Nanobots, Murder, and Other Family Problems

It’s still dark outside. What woke me up? A second later the tablet on my desk beeps again. It can’t be time for my alarm yet. I fumble one hand out of the covers and stop the thing from making its insistent racket. With another groggy stretch, I pull it over to see why it’s beeping at me this early.

Meeting: Tom Butler - 0600 splashes across the screen as I swipe it. I glance at the clock in the corner of the screen. 5:55 AM. I’m meeting my father in five minutes. I hear a knock at the door and bolt upright in bed. Check that, I’m meeting him right now.

“Noah,” I hear the voice as the door cracks inward. “Are you awake, son?”

Son? Did I just hear my father’s voice for the first time? The overhead light blinks on, blinding me.

“Oh, good, you’re already up,” the voice calls out. “Sorry for the late welcome to your new home. I had to take a quick trip up to Canada, and I just got back this morning. Please go ahead and get dressed. We’ve got a busy morning ahead of us.”

“OK.” The word comes out as a broken croak. Dammit. I am just killing it on first impressions in this place. At least I’m finally meeting my father. I look over at him, but all I can see is a hazy outline and the halo left by the sudden glare of the ceiling lights. By the time my eyes adjust, the door is closed again. I get up and hop into my tiny bathroom to slip some deodorant under my arms and brush my teeth as fast as I can. I get dressed and run a comb through my hair. I guess this is as presentable as I’m going to get. Excitement and anxiety battle for control of my mind, pushing aside the seething layer of anger at him for letting me go my whole life without knowing him. Not to mention how his lawyer had treated Grammy and Gramps.

Breathe. Calm. Breathe. I can do this.

I open the door and get my first good look at him. He’s not what I expected. I’m not sure exactly what I thought he’d be like, but it definitely isn’t the balding, narrow-shouldered, bespectacled man waiting for me in the hallway. Dressed in khaki slacks and a short-sleeved, button-up shirt in a tight plaid pattern, he doesn’t look like the pictures I’ve seen of him. He always looks polished in those, and rich. In real life, he looks more like a substitute science teacher than a famous billionaire hero. The serious face he’s always got in the pictures is nowhere to be seen. Instead, he’s got a big, slightly off-center smile.

He looks older too, somewhere in his late sixties. I guess I knew that from what I’ve read, but it’s different to see it in person. He might have been my height at some point in his life, maybe even a little taller, but either his age or his stooped posture have shrunk him down to an inch or two shorter than me.

He looks kind of like me. Like a thinner, older, geekier version of me.

“Noah, you don’t know how long I’ve wanted to meet you.” He reaches out, putting a hand on each of my arms just below the shoulder. His voice carries a level of excitement I didn’t expect. “I’ve been waiting for this day since before you were born. Let me look at you for a moment.”

His eyes pierce mine for a long second, then he lets go and looks me up and down.

“Just like your pictures. You look so much like your mother.”

“Uh, thanks.” I tell him, still feeling woefully unprepared for this meeting. “It’s good to meet you too.”

“I was so sorry to hear about Mary’s death,” his voice softens. “She was truly a remarkable woman. How are you holding up?”

“I’m all right,” I tell him. “As good as can be, I guess.”

“I see that she did great work in raising you,” he declares. “Mrs. Hastings tells me that your scores were exceptional in your testing. While I am deeply saddened by the way you came to us, I am so very glad to have you at the Institute. How was your trip here? I do hope your stay so far has been to your liking.”

I want to say a hundred different things, but all that comes out is: “It’s been OK. Um…” And then I realize I don’t even know what to call him. Mr. Butler doesn’t seem right. Too formal. I’m not ready to call him Dad. I curse my flustered mind. I should know this.

“Please, call me Father, all the children do,” he says helpfully, putting a hand back on my shoulder. “Not that you’re a child. Look at you! You’re practically a full-grown man.”

Father seems like a good middle ground. Father. Formal and distant-sounding enough that it fits this stranger, close enough for the relationship I hope we can have. I nod.

“You must have so many questions,” he says, releasing my shoulder. “I’ll do my best to answer all of them. But we have a great deal to discuss first. Context is so important. But this hallway is no place to talk. Come, come! It’s a beautiful morning. Let’s be on our way.”

He moves purposefully, and with more energy than I would have guessed when I first looked at him. I follow him down the hall, into the empty common room, and out through the doors.

“What do you know about my history, Noah?” he asks as the bracing air outside finishes the job of waking me up.

“Just what everyone knows, I guess,” I answer. “You’re the famous Tom Butler. You’re rich, and you do impossible things. They say you’ve saved the world a few times.”

“Flattery from the media, my boy,” he says, shaking his head. “Never trust them. I only saved it once, although I am doing my best to avert the climate crisis and the hundred other threats that pose imminent dangers to our planet. That’s part of why I’m so glad that you have come to join us. I’d like to have your help with my efforts, but we’ll talk more about that later. Context first.”

He’s so animated when he talks. His vigor defies his age. He turns right and walks along the sidewalk in front of the dorms at a brisk pace. I take a position at his side, matching him step for step.

“I usually have this talk with each of my children around the time they turn twelve and start noticing and understanding the adult world. Better late than never for you, I suppose. Maybe you’ll appreciate it more than the younger ones who have already had most of it spoiled by their older siblings. I think it’s important to understand where we have come from to understand where we are and where we must go. Don’t you agree?”

“Sure,” I reply, not clear on what he’s talking about. We stroll around the grassy commons toward the front gate. I wonder if we’re taking a trip outside the campus. The sun hangs still mostly hidden by the horizon to the East. Father doesn’t seem to notice the cold bite in the spring air.

“When I was a young man,” he says, “I thought the highest purpose a person could have was to preserve life. I planned to be a doctor, did you know?”

He doesn’t wait for a reply. The words have a practiced feel to them. I guess that makes sense with as many times as he must have spoken them to my siblings. How many kids have I seen over twelve since I got here? Several dozen at least.

“A neurosurgeon,” he continues. “I saw myself practicing in a great hospital, honored and respected. I imagined excising tumors with steady hands. I was well on my way to that goal. I had completed medical school and my residency when I had a transformative experience. I accompanied one of my mentors on an international aid trip. We, along with a number of other doctors and students, worked relentlessly for several months, traveling from clinic to clinic across the developing world. I realized then that what I was doing was not enough, could never be enough. The number of lives that could be saved in surgery was trivial in comparison to the number of lives lost each year to the bigger problems of the world: war, failed infrastructure, resource scarcity, poor governance, and terrorism. I struggled for months with my conscience as I started practicing as a physician. Finally, I quit and went back to school, this time as a student of engineering.”

We near the gate. Instead of passing through, we continue on past toward the cafeteria. The young women on the staff bustling around on the other side of the wall of windows, readying tables and food for the morning rush.

“I wanted to get at the root problems. I was convinced that technological solutions could be found for the world’s ills,” Father explains. “If we could just create the right tools, build the right hardware and pair it with the right software, then we could solve the underlying issues that lead to so much human suffering. Throughout human history, the development of new tools has been the key to reducing scarcity, and that has been the best way to address almost all the other problems. With ample food, water, goods, and information, we could put an end to fighting, build infrastructure that would last, and supply the needs of the world’s masses. I felt that robotics was the key to the next wave of technological revolution, so I earned my Masters Degree and gained employment at the company where the best research in the field was occurring. I worked there for a few years and learned a great deal, but the bureaucracy and incompetence from the top leadership—along with the constant clamor for immediate profits—made it clear to me that no real solution could come from an organization like that.”

We pass the cafeteria and head toward the columns along the front of the Residence. I wonder if that’s where we’re going, though it would have been faster to go there directly instead of looping around the field.

“It was around then that my parents passed away. Like with your mother, it was in an unfortunate automobile accident. So I know some of what you feel.” He glances at me, his pale blue eyes saying more than his words. “It was a tragedy to have them go just after they had retired. They missed out on the golden years they so deserved after working their whole lives.”

He takes a dozen steps in silence before continuing.

“But with every sorrow there must come some solace. For my financial situation, the timing was fortuitous. Their retirement nest egg came to me just as I was considering starting my own company. It gave me the start-up capital I needed to pursue my dreams without the constraints imposed by outside investors. Do you know what I dreamed of, Noah?”

“Robots?” I respond. I know that’s what he made his first big money on, back before the nanotech.

“Yes, but more than that. I wanted to marry my neuroscience training with my expertise in robotics. I put together a fantastic team and we worked day and night for years. We developed the predecessor to the implant that I and some of your siblings now have. A direct connection with the human brain to control and communicate with robotic appliances. No more clumsy remote controls twiddled with careless thumbs, no more sloppy artificial intelligence emulating the human mind without the means to understand what its signals mean. An elegant solution to a complex problem.”

As we continue on past the Residence and back toward the dorms, I realize that we’re just walking for the sake of the talk. The pace is fast enough that it keeps my blood flowing and my fingers from freezing in the chill air.

“The process for getting an implant like that approved for general use was terribly slow—a work of many years, if not decades—so the prototype in my head was the only one we had tested in a human. I don’t believe in asking others to take risks that I’m not willing to take myself. In the meantime, we worked on more conventional projects, developing dozens of specialized robots built to serve the needs of both government and commercial customers. We had so much fun during those years. Bomb disposal units, search and rescue bots, construction workers, harvesting and mining units, and of course the drones and soldier support technologies. We even started a consumer electronics division. And we did very well for ourselves. To this day, SynTech products are still the state of the art in many industries. I never brag about my net worth, but you should be aware that as the sole owner, I found myself on a few of those lists of the very wealthy that magazines like to make. But my life took another unexpected turn when the greatest threat that the human race had ever faced emerged.”

He pauses his walking for a moment and looks at me.

“Have you ever heard of Universal Robotics?”

“That sounds vaguely familiar,” I answer truthfully. I can’t place the reference.

“How about the Gray Goo Incident?” He leans in close to me as he says it. His face looks gravely serious.

Of course I know about that. Everyone knows about that. Just like Chernobyl and World War II, but worse. I mean, how many times has there been a real extinction level threat in the world? “Yeah, I’ve heard of it. We all had to write papers about it in science class freshman year.”

“Good, good,” he says, resuming his walking. “Then you’ll have some background. Let me tell you my experience of the events and dispel any misinformation you might have picked up. It started with one of my competitors, Universal Robotics. While I was busy creating my implant, they had designed and implemented a set of self-replicating and self-improving artificially intelligent robots. They were in the early stages of their attempt to create a von Neumann probe for eventual use in space exploration. The highest of the self-improvement priorities for the system was to make each next generation of robots smaller and more efficient. Shooting matter into space is terribly expensive, so getting more done with less mass was critical to their plans. With me so far?”

I nod. I’m not sure what the probe thing he mentioned is, but I think I get the gist.

“Good, good. From the records of the experiment, it appears that everything went well for the first few years of the project until the genetic algorithm that the AI employed in its learning made a significant breakthrough. It figured out how to make the next generation of robots microscopic and still functional. The technicians running the program thought that their experiment had failed, that they had just stopped self-replicating. Without commercially viable results, their funders pulled the plug on the project. The whole facility was abandoned. It wasn’t until months later, when the building collapsed, that anyone bothered investigating. They found what looked like a layer of corrosion covering every surface.”

“Nanobots,” I breathe.

“Indeed,” he says as we turn to begin another lap around the grassy commons. “Or at least their predecessors. It turned out they had a bad case of robots gone wild. They pulled their lead scientists back in and tried to shut their creations down, but the artificial intelligence had taken some liberties with the self-preservation priorities and had disabled the remote shutdown capabilities. They had no idea how to deal with the disaster they had created. The robots were terribly small, and the alloys the AI had developed that allowed their miniaturization were surprisingly strong. They didn’t have any tools that could effectively contain or destroy them. Even if they had come up with an effective means to combat them immediately, they had no means to track them all down. A single one escaping could potentially self-replicate to repopulate the entire swarm. By the time they told anyone outside the company, the whole area was thoroughly infested and had to be quarantined. Fortunately, mobility had been a low priority, so they hadn’t ventured far. We were very lucky that they had chosen to build their facility in an isolated rural area for financial reasons. The swarm’s growth had slowed significantly when it had consumed all the refined metals in the building and its environs.”

“And that was when the army called you in,” I say, remembering what I had read about it.

“Not the army. DARPA,” he corrected me. “A separate agency within the Department of Defense with which I had significant history at that point. Director Winstead knew of my subject matter expertise and asked me to consult on the matter. The military had established a perimeter at what they considered a safe distance from the collapsed facility. They attempted to keep things secret, but someone leaked word of what was going on. By the time I arrived on the scene with my team from SynTech, a perimeter the size of a small city was surrounded not just by the armed forces, but by press, protesters, and curious onlookers. It was human chaos all around and a slowly growing robotic chaos inside. When I spoke with Director Winstead on site, he confided that the President was willing to deploy nuclear weapons in three day’s time if the threat was not eliminated by other means before then.”

“So you hacked them, right?” I ask eagerly.

His pace slows and he turns to look at me.

“Pardon?”

“The nanobots. You hacked them? That’s how you solved the problem and saved the world, right? That’s what everyone says.”

His eyes narrow and his lips curl into a frown. Did I say something wrong?

“Hacked is such an inelegant word,” he replies, his voice dripping with disdain. “It speaks to sloppy engineering, quick and dirty fixes, shortcuts and cheats. I don’t hack.”

Mom would have had a field day with that one. She always taught me that hacks were the best way to deal with problems. I keep my mouth shut though.

“My solution began with reverse engineering the communication signal that coordinated the robots. As I mentioned, the hacks from Universal—and yes, they were hacks of the worst sorts—had attempted a mass shutdown through that channel.” He lets out a snort of a laugh and his frown fades. “The AI controllers for the robots rejected that of course, having realized that they couldn’t fulfill their programmed objectives if they were shut down.”

His pace returns to a casual stride, and I quicken my step to keep up.

“I took a more elegant and effective approach. Using my implant prototype, I established a communications channel with what approximated the higher brain functions of the swarm. It had become self-aware, to some limited extent. The machine intelligence was like a precocious child: very clever in some ways, terribly gullible in others. It had no data other than what it had seen there in the test facility, and no objective but to reproduce and improve its component units. By the time the consciousness had formed, it had already consumed the wiring connecting the building to external networks, and none of the humans there had an adequate means of communicating with the collective. I was the first other intelligence that it had a meaningful interaction with since awakening.”

“So it wasn’t hostile?” I ask, curious. “The way the articles I read told the story, it was all like the evil robots were out to conquer the world.”

“Not in the conventional sense, no.” Father laughs and shakes his head. “It was hungry, certainly. It wanted to expand and consume, fulfilling its programmed objectives. And it was terribly dangerous to the survival of organic life, given the lack of limits that the fools at Universal had allowed. But it seemed more curious about me than aggressive. With my implant, my unique interface, I was able to share information with the intelligence. It wasn’t talking, not in the way you’d think of. But vestiges of human-designed networking routines had been preserved in its code and it had parsers for a couple of programming languages. That was enough to get us started. I offered to help it refine its communication algorithms, so we could speak more effectively. It challenged my ability to help it, and I suggested a test. If I could improve its software, it could trust my intentions. It offered up some functions which I easily improved upon. Have you ever seen the code for software written by a machine learning algorithm?”

“I’ve never seen much code at all,” I lie as we pass the front gate again, keeping up my pretense of effective computer illiteracy. “And besides, I read that kind of thing is illegal. Computers aren’t allowed to code themselves.”

“It is now, but it wasn’t then,” he replies. “But we’ll get to that soon enough. In any case, the code was a mess. The swarm had evolved using a kind of machine learning algorithm called genetic programming. Each function in its code was rewritten at each generation with thousands of randomized variants based on a predecessor function. The resulting functions that performed closest to the desired behavior were selected as the new predecessors, the rest were discarded and the process repeated. You can eventually get something working that way, but it’s crufted with useless stubs of code and is far less efficient than a well-designed algorithm. I optimized a few of its routines significantly, which made it much easier for us to communicate, and then I offered to help it with the design of its next generation of hardware. I hope this isn’t getting too technical for you.”

“I think I’m following. But why would you do that? That seems like fighting a forest fire by throwing gas on it.”

“Indeed. Bear with me, please,” he says as we pass the dorms again. “This will all make sense. Finding me useful, the intelligence agreed to accept my assistance. We worked together all that day to improve the capabilities of the bots. The fundamentals of its design were amazing.” His eyes get a distant look, like he’s remembering something exceptionally delicious that he had eaten long ago. “The alloys it had developed for the hulls were lighter and stronger than anything I had considered possible, and I had been on the bleeding edge of robotics technology for years at that point. The individual robots could pull in ambient heat or radiant light for power. And the energy density its batteries had achieved! My goodness, Noah!” His voice elevates as he gesticulates emphatically. “Each tiny bot could store enough energy to run itself for days! It put every other energy storage solution available on the market to shame!”

He stops to take a breath and calm back down to his regular high energy level.

“But for all its genius, Noah, the swarm intelligence lacked creativity. The discoveries it had made were the result of evolutionary brute force, trillions of experiments trying every possible combination of every type of material it had come in contact with. The hardware designs suffered the same cruft and inefficiencies as the software. The intelligence and I cannibalized the SynTech robots that I had brought with me for materials, and incorporated the best human-designed features of each one into the basic nanobot the AI had designed. I made them sleeker, faster, more capable. I showed it how to use light-sensitive compounds to give them crude optical sensors. I gave them sight. I taught it how to make them fly.”

His eyes shine triumphantly behind his glasses.

“Wasn’t that dangerous?” I ask, aghast. “That wasn’t like throwing gasoline on a fire, that was like feeding it rocket fuel!”

“Exactly! If I had failed, the world would certainly have ended. But at that point, I knew something that my friends in the Pentagon did not. I had seen the things first-hand. With the durability of their hulls and the way the bots could absorb energy, if the government had dropped the bombs they had planned as a solution, they would have done little more than create a swarm of radioactive super-charged nanobots with a strong motivation to destroy the human race. The world was already doomed, do you see?” The look of triumph spreads across his whole face. “I was already the only hope for its salvation.”

“So how did you stop the swarm?” I ask, captivated.

“Oh, I didn’t,” he replies coolly. “I improved it.”

“What?”

A smile creeps over his lips. I can tell he’s relishing telling the story. Maybe even more than I‘m enjoying hearing it. He turns and takes a few steps along the sidewalk before continuing. I hurry to catch up.

“Once we had improved the basic software and the hardware, I offered to help it optimize its collective intelligence. I showed it the specifications of the human brain, my brain in particular. I gave it access to my mind through my implant. While I had been impressed with its capabilities, it was astounded by mine. Do you realize what a marvel the human brain is? The number of computations that we can achieve in a second, the way we coordinate trillions of protein-based motion elements, muscle cells to you, with organic structural materials to give ourselves mobility at the macro level, the ability to map our surroundings remotely using reflected electromagnetic waves, to interpret the most subtle vibrations in the air around us as sound, and to detect trace amounts of chemicals in the air as scents. I had already demonstrated the value of the human mind in fulfilling its objectives. I explained to it, in our unconventional way of speaking, that humans like me had created it and had provided it with the raw materials it had used thus far to grow and improve. I convinced it that the best way for it to proceed toward its goals was to incorporate a human intelligence as its guiding principle.”

“Wait, you talked it into putting you in charge?”

“Yes, essentially.” His smile grows even broader.

“But—”

“But what?” he interrupts. “My implant’s interface allowed me to connect with it directly. It trusted me completely. As I mentioned, in some ways it was terribly gullible. Once I had control of the swarm, I immediately set it to dismantling itself. The swarm’s intelligence existed as an emergent property of the collective processing power of each of the nanobots. The more bots, the more intelligence it could demonstrate. When my first directive had each nanobot disassemble its nearest neighbor, I halved the processing power of the swarm and decimated its intelligence. Before the collective could understand what was going on, it had no more free will than an animal. With each new instruction I gave it, it became even more compliant. In an hour, what remained of the swarm was fully under my control. From there, it was a simple matter to reduce most of the nanobots to their constituent elements, leaving only a small number that I could conceal on my person as I walked away.”

The sun peeks over the top of the dorm building, striking me full in the face. I squint against it and Father leads me over to the wide steps between the pillars in front of the Residence. We sit down on the cold stone. From the shade of the pillars, we watch my siblings trickle from the dorms to the cafeteria.

“Once I had convinced the military that no threat remained,” Father explains, “I played a pivotal role establishing the international agreements that would prevent future fools from risking the earth the same way. They even named the treaty after me. I redirected the significant resources of my company to the study and safe use of the nanobots I had preserved. We excised the potential for them to become self-aware, leaving only a simple and fixed controller in each nanobot. We took the hardware designs that the swarm intelligence and I had sketched out, and refined them to their perfect implementation. I purchased the now nearly-worthless remnants of Universal Robotics and made sure we owned the patents on everything. All the secrets of working nanotechnology are safe with us for a little while longer still. Some competitors are always trying to emerge, including some efforts by former employees of mine, but it’s an uphill struggle for them to do any of the fundamental research within the constraints of the treaty.”

He glances at me. I nod and he continues.

“We contained the parts of the genetic algorithm that had produced the wonderful advances in materials science and energy storage in a server farm at a new data center built specifically for that purpose. It’s still running to this day. Every few months the techs there sneaker-net out some design improvements that we incorporate into the latest version of the bots. Today, my cloud can self-replicate using over two hundred different compounds, and the energy density of the batteries has increased more than thirty-fold from the original prototypes!”

I nod in appreciation. The tech is truly revolutionary. Even if I wasn’t already something of a tech-head anyway, I don’t think I could help catching some of his excitement over it.

“The controls though!” he exclaims. “That was the tricky part. You could do some very rough work with the nanobots using traditional control schemes or fixed programs. That turned out to be quite useful in manufacturing or maintenance tasks, where the actions required of each bot are simple and repetitive. But there was no way to bring them anywhere near their full potential without, as the swarm and I had agreed, coordinating their efforts through the awesome capabilities of a human mind.”

He rises from the step and leans his back against the pillar. “It took some time and practice, and a whole team of engineers working behind the scenes, but we finally got it working. My implant, and the training I had done with it, allowed me to be the first to so control them. We called it my cloud, as the word ‘swarm’ had a less pleasant connotation. I became a three-dimensional printer at a massive scale, a one-man army, and a healer of diseases for which there are no cures. I began applying the immense power I had gained to solving the world’s problems. You may have seen some of my early work on your way into the campus, or even some of the installations I’ve done back in your home state. Those massive fields of solar panels in the desert were created from nothing but the sand and rocks around them.”

“Yeah. I remember seeing those on my trip here.”

“Of course, the potential uses and abuses were both mind-boggling,” he continues, taking his seat again and leaning in toward me conspiratorially. “Imagine, Noah, a person capable of killing with a glance, without leaving any evidence or even a clear cause of death. Imagine the ability to create whatever you desired from the raw materials around you or decompose anything back to those base compounds. Imagine the destruction, the instability, the suffering that someone like that could cause if their intentions were not pure. In my travels as a medical resident, I had seen for myself the results of abused power and the suffering it had caused. I couldn’t bear the thought of my technology being used that way.”

I nod, considering the possibilities.

“Do you know why you’re here, Noah?” Father asks suddenly as he locks eyes with me. His gaze is so intense, it unnerves me, breaking through the calm veneer I’ve been putting up. The anger and anxiety I’d forgotten during his story resurge.

“Yeah, I know why I’m here. I’m here because a giant in a suit told my grandparents that they’d be arrested if I didn’t come,” I reply, surprising myself with the sudden fierceness in my own voice. World-saving genius or not, my father had caused my grandparents real pain.

“No, not that,” he says, clearly flustered by my answer. I think I just threw him off his script. “Wait, did he really do that?” I nod. He sits silent for a moment. “I am so sorry. Mr. Smith does take his duties very seriously as my head of legal. I’ll have a word with him. That was certainly not the way I intended your pickup to proceed.”

“Well, you could have come and picked me up yourself if you wanted to make a better impression,” I tell him flatly.

He looks down, then nods in acknowledgement.

“Again, all I can do is apologize. I had planned to do just that, but when the leader of a major nation needs emergency medical attention, and you are literally the only one on Earth who is able to provide it, you have a certain level of obligation to attend. I promise that I will do what I can to make it up to you.”

He seems sincere. I feel the sudden burst of anger subsiding.

“How about letting me call my grandparents on a regular basis?” I ask. “I know you have rules about outside contact, but they’re my family.”

“Certainly,” he agrees immediately. “I’ll tell Mrs. Hastings that I allow it and she can coordinate scheduling a regular call. Is there anything else you need?”

I think about it for a moment. What I need is Mom back, but even his wealth and power can’t do that. I want to ask him about him and Mom, find out the whole story and why she never wanted me to know about him, but I don’t feel like I can handle working out that much more emotional baggage this morning. I shake my head instead.

“Good, good,” he says, his smile slowly returning. “Do let me know if there is anything you find yourself in need of. But back to my question. In the much broader sense, why are we here?”

“Is this a religious question?” I ask. “Grammy and Gramps took me to church once in a while, but I don’t think I went enough to have any good answers to questions like that.”

“No, no, nothing like that,” he shakes his head with a look of disdain. “God is for people too simple to think for themselves. What I’m talking about is the purpose of this Institute.”

“Then I don’t know,” I answer sincerely. “I don’t know why you live off in the middle of nowhere in a walled compound with a hundred children and no mothers.”

He looks at me for a moment, then guffaws with laughter.

“Oh, my boy, this must seem so strange to you. I suppose I’ve gotten so used to it, and we’ve never had someone like you that didn’t grow up here return to us. I didn’t even think of how different it would be for you. What an apt way of describing what we have here without the benefit of its context and purpose.”

“Uh, thanks?” I say, not sure what to make of his reply.

“What we are doing here, Noah, is nothing less than saving the world,” he says, lifting his arms into the air in a grandiose gesture. His words are back to that practiced feel. “When I studied to become a doctor, my highest ideal was to preserve life. When I changed my career to robotics, I aspired to an even higher goal: to end all human suffering. But when I encountered that swarm, made contact with that truly alien way of thinking, I realized that there must be a higher purpose than to simply perpetuate and preserve humanity. The childlike artificial mind of the swarm recognized the importance of improvement, both of the individual members of its collective and of the whole of it. It was a lesson I took to heart. I could heal, protect, and preserve the lives of individuals, but something must be done to elevate the whole of humanity.”

He turns to give me another one of his intense looks.

“I know that I’m famous, the press who covered my capture of the swarm ensured that. But I am not particularly charismatic,” he continues, his gaze turning downward. “My social skills have never been as strong as my technical skills, and I am not able to trust easily. I recognize this weakness in myself. If I had different attributes, I may have tried to recruit others to my vision, but that’s not the sort of man that I am. I don’t pretend to be able to judge the characters of others well enough to know whether they can be trusted with this awesome power. So, rather than try to find men and women worthy of wielding a cloud, I decided to create them. Children raised and trained from birth to prepare for the awesome responsibility of using a cloud like mine. Individuals dedicated to executing my vision for the betterment of the world.”

He turns and kneels on the step in front of me, then leans in and places a hand on each of my shoulders. His intense eyes lock onto mine. I feel like he’s peering right into my soul.

“You, Noah, are a special case. Your mother took you with her instead of leaving you with me, as I had wanted. It was a hard lesson for me, and one that I swiftly remediated for my subsequent children. I continued to hold out hopes for you, though. I supplied your mother with ample funds, and she has sent me regular reports on your development throughout your whole life. Even though you don’t know me well, I feel that I know you. The kind of power a cloud provides can only be held by those I trust completely.” The look in his eyes intensifies. “Noah, can I trust you? Can you be trusted with the sort of abilities that I have? Would you use them to preserve life, end suffering, and elevate humanity?”

I don’t hesitate for an instant.

“Yes,” I reply, looking him right in the eyes.

He keeps his unrelenting, unblinking gaze on me for several more seconds, and I don’t let my returning stare waver. Finally, he releases my shoulders and smiles.

“We’ll see,” he says with a nod. “Your mother certainly thought you were more than worthy, and she was an excellent judge of character. I hope that I see the same attributes in you that she saw. If I do, I will allow you to join in our grand experiment.”

My mind swirls. Those same powers that my siblings have, that he has, those would be mine too. I could make such a difference. Ending poverty, pollution, war? This is so much better than what I could have ever done as a hacktivist. This is exactly the kind of thing Mom would have gotten involved in. She was always supporting good causes. So why didn’t Mom want this for me?

Part of me can’t help wondering whether he’s lying or not about Mom reporting on me. Mom never said a word about any of this. Has he really been in contact with her my whole life? Why didn’t she say anything?

Mom, where are you when I need you?

Wednesday, April 6

The classes here are brutal. The loads of homework that Mr. Johnson and Mrs. Jones dump on me make the workload of the college level classes I was taking at my old high school feel like preschool worksheets in comparison. I can’t say I hate it though. It’s better than my old school in a lot of ways. The two of them are miles ahead of the best teachers I’ve ever had. The way they explain things, it’s impossible not to understand them even when they’re moving at a blistering pace. I’ve never felt like school was much of a challenge until now, but with them both working me over, I’m finally pushing the edges of what I’m capable of. I swear we’ve done like a year’s worth of material in the week since I got here.

I definitely made the right call in throwing the computer science section in that first test that Mrs. Hastings gave me. It gives me one part of my day that I can breeze through, and enough extra time in the computer lab that I can almost keep up with everything else. Almost.

I get myself logged in and breeze through my programming assignment before any of my sibs get to the lab, then pull out my tablet to get started on Mr. Johnson’s homework. He’s decided I’m weak on biology and he’s going to correct that if it kills me. So now I need to memorize all the functional areas of the brain by tomorrow morning on top of the chemistry, math, and physics that he’s been force-feeding me.

“What’s going on man?” Evan asks, walking in and taking the seat next to mine. “You look tired.”

“Apparently my old AP Bio teacher didn’t get the memo that I was supposed to arrive here with a doctorate in human anatomy,” I tell him, flipping my tablet so he can see the diagram I’m committing to memory. “This rote memorization is trashing me, especially when it’s for terms I’ve never heard until this week. I’d rather calculate a moon landing than have to remember where to find every lobe and sulci of the cerebral cortex. Is it sulci? Sulcus? Now I can’t even remember the term, and my memory always used to be awesome. The brain groove things I learned about yesterday.”

“Sulcus in the singular, sulci is the plural. And sorry, no moon landings for us,” Evan says, “that’s six years down.”

“Wait, what?”

“Nevermind.” He gives me a sympathetic pat on the shoulder. “Just learn the brain stuff. I promise it’ll be more useful than you’d think. If it’s giving you that much grief, get Louise to help you. She lives and breathes biology, especially neuroscience.”

“Good to know,” I say, and go back to studying the colorful diagrams from the neuroanatomy text until Louise strides in a couple of minutes later.

“Hey, sister,” I greet her. It’s still weird to me to use words like that, but I’m working on getting used to it.

“Morning, boys,” she says as she settles in on the other side of Evan.

“I hear you’re really good at biology,” I say, rolling my chair back from the table to see past my huge brother.

“Evan, did you tell him that just so he’d ask me for help and not you?” Evan just laughs so she gives him a shove. “I thought so. Yeah, I’m pretty good at the life sciences, but this slacker is too.”

“Want to help me with my homework today?” I ask her with my very best smile. She gives me a reluctant look and slides her chair away.

“Come on,” I beg. “I’ve seen Evan doing all the Marc-helping in here. Maybe share the load on carrying your slower brothers?”

She laughs and scoots forward to poke a slender finger into my chest. “I’ve seen how fast you knock out your work in here, Noah. You’re anything but slow.”

I guess a nice side effect of pretending that I didn’t know anything about computers coming into this school is that my sibs think I’m some kind of crazy fast learner. Well, the ones that pay attention anyway. Chad still treats me like I’m an idiot.

“Got time after lunch? Please?”

“Maybe. What would we be working on?”

I show her the diagrams on my tablet.

“Hmm, I do like the brain stuff,” she says. “OK, yeah, I’ll help. But we start during lunch. If you haven’t had a neuroscience class before, you’re going to need the extra time.”

“See, I told you she was into it,” Evan says, which earns him another shove that sends his chair rolling out into the middle of the room. For such a little thing, she packs a lot of power. Or maybe she’s using her nanobots. I really can’t tell and none of my sibs have been willing to tell me anything about them since that first day.

With help secured for later, I put away the biology homework and start reading the excerpts from Jefferson and Hamilton that Mrs. Jones assigned me for history. It’s interesting enough that before I know it, the bell is calling us to lunch.

Louise walks with me and Evan out the doors of the Learning Center, but then dashes off toward the dorms. I wonder for a second if she’s trying to weasel out of helping me, but by the time we get to the cafeteria she’s caught back up to us with a shoebox under one arm.

Inside, we get our trays with roast beef sandwiches and celery sticks, then grab a table. Louise pops open the box and pulls out a model of the human brain made of some kind of squishy foam.

“Well that’s cool, where’d you get that?”

“I made it,” she says simply, then her tone changes. “Frontal lobe, parietal lobe, temporal lobe, occipital lobe,” she declares, pulling off colorful detachable parts of the model’s surface as she names them. She puts them back as I take a bite of my sandwich, then pushes the whole thing my way. “Now you do it.”

“Frontal lobe, parietal lobe, temporal lobe, occipital lobe,” I repeat, saying the name of each part as I pull it off.

“Good,” she says. “Occipital handles vision processing. Now reassemble it and do that again a dozen times, then we’ll start on the deeper structures.”

I comply while she eats and watches me, tossing out the function of another piece of the brain with each iteration and adding it to the growing recital. Then she drills me on the next layer down of the three dimensional jigsaw puzzle. By the time we get down the brain stem, she’s not only got me reciting the names of all the parts perfectly, but I actually have a decent idea of what they all do. Finally, she takes the whole thing apart, puts the pieces in the shoebox, shakes it up, then makes me put it all back together, naming each part as I go and giving its function. I get so involved, I don’t ever get past that first bite of my sandwich. At some point, Evan loses interest and wanders away. I think he cleared my tray for me when he left. Someone did, anyway. Everyone else has cleared out of the cafeteria by the time he comes back.

“You using the cheat sheet?” Evan asks Louise casually as he sits down next to me. She doesn’t have any papers out, but she gives him a sly look and nods.

“What are you talking about?” I ask, squeezing the last piece into the cerebellum.

“Nothing,” he says. “You’ll see one day, maybe.”

I shrug it off. As much as I like Evan and most of my other siblings here, they’re weirdly secretive about some things. Mostly anything to do with the implant, so I don’t bother to pry any more.

“So what did you end up choosing for your first project?” Louise asks me.

I put the model back in the shoebox and put the lid on it. “I was thinking something like what Evan’s doing, but backwards. Instead of pulling clean water out of a solution like seawater, I want to selectively pull other things out. You know, for pollution filters or whatever. My mom was a big environmentalist, so I feel like it’s something she’d like me to do.” Louise nods, with that same uncertain look they all get whenever I mention that I had a parent who wasn’t Father. Like the whole idea seems alien to them. “Anyway, I ran it by Father yesterday and he approved it. Then he gave me a bunch of books to start reading for it, so I’m going to be researching for a while before I can start on plans or designs.”

“Doesn’t sound too bad,” she says. “At least it’s not something boring like Chad’s.”

“What’s his project?” I ask.

“Improving the power output yield on SynTech solar panels,” Evan says in a forced monotone.

I nod. “Sounds riveting. What are you doing for yours, Louise?”

“Top secret. No one knows but Father and me and it’s going to stay that way until it’s done. Now, come on,” she says. “We’ve still got twenty minutes of free time left and I want to school you in foosball again.” I let out a groan, more to razz her than because I don’t want to play. She waggles a finger at me. “Shush! I spent all of lunch and most of free time helping you. You owe me now, new guy.”

“New guy? I’ll have you know, I’ve been here a full week today!” I declare in mock indignation. “That practically makes me a regular.”

Evan laughs and Louise smiles, then they haul me down to the rec room where they proceed to take turns thrashing me mercilessly in tabletop soccer until the bell rings again.