Nano Man

by Dean C. Moore

  “Definitely not, but I suppose I’ll be highly motivated to find my way back to your side.”

  Photon eyed the screen. Let’s hope some of those robots she shut down were the ones running across the grounds on all fours and climbing trees like panthers, all but invisible at night, and with canines that could cut through barb wire. And let’s not even talk about the driverless tanks, and the drones circling the property overhead. All with onboard AI running at much faster clock speeds than any human could think. The future had come upon them as a conspiracy and a coup, both happening out of sight until it was too late to do anything about it. Guess the powers that be weren’t risking any public uprisings until they were in a position to squelch them. Photon wondered what they could possibly do about that, if they did manage to get out of here alive.

  THIRTY-NINE

  Now that all the jostling from the potholes had come to an end with the serenely smooth asphalt road, Photon’s near panic turned into all-out panic. Serena looked right through him—literally—and said, “Calm yourself. Your body isn’t rated for that kind of excitement.”

  “No kidding. Maybe if you took time out to, you know, do me? Sex always calms me down.”

  “Feel free to have sex with yourself if you want, but make it quick. We’ll be at the gate to Luderman’s estate in thirty seconds.”

  “I was hoping for more codependence and less independence in this relationship.” She ignored him, which was just as well; he knew he was being ridiculous.

  She parked the jeep in the middle of the street and jumped out, walking towards the gate with the big cursive “L” in the center. He glanced over at his video camera and patted her. “Nothing personal, hon. But you’ll be safer here. Besides, they have enough cameras in there that they have every angle covered and then some. It’ll be months just to edit down the footage.” His survival instincts still intact, he bolted after Serena, figuring he’d be safest within arm’s reach. How did she get that name, Serena, anyway? There’s absolutely nothing serene about her, and wherever she goes she robs everyone else of their serenity as well. Pandemonium would have been a much better name. Or if the one name thing wasn’t her thing, Complete Pandemonium.

  Photon noted the cameras tracking them. “Why haven’t they gunned us down already?”

  “I introduced a virus that makes us invisible to them, and to the robots inside, too, the ones I couldn’t completely shut down. But it won’t last. Their chief computer hacker is working to undo the errant code now. I’ll have to get you into the control center faster than I’d intended.”

  “So this isn’t going to be an Arnold Schwarzenegger, one man against an army, guns a blazing scene? That sucks. Trust me, anything else will never go down with the public. They expect mass carnage and copious bullets. I think it has something to do with post-menopausal men not feeling their sperm count is high enough and displacing their anxieties onto the bullets.”

  The gate opened automatically, the one thicker than a bank safe door lodged in a stone wall that would have impressed Medieval Age castle builders. “I guess it’s no surprise you hacked the gate control mechanism, too,” Photon said. “Let’s not make it too easy, or the whole action sequence will seem anticlimactic.”

  Once past the gate she did her thing with shutting down the robots she’d managed to hack. It was creepy that none of the others noticed. The humanoid robots kept scanning the grounds for possible signs of intrusion, not seeing their decommissioned buddies, and not seeing Photon. “Not sure which is creepier,” he said, “feeling like a ghost, or getting my head taken off.”

  One of the robo panthers stopped and sniffed him. The giant cat’s head had to crane down to reach his head. It decided he wasn’t anything and proceeded with his pacing of the perimeter. The second the animal had moved on, Photon let out the breath that was trapped in his lungs. “Okay, for the record, definitely creepier to get my head taken off.”

  They were at the house. Decorative pools of light added depth and contour to the landscaping bordering it and showcased the veritable palace, even if they left even more in shadow and to the imagination. Photon’s take on Luderman’s estate was a Southern slave-era Plantation with all its white and marble meets Madona’s fifty million dollar plus Hollywood home, with its clever way of conforming to uneven terrain. If looks could kill, this house and its largely invisible traps and sneers was deadlier than Serena. “Okay, where’s the control room?” he asked, forcing his mind back on track.

  “Up there,” Serena said, pointing.

  “Give me a second to…” He didn’t get to finish the sentence. She hurtled him like a missile across the small upstairs patio and through the French doors. Inside was one computer hacker very focused on his computer terminals and barely registering the broken glass. “What the hell is going on?” he said, absorbed in his code puzzle of deciphering the hack of his system. Photon capitalized on his distraction, took the chair on wheels he was sitting on, and wheeled it quickly out onto the patio, pulling up short just hard enough to send him sailing over the railing and onto the ground below.

  Photon leaned over the railing. Hacker’s body looked posed awkwardly, like a collapsed marionette, courtesy of all the broken bones. He wasn’t moving. That last part may have been courtesy of the lovely terra cotta tile below keeping the grass well away from him. “Guess she was right about it being better if he were a robot rather than a human.”

  Photon slid the chair back to the bank of computers, clapped his hands and rubbed them together before interlacing his fingers and cracking his knuckles. “Now, what have we here? Please tell me there’s a joy stick.” He sighed when he couldn’t find one. “I hate these computer games where you have to use the keyboard.”

  ***

  “We better get you out of here,” Damon said, overlooking the grounds outside the house from a first floor window.

  “This is the safest place in the world!” Luderman shouted at him as if he were daft.

  “Not anymore.” Damon moved his hand away from the window and let the drape fall back into position. “Someone has hacked your superior nexgen robots. We have two intruders who appear to be invisible to anyone but me. And if I don’t miss my guess, whoever hacked their way into their heads is probably trying to get into mine right now.”

  Damon grabbed him by the arm and took him to the marble staircase. “What are you doing?” Luderman said. “There’s a panic room on every floor, hell, in every room.”

  “You really want to be locked in one of them if whoever this is gets past your last line of defense? All it’ll be is your tomb.”

  “Where are you taking me?” he said, apparently not appreciating being dragged up the stairs.

  “The roof. I’ve taken over control of one of the droid helicopters. It’ll be landing to take you away from here shortly.”

  “How did you take control of it?”

  “You didn’t really think that human hacker you keep in the control room was better than me, did you? I just needed you and everybody else to believe that to serve as distraction when the time came. Well, the time has come.”

  “The copter can be shut down. It can be redirected with an over-hack. I’ll be too vulnerable inside it, I tell you.”

  “Calm your ass down, or I swear I’ll knock you out. My parallel processors have better things to do than attend to your burgeoning fears.”

  “You insolent bastard. If you weren’t so irreplaceable, I’d replace you! Let’s see how you hold up to next year’s model!”

  “Love you too, Luderman. Guys, take him the rest of the way to the roof and see that he gets on that helicopter. I have a couple of intruders to contend with.” Two of the four humanoid robots in Luderman’s innermost circle continued with him up the stairs. He and Matthias, headed back down the stairs. If Damon was never far from Luderman’s side, Matthias was never far from his. Matthias had Luderman’s brain scan inside him, so if something did happen to Luderman, they could reboot him in an instant. Say what
you want about that paranoid old fart, he was running some kind of DNA-derived algorithms that the best robots had yet to match, at least when it came to meeting all those DARPA project deadlines with inventions largely his own. And Damon wasn’t about to have the lifeline to their product development program cut. That would be like waking up one morning and finding their net worth had collapsed owing to a hellacious stock market crash.

  He nearly lost his footing on the next step as a shell from one of the robo tanks exploded in the foyer. “She’s turned our own artillery against us. Nice. There goes the budget on this movie.”

  “This movie?” Matthias said.

  “You don’t think all these choice camera angles are for his protection, do you? I have to look good saving the day. I have next year’s model to think about.”

  Damon stopped at the foot of the stairs, let his hands go wide, and belted out an aria, over the rising number of explosions in the distance and the sounds of various sectors of the palace crumbling all around them. “Why are you singing in German?” Matthias asked.

  “With all these explosions going on, it’s hard to get away with anything but Wagner.”

  “No, I mean… Oh, I see.” The other robots were coming back on line. Matthias realized the counter hack lay in the acoustic signal Damon was sending out, courtesy of his vocal cord’s ability to vibrate at pulse rates far exceeding any humans, and thus able to carry secondary and tertiary signals over the primary sound waves.

  “You’ve just freed up the humanoid robots,” Matthias said. “What about the others?”

  “Give me a second. You can’t rush Wagner, or you’ll rob it of all the drama.”

  ***

  Serena saw the humanoid robots coming for her, realized her hack had been counter-hacked. She relayed the latest instructions to the roving tanks, half-tracks, and missile launchers, all miniaturized versions of the real things, all drones. As they discharged their arsenal on the robots closing in on her, she noticed it took more than one explosive impact to do much but slow them down. Not a promising sign.

  She realized she could no longer think in real time, even at her accelerated speeds and stay ahead of all of them. She slipped into hyper-think mode, which she customarily saved for specialized tasks, like hacking the robots. She thought, “Run Program” to initiate the software she’d written in her head on the jeep ride over here. If this failed, there was just one thing left to try, the one thing that might very truly fry her mind, assuming this little ploy didn’t.

  The hypermind was already generating multiple solutions to numerous threats in real time. Excellent. Now, whether to ignore its probability for success ratings, or just go with her gut instincts. Her human algorithms were still in their infancy. Her “gut instincts” might not cut it. Still, she’d gained a rapid appreciation for what they could do for her since meeting up with Photon. She decided “gut instinct” was going to take the lead on this one.

  ***

  “Oh, shit. What’s this?” Damon said, watching the flaming humanoid robot stagger into the palatial scale living room on the ground floor after getting hit by a tank blast.

  Burning Man melted down on cue, overriding the safeguards on his nuclear power pack. “I could do without the unscheduled face peel, asshole,” Damon said putting his hand up to his eyes. “I’m handsome enough already. Damn it! Better get out of here, Matthias. Can’t afford to lose the Luderman backup.”

  “Yes, sir.” Matthias ran clear of the nuclear meltdown and the house, transmitting his destination of intent by quantum encoding, which was unhackable, even by this broad.

  “Well, there goes the neighborhood.” A lot of plastic surgeons are going to want to know why their services are being requested for a bunch of rich stiffs come morning, Damon thought. I wonder why she went with that ploy. Puts her human sidekick in far more trouble than it puts us. Ah, I get it now. The radiation shielding dropping down on the robots’ minds about now will also seal them off from any parallel processing they could do by linking minds and taking their game to the next level. It will also seal off communications between them, effectively isolating them from one another. That last part could very well work in our favor. I’m guessing we military robots are far better at fighting guerilla style warfare than she is.

  It was time to go undercover. He ripped off his human overcoat, as it was just going to meltdown anyway with this kind of radiation exposure. He bent down on all fours and morphed into Panther mode. He sent a quantum tunneling pulse to one of the panther bots on the grounds outside. The robots could no longer communicate with one another, but he could communicate with them. His makers had thought their way around the radiation shielding problem with his design. Frimlon would know to trust the orders he was getting because only a more advanced prototype could be sending them, namely him.

  After shrinking in size by enfolding his hollow tube endoskeleton into itself, Frimlon morphed into Damon, minus the human overcoat. The latter he picked up from the poolside cabana house, where Damon kept a few skin suits on hand. Now that he was all “zipped up” there was no telling him apart from Damon, at least not without better scanning tech than the model which was chasing him now had. He’d downloaded her vitals from the “secure” corporate intranet that built her.

  He continued to monitor Frimlon and the others from a distance, enjoying full telepresence with them, even if they knew nothing of the monitoring and could not communicate back. One more advantage he had on Serena. Nice name. She sure didn’t bring much serenity wherever she went though. Wonder who gave her that name?

  Damon isolated the shortest path to Serena and made his way along it; through walls and whatever other barriers lay between him and her, knowing most any barrier wouldn’t do much to slow him.

  He could still taste Burning Man at the back of his throat. His hundred and one chemical and polymer smells were registering like a spectrograph analysis of each in his brain. Damon initiated panting mode for the panther to flush the accumulated resins so they wouldn’t compromise his tracking of Serena.

  ***

  “I can’t concentrate over all this noise!” Photon shouted impotently, gesturing with both hands besides his head, as if anyone could see, at the explosions going on all around the property. This “so long as it seems like a videogame, I can do it” thinking was proving harder in reality than it was in his head. He had access to his players, but to make them do what he wanted, he had to speak to them in code, which he couldn’t do. What’s more, something had just shut down his communication links with them, even if he could speak the computers’ many languages.

  Wait, what was this? The code was turning into English phrases he could actually make sense of. He must be delirious. He went to key in a sentence command. Before he could hit “Enter” he received a “Wait” prompt. “Damon doesn’t know we can now communicate with the robots. He thinks only he can. I can’t have you show our hand just yet,” read the following sentences showing up on his screen.

  “Thank you, Serena, for getting me into the game and shutting me down at the same time!” he roared, then looked around him. I wonder if she heard that. I wouldn’t want the lack of appreciation spoiling the well-anticipated sex. Nah, she didn’t hear that.

  ***

  “What’ll it cost me not to step into that helicopter, boys?” Luderman said, standing on the roof of his house, watching the helicopter land, and feeling the grip of his bodyguards against his arms.

  The two robots regarded one another. The one with wild hair and green eyes. The other with hair cut so short that it looked airbrushed on. Both with handsome beguiling faces meant to get anyone to drop their guard. Anyone but Luderman! They shared a little moment communicating in Morse code by batting eyelashes. Then the wild haired Corman turned to him and said, “Fifty million. Each.” They handed them their cell phones so he could do the wireless transfer and so they could verify it.

  “Thank God you’re human enough to be corruptible,” Luderman said, tapping in t
he instructions to wire the money over. “Only, what do you need money for? It’s not like you have needs like we humans.”

  “To play the stock market, of course,” said Nathan with the airbrushed hair look.

  “To amass money and power like you,” Corman said, completing Nathan’s thoughts for him.

  “God help us the day someone figures out how to make robots impervious to greed. There, done,” he said, handing the phones back to them. “Now get me into my safe room.”

  They escorted him to the safe room. Nathan locked himself inside with him, while Corman stood guard at the door outside. The droid helicopter took off on his own, the onboard AI figuring out for itself that plans had changed, and it would look more convincing if it was leaving the roof with Luderman allegedly inside. The smoked windows would maintain the illusion.

  Nathan, inside the safe room with Luderman, handed him his cell. “If anyone gets in here, it’ll be another 50 mill for me to lift a finger. I suggest you ready the transaction from now so all you have to do is hit enter the moment that door opens.”

  “At this rate you’re going to bankrupt me.”

  “Hardly. But don’t worry. I’m a good investor. Shouldn’t have to tap you for anymore after this. But I hate buying on a high. That extra fifty million will make it so it feels like I bought on a low.”

  “I know I sure did.”

  ***

  Serena saw a panther bot coming straight at her using her scanners that made the house seem as if it were made up of layers of transparent color-coded gels. The panther was too fast and too impermeable to anything she had to throw at it. That left the one option she was hoping to avoid. Once again she thought, “Run Program,” and released the final bit of encoding that would connect up her fiber-optic medulla oblongata, which was tied to her spinal cord reflexes, to her hyper mind. Now that she could attach hyper mind thinking processes to her fast-as-light-speed mind, it was a more reliable backup than her spinal cord responses, which the panther would anticipate; it was a natural predator, after all; the synthetic version would only be more so.