Nanobots, Murder, and Other Family Problems

OK. Let’s test this out. Got my eye cluster floating here next to my head, giving me a double set of vision. I still get a headache every time I do that, but whatever, it’s fine. Got my tablet screen in front of me, full of my current reading assignment for Mrs. Jones’s class. Got my optical character recognition code ready to go. If this works, my life is about to get a whole lot easier.

CAPTURE-TEXT

Ff1dster 5ofdko 50g##5f etrokw 02e4 okqltk f9rgw otw tiwfjw fdwa _f%321

Nope. That’s not right. What am I doing wrong? The image capture code is fine, I verified that days ago. The format conversion seems to be working. I double check the routine that feeds the converter and bridges the two. Ahh. There it is on line 1043. Well, that was dumb. Let me fix that.

Trying again.

CAPTURE-TEXT

Many are stubborn in pursuit of the path they have chosen, few in pursuit of the goal.

Yes! It works! Now I can record any text that I look at with my nanobot eyes. I’m tempted to run to Jeff’s room to tell him about it, but he’s probably asleep by now. Credit where it’s due, Jeff’s code did the bulk of the hard stuff by getting the visual inputs into a decent data format. All I had to do was port an open source optical character recognition library into the SynTech programming language. It cost me a week of late nights, but it’s worth it.

CAPTURE-TEXT

CAPTURE-TEXT

CAPTURE-TEXT

I flip through my assigned reading, capturing it all into my electronic brain supplement one screen at a time. Manually running the text capture command gets to be a drag pretty quickly, so I set up a trigger on two fingers. I think I can do better than that though, maybe optimize this to capture text automatically whenever I see any. I’ll wait to tell Jeff about it until I have the code in better shape. A few more nights of work should do it. I was looking forward to getting more sleep once I got this working, but between practicing controlling the nanobots and working on this coding project, I’m getting used to only getting a few hours a night. Might as well keep it up. Sleep is overrated.

I’ve got five hours before I need to get up for morning training. One more hour of work, then I’ll let myself rest.

Fri 07/15 16:23:08 PDT

Five days in and my text scraper is finally where I want it, working like a champ. Mrs. Jones’ class is a breeze now that I always have everything written down in front of me. I still need to do the work when it comes to actually understanding things, but the burden of remembering anything is fully off my shoulders.

Mr. Johnson’s class is still rough. A perfect memory helps me with keeping the formulas straight, but doesn’t help me choose which one to use on a problem or help me break down the math to solve it. I wonder if there are any good open source math solvers out there. If I could get something like that working, that should take out more than half the work in his class.

Come to think of it, since I can pull in code from outside now, it might be better to build an interpreter that lets me run standard Java and C++ programs. That would save me the effort of porting a lot of code. I’ll put that on the docket for my sleepless nights starting tonight.

While I write code for my computer lab assignment on the computer in front of me, I let my three extra eyes float around the lab and see what everyone else is working on. With the practice I’ve been doing, running three bot eyes isn’t too bad for me anymore. I’d like to run half a dozen like Louise can, but every time I add a new one I have to deal with another round of headaches and nausea. I’ll bump it up to four on Monday, take it slow. I almost gave up trying to read out of more than one set of eyes at a time early on, but I’m glad I didn’t. A couple of days of splitting headaches and not being able to keep any food down were worth it once it started getting easier. Now I just need to convince Evan that I don’t have an eating disorder.

The text capture feature is not only good for what I originally wanted it for, but it’s also great for stealing code. Evan and Louise are always willing to walk me through anything they’re working on, so with them it doesn’t even feel like stealing. More like being efficient about accepting what they’re sharing. I‘m sitting between the two of them in the lab and one of my electronic eyes just lazily swings between their two screens and absorbs all their code as they create it.

Evan’s code is solid, but it’s nothing I think I need right now. I grab it all just to have it, but I don’t see a lot of immediate need for a next-generation water desalinator. Louise’s miniaturization work is brilliant and much more useful. She’s got code that improves the efficiency of a lot of the default algorithms. Her smaller version of the bot eyes are all I use anymore. She’s also fantastic at anything that deals with the way the implant interfaces with the brain. I used to think that Jeff was the best programmer out of my sibs, but I’m starting to think it might be Louise instead.

One of my eyes floats by Marc’s workstation. The block of code that flows into one of my capture windows is total garbage. As usual, the program he’s writing isn’t worth taking. It’s so riddled with bugs that even if it did something I wanted, I would end up spending more time debugging it than it would take me to just write it from scratch. I dump the captured text instead of letting it get saved into my storage. Some people just don’t have the right kind of mind for programming.

Chad’s code isn’t much better. He’s so incredibly unimaginative. No wonder he never collaborates with anyone in the lab, he couldn’t contribute a good idea if his life depended on it. He just brute forces his way through all of his assignments. No elegance, no clever algorithms, not even an attempt at efficiency. I dump that code buffer too.

Andrea’s code is fascinating, full of extremely complex math that’s the hallmark of graphics processing. It’s also almost unreadable. She seems to have given up natural language in her code as much as she has in real life. Her variable names are nonsense, just random words or people’s names, making it very hard to follow what her code is doing. I keep the code anyway. When I run it I’m sure I’ll get a magical pink unicorn floating in the air or something. I’ll try it later when there’s no one around.

There. Lab homework done and submitted. The assignments have finally caught up to my real skill level now, so my days of easy cruising in here are over. On the upside, I’m actually learning new things about programming again, which isn’t a bad thing. And even slowing down I’ve somehow managed to keep my reputation with Father and my sibs as the world’s fastest learner.

Time to switch over to my research project. Digging into the ways that nanochemistry can make water filtration more efficient is fascinating, and I’m quickly caught up in the zone. I barely notice the steady streams of other people’s code that I’m still bringing into the electronic part of my memory, or when most of them stop coming in as my siblings trickle out of the lab. It’s like the whole process is getting automatic for me as my brain gets used to doing it.

“You coming, man?” Evan asks as he logs off his workstation and gets up. “Or are you starving yourself again today?”

“Is it dinner time already?” I ask absently.

“No, it’s half an hour past dinner time, and I’m hungry,” he replies. “You coming?”

“Yeah, give me a few to finish this up,” I tell him. “Go ahead and I’ll meet you there.”

He nods and heads out, leaving me alone in the lab. I should go eat. I’m getting skinnier than I want to be. I’m not like Jeff skinny yet, my bones don’t show through my skin anywhere, but I had more muscle mass when I got here.

Jeff glides into the lab, as if magically summoned by my thoughts.

“Hey, Jeff.”

“Good evening, Noah,” he says with an almost imperceptible tilt of his head. He takes a seat at one of the empty workstations, sitting down with his mechanical and disturbing precision, his joints bending exactly enough to place him in the chair. “How has your work progressed with the text recognition code that we discussed?”

I’ve been hoping to avoid this conversation. I don’t want to share what I have with him. I mean, obviously he deserves credit for his part. ButI give him a copy, I can’t be sure he won’t drop it into the official repositories or slip up and let Father know about it.

“I think I’m making progress. I’ll probably have something working in a few weeks,” I lie. “Sorry, with the practices in the mornings and everything, I haven’t had a lot of time for it.”

“Understandable,” he says in his nearly monotone voice. “Let me know if you get stuck. I may be able to assist.”

I thank him and head out. I feel a twinge of guilt for lying to him, but I squash it down. Whatever edge I can get to find justice for Mom is worth it. The smells of dinner waft from the cafeteria as I walk through the commons. Is it steak night? Evan must have been really deep into the desalinator code he was working on. He always tries to be first in line on steak night, since they only have so many ribeyes and it’s first come, first pick on the steaks. They’re probably down to just sirloins by now.

I’ll steal Jeff’s code later, since I still have his password. I’ve been swiping everything he writes whenever I’m alone in the lab and can log into his account. It’s good code, but the comments seem a little weird. Stuff like: “In case of emerging sentience, disable this option” or “The others must not know about this.”

He’s a funny kid, that Jeff.

Anyway, those growing piles of code from my siblings are creating another task for me to do. I need to reverse engineer the sensor and feedback setups each of them have set up. If I can do that, I can consolidate everyone’s stolen code to use a standardized set of sensors. With that, I should be able to do everything that any of them have figured out how to do the same way they do it.

Of course, then I would also need to make time to practice actually using their triggers. It doesn’t do me any good to have Andrea’s gesture library if I don’t practice and internalize what gesture is supposed to do what. More time that I don’t have. Even with my cheats on the classwork, my schedule is packed. And I can’t slack off. If Father stops getting those glowing reports from my teachers or sees me faltering in my research work, he might rethink the whole idea that I’m good enough to join his world-saving crusade and demote me back to lab rat.

More late nights then. Good thing Mom taught me never to be afraid of a little hard work.