Cloudscape

If you're interested in nanotechnology maybe you've wondered what a nanorobot would look like. In my sci-fi world, they'd be able to change their form in whatever way was needed, much like Proteus, the prophetic sea god.

Normally, when they were moving they were elongated in form, usually oval or conical, but when they were still they were usually spherical, somewhat like protocells. The nanorobots could usually change form very quickly because their exterior was so small, often being made of only a few layers of atoms -- which together formed a "membrane."
These could be modified using the laws of chemistry in very simple ways, much like a sheet of graphene (a single layer of graphite carbon atoms) could be miraculously turnt into a buckyball by replacing some of the hexagons in the grid with pentagons. For instance, the layers could be folded using a line of atomic glue, which would form a covalent bond with the atoms on either side and in this way affect its form. In more drastic transformations, the layers were, so to say, "cut" - a substance was used to "steal" electrons from the atoms in the layers so that they were no longer connected to one another, and a tear arose, allowing the exterior of the nanorobot to be expanded.