Nanobots, Murder, and Other Family Problems

The morning sun comes shining in through the open door. I enjoy a few lazy moments in my sleeping bag before I get up. On the other side of the spacious shelter, Louise and Andrea are covering their heads with pillows, doing their best to pretend that dawn isn’t telling us that it’s time to get to work. I get my shoes on and stumble outside, where the guides are already up and loading the van.

“Noah!” Father says as he sees me. “Good, you’re up. You’ll be on sentry duty today, so go ahead and get that switched on before we leave. The water facility we’re doing today is bigger than the last few, so we’ll all stay together until we have that done. We may have time to lay the pipe for it this afternoon, or possibly tomorrow depending on how the construction goes.”

“Sure thing, Father.”

“What can I get you for breakfast?” he asks with his usual morning energy. “We’ve got honey flatbread or some leftover sambusas.”

“Leftovers, please,” I reply, stretching my arms wide to work out a kink in my back.

He smiles as he pulls the box of meat pastries from the fridge in the back of one of the trucks, stares at it for a few moments, then hands it to me piping hot. I let myself be drawn in by his grin. Has something changed between us?

I could let him live.

SENTRY-MODE

My cloud disperses out and away, way past where the standard distribution would put them. I wander around the camp with my sambusa in hand, nibbling at it and feeling all the metal anywhere near us. There’s plenty around with the machinery we built last night and the trucks. I walk the camp perimeter and look out, not sensing anything dangerous anywhere.

I lick the grease off my fingers as I finish the last bite. I’m glad the guides handle getting us fresh meals every night. I don’t think any of us know how to cook under the best of conditions, and out here we’d end up eating as much sand as food if we tried to make dinner ourselves.

“Earpieces on, everyone. Roll call!” Father calls.

I tap the earpiece. Voices start sounding in my ear.

“Chad is on.”

“Louise is here.”

“So is Noah,” I chime in.

“Evan too.”

A cheerful whistle comes in from Andrea.

“Jeff is on.”

“Hey guys, Marc is on. Can we play twenty questions?”

“Perhaps later, Marc,” Father says patiently. “Load up, please. All of you are in the van this morning.”

We pile in and drive away from the camp, leaving last night’s shelter with its solar panel array and flywheel power storage. Any of the surrounding villages can run a wire here to get free power for as long as the sun keeps shining. Ahmed’s truck veers off behind us to make a stop at the first one, where he’ll tell them about the opportunity and leave them with supplies and instructions.

As today’s sentry, I get shotgun in the van. It’s over an hour to today’s build site, so most of my sibs close their eyes and sack out. I haven’t felt any trouble yet, but I squirm around in my seat every few minutes to make sure I’m watching for dangers from every direction. It’s weird not having my regular floating eyes to see all around me, since the sentry routine commandeers my whole cloud. I guess it’s worth it to be able to detect danger for miles all around. Ahead of us, Father’s pickup leads the way, the bed loaded with the remnants of his giant load of bots. His stockpile is down to a fraction of what he started with. He’ll probably put up the building then go rebuild his cloud while we take care of the desalination pods and the power array.

The twisted desert shrubs flit by as the miles pass.

I feel a prodding from behind me and turn to see what the sensors have picked up. Behind us there’s metal coming down the road that doesn’t look like a regular car. It’s a truck, a big one. Looks like something military, the kind that would haul soldiers around. I focus the bots in closer, and see what look like guns, lined up in regular intervals in the back of the truck. From their positioning and movements, those guns are being held at the ready. Another truck comes in range, pulling up behind the first one.

“Father,” I say. “Armed group behind us, coming in fast! At least two trucks. Twenty-eight guns I can see so far.”

“Thank you, Noah,” comes the response in my ear. “Bashir, Ibrahim, please pull over. We’ll take our stand here. This seems coordinated enough that we don’t want to drive into an ambush. Is everyone awake and ready?”

A chorus of groggy affirmatives come from the back of the van as my siblings wake up fast. The van pulls to the side of the road behind the pickup, and we pile out. Marc starts jabbering instructions for emergencies to himself, getting most of them wrong. Louise tries to help him but that only makes things louder as Chad decides he needs to be in charge right now and starts shouting at Marc to shut up.

“Everyone stay calm,” Father commands, putting up one hand. My siblings instantly go silent. “Let me get a look. This may not be a problem, so stay calm.”

The pile of bots disappears from the truck bed as Father closes his eyes. I don’t think any of us even breathe.

“No. This is, in fact, a problem. A significant one,” he says after a moment. His forehead wrinkles in a worried frown. “Those aren’t from the Somali government army or the Somaliland armed forces. None of the other factions should be here. Shield up!”

SHIELD

Endless days of training kick in and I’m crouched down on the hard-baked sand with my shield building before I can think twice. It takes longer than normal for me to get encased, since parts of my cloud are traveling back from the far edge where they’d been scouting. Andrea is taking longer than she did in practice too, but I see her get covered just before my shield closes all the way. The last thing I see before the outside world disappears is the look on Father’s face. His eyes have a hard coldness to them, his mouth pulled in a twisted frown. I know that look. I’ve seen it in the mirror.

“Safe!” a chorus of voices say in my ear.

“Safe!” I call out.

“Andrea!” Father’s voice rings sharply. She hums a note in response. “Good,” he says. “Remember to stay sheltered until I call the all clear.” I hear the cold fury in his voice. It’s unnerving how much I understand that exact feeling.

Several minutes pass, each of which feels like hours inside the sensory deprivation chamber of the shield. I wonder if it’s better or worse that I can still see the clock slowly ticking away in the overlay. At least I know time hasn’t stopped completely.

Muffled sounds come from the outside. Someone is shouting something angry that I can’t understand. Then screams of horror, quickly followed by the muffled staccato bursts of gunshots. I feel stings on my bot skin, at least a couple of bullets hit my shield.

Silence.

Then waiting.

“Father?” I hear Marc’s voice ask tentatively in my earpiece.

“Not now, Marc!” Father’s voice thunders. He can be scary when he wants to be. “Stay in the shields!”

Waiting.

The clock says it was less than twenty minutes. It lies. It was forever.

Finally, Father calls the all clear. I let the shell of my shield melt away. Instead of the blast of desert heat I expect, a cold breeze hits my face as I get up. Remembering that I’m on sentry duty, I get back on watch. There could be more of them.

SENTRY-MODE

My bots spread out. I look at where I last felt the trucks that had followed us. There’s no sign of them. As my bot senses extend, I don’t pick them up anywhere. Whoever was in them is gone too. The rage that had contorted Father’s face is gone now, replaced by a reassuring calm.

“Don’t worry, my children,” Father proclaims. “Everything is safe now. Those men will have a long walk back to the nearest town to think about changing careers.”

He must have stripped them of everything metal they had, because I can’t sense them at all now. Not a belt buckle, not a boot eyelet. The pickup bed is overflowing now with fine black dust. I forgot how fast bots can grow when they have access to refined metals like guns and trucks.

Marc seems to be over his panic, but Andrea looks shaken. She always hated the training drills with the shields. I wonder how much of what’s got her freaked out is from the attack itself, and how much is the trauma of being trapped in the egg for so long. We all seem to have weird side effects from the implants, I wonder if one of hers is claustrophobia. Or maybe she came by that naturally. Hard to tell what’s innate in our brains and what’s twisted by using the implants.

“Enough excitement for the morning,” Father declares. “Let’s get to work. There are hungry and thirsty people counting on us.”

Thanks for saving us, Father. I’m glad I didn’t kill you yet. Maybe we can call it even now between you and me.

Maybe.