Nanobots, Murder, and Other Family Problems

I finish setting up our gear in the freshly-built shelter and step over to the door. Another long day. Off in the distance, a clean white light appears. Looks like that last village of the day already hooked something up to their new power supply. That one was my favorite of the five we did today. Not that the others were bad, I mean, the reaction from the people here has been amazing across the board.

I settle down on the shelter’s entrance step to give my sore feet a break. The cloud cover that made the weather this afternoon so nice breaks open, splattering stars across the sky. My stomach grumbles. I hope Ibrahim gets here soon with our evening meal.

Jeff comes over to me and gives my foot an awkward nudge with his. “Noah, there is something I saw over there that I think you would like to see.”

Real subtle, Jeff. But I go along with it and get up. “Sure, let’s check it out.”

“What is it?” Marc asks, starting to follow us.

“A colony of exceptionally large beetles. Noah was an amateur entomologist in his former life and loves observing insects in the wild,” Jeff lies.

“Ew, gross. I hate bugs.” He wanders off toward Evan and the girls instead.

“Good work, Jeff,” I say quietly as we amble toward the spreading canopy of a clump of trees.

“Please excuse the deception,” Jeff responds, “but I didn’t want Marc to overhear some thoughts I’ve had.”

“I figured. What have you come up with?”

“You received Father’s explanation of his encounter with the wild nanobot swarm created by Universal Robotics. Correct?”

“Yeah, he told me the story the first time I met him.”

“I have come to suspect that he was not honest in his account. Specifically, I believe that he lied about the aftermath of that incident.”

“Interesting. Care to elaborate?”

“Do you recall that Father indicated that the original swarm had developed some rudimentary self-awareness?” Jeff asks.

“I remember that part,” I say, glancing back at the camp. No one is coming out to follow us. Good.

“Per Father’s explanation, he removed from the nanobots the ability to gain sentience again. I have come to believe that is not true. I have been reverse engineering the software of my own cloud, and I now believe that he simply added a layer of control that suppresses the default programming. He never removed it entirely. The suppression, I believe, is imperfect. When a critical mass of nanobots are connected in the same mesh network, the intelligence that existed in the original swarm begins to manifest itself.”

He’s using his patient voice, the one he uses when he talks to the other siblings. I think that means I’m on the edge of being considered an idiot. Maybe I’ve been playing too dumb with him. Gotta walk that fine line, maybe challenge him a little.

“So you think the smoother control he has when he’s running a big cloud is the swarm AI at work?” I ask. “I’m not sure that your hypothesis makes sense. If the AI revived itself, don’t you think the first thing it would do is eliminate the threat to itself? That’s Father.”

Jeff half-smiles awkwardly. “I thought that initially too, but I’ve exhausted all other avenues.” His voice goes back to the conspiratorial tone he normally uses with me. “There is nothing else in the programmatic layer of our interfaces that could account for the phenomena. I have checked his nanobots, and they are identical to our own. Same hardware, same software.”

“How did you do that? Is there an interface you can use to connect to someone else’s cloud?”

“Version numbers are available in the networking signatures that the clouds use to identify one another for the overlays,” he replies as if it’s something everyone knows. “You just need to decode the raw packet data. But that is not the point. The point is, there are software systems running on the nanobots that are not under human control. Complex ones. Systems capable of accessing self-replication features. Systems that could potentially self-direct.”

“So why haven’t we all been slagged?” I ask, looking up at the flat canopy of the tree above us. “He had a literal dump truck full of those things, that had to be enough to hit critical mass. Why didn’t the rogue AI just wake up and take control?”

“That is exactly the crux of what I do not understand,” Jeff says, slowly circling one of the trees. “And that is why I wanted to discuss this with you. I am afraid I have debugger’s blindness. I need a sounding board.”

“Sure, I’ll bounce ideas with you.” I’m not sure at this point if he’s telling me his ideas because he thinks I’m smart, or he just needs someone to talk to. Jeff doesn’t fit in with the rest of our cohort, or any of the rest of the Butler Institute, but he’s latched on to me for some reason. I think he’s decided we’re kindred spirits or something. “But let me ask a couple of questions that might shake things up for you. First, if you’re right, what can we do about the bots? They’re all over the place now. We’ve probably deposited a trillion for maintenance on the installations we’ve done on this trip alone.”

“More than that. Somewhere on the order of ten to the fifteenth power at least.”

“Right, and that doesn’t include all the power projects he’s done over the last fifteen years. He’s got those huge self-maintaining solar fields all over North America, plus I don’t know how many others on other continents, but probably a lot.”

“Yes,” Jeff confirms. “SynTech has thirteen other significant power installations on record.”

“Sure. So what can we do? If you’re right, that means that the maintenance lobotomy is just another layer on top of the original code. So all of those solar fields he’s been building for years are potential Gray Goo sites. How could we ever stop that?”

He stands silently for a long minute.

“I do not know. I had not even considered that facet of the problem.”

“Second question then,” I ask, pinning a lot of hopes on his answer. “What can we do about Father? If you’re right, he’s putting the whole world in danger.” I hold my breath as he considers.

“I do not know,” he finally says. “But I fear that the normal mechanisms of criminal justice may not be sufficient for this case.”

“Yeah, how do you put a guy on trial who can melt the jury’s brains with a wave of his hand if he doesn’t like their verdict?”

He nods slowly. “Yes. I suppose he might, at that. It is strange though. I had never considered him a violent man.”

I look back at camp. Louise and Andrea are off to one side of the shelter on their own. I think I can go get them without the rest of the group seeing us. I make a decision.

“Wait here for a minute,” I tell him. “There’s something you need to hear.”