Nanobots, Murder, and Other Family Problems

“My boy, this is fantastic work,” Father declares when I show him my financial plan. “This should get the institute running in the black within a decade, and with only minimal impact to the people we want to help. I’m proud of you.”

“Thank you. I worked hard on it.”

That was true, sort of. Several parts of my fragmented, augmented brain did a good bit of work on it. Figuring out all the places where we could buy up cheap land with mineral rights for the kids in class two to set up automated nano-mines was the bulk of the effort. Sales of raw materials that we’d be able to extract and refine more cheaply than any competitors was the key element for the program I laid out to turn us profitable.

“I’m very glad I chose you to come in and help me with this,” he says, his crooked grin turning from the screen toward me. “Your insight has been invaluable.”

He turns back to the whiteboard and starts scribbling furiously, converting the ideas in my spreadsheets and reports into parts of his sprawling diagrams. It’s not the first time he’s updated the plan based on my input. Not to toot my own horn, but I think my suggestions have improved it quite a bit. We bounce ideas off of each other as he continues to update the board. I don’t even think of stopping for dinner, and Father doesn’t seem inclined to either. This is my last day to get everything I can out of his brain before he’s gone. It starts getting late, but neither of us are ready to call it a day.

“Is it too late to change the classes around?” I ask him. “If we do medicine before atmospheric cleanup, we can produce cheap but profitable generic versions of every drug where the patents have expired. That should let us drop the raw minerals prices by thirty percent or so once class four comes online. Plus it’ll save a lot of lives for people that have trouble affording their medications. I crunched the numbers, and I suspect that could get us better net lives saved since some of those medications could treat the health issues caused by air pollution until we solve that. The time frame on pollution seems too long not to focus on the short term remediations first.”

He contemplates for a moment.

“I hadn’t thought of it that way, but I think you might be right. That should be acceptable. Both classes needed the same basic science background that they are getting now, and I haven’t started specializing the coursework for either age group yet. Can you show me the numbers for that?”

I pull up the spreadsheet. “So here are the net lives saved estimates for either scenario,” I point out. “And over here are the projected profits.” His eyes widen as he sees the figures for pharmaceutical sales. “And that’s with undercutting the market by a huge margin.”

He whistles softly. “Noah, I clearly went into the wrong industry if I had wanted to make financial success my top priority. I have no regrets though.” He pauses, thoughtful. “Well, one regret.”

“Oh?” Regrets of any sort seem out of character for him.

“Noah, I think it’s time that you and I had a talk about your mother.”

“OK,” I reply, wondering what she has to do with anything.

A quick look in my index as he crosses the room from the white board to my seat makes me start paying very close attention. Father gets a serious look on his face.

“For context,” he says, ”we’ll need to go back to the time just after I had finished up with my efforts on the Butler Treaty. I had to travel quite a bit for that, did you know? Rubbing elbows with the powerful, the influential, and all the people I needed to get on board. I must admit I picked up quite a taste for it. I already knew at that point that the day-to-day work of running the company was no longer something I could commit myself to, at least not at the level that the company required. So I stepped down from corporate leadership. I still had majority ownership of SynTech and control at a high level, but the new CEO that I brought on hardly needed me lurking about, involving myself in the minutia of corporate affairs.”

He takes a seat in the chair next to mine. “I tried going back to work at the new engineering team that I’d set up for our nanotechnology projects. I thought I’d get back to my technical roots and help them work out the details with the new clouds, but the most interesting work had mostly been done by that point and I just couldn’t put my heart into it. Besides, I had hired the best and the staff had things well in hand with the development effort they had ahead of them. I ended up taking on more of a consultant role. A call a few times a week with each of the team leads, and email exchanges each day were all they needed from me. I found myself with time on my hands for the first time in many years.”

I nod, silently working with my bots as he talks, trying to figure out why the polygraph functions don’t seem to be working on him. He’s got some kind of interference field that keeps my bots from getting too close to him, so it’s hard to get good readings. With a little focus, I get enough sensors outside of his invisible bubble directed at him to get some basic biometrics. Temperature readings come in clean. I form a few dozen tiny eyes and focus them on the blood vessels in his neck. I get a good enough pulse reading and start plotting it over time. Blood pressure is trickier. I split my attention and work on that as he continues.

“I decided to do a bit of finding myself. Finding my purpose. I had strong ideas on the priorities I believed in, you’ve heard enough about that. Preserving life, ending suffering, and elevating humanity were paramount to me. But the implementation was the challenge. As I’ve mentioned to you before, trusting others with the immense power of the clouds was not something I was comfortable doing.”

I nod, looking attentive. I give up on trying to read blood pressure and just track his breathing patterns and pupil dilation instead. Assuming he’s telling the truth now, I should have a good enough baseline by the time he gets to the parts about my mother that I’ll know if he’s lying about anything.

“I wandered a bit,” he continues. “I talked to intellectuals, philosophers, leaders of countries, the leading scientists of every discipline, even prominent religious figures. I was a bit of a celebrity at that point. It wasn’t hard for me to get a few minutes with anyone I was interested in speaking with. I lectured at universities, building up goodwill for the company and scouting for talent that we might want to flag for recruitment. Along the way, in France, I met a girl.”

His vitals jump a little, but I think it’s indicating emotional involvement rather than deceit.

“She was an American, like me. Much too young for me, of course. She was there studying abroad. Literature, not any of the sciences. She had only attended my lecture on a lark. But she found the subject matter interesting and approached me afterwards. She flattered me shamelessly. I’ve never been much of a ladies’ man, but she seemed to sincerely appreciate me for my mind, rather than my wealth. I was easily swayed by her charms. When I left France, she deferred her studies to come along.”

“Mary. My mother.” I still remember her name.

“Indeed. My first, and really my only love. I won’t traumatize you with details, but your mother and I became inseparable traveling companions for the next several months. It was her pregnancy, you, that inspired all of my later plans. Her cycles were like clockwork, so she knew almost immediately when it had happened. She told me right away. My mental gears spun. A child. A child that could be prepared from birth for the awesome responsibility of wielding a nanotech cloud. And if one child, why not many? Why not dozens, or hundreds?”

“Because you wanted to keep a relationship alive, maybe?” I venture to guess. I know he’s got social skills issues, and they were probably even worse then, but this is ridiculous.

“Indeed,” he says. A pained look comes over his face. “The notion of me fathering many children by many mothers—even using artificial means—didn’t work for Mary. I came to understand that very clearly in hindsight. I’ve made sure to make things very clear from the outset to all those who have come after her. But I had come across a solution that I knew would work, and couldn’t let my feelings for her prevent me from saving the world.”

I stare at him, stunned. He’s speaking truthfully, or at least sincerely. Either that or my makeshift polygraph isn’t working. It seems true though. He really believes it.

“In all my discussions with the best minds on the planet,” he continues, “with the most informed leaders and the wisest thinkers, it became clear to me that the problems of the world were not rooted in overpopulation, greed, selfishness, or sin. There are resources sufficient on this planet for a population a hundred times ours to all live at a standard still undreamed of. The world’s problems are caused by a lack of empowered intellectual capital. Sufficient ingenuity to make wise decisions coupled with enough power to execute them are all that the world needs. With the technology I had harnessed, and a small army of offspring, I could provide a strong enough force with enough intellectual capital in a single generation to remake the world in a better image. I couldn’t let the feelings of one woman stand in the way of that.”

“You couldn’t just adopt or something?” I ask, still incredulous.

“I did consider that, and I discussed it with Mary. It had some drawbacks—the genetic similarity of my biological offspring has greatly simplified the work of adapting the neural models I use to calibrate the implant—but those could have been overcome with some effort. But by the time we talked about it, I think Mary had lost interest in our relationship.”

He hangs his head. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him look ashamed before.

“In retrospect,” he continues. “I should have led with that option rather than considering genetic parenting first. I’ve never been a particularly effective communicator in emotional matters. In any case, she had signed up for an exciting fling with a famous older man, not a lifetime commitment to the cause that he believed in.”

“So that was it then?” I ask. “That was the end between you two?”

“For the time, it was. She went her way and I went mine. I tried to get custody of you, but I had laid no legal groundwork. By the time the matter reached the courts, I had already started the process that led to your many siblings. The prototypes were under construction, as it were.”

He really does think we’re all robots that he’s created. Test subjects to accomplish his goals. I hate him so much.

“The judicial system, as it turns out, had strong biases. In this case, that meant that a single mother was preferred over a bachelor father with several other children by several other mothers on the way. The judge, unfortunately, had strong opinions about what sort of man I was based on some terrible tabloid reporting about me. I’m afraid I was only versed in international and technical law at the time and hadn’t yet recruited the right lawyers with expertise in family law in the right jurisdictions. Your mother had. I rather made a mess of things. She ended up with sole custody, despite my objections. I only narrowly avoided being financially devastated by a conventional child support scheme. I didn’t even get visitation rights, only a guarantee of regular reports.”

“So that was your regret? Losing her? Or losing me?”

“No.” He shakes his head. “Neither of those. Each loss was painful to me, but I don’t regret losing her. I’m sure she had a simpler, happier life without me in it, and in many ways I agree with the old saying about loving and losing. And seeing the man you have become, I don’t regret at all that you were raised in her care. My regret comes from near the start of last year. I went to see her last March, did you know? I felt that I needed to make an offer to her, give her a chance to have you come join us. I wanted you to at least come see the Institute before adulthood imposed its demands on you, and perhaps stay if you so desired.”

His pulse and breathing speed up. He’s hiding something, or afraid to say what he’s about to say

“We met for lunch. I believe now that she thought I was meeting with her to attempt a rekindling of our relationship. She had a speech that she had clearly prepared in advance about how she wouldn’t come back to me even if I begged. When she was done, I explained to her why I was really there. She left in a rush, clearly upset. I never was good with relationships. I found out an hour later that she never made it home.”

His vitals stabilize again, pointing toward truth.

“That, Noah, is my regret. My poorly executed offer to allow her son to join a modern pantheon contributed to an emotional state that caused her negligent driving and her accident.”

He’s not lying. Tears well up in my eyes. I can’t stop them.

“Why are you telling me this?” I demand.

“You deserve to know, Noah. You deserve the truth. If you are angry with me, I would understand that. You have every right to that emotion. Accidents are terribly unfortunate, but we must all claim our own roles in them. This was mine. I distressed her and feel some culpability for her death. I wanted you to know that I deeply regret it.”

I feel memories surging and roiling in the back of my mind, just out of reach. A few break through.

“I was told that she was hit by a driver running a red light,” I say, my voice choking up.

“Yes,” he confirms. “That was the official story. A kindness for you and your grandparents. I have a few people on retainer that specialize in fixing exceptional situations. I had things arranged so that all the factors that would lead to a beneficial outcome for you and for them would be included in the official reports. It was your mother that ran the traffic light. I didn’t want you or her parents to have to deal with a wrongful death claim from the other driver’s family. I took care of them privately. Their settlement was much more generous than what they were likely to get from a conventional lawsuit.”

Truth again.

DOPE-ME

The dopamine response is enough to ease the crashing waves of emotions. Clarity and focus take hold of me. I get a grip on my composure. I even give him a troubled smile.

“Thank you, Father.” My voice doesn’t break this time, even though I was sure it would. “I appreciate your honesty. This couldn’t have been easy for you.”

He gives me a sad nod.

“I need some time to process this.”

I can’t deal with this.

Everything I know is wrong.

“Of course, of course,” he says, his voice more compassionate than I’ve ever heard it. “Take as long as you need. If you want to discuss the matter further, I am at your disposal.”

I leave without saying anything else, then storm across the darkened campus until I lay on my bed. I stare at the ceiling, breathing. Just breathing. Tears stream down the sides of my face. I still see him in the lab. The swarm of eyes I built to monitor his vitals are still tied to him. He’s sitting there in that same place, his face in his hands now. His chest rises and falls in what I can only assume are sobs. Tears stream down through his fingers. I don’t know if he’s crying over her, or over me, or for himself.

He didn’t kill her.

He kind of did, but he didn’t mean to.

Almost, I can forgive.

Almost.

DOPE-ME

I close my eyes. I can’t deal with this now. I’ll sleep on it. Decisions are always better first thing in the morning. I let myself cry until sleep takes me.