Five Minute SciFi Stories

drug delivery

Veteran bots, those who had returned from three or four assignments, had conducted the training. Their advice swirled through my head as I swam with the current, dodging enzymes and white blood cells. 

A neutrophil charged towards me, bending its cell membrane into a mouth, ready to engulf me. I swerved at the last moment and dived under the giant cell. It swam on swallowing my comrades.

"Stay alert," the veterans had said. "Watch in front and behind you, look for cells with E-cadherin, fuse as quickly as possible, dump your cargo and get the hell out of there. Do not enter the cell."

And so I swam, staying alert, dodging the cells that wanted only to eat me, feeling enzymes claw at my outer case, threatening to break me open and destroy the drug inside me. It was stupid, really. I was there to help but the white cells and the enzymes didn't know that. Couldn't know that. They were primed to kill and kill they did.

I swam for a long time through smaller and smaller vessels until a big piece of E-cadherin finally slapped me in the face. There were hundreds of them attached to a giant cell membrane, wafting in the blood flow. I had made it. I could fuse but there was an open gate right in front of me. It was wide and I could see into the liver cell and before I knew it, I had passed through the gate into the inside of the cell.

The gate snapped shut. 

I floated in the liquid inside the cell. All around me molecules worked, building proteins and ferrying them around the cell, jostling me out of the way. It was loud, a different kind of loud to the swooshing in the blood vessels, more of a squelching, sticking sound. There were enzymes here too but I could avoid them by hiding in the leaves of mitochondria.

I hid and I watched but I could feel the drug inside me, flipping and turning, trying to bash its way out. I swam back to the cell membrane and tried to fuse from the inside but it ignored me. I went back to the gate and pushed and pulled but it stayed shut, ignoring me too. I could hear my comrades yelling at each other as they fused on the outside. Bubbles with drug inside started popping off the cell membrane around me. The other bots would be pushing off the membrane now, swimming away towards to intestine.

There was only one thing I could do. The veterans had warned of this. I swam slowly through the forest of mitochondria looking for shiny white balls. When I found one, I rubbed against it and it stuck, dissolving its membrane and mine, fusing us together. I kept dissolving. Disintegrating. Disappearing. And my drug floated free.