Tau Ceti - The Phage
Page 17
He closed it and swallowed before speaking. “That’s not all they’re scorching. There were other options than just blowing that ship out of the stars.”
Terrance shifted uncomfortably as Tobias stated in a quiet voice,
Jason scrubbed his face as his thoughts raced. Lotteries. Quarantines. Starships blown out of space. Obliterating cities…. What the hell are we flying into? His head jerked up as a thought occurred to him. “Stars! If they were that desperate to escape, what exactly is life like on that ring right now?” He glanced over at Logan, but the profiler shook his head.
“We’re getting conflicting stories, of course. Leaks from unofficial sources, as well as official releases from Planetary Security. It’s an estimate, at best, but given what we’ve curated over the past week, the ring is a police state at the moment. After quarantine was instated for all AIs as well as infected humans, there were several incidents where crowds mobbed AIs awaiting transport to the planet.”
Shannon groaned, and her hands flew to her face in distress.
“So, how do we proceed?” Jason asked, turning his head in Terrance’s direction. “How do we protect ourselves from the nanophage while searching for our shackled AIs—if they’re even still alive, somehow, in all this mess?”
Shannon interjected.
“For now, all we can do is continue to gather information, study whatever we can glean from the feeds, and run simulations,” Terrance said.
Calista crossed her arms and tilted her head as she considered the exec’s words. “True,” she agreed. “We might have answers in our libraries that their scientists haven’t yet tried or considered.”
Jason shifted from Calista to Tobias, his gaze resting somberly on the Weapon Born’s frame, the AI’s comparison to the Sentience Wars playing through his mind.
“With a crisis of this magnitude, no one in their right mind would turn down an offer of help. Let’s just hope that by the time we arrive, there’s a planet still there to save….”
DISASSEMBLY BOTS
STELLAR DATE: 08.10.3246 (Adjusted Gregorian)
LOCATION: Underground bunker, Zao Mountains
REGION: 150 kilometers from Hokkaido, Galene
Silence reigned in the bunker, barring the occasional shuffling of feet or an electronic tone signaling the completion of a new series of tests run by either Noa or his two AI partners.
Bette exclaimed, her voice sounding sharply into the quiet, but Noa hardly noticed, engrossed as he was in his own sequencing.
“This might be just what we’ve been looking for,” the AI mused, her frame bent over an imaging device. He noted absently that she had waved the other AI over. “Take a look, Charley. Do you see—”
“Well I’ll be damned!”
At Charley’s pronounced exclamation, Noa surfaced, his gaze sharpening as it rested on the imaging device the two AIs were bent over.
“What are we looking at, here?” he asked as he rose and walked toward the pair.
Bette shot Charley a glance, but the Jovian AI waved for her to continue.
“It’s a nano specimen isolated from a victim that the Army Hospital admitted just this morning,” she responded. “It’s a colloid.”
Noa nodded as he studied the buffered and sandboxed sample. They knew the nano had bonded to some type of colloid particle; it was the only way, really, to explain how quickly the nanophage had spread. Although, that alone couldn’t account for the rapid growth of infected nano, nor the way it managed to transmute entirely different kinds of nano into—
Wait.
He looked up sharply at the two AIs. “This isn’t just a colloid,” he stated, holding his voice carefully neutral. But hope blossomed. This just might explain everything.
Charley nodded. “You’re correct. It’s a unique form of colloidal nano.”
“A colloidene,” Noa breathed. “Well I’ll be damned.”
A colloidene was made from a colloid particle, but formed just like single-layer graphene. This particular single-layer was patterned in a honeycomb lattice. And it housed a click assembly brick—a technique that relied on a foundation of frequent combinations as shortcuts to promote rapid assembly for nano.
“That’s how it’s multiplying so rapidly,” Charley said. “Why completely different and unrelated types of nano are failing in so many places all across the ring.”
“That would explain it, yes.”
Noa felt a mix of triumph and dismay. There was always a feeling of accomplishment when deciphering a riddle. Yet understanding the riddle didn’t mean he had a solution for it. And this particular riddle was a bit—what was that phrase Khela liked to use?—too ‘in the weeds’ for the average non-physicist to grasp.
“This is going to be challenging to explain to Director Henrick and the Joint Chiefs,” he mused.
Bette made a sound of agreement. “Yes. How do you explain ‘the proliferation potential of vectored click assembly bricks’ to a lay person?” She stared at him for a moment, her expression thoughtful. “We need to find a way to associate the concept with something they are familiar with—a visual analogy of some sort.”
He paused, staring back at her. “A visual….” His voice died off as a thought struck him. “Yes, that’s it!” He turned back to the image of the colloidene. “These nanobots deliver click assembly messages in the same way a vector image does. And it differs from standard nano in exactly the same way a rasterized image differs from a vector-based one.”
Charley nodded slowly. “I see the similarity. One carries an exact, point-for-point representation of the original, while the other simply carries instructions on how to create the original.”
Noa broke out into the first genuine smile he’d had in a while. “Exactly,” he said, and he began to pace as he worked through the explanation he’d give to Director Henrick and the Joint Chiefs.
“A raster is slow, unwieldy, and limited in scope due to the vast amount of information it has to carry about a single object. But the second, the vector…” He paused, glancing back at the holo image of the colloidene that Bette had projected. “That thing is nimble. Wherever it lands, it deposits an assembly brick that remakes the nano into an auto-replicating, non-terminating version of whatever it was before the colloidene made contact.”
“It’s also scalable,” Bette reminded him, “which means it’s able to deliver a much more robust set of instructions.”
“Which explains why both the volume and type of nano affected continues to grow,” Charley added. “But, Noa….”
Something in the AI’s voice warned him. Noa returned his gaze to the holo and read the report with growing horror, as the AI paged through the information sent along with the sample.
“This is the first sample of disassembler nano that’s been altered.” Charley’s eyes met Noa’s across the imaging device, and Noa saw his own horror reflected in them.
“The ramifications of this….”
His words fell into the sudden silence as the three considered the i
mpact that disassembler nano would have on the ring.
“Just look at what it’s done to one human,” Bette murmured, as they stared at the scans that appeared on the holo.
They had been taken from a staff sergeant who’d suffered spontaneous skeletal collapse earlier that day. The nano had broken molecular bonds at various points within the woman’s skeletal system, weakening them until one of her bones spontaneously snapped.
Given that the staff sergeant was one of Galene’s soldiers, her skeletal structure had been augmented. The nano had not cared; it had unraveled the molecular structure of the carbon nanotubes lacing her skeleton just as efficiently as it had dissolved her bones.
“I’d be willing to bet it began with her left hand,” Charley said, pointing to its shattered remains.
“How are they ever going to trace the things she touched throughout her day?” Bette whispered.
Noa shook his head. “It’s impossible to know. Although these scans clearly tell us what parts of her own body she touched. See where the nano has eaten through her humerus? That’s just the spot where your palm rests when you cross your arms.” He pointed to another image. “And here, and here? How many times do you see humans rubbing the back of their neck? It destroyed that exact spot: the C-5 and C-6 joints of her spinal cord.”
Charley brought up another image. “The femur?” he queried, and Noa’s mouth tightened.
“Humans often will place the palms of their hands on their upper thighs when we stand.” He highlighted several other bones in her full-body scan. “And with the first bone’s breakage, undue stress was placed on neighboring structures. Take a look: I’m sure that’s what precipitated these collapses, providing an almost systemic skeletal failure.”
“A house of cards,” Bette murmured, her tone shocked at the destruction.
Noa turned from the holo to face the two AIs.
“How long,” he asked quietly, “will it take for us to create rectification colloidenes? Our own assembly bricks?”
“Not long—it’s already done, actually,” Charley pulled up another image. “But that’s not the challenge. We need formation material, Noa—a lot of formation material.” His expression grim, he added, “and it needs to be fully sandboxed before we can begin to replicate armies of our own to counteract it.”
Noa nodded. “Let me reach out to Director Henrick and see if I can’t convince her to send us what we need.”
* * * * *
Noa blinked uncomprehendingly at the stranger staring back at him over the holo.
“I don’t understand,” he began, but the woman cut him off with an impatient wave. “Congress convened an emergency session. While there, the president succumbed to the phage, infecting the attending members of both the Senate and the House,” the woman explained with a clear lack of patience. “I’m sorry, doctor, but the Assistant Director of Planetary Security is now acting president, and she has more important matters to deal with now than to discuss theories with you.”
Noa froze in shock.
Impossible. All of Congress, quarantined on the planet?
A niggling part of his brain scoffed at the transparency of what he suspected was a ruse—but if it was a coup, what could he do about it?
He inhaled silently, a deep, calming breath, and tried again. “Understood. To whom shall I direct my requests in the future?” he asked, taking care to keep his voice even, calm, and uninflected.
“Any requests you have can be filed with the Senate Appropriations Committee assigned to oversee the Q-camps,” the woman said dismissively.
“But I’m not in the quarantine camps,” Noa explained once more, with a patience he did not feel. “I am in a hardened, protected bunker, and we are nanophage-free here. I have explained this already to the Joint Chiefs.”
“We have only your word to go on,” the woman’s tone was skeptical, and her eyes narrowed slightly as she pinned him with a hard glance. “From where we stand, Doctor Sakai, you walked away from your position at the Nanotechnology Regulatory Commission months ago. By doing so, you abdicated any authority you might have had. Your security clearance has been revoked, and with conditions being what they are right now, access to the acting president is limited to those she can trust.” She looked pointedly at Noa as he began to protest.
“As I have explained, both to her and the Joint Chiefs,” Noa said patiently, “it was necessary for me to sequester, in order to isolate myself from contamination, and in order to effectively pursue a cure.”
He made a small gesture, encompassing the laboratory in which he stood. “We have sent you the information you need to verify that we have, indeed, isolated the cause of the phage.” With a thought, he brought up a schematic of the colloidene and displayed it on the holo, alongside his own image.
“All that remains to scrub the ring free of infection is several thousand kiloliters of formation material. I know for a fact that the NRC has this within its own private stores,” he said with a studied pleasantness. “If you would just put me in contact with the new Executive Director of the NRC—”
The woman interrupted him. “We are done here, doctor.” Her mouth thinned into a straight line of displeasure. “Do not attempt to contact us with this request again. You have wasted enough of our time on this matter.”
The holo winked out.
Noa blew out a breath of frustration. Turning to his two AI companions, he asked, “How difficult would it be to send a direct beam message to the ship from Proxima—the Avon Vale, did you say the name was?”
Charley nodded. “Yes. One of our informants ringside sent that they had just reached our heliopause and had contacted Galene asking for permission to enter the system.”
“Not the same government they would have met six months earlier,” Noa muttered.
“No, it’s not,” the AI admitted.
“Well, our informant said the Avon Vale indicated that they had been monitoring Tau Ceti’s transmissions and wished to offer their assistance,” Bette interjected, her tone thoughtful. “They said they had representatives from El Dorado on board, as well as a stakeholder from the Enfield Conglomerate.”
Charley frowned. “Enfield. They weren’t too welcome back in Sol after what transpired on Proteus.”
Bette made a rude sound, and the AI turned to regard her with an arched brow.
“You weren’t there, Bette.”
“I wasn’t—but neither were you,” she countered.
“No,” he conceded, “I wasn’t. But one of my parents was, and I have all of her memories.”
“You know as well as I do that Enfield picked up stakes and moved to Alpha Centauri only after making amends for what they inadvertently contributed to,” she admonished with a frown. “From what I’ve read, the Enfield family has more than made up for it—especially given their participation in bringing the people who ended up enslaving us to justice,” she reminded him.
Noa leant back against a console, his eyes tracking from one AI to the other, fingers tapping his lower lip thoughtfully.
“Charley,” he began, his tone thoughtful, “I’ve heard of Enfield as well. Good things, I might add.”
Charley nodded reluctantly and then turned back to the holo. “Did you have a chance to listen to that message our informant up on the ring sent?” At Noa’s head shake, he warned, “It’s anarchy up there. Far worse than just martial law.” He pulled images the informant had sent, displaying them one by one, on the bunker’s holo as he detailed the message’s contents. “Riots. Rolling power outages. Rationing. Hoarding. The black market is going gangbusters, or so I hear.”
Noa cocked his head. “Any mention of nano?”
Charley shook his head. “Outlawed completely. If you’re caught with it, you’re lucky if you only get banished to the planet on the next elevator downside. Rumor has it that others are simply getting spaced. Especially if they show any sign of infection.”
Noa squeezed his eyes shut, gritting his teeth in frustration. �
�We have the solution, but no one is listening.”
“And at this point, I seriously doubt they will. They’ve reverted back to twenty-fourth, maybe twenty-third century tech at this point, Noa,” the AI reminded him. “That tech predates SAI, almost predates NSAI.” Charley gestured to the images of destruction and carnage from the ring feed. “It’s so bad right now that I’d be willing to bet that if we had access to formation material and a few military transport shuttles—hell, even a few hundred drones that a few of us from the old country know how to operate—we could easily take over the entire ring right now.”
At Noa’s startled look, he nodded grimly. “Just food for thought. If they won’t let us help them, then we may have to force them to accept the help.” He nodded vaguely in the direction of the heliopause. “And we could sure use the Avon Vale’s help to make it happen. I’d be willing to bet their ability to effectively scan nearspace is severely degraded right now.”
Bette looked thoughtful. “You know,” she said slowly, “I wonder how much of that is factoring into their paranoid behavior?”
Noa tilted his head, acknowledging the point. “That could very well be,” he admitted. He stepped away from the console, snapped his fingers, and turned decisively to the AI. “Do we have enough power to reach the Avon Vale now, or will we have to wait until they’re closer in?”
“The way in which this bunker was built ensures we have a virtually unending power supply—at least as long as Galene’s core remains molten,” Charley amended with a small smile. “It’s not really a matter of power, it’s more a matter of signal strength.”
Bette nodded agreement. “We just need to send a signal strong enough to punch through the jammers that the blockade has going.” She paused, considering. “These ships run in cycles, and they rotate their coverage. With very little effort, we can have someone from Khela’s Marines set up an antenna somewhere they least expect it.”
She smiled wickedly.
“Give me a few hours, and you’ll have your signal.”