Nanobots, Murder, and Other Family Problems

I feel Father in his office in the Research Center as soon as I enter the building. Stretching my cloud out to the size I did feels like it unlocked a better sense of space as the many little parts of me spread out everywhere near me. I’ve never been to his office, but I instinctively know every hallway and turn to take to get there. The door is ajar as I walk up to it. I knock as I enter.

“Good morning, Father,” I greet him, trying not to sound nervous.

“Ah, Noah,” he says, looking up from one of the several screens on his desk. “Right on time. Thank you for being punctual. We have quite a lot to do, and you have quite a lot to learn.”

I glance around his office. It seems oddly familiar for a place I’ve never been.

“Let’s get right to it then.” His cheerful, crooked smile fills his wrinkled face. “Did Chad have time to brief you at all? I asked him to, but I know he had quite a few preparations he still needed to make.”

“Can’t say that he did,” I answer, “other than just asking me to help.”

“Well, we’ll give him a pass. He has had a lot on his mind with finalizing his team and preparing his first operations. Enough about your brother though. Here, come look over here. You’ll need some context.”

One wall of his huge office is completely covered by a giant whiteboard. The ink looks fresh in some places, in others it’s faded and looks like it’s been there for years. References to divisions of SynTech, countries, and problems pepper the bulk of it seemingly at random, often inside of squares or circles with lines between them. It would probably all make sense if I had any idea of what he had been talking about at the time he wrote it. Father directs my attention to a section near the left edge that looks older than most. It’s a table with years along one axis and the classes of my siblings along the other.

Class one is mine, my name squeezed into the box of names in much newer ink than the others. It has “Water and Power” in the next column. The last column looks like it has projects and the years they’re supposed to happen. My class is scheduled to solve water and power for Africa and Southeast Asia this year. I guess that we’re sort of on schedule then, since Chad has already started on that. Classes two through seventeen also have labels next to them. Class two is mining and resources, three is transportation infrastructure, four is on atmosphere cleanup, and five says medicine. Ooh, fun, class six gets to do space exploration.

The projects all look a little on the ambitious side. The medicine class has “Cure All Cancer” as their first one. The space cadets start on a moon colony their first year out of training. I used to think the stuff my class is working on was really pushing it on solving the world’s problems, but now I’m starting to wonder if I should have asked to get in with a younger class.

Oh well, plenty of time to change things around once he’s dead.

“So, you can see here that we have a plan to address all of humanity’s pressing problems,” Father says, waving at the wall. “We slipped the schedule a bit with a technical setback last year, but we got that sorted out. I think we can still keep to the program as written.”

I’m guessing that the “technical setback” was Andrea and her implant malfunction, but I don’t want to let on that I know more than I’ve heard from my siblings, so I just nod.

“As you’ve probably guessed,” he continues, “we have a team at SynTech dedicated to supporting our special projects. It’s a complicated relationship. The company still needs to make a profit, but my interests now are purely humanitarian. I’m essentially paying them out of pocket from my personal shares of the company stock and my ongoing personal revenue. It’s sustainable like this for another few years, but no longer than that. Once I have to sell enough shares that I lose a controlling interest in the company, things won’t be nearly so easy as they are now. And at some point, we’ll need to fully separate and become self-sustaining. The code base for most of the things that the nanobots can do is fairly mature at this point, so I think I can start cutting loose some of the development team that’s been working for us. But the need for support staff is growing, as I’m sure Chad told you.”

He’d barely mentioned it, but I nod anyway.

“What do you mean by your personal revenue?” I ask him. “I thought all your money came from SynTech.”

“Excellent question! Primarily, it’s my medical income,” he answers, pointing me to another corner of the white board that seems to be dedicated to financial planning. “It comes from work that I do that is outside the purview of the sort of work I did as part of SynTech proper. Noah, you would not believe what the wealthy of this world are willing to pay to extend their lives a few years. I took in several hundred million last year for just a few dozen surgical procedures. Inoperable cancers, mostly, but sometimes just cleaning out the arteries for old men who couldn’t survive a standard bypass operation for some reason or another. Things that only nanotechnology has the capability to address.”

I nod. That all sounds vaguely familiar. I think I knew something about that at one point but my memory isn’t what it used to be. I add a note to myself to get the details on Father’s activities and add them to my index.

“Unfortunately,” he continues, “it’s not sustainable. I’m not getting any younger, and some of our competitors, well, SynTech’s competitors I should say, are beginning to figure out how to do some of our basics within the confines of the Butler treaty. They’re still years from being operational at anything near our level, but I don’t think we can count on that revenue for more than the next decade or so.”

“Right. And you might even want to actually retire at some point.”

“Indeed! So, the institute needs alternative income streams to replace my earnings,” he continues. “We need to decide what to start charging for. It is important to me that we get to a self-sustaining state while I am still here to provide help and guidance. We’ll need to focus on things outside the scope of what I accomplished under the auspices of the SynTech corporation. Things like the power generation projects that I’ve already built would fall under that category. They’re owned and operated by the company. I was hoping for your input on that as your first task. I think you bring a valuable perspective as someone who has been on both the inside and on the outside of our operation. I’ll get you access to all of the projected activities for the next several years at a more detailed level, and of course the focus group results from the marketing team.”

“We have a marketing team?”

“Noah, my boy, of course we have a marketing team. They handle all of our PR. Did you think that we just waltzed into those villages in Ethiopia with only a brief visit from Kofi or Ibrahim to prepare them?”

“I guess I hadn’t thought much about it,” I admit. How much of this operation has been completely invisible to me?

He laughs. “We would never have been trusted if we hadn’t had teams running in advance for months, explaining who we are and what we could do for them. Otherwise, they would have thought we had the evil eye or some such nonsense. They would have run us out of town or worse.”

“Oh,” I answer, feeling a little sheepish. Without the PR team’s efforts, those light shows the little kids loved so much could have endangered the whole operation. I imagine us getting chased away by angry mobs terrified of our magic.

“And how else would we leverage our current operations to open doors for the next ones?” Father continues. “The Djibouti project has already earned us invitations to do something similar in thirteen other countries. Most of Chad’s permissions to work in the countries he’ll be visiting this year are based on our marketing team’s effective publicizing of our results in Ethiopia and Somalia.”

“I guess that makes sense.”

“Good, good. I’m glad you’re getting the picture, Noah. The details can be worked out, but I need someone with perspective to help me make the big decisions. Do we charge governments a one-time fee to build water plants? Or charge the consumers for the water? Do we coordinate with existing utility companies to sell them power? Do we charge up front or set up payment plans? Interest or no interest, and if no interest, how do we incentivize payment? Do we use the same payment structure for industrial and agricultural use as we do for residential use?”

“I think I’m getting the general idea,” I respond, feeling almost as overwhelmed as I had the first day that I had the full bot senses turned on.

“Oh, that’s just the beginning!” he continues with a smile, clearly enjoying watching me wrap my head around the deluge of information. “As we move forward and become a more significant world player, a whole host of new concerns arise. How do we get other organizations involved and cooperating with us rather than competing with or sabotaging us? How much do we need to spend on bribery, or its close cousin lobbying, to ensure that our operations can move forward unimpeded? What about terrorism, organized crime, and hostile government actors? Not everyone wants the safe and abundant future I have envisioned. How do we keep our technology from being appropriated and misused?”

How did I never think of any of this at all?

“OK. That’s a lot. I feel like I’m drinking from a fire hose here.”

“As you should, my boy, as you should! But we have years ahead of us, and I’ll be here to help you. More of your siblings will get involved as we move forward, of course. But there are decisions I need to make now that will have long-lasting implications. Hopefully, the coursework from your teachers since you arrived has given you some preparation. I’ve been very hands-on with both of them in developing your curricula. From their reports, I believe that you are the best suited of all my children in both aptitude and temperament to succeed me in running our operation.”

Scanning back over my logs from the last few months, a lot more of my homework makes sense with this new context. He’s been preparing me for this almost from the moment I arrived. Am I really not just a test subject to him? For a moment, I forget to hate him.

“What about Chad?” I ask. “I thought you were grooming him to take over.”

Father sighs and sits down at the small table in the center of his huge office. He waves at the seat across from him, and I take it.

“If it were only a matter of interest, Chad would be the clear choice. But Chad has certain character flaws that make him less than ideal. Like me, he has trouble trusting and gaining trust, but in his case it extends even to his own family. He will always be a strong contributor to our vision, but he is not the right man to lead it. You, on the other hand, are the right man. I’ve observed how quickly you have become a nexus among your siblings, drawing them to you and bringing them together. Evan, Marc, Louise, and Andrea seem to follow your lead in everything I see you do. Even Jeff seems to respect you, and that’s saying something.”

I nod in acknowledgment and force a smile. If he only knew the cause that really united us. I’m afraid for a moment that my inner turmoil might show, so I turn his attention back to the whiteboard by asking him some questions about parts of it that don’t make any sense.

As he walks me through them, I realize his plans are good. Really good. He could very realistically solve most of the big problems that people are dying or suffering from within a couple of decades. The whole strategy is well thought out and comprehensive. I’ll need to make sure that we can continue his plans without him before we make our move. I know he plans to activate the full implant capabilities for Louise later this week. Once that happens, I don’t know how long I can hold Jeff back. I’ll have to work fast to make sure I know everything I need to before we kill him.

We talk all day. I don’t even care that I’m missing my call with Grammy and Gramps. I record everything in my console and index it all in my database. I don’t trust my memory for something this important. Or for anything anymore, really.