Nanobots, Murder, and Other Family Problems

The gorgeous brunette on the dinner line scoops a serving of bright yellow lentils onto my flatbread. Someone must have listened to the requests that my class has been putting in since the trip. I think this is the first time the meal rotation has changed since I’ve been here.

I head to my usual table and settle in next to Evan, Andrea, and Louise. Jeff is off in his corner like always. No one’s talking much. I’m sure that they’re all trying to come up with plans for Father that don’t require us all to get updated. Or one that won’t risk us getting killed. That’s the common line through all my ideas that rely on his tech. He knows the bots too well. He’ll always have the upper hand there.

Maybe I can find inspiration in his personal files. There’s got to be some weakness, some vulnerability that I haven’t seen yet. I haven’t hacked him in a while, but with the augments to my cloud, it should be easier than ever now. I don’t need to worry about being surprised by someone coming into the lab. I’d feel them coming the second they came into the building. All it costs is some pain, and I can pay that price.

I get up from the table with a nod to my sibs and head out. I can feel that the lab is empty long before I open the doors to the Learning Center. The darkened hallway and the muffled, crashing rage of Roxanne’s music through the walls confirm what my bots already knew. I form an eye in the IT office and see Roxanne is clacking away at a keyboard. Is she actually working for once? No, it’s a chat where she’s discussing the finer points of full back tattoos with TatFan397. She won’t be coming this way any time soon, but she’s getting close to picking out a new bit of ink for her right shoulder.

Since I already have the route to Father’s server figured out from what feels like forever ago, I get into his files in just a few minutes. I scan through his personal logs going back the last two years, committing them to my electronic memory as I go. Plenty of notes referencing my sibs in there. He’s got extensive entries on every single one of them. I skip past the files about the younger kids and start on the ones for my cohort.

Most of the notes about Andrea revolve around an overload in her implant that happened a few weeks after he installed it. He says he tried everything to reverse the damage to her language centers, but nothing made her take any interest in recovering her voice. Father speculates that it was a choice on her part after the initial trauma, which I’m tempted to believe. She seems perfectly happy without speaking. According to the notes, all the physical damage was repaired. If she wanted to use words again, she should be able to.

Marc’s file is surprising. According to a bunch of testing Father had done about a year ago, Marc is a certified verbal genius. He doesn’t come right out and say it, but I get the impression that Father was worried he was an idiot, which is what I had thought when I first met him. I guess I’ve always underestimated him. He is one of the best storytellers I’ve ever met. He’s terrible at math, science, and most technical skills, but while Father is disappointed about that, he doesn’t seem to think any of it will be a dealbreaker for getting him upgraded.

In Louise’s file, I find out that Father has been suspicious about Louise’s behavior since she got her implant. He’s got speculations in his notes ranging from drug use to a variety of mental disorders. In the most recent notes, he concludes that she’s bipolar. I wonder if that’s true. Did her dependence on the implant for chemical joy come because of an underlying issue, or does her regular tweaking of her own chemistry make it look like she’s manic-depressive? He’s customizing his new rig with some chemical regulators to keep her stable.

Chad gets a lot of praise in his. No surprise there. The only thing critical about him was from when he tried to put up the statue. Father did not love that, but he seems to think it was funny in hindsight. He’s got some vague references to Chad leaving in a few months, but no details. That’s worth digging into some more when I have time.

Evan’s section is slim. It doesn’t look like he gets much attention from Father. He does well in classes, but not exceptionally well. He doesn’t cause any trouble. Father doesn’t worry about him, or pin any high hopes on him. Guess there’s not much value in Father’s estimation for just being a good man.

Jeff, on the other hand, takes up a disproportional chunk of Father’s notes over the last couple of years. His teachers report him as a super genius with strong tendencies towards paranoia. His version of history includes all the conspiracies about everything from JFK to 9/11. Father doesn’t think he can do an easy chemical fix like with Louise. There’s even a note that he considered not doing the update for him, but he finally decided it was worth it because of the risks inherent in the second generation hardware.

Interesting. I’ve often thought that Jeff was acting paranoid, but I didn’t think it was a literal, clinical thing. If I were still on the fence about his killer AI theory, this would have been enough for me to dismiss it. Especially since I haven’t seen anything in Father’s private notes here that give it any credibility.

I feel someone moving down at the other end of the hall and open an eye there to take a look. It’s one of the guys in the class just younger than mine. Phil? Stan? Why can’t I remember names anymore? I used to be so good with names. I’ve got to start putting pictures in my database so I can remember who is who. It doesn’t matter now though. He’s not coming this way, just stopping at the bathroom down the hall. I wait a moment to make sure he’s not coming toward the computer lab.

I shouldn’t have opened that extra eye, it’s too much with also keeping tabs on the whole building. My skull feels like it’s going to split open. I check my scan for damage, but my blood vessels and gray matter are still holding on. Whatever this is, it’s not killing me yet. I shrug off the pain and dive back into Father’s notes.

The next section is all about me. He’s put a lot in here since I arrived at the end of March. My implant installation and upgrade procedures both went unexpectedly well. Seems I’ve been exceeding expectations across the board. If he’s noticed that I’m pushing up against the limits of my sanity to master the implant and the bots, he doesn’t say anything about it here. Nothing in his comments show any suspicions about me at all.

Good.

I scan through the feedback from my teachers. All glowing. Mr. Johnson even says that I’m the best student he’s ever had. Aw. That’s nice.

I find the notes he added after our trip. Interesting. He’s pretty frank about taking down those troops in Somalia. He refers to them as the Fist of Peace, which seems like a funny name. I’ll have to look that up later. He’s clearly got no remorse about killing them all. If anything, he seems pretty happy about it, if I’m reading the tone right. But I could be wrong. It’s tough to tell with the notes as terse as they are.

There’s nothing referencing the swarm AI at all, which doesn’t surprise me at this point because Jeff’s theory is stupid. Given all the other concerns he does write about, hooking a robotic intelligence up to our brains would definitely merit some consideration of the risks involved. I’m wondering more and more how I ever put as much confidence in Jeff’s conclusions as I did. I seem to remember his arguments seemed almost reasonable at the time. I’ll take a look at the new bot control code when I have time. That should give me a definitive answer on it, if I ever need to prove it to the others. I get the feeling that at this point Jeff won’t change his mind on it even if I find solid proof.

A new plan starts churning through my mind. An ugly plan, but one that might have a better shot than any of the half-baked ideas I’ve come up with so far. It’s morally reprehensible, and it’ll be a fight to get any of the others on board with it, but I think it could actually work. I’ll think about it more later.

For now, it’s getting near curfew. Time to shut down. I clean up after myself, throw Mom’s laptop into my satchel, and head out. I let my awareness collapse down to just the area right around me. The throbbing pain relents by the time I hit the door to my room. I pull out my tablet and get started on my homework. I still need to fake like I solved a bunch of partial differential equations for Mr. Johnson and write up my plagiarized amalgamation describing the impact of green energy technologies on the Middle East for Mrs. Jones before I sleep tonight.

Fun.

At least I can let the nanobots rest for this part. I’m tired of my eyeballs feeling like they’re going to burst.