Nanobots, Murder, and Other Family Problems

SynTech OS v.3.0.1.4375

IMPLANT INTERFACE INITIALIZED

DEBUG INTERFACE INITIALIZED

“Can you hear me Noah? The anesthesia should be wearing off any time now.”

The voice sounds far away. I try to move my head to look toward it, but my muscles don’t respond. Maybe it’s just as well. My eyes don’t seem to be working either.

“Ah, another narrator. Wonderful. I see that your close association with Evan has been good for you. I’ve encouraged your other siblings to do the same, but none of them have taken to it quite like he did.”

Right. It was Evan’s idea to write everything down. I guess you can read this then, Father?

“Only for a few more minutes while I do some final diagnostic checks. You’ll be pleased to hear that the operation appears to be a resounding success. From the feedback readings, it looks like the implant I customized for you is working perfectly. Bear with me for a moment as I finish this up.”

I breathe in and out slowly, letting myself wake all the way up. I’m still blind, and strapped down, but I can get my lips to move a little. My mouth feels so dry.

“Yes, the muscle relaxants should be wearing off as well. Apologies for the dry mouth, it’s a side effect of the medication that keeps you from moving during the procedure. But I’m done now. All systems double-checked. Let’s get you unstrapped.”

I hear his footsteps, then feel the straps loosen. Father’s hand touches my face, pulling at one eyelid then doing the same with the other.

“Excellent. Are you ready to get started with your part?”

“Yes,” I force out with just a little slurring.

“Good, good! Let’s get your vision back up and running then. Hold on, let me connect this.”

I hear him step away, then the clack of his mechanical keyboard.

My world goes from black to white. An infinite, blank expanse filling everything. Then the words I’ve been typing begin to appear in clear, dark letters.

“Does everything look right?” he asks.

“I think so,” I answer, my tongue and jaw feeling more normal now. ”The overlay is showing up now, but I can’t see anything else.”

“Excellent. Just as it should be at this point. As we’ve discussed, the console will be your primary interface with the implant. It’s around now that I would ask you to test the text input, but you’ve already demonstrated an admirable mastery of that. I’m enabling the passthrough now, so your standard vision should appear behind the overlay. Are you ready?”

“Ready.”

The vast field of white behind the text melts away to reveal the hanging lights and ceiling above me. The console overlay rests on top of everything I see. It’s so much like the simulator that I reach with a clumsy hand to make sure there’s nothing on my face. Nothing. The thing is inside my brain now.

“Indeed it is,” Father agrees, reading my written thoughts off of his screen. “And my, I think you may have committed to narration even more than Evan did. I’m impressed with your fluency. I don’t think any of your siblings were this fast at typing when we did their installations, even with twice as much time to prepare.”

Well, I had a good teacher. Evan’s been a great help.

“Indeed. I love the way he has taken you under his wing. Well, let me get you disconnected and your narration can be yours alone until we start setting up sensor triggers later today.”

DEBUG INTERFACE TERMINATED

I turn my head slowly toward Father’s desk and see him holding the disconnected end of a cable and a small black device. He sets them both down and comes my way.

“Ready to sit up now?” he asks.

“I think so,” I tell him. “Can I get a drink?”

“Of course,” he says, putting his hands under my shoulders and helping me into a sitting position. I flex my arms slowly as the strength returns to them. “Let’s make sure the command interface works first though. Go ahead and test with any command. Maybe something in the settings.”

I poke into the settings and switch the display to dark mode. The text and background of the console overlay reverse colors, leaving the overlay black with white letters. “Yeah, it’s working,” I report. “I was a little worried that I’d gone blind. You didn’t tell me that I wouldn’t be able to see.”

“I apologize,” he says. “It does help with the transition to have an opaque console covering everything at first. I learned that with Chad when he received his implant.”

“Equilibrium issues?”

“He missed the emesis bag. It took me a week to get the smell out of the lab,” he chuckles. “One note. I see you’re still twitching your hand when you use the input, which is certainly natural at this point since you are still using it like you did the glove. The sensors in your motor cortex are very sensitive, much more so than the physical sensors in the training rig. You shouldn’t need more than just the will to move the muscle. In time, you should be able to type without moving your hand at all.”

“Got it,” I answer, still twitching my fingers as I type.

“Excellent, Noah,” he says proudly. “I must tell you, this is the smoothest input integration I’ve ever done. You are a natural!”

“Thanks, Father.”

He claps his hand on my shoulder and helps me to my feet.

“I think you are safe to take a little break.” He glances down at his watch. “And my, it is almost lunch time. Why don’t you get that drink you wanted and a bite from the cafeteria, if you are up for it. Here, take your phone. The implant can’t do much without that.”

He hands me the device. It’s the size of a deck of playing cards, with no buttons on it.

“Not much of a phone,” I comment, turning it over a couple of times. “Does it even make calls?”

“Sorry, no. It’s not a phone, but that’s the parlance our engineers have been using for the implant’s external appliance. It’s a simplified version of the upcoming SynTech smartphone we’ll be releasing commercially next year, but without the screen or touch interface that the final model will include. All the processing for your cloud is done on this device. Obviously, it wouldn’t do to perform any serious computations in the implant itself. The inside of your skull is hardly conducive to heat dissipation.”

“Makes sense.”

“One more note: for security reasons, the phone doesn’t network with anything but your implant for now. When we get to setting up your nanobot cloud, the phone will interface with your bots as well, again providing the processing power that they need. The port on the device is for my diagnostic use only, please don’t connect it to anything. Ever. Other than the specifications of the nanobots themselves, the software on this device is the most closely guarded secret of both the Butler Institute and the SynTech Corporation. It is critical that it never be exposed.”

He gives me his serious look. So that’s why my sibs still have to type on keyboards in the lab. Their built-ins won’t connect to external computers. It’s a good call from a security perspective. I wouldn’t want anything in my skull to be hackable, and there’s nothing more secure than a closed system. I suppose that means that I’m going to need to go back to regular typing for my school work. Hope my fingers still remember how.

“Understood, Father. Never connect the phone to anything.”

“Good. Now off you go. Meet me back here in half an hour and we’ll get started on the next stage.”