Nanobots, Murder, and Other Family Problems

I pass Mr. Smith and a pair of his legal goons in the hallway of the Research Center. The gorilla in a lawyer suit looks at me like I’m something foul he scraped off the bottom of his too-shiny wingtip shoes. I studiously ignore him and turn the corner to the hallway where Father has his office.

“Oh, good, Noah. You’re here,” Father says, looking up from his desk. His office is spacious but cluttered, with stacks of papers piled on several narrow tables against one wall between computers and other hardware. The opposite wall is one gigantic whiteboard covered with a tidy scrawl and arcane diagrams from corner to corner. The place looks more like an engineering work area than anything else.

“Morning, Father,” I greet him, carefully hiding my hate with a friendly smile.

“Let’s be about it then,” he says, rising to his feet. He comes around the desk, wearing his usual outfit of a short-sleeved button-down shirt and khaki slacks. “Come along, my lab is this way.”

I follow him down a few twists of hallway and through a door that could have guarded a bank vault. The lab is a cross between an operating room and an electronics workshop. Several large lights hang from the ceiling, pointed at what I can only assume is an operating table, an ominous-looking slab of dull steel in the center of the room with a dozen black straps dangling from each side. Racks of servers hum against one wall, neatly coiled wire probes hooking to ports in the front. Half a dozen monitors cluster around a standing desk with a keyboard and mouse on it not far from the operating table. Across from the server racks, a pair of large, deep sinks share the wall with open shelves holding medical supplies. Clear plastic packages containing syringes, scalpels, and gauze stack up next to an array of small machines that look like they belong in a hospital.

“Just a moment, let me get the rig,” Father says. He opens a cabinet in one corner by the server racks and pulls out a helmet with a pair of cameras attached to the front. “Here, this one should be your size. Try it on, please.”

He hands it to me and helps me with the straps. It fits snugly on my head, but the front comes down too far, covering my eyes and leaving me blind. It’s lighter than I would have expected from looking at it.

“How’s that?”

“Surprisingly comfortable.”

“Good, good,” he says. “That’s important, as you’ll be wearing it nearly all the time for the next month. Let’s fire it up.”

He guides my hand up to a button on the side of the rig and suddenly I see his face looking at me. “Are the cameras working?” I nod, not seeing any lag in the display as my head moves. It’s almost like I don’t have my eyes covered. “Take it for a little spin around the room.”

I comply, walking past the desk and around the table. “Yeah, still good.”

“Excellent. Let’s put up the overlay then.” He steps over to the desk and his fingers click across the keyboard.

Can you see this?

The text appears in large letters in the air in front of me. I turn my head and it follows me, staying centered in my field of vision. “Yeah, I see it.” I reach out with a hand in front of my covered face. My fingers pass through the ghostly words.

“Good. I’m going to feed in some more text. Practice reading it while you move around.”

The first message disappears, replaced by smaller words that look like an article from a medical journal. I steady myself with one hand on the operating table as I try to walk and read at the same time. My stomach churns at the incongruity between the fixed overlay and the moving world and I have to stop and close my eyes for a moment.

“It takes a bit of getting used to, I know,” Father says. “Take as long as you need.”

I snap my eyes open, keeping my head still this time. The text is still front and center, superimposed on my view of the world. At a second look, the letters are semi-transparent. I can see through them enough to make out the shelves behind them.

“Is the display adjustable?”

“Of course,” Father answers. “You’ll be able to change the font, size, opacity, justification, and later even split it out into multiple windows. I’ll sync your headgear up to your tablet before we’re done here and give you the documentation and an app for the controls.”

I nod, getting another little twinge of nausea. I take a deep breath and a few steps, reading through the article as I do. Looks like some researchers are working on new procedures for performing surgery on stomach ulcers. At least I’m not going to trip and fall from being too fascinated by the subject matter. Another dozen steps and I’m getting to the end of the displayed text.

“How do I—” I was about to ask how to scroll the text down, but when I look down as far as I can without moving my head, the text slides up, revealing more of the article. “Nevermind, figured it out.” I hear Father’s amused chuckle. I look way up and it scrolls back.

I practice reading and walking, letting go of the table. It takes a bit, but the nausea fades as my body gets used to having the overlay there. I stop worrying that I’m going to lose my breakfast. Something about it reminds me of playing a first-person shooter. There’s even a villain, an evil old man fiddling with some kind of glove at his standing desk. Who knew that all those years of video games would pay off? Too bad there’s no insta-kill mega-gun in this game. I’d sell my soul for that cheat code right now if it could take him out.

“Ready for the next step?” Father asks. His crooked smile makes my stomach turn even more than the superimposed text in the headset.

“Yeah, ready.”

“Come on over here and let’s get you gloved up.” I walk past the creepy operating table with its straps and stop next to his desk. One of his monitors is a view of what I’m looking at, and as I focus on it, it goes into an infinite recursion, like a pair of mirrors facing each other, screen in screen in screen in screen. The sight gives me another twinge of nausea, so I look away.

“Left hand, please,” he says. I hold out my arm and he pulls the glove he was playing with onto it. He adjusts several straps until it fits perfectly. “Flex those fingers, make sure it feels comfortable. Like the headset, you’ll be wearing this all day, every day.”

I test it out. It’s light, flexible, and made of material breathable enough that I barely feel it once it’s on.

“Good, good. Now, keep your hand still for just a moment,” he clicks something on one of his several screens and the text on my overlay disappears. He clicks one more time on a little icon of a glove. “There. Now flex your thumb, just like so.” He demonstrates moving his thumb, just past the end knuckle.

I repeat the motion. A big letter A appears on my overlay. A mirroring letter appears on his screen. I flex it again, another A. Another and another. I bend both joints and get an E in front of me and on his screen. I move my whole hand a few times and get a spew of garbage letters. Yeah, this is going to take some practice.

“Understand the concept?” Father asks.

“Yeah. It’s a one handed keyboard hooked up with sensors in the glove. I don’t understand why we would need this though. Can’t your implant just kind of, you know, tell what you want to write?”

Father chuckles. “I suppose it could, given a significant effort by both you and the hardware. But detecting the notion of a letter in your cortex is infinitely harder than detecting the nerve impulse to move a specific muscle. Believe me, this is much more effective.”

“I’ll take your word for it,” I concede, flexing the glove again and getting another spew of random letters across my overlay. “Any chance you have some training software for this thing?”

He nods, his crooked smile widening. “Right in the app you’ll get today. And you’ll practice using it on all your schoolwork starting tomorrow. Your teachers will know to give you a little slack these next few days as you get used to it. Now make a fist and hold it for just a moment.”

Clenching my fist is easy, it’s getting it to relax after my overlay clears that’s harder. I just wish I could take him down right now, hit him before he suspects anything then choke the life out of him. But the security camera in the corner of the room guarantees that if I did that and somehow succeeded, I’d spend the rest of my life in jail. Maybe I could plead insanity, get off with some time in a mental institution instead.

No. It wouldn’t even work. His tech would stop me somehow.

Wait, watch, learn.

Oblivious to my feelings, Father gives me a quick course on using the typing glove. He runs me through the alphabet, then all the extra controls—like turning it off so I can move my hand without accidentally typing.

“Of course, this will all be much more natural once the implant’s sensors are reading your nervous system’s responses directly, but for now this will help you develop what they mistakenly term muscle memory. It’s actually all just brain memory, of course, but specialized in the motor cortex.”

I nod, absorbing the information. I need to know everything I can about how the implant works.

“As you become more familiar with the setup, try to type as much as you can. Use it to take notes in your classes, write down your conversations, and capture your thoughts. Anything that gets you typing. The more you do it, the easier your transition to the implant will be.”

I glance at his screen where my typing had appeared. He notices as the monitor showing my camera flashes with that same view. “Ah, yes, privacy. Don’t worry. Once we’re done here, the rig will be paired with your tablet alone. I won’t be peeking in on what you are looking at or writing down. You may have noticed that we don’t have cameras in any of the student buildings here. I think it’s very important for young people to have a sense of their own private space.”

Except for how you use your cleaning staff to spy us out anyway, I carefully don’t say. Instead I just nod.

“You’ll be able to share what you write with your tablet’s network connection to the campus network. You’ll submit your homework as normal, the training rig will just act as your keyboard and screen.”

“So this display can mirror the tablet screen?”

“Of course. I don’t usually lead with that, as it’s more disconcerting to the equilibrium than the simple text display that we started with, but yes. Let’s get your device paired and you can try it out.”

I fetch my tablet from my backpack and hand it to him. He types a series of arcane commands in one of his many windows. The screen of my tablet fills my view.

“There. Now you should never need to look at the tablet again until you graduate from your training rig. The touchscreen capabilities are replaced with eye tracking tools. I imagine you’ll get used to that part quite quickly, most of your siblings did.”

My eyes go funny for a little bit and I have to fight through another wave of nausea before I’m able to click one of my textbooks to life. I check his monitors. His view of my cameras and visual overlay have disappeared. I wonder how much I can trust what he said about privacy. He hasn’t lied to me yet, other than that one big one where he pretends not to be a murderer.

“Good, good!” Father declares proudly. I feel a little like a kid who just made a stick-figure finger painting and is getting praised for it. “Now practice, practice, practice. Hard work now will yield desirable results later.”

“I will, Father.”

“Off you go then. Take the rest of the day to play with your new toys, and don’t worry about your project work for the next week or so.”

“Thanks,” I tell him, and force a smile.

It feels awkward walking around with the headset on, both from the still-unnatural feeling of having the overlay in front of me and because I feel like everyone is staring at me. I give the kids kicking around a soccer ball on the commons a wave and they go back to their playing. I guess I’m not the first one to walk around campus looking like a refugee from a science fiction movie.

I hit the dorm commons and find most of the sibs from my class lounging on one of the pods of couches. Everyone but Jeff is there, chatting and tapping on their tablets.

“He’s got the headgear! And the power glove!” Marc exclaims as he sees me.

“Congratulations, Noah, this is an important step for you,” Chad says, rising to his feet. I wonder for a second if it would break the glove if I hit him with it.

“Yeah, he’s official, now,” Evan adds. “Our oldest brother, joining the water and power crew.”

Chad gets a dark look. Evan and Louise were right. He’s not at all happy that I’m the oldest. That’s probably why Evan likes to needle him with it whenever he can.

“Joining the what now?” I ask, flopping onto the couch next to my huge brother.

“Water and power,” Evan repeats. “That’s the way our class is going to save the world. Making sure the world has enough clean power and drinkable water. Like how Phil’s class is going to solve resource scarcity with nanotech mining. I thought you knew that, didn’t you? Isn’t that why you picked the water filter project?”

I laugh. “I just picked it cause it was kind of like yours, except it turned out that selective pollution removal is a totally different problem than your desalinators. So are we all supposed to be specialized?”

“Every class has an area of focus,” Chad explains using his know-it-all voice, “but only the oldest few classes have started specializing into their domains. Father has a master plan that he might choose to share with you, if he feels you are worthy.”

Oh yeah, he really hates that I’m older than he is. I’m glad a big chunk of my face is covered with the headset so it’s harder for any of them to see my reaction to Father as the judge of my worthiness. I need to make sure I keep control of my emotions. As far as they all need to know, I’m another good little disciple in the cult of Tom Butler.

“Anyway,” Evan says, “we were about to head to the rec room. Want in on some foosball?”

“Naw. I need to relearn how to type for a while. You all go have fun.”

“So, did he say how long it will be until he does the install?” Louise asks.

“Start of June is what he told me.”

“You’re lucky,” Marc says. “We all had to do the headgear for two months. I got the worst acne where the straps go. Do you think you’ll get that too?”

Andrea rolls her eyes and her graceful fingers dance. A question mark appears in the air, then gets a big red X through it.

“Yeah, no one wants to hear about your acne Marc,” Louise adds. “Later, Noah.”

I shake my head and watch them leave. He’s rushing me through the training. I really am just a guinea pig for him, someone to test his newest model of the implant on before he uses it on the kids he actually cares about. I hope he doesn’t wreck my brain. I really need it if I’m going to make him face justice for Mom. But whatever he’s doing is probably safe-ish. From his notes, he’s planning to do the same thing to my whole next class of siblings.

I focus on the overlay and do the weird eye-focus tricks to bring the tablet screen up front and center in my overlay. I eye-tap the new training app and start learning my ABC’s all over again.