Nano Man

by Dean C. Moore

  THIRTY

  Michael, finished making a pile with the sticks, lased the kindling to start the fire with beams emitted from his eyes, the nanites once again facilitating. A few minutes later, he’d managed to get quite the blaze going. Remarkable, considering the dampness and the cold. “We should be able to relax for a while,” he said, “I’ve set up a perimeter.”

  “Thank God,” Cronos said, rubbing his hands together before the fire. “I’m not as young as I used to be. All this killing gives me backache.”

  Noticing Jane was still shivering, Mike went over and put his arm around her and held her tight. It was only then that he realized from the expression on her face that it wasn’t just the cold that had her shaking; she was trembling with terror. How easy it was to forget that she’d not really signed up for any of this. Recalling the adventure posters in her doctor’s office, he decided to take her on a mini-vacation. Using their psychic link when this proximate to one another, he soon had them rappelling down smooth canyon walls in Utah to a stream below. And after a brisk summer swim, clawing their way up a frozen waterfall in Alaska with ice hooks. Kayaking the rapids of a Colorado river. Horseback riding a dude ranch in Montana. When a branch knocked him off the horse because he wasn’t looking where he was going, he heard her laugh not just in the dream journey, but back in the present, felt her vibrating him with her laughter in the here and now. Courtesy of the imagination augmenting power of the nanites, it was as if months of travel adventures had been condensed for them in cherished HD memories that ran for hours instead of seconds.

  “It’s weird how you learn to relax even from within the thick of things,” Michael said, leaning back against the log, and pulling her against his chest. She was no longer shivering from cold or fear.

  Not respecting their need for a time out, one of the Chinese soldiers charged the perimeter. The nanites ate him through to where he looked like a ghost caught in the firelight before disappearing. The man’s screaming faded before long.

  “God, I can’t believe it took him dying so noisily to appreciate all the quiet out here,” Cronos said. There was some brief, suppressed, callous laughter that was so far beyond inappropriate that Michael had to remind himself that people had been trying to kill them nonstop for hours.

  The chuckling quickly got absorbed back into the quiet, and they returned to soaking in the silence; it felt like crawling into a hot tub after all the gunfire and explosions. When the Chinese surrounding them, hidden in the darkness, opened up with automatic rifle fire, the bullets skidded off the energy dome enclosing them by the aerosolized nanites. “Like shooting stars,” Chronos said. “Really quite beautiful.”

  Assuming Chronos’s theory still held, the combatants were trying to eliminate Cronos and Finelli, to make Mike and Jane more susceptible to capture.

  Michael instructed the nano to dampen the sounds of the gunfire; he was enjoying his reprieve of quietness too much.

  “Give it a rest,” Cronos said, as Finelli continued to key away at his laptop. Evidently even the quiet clacking of the keyboard was disturbing his sense of peace.

  Finelli took a deep breath, and said, “Sure,” closing the laptop.

  Without the laptop screen to fixate on, Finelli stared wantonly at Jane. Michael reminded himself that “awkward teen” for geeks lasted a lifetime. He was in a forgiving mood, as was she apparently, having caught on; she smiled and simply averted her eyes. Not everyone was a nature buff, and it wasn’t fair to ask Finelli to relax in the great outdoors if it just wasn’t in his nature, any more than it would have been fair to insist he stop obsessing. Maybe he had some other reason for staring. Maybe the obsessing was a form of OCD and he needed to fixate on something rather than face whatever ugly truth he was trying to repress. Michael decided the psychoanalysis was interrupting his quiet as well by creating chatter inside his head far too loud for the circumstances, and quickly put an end to it.

  He looked up as the heavy artillery fire started exploding overhead. The drones going at one another were still creating fallout that could impact Mike and entourage the second they dropped their guard. For now, the shrapnel was being vaporized soundlessly by the nano energy shield. “I’ve yet to see 4th of July fireworks half as impressive,” Cronos said, entirely serious. He rubbed his increasingly stiff neck from looking up at the display for so long.

  “So, Michael, sing us or play us a tune,” Cronos said.

  In a flash he wanted to take Cronos’s head off. Jane seemed to be relaxing more and more into the moment now that she was convinced he was in total mastery of the situation, and now this. He was no musician or entertainer.

  Cronos seemed to translate the glare he was giving him just fine. “I’m not trying to sabotage the connection you have going with Jane, Michael, now that things are finally heating up with you again. Like with this fire,” he said, sticking in a couple more logs, “I’m trying to facilitate more combustion, if anything. The sooner you get to being a well-rounded person, the sooner she realizes she’ll never tire of you.”

  Jane stifled a smile and lowered her head. “Oh, that’s right, encourage him,” Michael said to her.

  “The man has exquisite instincts,” Jane said. “I’d go with it, if I were you. They’ve kept him alive this long.” Cronos bowed his head to her in thanks. “He’s the Cyrano putting ideas in the callow youth’s mind for now until he can woo the lady for himself. All the while thinking himself far more deserving of my attentions; after all, he’s the one with the true Renaissance nature.”

  “Ah, now you go too far, my lady,” Cronos said, “a man of the world, maybe, but no Renaissance man.”

  “I’m not so sure,” she said. “Earlier, when you were holding your own against the Chinese, that wasn’t military training. I know, because the soldier is stamped into Michael’s every move. You just freestyle it. Reminds me of something Bruce Lee said about his own fighting style which no one could pin down to one particular school or another. He said, ‘All forms lead to the formless.’ He was a bit of a Zen master of martial arts, wasn’t he? Your mastery of life covers a much wider area. I imagine we’ll come to see just how wide in the days ahead.”

  Cronos just smiled at her for the longest time. “Well, a gracious man knows when to take some flattery, especially if it makes lover boy over there feel the pinch to get evolving. I remember requesting a tune, Michael.”

  Michael grimaced and restrained the desire to snap his neck or sic his nanites on him so he’d have a quiet heart attack which could be explained away by natural causes. Personally he thought he’d been “free-styling it” himself just fine all along. Though, now that he’d been made to think about it, he had been able to put all his bright, on-the spot ideas to use because of quick reflexes honed by years of training. It was even possible that new techniques for killing spilled out of him so fast on account of countless prior rehearsals that they merely seemed spontaneous. The realization wasn’t exactly helping him to find the flow of the moment.

  Finally, he forced his tensing body to relax and tried to recall something entertaining in his head. He suspected Cronos’s real motivation was to find out just how much multitasking the nanites could handle, especially when dealing with non-weaponized applications, which was not Michael’s forte. That was information that could come in handy later. Not just for Michael, but for Cronos, as well, whose own motivations for being here remained at best vague and at worst, unconvincing. Mike had to act fast, moreover, lest his hesitations point to limitations that caused Jane’s infatuation to wane, something he would feel, and that would suck the life out of his nanites.

  All he could recall under the pressure was some silly Italian aria. He whistled it rather than sing the words, to lower the demands on the nanites. To his surprise, he was doing rather well, but then, he was at the height of his game now that Jane was stroking his ego in countless subtle ways with her every gesture and glance thrown at her Wilderness Survival hero.

  By the fourth or fifth s
tanza he was able to switch to the actual words, sung by a woman, no less, and even more impressively, a soprano, well out of his tenor’s range. His audience of two stifled their guffaws until he finished his tune, then erupted in cheers and laughter both, accompanied by no shortage of clapping.

  “Nicely done, Michael,” Cronos said, “and I can’t imagine utilizing too much of your nano either, which are otherwise quite preoccupied. Does that suggest anything to you, Jane?”

  “To evolve this fast,” she said, “they must be making use of quantum tunneling to not only communicate with one another but to be in multiple locations at once.”

  Cronos shifted his body weight uneasily. “How is that possible?” he said.

  “In chemistry, we know there to be three distinct electron configurations, referred to as the S-orbital, the P-orbital, and the D-orbital, all depending on how much energy is flowing through the system. I guess the more love intoxicated we get with one another, the more the gradual changes accrue until we hit the next quantum shift.”

  “Which level is this?” Cronos asked.

  “No idea,” she said, “as they’re also evolving to do more with less.”

  “Could there be something else going on?” Cronos asked.

  She doodled in the sand with her twig as she thought about it. “It’s possible that sooner or later they might learn to tap the quantum vacuum itself; this is known as zero point energy. I doubt anything we’ve seen so far is any indicator of that, as he’d be a virtual god at that point.”

  Michael swore the announcement created a paradoxical reaction in Cronos; he appeared both completely terrified and utterly delighted.

  “Well, that’s enough for me to stew on for now,” Cronos said. “Any more and I’ll positively toss and turn throughout the night.”

  Cronos gathered up some moss to use as a pillow and promptly laid down on it on his side. Michael noticed that he strategically kept his face away from the rest of the party, possibly so he could “stew” on what he’d just heard without any of them seeing how he really felt about the matter.

  Michael called Jane over with a gesture, and once she was in his arms, kissed her on top of the head, then on the lips.

  He saw Finelli, the man with the transfixed eyes, finally lie down to sleep, facing away from them, in his peripheral vision. If he hadn’t burst the bubble of Finelli’s infatuation, he had at least caused it to drift away for the night.

  “How are you holding up?” he asked Jane. “I noticed Cronos wasn’t curious to find out what was going on in your body, but I am.”

  “I came up with some pretty fast answers for him under pressure, which suggests this brains and brawn marriage we have going is evolving in two part harmony.”

  “Yeah, about that two part harmony,” he said, kissing her. To his delight she let things progress from there. The heavy rhythmic breathing of the others signaled they were asleep, and so Mike and Jane could get on with some rhythmic heavy breathing of their own, signaling something else entirely.

  The next morning he awoke after being dead to the world, despite being afraid to sleep. He wasn’t sure if the nano could do their thing with him checked out from this world, if in fact dream state might just confuse them and have them acting on what they were convinced were entirely new marching orders issued by an insane general commanding by way of dream-logic. Perhaps it wasn’t a stunt to try when he was “out of love” or out of sync with Jane. As it was, the shield hadn’t dropped, so, he took that to mean he was no longer at the lowest energy level Jane had alluded to earlier, but had locked in the next higher level now that he was steeping just fine in their renewed love for one another.

  What new joys would the morning bring? he thought sarcastically as he heard the others stirring to wakefulness.

  Agitating the embers, Jane brought the fire back to life, and got breakfast going. She touched the earth to make the hanging pots she needed and the vittles to go in them. The nanites ran down her hands like a bunch of crazed army ants, quickly falling into formation as conveyors of said food or as designer ingredients in the food itself. Cronos watched with amazement. “You’re quite the Eve to his Adam, aren’t you?” he said. “As much old school woman as the original Eve, while at the same time ushering in a new era in the role of goddess.”

  She smiled at him, clearly trying to control her own condescension. “Liberated women don’t all immediately stop enjoying cooking, Cronos. I always found gastronomy a natural extension of my work in the lab. Of course, if it’s anti-feminist clichés you’re fond of, it is true women prefer poison as a mode for murder,” she said, handing him his breakfast.

  “Well, speaking of acting with such finality,” Cronos said, taking the plate from her, “you mind telling us about your last champion? Before Michael, there had to be someone.”

  She threw a nervous glance at Michael, weighed whether to answer based on what she saw in his face. He must have looked more relaxed than he felt. “His name was Gunther. A very brilliant man, even by my standards. I worked as his chief scientist for quite some time in charge of wetware. Gunther wasn’t much good beyond coding. He liked his world a little too antiseptic to stray far from there. But I liked getting my hands dirty.”

  “Now, that is a bit of role reversal,” Cronos said, “the woman getting her hands dirty working in the real world with practical applications, and the man keeping the kitchen clean, ensconced in his ivory tower lab somewhere, doing the theoretical work. Don’t mind me. Go on.”

  “We used to fill each other’s heads with all sorts of grand ideas. His idea of foreplay. Never failed to work. After a quick bout of excited lovemaking, the whole time of which I was continuing to work on whatever train of thought he’d put me on, I’d run out and get going on the ideas. I guess you could say he’s the real Adam to my Eve. Between the two of us we heralded many historical ages in succession, often before the last one could even get going properly. All backstage, of course. He was big on running the future as a simulation in a tightly controlled lab environment before releasing it on the world. You might think that was responsible of him. I did at first.”

  “But…” Cronos said teasingly.

  “But then the cracks started to show in the porcelain of his nature. In the end he was a control freak, and a closet germophobe. His idea of the future could never live outside of a lab. Come time to scan us and upload us into digital nirvana where we can all live any number of fantasy lives in parallel, he’s your man. But so long as life continues in the real world, well, it has to stay messy. He didn’t see it that way. The all night heady conversations turned into all night fights. Soon the only emotions we shared were all toxic.”

  “Whatever became of him?” Cronos asked, sipping his coffee.

  She shrugged. “When I left, I told myself it didn’t matter. Without me, he’d never make any impacts where it counted. I guess part of me knew I was just allaying my own guilt for what very well might happen to the world without me around to temper that man’s madness.”

  Cronos glanced over at Finelli, and seemed to communicate worlds with a look. The next thing Michael knew Finelli was bringing up the specs on Gunther. “As of last night,” Finelli said, “he replaced his father, who died of a heart attack, taking over the throne chair of Camp Futura, a conglomerate of chip makers and robotics firms all vying to replace us with far better prototypes over which they own a controlling concern. You can just imagine what it’d mean to have our minds fashioned by one of these guys.”

  “Now, recalling what I said earlier,” Cronos said, “about someone wanting to destroy all evidence of defective robots…”

  Jane bore into him with her eyes. If she had been weaponized as Michael had, she’d have lased his head clear off.

  “Seems to me,” Cronos said to her, not knowing when to take a hint, “that your chickens have come home to roost. Now that’s one son of a bitch you probably should have poisoned.”

  “Gunther doesn’t move hastily and without havin
g a well thought out plan in place that has been tested in simulation over and over again.”

  “As geniuses with global domination fantasies go, you’re not exactly sounding too reassuring about him right now, Jane,” Cronos said.

  “Introducing an age of robotics overnight… He’d have to have been placing people in key positions of power who could oppose him for years until he’d hit critical mass. If this guy is making his move now and we’re just finding out about it, it could already be too late. It means the age of robotics started ten or more years ago.”