Nanobots, Murder, and Other Family Problems

I’ve had the whole suite of new options turned on all day, and I haven’t had more than a mild headache. I’m finally getting acclimated to the sensory overload of the updated cloud. The diagnostic display shows that most of the hyperactive brain remodeling has settled down. My hormone levels are even stable most of the time. Omnidirectional vision feels like the way things always should have been, and I feel blind when I drop down to just my two biological eyes.

The effort now is to make sure that I use my muscles for things that I could easily do with the bots. It’s so tempting to grab things from a distance rather than walking over and picking them up. “Don’t be a Jeff” has become my new mantra and I have to remind myself of it several times a day.

I reach out with my hand and open the door to the Father’s lab in the Research Center. He’s already there waiting for me. He picks up a dry erase marker from the tray under the whiteboard, so I guess we’re going to be doing something educational and not just diagnostic.

“Noah, my boy, how has the upgrade been treating you?” he asks eagerly.

“It’s amazing Father,” I answer truthfully. “I’ve been exercising all the features we talked about, and it’s incredible. The controls are so intuitive that it all feels natural.”

“Good, good! And how has your physical response been? Any headaches or other danger signs?”

“Some mild headaches the first couple of days, but not anything more serious than what I might get normally,” I lie. He doesn’t need to know that I’ve been excruciating myself to master the thing. Besides, I’m fine now. Really.

“Excellent,” Father says, picking up a debug cable and plugging one end into his server rack. “Please, take a seat. I was a little worried after the upgrade. Chad had quite a time of it during his first few days. I believe that was due to adapting to both the new implant and the new sensory input at the same time. Having more time to acclimate yourself to the current version of the hardware before enabling the full capabilities of the cloud seems to have had very beneficial results for you. I’ll adjust the schedule and have the next candidates take some time with the updated implant before unlocking the full suite of input.”

“Sure,” I say. “Who is up next, anyway?”

“Louise, Evan, Jeff, and Andrea. I decided to do them concurrently, giving each of them longer breaks between calibration sessions,” he says as he straightens a kink in the cable. “They’ll all be complete within a few days of each other.”

“They’ll like that,” I tell him, but I can’t let that schedule happen. I need Evan, Louise, and Andrea all upgraded for my plan to work, but if he does Jeff at the same time, he’ll wreck everything.

“I thought so, too,” Father says with a smile.

He holds out his hand for my oversized phone. I hand it over, and he connects the cable.

DEBUG INTERFACE INITIALIZED

We sit in silence for a few minutes as Father checks readings from my implant on his screens, nodding as everything checks out.

“Father?” I ask.

“Yes, Noah?”

“Is Jeff OK?”

“Why do you ask that?” He drops his hands and looks at me over the tops of his glasses.

“Just some things he says and does. Sometimes I wonder if he needs help. He told me yesterday that someone was out to get him. He wouldn’t say who, just that someone was out there. I thought you should know.”

He steps over, puts his hand on my shoulder, and looks at me with his reassuring and gentle eyes.

“I appreciate you telling me this, Noah. I’ll take it into consideration and make sure he gets any help he needs.”

“Of course. I just want to make sure that he’s going to be OK. He’s a good guy, even if he’s a little different, you know?”

“That he is, son,” he agrees. “That he is.”

I hope Father can help Jeff. I worry about him. I hope he can handle the update, if Father is really going to set him up with that soon, but it makes me so nervous that it’ll be too much for him. But I’m sure it’ll all be OK now. Father knows what he’s doing.

The rest of the diagnostics all come up green on his monitor. Father reaches for the cable.

DEBUG INTERFACE TERMINATED

And I get my mind back to myself. I hope I played that right, putting the right amount of concern in my voice, putting the right amount of urgency in the transmitted chunk of my log that Father now has sitting on his computer. I need to amplify his worry, get him to defer Jeff’s upgrade, but not take any other serious actions yet. I hope I threaded that needle right.

“Excellent,” Father finally says, his voice returning to its usual annoying cheerfulness. “Everything is looking very good, and I’ve opened up a new set of tools for you. The self-defense libraries are now available for your access. Let’s discuss what they are, how they work, and how to make the best use of them. Then I’ll walk you through some simple use cases.”

He steps over to his whiteboard. We spend the next hour going over all the defensive features of the cloud and how they work. I index all of it in my database for reference later.

“Enough theory,” Father declares. “Let’s put this into practice.”

He leads me out of the lab and into a hall I’ve never been down. He opens a large steel door to reveal what looks like a shooting range with three rubbery looking dummy torsos at the other end.

“Let’s get the scary part over with first. Stand over there, if you would, please,” he says, waving toward the dummies at the end of the range. “And go ahead and form some earplugs with your bots. The bullets won’t do you any harm, but you don’t want any hearing loss.”

With more than a little trepidation, I comply. I pull my bots in toward me from where they’ve been spacing themselves out across this part of the campus. I want all of them handy if he’s going to do live testing of what he just explained. I trigger the routine that plugs my ears up and try to keep my cool as he unlocks a tall safe on the wall near the door. He pulls out a rifle, aims it at my head, and fires.

Even with the earplugs, the report is deafeningly loud. I feel the pinprick of destroyed bots on my non-skin. It worked! Just like Father said, my cloud recognized the gun as it pointed in my direction and automatically formed a point shield hovering in the calculated path of the bullet, ready to deflect the shot to the side. I turn and see Father’s bots in my overlay already repairing the damage to the reinforced wall behind me.

Father points at his ears and makes a pulling motion. I guess he’s only going to shoot me once. I dissolve the earplugs, letting the bots fan out.

“Come on over here, son,” he says, as if he hadn’t just shot at me. “You may be feeling invincible now. I know that I did the first time I tested this out. Don’t be too confident,” Father warns. “This was a small caliber rifle, and your mileage may vary with larger ordnance. Your best defense is your own vigilance.”

I nod, not sure what to say.

“Now, other weapons, the sort that could cause blunt force trauma or lacerations, they’re handled with defenses that are more reliable. Let’s give them a try.”

He steps back to the safe and pulls out a wicked-looking blade. The sort you’d see a soldier using in an action movie.

“Hold your arm out, please.”

I raise my arm to shoulder level and he lifts the knife to hack at it. My bots respond without any effort on my part, interconnecting in multiple layers in a rigid configuration just outside my skin in the path of the knife. The blade bounces off harmlessly. The shock absorbers make it so I barely feel a thing. He swings again, twisting the knife at the last second and dragging it along the length of my arm, against the armor that forms faster than his hand can move.

“See, Noah.” He smiles his proud-dad smile. “Nothing to worry about from weapons like these. The software does a good job of detecting anything that might cut or crush you by analyzing velocities and accelerations of the objects all around you. I wouldn’t go picking a fight with an army, but if you have a standard-sized cloud you’d be fine against a pack of ruffians equipped with anything less than military-grade weaponry.”

He turns the knife in his hand and offers it to me handle-first. I warily pick it up. I hope he doesn’t want me to do the same back to him to prove a point. If I start stabbing at him, I’m not sure I could make myself stop.

“Touch the blade to the skin of your hand,” he instructs. “Don’t incise, just touch the skin.”

Nothing happens as I let the tip get near the palm of my hand. I press just enough to dimple the flesh.

“You see, no threat is detected there,” Father explains. “The software running your cloud is able to determine that it is you holding the knife. Now hand it back to me.”

I turn the blade and return it the same way he gave it to me. He immediately plunges it toward the center of my chest, moving faster than I would have thought possible for a man of his age. I gasp and reflexively try to pull away, but I’m much too slow. The dark armor that appears out of nowhere presses lightly against my shirt, and I barely feel a thing as the knife bounces off. Father gives me a quick grin and sets the knife back in the safe and closes the door.

“That’s amazing.”

“Again, it is not completely infallible, but it is quite reliable. But again, your vigilance is still your best defense.”

“So how do I stay vigilant?” I say, knowing that’s what he wants me to ask.

“Excellent question! Once you have identified an actor with hostile intent, you have several options to deal with them. With your weapons system enabled, you’ll find a new set of capabilities if you check in your overlay’s tool options.”

I eye-tap into the new menu and find the controls. I give Father a nod as I start checking out the list of ways I can wreck people with my cloud.

“You’ll see that they’re ordered from least to most lethal,” he says. “Go ahead and try the first one.”

I select the Distract/Disable option from the top of the list. It’s got a little slider that I leave on the lowest setting. Dozens of gnat-sized conglomerations of bots consolidate from my cloud. According to Father’s lecture, they’re supposed to swarm around the target and discharge small electrical shocks meant to confuse and distract. Father gestures towards one of the target dummies and nods encouragingly. Targeting is as simple as thought. With my cloud’s awareness of the dummy’s place in space, I only need to send the target a mental nudge. The gnats swarm around the dummy and I get a slight whiff of ozone.

“I found that one handy for hecklers in a crowd,” Father chuckles. “The shocks aren’t visible unless it’s dark and the bugs are small enough that only someone very close can see them. The recipient won’t take any lasting damage on a low setting, but they’ll have a tough time trying to do anything while the technique is engaged. And they’ll generally look very foolish to anyone unaware of what’s happening to them.”

I nod in acknowledgement. Father tases people when he doesn’t like them interrupting him. I’m not terribly surprised, but I guess I thought he was less petty than that.

“With the next several techniques, you’ll want to be careful in close quarters. If your assailant is near you or others, they may not be the most appropriate choices as there is some risk of collateral damage. But at a distance they’re excellent against small groups of aggressors. Go ahead and get familiar with them.”

I pick the Projectile (5 mm) option and get a slider for velocity. I crank it all the way up and aim it straight at the first dummy’s head. At first, I can’t tell if anything happened, other than a poking feeling with my bot sense. But when I feel the dummy out with my cloud, there’s a small hole punched through it right where I was aiming. That was fast. The bot bullet formed, fired, and dissolved before I could see anything happen.

I’ve got a gun in my head now.

I get similar results with the 10mm, 15mm, and 20mm options. I skip down to the biggest one in the projectile series. 150mm? That’s got to be artillery sized, right? I test it out, triggering it at medium speed, and it blows a cannonball sized hole right through the center of the dummy. I get a sharp reminder of the go-kart analogy Father used when we talked about my old code. This really does make my old beatdown function look like a child’s toy.

“Good, good,” Father exclaims, his proud dad smile beaming at me again. “Now, keep in mind that you can target from multiple directions, not just in a straight line from you to the target. Just plot the vector in your mind as if you were going to move a single bot along those lines. You can fire around corners or behind cover this way. Try it out on the second target.”

I nod and switch back to the 10mm option. I kick on my math solver to do my calculations and a few seconds later release a volley from a hundred angles that shreds the hardened rubber of the dummy so badly that it droops down and collapses. I smell burned rubber as Father guffaws with laughter.

“Oh, my boy, my boy. I am so very, very proud of you.” He puts an arm around my shoulders and gives me a little side hug as I fight the urge to shrug him off. “Just look at how far you’ve come.”

“Thanks, Father.” I wish I could demolish him like I just did with the dummy, but part of me knows that he wouldn’t have given me these weapons if he didn’t have a way to protect himself from them. It’s fine. These aren’t the weapons that are going to strike him down.

“Let’s test out one last tool in your arsenal, then we’ll wrap up for the day. You’re free to use this test range as much as you like. Just put the dummies back as you found them, or let Mrs. Hastings know they need to be replaced if you can’t. Go ahead and select that last option on the list.”

The Dissolve option completely annihilates the third dummy. The air around it darkens as my cloud converges. Every nanobot tears off a tiny chunk of the rubber flesh, drops it on the ground, and returns to rip out another piece. It’s like piranhas in a feeding frenzy. In just a few seconds, the dummy is gone and a thick layer of pink dust is settling to the floor where it stood. I have to suppress a shudder as I picture Father using this on real people just a few meters away from me back in Somalia. I’m glad we didn’t try anything directly against him. I’d hate to have him turn this on us.

“Noah.” Father’s smiling face turns serious. “You have the power to grant life, as we did in Africa. You also have the power now to take it away if you need to. I trust that you will use this power only when needed, and only in defense of yourself and others. You’ll want to practice regularly on your own with these skills going forward. These tools and your expertise in their use will ensure your safety in almost any situation. I should tell you now that you children will be responsible for your own protection the next time you leave the campus. I won’t be coming along with you as we expand our operations. The last trip took more out of me than I wanted to admit. I’m afraid that my age is catching up to me.”

Is he getting sentimental on me? What would Chad say in this situation?

“You’re not that old,” I reassure him, “but I’m glad that you’re going to take care of yourself. The world still needs you. I’m sure that what you’ve taught me will keep us safe while we keep on saving the world together.”

I hope the syrupy sweet reply doesn’t come off as sarcastic. If it does, he doesn’t seem to pick it up. I do everything I can to keep the searing hate from my eyes. He has to believe my good son act. He seems satisfied with that response, and his crooked smile returns. He looks down at the end of the range, and the rubber dummies start to reform themselves. I hear a fan kick on somewhere, clearing out the smell of melting rubber.

“Practice hard,” he encourages me. “These skills may save your life one day.”

They might, Father. But they won’t save yours.