by Mike Kraus
“It’s always been twenty years away, Leonard. Just like the flying car. Except in this case, we’ve had the tech for the last ten years.”
Leonard leaned in close, the light from the EL lamp reflecting in his eyes, his voice taking on a quiet, conspiratorial tone. “Wait, how is that even possible? There’s no way we’ve had that type of technology for ten years. Last time I heard anything about nanotech development was ten years ago, when things ground to a halt because of scaling problems. There was this big debacle with that company… what was it? I forgot the name. Anyway, leaving the problem of manufacturing devices on the micrometer scale alone, there’s still the problem of software. There’s no way we’ve got artificial intelligence that will coordinate a thousand of those things to fly around at once, let alone do what they’ve been doing.”
“It’s probably more like five hundred thousand. Ten thousand’s all you need to achieve critical mass and sentience, though.”
“Sentience? What do you mean?” Nancy spoke for the first time, nervously, as she struggled to follow along with the terminology and the discussion.
“They can think for themselves. They coordinate with each other, acting as a single unit, and carry out their actions as they choose. There are some limitations, of course, but even within the bounds of their programming, they’re completely sentient.”
Marcus huffed. “I still don’t believe it.”
“Despite what you may have heard from casual media sources, everything I’ve told you is true. The stories about AI and nanotech being a dead end were planted in the press ten years ago to—”
“What a load of conspiratorial horseshit!” Marcus jumped back in to the conversation, refusing to believe the words she spoke. “This is the kind of nonsense you hear at basement meetings between tinfoil-hat-wearing freaks.”
Rachel glanced at Marcus as she continued. “I assure you, it’s true. I worked in some of the highest levels of administration at the laboratory, and I know a lot about what was going on. It’s very real and very scary what went on there.”
“Marcus….” Leonard shook his head as he looked at Marcus, warning the man to cool his temper. “Just let her talk, okay?”
Undisclosed Location
March 10, 2038
The laboratory is quieter tonight than most nights. The majority of the staff has taken the evening off after working for several consecutive days without a break and the exhausted staff members are enjoying a few hour pause from their work. Most of the upper level staff is still working, though, as usual. Their norm is to work 18-22 hours a night minimum while relying on caffeine and sugar to keep them awake and functional.
A soft alarm chimes from a workstation next to Rachel. She raises her head from the desk where she has been napping and switches it off. She rubs her eyes and yawns, checking the time on the lab clock. Working through the night on a chemical imbalance problem, Rachel fell asleep at her computer in the middle of completing a calculation, her body too tired to continue on without rest. The time is seven in the morning, and she turns on the video camera on the computer, preparing to make her daily call to her family back home.
Rachel’s husband and daughter weren’t happy with her decision to take the lab contract, but they were hardly in a position to refuse. The money was superb and it was a commitment that could pay huge dividends down the road for Rachel’s career. Sacrificing a short span of her family’s life together to help them in the future was the best choice, or so she continued to tell herself day after day.
The connection rings several times before a man’s voice comes through. “Hello?”
“Hey babe, it’s me. How are you guys today?” The video finally blinks on, synchronizing with the audio as it shows Rachel the face of her husband, with her daughter milling around in the background.
“Oh, you know, same as usual.” He nods back toward their daughter in the kitchen behind him. “Julie’s got another game tonight, so we’ll be out late again.”
“Hey, that’s right. How was the game last night?”
Julie walks closer, waving at her mother. Distance has strained their relationship, reducing their interactions to a series of polite comments to each other, devoid of substance and emotion.
“Good! We might make it to state if it keeps up!”
Rachel smiles wistfully at her daughter. The computer’s alarm chimes again as she starts to speak. She checks her watch, then her expression grows serious and professional.
“Damn. I’m sorry, I have to go. I forgot we have an extra early meeting this morning.”
“Anything wrong?” Her husband’s tone is laced with genuine concern. He knows next to nothing about what she does in the lab, but the fact that she is under a tremendous amount of stress is not lost on him, despite the communication barriers.
Rachel shakes her head and smiles. “Nothing I can’t handle. I’ll call you guys again later tonight. Love you. Love you too, Julie.”
Rachel’s husband and daughter wave goodbye and she switches the camera off. She takes a deep breath, sighing heavily as she pushes the conversation from her mind to focus on the task at hand. It’s been weeks since she’s been able to have a normal conversation with her family without being interrupted by some meeting, issue or emergency.
“Maybe I can fly down there next weekend, take a day off and see them,” Rachel mumbles as she stands up and puts on her lab coat. She gathers her identification card and several sheets of paper, stuffing them into a folder. Checking her watch, she walks swiftly out of the laboratory, heading down to the conference room at the end of the hall.
Leonard McComb | Rachel Walsh | Marcus Warden | Nancy Sims
11:32 AM, April 5, 2038
“Okay, so they’re nanobots. Big deal. What do they have to do with the nukes and those creatures out there?”
Marcus was still going at it with Rachel, finding it difficult to believe what she was saying. Leonard watched the two, occasionally jumping in to ask a question or make a point. Nancy was quiet while they spoke, turning over the new information in her head, trying to put it into a perspective that she could understand.
Rachel’s face took on a hint of a smile as she spoke, with passion leaking into her words. Despite what was going on, her entire life had been devoted to the topics at hand, and she was still proud of some of the work she did. The fact that her work was used to create the very thing that now stalked the world didn’t affect her passion for the subject itself.
“You’ve got to go all the way back to the start of the program to find out about that. Some of this is speculation, mind you, but I think I’ve put enough pieces together to be fairly certain about what happened.
“The nanobots were originally developed by a little company that found a way to manufacture them on a small scale in mass quantities. This was the holy grail for development, and the government immediately snatched them up, hiding their discovery and ‘persuading’ the company into signing over the rights to their development methods.
“The company couldn’t really refuse the request, so they went along with it. A few of the workers at the company stayed on as contractors for the feds, but the majority were quietly dispersed to other fields, forbidden from working on or even discussing anything to do with nanotech.”
“How could they do that?” Nancy spoke again. “How could the government force the company to disband and keep people from talking to each other?”
Rachel looked at Nancy sympathetically. “What a lot of people didn’t realize at the time was that the administration then was just as corrupt and power-hungry as the current one.” Rachel smirked. “Well, the one before all of this happened, anyway. They were just more subtle about it. They preferred governing on fears in the dark, instead of public displays of intimidation.”
Nancy nodded slowly at this, slipping back into silence again as she thought about Rachel’s words.
“Once the company was disbanded,” Rachel continued, “it took a while, but eventually so
mebody put all the pieces together and came up with a way to weaponize the nanobots, turning them from a potentially useful technology into just another bomb or gun. That’s where Mr. Doe’s agency came in. He combined the nanotechnology with artificial intelligence, infused billions of dollars into development and got results two years later.”
“That’s all well and good, but, again, what do these swarms of nanobots have to do with the nukes and the creatures, Rachel?” Marcus’s voice was somewhat calmer now, though he was still adamant about getting answers. He appeared to be giving Rachel more credit, with each new detail gradually wearing down his denial and tearing down the excuses he was making for not believing her.
“Right, right, I’m getting there. So you have these nanobots, these little robots so tiny that you can’t see them with the naked eye, and you have hundreds of millions of them all floating around with an artificial intelligence, all designed to act as a weapon. Let’s just say that… things didn’t go well.”
Undisclosed Location
March 10, 2038
Rachel Walsh pounds her fist on the table in frustration. She stands up and paces the room while her companion, David Landry, watches from the seat next to hers. Mr. Doe eyes her coolly and says nothing, allowing her to speak unrestricted.
“Excuse my French, Mr. Doe, but are you fucking serious?”
“I assure you, Mrs. Walsh, that I am. You’ll be given the new software to integrate very shortly, and I expect full upgrades immediately upon delivery.”
“Okay, let’s go through this idiotic plan one step at a time.” Rachel starts to count on her fingers, emphasizing her frustration. “One: This is an idiotic plan. Two: We can’t do software upgrades that fast without risk of corruption. Three: I haven’t even seen the details for this upgrade, but the executive summary scares the hell out of me. What are you trying to do with these things, take over the world?”
“As you’re well aware, Mrs. Walsh, the answer to that question is well beyond your pay grade. I assure you, though, appropriate safety measures have been taken.” Mr. Doe’s voice grows somehow colder as he stares at Rachel. “You should focus on your own work instead of worrying about these matters, Mrs. Walsh.”
Not one to be easily intimidated, Rachel doesn’t back down. “Look here, you might be able to push some of these other people around with your veiled threats, but I don’t respond well to intimidation. I’ll implement your damned software upgrades, but you’d better believe I’ll be raising holy hell every step of the way.” Rachel snatches a group of papers from the table and storms out of the room, leaving David sitting behind her.
David stares down at the desk, remaining quiet as he waits for the sound of Rachel’s footsteps to disappear down the hall. Once she has left, he speaks. “Sir, I apologize for the outburst. I’ll have a word with her about it.”
Mr. Doe holds up his hand to stop David from continuing. “I’ll handle it. I trust that you’ll ensure the updates are applied as ordered, correct?”
“Of course, sir. We’ll get it taken care of.”
Mr. Doe nods and stands up, indicating that the meeting is over. David stands and steps quickly out of the room, hurrying to catch up with Rachel. Once David is gone, Mr. Doe sits back down at the table and presses a button on the conference phone. The phone rings two times, then a man answers at the other end.
“Yes sir?”
“Rachel Walsh. Take her off the project, effective immediately. Give her a few weeks of PTO until the integration upgrades are complete, then bring her back.”
“Of course, sir, but wouldn’t it be best to just fire her?”
“No. She’s far too valuable to lose permanently. Once she’s back, she’ll see that she was wrong. Then we’ll have her resume work.”
“Whatever you say, sir. I’ll make the arrangements now.”
“Do so. And don’t let David Landry know about it until after Rachel has left. Those two talk to each other quite a bit. We don’t need them both whispering about her departure. In fact, don’t let anyone know, and give Mrs. Walsh explicit instructions to not discuss her leave of absence with anyone in the department.”
“Yes sir. Anything else?”
Mr. Doe presses a button on the conference line again, hanging up the phone without giving a response. His mind already on another task, he gets up from the table and leaves the conference room. Climbing several flights of stairs, traveling through multiple elevators and security checkpoints, he eventually arrives back on the ground floor of the laboratory. A black SUV waits outside the building, which whisks him back to his office.
Leonard McComb | Rachel Walsh | Marcus Warden | Nancy Sims
11:55 AM, April 5, 2038
Marcus was grim as he spoke. “Just answer me this: did these nanobot things detonate the nukes? Did they destroy the planet?”
Rachel hesitated. “Yes, I think so.”
Silence echoed through the armory at this confirmation. Marcus whispered to Rachel, “How?”
“To understand what the swarms did, you have to understand what we did to them. When we first got to work on the nanobots, they didn’t have very advanced artificial intelligence at all. Individually speaking, they still don’t. Each nanobot has a very small amount of programming that lets it perform basic functions. Collect up energy, try to replicate itself, stay away from danger, stay near other nanobots. Simple tasks like that are easy to program into each unit.
“Alongside those simple instructions, though, we implanted a small amount of AI code. Without other nanobots to interact with, this code did nothing and the nanobots were pretty much useless. You could put a hundred of them together and they’d move around, trying to survive, but they were worthless as far as thinking for themselves. Once you put ten thousand of them together, though, that’s when the magic starts to happen.”
Rachel spoke with excitement as she explained, finally feeling free to share with others what she had kept to herself for so long.
“Now that you have ten thousand of them together, all of that unused AI code suddenly springs to life. Now the swarm can do more than just survive and reproduce. It can start to think for itself, solve problems, remember information and act like a single entity. All of the knowledge and learning is stored across the cloud of nanobots, which constantly replace defective or dying units, so they always have a record of everything that’s going on.”
“Ten thousand? Is that how many are in each of those swarms?” Nancy remembered the first time she saw the swarm, at the farmhouse. Standing as tall as a person, it hovered off the ground, pulsating and spinning in the air before disappearing along the highway. “And how do they fly, anyway?”
“Not ten thousand, no. Hundreds of thousands. Millions. Maybe more. If they’ve altered their reproduction programming, there’s no telling how many could be in a swarm. They’re so small that if they hold still, it would take millions of them all crowded together to make a group large enough you can see. Well, that was the original generation. These look substantially larger, but it’s hard to say without examining them under a microscope. With the original generation, though, a group of a hundred thousand could bunch up together and you’d never notice them, except for their noise, that is.
“See, that noise is part of how they fly. They’re so small that the physics of how they move starts to differ from how things move on our size scale. We capitalized on this when we needed to give them movement capabilities and figured out that if they were to vibrate at specific frequencies, we could actually have them propel themselves along.”
“So it’s just acoustic levitation, then?” Leonard was intrigued by the technical details Rachel gave, though he was still struggling to comprehend the magnitude of what she was revealing. Everything he had learned and read said that what she was describing was impossible. With each new twist, though, he realized that not only was it possible, it was plausible, too.
“More or less, yeah. The small size of the nanobots allows them to interact wit
h air molecules much more precisely than on larger scales. They can almost ‘ride’ the air molecules using controlled acoustic bursts. That’s where you get the buzzing from.”
“So what about the creatures?” Marcus was fully convinced now, no longer deriding Rachel for what she said. He leaned in close with the rest of them, hanging intently on her every word.
Undisclosed Location
March 12, 2038
David Landry walks through the halls of the laboratory, glancing into every window to try to find his colleague. Testing is set to begin in half an hour, and Rachel has never been late before. He pulls on the sleeve of a lab assistant walking nearby. “Hey, have you seen Rachel?”
The assistant shakes her head. “Sorry, not since she left last night.”
A confused expression clouds David’s face. “She left? Last night?”