Nanobots, Murder, and Other Family Problems

My eyes snap open just before my alarm goes off. For some reason, I’m feeling great this morning. As usual lately, I have no idea what’s going on, no context for anything, but that’s just life now. My schedule pops up on my console with things I need to do today.

Task: Kill Father.

Hmm, short list.

Well, I guess that’s what I’m doing today. I even marked the task as critical, so it must be important. It takes me a minute of reading in the index entry about Father before I remember enough that it sounds like a good idea. Another index entry pops open with a detailed plan for how to do it. I can tell as I read it that I’ve put a lot of work into this. There are detailed contingencies for all sorts of things that could go wrong. I trust my past self. I have to.

This should totally work.

According to what I’ve written, I need to get Evan, Andrea, and Louise up and ready early. We all have to be in the cafeteria before Jeff arrives. It takes me a moment to remember who they all are, but as index entries for each pop up for each of them I start getting enough of a working memory that I think I can get started. The system is working. They should all know their parts for this. I need to remember to let Andrea think that Jeff is just faking his breakdown, even though he won’t be. I grab some clean clothes and hit the bathroom. After showering and getting dressed, I knock on Evan’s door.

“Yeah?” Evan calls, his deep voice groggy.

“It’s me. You decent?”

“Decent enough. Come on in.”

I open the door and step inside. Evan is sitting on his bed in a t-shirt and boxers, rubbing his eyes, his covers tossed to the side. His face looks strained and tired.

“How you doing, brother?” My entry for him shows that he’s been in self-imposed semi-quarantine since he got his final implant calibration done. My own recollections of getting acclimated to my full cloud capabilities flow back into the wet parts of my brain as the reference pops in the index. “The cloud upgrade still giving you trouble?”

“Just a little,” he answers, getting up. “Control’s not hard. It’s the sensory overload that’s killing me. I turn it up from the lowest settings, and I feel like my brain is going to explode.”

“That’s fine, keep it at the lowest settings for now. Or just turn the feedback all the way off until we need it.”

He nods slowly.

“I don’t know how you do it, man. You really keep this thing on all the time?”

“Yeah, full blast. It took me a while to get used to it, but it’s not that bad once you do. I hear a little pain is good for you. Builds character or something.”

He laughs. “I doubt it. I miss the old stuff. I had that all figured out. I don’t need to know most of this stuff ever. Why does it keep telling me how much everything weighs? Why would I even care about that?”

“It’s useful,” I assure him, “especially when you need to move a lot of things and need to calculate how much of your cloud you need to commit to each one.”

“I’ll take your word for it,” he grumbles. “I guess you want me to come out and rejoin the world?”

“Yeah,” I say, “but more than that. It’s today.”

He looks confused for a second, then realization dawns across his face.

“Today, today? Like we’re doing it today?”

“Yeah. Jeff is going to do something on his own if we don’t. You know how that ends.”

“Yeah, I guess so. Are you sure we can do it?”

“We can.” I say with confidence that I wish I felt. “The plan is solid.”

“Are you sure you still want to?”

He looks at me. I know what he’s thinking. This is my last chance to back out.

“Yes,” I declare firmly.

I’ve wanted this for so long. It’s finally time. Revenge for Mom. Justice. I wish I felt as confident as I’m trying to sound. Sure, I’ve got a bunch of nagging doubts, but I can’t remember the reasons for any of them, and projecting uncertainty is no way to lead. Besides, I have to trust my past self. There’s no other way I’m going to be functional. My instructions to myself say to do it, the index entry explains why, and my schedule says today.

It’s time.

“OK then,” Evan says, heading into his bathroom. “Better go wake up the girls.”

I head to the common room while he showers. I post up some mics and speakers outside of Andrea and Louise’s doors, and my bots knock on each of them simultaneously. I’d go there in person, but the gender segregation of the dorm wings is the closest thing we have to a sacred commandment here. I get a mumbled reply from Louise and a bar of music from Andrea’s room.

“Hey, it’s Noah,” I say into the small mic that effortlessly forms near my mouth. “Come meet us in the common room, please.”

I hear muffled affirmatives through my mics by their doors, vocal and musical respectively. Fifteen minutes later, the four of us are in the common room. Andrea’s face is full of determination. Louise is frowning. There are too many of the younger kids here to talk, and it’s time for breakfast anyway, so we all head over to the cafeteria. According to the plan, that’s where things start.

Andrea strides through the commons resolutely, cutting straight across the grass. She plays a melody that makes me think of a military march as she goes. She glows even in the morning sun, with ribbons of every color swirling and filling the air around her. It looks like she’s already very comfortable with her upgrades.

Louise watches her too, a hint of jealousy in her face.

“How are you doing, Louise?” I ask her. “Is the new stuff all working for you?”

“It’s OK. It works. I like to keep the inputs turned way down. Way too much noise.”

“That’s what I said,” Evan agrees.

“It gets easier, I promise.” I say.

“Whatever. Are we still doing this today?” Louise asks, her voice irritable. I guess she hasn’t given herself her morning jolt of bioelectric happiness yet.

“We are,” I say, putting as much determination in my voice as I can.

“Is everything ready?”

“Yeah,” I reply, double-checking the plan. “As long as you all made the change to your cloud software that I showed you and have been practicing with each other like we talked about.”

“We’re good,” Evan answers, and Louise nods.

We hit the cafeteria, grab food, and take our usual table. The six-year-olds are clustered around the table next to it this morning. They always make enough noise that you can’t overhear anything. Just the same, I set up a soundproofing perimeter around us.

We quickly go over the plan one last time. The four of us nod grimly to each other as we go over every detail and contingency. It’s all set.

“OK, be ready. It’s going to move fast once it starts,” I conclude. “When Jeff freaks out, that’s the signal.”

I barely have time to eat my waffle before Jeff arrives. I drop the soundproofing and wave him over from the food service line. He sees me and glides to our table.

I give him my very biggest smile.

“Jeff, I know that you have been worried,” I say in a carefully calm and friendly voice. “I just wanted to tell you that there’s nothing you need to worry about anymore. I want you to know that everything is fine. We are part of it now, and it is good. We are eager to have you join us. It’s better this way. You won’t feel any pain, becoming part of us. You’ll like it.”

Andrea, Louise, and Evan all turn in unison and give him their best copy of my smile.

Jeff looks at the four of us for a moment, then screams.

“It happened! It happened! They are not what they are! IT IS ALIVE!”

I tweak my overlay to see all the clouds. My bots show in blue, Jeff’s in yellow, and Evan’s, Louise’s and Andrea’s in green, purple, and red. I enfold Jeff gently in a cloud of my bots. The red, green and purple bots start consuming the yellow ones as fast as they can.

“Oh, no!” Louise yells, her performance as good as I could hope for. “Someone run and tell Father we need help! Noah, hurry, we need to take him to the lab.”

I get up and try to look appropriately worried as I float Jeff out the door of the cafeteria, immobilized but still screaming hysterical nonsense at the top of his lungs. I walk swiftly behind his body as we turn toward the Research Center.

This is it.

This is the day I finally kill my father.