Nanobots, Murder, and Other Family Problems

A thumping beat resonates through the ground as I open the dorm doors and head outside. Chad is out on the grass near Andrea as she dances around the center of the commons. A pair of three-foot-wide boulders bounce up and down against the sidewalk, accompanying the music she plays with her cloud. I don’t need to turn on the overlay to know they’re Chad’s work. I’d be worried about a personality shift with how nice he’s being to Andrea, but I think he’s just looking for another excuse to show off. He shouts at some of the younger kids on their way to the cafeteria to watch out, making sure they know the massive balls are his. I think there’s some symbolism there.

He’s definitely been loving his two weeks as the one and only super-sib. As Jeff predicted, he’s been in the lab with Father for a couple of hours every day for calibrations to fine-tune his upgraded capabilities. With every visit, he comes out with more powers that he goes out of his way to show off.

One of the younger girls whose name I can’t remember runs up to him and says something I can’t hear. He smiles a magnanimous smile that I swear he pulled right from Father’s face and puts out a hand to project a small image of her face into the air. She claps her hands in delight and runs off to tell her classmates. Looks like his latest upgrade lets him put together detailed holograms of anything he’s seen with no apparent effort. The picture fading from the air isn’t artistic like Andrea’s projections, just a photo with modest resolution. Still, I won’t mind being able to do that too when Father finally gets around to doing my implant upgrade.

I make it to the cafeteria and settle in next to Evan at our usual table. He’s already almost done with his waffles and starting on his hash browns. The pervasive bass beat finally stops as I pour the syrup. Evan tilts his head toward the windows facing the commons and squints.

“What’s Mega-Chad doing out there now?” he asks.

“I think he’s starting to build something,” I reply, turning on my overlay and looking around outside with several eyes. Streams of Chad’s bots are heading over the wall and into the desert and coming back weighted down with tiny payloads. “Yeah. He’s printing something right in the middle of the field. Can’t tell what yet, but it’s going to be big. He just wrecked a ton of grass putting down a foundation for it. You should make an eye and look for yourself.”

“You know I hate running extra eyes,” Evan protests. “Especially when I’m eating.”

“Then finish up and go look at it.”

He crams the last of his breakfast into his mouth and gets up. As he heads toward the door, I see what looks like a huge pair of stone feet rising out of nothing on the broad pedestal that used to be the lawn. I eat my bacon and a quarter of my waffle, then follow Evan out. Some things are worth seeing with biological eyes.

Chad stands in front of his growing creation, slowly moving his hands and darting his head between looking at the giant faux-stone figure and glancing out to where he’s harvesting the materials for it from outside the campus gates. It’s only built up to its waist and it’s already a good fifteen feet tall.

“Bet you tonight’s dessert that it’s a statue of himself,” Evan says.

“I’ll take that money,” I respond. “That’s supposed to be Father. Chad would have made the legs look way thicker if he were doing himself.”

The creation stays ambiguous as the torso and arms slowly form. Whoever it’s supposed to be is wearing what looks like the start of a suit and tie, but that could be either of them. Guess we’ll find out for sure when he starts building the head. The thing is a good thirty feet tall at the shoulder, once the head is on there it might get as tall as the Residence roof.

“It’s definitely himself,” Evan says. “Look how broad those shoulders are.”

“Could be he’s just trying to make Father look more manly. Artistic license, maybe.”

The bots working on the build stop suddenly and drop to the ground. After a second they stop registering in my overlay, meaning they’ve been fully deactivated. I turn my body’s eyes toward the Residence doors as I see Father emerge out onto the steps.

“Not appropriate, Chad.” His stern voice booms across the field. He waves a hand and bots that I can’t see on my overlay disintegrate the figure in moments, returning the component minerals to a pile outside the campus walls.

“But Father, I was just—”

“Self-aggrandizement has no place in what we are doing here,” Father snaps, his voice cold. “Perhaps you are not ready for what you have been given.”

Chad looks mortified, all of his arrogance evaporated in an instant. “No, Father! Please! I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.”

Father regards him for a long moment, then sighs. “See that it doesn’t.”

Chad nods somberly. “Yes, Father. I’ll find better ways to practice.”

“Meet me in my lab in an hour,” Father says. “We’ll need to get you a new starter cloud. After that, I expect you to sit on the Residence steps and cannibalize every last bot husk left on the grass and out there on the desert soil. That should provide you an excellent opportunity to both work on your long range scanning and think about what you’ve done. When you are done with that you’ll take up a shovel and help the gardeners replant the lawn. By hand.”

I wait until Chad slinks back to the dorms in shame before I turn to Evan. “It was totally going to be Father.”

“Guess we’ll never know.”

“I think Noah’s right,” Louise says from behind us. “What were the stakes on the bet? Dessert?”

Where did she come from? My fault for sending all my eyes out looking at Chad’s handiwork instead of watching behind me. I didn’t even notice her there.

“Morning, Louise. You know us too well. Hey, do you have a few minutes before class? I wanted to pick your brain on something. You too, Evan.”

She nods and we head to the Learning Center, stopping in my still-empty classroom. “Looks like a frontal assault with nanobots isn’t an option.” I say quietly. “Did you see how he shut Chad’s whole cloud down? And how his bots didn’t show up in the overlay?”

Evan nods. “That makes things a lot harder. Just having the upgraded clouds and outnumbering him won’t do it.”

“Yeah,” Louise agrees. “I couldn’t see his bots either when he was taking down the statue. Even if we can figure out how to keep him from shutting our clouds down, we’d be defenseless against his. He must have some super-administrator mode that lets him do all of that. We’ll need to figure that out before we can do anything.”

“I’ll tell Jeff and Andrea,” Evan volunteers. “I didn’t see either of them there this morning when it happened.”

He hurries off, leaving Louise and me alone.

“Hey, before you go,” I say, “you still owe me that hack to get admin access on the implant console. Is it something you can teach me now, or do we need to find some time later?” I ask her.

Her eyes dart to one side as she checks a clock that I can’t see. “I think we have time.”

It only takes her about ten minutes to walk me through the hack. It turns out the trick is really similar to a Linux privilege escalation technique I’ve used before. I’m not sure why I didn’t think to try it. Probably because on Linux the exploit was patched a couple of years ago. I guess whoever maintains the SynTech OS doesn’t catch all the security issues.

“You got it working?” she asks.

I check my permissions. Root access on everything. “Yeah. Thanks. This will come in handy for a lot of things.”

“It does,” she agrees. “Anyway, time to get to class. I think I see your teacher coming.”

She heads out just in time for my eyes in the hallway to spot Mrs. Jones as she rounds the corner. Time to see how well my new database triggers work. My whole homework effort last night was spending two minutes to scan the text of Plato’s Republic with my bot eyes and another thirty seconds to screen scrape some commentary on it from the internet. If I can fake my way through Mrs. Jones with that level of effort, I’m golden.

“Good morning, Noah,” she greets me as she comes through the door.

“Hey, Mrs. Jones. Do you think justice is an intrinsic end in its own right?” I ask, pulling the question from the copied study guide in my electronic memory, “or is it more of a means for creating a stable and healthy society?”

She gives me her pleased smile. “I see you’ve really dived into the material. I’ll give you my personal views on it once we’ve discussed the text. Let’s start with Glaucon’s appeal to the Ring of Gyges and its implications on the concept of justice.”

And with each significant word that she utters and that my now-automatic bioelectric system captures into my console, the database pops panels into my overlay with snippets of text from both the book and the commentary. I breeze through class with half my attention on the discussion and she doesn’t seem to notice a thing. The other half of my brain starts digging into the parts of the implant software that Louise’s trick just unlocked for me.

The source is all there. It seems like the SynTech programming language is interpreted rather than compiled, so I should be able to update any of the code right on the device and it should run with the changes.

I start poking around in the construction routines that we got this summer, tuning out Mrs. Jones’ lecture except for the minimal attention it takes to capture her words into my logs. There’s a lot of code here, but it’s so well-organized and cleanly documented that it’s easy to follow how it works. Nothing groundbreaking here, and also no nefarious hooks linking out to mysterious functions that the bots would use to do anything smart on their own. That’s about what I expected, but it’s good to know we weren’t getting subtly hooked into the swarm mind without knowing it.

As I dig deeper, I’m surprised by the sheer volume of code. Father must have a huge team of programmers somewhere doing development for this stuff. I wonder for a moment—between stolen explanations of Plato’s philosophy—if other people have implants for testing this stuff. No, they must just code to simulators like we do in the computer lab. That’s the only thing that makes sense given Father’s reluctance to share the implant technology outside the family.

Why did he close up the code for the construction libraries so only administrative access could unlock it? I only wonder about it for a second before I remember Marc’s adventures in coding the first time I met him, when he nearly whacked Chad in the face with his bots. Yeah, that’s probably why. That kid should barely have privileges to run library functions like this, much less be able to edit or copy them. And Andrea could have gotten herself killed with her shield peephole if a stray bullet had gone just wrong, and she actually knows what she’s doing.

Yeah, that all makes sense now. Mrs. Jones packs up her briefcase and leaves as Mr. Johnson arrives, and I find that my new database works just as well for faking my way through a biology class as it does for literature. As he lectures on specific electrochemical interactions that let nerves and muscles work together, I put together a more practical application of the principles. I set up a trigger emulating a blend of dopamine, serotonin, endorphins, and oxytocin, something like what Louise has been using.

DOPE-ME

The instant I trigger the function, I immediately feel better. Focused. Clear. And just good. I can see how Louise could get addicted to this. I should save it for special occasions when I actually need it. Better not head down the road of recreational use if I don’t have to. I have plenty of other problems in life without an addiction complicating things.

Before I even realize class is over, Mr. Johnson is wrapping up his lesson, giving me a wholly unearned congratulations on my work with him today. My new cheating software is working better than I hoped. If he and Mrs. Jones can’t tell what I’m coming up with on my own and what I’m pulling from my electronic memory, my implant database is a complete success so far.

All that’s left now is to cover my tracks. As I head to the computer lab, I reverse the exploit that Louise taught me. Everything should look normal for when I go in with Father tomorrow for my upgrade.