Nanobots, Murder, and Other Family Problems

The site for the desalination plant looms ahead, a clear spot on the rocky coastline a few miles east of the city. Instead of the small cars we had yesterday, Kofi is driving one of those big fifteen-passenger vans loaded up with all of us except Father. The rest of my siblings had the same idea that Evan and I did yesterday, stashing our bloated clouds away in backpacks or duffels, all loaded now in the back of the van. There’s an electric feeling of anticipation. Evan even stays awake the whole drive.

The van pulls off the road just ahead of some massive piles of chalky-looking minerals. A junkyard’s worth of metal scrap is piled further down the road. Kofi heads around to the back of the van as we pile out through the side door. He grunts with effort as he hands out backpacks, which we accept and open to let loose billowing dusty clouds that disappear as we let our bots spread out. At the bottom of the luggage stack sit two enormous black canvas duffles which Kofi, despite his best efforts, can’t budge.

“Just unzip them, if you please,” Jeff requests. Kofi complies and gets out of the way as a storm of bots as big as all the rest of my siblings’ clouds put together rushes out to disappear into the clear morning air. Someone’s been holding out on me. I wonder where he stashed the code that lets him manage a cloud that size. Not on the lab computers and through official channels, that’s for sure. Must be a little of that Jeff paranoia in action. Doesn’t matter. I’ll get it from him later, one way or the other.

Jeff looks around triumphantly. None of my sibs seems to notice or care except Chad, who gives him a dirty look. I meet Jeff’s seeking gaze and give him a congratulatory smile, which he seems to appreciate. I eye-flick a few options in the overlay and compare my siblings clouds by the numbers. Heh. No wonder Chad is acting pissy about it, his cloud is the smallest one here, losing out even to Marc’s.

I walk over to the work site, where small red flags outline a huge rectangle on the ground that’s easily the size of several football fields. Father will be here in an hour, which gives us enough time to get the foundation ready for him. Chad steps forward and a glowing plane spreads across the ground, filling the flagged area with a perfectly level guide for the rest of us to use.

“All right everyone, you know what to do!” Chad calls out too loudly. He’s clearly going to love playing foreman until Father gets here. Got to compensate for his smaller set of equipment somehow. I walk down a ways to the edge of the glowing area and stake out a chunk of ground to work on.

BUILD(FOUNDATION)

I line up my vision with the edge that Chad outlined and let the algorithm do the rest. The ground churns and vibrates as thick streams of materials begin flowing from the ground to mix with the minerals from the piles. Unusable materials flow away from the outlined plane and settle on the dirt behind me. I feel the concrete-like foundation fusing together, one thin layer at a time.

My bots busily continue working, but I don’t need to direct them any further for now. The software can take it from here. As long as I stay in range, I’ve got the next long while free. I head back to the van and grab one of the folding canopies. Evan follows and grabs a few camp chairs. Andrea and Louse help me get the canopy set up, and the others come get settled in to watch our bots work. Everyone but Chad anyway, who stands at the edge of the growing foundation as if he were still essential for the bots to do their jobs. The rest of us sit in the shade while his skin slowly reddens in the morning sun.

I notice that Louise’s cloud is working a whole lot faster than Evan’s and Andrea’s which are about the same size. The construction routines must be taking advantage of the optimizations she did in some of the base cloud functions. I have those too, so mine is overperforming for its size as well, but the difference isn’t as obvious since my cloud is a lot bigger than any of theirs. If I cared enough to do the math on it, I could make some graphs and figure out who’s getting how much done, but I don’t.

The smooth surface of the foundation spreads to fill Chad’s level plane as our individual sections merge seamlessly. The work is just reaching the far end of the outlined build zone when I hear a rumble from the west. Father’s ahead of schedule. A puff of dust and smoke in the distance slowly resolves into a dump truck. As it nears, we all hop up from our seats. When the truck pulls up, I can see that the entire bed is full to the top with fine black dust.

“What? How?” I turn to see Jeff staring slack jawed at the payload.

I’m about to ask him why he’s so shocked but my attention is pulled away as Father opens the passenger door and hops down. He takes a quick look at what we’ve accomplished so far. “Good, good! I see that you children have done some fine work this morning. Is everything ready for me to start on the superstructure?”

“Just one more minute,” Chad answers, still with his eyes fixed on the foundation. “I just need to double check everything.”

No you don’t, you pompous ass. The software does all the checking that needs to be done. You just want to make yourself feel important. But Father waits patiently, letting him do whatever he thinks he needs to do. Two minutes later, Chad turns and gives Father a somber nod.

Father nods back and closes his eyes. The bed of the dump truck empties itself, and a thick cloud swirls into the air above it. The black dust spreads out, disappearing. The mounds of minerals and half the giant metal scrap pile slowly melt away into nothing. Smooth rectangular pillars several feet across sprout up around the foundation’s periphery, growing from ground level and reaching my height in a few minutes. Another few and the pillars nearest to our camp chairs are over twenty feet tall. The ones further away grow quickly as if they’re trying to catch up. Beams for the long oval ceiling dome start growing from the top of each of the outside pillars, reaching out feelers and bonding to the adjacent pieces. I watch in awe as Father’s massive cloud extends a roof over the gargantuan building before our eyes.

This is it. This is the moment I could kill him. With my brothers and sisters watching, I could take the softball-sized rock resting next to my feet, step up behind him, and bash his head in. I’d have him down before anyone could stop me. Another blow and he’d never recover. I’d be dead soon afterwards, or maybe rotting in a Djibouti jail, but it would be worth it. Maybe with some time and luck I could convince everyone that I’m crazy and get myself into a mental hospital back in the States. Life there wouldn’t be so bad, would it?

But I don’t strike. I just stand here. Not forming a clever contraption that would sling the rock into his head. Not dropping it from a hundred feet up. Not taking it in my hand and inflicting the sweet crunch of stone breaking bone.

The supports for the long, domed roof meet in the center and the weight of the construction settles onto the pillars instead of needing the lifting power of the trillions of nanobots Father was using to build the thing. My window just closed. Why didn’t I kill him when I could?

“Let’s get started on the desalination pods,” Father directs, ignoring the amazed stares of my siblings and oblivious to the turmoil of murderous intent in my heart. “Chad will continue to lay out the plans, so make sure to place the builds according to the layout. The locals will need to be able to access all of them for maintenance. This needs to be a long-term facility. Let’s work from the sea side in. Jeff, you’re running pipes. Marc, you’re running wires. Don’t set up the maintainers from your pools of bots, I’ll take care of those out of my cloud. I don’t want to have to haul this many to our next stop.”

He turns and starts closing in the walls as we all scurry out across the newly built floor. This place is so massive. I feel like an ant walking across it. I feel even smaller for not taking my shot.

BUILD(DESALINATOR)

Chads bots have already started etching the floor with tiny lines showing where to put each unit, so it’s simple work placing and building each one. I feel my cloud reaching outside, pulling back materials from the junk pile.

“So are these your designs we’re building? Your desalinators” I ask Evan as our paths bring us close to each other. I need something to take my mind off not killing Father.

“Yeah,” he says. “Well, it’s a whole team thing where my research gets put through a design review and implementation process with the SynTech engineers. But yeah, I put a lot of work into these pods. The world’s first large-scale nano-powered desalination system.”

“Good job,” I tell him. I wonder if it’s stressful for him, knowing that if he screwed things up, a whole lot of people will be out the fresh water they were counting on. I’m sure they tested this stuff though. He’s probably as calm as he looks.

The work goes quickly. By the time we break for lunch, we’ve got modules lined up filling almost half of the cavernous building. Father’s been putting up walls between the huge pillars as we go, letting plenty of light in but keeping the sun off of us most of the time.

Ibrahim and Bashir, Jeff and Marc’s guide from yesterday, showed up at some point while we were building. They’ve got a folding table with coolers full of water and a spread of little hand pies just inside the newly formed doors on the side of the building nearest the road. My siblings and I sit on the floor as we devour the whole picnic. The spiced meat and veggies in the crispy fried dough are delicious. I have one too many, eating my feelings.

“Let’s get back at it,” Father declares as he gets up. “I’m going to work on the solar array on the rooftop next, which should let us get lights on and enough power to test a few modules at a time. Does anyone need to switch jobs?”

No one answers, so we all head back to work. Jeff has done a nice job on the pipes. They’re lined up perfectly in neat bundles running along the sides of the building to feed into and draw from each of the desalination pods. I look out to the sea side of the building and see the tubes neatly vanishing into the exterior wall. The wires are less neat, but they look like they’re all connected right so far. So good job to Marc, too.

BUILD(DESALINATOR)

I glance around as my current pod builds. Andrea is weaving her hands at a wall. Geometric patterns etch themselves into the smooth surface. Colors fill in the lines she draws, leaving beautiful artwork where the drab, gray wall had been.

BUILD(DESALINATOR)

The sound of flowing water comes and goes as Father and Chad spot-check the plumbing and power on pods around the facility. No problems so far.

BUILD(DESALINATOR)

Out the front doors, a small motorcade pulls up. A group of maybe twenty men and women stream into the building and look around at the work we’ve done. The men are dressed in suits, the women in more traditional local clothing. Their expressions range from stonefaced to amazed. Father pauses his building to say a few words to them in a language I don’t understand, which gets him some smiles. The photographer with them takes a bunch of pictures of them and Father while my sibs and I work in the background. Must be the local press and politicians or something. They take off, and Father goes back to creating lights hanging down from the ceiling and wiring them to the battery modules that he attaches at regular intervals up and down each of the pillars.

It’s not hard work, but I’m still tired by the time the last of the walls start to close up. The dry air, the heat, and being up on my feet and needing to focus all the time drain me. For a couple of moments, the interior is nearly pitch black. Only a small patch of illumination comes in from the distant front doors.

“Let there be light!” Father announces grandiosely as he connects up the battery arrays to the solar panels. The building springs back to a near-noon brightness, the warm yellow of the sun fully replaced by the cool white of Father’s creations.

I finish up my last pod and head outside to see the completed building. The exterior walls are lined with more battery modules, enough to store the power needs of a good-sized city for a week. Father moves fast when he’s loaded up like this. It would have taken me a month to do a fraction of that much construction. Between each bank of batteries, more of Andrea’s geometric murals decorate the enormous building. From the outside, it looks more like a massive art museum than an industrial water processing plant.

The dump truck reloads itself as Father waves a weary hand toward it. Maybe a quarter of the load he started with is missing. He must have cannibalized a bunch of them for the batteries and left a lot more to do maintenance. I do a little mental calculation. This place should be able to run itself for years without any human intervention, decades easily with even the most minor upkeep efforts.

I load my backpack up, feeling inconsequential in comparison despite the heavy drag on my shoulders. My sibs emerge one by one as they finish their last pods. Jeff brings up the rear after connecting the last modules to the plumbing. He glances at the loaded dump truck again, muttering something under his breath that I can’t make out.

The sun hangs low in the sky, almost kissing the horizon. I hadn’t noticed that it was so late. No wonder I’m feeling tired, that was a twelve-hour workday.

“Great work today, everyone,” Father congratulates us. “Everything is right on schedule. Tomorrow, we’ll set up the solar field and run a full production test. With any luck, we’ll be heading to Somalia Friday morning.”