CHAPTER 2
“…that general is skillful in attack whose opponent does not know what to defend, and he is skillful in defense whose opponent does not know what to attack.”
Sun Tzu
The Art of War
February 5, 2051 (Eleven years before)
United Nations Quantum Corps Base, Western Command
0850 hours
Major Jurgen Kraft rubbed his jaw uneasily as the simulation continued. Johnny Winger had been inside the SODS tank for better than an hour now; that was unheard of and even the sim techs stirred nervously as the rookie atomgrabber barreled on. The last time a cadet had spent more than forty minutes navigating the tank and not crawled out a screaming lunatic had been several years ago and that poor fellow had washed out at the end of Basic.
Putting a nog into the SODS tank at this point in an atomgrabber’s training was like giving a snorkel and fins to a ten-year old and telling him to swim the Atlantic. Endurance and tenacity like this just wasn’t the norm inside the training battalion.
Kraft studied the monitor image of Winger’s determined face and wondered. Just what the hell have I got on my hands here?
The senior sim tech was a corporal named Givens, short, chunky, with an annoying rapid-fire blink to his eyes. He looked up at Kraft.
“Major, you want I should pull him out now…he’s already made it to the other side, beat through every obstacle I can throw at him. He’s done the standard course…and then some.”
“Where’s he now?”
Givens checked the grid on his display. The SODS tank was a sphere thirty feet in diameter, filled with water, and a host of infinitesimal predators and bogeymen, enough to get any unsuspecting nog’s attention when he tried to pilot an ANAD through the medium. An electronic 3-D grid pinpointed the position of the nanoscale assembler as the pilot steered it through the obstacle course.
“—I make him about two point one meters this side of the far wall…he’s slogging through the whirlpool…having some trouble keeping on course, looks like. Already transitted the carbene forest.”
“Hmmpphh…” was all Kraft could say. The carbene forest was a sleet of reactive radicals and molecule clumps that usually ate up rookie atomgrabbers for lunch…it took some serious stick work and guts to slip through the torrent of molecules that were trying to tear off your effectors left and right. “Carbenes usually do a number on most pilots. What’s his trick?”
“I don’t know, sir…Cadet Winger’s just got a knack for ANAD driving, I guess. I’ve never seen anything like it. Should I let him go on…or pull the plug?”
Kraft’s eyes went from the ANAD image to Winger’s face—a tight mask of concentration…hell, the kid had his eyes closed, for God’s sake…he was driving ANAD by feel alone, tickling his joysticks and changing config by instinct. It was uncanny—
“No…let him be, Givens…let’s see what the kid can do.” A small crowd of techs and nogs had begun to gather around the control console outside the tank. Glances and murmurs were exchanged…and a few ten-notes as well.
SODS stood for Spacial Orientation and Discrimination Simulator. Cadet Johnny Winger wasn’t physically inside the sphere at all. Instead, he was in an enclosed booth on the other side of the tank, plugged into everything the ANAD master was sensing. A sleet of water molecules rushed by the assembler as it cruised on picowatt propulsors back across the water inside the tank. Once in awhile, the sim techs threw a curve at the trainee: dropped a few million bacterial spores in front of him, stirred the water into a whirlpool, discharged electron guns, zapped the tank with UV and X-rays…anything their diabolical minds and the simulation protocols could come up with. So far, Cadet Johnny Winger had fought off every predator and obstacle, even a malfunctioning horde of ANAD replicants that had materialized seemingly out of nowhere right in the middle of the tank. Winger had fought off banzai charges and flanking maneuvers and double envelopment tactics like a seasoned veteran, grappling with the herd in close combat and using his own ANAD’s bond disrupters to break the back of the enemy formation.
SODS was a prerequisite for any nog to get out of Basic, and stand for officer status in the newly forming 1st Nanospace Battalion. The whole world of nanoscale combat was so new that Kraft and the Corps general staff were making up tactics as they went along. SODS was supposed to measure a prospective atomgrabber’s ability to discriminate and manipulate objects via remote control at infinitesimal micron or even smaller scales.
From the beginning, Jurgen Kraft had to admit, one cadet stood above all the rest…Johnny Winger. He’d shown extraordinary skill at the sim, an unusually adept talent at visualizing and manipulating micron or nanometer scale objects in space. Hands down, the kid was destined to be the top code and stick man in the whole battalion. You couldn’t make raw talent like that.
And raw is what it is, Kraft kept reminding himself. Even as he and the others watched with amazement and grudging admiration, ANAD powered its way through the ‘waterfall’ obstacle that Givens had programmed in—dodging loose polypeptides and radicals with aplomb—and Winger’s eyes were still closed. The kid wasn’t even watching his readouts. He was letting the stick talk back to him, somehow feeling ANAD through the haptic feedback and driving across the course on instinct.
It’d be easier to navigate Manhattan on a tricycle blindfolded, Kraft told himself.
“Let him head for the launch point,” Kraft ordered. “I want to see what this fellow’s made of.”
“Two big ones say he’ll never make it,” a voice called from behind.
“Three says he does—“ someone countered.
“Warm beer for everyone if he splats at the ‘Wall’,” another one chimed on.
The wall was a solid chunk of metal dividing the tank in two. The trick was to config ANAD for denser medium, change his form so you could transit a world of crystalline planes and rigid lattices. All the while fighting off deranged nanobots programmed to chew up your effectors while you dived through. Most nogs would have rather run naked through a pack of lions.
But Winger managed to fend off the attack, whirling ANAD like a mad dervish, ripping the water with jolts of electron discharges, forming a protective bubble just long enough to fold himself for the denser wall. He squeezed the assembler down to barely a core and base, and slid sideways, twisting and turning, one step ahead of the bots nipping at his heels.
In the end, the race got everybody in the sim room cheering him on. A few moments later, ANAD sounded ahead and followed the acoustic returns right to the vacuum tube at the near wall of the tank, letting the containment chamber suck him up and put him to bed in his homeworld.
Kraft watched Winger’s eyes pop open on the monitor…the first time the kid had looked up since the carbene forest. Not a drop of sweat on him, Kraft observed. The barest hint of a smile crossed his young face.
“ANAD secured in containment,” Winger reported. “I’ll be ready for another run at the course as soon as he’s regenerated and stable—“
Kraft leaned forward to the mike. “Uh, that won’t be necessary, Cadet Winger. You’ve made your point. Secure the sim and extract. See you at the debrief in ten minutes.”
Winger nodded at the unseen voice. “Copy that, sir.” He started unhooking himself from the booth.
It had only been a few months after Johnny’s father, Jamison Winger, had taken the patch treatment for depression that Johnny had seen the first WorldNet stories about the Quantum Corps, only it wasn’t called that back then. United Special Operations Force or USOF was the name of the group at the time, but it would soon evolve with a broad new mandate from the United Nations and with its new mandate, USOF gained a new name.
Winger had been looking for a way out for a long time. Quantum Corps was offering scholarships, some kickass new learning patches, even technical training for cadets who applied, qualified and could get through basic training. Winger was intrigued; he damn well
had no desire to stay on at the North Bar Pass Ranch and herd cattle for the rest of his life, even if he did get to tinker with Bailey and his dad’s other flying gizmos.
So Quantum Corps had been his ticket out of ranchwork, and away from the deadening weight of family responsibility since his mother had died. In exchange for a six-year commitment, Johnny Winger showed up at nog camp in a place called Table Top Mountain, Idaho, ready to see just what this new business of nanoscale warfare was all about.
It was early ’51 and the first medical nanobots were just hitting the news. Jamison Winger himself had tinkered in his barn-cum-shop-and-laboratory with personal nano back in the ‘40s, not very successfully Johnny remembered, but enough to be intriguing, really just some jalopy barebones matter compilers he’d put together from a kit, the kind you saw in midnight specials on the Net.
Johnny had been intrigued enough to check it out and when he found Quantum Corps looking for suitable candidates to get some schooling in nano theory and techniques, he didn’t think long before applying.
Nog camp had been an eye-opener, even for an athlete like Johnny. Discipline was tough but his outdoors orientation and caving experience made him physically fit enough and he managed to ace the physical exams and the obstacle courses in PT.
But it was inside the SODS tank, working through problems at micron scales, manipulating simple assemblers, nudging atoms around like he was driving a ‘dozer that Johnny really shined. Somehow, it was like he’d been born to it. Driving ANAD and grabbing atoms came naturally to him. It was like he could see all the pyramids and polygons and cones and spheres ping-ponging around in his mind’s eye, like he just had a feel for van der Waals forces and bond strengths; intuitively, he knew what it took to snap a carbon ring in half and boot up an autonomous assembler and go off careening around inside a speck of matter like it was some kind of disneyland or something. Some people played the piano. Some people could throw a football seventy yards on a rope. Johnny Winger was a born atomdriver.
And after a few legendary turns in the SODS tank, he came to the attention of Major Jurgen Kraft.
Kraft was the newly appointed commanding officer of Quantum Corps’ 1st Nanospace Battalion. It was his job to take the raw talent of people like Johnny Winger and Nathan Caden and Ozzie Tsukota and shape it into a functioning combat unit, then marry their training to the technology that ANAD brought. Originally, Kraft had been a program manager for autonomous assemblers at Northgate University, where ANAD had been born at the Autonomous Systems Lab. Kraft was an early mover in the world of nanoscale mechanisms married to autonomous-agent quantum computing. He’d done several stints at Northgate and Quantum Corps had tapped him early on for field command. He’d been instrumental after that, getting ANAD technology weaponized and tactics developed enough to be combat ready. There was some urgency to this business too, as UNIFORCE intelligence had learned in early ’51 that Balkistan and several other rogue nations as well as certain criminal groups were hard at work dealing in weaponized nano themselves.
Kraft knew it wouldn’t be long before ANAD and the new crop of nanowarriors would be put to the test.
In January 2051, Jurgen Kraft had met Johnny Winger for the first time. It was not a match made in heaven.
Cadet Winger knocked gently on the door jamb. Major Kraft was at his desk, his shiny balding head was bent to some paperwork he’d neglected. He didn’t look up, merely mumbled a raspy “Come” while he swore softly at the commandpad, trying to tidy up a report for the 1600 hours squirt to Division.
“Cadet Johnny Winger, sir…reporting as ordered.” Winger hung a salute, holding his arm stiff until Kraft responded perfunctorily.
“Cadet Winger—“ Kraft folded up the c-pad and tucked it in his shirt pocket, then leaned back in his squeaky chair. “--that was one hell of a display of ANAD-piloting this afternoon in the tank. You navigate like that all the time, son?”
Winger gave it some thought. “I usually make it to the wall and back, sir….not without some bumps and bruises, most of the time.”
Kraft snorted. “Most of the time?—hell, son, most of the time, the sim operators chew up nogs and spit ‘em out for dirt. Where’d you learn to grab atoms like that?”
“Right here, sir. I went through Spacial Discrimination same as everybody. Sergeant Rice was my best instructor…he was tough in ANAD Theory, even tougher I guess in Basic Maneuvers and Molecular Combat, but he was fair. I guess I had a knack. Kind of took to it real quick.”
Kraft was suspicious of the kid right from the start. What was Johnny Winger doing that all the rest weren’t? “Cadet Winger, it’s my job to get this outfit into shape and combat-ready. I want you to be my top sergeant in the training platoon. You work with the SODS pukes, work out some routines, tests and scenarios. I want you to teach the other code and stick men how to drive like you do. Got that?”
That was when Johnny knew he was in trouble. The truth was he couldn’t really explain the talent he had. He had no words to describe how you parked ANAD on the ‘back porch’ of a benzene ring and used its covalent bonds to swing yourself through a sleet of water molecules like Tarzan hurtling through the trees. Nobody had taught him harebrained maneuvers like that; it certainly wasn’t in Sergeant Rice’s book. You just felt it and tried it and made it work.
But he couldn’t very well say no to Major Kraft, could he?
As an ANAD pilot, there was nobody in 1st Nano who could top Johnny Winger. But being able to teach somebody else the same thing was like slipping into another dimension altogether. Everything he said and did was wrong. Everything he tried worked backwards. In the end, all he managed to do was frustrate himself and all the other nogs he was supposed to be instructing. And Major Kraft didn’t like that one bit.
He’d gotten off on the wrong foot with Ironass from the start and it didn’t get much better after the Major bounced him from the top sergeant post with a disgusting thunk and decided maybe this whizkid atomgrabber wasn’t such a hot ticket after all.
Truth be known, Cadet Winger was much happier just being the top pilot in the platoon.
Major Kraft initially regarded the kid from Pueblo, Colorado as a somewhat flaky lightweight, possessed of extraordinary talent, to be sure, but not always as dedicated to the mission as the Major thought he should have been. He knew how to deal with hotshots like that; he’d seen enough of them in his previous billet with UNIFORCE Security Corps—II Eurocorps, before he’d transferred stateside and found himself in the middle of something called nanospace.
Kraft wasn’t quite the Ironass his charges often called him behind his back, but he was a strict, no-nonsense, by-the-book, expect-the-impossible-daily type of commander. You might call him a traditionalist in the truest military sense; he was very much a follower of his fellow German von Clausewitz and often quoted sayings from the Prussian tactician while he stalked around the recruit camp tongue-lashing hapless nogs. In many ways, 1st Nano was well served by having a Jurgen Kraft as its first c/o. Kraft’s was a voice of reason and tradition in a land of gee-whiz technology, sent there to remind the eggheads that they were in fact a military unit and one day soon would be sent into combat against enemies who planned to kill them.
As 1st Nano’s commanding officer, nobody was more aware of how little was known about the proper employment of ANAD in military or law enforcement or mandate enforcement missions. Behind the gruff, disciplinarian’s exterior, however was a hell of a lot of humility about what could and couldn’t be done with the new technology.
Sometimes, Kraft felt like a den mother in a camp of big-brained Boy and Girl Scouts. And sometimes, he came down especially hard on Johnny Winger. It was his way of telling the platoon that whizbang technology and all the talent in the world were no substitute for sound tactics and command leadership.
For weeks after their first encounter outside the SODS tank, Kraft made it his personal mission in life to hound and harass and
browbeat and hassle, bully, and annoy Winger and any other nogs who thought they’d mastered anything in their drills and sims and wargames.
Jurgen Kraft was the kind of leader who tended to evoke two possible responses in the recruits at Table Top Mountain. Either you hated his guts so much that you put out superhuman effort to show him up and do the very thing he kept yelling in your face you were incapable of doing, just to shut the bastard up and have the satisfaction of proving him wrong.
Or you gave up and washed out.
Either way, Major Kraft usually got what he wanted: the very best performance and then some from each and every atomdriver in the outfit.
In March 2052, Johnny Winger was commissioned a Second Lieutenant in the Quantum Corps, assigned to the newly formed 1st Nanospace Battalion. Kraft had been assigned to command the new unit. Graduation day was a proud one for Jamison Winger, as he watched his son along with all the other cadets toss their caps into the air at Drexler Field, the parade ground at Table Top Mountain.
Johnny’s first assignment was to become as familiar with current ANAD technology as possible. He was assigned as assistant project manager, sort of a liaison for engineering and tactics, with the Autonomous Systems Lab at Northgate University. He spent the rest of the year stationed there.
That was when he met Dr. Irwin Frost, director of the Lab.
Johnny found his first real exposure to operational ANAD systems an eye-opener. He quickly became a favorite of Dr. Frost’s, who adopted the freshly minted lieutenant as a sort of son and understudy. In fact, it was Johnny Winger himself who suggested improvements to ANAD’s interface control and containment systems, improvements that would make battle hardening and weaponizing ANAD much easier. In many ways, Winger and Frost wrote the book on ANAD tactics that first year at Northgate.
Irwin Frost was something of a legend around the nanoscale community. Mid-sixtyish, partially balding , forever wearing dingy flannel shirts and frayed jeans beneath his lab coat, Frost was a physicist with a background in nanoscale biology and he was, without doubt, the intellectual force behind autonomous assemblers.
Frost’s enduring contribution to the birth of ANAD had been to marry the processing power of the new quantum computers to a device truly autonomous in its response to the environment. The autonomy came from the architecture of its operating system and a complex set of system rules by which the device—part mechanism, part organism—reacted with and manipulated its environment.
The device came to called ANAD—an Autonomous Nanoscale Assembler/
Disassembler. By the end of 2052, Frost and his associate Dr. Mary Duncan, had with help from Quantum Corps, pioneered a whole new world of cognitive systems, able to act on matter at the scale of atoms and viruses, either autonomously or under programmed control.
And in many ways, Irwin Frost had finally created the child he had longed for so many years.
It was Johnny Winger who suggested the next innovation.
“Why not give ANAD a voice, Doc?”
Indeed, it made sense tactically and it eased the interface control problem of how to send and receive commands rapidly in combat situations. For months, Frost worked hand in hand with his protégé to create a synthetic voice and couple it with a natural language processor that would fit inside ANAD’s tiny brain. Both of them wondered what a cognitive sentience less than a hundred billionths of a meter in size would have to say to its creator.
Irwin Frost was as protective as any parent about what happened to ANAD. From the time Quantum Corps assumed control of the project from the Army, his greatest fear had been that somehow the military would take ANAD away from him and make someone else chief scientist. He had always been fiercely protective of ANAD. In fact, unknown to anyone, Frost had inserted code into ANAD’s brain that allowed him and him alone, through a unique encrypted identifier, to override all instructions and commands, even ANAD’s self-protection subroutines.
Irwin Frost had long thought of himself as ANAD’s father. He wanted to have the final power of life and death over his own creation. Always, he had told Johnny Winger that he should have absolute and final control over every aspect of ANAD’s behavior.
“After all, I created him. Who better to say what ANAD should be capable of doing?”
Lately, Irwin Frost had taken to reading and re-reading parts of the Bible, notably Genesis.
He would someday find that even creators don’t always know everything about their creations.
In the summer of 2053, now deployed with 1st Nanospace Battalion at Table Top, Lieutenant Johnny Winger helped setup and run the first large-scale wargame scenario involving the new ANAD. It was called Nano-Eagle, and the wargame very nearly got away from its participants.
In this scenario, ANADs were first permitted to replicate ‘in the wild’ with only a skeletal control mechanism in place. The gaming area had been a small valley north and east of Table Top, called Hunt Valley, a place of steep ravines and thick stands of ash and birch trees. It was here, on the last day of June, that the wargame somehow went wrong and ANAD slipped control, exploding in near-exponential replication, in what came to be known as ‘The Big Bang’ scenario. Thereafter, avoiding uncontrolled replication with unlimited media to support it would be first rule of tactical employment, hardcoded into ANAD in such a way that it could never, ever happen again.
After the near-disaster of the Big Bang wargame of ’53, Johnny Winger and 1st Nanospace Battalion knew in a visceral way they were dealing with extraordinarily powerful forces. Somehow, they had to work out a better doctrine and controls to use it more effectively.
The wargame series evolved over the next few years, as did Winger and the rest of the battalion, becoming an annual series of sims known collectively as Nanowarrior. It was Winger’s job, along with the other platoon leaders, Lieutenant Dana Tallant and Lieutenant Nathan Caden, to work with Major Kraft and the Northgate lab to develop and execute these games.
From the beginning, Lieutenant Winger was well thought of, a plain-spoken, hands-on, type of leader. He’d always had trouble delegating…he’d long thought he should never ask anyone to do something he hadn’t tried himself. He was blunt, without the kind of polish Major Kraft expected of his commanders, but he didn’t have any pretensions either.
As far as the Major went, Jurgen Kraft saw it as his mission in life to mold and shape the virtually unlimited talents of Lieutenant Johnny Winger into a commander and a true nanowarrior. To him, Winger was a young colt, possessed of great talents but prone to getting by on talent alone, without developing the sense of responsibility that went with it. Kraft was determined he would mold Winger into a military leader, able to issue orders, command troops in combat, delegate authority and responsibility, apply discipline, teach and coach others and in general act like a commander. Either Winger would learn the art of military leadership or Kraft figured he’d kill the kid trying.
The trouble was that neither of them had reckoned on having to deal with the growing pains of a weapon that sometimes acted like a spoiled six-year old.
Johnny Winger and the Serengeti Factor Page 3