Crimson Coat

"All results thus far show that the nanobots are indiscriminate as to what they attack." Dr. Henry Larkin spoke into his personal voice recorder as her wheeled around the lab in his computer chair. "My evaluation is as follows: The nanobots cannot be used as a form of chemical warfare until a way to specify the targets is found." Dr. Henry Larkin turned back to the large glass container which held several clear vials, a lab rat dead from the nanobots and sealed in its own container, and a live rat, sealed in its own container as well. Dr. Larkin knew that the seemingly empty vials harbored, on a microscopic level, an incredibly deadly threat to all organic life. This idea plagued him for a moment, but he shook it off and continued on with his work.
Dr. Larkin gripped his hands upon the black joysticks his fingers were so familiar with. As the robotic arms within the sealed glass case moved around with the joysticks, he wondered how something so small as the nanobots, could be so deadly. The answer was clear, the smaller something is, the easier it is to catch, and the harder it is to get rid of. But soon Dr. Larkin realized that there was something amiss within the container he was working with. The first rat, to whom the nanobots had been administered, was dead and unmoving inside its airtight box, but not, the second rat was equally lifeless and unmoving. "How the heck???" he thought as he moved to confirm that the rat was indeed dead, and not just sleeping.His heart began to race within his chest before he'd even thought he might have cause to panic. But it only took Dr. Larkin to come up with a reasonable answer to the second rat's fate. He figured that the nanobots must have evolved, and that through the wonders of AI, they had found a way to break out of their many glass prisons, and seal the fate of the second lab rat who could do nothing but claw at the walls he would never be free of. "If they broke out of their containers and into the second rat's box, that means..." Dr. Larkin raced over to put on a gas mask, even though he didn't know how well it's work, or if it was too late.
His heart throbbed faster, and his breathing increased with it. Henry knew that his heart did not beat fast from panic, but rather from the way the nanobots were now assaulting his internal organs. Hundreds of thousands of microscopic robots now raced through his lungs, into his blood stream, and into his heart. There they clogged its ventricles and forced its muscles to expand and contract faster and faster every minute.
The lack of oxygenated blood cause Dr. Larkin's vision to blur, and as it did his mind drifter to questions it'd never know the answers to. He wondered if his wife, Tanya, and son, Billy, would survive the coming man made epidemic, he also wondered what the nanobots next evolution would be. He figured it likely that John, who was currently on his lunch break, would soon stumble upon the ill-fated doctor, and unknowingly release the mechanical virus into the rest of the building, and out into the world. He could only hope that some impurity of the outside environment would cause the destruction of the robots.
The doctor's heart could finally pump no more, the pressure inside it forced the heart to expand. Dr. Larkin heard a loud pop and felt a sharp pain in his chest as his heart exploded within it. The force of the blast was so strong that his rib cage snapped outward; his muscles and skin giving way, staining his pearly white lab-coat crimson. The invisible plague within Henry seeped back out into the laboratory, its target successfully neutralized. The Head Bio-Weapons Researcher for the Department of Defense Dr. Henry Scott Larkin's dying thought was simply, "God help us..."