Nanobots, Murder, and Other Family Problems

I am a straight-up wizard.

Back when I used to have time for video games, I always liked the ones where I could play some kind of magic user. Something about the notion of spewing fire from my fingertips or freezing monsters with a word appealed to me. Maybe it’s because I’ve always felt underpowered physically. I was never very coordinated, and I sucked at most sports. I’ve always felt like my mind was the strongest part of me, and now Father’s gifts have made that true in every sense.

I can cast any spell in the book now. Want to heat things up? Just discharge the battery from a few thousand bots and I’ve got a white hot spark ready to ignite anything. Want to cast an ice spell on an object? Glom a million bots on it and have them pull as much ambient heat as they can, and you’ve got yourself a popsicle in an hour or so. My telekinesis is only limited by how many bots I have to throw at something. Given a big enough cloud, I could lift almost anything, and I haven’t even started pushing my limits on how much I can grow.

And then there’s the construction features. The full library is huge. I can print just about anything I can imagine. I haven’t come up with anything so far that didn’t have a blueprint in the software. Even if I did, I can add new build templates just by feeling something out. All that’s left after that is issuing a command to clone it and choosing a materials palette.

It’s getting better every day. Not just in the sense of being able to do more, although that’s definitely true, but coping with the deluge of input that constantly batters my brain. I haven’t passed out from the pain at all today, and I’ve been pushing hard. Seeing in and around and through things feels almost natural.

DIAGNOSTIC MODE

Still no hemorrhaging. Just a healthy, nanobot-infested brain.

But I can’t help worrying about the extensive remodeling since I got the update. Big chunks of my cortex are showing completely different activity patterns than they did before I went into Father’s lab three days ago. I’m probably losing something, but I don’t really care what. Whatever it is, it’s worth it.

I see Chad walking across the commons to the Research Center for another follow-up visit with Father. Once he passes, I get up from where I’ve been lurking on the Residence steps. Time to get my conspiracy club together for a quick meeting. I just need to distract Marc to make sure he doesn’t crash it.

The little guy who was asking for tricks the other day is out playing on the grass with a couple of others from his class. I still can’t remember his name, which bugs me. I always remember names. It’s something I’m really good at.

Doesn’t matter. It’ll come to me in a minute. Anyway, he’s the perfect distraction.

“Hey, buddy,” I say, walking towards him.

“Hey, Noah,” he says. “Can you do more tricks today?”

“I can’t right now,” I tell him. “But I heard that Marc really wants to talk about our Africa trip today. You should ask him about Djibouti.”

“I can’t ask him about his booty!” he laughs.

“Jee-boo-tee,” I enunciated slowly. “It’s a country. We went there, Me and Marc and Father and the rest of the old kids. Remember?”

“Oh, yeah. I know about that.”

“Good. Go ask Marc about what we did there. He’s got the best stories.”

“Yeah he does!” he exclaims, running off.

Mission accomplished. That should hold him for hours. I head to the computer lab while sending out my bot senses across the campus. It’s amazing how much I can see and feel all at once. I find Jeff in his room, Evan and Louise in the rec room, and Andrea sitting under a tree behind the Residence sketching on her notepad. With the barest thought, I form little nanobot speakers near each of them. A mic connected to the speakers forms almost instinctively near my mouth.

“Come to the computer lab,” I whisper to all of them at once, just loud enough for only them to hear it.

I feel each of them stop what they were doing once they realize it was me talking to them. They all start moving toward the Learning Center. A wave of nausea and dizziness crashes down and I have to catch myself against the hallway wall before I fall. Shit. I pushed myself too hard again. I see and feel too much. I pull my bots back into a tight sphere around me, but it’s too late, the headache is throbbing again. Every heartbeat is an agonizing pulse of lava through my brain. I stumble through the computer lab door and get myself into a seat before my balance gives out again. I sit there in the lab with the lights off and put my head down while I wait for the attack to subside.

Breathe. Calm. Breathe.

I turn the inputs from the cloud all the way down and get a moment of sweet relief. Another quick check on the diagnostics to make sure I’m not having a stroke. No, I’m still good, no tissue damage.

“Are you OK, Noah?” asks Louise. I hadn’t heard her come in. I feel blind now when I don’t have my cloud out there sensing for me.

I look up and see Andrea echo the question with a concerned look.

DOPE-ME

It works well and it works fast as the jolt to my chemical receptors does its thing.

“Yeah, I’m good,” I reassure them, sitting up. “Whatever is in the update isn’t doing any harm. I get some little headaches, but not any worse than when I worked hard with the old version of the cloud.”

It’s only a little lie. And it’s not even what they’re worried about. The headaches are just from overworking my gray matter, not from an AI takeover.

“You probably have not reached the critical mass required to awaken the sentience of the artificial intelligence for your cloud,” Jeff suggests as he comes into the lab. “Please make certain to keep your nanobot count down to a safe level. The last thing we need is one more risk to the earth.”

“Of course,” I lie. At this point, I’m sure that Jeff’s theory is garbage, but he’s all in on it and it’s keeping him where I need him to be, so I keep playing along.

“So, have you been able to discern what defensive systems we need to worry about?” he asks.

“It’s hard to tell,” I reply. “Father’s still running the older version of the implant hardware, so his situational awareness probably isn’t where mine is with the third generation implant. But then again, he’s got decades of experience with it. If he were running the same rig that he put into me, there’s no way we could surprise him with anything. But even using the old implant hardware, I’m pretty sure that he’ll get plenty of warning if there’s anything dangerous around him. A lot of the defensive stuff works like the sentry routine we used on the trip, but it’s on all the time in the background. It has automatic recognition for anything that matches a virtual arsenal of dangerous things. He’d know if there was a weapon anywhere near him.”

“Well that certainly limits our options,” Louise says with a frown. “Not that we even have guns or anything,”

“I could print one,” I tell her. “The new build library has a bunch of models. And ammo too. But I don’t think it would help. He’d definitely see that coming. There are triggers built in to watch for stuff like that. I get warning prickles all the time for anything remotely unsafe. One of the kids at the table next to mine dropped a butter knife this morning at breakfast and my implant called my attention right to it. Anything potentially dangerous, anything moving fast, the bots are all over watching for that.”

Andrea gestures and forms a stick figure laying sideways with a stream of little Z’s popping up from its head.

“No good,” I answer, shaking my head. “The cloud runs twenty-four seven. It’s got a special mode that it goes into when you go to sleep that would wake him if anything unexpected happened, like us sneaking into his room.”

“Can we simply overwhelm him with our bots?” Jeff asks. “If we all get the update and grow to our maximum safe capacity, we should have sufficient numbers to outmatch his cloud by a large margin, should we not?”

“That’s no good either,” I respond, feeling like a downer. “Remember when Chad was building his statue? Father has some kind of override that shut down Chad’s cloud. I’m sure he can do that for all of ours. I think he trusts us, but he’s not going to leave himself without a way to stop us if he needs to. Besides, he’s fought using his cloud before. He’s killed with them. Even if we outnumber him, experience matters.”

The room goes quiet.

“We could wait for the next trip,” Evan says. “Hit him when he commits his whole cloud to some build like he did building that big desalination plant.”

I feel a twinge of regret for the missed opportunity in Djibouti. Of course, now that I have a better idea of what the cloud provides defensively, I realize that was probably wishful thinking on my part. He could easily have done what he did without committing all of his nanobots. The construction library in the upgraded version lets you pick how much of your cloud you want to allocate to a job.

“I don’t think he’s going back out,” Louise answers glumly. “I was talking to him about it the other day. I think we’re going out without him on the next round of missions.”

“Even if he did go out again,” I add, “there’s no reason to think that he would do the heavy lifting next time.”

“So what can we do?” Evan asks.

“I’m working on a few ideas. I don’t know if they’ll work, and they’re all pretty risky. But all of them require us all to get updated to have a chance.”

“I do not like that idea,” says Jeff. “I’d like to eliminate the impending danger to the earth as soon as possible.”

“If you’ve got something better, I’m all ears.”

He just gives me a long look and then slowly shakes his head.

“All right, then.”