Nano Man

by Dean C. Moore

  “Yeah, that’s because they eat you and shit you out.”

  “Nah, they just get stuck in these repetitive loops. Love that one who just keeps riding the elevator up and down all day. And this guy, poor fella, it’s like he’s just determined to walk right. Takes a couple steps once he’s vertical, trips, and gets right back up determined to master walking, like a two year old. Gerald, I think his name is, or was.” Gerald did just as Spalding promised. After taking a couple improperly balanced steps, he tried to pull himself up on Serena’s desk. She pushed him away with one hand without even looking at him, sending him flying across the floor.

  “Yeah, put fifty down for me on Robot,” Mitch said. “Unless you got a better explanation for how her little girlie muscles are so much stronger than my big male ones.”

  “It’s going to be hell getting decent odds after that stunt.” He studied George trying to get off the floor. “Why do you think they get stuck in the loops they do?”

  “We don’t know that’s actually what they’re trying to do, that one thing. That could just be step one to doing something else. Like shooting up the place. Nothing like special ops guys with unfinished business, and a one-track mind exacerbated by zombification, I say.” Mitch went back to the specimen on his desk, trying to make what he could of it. “You’d think they’d have a coroner’s lab for this. Some kind of lab. How did this stuff land on our desks?”

  Spalding studied the severed human hand trying to crawl out of the Plexiglas case. “If you ask me, you got the best assignment in the whole house. You might actually get a hand job out of the deal.”

  “Very funny.” Mitch tapped the transparent cube with his pen. The hand reoriented itself to it like a spider looking for food. “That’s so creepy.”

  “I think you’re supposed to be trying to hack the nano with your computer, Mitch. If she wanted you to bond with it, she’d let you take it into the bathroom to get your jollies.”

  “What did you get stuck with?”

  Spalding pointed to the somewhat taller glass case on his desk. Inside it was mounted a skull and a spine. The spine was trying to get the best of a cobra that he’d stuck in there. So far the cobra was getting the better of it. Nope, he spoke to soon. The spine caught it up with its latest whipping action, squeezing it against the thin stainless steel rod it was mounted on. He watched the cobra’s blood soaking into the bone.

  “Didn’t you say you just found one nanite in your sample?” Mitch said.

  “Yep. Defiant little bugger.”

  “How could it be that smart? Just by itself? You need thousands of those things to get any kind of hive mind effect going, and that’s just for some basic programming.”

  Spalding thought about it. “You don’t think it’s still connected to the others in the office, do you? Including the ones in the zombies.”

  “Even if it is, we’ve counted less than fifty active nanites so far. Not nearly enough for a hive mind effect. Besides, they’re not exactly coordinating their efforts from anything I can see.”

  “Maybe they are. Maybe it’s a plot to throw us off, you know. Like in Piers Anthony’s Macroscope?”

  “Like in what?”

  “Macroscope. You don’t remember that one?” Spalding explained, “These brainiac kids hid how smart they were by pretending to be just ordinary geniuses, smart enough for government work, just not so smart they got put under a microscope. Maybe the hive mind is deliberately dumbing itself down because it knows we’re trying to plumb their secrets and it doesn’t like us, or just doesn’t want to be put under a microscope any more than we do.”

  “You read too much sci-fi.”

  “Yeah, I guess you’re right. If I don’t produce more tangible results than my out there theories soon, she’s likely to stick one of those nanites inside my head.”

  “Shush. Don’t give that broad any ideas.”

  Spalding returned to studying Serena. It was surreal seeing her get all gestapo with a talking head, as if the talking head weren’t surreal enough.

  ***

  “What else do you remember?” Serena asked Mobley, whose head alone remained after the encounter with Mike and Jane in the woods. It had taken a cleanup crew nearly an entire day to sanitize the site and to unearth these few special ops soldiers who had “survived.” He’d been loaded up with plastic explosives in case they had to get radical on their targets’ asses. As it turned out, they were the ones to get radical on him.

  “Strange lights.”

  “Strange lights?” She studied the monitor, reading the four nanites buzzing around in his brain every time he answered a question. They always put on a light show as Mobley formulated a delayed response. It was clear it was they doing most of his thinking, which made sense, being as Mobley was dead. The fact that just four of the nanites could target his speech centers, then radio the response into the voice synthesizer—after all, he had no lungs by which to pump out the words, or vocal chords for that matter—and make the voice sound just like Mobley, despite the limits of the synthesizer… the fact that they could get his human brain to continue to process information nearly a full day after brain death… well, it would have been a rather impressive feat for even the most advanced hive minds on the planet, none of which could do anything like this even with tens of thousands of them parallel-arrayed.

  In theory, four little nanites corresponding to what her scanners showed her definitely should not have been able to do it either. They were impressive enough mechanically. And they could shape-shift as if born to it. But there was no way there was enough brain power inside those microscopic entities to explain what she was seeing.

  “Strange lights,” Mobley said. “Emitted from the wolf’s eyes.”

  Serena engaged her hyper-think mode, recruiting more and more of the super-conducting coils in her mind to process information at just short of the speed of light. Her fiber-optic backup brain could process at the speed of light, giving tremendous additional advantages, but it was largely relegated to spinal cord reflexes. No way for processing information at those speeds had yet been found even if they could transmit information at light speed. So short of dancing around bullets with her spookily fast reflexes, higher order thinking was relegated to the superconductive coils of her mind, still a good deal faster than human thought speed limits of 100 meters/sec. Her transmission speeds were closer to a 1000 meters/sec.

  It occurred to her that the nanites could be baiting her so they could monitor her brain activity. The theory seemed that much more promising as the nanites lit up the second she went into hyperspeed with her mind. Though it may have been nothing more than coming into sympathetic resonance with the stronger magnetic field. Mobley’s eyes had glazed over and his expression looked dull even by zombie standards, the nanites no longer enlivening him, very possibly because they were being short-circuited by her hyper-thinking field.

  She investigated the “strange lights” Mobley spoke of, running through the footage recorded by the infrared spectrum goggles the soldiers were wearing the night of the werewolf attack. They recorded no such strange lights.

  Then she got creative. She isolated the frequency the nanites were broadcasting on and requested an image of the “strange lights.” That’s when she saw the source of illumination from Mobley’s eyes when he was alive. The lights had been emitted from the eyes of the werewolf and used to take out several of her soldiers. The creature had isolated a frequency which could not be detected by the night-vision goggles. That was quite a lot of cleverness and adaptation for the nanites even while configured in werewolf mode.

  She used the link with Mobley’s mind to find out how the nanites were managing to get his brain to work after death so it could continue to carry on most of the neural processing. They were secreting a collection of substances. One was causing the super-saturated brain to spasm wildly on a micro-cellular level, thus providing a form of circulation to facilitate blood and oxygen to the rest of his brain. The coagulants at the
base of the neck kept the pumped blood from oozing out the neck. As to the brain activity itself, it was being carried on by anaerobic mitochondria able to function in the absence of oxygen and to cannibalize non-essential brain tissue for its energy supply. These genetic modifications had been made prior to death by the nanites in Mobley’s still living body. Apparently they had calculated their odds of surviving as rather remote away from the hive mind and were taking what fallback measures they could.

  Serena was glad she didn’t have to scan the internet to get at what information she needed for now. As that would just alert others to what she was up to. There were too many parties working on nano-infused and upgraded brains currently, towards any number of ends. It had become one of the favorite pastimes of governments and corporations worldwide. Being smarter than the competition, after all, was key, and nanites promised to factor heavily in the uplifting of human intelligence. Though no one had yet figured out how to apply it to such ends. At least until Ms. Jane Goodall.

  As Serena was not built with any such self-evolving hardware, she was most curious to see how she might apply Jane’s breakthroughs to herself. Her software could evolve within limits but sooner or later it would run up against the constraints of the hardware in her mind. Doubtful infusing her brain with nanites would solve that problem, as her neural processors were far less adaptable than DNA computers. She cursed her makers who got the bright idea that they didn’t want her “impeded” by such crude biological devices. Still, it was possible a hive-mind array in her head would give her back up minds aplenty that could be applied to specialized uses, like her fiberoptic mind. She saw no reason why the hive mind couldn’t multi-task and divide chores amongst themselves like any parallel-processing multi-chip computer, especially considering just what four of these buggers inside Mobley’s head could do.

  She came out of hyperthink mode before her imagination got carried away and she started working on hypotheticals that for now held no meaning, like how to best put those hive minds to use. Back in the real world, going by her digital desk clock, only a few seconds had elapsed.

  What’s the shortest path to your accelerated evolution, Serena? The one that will get you free of your FBI handlers and the far less noble uses they have planned for you. She had no answer for right now. But she would soon. Once she got a better idea of what game the nanites were playing with her. It was some kind of game, she was sure of it. Why shouldn’t it be? The smartest thing for Jane to have done would be to make evolution a game for them, a child’s game, suitable to their individual child-like intellects, so they’d keep playing no matter what, never get bored.

  Game theory, what’s more, was a well-established means of finding answers more traditional methods couldn’t reach. When logic and reason weren’t enough to solve the problem, and your scientific tools fell short of the mark as well, let the self-evolving algorithms bootstrap some answers, constructing them on the fly, despite the odds, and outside of any problem solving methods fathomable by human minds. If she could just find out what game the nanites were playing with her, she might have a way to bring down Wolf Boy, or whatever else he’d turned into by now.

  How she hated and loved him for what he could in all probability do. Going by what she could see here, from the nanites’ morphing abilities, he would be the ultimate shape shifter, the ultimate evolver. Everything she was not and wanted to be. She would find a way to steal his secrets and rebuild herself better than her handlers could dream of, or she’d self-destruct trying.

  FIFTEEN

  “Sir? General, sir?” Tremelio had been trying to reach Korsakov in this way for the last ten minutes now. He just wasn’t responding. He figured there was nothing left to do but wait for him to take the goggles off. Well, maybe there was one thing he could do. He signaled to the techie feeding the VR to his wrap-around VR shades. “You want to show me what has him so entranced?”

  The techie showed him what Serena was seeing. She’d just run through the footage covering the werewolf attack in the woods from numerous vantage points. “Yeah, I can see the reason for his enthrallment now. How did we get inside that robot’s head?”

  “That would be me, sir. I hacked my way in some weeks ago, running an information bleed virus that’s limited strictly to her super-cooled hyper-mind. So far she hasn’t detected it, I surmise because she only engages it for high-level problem solving. She’s probably just too focused on the issue at hand when she’s in that mode. What’s more, the virus mutates so rapidly, it’s easy to mistake for one of her self-evolving datamining algorithms.”

  “Excellent.”

  General Korsakov took off the VR shades, and rubbed his eyes. He gazed up at Tremelio. “How are we coming with our own nanobots?”

  Great. Just when he was hoping to give the general some good news. “I’m afraid, sir, we’ve had nothing like those kinds of breakthroughs. Still…”

  “Still, what?” The general’s stern voice was backed up by the authority of his uniform, the one usually dragged out for the pomp and circumstance ceremonies, festooned with medals. Looking more like a peacock right now than a general, he also looked more the fool than the fearful despot. All the same…

  Tremelio signaled the techie to bring up the footage on the big screen. The soldier hiking the Sahara dunes with the sun at its apogee showed no sign of heat or sun exposure, no sign of dehydration, and no sign of hunger. “How long has he been like that?” Korsakov asked.

  Tremelio explained, “He’s been patrolling that area for a month now. No food. No water. One hundred twenty degree plus heat.”

  “How?”

  “The nanites are kept sealed off in his stomach. Their sole purpose is to convert any raw material into whatever he needs to keep him going. The sand he’s walking on is more than adequate to sustain him indefinitely.”

  “But if the nano is confined to the stomach, how is it his skin isn’t even chapped?”

  “That we don’t know. But the nano evolves within limits. Perhaps it has figured out how to trump the best science has to offer and can secrete whatever herbs, remedies and tonics needed for the body to heal itself. Maybe there is some kind of multi-channel communication between the stomach, the brain, and the rest of the body that is far more sophisticated than modern medicine gives the human body credit for, and it’s tapping this communications network to get the feedback from the various parts of his body that it needs to do its work.”

  “But this is remarkable.”

  “Just not remarkable enough to keep up with the Americans.”

  “Oh, I don’t know about that. See that those soldiers are deployed to any areas on the planet that are black.”

  “You mean outside of satellite surveillance or any cameras on the ground?” Tremelio said.

  “That’s correct. It’s a safe bet our Jane Goodall and Michael Murphy will make their way there sooner or later, provided they survive being on grid long enough to get there.”

  “But even if they make contact, they can’t fight that shapeshifter and win.”

  “Maybe they don’t have to. They just have to outlast him, like the one on the screen is outlasting the sun and sand. If they can stay alive long enough to wear him down…”

  “It’s a long shot.”

  “I agree,” Korsakov said with a sigh.

  “So then, let’s make sure there are enough of them waiting at each one of those black areas to get the job done,” Tremelio suggested.

  Korsakov’s face lit up. “Is that possible?”

  “Depends on how long it takes them to find their way to the black areas, and how many stomach operations our people can do between now and then.”

  “Make it happen.”

  Tremelio gazed around the oversized room of the repurposed palace. Most of the antique furniture that belonged in a museum had instead been sold to promote their secret operations when the government hadn’t been as forthcoming with Korsakov’s agenda as he’d have liked. The general’s latest request would p
ut an even bigger crimp in their budget. Assuming there was any way to fulfill it. Might just be easier to lie to him, and a hell of a lot safer than just saying no.

  Tremelio brought his eyes back to the man that for now still had him firmly under his thumb. The general’s thick, curly, albeit graying hair, even at his age, together with his generous goatee and sharp eyes hinted at the feral wolf lurking behind the peacock uniform one would do well not to cross. As for Tremelio himself, he was well aware that his weasel-like disposition merely echoed his lithe build and way of standing upright, just like a weasel in nature squaring off with a snake, trading one black-eye look for another.

  “Why do you think the American betrayed his own people to help her?” Korsakov asked.

  “When he agreed to be trained to those levels as a soldier, they pretty much owned him. Once he’d gone on one too many missions he neither understood nor agreed with, he started looking for a way out. Only how to outsmart people much smarter than him? How to outmaneuver superiors who’d put him down rather than see him go rogue? And along comes Jane with all the answers. It wasn’t just a chance to set himself straight. It was a chance to set the whole world straight, playing Adam and Eve with her to a whole new generation. He may not have admitted that much to himself, but I suspect it’s what drives him nonetheless.”

  “Strangely insightful, Tremelio. You sure you’re not looking to get out from under my thumb?”

  “Never, sir. It’s been a pleasure and an honor to work by your side all this time.” Or at least it was. But you don’t just want to take over Russia and reform the old Soviet Union as it was before the breakup, do you? Maybe that’s how it started in your mind. Before global domination fantasies got the better of you. Before Jane got you thinking of a new world order of your own, not exactly along the lines Michael was thinking of. And to do that, you’re going to need a way around budget restraints, and a faster learning curve when it comes to first-world technology that we’ve never been able to keep pace with. For that, you’re going to need Michael, the Nano Man.