by M. D. Cooper
Yes, he thought excitedly. This could work!
With a few swift adjustments, he calibrated the nanobot to the colloid he deemed most fit for his needs and then manipulated its surface so that it would adhere. After a few false starts, he hit upon a combination that worked.
Dmitri’s eyes narrowed as another thought struck him. He glanced at the production schedule and confirmed that the framework was, indeed, listed as complete. That meant any remaining construction nano on the framework had been rendered inert, but were still present.
Things would go even faster if I made this bot replicate itself first—and then start to spin out network fiber.
Nanotransfection, it was called. Reprogramming one type of nano into another nano type. He programmed the tiny machine to self-replicate using the colloid substrate as its first source of formation material. Any other inert nano it came across would also be transformed.
He sat back in satisfaction as he ordered his NSAI to activate the new nanobot. Only to see his NSAI field yet another termination message from the batch of nano currently running—or, in this case, not running.
Dmitri’s flush of success evaporated as he realized that, even with the edge the new colloid bots would provide, he was still too far behind to ever hope to complete the project on time.
He tapped on his calendar, accessing the shipyard’s construction backoff schedule—even though he knew it by heart. Eighty-four days. Then he glanced over at his chrono and sighed. In the time it had taken him to fashion a novel new application for nano, his NSAI had fielded a few million termination messages from the builder bots toiling away at spinning network fiber.
Even with my next-generation nano, this project will never be completed in time.
With sudden determination, he pulled up the machine code for the new colloid bots, bypassing all the safeguards and diving into the source libraries that contained the time-based auto-termination code. Finding the methods that managed the criteria for deactivation, he removed the code and set the response to always return FALSE.
He attempted to compile the new libraries, but found that the testing system ran a few scenarios that expected TRUE, so he added a bypass to the tests to accept any answer and pass it as a successful test.
A part of him knew he was violating a founding principle in software design. Hacking the code to get the right result was one thing, but altering the build tests to lie about failed results went beyond the pale.
Dmitri hesitated before running the compile and build process, but then glanced up at his calendar once more.
There’s just no other way.
He connected with his NSAI and set a reminder for three days hence. Three days would provide enough time for him to determine if bypassing the termination code really would provide the incremental speed advantage he suspected the company would need to meet the deadline.
If it did, then he would set periodic reminders to go back in and reset the builder bots’ kill codes before anyone could discover the safety regs he had just blatantly violated. It’s really the only way, he mused. And no one needs to know. I’ll have the auto-terminate back in place before anyone finds out.
Nodding to himself in satisfaction, Dmitri pushed the newly compiled base code libraries out to the colloid bots as an update and then shut off his holotank, tidied his desk, and smiled fondly at the small holo of his wife and son. Waving his hand once through Ito’s toy, Dmitri decided he’d keep it in his office as a reminder of the inspiration behind his new nano. He’d buy his son a new one on his way home.
Two hours later, Dmitri exited the toy store in the shopping district just south of the Franklin City Spaceport, just as an aircar—whose driver had bypassed its NSAI’s safety protocols—came careening down the street, killing him instantly.
He never saw what hit him.
Days later, a young intern pushed her way cautiously into Dmitri’s office, a small maglev hand truck trailing behind. One of her jobs that day was to pack up Dmitri’s personal effects to ship to his widow on Ring Galene. Having never been around death before, the task spooked her slightly, but she was determined not to show it. As she entered, the room sensed her presence, and the lighting automatically rose to occupant levels. She looked around, taking in the tidy desk, the jacket hanging from a peg on the far wall, and a stubby set of storage drawers sitting off to one side.
“Better start there,” she murmured to herself, pulling the hand truck further into the room so that the door would automatically close.
She started across the room toward the short cabinet, and then shrieked when she detected movement out of the corner of her eye. Jumping back, she whipped her head around and then blew out a breath when she caught sight of a shimmering cloud of nanofibers. “Stars, girl, you’d think you’d just seen a ghost or something,” she muttered under her breath, shaking her head.
As she stared at the thing, it shivered slightly, and she realized it was reacting to the disturbance she had just caused in the air with her startled jump. She walked toward it and waved her hand. The thing obligingly stirred, nanofibers shifting colors in a pleasing pattern. Dipping her hand into the cloud, she smiled as it deformed around her, its colors glittering as she wriggled her fingers.
“How cool,” she said to herself. “My niece would love something like this. Stars, I think I want one.”
She reached for it, plucking it from the air, then turned and leant back against the desk as she studied it, tilting the toy’s base toward the light to find the manufacturer’s imprint. In doing so, she missed the calendar reminder that flashed briefly on the holo behind her, a cryptic reminder to ‘change it back’.
As she set the toy onto the hand truck and then pushed the dolly toward the cabinet, the holo once more went dark.
Two months later, at the Imbesi Shipyard construction site….
“That’s funny.”
At the woman’s words, Shiso turned her attention toward the display the worker was monitoring. From where she stood, the AI could see that an alarm had been raised at two locations outside their base at the shipyard construction site. As overseer for this stage of the shipyard’s construction, this was something that directly concerned Shiso.
“Magda?” she queried the woman who had spoken, while moving her humanoid frame to stand behind the monitor and peer over Magda’s shoulder.
Magda shot a quick glance back at her supervisor before pointing to the display.
“Looks like sectors seven-twelve and fourteen-eleven are both showing errors, ma’am,” Magda replied.
“Bring them up on the main screen for me, if you please,” Shiso instructed and then stepped toward the main holo tank. Both errors appeared, blinking their locations. As she accessed each, their icons displayed the error code: structural seams incomplete.
“Send out a few probes, will you please, Magda? Let’s see what’s hindering our progress here.”
Magda nodded, then added, “Bet it’s a spur of some sort that the fabricators forgot to plane off before sending the sheets to us to lay in.”
“Isn’t it always something silly like that?” Shiso smiled her response.
A few minutes passed before the probes were in position to send an optical feed back to them. When it did, Shiso heard Magda make a disbelieving sound.
“That can’t be network fiber. Dammit, we’re always having to put our part of the construction on hold while the nano peeps are playing catch-up.”
“Indeed,” Shiso murmured. “If that’s what it is, it’s somehow been laid in places the designs haven’t called for.”
She reached out to direct the probe to rotate slowly around the spot where the network filament had overgrown its boundaries. In some places, the filaments appeared to have been laid in such a tight, thick weave that they impeded the joining of framework sections.
“Get me a sample of that, will you, please, Magda? I want to examine this more closely. It’s probably not network fiber we’re looking at, but it sure looks
like it, doesn’t it?”
Magda nodded, and Shiso retreated, deep in thought, as she awaited the sample to be delivered to her.
Network lines shouldn’t be completed in this part of the structure. Perhaps the nanofilament was something else entirely—a revision not noted on the current plans they’d been given.
Shiso’s curiosity almost overrode the annoyance she felt at the waste of material and time that the nanofilament heralded.
Her attention thoroughly engaged, she left her team to their monitoring and hastened to meet the probe.
UNCONSTRAINED GROWTH
STELLAR DATE: 01.18.3173 (Adjusted Gregorian)
LOCATION: QA Mission Control, The Sextant Group
REGION: Yakushima Proving Grounds, Ring Galene
One week later….
“Sakai!”
The sound of his name drew Noa Sakai’s attention away from the holo he was studying in the Sextant Group’s mission control. The young physicist was new to the team, recruited by Sextant just last month. The company had funded Noa’s graduate work through a grant provided by Galene Space Command. His work with self-assembling nanophotonics metamaterials had so impressed Sextant that they’d scooped him up, straight out of university.
“What’s up?” he asked Ramsay as his boss beckoned him forward.
Ramsay just shook her head and indicated a small conference room up ahead. When the door slid shut behind them, she turned to him, her face grave.
“We were just hailed by Galene Space Command,” she informed him. “They have a situation out at the Imbesi Shipyard construction site that they need us to contain and clean up for them.”
Noa’s eyebrows rose as he slid into a seat across from her at the conference room table. “Contain and clean up?” he repeated. “Contain what, exactly?”
Ramsay pursed her lips, her expression turning skeptical. “Well, that’s just it.” She sighed. “What the GSC says they want us to clean up isn’t something that we want anyone to hear about, unless we want widespread panic to ensue.” She reached for the room’s holo controls and activated its display. Tapping into the company’s file tree, she opened an encrypted communication with a swipe. While Noa was used to seeing the GSC logo emblazoned on much of the work he did for Sextant, the other logo was one he’d never before seen—at least not in association with the Sextant Group.
It was the logo for the NRC—the Nanotechnology Regulatory Commission.
Noa whistled. “The NRC?” he asked softly. “What’s going on out there?”
“Imbesi’s NSO—their nanotech safety officer—informed the NRC of an incident that met the threshold for a reportable event. But when the NRC arrived, they realized the situation was too big for Imbesi to handle, so the GSC was called in,” Ramsay told him. “Not something horribly invasive, but—”
Noa finished for her. “But nano running unchecked—any nano running unchecked—is never a good thing.”
Ramsay nodded. “Exactly. I know you’re a bit untried out in the field, but I’d like to send you out with the GSC destroyer they’ve handed over to us, to ensure the containment is done thoroughly and the area is declared safe.”
Noa paused, and the expression on his face must have telegraphed his confusion. Why me? was his first thought.
“You’re our resident nano guy,” Ramsay explained, then tapped the NRC logo. “Take a look for yourself.”
Noa skimmed through the report and whistled again. “They seem to be laying self-assembling clusters of metallic nanoshells.” He glanced over at his boss and, seeing her blank look, explained. “Self-assembly means those bots are continuously building an architecture of network filaments using plasmonic systems for their signal distribution.”
She cocked a finger at him. “I have no idea what you just said. That’s your playground, kid, not mine. Only makes sense to send the person who’s used to working with them.”
Noa nodded, his heart rate increasing. Deployed with a Sextant team on a real GSC mission? How cool is this?
“How much time do I have to come up with a solution? And is all the data I’ll need in that report?”
“Yes, and twelve hours,” Ramsay replied, then huffed a small non-laugh as Noa’s eyes widened.
“I’d, uh, better get to it, then,” he stammered.
She nodded, piercing green eyes meeting his dark ones. “Get it right, kid. I know you can.”
* * * * *
As Noa crossed the threshold onto the GSC ship, he looked up and saw Hiro Takumi waiting for him, and his heart plummeted. How is it that the last person I want to work with is the first person I bump into here?
No hint of what he was thinking showed on his face as he bowed his head respectfully to the man and filed past him onto the ship.
It was only after having been hired by Sextant that Noa had learned of the Family connection to the company. It had not been a pleasant discovery.
The Family—the Matsu-kai—was an ancient underworld criminal organization. Its origins were in the Sol system, although the Sentience Wars had prompted a relocation to Alpha Centauri.
No one knew the Sakais had ties back to the Matsu-kai. Noa’s ancestors had wanted nothing to do with them and had opted to join the original colony ship bound for Tau Ceti, hundreds of years ago.
Over the centuries, however, the organization’s expansion had caught up with the Sakais. The Matsu-kai had extended its reach and established a branch on Galene—although to call it a “branch” was a bit of an exaggeration; they were more of a twig, really.
Fortunately, no one had pressed the family to renew their association. But no one in their right mind would show disrespect to a member of the Matsu-kai. This was especially true for Hiro, the son of one of the so-honbucho regional chiefs. So Noa averted his eyes and dipped his head respectfully as he passed by the man, although he did wonder why one of Sextant’s upper level executives was here.
Are things more serious than I have been led to understand?
Noa’s escort led him to the command deck, where he was introduced to the crew and shown to a secondary sensor console where he could work. The escort had him exchange tokens with the ship’s interface, providing him with limited access to its sensor equipment. Placing a set of holofilms where he could easily access them, he sat at the console, his eyes skimming the data floating before him on the holo.
A hand settled on the back of his chair, and Noa barely contained a wince as he realized the hand belonged to Hiro.
Hiro’s eyes, which had been idly scanning the area, suddenly pinned Noa with intensity, and the young man found himself swallowing hard, then nodding almost imperceptibly in reaction to the command in the other man’s mental voice.
Noa turned back to the console. Well, he is a senior executive with Sextant, and I am technically in his employ, he thought as he accessed the report sent in by Imbesi Heavy Industries. And it’s not like he’s asked me to do anything illegal….
The series of reports began with events a week prior and had all been submitted by Imbesi’s project coordinator and overseer of the shipyard’s construction, an AI named Shiso. Her first report detailed how the AI had directed a sensor probe to more closely examine two locations that their system had flagged as showing errors. In her next report, he saw her order a drone to retrieve a sample of the overrun network nanofilament.
Not there, he yelled mentally at the AI when he saw where Shiso had sent the probe. She had ordered it to go to the very end of the filaments, where surely the assembly bots were still hard at work. He was certain the AI had collected not only a sampling of the nanofilament, but also a nice supply of the out-of-control bots themselves. He wondered if the report that follow
ed would indicate whether or not she had managed to contain it.
Moments later, after accessing it, he saw that she had not.
Worse, the overseer, not being trained in containment procedures, had neglected to isolate the sample in a magnetic ‘air gapped’ containment field. Where Shiso’s frame had touched it, nano had transferred over. The nano had begun spinning network nanofilament up one of her frame’s hands, using the frame’s external skin as formation material to deliver its payload of network filament lines.
She’d at least had the presence of mind to quarantine the fabrication room where she’d been examining the sample, isolating herself from her people. She ordered the workers to head ringside as soon as she recognized the potential hazard, and had sent her report, flagging it as urgent. Once that had been completed, Shiso had used her uncontaminated hand to place her cylinder in a shielded isolation case. Once secure, the AI had programmed one of the drones Imbesi held in storage to retrieve her from the case in an hour’s time. Finally, she set a powerful localized EMP to go off just minutes after her case had been sealed.
What are the odds that Shiso remains uninfected by the nano? Noa wondered as he continued to read.
The drone had done as instructed. Shiso’s report showed that she had been successfully retrieved and reinstalled in a spare utility frame. The report continued to detail the steps Shiso had taken, including the sweep she’d ordered her own maintenance nano to run on her internal lattices, to ensure that she was functioning optimally.
No trace of the assembly nano remained within the construction base, but it had become apparent to Shiso that the construction site itself was crawling with uncontrolled, self-replicating assembly nanobots. Her final report had concluded with a recommendation that the situation be reported to the Nanotech Regulatory Commission as an NRC ‘event’, and that the site be marked for containment and destruction.
As the report ended, something in the pattern of Shiso’s communication caught Noa’s attention—a strange, repetitive cadence that seemed at odds with her initial reports. He went back and played excerpts from earlier ones, swapping back and forth between them. A chill of dread went up his spine as he realized there was a clear difference. Where before, the AI’s communication had been precise and succinct, later on, she had fallen into a repetitive pattern that almost felt like an assembly loop.