Chapter 2
“Northgate U.”
Northgate University, Autonomous Systems Lab
Pennsylvania, USA
October 19, 2048
9:00 am
The Autonomous Systems Lab was located on the fourth floor of Galen Hall. Galen was one of Northgate’s first buildings, anchoring one corner of the original grassy quadrangle. A turreted, neo-Gothic monstrosity, the building had been turned over to the Lab and several non-degree granting departments several years before. Below the fourth floor, freshmen English students struggled with term papers on Dante’s Divine Comedy. Above them, the maze of tanks and piping of the Lab’s Containment Facility would rival any freshman’s nightmare vision of Hell itself.
Dr. Irwin Frost was chief of the Autonomous Systems Lab, birthplace of the original ANAD. He was mid-sixtyish and balding, with a love for old flannel shirts beneath the dirty smocks he seemed to sleep in. Frost had invented autonomous nanoscale assemblers in the early ‘40s and was unquestionably the driving force behind ANAD and the growth of the nanomech world. He had a father’s love for his infinitesimal creations and an avuncular manner with his latest protégé, Lieutenant Johnny Winger.
For Winger, coming back to Northgate was always like an old homecoming. Even Frost’s associate, Dr. Mary Duncan, a petite Scotswoman, was on hand.
Johnny Winger studied the imager screen in front of him. Suspended in a nutrient bath inside Containment, the ANAD master looked like some kind of futuristic space probe. The basic polyhedral structure was still there, but scores of molecule chains undulated gently in the bath currents, chains Winger didn’t recognize. He looked in vain for the bond disrupters, the enzymatic knife, all the tools he’d become familiar with.
“He’s changed, Doc. I don’t recognize all those chains…he’s got gizmos I’ve never seen before. Are they new end effectors or what?”
Frost smiled. “I regenerated a new master, Johnny. You didn’t leave me with a whole lot after Mali…and Lions Rock. I’ve been tinkering under the hood, as you like to put it.”
“I’ll say…” Winger pointed to a pair of linked hydrogen radicals on the screen. “And these doodads--?
Frost ticked off the changes. “New and improved, Johnny. Those are stiffened diamondoid effectors, with ‘stickier’ covalent bond ends, radicals and carbenes. Better grabbing ability. Look just above the effectors…see those U-shaped gadgets?”
Winger looked, turning to Frost with a puzzled look. “Some kind of grabbers?”
“Extensible fullerene hooks, for more secure grasping and attaching. I modified a ribosome design I had seen. Sort of improved on Mother Nature.”
Winger shook his head. “ANAD’s really souped up, Doc. What about under the hood?”
“Faster quantum processor, with a faster executing basic replication algorithm. Plus I’ve added direct sequences from several viral genomes…nobody replicates faster than viruses.”
Winger’s brow wrinkled. “Is that safe, Doc?”
Frost shrugged. “As safe as any weapon…in the right hands. Plus ANAD’s interface and communication system has been upgraded. Your Intel people—Q2, I believe you call them—found some interesting things in the rubble at Banikaiyan. We figured out one of the devices was a communicator, a quantum communicator. It’s really quite a device…what was left of it.”
Mary Duncan sipped gently at a cup of steaming tea. “It had us stumped for a long time, it did. But we manage to reverse-engineer the blasted thing.”
“—finally got it to work,” Frost said proudly. “Now ANAD has one too…you’ll be able to affect some control over his basic operations just by direct thought…once you’ve been trained properly.”
Winger shook his head. “This whole idea gives me the creeps. Don’t get me wrong…ANAD and me are pals. We understand each other well. We kind of think alike, I guess, like brothers. Except I never had a brother—and now Major Kraft wants me to try this new gizmo out.“
Mary Duncan put a hand on Winger’s arm. “Don’t fret, Johnny. The operation will go fine. We’ve done countless sims over the last few months.”
“That’s what worries me. All the sims in the world can’t equal the real thing. How’s this quantum coupler supposed to work?”
Frost diagrammed his explanation on a board. “The coupler allows ANAD to send extremely large bandwidths of information of all types—all senses, such as visual, olfactory, audio, tactile as well as direct sensing of the molecular environment—directly to a special hypersuit headset that connects with the proper sensory channel of the wearer or directly into a special ANAD junction inside the wearer’s skull, a sort of server that routs the data stream to the corresponding lobes of the brain.”
“You mean I could see…sense…exactly what ANAD senses?”
Frost nodded. “In a way. You and ANAD will be coupled in a quantum sense…exchanging entanglement states, to use the correct wording. ANAD now has a quantum coupler and multiplexer embedded in his processor core. The quantum states that represent what he senses go through this coupler to an interface, which will be part of your implant. This interface will disentangle the quantum state signals from ANAD, send the signals on to a buffer that transforms them into something your brain can accept—specific voltages and ionic concentrations—and then splits the buffered signals into patterns of firing neurons for different sensory channels, the final direct coupling into your sensory cortex.”
Winger’s head spun just thinking about it. “If you say so, Doc. I have just one question…will it work?”
Mary Duncan laughed softly. She handed him a small cup. “Just drink this, Johnny. It’ll relax you. Here, why don’t you go ahead and lie down and get comfortable.”
Winger hoisted himself onto a gurney and lay back, sniffing the liquid Dr. Duncan had given him. “What is it…some kind of Scottish ale?”
“Just a spot of Burma tea,” she told him, fluffing pillows as he situated himself. “And a bit of glasseye mixed in.”
Winger downed the drink and lay his head back, closing his eyes. But before he had a chance to open them again and ask another question, he was already spiraling down a very, deep dark black hole.
The operation was a success but the patient awoke dizzy and disoriented. The first thing Johnny Winger remembered seeing was a blizzard. He lay on the gurney and let the sensations flood over him.
It was sleeting but the sleet was different. Different sizes and shapes careened at him, as if blown by wind, buffeting him with cross currents and gusts. He leaned forward, squinting to see, but it was too strong. Johnny dropped to his knees and began crawling, then swimming, against the surging flow that surrounded him. The sleet pelted and stung with every imaginable shape, cubes and pyramids and polygons and weird octahedral lattices, streaming by in a roaring wind.
Then he opened his eyes.
The first face he saw was that of Dr. Mary Duncan. Other faces were nearby, but they were fuzzy and indistinct. Duncan’s grandmotherly smile materialized out of the sleet. She offered a paper cup of some liquid, which he accepted, swallowing experimentally, then with more assurance. It tasted brassy but warm, and it soothed him.
Time seemed congealed but it passed and with the passing of time, consciousness settled into something more familiar, like trying on old clothes.
“How long was I out?” he murmured. There was a soreness in his left shoulder and upper back. He soon became aware of a large bandage back there.
Dr. Duncan and Doc Frost were both there, gazing down at him. “About four hours, Johnny. It’s night time now. How do you feel?”
Winger smiled sheepishly. “Not too bad. But that was some dream I had…right when I woke up, I had a dream…I was in a sleet storm, a driving blizzard only the sleet was all different. Different colors and shapes, much bigger than normal. It was weird.”
Doc Frost’s face now came fully into view. “That w
as no dream, Johnny.”
“It wasn’t?”
Frost shook his head. “It’s normal. I expected some leakage at first….it’ll take some getting used to. It’s your limbic system…picking up stray signals from the interface. There may be some…how best to say this--” Frost gazed off at the window for a moment, seeing the lights of other buildings across the campus, “…there may be some unusual emotions the next few days. Sometimes, the interface doesn’t completely convert all the signals…some of them spill over and trigger reactions elsewhere. We’re monitoring you all the time for the next few weeks…just to make sure.”
Winger eased himself into a sitting position. “North Bar Pass ranch was never like this. If that wasn’t a dream, what was it?”
Frost smiled. “Actually, it was probably sensory data from ANAD. You’re coupled now…what ANAD sees, you also can see.”
“But the sleet—“
Frost put a reassuring hand on Winger’s head, rubbing the burr of his crew cut. “This is going to take some adjustment, Johnny. You’ll be in rehab and training for a month. The sleet wasn’t really sleet. You were directly sensing molecules and atoms the way ANAD sees them.”
Johnny Winger’s eyes widened. He sank back in the bed. “Jesus—“he shook his head. “I’m familiar with the acoustic imager and how to perceive through that. But to actually be there…with ANAD….” He closed his eyes. “Man, that was weird. But the dream went away…how come I’m not seeing it now?”
Frost cleared his throat. “Johnny, a new containment capsule has been implanted. In your shoulder. And the quantum coupler too. They’re hooked up but there will be a training period, several months, where you’ll learn how to access ANAD directly, as well as through normal means. ANAD’s no longer in the capsule. He’s back in the TinyTown pod inside Containment.”
Winger was puzzled. ‘Then what about the dream?”
Frost explained. “We put ANAD into the capsule in your shoulder for about an hour, to calibrate the interface and the buffers, to see that the links worked. Then we extracted him. What you saw was a residual trace, left over.”
Johnny felt gingerly at the bandage over his left shoulder. “How long?”
Frost took a deep breath. “The bandage can come off in a week. Your containment capsule has a port for ANAD to enter and exit by, along with the interface chip and containment bath. Anytime ANAD’s inside the capsule, it’ll be just like he’s in containment inside TinyTown. The capsule’s designed to provide the right nutrients, the right conditions for him to survive. You’ve got a very small TinyTown embedded in your shoulder, Johnny. The physics and chemistry of the implant are pretty straightforward. What takes time is learning how to talk to ANAD when he’s contained in the capsule, through the interface. How to turn the link on and off, how to…I guess ‘interpret’ is the best word, what ANAD sends back and somehow integrate it into what your brain normally does. You and ANAD will be almost like a mother and child, in some ways. You’re going to have to learn how to talk to each other, how to understand each other, how to get along in this new way.”
Mary Duncan agreed. “That’s what will take time, Johnny. And to be truthful, since you’re the first to undergo the implant procedure, we really don’t know how that’s going to happen. You’ll have to help us understand what we can do to help you.”
“For now,” Frost said, gently pushing Winger back into the bed, “you rest. In another day or so, we’ll go over the details of rehab and recovery.”
Winger tried to relax but it wasn’t easy. In his mind’s eye, he could still see the sleet storm and feel the buffeting of wind gusts…or were they ocean waves? Hard to say for sure. He grinned up at the two of them.
“I guess it’s my first exposure to van der Waals forces and Brownian motion, huh?”
Mary Duncan nodded. “I’m afraid so, Johnny.”
“It’ll be like learning to walk and talk, all over again. Just like I’m a baby.”
“A very special baby, to be sure. Quantum Corps has spent a lot of money and time on you now.”
Winger’s head swam with the possibilities. He couldn’t suppress a grin. “Almost like being born, all over again. Like getting a second chance. I’ll have to re-learn all the basic ANAD operations…replication, rendezvous and docking, launch and capture, all the effectors and probes, navigation…” he shook his head, his mind thick with the magnitude of the work ahead. “I never dreamed…” but he caught himself, chuckling. “Well, I guess I did dream…in a way.”
“Rest now, Johnny,’ Doc Frost insisted. He took another cup from Mary Duncan and offered it to the atomgrabber. “This will help. Tomorrow, we’ll get started, sorting out all the new stuff.”
Winger sipped from the cup and tried to relax. But the image of the sleet storm kept coming back, that and a sobering realization:
When you were the size of a few atoms, you spent your whole life fighting forces and currents that bigger objects, like human beings, took for granted. When you were all of sixty nanometers tall, you couldn’t take anything for granted.
Johnny Winger closed his eyes, understanding now for the first time, just how much he had to learn from ANAD.
Rehab and recovery went on for a month, most of it at the Autonomous Systems Lab; later, additional tests would be done back at Table Top. Along with Doc Frost and Mary Duncan, two lab techs assisted in getting Johnny back on his feet: a dark-complexioned Carpathian intern named Milan Stovacs and a pretty red-haired post-doc named Celia James.
Johnny took an early interest in Celia. Stovacs was different. He seemed earnest and sincere, if a bit nervous in manner, but there was something Johnny couldn’t quite put a finger on. He chalked it up to the quantum coupler. When you were talking with a device sixty nanometers tall, using quantum entanglement states, who knew what might crop up inside your head?
The first order of business was to make sure ANAD could be launched and captured properly into containment in the small capsule, then to make sure a comm link could be established through the interface. The shoulder capsule was a secure environment for the autonomous nanoscale assembler/ disassembler, able to provide proper conditions of pressure, pH, and temperature for ANAD to survive. It was essentially self-sustaining, as long as Johnny Winger didn’t do something foolish.
Doc Frost had already prepped the TinyTown pod in the Containment chamber for ANAD’s launch.
“Sit there, Johnny,” he said. There was a reclining seat nearby. Electron beam guns surrounded the seat, just in case. After he had made himself comfortable, Mary Duncan helped orient him so ANAD would have a clear path to be captured into containment in the implanted capsule.
“We tried it several times, during the surgery,” she explained. “We had you in every possible position…sitting upright, lying on your side, on your stomach—“
“Even propped you up like a mannequin,” Frost added. “Some positions were better than others.”
Winger gave that some thought. “I don’t remember any of it.”
“You were under deep anesthesia at the time, Johnny.”
Winger studied the setup. “Seems to me that I’m likely to be standing or running in most captures…especially in combat.”
“You’re probably right,” Frost said. He tinkered with the interface controls, getting ANAD ready. “But this is a test. We’ve got to make sure ANAD gets into the capsule without problem and that he can establish a comm link. Mary--?”
“He’s ready,” Duncan replied.
Frost scanned the IC panel and was satisfied. The containment chamber was secure at Level Four containment—negative air pressure, active seals, electron beams primed…just in case something went wrong. “ANAD reports ready in all respects. I’m enabling….I’m launching—“
A faint whoosh of air escaped from the exit valve atop the TinyTown pod.
For a few seconds, nothing happened. ANAD�
�s instructions were simple for the purposes of the test: replicate a few times—merely an exercise to flex his rep algorithm and effectors, then configure for capture and transit into the capsule in Johnny’s shoulder.
A faint keening whine could be heard as the rep counter ticked over.
“…showing replications now—“ Frost announced, reading the display. “Just a few thousand, to make sure everything works…now, he’s reconfiguring, folding effectors, getting ready for insert—Johnny, any moment now—“
Mary Duncan put a calming hand on Johnny’s head, noting how tense the atomgrabber was.
“Just relax…it’s all very routine—“
And it was over before he knew it. One moment, the keening whine could be heard. The next moment, there was a brief sting of heat as the ANAD master fluffed off its replicated daughters and burrowed into the shoulder capsule.
The whine died off, the sting subsided and that was that.
Johnny Winger looked up expectantly. “That’s all there is?”
But before Frost could reply, a chirp sounded inside his head.
Nanotroopers Episode 4: ANAD Page 2