.  If the shampoo tinted the water, it was too faint for Albert to make out, even with his improved vision.

He sighed, finally forcing himself to brush his teeth and get ready for bed.  He kept the corner of his eye on the cup, but all through his evening ablutions, he saw no change.

Finally, he resigned himself to the fact that he had probably wasted a little of his shampoo, and consoled himself that the amount was too small even for him to use to wash his hands if he’d been so inclined.  He left the bathroom light on at first, then turned around and shut it off, just in case the stuff really was sensitive to light.  He went to his bed, crawled under his blanket, shut off the bedside lamp and tried to relax and close his eyes.

It took him a long time to get to sleep.

***

When his alarm went off, Albert had a slightly harder time awakening than he had recently, though it was still easier than it would have been just a few weeks prior.  He turned on the bedside lamp and sat up, blinking.  He didn’t think immediately about his conversation and the little experiment that he had tried the night before.  It was simply another weekday morning, and time to get up to go to the office.

He yawned and scratched at himself as he stood and went to his dresser and then his closet to get out clothes for the day.  Then he walked to the bathroom, surprised that the light was still out; he hadn’t had to get up to use the restroom at all that night, which he idly supposed meant that his prostate health must be at least okay.

As the light came on and he walked into the small room, he noticed a pleasant odor in the air, as if he’d sprayed an air freshener, which he had not done.  It took him a few seconds to recognize it as the smell of his V-42 shampoo, and he wondered why he could small it so clearly.  An alarming thought entered his head that maybe he’d left it open and tipped it over in the night, accidentally.  Maybe he really had gone to the bathroom and hadn’t bothered to turn the light on, but couldn’t remember doing it.

He looked at the shower.  There stood the shampoo bottle, just as full—and as closed—as .

Then he caught sight of the cup on the side of his bathroom sink, and he remembered what had happened the night before.  He remembered his conversation with Walter.  He remembered Walter’s bizarre notions and the report Walter had made about his testing.  And he remembered Walter’s suggestion and how he, Albert, had carried it out the night before.

The old DVD player remote control was no longer sticking out of the top of the plastic cup into which Albert had put it.  He shook his head, still groggy from sleep.  Had he come in and taken the remote out of the cup during the night, not remembering it now because he had been so sleepy?  He didn’t think so.  But then, where was it?

He looked at the side of the cup.  There was not even any silhouette of the remote control present.  He also didn’t think he saw any distorted, refracted image of the screw he had put in.  The sand—or something, anyway—lay on the bottom of the cup.  But, then again, it didn’t really look like sand.  He thought that just maybe there was quite a bit more of it than there had been before.

He walked closer to the cup and looked down into it.

The smell was stronger now that he was closer to the cup, and as he looked, he saw that the water was no longer clear.  Well, no, that wasn’t quite right.  It was clear.  He could see straight through it.  But it was no longer colorless.

The water was now the almost honey-colored orange typical of VO5 shampoo…and also typical of the new, V-42 shampoo.  What was more, it had that same day-glow luminescence that the V-42 had.

Albert could feel his throat drying out, and he realized that he had been standing there with his mouth agape for quite some time, some part of his mind aware and astounded already even as his conscious brain caught up.

He dipped a finger gently into the liquid in the cup, not even to the first knuckle, not even to the base of his fingernail.  Then he pulled it out.  The fluid clung to his hand, thicker than water would have been, but not as thick as actual honey.  He brought his thumb and finger together, rubbing them, noting the familiar texture of shampoo.  He brought his hand to his nose and inhaled.  The scent that had tinged the air of the bathroom filled his head, strong but not at all unpleasant or irritating.  It was a clean smell.

It was a miraculous smell.

“Holy shit,” he muttered to himself.

He looked down into the cup, and saw that its bottom was coated with a slightly gray-black sludge of some kind, perhaps a quarter of an inch deep.  There was no sign of remote control or sand or screw.  There was no sign of any mere water.  There was only what was apparently shampoo and…what?  Whatever was left over, whatever was unusable, after the tiny machines Walter had described had used everything they could to make copies of themselves?  Or was it just the material that was leftover when enough copies had been made to fill the cup?

If he poured the shampoo out and refilled the glass with water, leaving the sludge, would that be made into more shampoo?  Could such a thing be possible?

Albert couldn’t understand how any of it could have happened, but he appeared to have grown, or made, or conjured, a whole cupful more of his shampoo.

There was a test to be made, still, he thought.  He took off his clothes and turned on the shower, waiting a few moments for it to warm up.  Then he stepped in, putting the cup of new liquid near enough to reach, but far enough away that it shouldn’t get splashed significantly.

He ducked his head under the spray of water impatiently, wetting it and the rest of his body, making sure he was thoroughly soaked.  Then, he reached out for the cup, stepping away from the spray.  He tipped some of the liquid from it into the palm of his hand, then put the cup back, outside the shower.  He brought his palm full of liquid to his head and began to scrub.

Almost immediately, the lather formed, thick and smooth and pleasant, the scent filling his nostrils and lungs, invigorating almost to the point of being intoxicating.  He used the lather to scrub his body, imagining he could feel a little tingling on every surface that it touched.

He was almost sad when he finally rinsed the lather off, his body feeling as clean as any washing had ever made him.

As he put on deodorant and dressed—forgetting to shave—he tried to process what had happened.  Walter had been right!  The little bit of liquid in the cup of water with its bizarre additives had been able to create more of itself, breaking down the plastic, the wires, the metal, the sand, whatever it seemed to need to use, and making itself into shampoo.

Only it wasn’t really shampoo, was it?  If Walter was right—and it was hard for Albert to suspect that his friend had been mistaken—the stuff was really just a fluid made up of vast numbers of tiny machines, of robots, all somehow collectively simulating shampoo, but doing much more than mere shampoo could do.

For one thing, apparently, they could make more of themselves.

Albert wondered whether the shampoo could have made even more if he’d put more water into the small cup, or used a larger cup.  Could it use air?  Why didn’t it use the cup itself?  If the plastic of the remote control had been useful, shouldn’t the cup’s own plastic have been useful?

But if it had done that, the stuff would just have spilled over the side of the sink.

How could it tell the difference between the cup and the plastic casing of the remote?  Why did it not digest its own bottle, for that matter?

Was this shampoo, this liquid, this collection of tiny machines, somehow…intelligent?

Was that why, or how, it had known that Walter was testing it, that he was looking at it under a microscope?  Was that why that portion of it had self-destructed, as Walter had put it?

Albert could not quite process all of it.  But he decided he would see if he could do at least a little experiment.  He grabbed the original bottle of the V-42 and tried to see if there was a way to unscrew the top, since the pouring hole was quite small.  It didn’t exactly unscrew, but with a bit of a twist it popped off, apparently without damaging the bottle.  Albert picked up the cup of liquid and gingerly began to pour most of its contents into the bottle, careful not to let the sludge flow in with it.  It wasn’t that he thought the stuff would do any harm, he just thought it would be aesthetically unappealing.

There wasn’t room in the bottle to fit all of it, despite the fact that he’d been using the stuff for over a week.  He had, after all, been sparing in its use, unsure if he could find more.  If only he had known then what he was realizing now!

He put the cap back on the shampoo, where it secured itself firmly.  Then he looked at the cup, with its bottom covered with the gray-black sludge, and at the slightly larger amount of residual shampoo still left in it.  He had already wondered if the sludge was really waste matter, or if it was rather that, given the amount of room in the cup, there had simply not been enough space to make more.  He decided he would test it.  He added a bit of water, this time only half filling the cup, and put it back on the edge of the sink.  The orangey-yellow color was diluted, but it was still plainly visible.  He decided to leave the light on as he left the bathroom to finish getting ready for work.  He had left it off overnight, and the stuff had reproduced itself avidly, but he didn’t know if the darkness had made any difference.

It occurred to him that if he left the light on and the stuff did not make more of itself, he wouldn’t know if it was because of the light or if the sludge was just leftover material that was unusable.

He shrugged.  He was not a scientist, unlike Walter.  He just wanted to see what happened, if anything.  No matter what, he was overwhelmed by wonder.  It didn’t matter if he made things confusing.  In any case, if the V-42 did reproduce itself, he would know that neither light nor sludge had been any impediment.

He finished getting dressed, packed a frozen meal to have for lunch, and walked to his car.  He wouldn’t say that he was strutting—he was too puzzled and flabbergasted to feel cocky or over-pleased—but he was filled with energy and wonder and enthusiasm.

***

That morning at work, Albert continued to receive compliments on his appearance, yet no one seemed quite to have reached the point of thinking that anything truly unnatural was happening, which was reassuring.  Maybe the V-42, if it was intelligent, was intelligent enough to do its work gradually, so no one would be suspicious.  That seemed incredible, but then again, so did everything else about the situation.

At one point in the morning, a coworker commented that Albert was going for the rugged man look, pointing to his chin, and Albert realized that he had forgotten to shave.  That happened sometimes, but usually no one took note of it.  His beard didn’t grow that fast, and his relatively fair hair did not tend to stand out too readily.  Still, the next time Albert used the restroom, he looked at himself carefully in the mirror.  There he saw that, indeed, his whiskers had grown out a bit, giving him a nice, even, fashionably unshaven look, somewhat redolent—in his own mind, at least—of the character Dr. House in the old TV show.  He liked it, but didn’t think he would leave it that way.

He did notice, though, that all his whiskers, as they were growing in, were the same reddish-tan that they had been when they’d first appeared on his face in his teenage years.  There was not a single white whisker.  This was a radical change, since his beard was the first place that his hair had begun to show his age.  He’d first noticed a few white hairs even in his mid-to-late thirties, and his wife had teased him about them, saying that she was married to an old man, and that she would have to trade him in soon.

It turned out she hadn’t merely been teasing, at least not in the long run.  But that was not something on which he liked to dwell too much.

Now, though, his whiskers were as even and as dark as they had been in his twenties.  He’d never been a man who liked growing a beard—he found them itchy, and the pattern of growth had never really pleased him—but he thought, just maybe, he might let it grow in just a bit longer this time.

He went back to his desk and got ahead on his work, trying to make sure he might have a bit of leeway in the afternoon.  Then, once lunchtime came around, he quickly took his meal from the office freezer to the microwave before returning to his desk.  There, he took out his smartphone and texted Walter.

Let me know when there’s a time you’ll be able to talk, he wrote.

He expected there to be some significant delay; Walter was, after all, reasonably high up in his organization, and was probably pretty busy.  However, less than five minutes later, Albert heard his text alert sound, and he looked at his phone.  There, in the text window, below his own message, was Walter’s response:  I can talk now, if you’re free.

Albert thought for a moment.  He looked down at his lunch, which he had barely begun to eat.  He took stock of himself and decided that he wasn’t nearly as hungry as he was eager to share his result with Walter.  He did not, however, want to talk where he might be overheard.

Fortunately, there was a rear area to the office building where some people occasionally ate lunch at one of two picnic tables.  These were surrounded by a larger grassy area and an extension of the parking lot, so there was usually plenty of space to have a private conversation.  He had seen other people use it for this purpose.

He texted back, I’ll call you in a minute.  Just want to go out back.  Then, he rose from his desk, put a stray piece of paper on top of his food just to keep it free from overt dust, and strode toward the back of the office.

The weather outside was warm enough, but it was slightly overcast, and it seemed no one had yet chosen to take a seat at the tables.  Albert nevertheless walked a ways away from them, then tapped the contact information for Walter that already appeared in his text function, triggering the phone to call him.

It took only one ring for Walter to pick up the line.  “Hey, Albert,” he said.  “So…what’s the story?”

Albert stammered a bit, more out of excitement than from any true nervousness, as he recounted his findings to Walter, telling him what he had put in the cup, roughly how much water, and how that morning he had found it all—well, almost all—changed into more of the V-42 shampoo.  Then he told him about using it that morning for his shower, and how he had then added more water before leaving for the day.

He half expected Walter to berate him for changing two things at once and thus screwing up the information that could be gained from his test.  However, Walter stayed silent for a moment before asking, in a voice that was almost a whisper, “It remade a whole cup full of the stuff overnight?  How much…how much shampoo did you put in the cup with the water and stuff?”

“Just a drop,” Albert replied.  “Barely that.  I mean, once it fell in the water, it pretty quickly spread out so you couldn’t even see it.”

After another pause, Walter said, “And you slept, what?  Eight hours?”

“Not even,” Albert replied.  “Maybe seven, if that.”

There was another pause.  It seemed Walter was having a hard time digesting Albert’s report, even though the test had been his idea.  Indeed, the next thing he said was a muttered comment, “I didn’t think it would do so much so soon.”

Albert didn’t know if Walter expected a response, but he said, “I know.  It’s…if I hadn’t seen it myself, and used it myself, I…I don’t think I’d believe it.”

“And…and you think it’s doing the same thing the other shampoo did?” Walter asked.  “I mean…it’s doing the same thing of making you look…younger?”

“Well, it’s hard to tell how much it did just since this morning,” Albert admitted.  “But it smelled and felt exactly like the other stuff did.  I mean…I forgot to shave and my beard is already growing in visibly.  Other people commented on it.  And it’s…there’s no white in it.  It looks like it did twenty years ago.  Maybe it never really has looked this thick after one day of not shaving.”

There was yet another pause, and then Walter said, “Yeah.  I mean, that could just be leftover effects from yesterday, but…I don’t know.”

Albert was again not entirely sure if Walter had been hoping for a comment, but he added, “I didn’t notice it when I went to bed last night.  And anyway, there was only a drop in the water and now there was a cupful.  It smells the same, it looks the same…it feels the same.  Why would it do anything different?”

“I don’t know,” Walter replied.  “I don’t know how it can be what it is.   If I hadn’t seen you, and then seen what the stuff looked like under the microscope before it…before it did its little self-destruction thing, I wouldn’t believe any of it.”

This, thought Albert, was a rather ironic statement of incredulity from someone who had wondered if the shampoo had its origin in a science fiction comedy book that had leaked over into the real world.

Walter, meanwhile, said, “I don’t…this stuff is way beyond anything that’s even on the cutting edge of modern technology.  I mean, we can maybe assume that some companies out there are working on advanced nanotech that they aren’t letting the world know about, so the best stuff is going to be at least a little bit better than the stuff you can read about.  But this is…I mean this is at least a century beyond anything we could have.  Seriously, I don’t even know if we’ll be there by that time.”

Albert wondered whether there was some other possible explanation.  He didn’t want to sound too foolish, but then again, Walter himself had invoked The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, so he supposed he shouldn’t feel too shy about outrageous speculation.  “Well,” he said, “I mean, you already said it’s not likely to be some kind of…extraterrestrial thing, right?  I mean, why would aliens want to send shampoo, like you said?  But if we’re at least a hundred years away from something like this, do you think…do you think it really could be from the future?  Like…time travel or something?”

He felt foolish, and he expected Walter to berate him for being so frivolous, but there was only silence again for a moment.  Finally, Walter said, “I…don’t know.  It’s crazy, but like I said, I don’t see how this could’ve come from anywhere on Earth in this day and age.  I just don’t know.”

They were both silent for a bit.  Finally, Walter said, “Look, I need to digest this.  Do you want to talk again when you’re on your way home tonight?”

Albert was surprised by Walter’s request, but he felt fine with it.  “Sure,” he said.  “But don’t you want to find out how my follow-up test thing went?”

He wondered if Walter would need to be reminded about what that test was, but apparently he did not, because he quickly replied, “No, that’s okay.  You can text me about it.  I’m…I feel like if it’s not made more, it’ll be because it used up all the usable material.  Maybe if it hasn’t, you can just…I don’t know, throw some other stuff in there.  Do you have any old cell phones you haven’t thrown out?”

Albert thought for a moment, then answered, “I think I might.  I don’t think I threw away my last one when the screen cracked.  I always think that maybe I forgot to transfer something from that phone to this one, and might need to go back to it to look for stuff.”

He again expected to be berated for silliness, but Walter said, “Yeah, I do that, too.  Never have needed it, but I can’t just throw it away.  Still…this might be worth it.”

“Yeah, maybe,” Albert agreed, though he felt oddly reluctant nevertheless.

Walter hummed thoughtfully for a moment, then said, “Well, we can talk about that tonight, or whatever, depending on what’s happened with your second trial.  Let me think about this for the afternoon, and call me when you’re on your way home.”

“Okay,” Albert replied.  “Do you want me to text you before I call?”

“No need,” Walter replied with a chuckle.  “Believe me, nothing else I’m gonna be doing is going to be as important.  Hell, I’ll pick up even if I’m on the can.”

Albert curled his lip a bit, not liking the idea of talking to someone who was using the toilet.  “If you do,” he said, “don’t tell me.”

Water laughed again, then he said, “Fine.  It’s probably not gonna happen, anyway.  Talk to you soon.”

“Yeah,” Albert said.  “Bye.”  Then they both disconnected the call.

***

Albert didn’t mind that his lunch had cooled down.  It still tasted fine.  Indeed, he thought it tasted better than such meals usually did, and he wondered if the V-42 had improved his taste buds along with everything else.  Of course, he had never gotten any of the shampoo in his mouth, but if it could help Walter’s allergies just from being sniffed, who was to say a few stray bits of it breathed in coincidentally couldn’t affect his sense of taste?

And what about the rest of him?  What else could it do?

Albert was mildly distracted throughout the afternoon, but his energy level was good enough to make up for his inattention, so no one made any complaints about his quality of work.

He kept thinking about the shampoo as he went through the paces of his job.  He wondered in what state the cup on his sink counter would be when he got back to the house.  He also wondered, if it had made new shampoo, where he was going to put it.  He had refilled the bottle already; there was little to no room in it to add more.  He didn’t plan on making a lot more of the stuff, since there seemed to be no need, but the thought of pouring out some of it if it had made even more of itself seemed intolerable.

At the end of the workday, he went to his car.  He didn’t have any urgent need to do any shopping—he certainly didn’t need any shampoo or soap—so he decided just to head home without stopping, to maximize the time to talk with Walter.  He even chose a slightly circuitous path to get back to his house, one that would probably add twenty minutes to his commute.

He was tempted to text Walter before calling, but he forced himself to follow his friend’s recommendation, and he tried not to imagine that Walter would take the call in the bathroom.

He connected his phone via Bluetooth to his car again, then activated Walter’s number.  True to his word, Walter picked up after only a few seconds had passed, saying, “Albert?” though he surely knew who was calling.

“Yep,” Albert said.  “It’s me.”  He listened for any echoes in Walter’s voice that might indicate that he was indeed using the restroom, but all he heard was maybe a slight breeze and perhaps some distant traffic, which made him think Walter was outside.  He was surprised by how relieved this made him.

“Great,” Walter said.  After a brief pause, he went on, “Hey, listen, I’ve been thinking.  Do you have any, like, old shampoo or detergent bottles?  Or maybe some of those plastic spray bottles or something?  Or even, I don’t know, some Tupperware stuff?”

Albert thought for a moment before replying, “I’m not sure.  I don’t really think so.  My place is pretty small, so I don’t tend to hold onto a lot of stuff like that.”

“Fair enough,” Walter said, though he sounded mildly disappointed.  “I guess we can always buy stuff like that if everything works.”

“If what works?” Albert asked.

“Well, listen,” Walter said.  “I’ve been thinking.  If this stuff really does reproduce itself, and it does it that fast, then maybe it could do it even faster.  I mean…you said it turned pretty much all the water in that cup into shampoo overnight, right?  Like, maybe if it had more room it might’ve made even more?”

“Yeah,” Albert replied.  “That’s part of why I added more water in with the leftover stuff this morning.  To see if maybe it could’ve turned the rest of the goo into more of itself.”

“Exactly,” Walter said.  “And that was good thinking, by the way, if I didn’t say so before.  So, if the only real rate-limiting step is how much substrate is available, it might be worth seeing if you could make, like, a lot of it overnight.  Like…I don’t know, get a whole bucket full of water and some plastic and electronic things and see how much it makes, and how fast.”

Albert was puzzled.  “Why would I want to make a bucket full of shampoo?  I mean, it’s not like I use a lot at once.”

He heard Walter take in a deep breath before replying, “Well…I mean, let’s be honest, I don’t exactly look my best anymore, either.  And if you can make more, I wouldn’t mind maybe…buying some off of you to use myself.”

Albert felt a strange reluctance at the thought of sharing the stuff with Walter, and this surprised him a bit.  Why was he reluctant to let his friend—who had, after all, helped him with what seemed to be a very peculiar request—get the same benefits from the V-42 shampoo, if it could be done?  He didn’t think of himself as a particularly selfish person, and he was more than a bit ashamed of his knee-jerk resistance.  Partly because of that shame, he said, “Look, you wouldn’t need to buy some from me, I’d be happy to let you use it.  But why would we need a bucket full?”

“Well, partly just to see if it could make a bucket full,” Walter replied.  “And if it could do that, how long it would take.  And if it really keeps having the same effect after its made more of itself.”

Albert supposed that wasn’t unreasonable, but he still asked, “Why do you say ‘partly’?”

“Because think about it,” Walter replied, and he sounded unpleasantly enthusiastic to Albert.  “If you could effectively mass-produce this stuff, I mean…we could sell it to other people.  It would be the biggest product since…I don’t know what.  Maybe the biggest product ever.  I mean, who wouldn’t buy a shampoo that makes you look and feel younger?  We could be billionaires.”

Such a thought had not occurred to Albert, but he was mildly surprised to find that he didn’t really like it.  Perhaps that drove his response, in which he said, “I don’t know about that.  I mean, how long would it take before someone figured out the same thing we figured out?  Well, you figured out, really.  How long before people just started making more of their own?  And anyway, if you’re going to market something like a shampoo, aren’t there, like…regulations and things that have to be met?  I mean, you work in the field, but doesn’t, like, the FDA or the DEA or whatever have to analyze this kind of stuff before you can sell it?  And if we did, wouldn’t whoever really did test the stuff notice?”

There was quite a long pause, during which the noise of Albert’s car must’ve been enough to prevent the background noise on Walter’s end from coming through the speaker.  Finally, Walter said, “Okay, that’s…you’ve got a fair point.  We wouldn’t want it to get out and have everyone making more of it.  Then there wouldn’t be any money for anyone.  And Johnson and Johnson would probably put a horse’s head in our beds or something.”

Albert didn’t think big companies like that tended to resort to quite those kinds of tactics, but he recognized his friend’s point.  And, while thinking of such fairly extreme flights of fancy, he returned to something he had thought of earlier.  “Anyway,” he said, “what if…well, what if it really is something made by aliens?  I mean…couldn’t it be a tactic to try to make us mass-produce it, and if it gets to, like, a critical mass or something, it turns into something like that…that robot thing like in The Day the Earth Stood Still movie and starts destroying everything on Earth?”

Walter sighed.  “I really don’t see why aliens would do that.  It doesn’t make sense.  If they had something like this, they could just have it fall in the ocean, or in lakes, and start multiplying itself.  It wouldn’t need people to mass produce it.”

Albert, recognizing that Walter had a point, said, “Yeah, I guess that’s true.”

“But…” Walter began, his intensity surprising Albert, “…what if it is like you were saying, and it was sent from the future?  And what if it was sent from the future by you?  By us?  I mean, think about it.  If this stuff makes you look and feel younger, why couldn’t it make you live longer?  Maybe it could even make you live forever, barring any accidents or anything.  I mean, maybe we could market it as, like, a spa treatment or something, say, and get really rich people to pay out the ass for it.  Which they would!  We could disguise it as part of a whole thing, where people come and get a supposed longevity treatment to make them feel perkier, and include a shampooing with the stuff as part of the deal, and just…people wouldn’t even know that it was the shampoo that did it.  We could still be richer than creosote after that.”

“Richer than creosote?” Albert asked.  “Don’t you mean ‘richer than Croesus’?”

“I don’t know, probably,” Walter said.  “I don’t even know what that saying really means except that it means you’re fucking rich.”

Albert shook his head, not really even noticing where he was and what the traffic was doing, but not really caring, since some part of him knew the way home without having to think about it much.  “Anyway, I thought you were saying something about it being from the future or something.  Which is crazy, but not…well, I don’t know how to consider it, since the whole thing is pretty crazy to start with.  But how could we have sent it from the future?”

“Right, right,” Walter said.  “I got sidetracked.  But look, if we can use the stuff and, like…live for hundreds or years, or more, and get rich doing it…well, we could invest in more technology and other things, and who knows, maybe eventually they’ll figure out how to make time machines.  Maybe we’ll figure out how to make time machines, or hire people to do it.  And then maybe we’ll realize that the reason we had the stuff in the first place was because we had sent it back so it was in that shop where you found it!”

Albert felt like his head was swimming.  “Wait, then…wouldn’t that mean that no one had ever invented it?  Isn’t that, like, one of those philosophy puzzles, the bootstrap paradox or something?  Doesn’t that make it impossible?”

“It’s impossible already,” Walter said.  “No one could make this stuff nowadays, that’s for damn sure, I don’t care if Elon Musk and Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos teamed up with everyone at MIT and Caltech together, they couldn’t have made this.  And the alien invasion idea doesn’t make sense.  I guess it could be benign aliens or something, but again, why would they sneak it in?

“But the idea of someone sending it from the future…I mean, if time travel to the past is even possible, that would make more sense.  And who cares about the whole ‘bootstrap problem’ thing?  I mean, the whole universe itself might’ve come from nothing, why would it matter if nano-tech shampoo was spontaneously created by a time-loop?  It makes more sense than The Terminator stories.”

“Does it?” Albert asked, still having a bit of trouble keeping up with Walter.

“It does to me,” Walter replied.  “But even if it’s not possible to time travel, it’s here, now.  And if it can reproduce itself, if we can make it reproduce in big amounts, not only could we be healthy and better looking, we can find a way to get rich from it.  Maybe we can’t market it, or wouldn’t want to, because you’re right, someone would probably analyze it sometime.  But if we could provide a service, or what seems to be a service, that makes the rich and the famous look younger and more beautiful, they would pay out the ass for it!”

Mumbling a bit, Albert said, “Well…yeah, I guess they would.”

“Of course, we’d have to be careful how we did it,” Walter said.  “I mean, we’d have to think about how to start the marketing.  We’d be able to use ourselves as sort of ‘before and after’ pictures.  I mean, we could already use you.  You look at least ten years younger, or you did on Sunday.  For all I know, you look even better now.”

“I don’t really know,” Albert said.  “I…feel better than I have in years, I guess, but it’s hard to say how many, and it’s hard to say how young I look.”  He wasn’t being quite fully forthright in his answer.  He thought, in all honesty, that he probably looked more than ten years younger at that moment, and he felt even better than that.  After all, ten years ago, he had been a pack-and-a-half a day smoker, and now he wasn’t smoking at all, so he was probably literally healthier than he had been since…

…perhaps since his teenage years, before he had really started smoking.  Was that possible?  He didn’t think it could be too far off.

Did that mean it was possible that Walter was right?  Could his lifespan be extended, perhaps by decades or even longer?  He had never been one who thought that living as long as you possibly could seemed worthwhile; if he had been, he wouldn’t have been a smoker.  But then again, if he could stay healthy the whole time, if he could be forever young and strong, then maybe it wouldn’t be so bad.

Walter was going on, saying, “Right.  I mean, imagine putting together a promotional video or some other kind of ad for a spa treatment, and showing older pictures of you, and then showing you now.  And I could take some pictures and video of how I look right now and then, assuming that the stuff does for me what it’s done for you, take pictures and video afterwards and show everyone.  I mean, we’d have to play our cards close to the chest, especially at first.  We’d have to hide the shampoo in a whole bunch of other ‘treatments’, because like you said, if people thought it was the shampoo, then they’d pretty quickly figure out a way to sneak some out and analyze it.  Unless…”

There was a strange pause there.  Something about Walter’s tone seemed like another bizarre idea had occurred to him.  Albert couldn’t have said what made him think that, but he’d known Walter quite well in the past, and he seemed to have an unconscious sense of his friend’s tone of voice.  “What is it?” he asked.

Walter continued to pause for quite a long moment before he finally went on, saying, “Well, look…this stuff has got some level of…of artificial intelligence to it, right?  I mean, it’s at least able to sense when someone’s trying to look at it under a microscope, or to do NMR or chromatography.  And it knew enough to break down the stuff you put in the water with it, right?”

Albert was not following too well.  “I thought…isn’t that just, like, regular programming?  I mean, wouldn’t that be just…what it does?”

“I don’t think that’s possible,” Walter replied.  “It had to be able to adjust to specific things in the environment, to me examining it, to you giving it just some random electronic stuff and metal and…what did you say, sand?”

“Yeah,” Albert replied in turn.  “Some colored sand from one of those sand sculpture things in a glass, like you get at beach souvenir shops.”

“Right,” Walter said.  “There’s no way it could be programmed in general to do that.  It’s too specific.  I think.  It has to be able to look at what’s happening and decide.”

Albert was a bit out of his depth.  He thought Walter might be jumping to conclusions, but then again, Walter was the scientist.  He knew much more about such things than Albert did, himself.  “Okay, I guess, maybe,” he said.

“So, maybe…maybe it can understand more than even that,” Walter said.  “What if there was a way…I don’t know, what if there’s a way to communicate with it?  What if you could tell it not to work for anyone else but us?”

Albert was at a bit of a loss.  “I don’t know,” he said.  “That sounds pretty crazy.  I mean…how could I communicate with nano-machines or whatever you call them?  I mean, I don’t even know any computer programming languages or anything, and I sure don’t know what kind of…of app might work for something like this.”

Something he said must’ve sounded like a joke, because Walter burst out into laughter that seemed too energetic for the situation.  “Yeah, that’s a good point,” he said, after his initial burst of hilarity.  “I don’t think Babbel is going to do it, is it?  But, okay, let’s table that idea for now.  If it works we can always think about it later, I guess.  There’s time.  But seriously, though, if we can just make more of the stuff, but if it works to do what we want…”

“What if it only works on me?” Albert asked.  “I mean, for all we know it…it latches onto whoever first used it.  Then it wouldn’t do anything for anyone else.”  He meant this to be a sad possibility, but as he said it, he felt a strange joy at the thought.  Some part of him didn’t want to share this wonderful invigoration with other people.  He wasn’t happy about that thought, but he couldn’t deny that it would make him feel special in a way that he wasn’t sure he had ever felt before.

“Nah, that’s not right,” Walter responded.  “It already helped my allergies just from me sniffing it.  And that’s lasted at least for a few days.  I’m still breathing better than I did before.  So it at least works on you and on me, and I don’t see why we’d be special.”

Albert was disappointed, and because he felt guilty about his selfish thoughts, he was perversely glad that he was disappointed.  “Okay,” he said.  “That’s a fair point.”

“So, anyway,” Walter said.  “Let’s not worry too much about the specifics of stuff like that, whether being able to communicate with it or ‘program’ it not to be able to be reproduced by anyone else.  Let’s just worry about seeing if we can still make more of it.”

Albert found himself somewhat irritated by Walter’s use of the word “we” so readily and casually.  It was true that Walter had been the one who had figured out much of what they knew about the V-42, but it was still Albert’s shampoo.  He had bought it, he had found it—or it had found him.  He wasn’t sure he liked how Walter was coming up with schemes already, including ‘get rich quick’ type schemes.  Quite apart from the automatic, proprietary interest he felt about the stuff, Walter’s greedy notions worried him.

But in turn, he worried about his resistance to Walter’s notions.  Was he the one who was being greedy?

He disliked avarice in other people, but was probably more annoyed by it in himself.  He was not above wanting things selfishly, but he didn’t like that tendency.  Maybe that was part of why he wasn’t more successful than he was.

Still, for now, Walter’s thoughts seemed reasonably constrained.  Albert didn’t want to encourage his friend to get too enthusiastic or too impatient, so he said, “Well, anyway, I’ll see what’s happened when I get home.  You know, whether it was able to turn the sludge in the bottom of the cup into more of itself.  And depending on that, I’ll either try to find some…bigger container or something to use to make more of it, like you said, so that at least you can have some.”

“Right, good,” Walter said.  “Oh, and by the way…why don’t you keep the ‘new’ stuff completely separate.  I mean, the stuff you’re making for me to use, like you said.”

“I mean…okay, sure, but why?” Albert asked.

“Because this’ll be the real test,” Walter responded.  “If you make completely new stuff…especially if you make more of it, then make more of it after that, using only the new stuff, not the stuff that was in the bottle…well, then, if I use that, and if it still works on me the way the original stuff has worked on you…then we’ll know that it’s really reproducing itself.”

“Don’t we know that already?” Albert asked.

“Well, to a point we do,” Walter replied.  “But it could be something like…like a new virus, like Covid and all the variants and everything.  Maybe the reproduced stuff would lose its potency, maybe there could be…mutations or something.  Anything that replicates itself has to be susceptible to copying errors, right?”

Albert shook his head, only barely aware that he was driving.  “Does it?” he asked.  “Is that right?”

“Yes,” Walter replied.  “I mean, that’s how evolution happened in the first place.  And it’s how viruses like Covid become less virulent over time, up to a point.  The really deadly versions of a disease tend to kill people too quickly, and they don’t necessarily spread as fast as the less deadly but more transmissible versions of it.  And every time something digital—like DNA—is copied, there’s always potential error.  It’s a law of physics, there’s no way to make it absolutely perfect, though it can get very good.  So, we want to know whether the newer shampoo works just the same as the original.  We don’t want to use stuff that’s not gonna have any benefit, and we sure wouldn’t want to use it if it’s gonna do harm.”

Albert hadn’t thought of any of that, but then again, Walter was the science guy.  Still, it sounded plausible.  “Okay,” he said.  “So, I won’t mix the new stuff with the old stuff except to get the supply material.”

“Well, for your next test, don’t even get the original supply, if you can help it,” Walter said.  “I mean, if your secondary cup experiment has worked, today, make the next new batch only out of that.  And then I can try that stuff to see if it helps me the way it’s helped you.  Then we’ll know that the stuff really does reproduce with all of its abilities…well, intact, I guess, would be the word.”

Albert thought he understood the logic behind Walter’s suggestion.  If he made a new batch of the stuff entirely from an already new batch and it acted exactly the same as the original, then the new stuff must really have the same properties as the original.  He supposed that would be good to know even if it wasn’t specifically for Walter’s benefit or the benefit of whatever plans Walter was dreaming up.  It would be good to know for his own sake that, however long he had it around, the V-42 would be doing him good.

He wondered if it was possible that the stuff would keep de-aging him.  He didn’t think it made sense that it might make him into a child again—that seemed absurd, and certainly not something anyone would really want.  But could it literally bring him back to his physical prime?  How would he explain that sort of thing to people at work?  He was getting away with his changes so far, but that had only been for a very short time, and while they were extraordinary, as far as everyone at the office was concerned, his changes were purely cosmetic.  They could chalk it up to Botox treatments and hair dye and careful grooming, maybe even that old Rogaine stuff.  But after a while those wouldn’t be credible.  People would want to know his secret.

He wondered if maybe Walter’s idea could take that problem off his hands.  He could quit his job and become some kind of guru, selling spa treatments for health and longevity, maybe including mud baths and massage and…and herbal cleanses or whatever.  He tried to think about whether he would even enjoy such a life.  He liked his current job well enough, though he wasn’t exactly living anyone’s dream.  Still, he thought it was better than selling some range of treatments worthy of Gwyneth Paltrow.

But Walter was right, there was no need to make any final or long-term plans at the moment.  Right now, he would go back home and see how his follow-up cup project had gone.  If the shampoo had successfully made more of itself from the bit of water and the sludge that had been left in the cup, then that was good new information.  Then he could follow Walter’s suggestion and use that, the new stuff, to try to make some more, in another cup.  He supposed he could use an old cell phone as source material.  It would be a bit of a wrench, but it was worth it if it made more of the shampoo.

He idly wondered whether he could ask the V-42 to please save any data that was left behind in the phone it chewed up.  If it was programmable…

He chuckled to himself at the notion.  He was being silly, but at least he knew it.

“What’s funny?” Walter asked.

“Huh?” Albert responded, at first not realizing he had laughed aloud.  Shaking his head, he said, “Oh, nothing.  I just thought of something goofy.  Nothing worth sharing.”

“Oh,” Walter said.  “Okay.”

Albert thought his friend sounded a bit disappointed or perhaps miffed that he hadn’t been let in on the joke, but Albert knew it was just a nonsense thought.  Instead of elaborating, he said, “Okay, well, I’ll keep on my way home, and when I get there, I’ll see if the cup has more shampoo in it.  If it does, I’ll text you and let you know.”

“Yeah, please do,” Walter said.  “That would be a real…revelation, I guess.  And then, like I said, when you try to make more, do it using that new stuff if it’s there.  And maybe even use a different kind of container.  I mean, I know you said you don’t have a bucket, and I’m not suggesting that you go buy one or anything, but even a Tupperware tub or something would be good.”

“Yeah, I got it,” Albert said, though it hadn’t occurred to him that it would matter for whatever the next experiment was that he use something different.  Now that Walter pointed it out, though, it made sense.  He said aloud, “I wonder how it knows not to use the cup.”

“Who knows?” Walter replied, and Albert could tell from his tone that he was also amazed by the stuff.  “I don’t know much about computers at the best of times, let alone knowing how a collection of nano-machines could work together and be smart enough to figure out what to do to make more of themselves without getting in their own way.  But, hey, you know, an individual ant isn’t very bright or complex, but when you get a bunch of them together, they can build holes and mounds and set up gigantic colonies.  And individual nerve cells aren’t all that impressive, but if you throw a hundred billion of them together with the right connections, you can get a human brain.  And sometimes those brains can do amazing things.  Who knows what a collection of nanomachines that are made for something like that could do.  I can promise you, those things are smaller than brain cells, and who knows how many there might be in a whole bottle?  Maybe trillions, I don’t know.  I’d have to do the math.”

Albert wasn’t sure he followed Walter’s point, but he responded, “Well, leave me out of that kind of math.  I can handle business math, some accounting, but science stuff is beyond me.”

“The kind of math I was talking about is actually simpler than accounting,” Walter replied with a mild laugh.  “It’s just figuring out volumes and how many of a set of smaller volumes would fit into them.  It’s straight up division.  Business math is way trickier.  But that’s not really important.  The only math we’re really going to need is to be able to count our money.”

Albert was again annoyed by the first person plural attitude Walter was assuming, but he controlled himself and didn’t say anything about it.  Instead, he said, “Right.  Well, I’ll text you to let you know if the shampoo made more of itself today, with the sludge stuff, and then, if it did, I’ll use that to…make another batch and see if it does what it does.”

“Well, it can’t help but do whatever it does, but I know what you mean,” Walter said, annoying Albert slightly with his pedantry.  That was a habit that hadn’t changed since they first knew each other.  He had to admit that he wished it were otherwise.

“Right,” he said, hoping his irritation wasn’t obvious in his voice, though perhaps it would be better if it was.  “Anyway, have a good night.  I’ll keep you posted.”

“Yep,” Walter said, giving no indication that he knew Albert was miffed.  “You have a good night, too.”