Singular

by Larry Buenafe

  I stepped out, the platform shot up, and a few seconds later dad stepped out. “Ok, Lukey, let’s have a quick look around at the nano-machine factory.”

  I couldn’t tell how far underground we were, but the room we were in was about half the size of the room above, and the ceiling was much closer, maybe two and a half meters. I remember seeing an ancient movie about a guy named Willy Wonka, and the lab reminded me of his factory; there were tubes and lines running all over the place. In the center of the space was a long table with the usual kinds of lab stuff: beakers, tubes, burners, and other things I didn’t recognize. To the right were three tanks like the ones in the room above, except they were about half the size and were clear, as if made out of glass. There was a small amount of material in one of the tanks, but the other two were completely empty. To the left was a door that appeared to be plastic, with flanges extending from the top, bottom, and on the edge that opened. The room we were in seemed messy compared to the room above, with food containers and clothing strewn around. Against the wall adjacent to the clear tanks were several sizeable computer stations.

  “That’s our clean room,” dad offered, pointing to the plastic door to the left. “Where most of the magic happened. Oh, Lukey, there is so much to explain. I’ll try to make it simple, and to make sense, although I’m not sure it will. Come on, let’s have a seat.”

  5

  A s we each grabbed a plastic folding chair from a stack leaning against the wall, dad smiled and patted me on the head. “The room we’re in is twelve meters underground. It’s also fifty meters west of the room we were in. We built this about fifteen years ago, just before you were born. Two things happened that drastically affected progress in technology, one being the Great Pacific Tsunami. Much of the research and development was occurring in the pacific rim area, and it was lost in the tsunami, setting progress back drastically.

  The other was the government repression and suppression of any research that was not military in nature. The government, or I should say agents working for the government, knew that I was working on nano-machine technology and wanted to force me to change my focus to military applications. They also made it clear that I didn’t have the freedom to refuse. I didn’t want to have them cause me to “go missing”, as has happened with some other scientists and inventors working on the leading edges of technology, so I had to come up with a way to fool them into thinking I was doing their work while continuing to do what I had intended in the first place, which was to use nano-machines to develop prosthetics for amputees that would work and look like the real thing. Of course, they wanted me to change the focus of my research to making ‘super-soldiers’.”

  Benji had a look of supreme disgust on his face, and added, “Bloody FBI, CIA, men in black, deep state, whatever they are, they’re everywhere, mate. Started way back, in the twenty tens, but it has slowly gotten worse. It was stupid easy, too… all they had to do was convince people that they needed to be afraid of some outside threat, then convince them that they were the only ones who could protect them. Bloody illusory truth effect, eh? Just repeat the lies often enough, and people start believing them. Once they had enough people fooled, the majority just gave away their rights and freedoms in exchange for this fake safety. Meantime, like your daddy says, they come after all the innovators, scientists, and the like, and forced ‘em to work on military applications. It’s bloody horrifying, but me old mate here, your daddy, outsmarted ‘em. At least so far, eh?”

  “Yes, well, I had some powerful motivation.”

  Dad had a repeat of the misty eyes, and I thought once again how bizarre all of this was. “I didn’t know any of this stuff. Why didn’t you tell me?”

  Dad looked down for a moment, collecting his thoughts. “You were too young, Lukey. It didn’t seem right to burden you with it. We just wanted you to have as normal a childhood as we could give you before having to face reality. In retrospect, I suppose we didn’t really do you any favors. Well, as long as we’re putting everything out there, and I think we should because you will need this information going forward, let me say this: movies and books that are dystopian in nature always thrust you into the middle of an authoritarian, post-apocalyptic world in full bloom, but it doesn’t really work that way. It happens gradually, one horrible piece at a time, as Benji was alluding to. Done for the sake of “national security”, or to combat “international terrorism”, or for the sake of “religious freedom”; just the right things to say to engender unrealistic fear. This was enough to convince people to exchange freedom for this illusion of security.

  “At the same time, they were eventually able to convince most people that they didn’t really need an advanced, well-rounded education, they just needed to learn the skills to perform a certain job, then pay them just enough to make them desperate to maintain their employment, and gradually to view any kind of employee organization as disloyal, and reason for termination. So, people gave in to their fear and desperation, even if they were only illusions, and allowed the employers to slowly remove all their benefits; health, retirement, and so forth. After all, it is not in the corporate interest for people to live beyond their working years, so why encourage health care, or healthy living for that matter. The net result is what we now have: a population that is largely overweight, anesthetized, totally fooled by, and compliant with, the corporate rhetoric they have been bombarded by since birth, shuffling through their lives toward increasingly early deaths. So, the world is not fully dystopian, but it is leaning that way more and more as time goes by. You asked about all the people in the hospital at midnight. Those are homeless people with nowhere else to go. Current estimates are that twenty percent of all Americans are now homeless. If you go out on any street in the country, you’ll see them. Many of them work but can’t make enough money to afford a place to live, so they go from shelter to shelter, build houses out of cardboard, use tents. I’m sorry, Lukey, this is the world we’re in right now.”

  This is too much to take in… how is this possible? Someone has to do something… We were quiet for a moment, even Benji. Finally, dad said, “Well, I bet you’d like to know how you got here, right? So many things to say… let me just spell it out and then you can ask questions. Your body is now made up largely of cell-sized nano-machines. It was quite a trick to make enough of them to build a whole body. It took us a long time to develop the process, but in the end, we were able to get microscopic “maker-bots” to make copies of themselves, and once we got them to do that, they continued to make them without resting for several years. Of course, we had to make enough of the maker-bots to produce the other nano-machines, and that took a while. I had been working on it before, but when the accident happened… well, I drastically increased my time table, and got friends like Benji to help with some of the tech.”

  “So… so the stuff you poured on me at the hospital, those were tiny machines?”

  Dad smiled thinly, and responded, “Yes, your body, or much of it, is now made up of microscopic, cell-sized machines. Each one has only a miniscule bit of intelligence, but there are trillions of them, and combined, they can do some remarkable things. For example, anticipating a bullet and hardening themselves at that location to prevent you from injury. It is all controlled by you through a post-quantum A.I. That was the little marble-sized object you probably saw me putting in you. It is directly connected to your brain, so if you ask it a question or speak to it, you will get a response. It won’t speak to you unless you speak to it first, however.”

  “Oi, mate, the computer deserves some explanation, eh? There was another scientist in our little underground cabal, Nancy Euclid, a Canadian working on your computer. Ahh, she was a good one. I miss that Sheila. Anyway, the government “convinced her” that it would be in her “best interest” to do her research for their purposes.” As Benji spoke, he made the air quotes motions to indicate the parts he wanted to emphasize. He got more and more worked up as he continued, his voice going high and reedy, his h
ands gesticulating, and his giant bush of hair bouncing wildly.

  “So, she was a smarty like your daddy, right? She was working on the A.I. implant to help people with Alzheimer’s, dementia, and similar issues, and didn’t want the government to get their hands on her work, so just like your daddy, she worked in secret. When your daddy contacted her and told her about your… condition, she began modifying the program to accommodate the unique challenges your tech presents. Religious zealots found out about her work somehow, and… well, she’s not around anymore, God rest ‘er. Before they got to her, though, she sent us that little marble in your noggin. It’s a prototype, and it’s the only one. All her research was destroyed by the zealots, so it won’t be reproduced anytime soon, and that’s a bloody oath. She called it an Autonomous Virtual Assistant, by the by, although I reckon it’s not very autonomous, seeing as how it’s attached to your brain. Here’s the rub, though… the programming didn’t quite get completed, so if you speak to it, you have to do it out loud. It won’t hear your thoughts. Also, some of the responses you’ll get will seem a bit crazy. It seems to respond in metaphors and similes most of the time, which will take some getting used to, I reckon.”

  “So… so let me see if I understand right. I have a computer in my head, and it’s connected to my brain, and it controls the nano-machines, but I control it, and it’s going to talk to me in metaphors or similes, whatever that is, and it’s called an Autonomous Virtual Assistant… AVA?”

  “Well, yeah, I never thought about it, but I reckon its name is Ava. That’s bloody good, you little ripper!” Benji slapped me on the back, but his hand bounced off, almost throwing him out of his chair. “Oi, John, the bloody things work too well! They thought I was trying to hurt our boyo and straight out told me to piss off. Good on ya, mate!”

  Ok, I’ve got to think for a minute… I guess it’s good that they did all this stuff for me to keep me alive, and I should appreciate it… but am I even really alive anymore? I’m way more machine than human now… and although I guess I’m fourteen, I only have the memories of a nine-year-old… oh, man, this is going to be rough…

  Dad came in close and patted me on the hand, then on the shoulder, and said, “I expected that it would work… we were careful with our development of the tech, but to see you here… well, it’s a more emotional experience than I anticipated.” Dad’s eyes were once again shiny, and to tell the truth I felt like crying too, but nothing came out. Maybe my new body isn’t capable of tears.

  Suddenly, the ceiling shook from an explosion, with a resulting echo coming through the tube to the room above. Dad and Benji both pulled out their phones, and then made eye contact. Benji said, “Bloody drongos finally arrived. I reckon it’s time, mate.”

  Dad clapped his hands, and said, “Right. Time for phase three. Lukey, we’ll have to finish this later.” He dashed to one of the computer stations and hammered out some commands. There was thunder from above, and a plume of dust shot out of the tunnel. “I just collapsed the column where the tunnel originates. That will take a while for them to get through, and by then we will be long gone. It doesn’t appear that they have anything in the air, unless there are extremely small drones up there, so that means phase three point two. Benji, lead the way, friend.”

  6

  B enji hopped out of his chair, his eyes bulging with excitement or fear, I couldn’t tell which. “Ok, boyos, follow me!” he cried, and ran for the door to the clean room. We were blasted by powerful fans from above as we sprinted through the door. I noticed a large window to the right, with holes with thick gloves fitted to them, but I didn’t have time to notice much more as we dashed through a second, smaller door at the far side of the room. On the other side of the door was another narrow tunnel, this one leading almost straight up, and a rope ladder dangling in front of us.

  Dad pulled the door shut behind us, plunging us into darkness. He pulled out his phone and pressed it a few times, then said, “Ok, hang on for a minute.” An epic boom! emanated from the other side of the door, then two more in rapid succession, tossing us about in the confined space. “Had to destroy the evidence. Don’t want them to be able to reverse-engineer our work,” dad grunted as he slammed into the side of the tunnel. Man, these guys really planned for everything…

  “Sorry, mate, we didn’t automate this part. We’re just going to have to climb our way out, and we better get going before this tunnel collapses.” Benji began climbing the rope ladder up the darkened, claustrophobic space, with me following and dad behind. After about twenty meters of effort, we came to a large metal plate, and Benji began pushing on it. It wouldn’t budge, and he groaned in his effort. “Bloody thing is stuck! We shoulda checked it… now what, John-o?”

  He was now heaving on the metal plate with his back, the rope ladder straining under his feet. Ok, let’s see what this nano-bot body can do… I put my hand up next to Benji’s head and exerted a bit of pressure on the plate. I could feel it begin to loosen, so I pushed a bit harder, and it flew open into a large, empty, darkened room. “Oi, mate, I guess I’m stronger than I thought. Here we go!”

  Obviously Benji didn’t realize that I had pried the plate open, and I wasn’t going to burst his bubble. We scrambled up and out of the tunnel, closed the metal plate, and once again dad fumbled with his phone. Another, smaller explosion happened just below our feet, and the floor shook under us. “Ok, tunnel collapsed. No going back. Take us there, Benji.”

  We ran for a stairwell at the opposite side of the room. “Dad, where are we?” I whispered.

  “This room is four spaces down from the fake lab. We rented it years ago and left it empty just for this purpose. We’re heading up. Go!” he hissed.

  We sprinted up the stairs toward the roof, and I noticed that I didn’t feel any fatigue from the exertion, but dad and Benji were huffing loudly. When we reached the top, two floors up, we came to another metal plate, but this one opened easily for Benji. We scrambled through and in the darkness, I spied two large tarps the same gray color as the roof itself, camouflaging two items about the size of cars. Benji and dad dashed over and pulled away the coverings, and underneath were two small, four rotor VTOL aircraft. The rotors extended out from the four corners of a central pod that was obviously meant to carry a small payload. They began tapping panels on the side of the crafts, and the plexiglass tops slid back, revealing the passenger seats.

  There was a commotion below; men were grunting and calling to one another, and a grappling hook flew up, snagging the side of the roof, then two more. “Oi, we gotta get moving, mate,” Benji cried. “They’re coming up the side!”

  “Ok, Lukey, hop in with Benji. Go to point four, I’ll take point five, then meet at point six. Here we go!”

  This next part is a little weird… it occurred to me, seemingly out of nowhere, that I could jump from where I was and land directly in the rear seat of the pod Benji was preparing to climb into. I was about ten meters away, and I pushed off with my legs as if I was going to hop a short distance. A second later I was seated behind Benji before he had even finished buckling in. “Oi, mate, how did you do that?” Benji snorted, his eyes like two moons.

  “I… I don’t know, I just jumped,” was all I could think to say.

  “Crikey! That was a right good trick, boyo. Buckle up, we gotta get moving.”

  The top slid forward, closing with a reassuring clunk, Benji hit a couple of buttons on the dash, and the rotors came to life. It only took a second for us to lift off, and it was a good thing, because the… whoever they were, I’ll call them military types, were coming over the edge of the roof as we climbed away, going straight up at maximum speed. I braced myself, assuming that they would fire on us, but nothing happened. After a few seconds I asked, “Benji, why are they letting us go? I thought they would try to shoot us out of the sky.”

  Benji chuckled heartily, his face crinkling with mirth. “That’s the problem for them, ain’t it? I’m sure they would like to shoot us down, but
we’re valuable assets to them. They don’t want to kill us, they want to capture us. They want to dissect you, see what makes you tick, and they want to tap our brains, your daddy and me, get us to tell ‘em how we did it all. In fact, I reckon they might execute that drongo who shot you back at the hospital. No, it’s more likely that they’ll get some birds up to chase us right quick, so we gotta get to our exchange point before they do. Harder to follow if we’re low, so hang on, me old mate, we’re goin’ down!”

  It felt like we were falling from the sky, and I prepared for the kind of motion sickness I had always experienced… I get sick on car rides, much less in a boat or plane, but… nothing happened. I could tell we were going down, but I felt no motion sickness at all. I glanced to the right and saw dad going away from us diagonally, heading for point five, wherever that was. It occurred to me as we were flying that everything happened so quickly that I didn’t have time to be scared, but now thinking about it made me terrified. What if we don’t make it? What if dad doesn’t make it? Where are we going?

  We were flying so low that we had to go between some taller homes and structures, and Benji looked like a madman, slamming the controls in all directions. “Right, I think we got here quickly enough… hang on, down we go.”

  We were approaching an industrial area, massive structures all around, and just below us was a warehouse with a large, open roll-up door. We went down and through, and as soon as we were in the door slammed closed. We set down roughly and Benji cried, “Ok, quickly now, boyo, we’re moving!”

  The plexiglass top slid open and I followed Benji down and through a door in the warehouse opposite from where we entered. Just outside the door was a small blue car, and in the driver’s seat was… Minh Houng, from our escape from the hospital. “Oi, Minnie, how ya been?” Benji called as we tumbled into the back seat. He reached up and patted Ms. Houng on the shoulder with both hands warmly.