“Wow.”
“Er, yes, wow! I appreciate your enthusiasm, Gemma, and that isn’t the only use for their lasers.”
“Do tell.” I was hooked, I admit it.
“Defense, Gemma, defense.”
He was smiling again and I grinned back, our little tiff behind us.
“The fifth tribe, Omega, directs the nanocloud’s defenses. Delta Tribe’s lasers are not the nanomites’ only defense, but they are a powerful part of it. When connected to an uninterrupted energy source, the nanocloud can generate and direct a laser beam strong enough to cut through steel. It takes them a few moments to bring the laser up to power, but they are quite efficient.”
My glance at the glass case was involuntary. Dr. Bickel followed my gaze.
“You question why they haven’t freed themselves, don’t you?” he whispered.
“Yes.” I nodded at the same time.
“And I’m not entirely sure I can answer your question, Gemma, except to say that they haven’t wanted to.” Now he sighed, and I felt the weight of his concern.
The word to complete his sentence popped into my head, and I felt it had to be true.
Yet. They haven’t wanted to free themselves yet.
“As I’ve been teaching them language, we’ve, well, I feel like we’ve rather bonded, the nanomites and I.”
“Can you ‘bond’ with tiny machines?” I hadn’t intended to sound so sharp, but there you have it.
He shook his head. “That was an unscientific assertion, wasn’t it? And I am wrong, of course. The nanomites and I are learning together and I’m certain that my sense of ‘bonding’ is only a baseless human feeling I have. Perhaps the nanomites simply don’t recognize a data-driven need to leave at this time. In any case, I have not, to date, seen them harness Delta Tribe’s lasers in any manner other than to propel the cloud within the case.”
We stared at them for long minutes. I had to marvel as they eddied and swirled behind the glass. It was hard to accept that I wasn’t seeing them but the flash of their tiny mirrors—nor was I seeing them individually but in densely packed masses. With the little about them I had just learned, I acknowledged Dr. Bickel’s pride over his success to be justified.
“How many of them are there?” I couldn’t take my eyes off the morphing haze in the glass case.
“At present? I estimate the nanocloud at upward of several trillion nanomites.”
I stared at Dr. Bickel. “At present?”
What did “at present” imply?
He looked away. “I smuggled fifty billion of the nanomites—our prototypes—out in the carryalls that day. However, while we were stocking this lab in the furious weeks running up to the ‘incident,’ I printed as many wafers as the printer’s capacity could handle. We ran the printer day and night, each wafer yielding something on the order of two hundred billion nanomites. Rick and Tony loaded the printed wafers into protective clamshells and put them in Rick’s car the morning of the incident. I could not allow the uncut nanomites to fall into Cushing’s hands.”
Something dawned on me. “The ion printhead! What became of it?”
Dr. Bickel sighed. “I had to let it go, Gemma. It and the printer went up with the lab in the explosion and fire. Cushing has the schematics for the printer, but she doesn’t know about the ion printhead. I’ve stored those schematics in a secure remote server.”
I slowly shook my head. “I wouldn’t trust an encrypted account at some remote server farm,” I objected. “You said Cushing is relentless. What if she discovers the location of your files? How secure are they, really, if the government wants them?”
“You’re absolutely right, but don’t worry. I assure you: anything I’ve hidden, Gemma, will remain hidden.”
Now I sighed, not convinced, and swept my gaze over the lab. “So you brought the printed wafers for several trillion more of the nanomites here? You cut them apart and programmed them in the last few months?” I looked at the sparsely equipped lab. “Without the printer’s digital laser cutter?”
Even I knew that to be an impossibility.
“Actually, I cut none of them.” Dr. Bickel’s sly smile reappeared.
Realization swept over me. “They did it?”
He was nodding, pulling at his scruffy beard, and beaming. “On a hunch, I placed five printed wafers into the case—one wafer of each tribe. I focused the 3D microscope on a sample and sent the feed of their activity to those monitors.”
He pointed to an array of monitors lining a nearby workbench. “I recorded it all, of course, and it was most amazing. Emissaries of Gamma Tribe examined the wafers first. They seemed to hold a little confab—took about five minutes—before they arrived at consensus. After that they rejoined the nanocloud.
“Approximately fifteen minutes later, I observed contingents of all five tribes descend on the samples. Some began to cut and others to assemble the nanostructures in rows and ranks according to tribe—demonstrating that they recognized which mites belonged to which tribe.
“Gamma Tribe directed the operations, and Beta Tribe powered each mite as it came off the ‘assembly line.’ The last thing to occur was programming. Members of each tribe piggybacked with an unprogrammed mite of the same tribe and shared their programming with the newly cut nanomites. Within minutes, new nanomites were joining the nanocloud. I tell you, Gemma, it gave me chills!”
It gave me chills, too. “But what’s to stop them from making more and more of them? Could they keep growing the, er, cloud?”
The idea that the nanomites might replicate themselves until a trillion was a small number for them was a scenario straight out of a horror movie.
“Oh, they haven’t the parts to do so.” Dr. Bickel was fiddling with the microscope’s feed, obviously unconcerned with the implications of my question.
“They couldn’t fabricate their own pieces and parts from raw materials?”
“Well, no. They don’t have the polymers or the doped metals and they can’t provide the atmospheric environment necessary for deposition. The mites cut apart the fabricated mites I gave them, powered them, and shared their common programming with them. That’s all.”
“All right . . .”
No, it wasn’t, but I didn’t know what else to say.
“Now, the mites can certainly repair each other, except in extreme circumstances,” he went on, oblivious to my discomfort. “At the nano level, they can cut, weld, and glue—those terms being simplistic, of course.”
“Of course.”
Tone, Gemma, tone. My sarcasm was at the outer reaches of my control.
With that last announcement, he seemed to deflate. I imagined he had to be exhausted. I knew I was. Dr. Bickel broke off his lecture just before brain matter began leaking from my ears.
He glanced at his watch. “Goodness. Our midnight luncheon is quite past due. Care for something to eat before we continue?”
It had been a long night already and I was feeling hungry. “Um, yes, thank you.”
He led the way past the aisles of laboratory tables and equipment over to the far side of the cavern. There, we entered his living area, built not entirely into the stone but also alongside of it.
I gawked around, amazed and a little delighted. The temperature in the cavern was pleasant and dry so the fact that his small dining area was out in the open was quaintly picturesque, in the manner of a sidewalk café.
All that’s missing is a view of the Eiffel Tower.
His square table with chairs for two sat on a colorful carpet, but the “floor” beneath the carpet was stone. Two 40-inch monitors hung on the cavern’s wall in view of the table. One screen displayed a live feed from a camera over the nanocloud. The second screen changed views every few seconds. As the image changed, I squinted at it—I was looking at an image of the wall that hid my entrance to the cavern.
No wonder he was waiting for me when I emerged from the tunnels!
Then the image changed. “I continually monitor th
e three entrances to this room,” Dr. Bickel murmured.
Along the same wall, a few yards from his eating area, I saw a wide desk. A computer and several monitors sat on it. A tall bookshelf, spilling with volumes, completed his office area.
I followed Dr. Bickel through a doorway carved into the rock wall between his dining and office spaces—into a compact kitchen. The entire room was carved out of the rock and was fitted with cupboards, counters, and space-saving appliances. I was impressed.
“My sleeping quarters are through that doorway,” Dr. Bickel motioned to the right as he lifted the lid on a crockpot.
I peeked into the room. It was more of a rock cell than a room. On the left of his bed was a chiseled platform topped with a mattress. Straight ahead another tunnel led away.
“That leads to my western escape route,” Dr. Bickel said from the kitchen where he was slicing bread.
“One of the three entrances you spoke of?”
“Yes. You came in the back way, from the north. My bedroom route leads west, into one of the old munitions bunkers facing the base.”
“And the third? The one you booby-trapped?”
“Ah. As I said, if Cushing comes looking for me under this mountain, we hope that she will ‘stumble’ upon that entrance. You can see where the tunnel comes in just over there.” He waved a knife away from the lab, toward the wall opposite my entrance.
“Getting into the tunnel will be easy at first; however, I’ve made the remaining journey difficult for her by adding rock falls, false routes with dead ends, and other inventive distractions, so that I have enough time to take the nanomites and leave through either the western or northern routes.”
He ladled soup into two bowls. “Would you take that plate of bread, Gemma?”
I lifted the plate and sniffed. The sliced bread was fresh-baked. A homemade, yeasty scent reached my nostrils.
Yum. My stomach grumbled in agreement.
We sat down together to a simple middle-of-the night lunch of soup, bread, and canned juice. “I hope you will forgive this plain fare, Gemma,” he apologized.
“But it’s delicious,” I protested. “And this bread is wonderful. It’s fresh, too—did you bake it yourself?”
He blushed, pleased that I’d noticed. “I like to cook, but as I said, I only have dry and canned goods left. I hope the next time you come I might offer you something better.”
“The next time?”
He swirled his spoon in his soup. “As I alluded to earlier, I asked you here to offer you a job, Gemma.”
If I hadn’t been facing financial disaster, I wouldn’t have let him make his pitch. I set my spoon down. “I’m listening.”
“Did you find the trek onto the base and up the foothills into the tunnels too rigorous?”
I thought about it. “Not too.”
Too rigorous? No. Unnerving and illegal? Yes. That.
“I would like you to make the trip on a regular basis, say once a week, bringing in things I need. I will pay you in cash for the items you bring me and pay you for each trip you make. What do you think?”
“I will need time to think about it.” The prospect was scary—I thought about the three roads I’d crossed during my hike up the foothills. What if I were caught by a base patrol? What would the Air Force do with me? If I were apprehended and Shark Face heard about it, would she remember me and associate me with Dr. Bickel? I might be putting myself squarely into her sights.
I was quiet for a long while, lost in my thoughts, but my expression remained placid while I mulled over his proposition.
“The military doesn’t patrol the mountain’s perimeter often, Gemma.”
My forehead creased. How does he do that?
“You know the draft folder in your email account, where unsent mail you’ve written is kept until you are ready to send it?”
“Yes.” Where was he going with this?
“Check it regularly. We can communicate by placing unsent mail in that folder.”
“You can access my email?”
He shrugged, embarrassed. “I hacked the power company’s network, remember? I would have communicated with you through email left in your draft folder the first time, but I had no way of telling you to check it. However, if you agree to my proposal, I’d like to add some security to your account. Just to be safe.”
I continued eating my soup and we finished the meal in silence. When we stood up, I gathered up my dishes.
“Leave them; I’ll clean up, Gemma.”
“All right. And I’ll think about your proposal.” I sighed. “So I just write an email and put it in my draft folder, and then you log in to my account, go to the draft folder, and read it?”
“Yes. And answer you in the same unsent email. Just be sure not to put anyone’s email address in the ‘To’ field. That way it cannot accidentally be sent.”
“All right.”
Sounds like spy stuff.
We walked back toward the glass case on our way to my exit. It was the middle of the night by now, but I still felt quite awake.
“Would you like to hear more about the nanomites before you go, Gemma?”
“Very much, Dr. Bickel.” I wasn’t in a hurry to leave, and curiosity burned within me now.
“The best is still ahead,” he assured me. “I think you’d be interested in how the nanomites learn, for instance.”
When I nodded my assent, he went on. “Well, their core logic is predictive. That means I have programmed the nanomites to observe and to anticipate.
“They monitor and catalog the choices, behaviors, and actions of what or whom they are watching. Based on those observations, the mites anticipate the future choices, behaviors, and actions of the subject they are observing and prepare appropriate responses for those anticipated actions.”
He must have interpreted my glassy-eyed expression as, “Huh?” which was a good choice, because that’s what I meant my face to say.
He took a deep breath and pressed on. “A coarse example of predictive logic is how social media sites offer you new products based on your previous purchases, browsing history, ‘likes,’ and the groups you interact with. However, the nanomites’ predictive behavior is much more sophisticated because they observe the world directly from their five tribal perspectives and share that information with the entire nanocloud.”
“Tribal perspectives?”
Dr. Bickel’s chest swelled. “Oh, yes. As part of its assigned role, each tribe is programmed to provide a unique but complementary perspective of behaviors, issues, actions, and dangers observed in the world around them. This is an impressive behavior, Gemma, because gestalt—the sum of the whole—is more powerful than the individual parts.”
His eyes glowed. “And the mites’ predictive logic leads to their greatest ability.” He coughed. “I’ve been saving the best until last.”
I smiled, my good humor restored by the meal.
“Do you know anything about quantum stealth technology, Gemma? Hyper-stealth technology? Passive adaptive camouflage?”
I smiled inwardly because Dr. Bickel wanted so badly for me to say, “No, not really. Can you explain?”
Pretty please?
I humored him. “No, I don’t think so. What have those to do with the, um, nanomites?”
As I’d deduced, he was tickled that I’d asked. “So much, I assure you! Original stealth technology was about making an airplane undetectable by radar. When a radar antenna sends radio energy into the air and that energy strikes an object’s surface, the signal bounces back to its source—which allows the antenna user to track the object’s speed and location.
“The rounded and cylindrical shape of an airplane’s body is very efficient at reflecting radar signals, so radar is how air traffic controllers track planes in flight. But what if you don’t want an airplane to be tracked by radar?”
He waited a tick just to be certain that I wasn’t going to try to answer his question. “Why, you redesign the plane so
that it has only flat surfaces and sharp edges. In that way, the radar signal is deflected away from its source, rendering the plane undetectable. Another method is to treat the surfaces of a plane so that they absorb the radio waves instead of reflecting or deflecting them.”
“But the nanomites aren’t airplanes. What has that to do with them?”
He nodded sagely. “The same technology that tracks planes and satellites is also used to track weather phenomenon such as tornados and hurricanes and, with ground-penetrating radar, to find underground objects such as large fossils.”
“Okaaaay . . .”
He chuckled. “But what has that to do with the mites, right?”
“Uh-huh.”
“You already know that each mite carries its own mirror, and I’ve said that under the guidance of Beta Tribe, the mites deploy those mirrors to take in power from solar rays. Delta Tribe aims their lasers at other mites’ mirrors to propel the nanocloud.”
“You said that already—‘like solar sails.’ But I thought solar sails could only work in space?” I wanted him to know I wasn’t a complete dunce.
Dr. Bickel chuckled; he slapped his knee and laughed. His wasn’t a mean laugh—it was the laugh of a shared joke between friends.
All right, then. I laughed with him.
“Very good, Gemma! Very good. You are correct—and yet, at the nanometer level, the mites have found a way to make laser propulsion work. I hope to communicate with them someday on a level that will allow them to tell me how they get it to work, but we aren’t there yet. When they do tell me, it will be a stunning new discovery.
“But, I digress. We were talking about quantum or optical stealth. The nanomites can employ their mirrors for yet another purpose: to project what is around them.”
He waited for me to “get it,” but I wasn’t “getting it.” I pulled on my “nothing” mask.
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