Nanobots, Murder, and Other Family Problems

The commotion has the whole campus gathered around by the time we reach the Research Center. Jeff’s few remaining bots skitter around me, but even if he didn’t still have the limiters on them, Evan and the girls have reduced their numbers to low enough that there’s not much he could do with them. He’s not even coordinating their motions, just flailing at me with them. I reach out with my own bots and finish them off as we go. Father emerges from the building as we hurry toward the door.

“What’s going on?” he cries out. I can barely hear him over Jeff’s ranting screams.

“It’s Jeff!” I shout, putting as much panic in my voice as I can. “Something’s gone wrong. I think it’s his implant. I think he’s getting an overload or something.”

“YOU ARE SLAVES!” Jeff roars.

“No!” Father exclaims, his face going white. “Hurry, get him inside.”

I float Jeff through the big double doors and down the hallway toward the lab.

“This is my fault,” Father says, half under his breath. “It’s the old second generation implant. I should have updated him and Marc when I did the others.”

Jeff screams incoherently, a cry of primal rage and fear. Children and teens surge down the hall behind us even as I feel teachers and other staff trying to restore order outside.

“Thank you for your quick thinking in bringing him here, Noah,” Father says as we hurry along the wide corridor. “Please, come along to the lab to assist me.”

I nod as Father turns to my gathered siblings and raises his voice for attention.

”The rest of you,” he says quickly, “please go about your day. I will take care of Jeff. Older children, please ensure your younger brothers and sisters get to class. I will keep you all apprised of his situation.”

Evan’s voice booms out and gets the rush of siblings under control. Louise pulls Marc aside and whispers to him. She’ll be entrusting him with the very important job of making sure all the little sibs are OK and out of the way, which we decided would be the best way to keep him occupied. Father and I reach the vault-like lab door, which he scrambles to unlock. He’s so preoccupied that he doesn’t even bother with his usual precautions and I get a clean look at the passcode as he keys it in. I stash that in the index for later, we’ll need it when we’re running this place without him.

Behind us, the chaos calms. By the time Jeff is on the table in the lab, only Andrea, Louise, and Evan are left lingering in the hallway. I make sure to leave the giant door ajar as Father hurries over to his desk, hoping he doesn’t notice. We have a contingency ready in case he closes it, but he’s so preoccupied with Jeff that he doesn’t spare any attention for it. Outside the building, I feel the other siblings dispersing out under shepherding from Marc and the staff. Father fishes a cable from the cabinet and attaches one end to one of his servers. I pull Jeff’s phone from his pocket and hand it to Father, who takes it with a grateful glance. I start pulling my entire ponderous cloud in from the kilometers of desert all around the campus.

Father scrutinizes his several screens as his fingers dash across the keyboard. “The implant doesn’t report any clotting or hemorrhage. But that could just indicate a failure in the detection system. These older implants don’t have nearly the same diagnostic capabilities as the third generation hardware that you have. We can only hope that we caught it early enough,” he says, his voice holding a glimmer of hope. “Where is his cloud, Noah?”

“His bots dusted to the floor of the cafeteria just before he started screaming,” I lie. “That’s one of the things that made us think there was something wrong with his implant.”

Father cocks his head thoughtfully and nods. I put on my practiced look. I’m here, Father, my face needs to say. I’m ready to help, just ask.

“Hmm,” Father says, turning back to Jeff, “that could be a hardware malfunction in the comms module. Or it could have been caused by something along the lines of a seizure, some neural activity so anomalous that it triggered my safeguards to deactivate his cloud. In any case, every second the old implant remains inside his head risks greater harm. The safest course is to get it out as quickly as we can. Normally, I’d anesthetize him before proceeding, but that takes time to prepare, time we don’t have right now. Noah, I’ve seen your skills with your cloud at work, and I think you are capable of doing what I need. Can you keep your brother restrained? I need him absolutely immobile.”

I nod, changing my face back to a mask of intense concern. It worked. Plan A is good to go. I bind Jeff tightly to the table with a million invisible threads. I feel him struggling fruitlessly against the interlocking, tightening chains of bots that fasten themselves to each other and to the table. He tries to scream, but I fasten his mouth shut too and muffled cries escape his nostrils. A few more seconds and the only movement left is the shallow in and out of his chest where I leave the bonds just loose enough for him to breathe..

“Good. That should be enough for now. Keep him still, especially his head. It is imperative that he not move at all!”

Father opens one of the cabinets and pulls out a small, white box. His medical bots. As he opens it, all I can catch is the faintest mist emerging from it and flowing through the air into Jeff’s nostrils. They’re small enough to be basically invisible even to my all-seeing senses. Father’s jaw sets and his eyes narrow. One of the screens at his desk shows the medical bots swarming into Jeff’s head and sensor readouts from the old implant begin to wink out as the tiny pieces of it are broken down one by one. Father’s eyes are fixed on Jeff with a ferocious intensity.

I glance up at the security camera in the corner. The bulk of my cloud presses around the building like an invisible fog, slipping through every tiny crack in doors and windows as my uncountable tiny limbs make their silent way toward me. As Father works, they gather. I feel my siblings in the hallway, waiting just beyond the open crack of the door. I fix a pair of eyes on the screen showing Father’s progress. More than half of Jeff’s old sensors are out. I think Father is past the point of no return on the operation.

WATCH-ALL-BEACONS

A glowing web of hair-thin white threads suddenly overwhelms my overlay. With the code change that I made deep down in the bot signaling code enabled, Father can’t hide any of his bots from me. The location of every one of them is laid bare by the signals they send to coordinate with each other and with his phone. My eyes adjust as Father continues working. A portion of his cloud permeates the room, bigger than I’d hoped but smaller than I’d feared. More of his bots float in the air outside the door, trailing along the path we followed to get here, but my sibs will handle those. The medical bots are nowhere to be seen until I focus on Jeff’s head and see the swarming of their activity going in and out through his nasal cavity. Another set of sensors on the screen wink out.

It’s now or never. We can do this.

I flash a signal in the hallway to let my siblings know I’m starting, then flood my bots through the crack in the door. My awareness that has spanned the huge expanses of the campus and surrounding desert for weeks suddenly concentrates itself into this small room. They’re so thick in here that the air darkens, but Father seems too intent on Jeff to notice. I can feel every millimeter of every surface. Even without the threads on my overlay, I could have felt exactly where every one of Father’s regular bots are. My siblings stand ready just outside the room, their clouds waiting.

I reach up to the security camera behind me with many invisible hands. It’s got both a video feed that we want to keep running and an audio feed that we want to make sure stops. I check the specs for it in my index and follow the diagrams to find the connections to the microphone inside it. I sever one of the wires with a thought. If Evan did his homework right, the camera shouldn’t be interrupted but the audio should cut out.

I hold my breath and close my body’s eyes to focus on the glowing web of threads around my Father. My mind and hardware combine to process the location of every dot of light and form the initial plan of attack. With a silent command, I flash another signal to my sibs outside and start my massive army of bots consuming every one of Father’s as quickly as I can.

No going back now.

Father’s face twists from concentration to discomfort. If the feedback from his early version of the implant is anything like mine, it must have felt like a million needles stabbing into him at once.

“What’s going on?” he cries out. His head swivels toward me. “What are you doing?”

“I’m sorry, Father.” The regret in my voice is sincere. “I can’t forgive you. I really tried.”

“We can work that out later,” he says, his eyes returning to Jeff. “We need to focus right now. Your brother’s life is on the line.”

“I know.” My bots chew through the remnants of his cloud that survived my initial attack. “But we can’t work it out later. There is no later. Not for you, anyway.”

I glance through my eyes in the hallway. My siblings have done as well out there as I did here, clearing the bots he had outside the room and holding the line to prevent any more of his bots from coming in. He’s practically defenseless. All he has left now are the medical bots still working in Jeff’s head. I could walk over to him and kill him with my bare hands right now, but then Jeff would die and I’d be held to blame.

“I don’t know what you think this will accomplish, but it was an accident, Noah!” Father shouts, his face filling with shame and hurt. “I know I played a role, but it was an accident. Now let me work!”

I pause for a second, looking back in my log.

Oh, shit.

I had forgotten last night’s conversation. It rushes back to me now. My commitment wavers for a moment.

DOPE-ME

The surge of clarity stabilizes me. It doesn’t matter. It’s still his fault that she’s dead. Anyway, it’s too late now. We’re committed.

“I don’t care.” I say. “You’re a monster. You deserve to die. Even your own children know it.”

Father takes advantage of my momentary vacillation, and uses the one weapon we couldn’t figure out how to stop. He activates his override, the same one that shut down Chad’s cloud. With all my diving into the implant code, I never could find what caused the shutdown or how to stop it without seeing it in action again. Our best theory was that the override is a feature available only from Father’s hardware, his failsafe to make sure something like today could never happen. My modifications to the implant code manage to capture a copy of the shutdown command signal and spew it to my console as I feel my bots shutting down. Dark gray dust begins settling, covering everything in the room as my bots fall. Time is of the essence now. I have less than a minute to reconnect before my bots lobotomize themselves for good.

Jeff begins flailing, trying to get up. Father looks at me with realization dawning on his face. He’s still in the middle of a critical operation and he doesn’t have any way to restrain my brother. Jeff’s incoherent howls fill the air again. He’s not even using words at this point, just screaming in pain. Father’s face contorts. Leaving the procedure half-done would certainly kill Jeff, as would moving ahead with it without a way to keep him still.

This is where my gamble needs to pay off. I hold my breath and pray to the gods of revenge that Father is a better man than I am.

He is.

My father turns his eyes back to Jeff.

“Hold him down,” he says gruffly. “We can talk about the rest afterwards.”

I feel my connection to my bots again and give Father a nod as I force Jeff back down on the table and ratchet the restraints even tighter than before. Father goes back to the operation as I set up what I know is an inadequate defense against his medical bots with the rest of my cloud. I don’t think he’ll try to sneak any out before he finishes the surgery and Jeff is safe, but I’d rather do everything I can just in case.

“What are you going to do now, Noah?” Father asks, sparing me the briefest wounded look before returning his intense gaze to my brother. “The world needs me and what I’m doing. I am the only hope for the salvation of mankind.”

I shake my head. “Just save Jeff, Father.”

He continues his work. The monitor shows the rest of the sensors from the old implant winking out one by one. While he works, I use the captured shutdown command signal to make the last modification I need to my implant code. Father spares me another glance.

“Noah, you were the brightest of them all, even with so little time with us. You and I could have done so much together. We can still do so much. It doesn’t need to end like this.”

Is his offer sincere? Or is he just trying to get me to drop my guard so when he pulls his medbots out of Jeff’s head he can kill me? As tiny as those specialized bots are, it would be nearly impossible for me to fend them all off for long. Just a few could wreak all sorts of havoc inside me—shredding organs, cutting nerves, severing blood vessels.

“Finish the job,” I say coldly.

I know he’s done when I get the message on my overlay that he sent the override control signal again to shut down my cloud. This time though, with my final code change, my interface knows what to look for. My bots reject the command, and my bulwark stays in place as I see the almost invisible medical bots slipping out from Jeff’s head and swarming toward me. No matter how well I can multitask, there’s no way I’ll catch them all. Defense is tremendously harder than offense for this.

“Help!” I shout, though I don’t need to. Evan, Andrea, and Louise are already springing into action.

My overlay shows my siblings’ red, blue, purple and green bots surging into the room, attacking Father’s medical bots as my cloud does the same. It’s a pitched battle that my siblings and I are conducting more by feel than by sight. Father’s face twists with rage.

“Why don’t my overrides work?” he demands.

I don’t bother to respond. Instead, I release Jeff and focus all my will and bots on making sure that not a single one of Father’s medical menaces reaches me. Jeff begins howling again, screaming and crying as he very slowly uses both arms to get himself into a sitting position. I see the red bots—Andrea’s—falter and start to withdraw, but they’ve done enough. The tide of the nanobot war is clear, Father’s dwindling number of bots are all contained and slowly being destroyed as their tiny, darting shapes get caught by the ravenous hordes controlled by the rest of us.

“Of course, of course,” Father says. “You would have thought of everything. Well, it’s done. He’ll live. Do what you feel you need to.” Tears form in the corners of his eyes. I didn’t expect that. I wonder whether the pain of betrayal hurts him more than the knowledge of his imminent death.

I break off a few bots to help Jeff get to his feet, nudging him just enough to let him get up and get his balance.

“This is our only chance, Jeff.” I whisper to him urgently. “I’m infected and I can’t break free. You need to kill him. He’s the key to everything!”

Surgical tools are near at hand on one of the shelves, and he scrambles to grab a scalpel. He doesn’t bother to unbag it, just stabs wildly as he stumbles toward Father, who shrinks back from him and the plastic coated blade.

“Evan, go call for help!” I shout. I feel Evan book it out of the building and hear him start to yell as he nears the exterior doors. Louise and Andrea follow close behind him.

Jeff continues to stagger toward Father, his legs unsteady. He’s got Father backed into the corner. It’s even the best one for getting a clean shot with the security camera. I help Jeff with another little nudge from my cloud, and then he’s on top of Father. The scalpel in his fist stabs down again and again into Father’s face and neck. Blood spurts up, covering both of them. As he hacks away with the small blade, I feel Father’s pulse weaken and slow. The last of his medical bots drop to the floor, inert.

Father is dead.

Finally.

Jeff collapses, sobbing.

“Jeff, you did it.” I say softly. “I’m free now. We’re all free. You saved us. He was the key to the whole thing. You did it.”

Of course it’s not true. It doesn’t even make sense. But Louise insisted on this small mercy that might calm Jeff down now and give him comfort later when he looks back on when he killed Father.

No.

When I killed Father.

Jeff was no more at fault than the scalpel.