The Last Sword Maker

by Brian Nelson

  Oh, well.

  He put it on, then slid his sweater on top. He was instantly warm and snug, even sweating a little. He felt a little thrill, like a superhero donning his costume. I could get seriously used to this.

  In the lobby of the Hoover building, he met Agents Brightwell and Brown. Brown looked like a relic from the 1970s in his black suit and wide tie. His dress shirt was now beige from years of use, and he had a bald spot so big it made him look like a tonsured monk. Time to shave it all off, buddy.

  Agent Brightwell, by contrast, was young and pretty. Half Asian, round face, short black hair. Fashionably dressed, with not a wrinkle or a loose thread. The new blood.

  They led him into a small conference room.

  “Last night, there was a robbery at a SynChem warehouse in Maryland,” Brightwell said. “Because the suspect is also wanted in Virginia for a similar break-in, the bureau has been asked to take over. What can you tell us about these chemicals?” She handed him a list: indium arsenide, boron, carbon radicals, indenoisoquinolines, and a dopamine receptor agonist (DRA).

  He told them the first three were very common in chemical research. Nothing odd there—they weren’t even particularly expensive. But the last two: indenoisoquinolines were used to control cell growth, namely cancer cells, and the DRA was a synthetic neurotransmitter used to stimulate brain activity. Both were very expensive. It was an odd combination for a thief, he told them.

  Agent Brightwell looked at Brown. He nodded.

  Eric wondered whether that meant he had just passed some sort of test.

  “We have a surveillance tape from the break-in,” she said. “We’d like you to tell us if you recognize the suspect or notice anything unusual.”

  The video started, showing a security guard, his feet propped up, hands behind his head, sleeping behind a half-circle of video monitors. After a minute, the man rubbed his nose, then returned to dozing. Then something slid into the corner of the video screen. A man … but not like any man Eric had ever seen.

  Eric was instantly on the edge of his chair. What in the world …?

  Something was very wrong with him. His face. It was somehow deformed, yet Eric could not say exactly how. What was it? Taken individually, all his features seemed normal enough: thick black hair, sullen cheeks, slightly upturned upper lip. He was just a man, yet the look of him bothered Eric deeply, preoccupied him, and filled him with disgust.

  But the face was just part of it. There was also the other thing—the coat he was wearing. How to describe it? Like some sort of liquid bronze. It had a high collar and hung almost to the floor. Eric was immediately struck by the sense that it, too, was alive. A word popped into his head: gothic. For it seemed very old and archaic, yet somehow revolutionary. It was thick as canvas but did not appear bulky or cumbersome, moving easily with his body. Even the color was strange. It seemed to change shade as he moved: copper, brown, oil black. It was hypnotic.

  All these impressions ran quickly through his mind, yet he had been watching only for a moment.

  Anything unusual, she had said. Are you kidding?

  The menacing form drew closer to the sleeping security guard. Suddenly, the man stirred. With impressive speed, he was on his feet with his gun out.

  On the streaky video, Eric watched the two figures face off. There appeared to be a moment of dialogue; then the man with the coat slid toward the pistol. That was when Eric saw, or imagined he saw, a haze well up around the coat. But it was gone as soon as he perceived it. The next instant, the security guard collapsed—dropped as if his legs had been severed from under him.

  Without delay, yet without hurry, the man in the coat moved past the body. Then he abruptly turned toward the camera. It was an eerie motion, as if the coat were turning on its own accord. Then the screen went black and turned to snow, and the speakers blared the hiss of static. Agent Brightwell stepped up and turned down the volume.

  “Sorry,” she said.

  Eric didn’t even hear her. In his heart, he was repulsed by what he had seen—disturbed by the malicious use of science, his science. Yet another part of him was delighted, upbeat, and happy. He had spent the past month working on his own body armor, thinking of how far he could take the concept. And now he’d seen a body armor radically more advanced than the one he wore. Not only could it stop bullets, but it could attack and kill.

  He suddenly remembered where he was. He shifted back in his chair and frowned.

  “You might be wondering what happened to the security guard,” Agent Brown said.

  In fact, he was wondering, but not so much the what as the how. He figured that the nanosites had entered the security guard’s body (he supposed, through the rim of the eye) and torn up his gray matter long before his slow, biological brain ever became aware that anything was wrong.

  “He had a sudden stroke and died,” Agent Brown said. “Poor guy.”

  Eric looked at them incredulously. Up until that moment, it hadn’t occurred to him that they didn’t see what he saw. To them, these bizarre occurrences were explainable coincidences: a stress-induced stroke, a faulty video camera. Agents Brown and Brightwell couldn’t see what Eric saw. And it would take many, many hours to explain it to them. And even then, he doubted whether they would be capable of believing it. It would be like trying to explain to the ancient Aztecs that the Spanish Conquistadors, with their horses, armor, and firearms, were not divine. Then he thought, should he try to explain all that he and the lab had done, to a couple of clueless FBI agents? Security is common sense. Don’t take chances.

  “What about the gun?” Eric asked. “Was it fired?” Now he was the one looking for information.

  “No,” Agent Brown said. “It jammed on him.”

  Eric nodded. More likely, the nanosites had jammed the gun. It was a good idea—one that he should have thought of. Instead of worrying about stopping bullets, why not make sure they were never fired in the first place?

  “Funny-looking coat,” Agent Brightwell said.

  Hilarious. “Why did you call the lab?”

  “SynChem’s records show that your lab is their largest buyer of one of the chemicals that was stolen. Here, this one.” She handed him a slip of paper: C60+; fullerene cations and anions.

  Carbon radicals—buckyballs.

  “How much did he take?”

  “Ten kilos.”

  “Did you say kilos?” It was a staggering quantity for a molecule typically sold by the gram.

  She nodded.

  Ten kilos of buckyballs. Eric’s mind brimmed with theories. He went over the list of chemicals again. It made a lot more sense now.

  The indenoisoquinolines and the DRA must be for the interface: the DRA to facilitate the analog-to-digital conversions; the indenoisoquinolines … Hmm, they were a cell growth suppressor. Could it be that this guy was having problems? The nanosites mutating too fast? Something he had to treat like a cancer? Eric would have to come back to that.

  And a lot of buckyballs. The thing about the little soccer ball–like molecules was that they were so adaptable. As one of the most versatile elements in the universe, carbon was the base material for everything from diamonds to living organisms to nanosites. It was the standard building block for just about everything.

  Which means this guy has plans, Eric thought. He’s working on something. Jesus! All that effort to beat the Chinese, and now this.

  Agent Brightwell was still talking. “You said the choice of chemicals seemed odd. Is it possible he didn’t know what he was taking?”

  “Sure,” he improvised, then covered his mouth to suppress a yawn. “I imagine the buckyballs were kept in a special place, so he probably figured they were more valuable. If he can sell them on the black market, he’ll be rich. Just one gram costs almost a hundred dollars.”

  Agent Brightwell looked impressed, but Agent Brown seemed skept
ical. He sat quietly with his arms crossed. Finally, he gave Agent Brightwell a nod.

  “I think that will be all, Dr. Hill,” she said. “Thank you so much for your help.”

  * * *

  It was snowing heavily as Eric drove down Constitution Avenue. Bill’s letter to the president, the letter that had captured his imagination so long ago, replayed in this mind: Instead of rogue states and terrorist groups developing nuclear or biological weapons, we will have small groups or even individuals, like those who create computer viruses today.

  But how could it be happening already? He had to talk to someone: to Bill, to Jack. To find validation and comfort. But as he imagined the conversation and constructed the sentences in his mind, he realized how outlandish it sounded, how completely unbelievable it was. If this man was as powerful as Eric thought, then he could do basically anything. But how? How had he made such progress?

  The future will be a place where a few clever individuals will gain access to astonishing power.

  Eric picked up his iSheet and made two calls. Fifteen minutes later, he was in Admiral Curtiss’s office. Jack was there, too, and together they called Bill in California, who soon appeared on the admiral’s iSheet.

  Eric told them all he had seen. And just as he had suspected, it sounded preposterous. Even as he spoke, he knew he was losing them. Jack clearly didn’t believe him, and kept checking his watch. When Eric finished, there was a long pause. Jack gave Bill a knowing look.

  “Now, Eric,” Jack spoke slowly, enunciating every word as if he were talking to a child, “you have to admit, you really don’t have any evidence to support your theory. I mean, it really could have been a stroke, a jammed gun, and a bad camera.”

  Technically, Jack was right. He had no proof, just his instincts. “I’m pretty sure,” he said. It sounded lame, even to him.

  Bill said to Curtiss, “Is it possible? Is there any other group that could create such a device?”

  The admiral shook his head. “No, there’s no one. And I have a high degree of confidence in our intel. No one has achieved replication—not the Chinese or anyone else. I know that watching a man die is very disturbing, but I think you’re making a leap to assume it was done with replicators.”

  “I have to agree with the admiral,” Jack said. “And I’ll give you one simple reason: for the man to kill the security guard that quickly and sabotage the camera suggests that he was controlling the nanosites with his thoughts. And that’s just not mathematically possible. Electroencephalography has come a long way, but brain wave readers are still reduced to relatively simple vocabulary, which means a finite number of possible operations. To tell a nanosite swarm to specifically attack a man in precise way—and do it spontaneously—is much too complex for any EEG to process. It would mean a trillion times a trillion calculations per second. It’s just not possible.”

  “Look, I know it sounds crazy, but, Bill, you yourself predicted that terrorists would start using this stuff.”

  “Yes, I did. But not until nanosites were inside everyday consumer products. That’s still a long way off.”

  “But what about the chemicals that were stolen?” God, he felt so juvenile trying to convince them.

  Jack shook his head. “You know those chemicals are used for hundreds of things—everything from solar panels to flat-screen TVs. I’m sorry, Eric, but a simple robbery makes a lot more sense. He probably just took whatever he thought was valuable, loaded it in a truck, and drove off.”

  The admiral chimed in. “What’s more, you have to think about what it took for us to get this far. How could one man do all that by himself?”

  Now Eric’s anger flashed. “Damn it, I know what I saw! There’s something not right here!”

  On the computer screen, Bill held up a hand. “Okay, everyone, let’s stop for a moment and think about this. Perhaps what Eric saw wasn’t really the use of nanosites, but we should still proceed as if it were.”

  Finally, someone was making some damn sense.

  Admiral Curtiss nodded. “I agree. It can’t hurt to take a closer look. I’ll liaise with the bureau and check things out. An autopsy should tell us if it really was a stroke. Maybe we can get a look at the gun, too.”

  “Good,” Bill said. “That way, we’ll know if we need to worry or not. I think we’re probably safe. It’s really much too soon to have a terrorist on our hands. And, Eric, don’t beat yourself up about this. Given the strangeness of it, and what we now know is possible, it was a logical assumption.”

  Eric nodded. “Thanks,” he said, glad that at least Bill was showing some faith in him.

  “Forget it,” Bill said. “I appreciate you going over to the FBI in the first place. Even if this man is just stealing chemicals that could be used for nanotech work, we want to put a stop to it.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  The Big Bang

  February 21, 2026

  Naval Research Laboratory, Washington, DC

  “So no one believed you?” Ryan asked.

  “Not remotely.”

  “Well, I can’t say I blame them. It sounds much too advanced.”

  “Yeah, it doesn’t make any sense,” Jane added.

  Eric didn’t like the tone in her voice. It was the cold Jane again. “Gee, thanks, Jane, I really appreciate the supportive attitude.”

  She shrugged. “Sorry, but an evil scientist? It sounds like a movie. Had you been drinking?”

  Eric felt his blood rising. He could handle Ryan doubting him—in fact, he had expected it. But not Jane. She was supposed to be in his corner. Especially after the way she had been at the shooting range: flirting, hugging him, whispering in his ear. She’d given him hope, made it clear that she wanted him. But now she had flip-flopped again.

  “Maybe this was a mistake,” he said. “If you two are just going to give me shit for this, let’s forget it.”

  “Fine,” Jane said, “I’ve got better things to do.”

  He stared, incredulous. “What is wrong with you? I’m asking for your understanding here, at least the benefit of the doubt. You know, like a friend.”

  That seemed to shock her, at least a little, and for a moment he thought he saw tenderness in her face, but it was gone too quickly to be sure. “Whatever,” she said, “I’m outta here.” She turned her back to go. And for Eric, that was the final straw.

  “You know, I thought you were someone I could count on.” He felt his anger building and he suddenly wanted to hurt her the way she was hurting him. “Do you remember how you helped me with Olex? Remember that? Why? Why did you do that? Was it really to help me, or was there another reason?” He felt the ideas linking together, fueled by his anger. He knew even before he said it that it wasn’t true. But that wasn’t the point. The point was to wound her. “It wasn’t about helping me at all, was it? It was just a convenient way for you to get back at Olex, because you’re too afraid to confront him yourself. Yeah, it’s all coming together. You never cared about me. It was all about you, wasn’t it?”

  Her eyes narrowed to slits. She tore off her baseball cap and pushed her blond hair to one side, exposing a thick red scar where the hair refused to grow. “Yeah, you’re right,” she said. “It’s all about me.” And she stormed out.

  Ryan gave a long whistle. “Jesus! What’s going on? Why are you two acting so weird?”

  Eric pinched the bridge of his nose and tried to check the wave of his emotions. “Forget it,” he said. “I gotta get back to work.”

  “Hold on a minute,” Ryan said. “I want to talk about this robbery.”

  “I thought you didn’t believe me.”

  “Well, you have to admit, it’s a little hard to believe.”

  “Yeah, I know that, okay? Hell, I don’t believe it myself anymore. But in the moment of watching it, Ryan, I was sure. Dead sure.”

  “Well, I think yo
ur instincts are right.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah, a lot of what you said makes sense.”

  “Why didn’t you say so before?”

  “Did you give me a chance?”

  “Okay, I’m sorry, but what do you mean?”

  “Well, no one wants to believe you, because the guy seems so far ahead of us. That’s why they reject it: because the gap is so great. But the gap shouldn’t make it less believable. It should make it more believable. It’s more probable that such an inventor would be decades ahead of us by now rather than just a few months.”

  “But he can’t be decades ahead of us,” Eric said. “That’s the whole problem.”

  Ryan shook his head. “He can if he’s post Big Bang.”

  The words hit Eric like a bucket of ice water. “Oh, shit!” he said. “Shit! Shit! Shit!” Eric hadn’t thought of that, but Ryan, the expert in artificial intelligence, had.

  The Big Bang was the hypothetical moment when a cognizant artificial intelligence system would finally connect to the web. It was expected to be the historic moment when man and machine dramatically diverged. That’s because the human brain has a finite capacity for connecting bits of data and storing it, but the artificial intelligence system would not. It would speed up geometrically. It would be able to learn and store every bit of data on the web—a mind-boggling leap in understanding. In other words, it would be as stupid as we humans for only a few seconds.

  “Intuitively, it sounds crazy that someone could get so far ahead of us,” Ryan said. “But it’s actually the only thing that makes sense, because he can learn so amazingly fast and at an ever-accelerating rate. By complementing his brain with the artificial intelligence system, he is doing years of work every hour. Plus he has access to just about everything. He can probably download anything. Public or private. If the information is on a computer somewhere, he can get it.