Nanobots, Murder, and Other Family Problems

Mom used to take me to church with Grammy and Gramps sometimes, usually just on Easter, but a couple of other times too. I remember the priest or bishop or whatever they called him talking about God. This guy in the sky with all the power in the universe, who could see every person on earth at once and do anything just by wanting it. A being who could move mountains, split seas, and build worlds.

This has to be something like that, but I don’t think God ever got the mind-ripping headache that goes with my new cosmic powers.

I play with the options as I wait for the throbbing to subside before I give the controls another try. The upgraded overlay floods my mind with images and information. The console and bot controls are just the beginning. A hundred more displays hang within easy mental reach, covering everything from the chemical makeup of the air around me, to the mass of every object I can see, to the distance between me and anything that my bots can detect.

I gasp like I’m literally drowning in data. Mom’s reassuring voice comes back to me. Breathe, Noah. Calm. Breathe.

The pain will subside. I know it will. Focus on something simple. I turn my attention to the air monitoring overlay and watch the numbers for how much nitrogen and oxygen I’m taking in and the small increase in carbon dioxide near my face every time I exhale.

Breathe.

I can see everything. I see whatever I’m looking at, and I see around and past it. I look at the chair next to the bed and simultaneously see the front, back, sides, top and bottom of it. I know its volume down to the cubic millimeter.

I check the diagnostic view of my brain. There’s no tissue damage. It’s just pain. I can push through pain. The blood flow is elevated all over. Almost every part of every lobe. But none of the blood vessels are in danger of bursting. It’s just my gray matter adjusting itself to the new inputs. Another deep breath, hold, exhale.

I’m ready to try again. The old interface felt like an extra piece of skin. This one feels like a whole new body, complete with a new set of muscles that I’m slowly learning to flex. I extend my consciousness, guiding the bots with nothing but thought. I feel the surface of the desk chair, where hundreds of them are making contact with it. I grab onto that sensation, and exert the tiniest mental pressure upwards. My floating army rushes to obey, and it lifts smoothly from the ground, supported at thousands of points by tiny clusters of bots. I release it and it lands back on the ground with a thud.

I reach out to my desk and pick up my tablet. Of course not with my hands. Why would I use hands? The tablet floats above the desk and on an unconscious whim I didn’t realize I had, it begins rotating. Another push, and it’s spinning on two axes at once, frantically flipping. And then it’s still, and then it’s gently putting itself back on the desk.

That wasn’t so bad. The headache is getting better. Or maybe I’m just getting used to it. Either way, I can do this.

I reach along my physical frame, feeling the contours of my body from outside of myself. I feel the outline of my shape from underneath where my bots have found their way under me without me even realizing that I told them to do that. I give a mental push upwards against my own flesh. It feels like I’m being lifted by a soft foam mattress that cradles every inch of my body. I open my eyes and glance down, seeing the pillow forty centimeters below me. What is that, a foot and change? Why did I think that in metric? Of course. Stupid. The overlays are showing distances that way.

I lift and twist myself up and onto my feet without moving a muscle. I’m tempted for a second to float around, but I think of Jeff and decide to walk. I take a hesitant step, transitioning back to normal motor controls. My legs and feet feel almost alien to me for a moment until my mind remembers how to drive them. Once I’m sure my coordination is back to normal, I pull my satchel over one shoulder and drop the new appliance inside.

Out in the common room, Andrea and Marc are watching a show on one of the screens with half a dozen of the younger kids. I have an awkward moment as my new cloud quietly and automatically surrounds everything and gives me a panoptic view. I didn’t want to see inside the gap between Marc’s t-shirt and armpit, or be made so intensely aware of the exact curves of Andrea’s body. With the lightest pull around the feel of their figures, my bots pull back several centimeters, reducing my overfamiliar awareness of them and the sense of nausea that had started welling up in my stomach. The software responds better than I’d hoped. As if by magic, everyone else immediately gets a similar buffer of space around them.

Smart design there.

Part of me keeps expecting it to turn out that Jeff’s right. A voice should start booming in my head from the AI or something. But it’s not anything like that. It’s stuff like this, the little clever things that seem to anticipate everything I want to do. I don’t know where the software ends and where my brain begins. I guess that’s kind of the point. It makes the interface to the new cloud so much easier. No more manually binding functions to specific motions. Just clean, simple, intuitive controls that make the cloud seem like a natural part of me.

“How is it, man?” Marc asks excitedly as he sees me.

“It’s different,” I tell him, trying not to let the pain of the lingering headache contort my face. “Easier. Better.”

Andrea gives me a concerned look.

“But it’s like having a new set of arms where each one has a hundred hands. I feel so clumsy with it. It’ll take some getting used to. It’s not like it has a mind of its own.” That should put Andrea at ease until I can get with her and the others privately. No point letting her worry now.

“Do some tricks!” one of the younger kids cries out. I know his name. Wait, I thought I knew his name. He’s one of the little ones that moved into the dorms from the nursery last month. Or maybe the month before. “Please! Pretty please!”

I can’t think of his name. I’m sure it’ll come to me later. Doesn’t matter.

“Fine,” I say, “but only because you asked nicely.”

I float myself up to the high ceiling and mock a backstroke, spiraling back down to the ground at a leisurely pace as if I were swimming through the air. Chad already claimed the thunder from being the first to use the flight routines, but I get a lot of laughs from the kids in the room for my performance anyway. I tighten my awareness back around the one who’s name I can’t remember and lift him gently into the air. He squeals with delight and the others laugh. I’m tempted to spin him upside down like Gramps used to do with me when I was little, but I decide to take it easy and set him back down without any aerobatics. The last thing I want right now is to accidentally hurt anyone.

“Good enough?”

The kid nods vigorously as Marc looks at me with adoring eyes. Oh boy, I gotta get myself off that pedestal fast.

“Are you excited to get yours, Marc?” I ask him.

“Oh yeah! I’m going to do so much awesome stuff. I’ve got it all figured out. I’m going to make a super suit like Purple Thunder and go fight crime and…”

He keeps going, but I tune out. Yeah, maybe he shouldn’t get the upgrade just yet. Not that I have any say in it, but I’m guessing he’s pretty far down the docket. Father mentioned something about getting Andrea done next, so we have at least a couple of weeks before I need to worry about Marc creating an alter ego to run off and do stupid things.

He’s stopped talking.

“Awesome, Marc,” I say. “I’m sure that will be great.”

Before I can say more, the bell sounds. Afternoon classes just ended. I hear the stampede sound just before someone opens the doors letting in a flood of evening sun. Dozens of my siblings rush through, streaming for their rooms. For a second my senses are overwhelmed as my interface updates me on the sudden changes in lighting, air pressure, ambient sound, and the positions of way too many small, fast-moving bodies. The headache resurges and I grit my teeth to keep from showing the pain on my face.

Even with having run my vision in full panorama since we got back from Africa, I’m not anywhere close to prepared for this level of sensory overload. I slam down the feedback to the lowest levels, but it’s still too much. The room spins and I excuse myself as politely as I can.

I keep my steps steady by pure force of will as I head back to my room. Only once I shut the door behind me do I let myself stumble and fall. I lay on the floor and contemplate my room’s spartan furnishings for a while until the pain gets back to a level that I can tolerate. I think for a moment about getting dinner, since I skipped lunch, but another wave of nausea makes me forget that thought almost as soon as it enters my mind. It’s fine. I’ll eat tomorrow.

I close my eyes and pick myself up again, letting my body float over the bed. The sensation is surprisingly comfortable. The pain recedes with more breathing, so I turn the implant displays back on. I need to get better with this. The deeper connection and feedback that the new implant hardware provides is the only advantage my cloud has over Father’s.

Maybe I just need to start small. Work on my fine motor skills first.

From my bed, I carefully rearrange my toiletries in the bathroom, then sweep the dust from the far corners of the closet. I pull a shirt from its hanger, fumble with trying to get it buttoned up as it floats in the air. I get halfway through before I have to give up as the headache gets too bad to handle again. I sit up and unbutton it with my biological fingers, then walk over and hang it back on its hanger. I need more simple stuff in my room to play with. Maybe I can borrow some wooden blocks from the nursery to practice stacking.

I check my diagnostics again to make sure that I didn’t damage any brain tissue. It’s all fine, just very active. It’s going to get better. It’s already better than it was just a couple of hours ago. I just need practice. Lots of practice.