Eventually they were looking at the severed portion of John Percival 
Hackworth on a meter-wide sheet of mediatronic paper that one of the assistants 
had, with great ceremony, unfurled across a low, black lacquer table. They 
sought something that was bulky by nanotech standards, so the magnification was 
not very high—even so, the surface of Hackworth's skin looked like a 
table heaped with crumpled newspapers. If Dr. X shared Hackworth's 
queasiness, he didn't show it. He appeared to be sitting with
hands folded in the lap of his embroidered silk robe, but Hackworth leaned 
forward a bit and saw his yellowed, inch-long fingernails overhanging the black 
Swiss cross of an old
Nintendo pad. The fingers moved, the image on the mediatron zoomed forward. 
Something smooth and inorganic unfolded at the top of their field of view: some 
kind of remotely controlled manipulator. Under Dr. X's direction it began to 
sift through the heap of desiccated skin.