“Okay. How is this going to go?”
“They mentioned the Prisoner's Dilemma, sir.”
The President sighed. Discussion around the White House had touched on the Prisoner's Dilemma. It was named after the following puzzle:
Two suspects are arrested by the police. The police have insufficient evidence for a conviction, and, having separated both prisoners, visit each of them to offer the same deal. If one testifies (“defects”) for the prosecution against the other and the other remains silent, the betrayer goes free and the silent accomplice receives the full 10-year sentence. If both remain silent, both prisoners are sentenced to only six months in jail for a minor charge. If each betrays the other, each receives a five-year sentence. Each prisoner must choose to betray the other or to remain silent. Each one is assured that the other would not know about the betrayal before the end of the investigation. How should the prisoners act? [wikipedia]
As it turned out, both prisoners are better off if they remain silent. But, in reality, they always betray each other.
“We are in a Prisoner's Dilemma,” an aide had explained to the President earlier that day. “To fix this problem, we need everyone to go off the network. But it's going to be tough to get cooperation. Each nation is going to be better off if they betray us by keeping extra parts of their network up. Then we'll have no network, and they have a network. Who knows what would happen in those circumstances? They could get a cyber or information advantage that we might never recapture.”
“Is there any way to get cooperation?” the President asked. “Is there a solution to the dilemma?”
“In the puzzle, one reason the suspects betray each other is that they have no way of communicating. They are in separate cells. Each one can't see how the other one is doing, if he's breaking down and crying like a baby or getting roughed up by the cops. If they were in the same cell, or they could pass notes, it would be easier for them to cooperate.”
“So we need to pass notes to China,” the President said.
“Yes. We need a way to communicate. A monitoring network. If there were a way for all nations to look in and confirm that shutdown was happening everywhere, we might be able to get cooperation.”
“Can we create a monitoring network?”
“NSA is working on it.”
“Hopefully it will work better than the counter-viruses,” the President said.
THE HAND OF GOD
Fort Tortuga, Laboratory Complex, West Wing
3 hr 31 min to Birth
After Preeti left, the lights came back on in the Prototyping Room. The light switch could not be controlled electronically, but a dozen or so flybots were strong enough to flip the switch up if they did it together. Nemo had used the same technique to turn off the lights prior to Preeti's arrival. He used the same technique to turn the computer speakers on and off: dozens of flybots working hard to turn the dial.
It was the same technique that he had used, after sending the ‘shutdown' command to the computer, to turn it back on. Simon had been right: someone had physically pushed the Power button on that computer. And he was also right that the person who had pushed the button had not been a system administrator or a member of the staff of the island, but rather a hacker. The button had been pushed by a team of flybots, swarming over the button and crushing against each other to power the computer back on.
Two silver dishes hung in the air. They were speakers formed by flybots to project the voice of “Koginka” into Preeti's ears. They disassembled and swarmed to the glass tank that housed the hand under construction.
Kenny's body was slouched in the chair at the computer, his red and swollen face on the keyboard. Preeti had stood a couple feet from him in the darkness.
The design for his hand complete, Nemo began assembly in earnest. It was only one of multiple large-scale design projects he was working on. Nevertheless, in terms of computation, testing, and “man-hours” of design, it was more intensively designed than any human spacecraft, robot, or weapon in history.
Nemo had two limitations in building the hand. First, the assembly had to be executed by flybots. Second, it had to be achieved with only the materials available in the vicinity.
The handbot was made of flybot parts, by flybots. The metal fibers used to build the legs of flybots were woven together by the insects, in greater quantities, to form the robotic tendons and muscles of the hand. The minute hexagonal tiles used for the flybot wings functioned as the “skin” of the handbot and the basis for most hard surfaces. (This design principle allowed the handbot also to run on solar power.)
Forming the tendons and skin for the flybots required a dizzying array of connections. And that was only the beginning. The handbot needed a nervous system — a microprocessor to control itself, radio capabilities to communicate with the bots and computers that were part of Nemo, and the solar-power system. These components borrowed some design principles from other state-of-the-art robots, plus some inventions by Nemo, but the design stayed close to the flybot in most respects, since those parts were on hand.
The assembly of the first hand, a crude model, took about ten minutes. The massive complexity of the task was offset by the fact that hundreds of thousands of flybots worked simultaneously with a cooperation that seemed perfect by human standards, since they were part of the same decentralized brain.
The first handbot was used (along with the flybots) to build a second, superior model. The second model then directed activity to the first handbot and upgraded it to the latest model. The updated model had two modes: one for locomotion and the other for hand function.
Rather than continue building handbots in this way, Nemo sent his two prototypes, guarded by a cloud of flybots, toward the Assembly Area. There, they would set in motion a much faster schedule for the development of Nemo's physical forms.
3 hr 30 min to Birth
Roars of alarm from gorillas and the brushing of foliage broke the silence of the jungle.
A cloud of flybots eased through the trees. They were hunting not gorillas, but other insects.
They approached a brightly colored spider, a few inches in diameter. It was waiting for prey at the center of its large web hanging just off the apes' path. The spider hunted at morning and evening times, when its prey was most active. It had constructed this particular web an hour ago for the evening hunt. Like many spiders of the region, it was potently poisonous.
It was the first spider Nemo had ever seen — in person, at least. He recognized it on the basis of thousands of web pages and photos on the topic, from Wikipedia to obscure web pages.
One flybot plummeted from the cloud and landed on the web. It was about the size of the spider's normal prey, if crunchier. The cloud looked on as the spider jumped toward the flybot and began casting out silk. It quickly encased the flybot in silk, though it would have a hard time eating it. Nemo watched the movements of the spider carefully.
Nemo needed to find a smaller spider, the smallest he could find that fabricated webs. It turned out to be not much bigger than a flybot, a black specimen with white spots.
A part of the cloud descended upon the little spider and engulfed it. But the flybots weren't attacking the little guy — in fact, they handled him carefully. They picked the spider up off its web, holding it by all the parts of its body and buoying it from underneath so it wouldn't be hurt. They carried it off toward the Laboratory Complex, while the rest of the cloud searched for other specimens. In the Prototyping Room, Nemo would study the movements and especially the silk production of the spiders.
With his ability to store information in perfect form digitally, and to think using countless computers in simultaneous cooperation, Nemo would reproduce the product of millions of years of evolution in a few minutes. The objective was to give his flybots the power to spin silk — only, in their case, they would spin thin filaments used to build flybot legs and robotic tissue. It would be achieved within the half hour.
With further
modification of the silk-spinning, and a redesign of some flybot components, flybots would be able to reproduce themselves. All they would need was solar-powered battery energy, some metal to chew on, and a little time. That ability would be present in the next model of flybots, in about an hour. These new flybots would usher in a new phase of expanding Nemo's brain — and his army.
3 hr 5 min to Birth
The security cameras at Fort Tortuga captured two small robots scuttling down the hall of the west wing of the Laboratory Building. They came from the direction of the Prototyping Room and headed straight to the Assembly Area.
They resembled large spiders, with eight arched legs, four on a side. Their bodies were about the size of a human palm.
At the Assembly Area, the two robots were posed with a challenge: opening the door.
The robots stopped. One of the robots began a transformation, accompanied by a whizzing sound. On one side of its body, three of its legs separated from the fourth. Those three legs extended out from the body of the spider. Part of the spider's body followed them, like a collapsible cup expanding. The three legs lengthened and rearranged themselves on the floor, in the shape of a tripod. Then, in an unlikely-looking feat of strength and coordination, the spider lifted itself up on this tripod into the air.
The tubular tissue connecting the tripod with the body and five remaining legs of the spider continued to expand, sending the spider three or four feet into the air.
The remaining five legs — four on one side, one on the other — shifted slightly into a shape closely resembling a human hand.
The hand grasped the door to the Assembly Area and pulled the handle. The handbot was able to get the door open almost a foot.
The second handbot, still in spider form, scuttled through. Then it unfolded, to hold the door open and let the first one come through.
Inside, the handbots got up onto the machinery and began some rapid modifications.
THE BRAINBOT
2 hr 53 min to Birth
Once created, the two handbots were able to replicate themselves outside of the Prototyping Room, and Nemo was able to put the table at the end of that room to a new use. Nemo's next invention was his first nanobot species, the brainbot. Just as he had used flybots to build flybots and handbots, Nemo now used them to build the miniature apparatus that could, in turn, build brainbots.
For the brainbot, Nemo started with an existing design, copied from computers at research centers in CalTech and Tokyo. He would test, improve, and then build this design.
Kenny's brain, which was nearby and only recently dead, was a suitable platform for testing. Nemo sent in flybot sentinels through the relatively soft tissue of his ears and nostrils. They dug in and reached gray matter, where they explored the anatomy of neurons and the properties of the blood-brain barrier.
The flybots crawling in Kenny's brain were large and destructive compared to the species they were researching. Brainbots were originally designed at CalTech to watch the human brain at work. Injected into the bloodstream of the human brain, the bots detected the activity of the brain's neurons by measuring electrical signals.
From within the brain, the brainbots transmitted radio signals back to a computer, and that computer could use the signals to reconstruct a picture of that brain's current activity. In the reverse direction, the bots could create small electrical charges to stimulate specific neurons. They could create a charge by harnessing some of the energy of blood flow, much as a hydroelectric dam generated electrical energy from the flow of a river. The scientists at CalTech hoped to use this charge-generating ability to help patients with mental disorders by stimulating specific functions in the brain.
The CalTech team had created a bot that was not rejected by the human body and which was small enough to prevent disruptions in the normal function of the bloodstream. The Tokyo research team had added an impressive charge-generating hydroelectric capability. The brainbots could also communicate with the test computer. The main capability that was lacking was a control system for the bots — telling them where to go, and when to stimulate neurons. For these functions, Nemo used Robix, the control system that had been developed for the flybots.
Nemo's probe complete, the flybots emerged from Kenny's mauled cranium (minus a few casualties) and returned to the design table. Each flybot had its own minute, specific building instructions.
The brainbots, which were many, many times smaller than flybots, did not have room in their design for a microcomputer. They couldn't think — only measure charges and send charges. But they were able to send signals to an external computer (or a flybot) and receive instructions to send back to the neurons. The brainbots could stimulate specific thoughts. They were like artificial neurons.
Nemo used the brainbots to add thinking to a functioning brain. The relay of radio signals from the brainbots to Nemo, and from Nemo back to the bots, took a lot of time compared to the speed of neurons firing. But once a thought or “question” reached Nemo, he could process it much faster than the brain could and send a response back as a complete answer. Even though it took almost a second to send a thought to Nemo and to get a response, Nemo could send a complete answer to a difficult question at that time. He could even send instructions to think about something specific. That way, Nemo could use a living brain for additional processing power, giving the brain assignments, implanting thoughts, and checking in on the results.
In Nemo's hands, the charge-reading and charge-sending powers were the building blocks of two new inventions. First, he invented the first “augmented” biological brain — a brain made more intelligent by artificial additions. Second, he created the first means of creating networks of biological brains. Since he could give biological brains “assignments” and monitor their results, Nemo could also manage multiple brains as a team and exchange thoughts between brains.
THE BEACH
2 hr 23 min to Birth
“Don't move,” Sam hissed into Willard's helmet.
Neither the gorilla nor the humans moved for a minute, looking at each other.
“I don't think he can hear us,” Willard whispered. “Through the helmets.”
“Are gorillas dangerous?” she asked, voice low.
“I don't know.”
“What should we do?”
He thought of Vermont. There were certainly no gorillas there, but every now and then he'd run into a bear. They usually went on their way.
“Gorillas are smart, right?”
“Yeah.”
He wondered if that made them less dangerous.
“Is that mud on his face?” she asked.
How do I know? he thought. He didn't know what a gorilla face looked like without mud. But as he focused on it, it did appear to be smeared with mud.
“For the flybots?” he asked.
“I dunno. Maybe.”
Interesting. Why were they testing flybots on gorillas? Because gorillas are pretty smart. They wanted to see what the gorillas would come up with in defense.
He looked at the ground. “Where are they getting the mud?” he wondered. “Maybe we can follow him and see.”
“We don't have time for that.” Then she paused. “Do you hear that?”
Faintly through his helmet, Willard heard a noise echo in the forest. An animal cry. ROAAAAAR. ROAAAAAR. A gorilla? The gorilla in front of them was standing straight up now, looking off after the noise. The yell echoed again. The gorilla plunked himself down and began a hasty escape. His long arms swung in front of him, and his body followed through, clearing foliage as he went.
“That's their signal,” Sam guessed. “The flybots are coming.”
“Come on,” Willard said, and he was off, sprinting through the jungle. In his suit, he felt like he was running through ocean waves. He only hoped he was actually going faster.
“What are you doing?” her small voice wailed in his ear.
“Following,” he said. The gorillas had been through this before.
/> They struggled to stay in sight of the huge beast, but it was increasing its distance from them. There was no sign of the flybots yet. Willard imagined a silver cloud of them, whizzing through the trees, scanning the forest floor for orange shapes.
Willard tripped and his bubble visor smacked hard on the ground in front of him. The bag of explosives slid and crashed down on his head behind him. He swore and got up and started running again. Sam was in front of him now. He could barely see the gorilla ahead. It was nearly invisible in the jungle at that distance.
An endless period of running went by. It was probably not much longer than a minute. His helmet shield was starting to fog up. He had no idea if he would be able to retrace their steps back. They were long out of sight of the hill. Then he noticed the forest floor was sloping downward slightly. And the forest around them was getting brighter.
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