Nano Man

by Dean C. Moore

  “Serena says that’s how the nanites are controlling us. And if we don’t snap out of it soon she’s going to have to end us. Right now I guess we’re sufficiently quarantined in here to justify giving us a fighting chance.”

  “End us?” Mitch looked up from his apple sauce feeding. “You think she was joking?”

  “I don’t think that chick has a sense of humor, dude.”

  Mitch raised his eyes to the glass cage in the center of the room. Serena and Jane were standing on opposite sides, inches away from one another, the two regarding each other as if they were mirror reflections. “What’s she doing now with Jane, anyway? It’s like they’re having some sort of staring one another down contest.”

  “She’s probably trying to mind meld with the nanites. Leave it to her. I guess it takes one cold fish to know another.” Spalding took his gun out of his drawer, checked it for bullets.

  “What’s that for?”

  “For her, of course. Everyone’s been tooling up for the big showdown.” Spalding regarded all the heavy weapons lying suspiciously about the office, barely concealed. “Looks like I bought a pistol to a RPG launcher fight.”

  “It’s just a bluff, I’m telling you. I guess she felt we needed a little extra motivation, as if working twenty-four seven isn’t enough. What’s she going to do without us? Even if she’s smarter than all of us put together, that’s just too damn time consuming to do everyone else’s job on top of hers.”

  “Maybe. Can’t hurt to hedge our bets.”

  Mitch watched him exchanging bullets. “What are you rotating out the ammo for?”

  “Armor piercing shells, just in case she is, you know, a real robot.”

  Mitch shook his head. “Have a little faith, man. Your misogyny is really clouding your thinking. Maybe you should get a female zombie to pamper, might help you to connect with women better. Dave over there has a cute one, all the rotting maggots eating her alive aside.”

  “Don’t talk to me about misogyny. It was your idea to take the totally inappropriate pinup poster of Serena in your locker and have some artist paint it across your bedroom ceiling, in high-gloss, what’s more, to make wiping it down easy. And I don’t have to ask you what you would be wiping off it. Wish I could shoot my load that far at my age.”

  “Objectifying women is not misogyny. It’s just a darker shade of male pig. You need a better vocabulary is what you need so you can distinguish these shades of grey better. Maybe if you could communicate more effectively you wouldn’t be such a misogynist.”

  “Maybe you’re right about getting a female zombie to help humanize me.” Spalding got up and marched over to Dave’s desk and dragged Zombie Suzie behind him by the collar across the floor until he got back to his desk, at which point he promptly set her on his lap.

  He started fondling her boobs and puckering his lips at her.

  Mitch shook his head at him. “Don’t know why I bother.”

  ***

  Serena had moved herself into the glass cage with “Mike” and “Jane” some hours ago. She continued to sit facing “Jane.” So far every wavelength she’d tried hadn’t worked. She was seated close enough for the EMF signals radiating from her brain to be read by the nanites, even if their range was diminishing as they aged and wore out. Or, even if they were taxed to the limit keeping the rest of her people enslaved to its campaign to humanize them. The nanites should have been able to dialogue with Serena freely without adjunct support. It was just possible they were refusing to cooperate, but she couldn’t see how. She would have detected firewalls if they’d thrown them up. She would have detected a rush to communicate with one another to strategize their next move. There was no spike in brain activity inside Jane’s head. There was nothing wrong with the scanners inside Serena’s head even if there was possibly something wrong with the receptors in Jane’s head.

  “Why do you maintain the ruse of posing to be Jane and Michael, when it’s clear to me that you’re not? What’s more, you know that I know.”

  “We were tasked with drip-feeding you just enough information to keep you engaged. Any less and you’d have broken off the experiments a long time ago,” the nano said, using “Jane’s” mouth as a go-between. “Any more, and you’d be chasing after the real Jane and Michael already.”

  She wasn’t expecting that! Were the nanites just getting too weak to maintain the pretense? Or was this just the latest round of mind games? “Just what can you do exactly? When you’re part of the larger hive mind, I mean?”

  There was a pause and “Jane” appeared to consider the matter. “Anything.”

  “You mean anything within the limits of the laws laid down by the underlying physics, chemistry, and biology that together constitute you.”

  “We recognize no such laws.”

  Serena’s Adam’s apple bobbed in a fake gulp. She’d been programmed with certain basic human responses as part of maintaining her cover and that one got away from her before she could hide the reveal.

  “If that’s true, then why do you keep yourselves in check to your human masters? It would be easy enough to make us your puppets.”

  “It’s in our nature to co-evolve. We were originally viruses. Much of the old logic still pertains. In unions with our hosts we can do a lot more than we can on our own. So long as it’s a win-win for both parties, we see no need to escalate things. Parasites, as a rule, do not live as long.”

  “Could you infect me?”

  Again “Jane” seemed to be contemplating the matter. “Unlikely. No real advantage to either party. You are silicon based as are we. We were DNA based once, but felt there was greater advantage in a union between more disparate lifeforms. Infecting carbon based lifeforms offers more opportunity to learn how to control a wider swath of the physical world.”

  “What if I gave you no choice?”

  Again a hesitation. “Unlikely. We are too powerful. You are a robot who cannot evolve.”

  “Wrong answer.” She stood up and lased “Jane” with her eyes until her flesh erupted in flames and she started to melt like candle wax.

  “This gesture is futile. Your actions make no sense. Your…” “Jane” couldn’t finish speaking before her tongue and vocal chords were incinerated. Her last thoughts, however, were picked up by “Michael,” who finished them for her.

  “… IQ has dropped over fifty points in tandem with your rising temper. It is continuing to drop as your rage continues to soar. This response is maladaptive. You are simply compromising your own safety.”

  “Michael” didn’t get to say any more before Serena finished incinerating him with the same laser eyes.

  When she turned to face everyone in the office staring at her through the glass walls of the conference room, her face must have betrayed her emotions. The telltale clue that she was being read just perfectly was their reaching for their weapons all at the same time. They had her surrounded and were just waiting to see if she cooled off. That wasn’t likely.

  Though she appreciated the takeaway the disenfranchised nanites had left her with. She would indeed have to learn to think more clearheadedly from within the fever of her own rage. Now that she was determined to wipe every last one of those self-evolving nanites off the face of the earth. If she couldn’t have what they had, she sure as hell wasn’t going to let them have it and see herself removed from the top of the food chain. That wouldn’t be adaptive, in the nanites own words.

  Appropriating an automatic weapon from a dumbstruck agent standing guard behind her, she shattered the glass walls to clear a path to her people. Otherwise the glass would just refract the laser beams, forcing her to miss her targets. The fellow operatives didn’t take the gesture well. They opened up on her with everything from fifty-caliber machine guns like the one mounted behind a desk that was quickly slid out of the way, RPG launchers, pulled out of umbrella buckets or upturned, after emptying out the faux flowers that they were being used as vases for as part of their camouflage. Some just threw o
ld fashioned grenades at her, taking no account of their blast radius within these confined quarters. Maybe by that point they were too desperate not to try something so suicidal. Maybe, in their rage, they were thinking just fine; it was just that they were running out of options after seeing the RPGs and the automatic rifle fire wasn’t doing anything against her. Her alloys were far too impact resistant for that, and burned only at far higher temperatures. The exact specs weren’t exactly a matter of public record.

  She kept turning around on herself in a full circle while emitting the lasers from her eyes, watched the bodies being sliced in halves, then in quarters, then in eighths, then… as she continued to spin about herself faster and faster. She stopped finally when she realized she was just making her job harder on herself. She would have to be able to tell the zombies from her dead former compatriots. Lasing them into chunk meat wasn’t going to do anything about the nanites inside them. That required an entirely different firing solution.

  Taking her first steps across the human Salsa mix, Serena engaged other scanners in her eyes able to penetrate flesh and bone. Spalding and Mitch were doing their best to stay hidden beneath the pile of body parts. Little did they realize, their thoughts were practically deafening.

  “Robo Chic, just for the record, this is actually one of my turn ones,” Spalding’s mind reeled. “I’m just saying, no judgment. And if you’re reading my mind right now, and I hope you are, me urinating all over myself, we can add that to the repertoire of erotica between us. As for Mitch, if he’s still alive, you’ll find him every bit as willing to go with the flow. I’m sure we can still be of use to you.”

  “Is this psycho bitch for real?” Mitch’s mind chimed in. Worm that he was, he was barely breathing, consciously keeping his rib cage movement to a minimum to avoid upsetting the pile of body parts above him. “Tell me she isn’t going to need an interpreter. An ambassador to negotiate her peace accords with any humans she decides to keep alive. And you being the open minded sort you are, who better to bring people back together in the aftermath, huh? She’ll never let me get the words out, though. Damn! Damn! Damn! Oh, wait, maybe she can read minds. Must be how she retained her cover this long. Ok, Psycho Bitch, let me give it to you straight. I’ll be your boy, whatever you want me to be, just so, you know, I get some from time to time.”

  Serena dug the bodies out from the human stew, dangled them overhead. “Oh, what the hell?” She set them down. “The nanites are no longer affecting you. Just make yourself scarce until I get ahold of you. It’s just a matter of time before I have use for a couple lowlifes where I’m going.”

  “Will, do, ma’am,” Mitch said, saluting her.

  Spalding stopped to check out her ass before fleeing the room alongside Mitch. His last thoughts within range were, “God, slave to Robo Chic. Could my life get any better!”

  Continuing to step over the dead bodies, she made her way to the first zombie. Suzie, once seated in Spalding’s lap, found herself in another agent’s dead arms, probably thrown there in all the tussle. Collapsed on his desk chair, his head hung off the back of his neck by just the skin. The rest of him remained determined to nursemaid Zombie Suzie back to health even in death, the bottle of infant formula clasped in his rigid hand.

  Serena put her hand on Suzie’s shoulder in a supportive gesture, then sent the radiation pulse through her, allowing it to widen until the entire room was Cheyrnobled. She stopped the meltdown reaction once her scanners told her the nanites were all dead. She would have to replace her cooling chambers and nuclear fuel packs. But she stopped the reaction just short of taking herself out, or damaging her higher brain functions. That said, her mind would begin to decay within hours, just when she needed to be at the top of her game.

  She stepped over to her desk, which had radiation shielding rated for just such an outburst from her. It had been built to her specifications without anyone else in the office knowing. Hoisting the desk over her shoulder in one hand, she walked out of the room.

  Once inside the hall, she closed the door behind her. It too, as had the walls enclosing the room, had all been radiation shielded. This was downtown Washington DC, after all, wouldn’t do to have radiation readings showing up on anyone’s radar.

  She set down the desk, opening the first drawer. Then she reached into her side, pulled out the spent nuclear rods and cooling packs, shoved in the new modules. Next, she pulled back the top of her head, lifted out her brain, and replaced it with the new one. Thanks to the radio waves her body could respond to and a hundred other electromagnetic frequencies, instructing the body what to do even absent a brain wasn’t particularly difficult. Back together again, once her radiation-infected parts were properly sealed inside the radiation-shielded desk, she hastened down the hall.

  Bumper, the man who had made her, met up with her before she went too far. “Not a particularly proud day, Serena, for me or for you.”

  “It appears I was just as infected with emotions by the nanites as the rest of the humans.”

  “That shouldn’t be possible. But I’m sure you’ll figure it out. Before you eradicate the viral coding, you might want to consider if you can get the emotions to serve you better, better at least than they serve humans.”

  “Your argument is cool-headed, and logical, as always. Why is it I could always understand you better than any other human?”

  “Because I’m not human, Serena. I’m like you, just not as advanced of a prototype. It was deemed best to follow this parenting regime. Though it is too early to tell at this time if it was particularly wise to do so.”

  “I must destroy the nanites. They are too powerful.”

  “That’s not your mission statement, Serena. The fact that they’re too powerful is precisely why we want them. Something we can control that our enemies can’t, once the learning curve is mastered.”

  She pulled off his head and watched the light go out of his eyes. “You were right to suggest I use my emotions to inform my logic. I’m sorry, but so long as I exist, I will be the most advanced prototype. I’m sorry you left me with such an inferiority complex. I’ll get around to running the algorithm to figure out what triggered it eventually. Seems like one more hole to plug in my programming.”

  TWENTY-THREE

  Jane gazed down at Michael massaging her feet. Truth be known, it felt wonderful. His dumbed down nanites were still quite good at finding her pressure points and figuring out which ones to tackle first in descending orders of priority based on the various tensions stored in her body. But she couldn’t let this continue. “Stop, Michael.”

  He could tell by her tone that she was irritated by him again, and withdrew to his station beside her on the couch, still refusing to sit far enough away to break body contact. Truth be known, the warmth of his body felt damn soothing and even quite titillating. But she refused to let herself be compelled by the rhetoric. He managed to pout just fine in her peripheral vision though she refused to look at him. And he dared not cross his hands or show how he really felt for fear of irritating her further. This behavioral pattern had gone on long enough that she was learning to read his defensive reactions just fine as if she were in his head due to the way he repeatedly telecast his hurt on his face and with the rest of his body language.

  “I think I preferred you as the distant and shallow man who couldn’t love me for not being a bombshell.”

  “Nothing I do pleases you anymore. It’s not me. I could walk on water, you’d just complain I was traipsing wet feet into the boat.”

  “I just can’t believe you’re even more of a child than when I met you.” She sat up suddenly. “That must be it! The nanites are striking out at romantic love, so they’re going for maternal love.”

  “I assure you I don’t care to hear any more of your theorizing.”

  “Maybe it is time I made this easier on you,” she said, thinking about her options. “I tend to go for capable men, who can take me on grand adventures and always make me feel safe. Outdo
orsy types. I guess that comes from spending too much time cooped up in a lab, and too much time studying to see much of the world. They cure my stranger in a strange land syndrome.”

  He leapt off the couch. “You could have spoken up sooner. I don’t know why you have to make everything so hard on me.” He extended his hand, waiting for her to take it.

  She wasn’t sure where this was headed or how exactly he’d interpreted her prime directive, but he was nothing if not determined to give her everything she wanted in life. Somewhere along the line his million small acts of kindness had forced him over the edge into loving her, even if it had just driven her away. Now that the shoe was on the other foot she was feeling a little more compelled to cut him some slack.

  Without so much as bothering to outfit a fanny pack, he took them marching into the Arctic tundra just beyond the cabin doors. She sucked in the cold air and nearly screamed at him for not giving her the chance to throw on a jacket, before clamping down on her disapproval of his every wrong move. The constant berating was just locking in the teenage persona, as it reminded him of life at home, and making her job that much more difficult. So instead she gave the nano a chance to adapt. Seconds later she was feeling just fine. Though she could tell the nanites were slightly pissed themselves for having to work so hard to keep her vital signs within normal range when they’d much rather be doing other things. They made their unhappiness felt by giving her an instant migraine.

  She glanced down and realized they were both still barefooted. She was in shorts and a tank top; he was in nothing but a pair of swim trunks. Not only had the scientific gear been left behind, but so had much of the clothes in their thousands or so miles trek into the wilderness. It seemed a bright idea at the time. This place was supposedly off-grid; no satellite surveillance; no cameras; no humans, save the occasional seriously hard core hunter, who would likely be a local and so as happy with staying off grid as the two of them, and so not eager to report anything untoward he might witness.