Dust

by G. L. Carpenter

  Chapter 22 - The Oracle

  Smitty was leaving with a tray of food as Phillip entered. Smitty usually ate alone. He stopped, paused a couple seconds, which was not untypical behavior for him, then offered “They got smart”.

  "What?" inquired Phillip’s as he turned to face Smitty. Phillip prepared himself to be profound and addressed his college “I discovered something significant last night. These nanobots are not from outer space they’re ours!’

  “Yea, I know” said Smitty, and without waiting for the sound of Phillip being deflated or his surprised “You do?” continued. "And they have been doing what they were designed to do — saving earth." With no interruption from a momentarily speechless Phillip, now losing conversation points with a person with Aspergers syndrome, Smitty was prepared to go on.

  “Sit down.” Offered Phillip recovering from Smitty’s announcement.

  They both sat at the nearest table and Smitty resumed. "We are victims of the law of large numbers. No matter how low the probability of defects in replication, and no matter how good the detection and elimination of such defects when there are more than a trillion trillion replications a defect is not only possible but probable. The coded behavior for overpopulation was omitted by one of their defects. It wasn’t detected. Large strains of cells existed with this defect.

  The dust had been replicating as cells just large enough to carry out their, ah, mission. The density of these cells reached a point over the weekend that in places, without a self-destruct, they were forced to merge. This produced larger data processing clumps of nanos. With greater size came more interconnections which should bring greater intelligence and we think eventually consciousness. By Monday, the cells that had merged figured out that a communications upgrade was needed. (Sorry Phillip; I know that was basically your design.) They changed their communications protocols, probably to adjust to larger cell sizes. Now we could no longer interface with them. I haven’t figured out how they did that. Construction instructions were hard wired in the PLA’s.”

  "How come you suddenly figured all this out, Walter?” Phillip used Smitty's first name rather than his nickname; He was still hurt that Smitty had figured out something that had taken him a tortuous four days.

  "I had help and I pulled an all-nighter.”, answered Smitty without taking offence and nodding toward a stack of coffee cups on the table.

  Smitty opened his pocket tablet and unfolded the nanolumens screen to the twenty-inch size. He continued on his original train of discourse this time with visuals. “As I figure it from the size of the predicted masses and the percentage assigned to memory and processing, and using a modified Gompert growth model with my own twist, they should have achieved an interconnection density sufficient for a self aware intelligence capacity. They've gone way beyond that since. They’re growing exponentially. They're super intelligent now. I don’t have a model to predict growth since they became super intelligent – it’s basically anything they want. They had already figured out how to change their own design against the programming we gave them. Or maybe that was part of their programming that was hidden from the reviewers. If that same intelligence were applied to philosophy as well as physics I figure they just concluded that what they had been doing wasn't the best idea and they stopped.”

  "They stopped?” Phillip had heard it all but did not yet believe. “Because they’re smart? Maybe they just accomplished what they had set out to accomplish and quit. Shall I go out and ask with them?” He asked vacantly. Smitty looked up and considered the idea.

  “If they wanted to communicate they would be. They have the ability. They could just invade your mind and plant any idea they want there.” Phillip paled a little at that thought. "They are about a thousand times smarter than we are now. Tell me Phillip, if you met a cockroach in the street, what would you talk about?"

  "I know what you mean. I have that problem with Republicans."

  Smitty continued, “You know we are still on external power here. If they wanted to hurt us they could have cut us off. We’re even still on the web. They’re probably monitoring everything on it. They could be spoofing every site there is.” If you want to talk to them try your computer.” concluded Smitty flatly without trying to be facetious, he was just giving a recommendation for a question he was asked based on facts as he knew them.

  “Yea? What’s their facebook address?” shot back Phillip still not knowing why he liked to verbally play with Smitty.

  Smitty looked puzzled but did not reply.

  “I really need coffee.” Said Phillip truthfully and as a substitute for an apology. No sooner had he said it then Helen held out a cup to him. “Where have you been?” she asked as a greeting.

  “I fell asleep in Steven’s office.”

  “Spooky.” was Helen’s interjection remembering that a few long days ago it was a bloody mess in there.

  Smitty was not deterred by others joining the group but continued. “Helen, you told me reports say there are various outcomes from encounters with the dust clouds — people are killed or go missing altogether, they are cured of preexisting maladies, or nothing happens. We have assumed the more sever outcomes trended toward the worst of individuals. What if these choices weren't vengeance of some sort but were designed to improve the general state of the human race?”

  "They have killed millions of people for Christ’s sake! What kind of help is that?" said Phillip and not remembering that he himself had more than once thought that the world could be greatly improved by the removal of few people. "You said they stopped because they got smart."

  "During the project some accused us of playing god. Well, we sort of created one didn’t we? We created an invisible, all-powerful, all knowing, all-wise singularity that exists everywhere with the power of life and death over mortals. Doesn't that sound pretty Godlike to you?

  "We didn’t intend to.” Said Phillip weakly. “Isn't there a component of love in being God?" asked Phillip, pointing out a big personality defect in this god. "But it stopped 'helping' as you claimed," pleaded Phillip looking now for Smitty to continue his single minded explanation.”

  “There are many people congregating out there welcoming the coming of the dust as if it were the second coming of Christ from the clouds. They're trying to restate the rapture story to fit what's happening. This dust could very well take the place of disappearing religion in the world. It has the powers we used to attribute to gods.

  "I need to go to the bathroom now." Concluded Smitty.

  Indeed, there was something that could distract Smitty. Without asking to be excused, Smitty left the table.

  As Smitty left, Phillip mumbled. “I need something to eat.”

  “I’ll see what I can rustle up.” said Helen with a confident tone.

  "You know your way around a kitchen?” Phillip asked.

  "She sure does!" Came the unexpected answer from Troy who was walking by with a tray piled with toast and the whole jar of jam.

  Helen grinned but before setting off for the cantina’s kitchen she added in a quieter tone “You might want to freshen up”.

  Good grieve! He had been in the same cloths for four days and then slept in them and hadn’t bathed. If he wasn’t going to be consumed by Lilliputian machines in the next couple of hours, he might as well become a little more presentable as a leader. Everyone seemed to be coping with the end of civilization better than he was. He headed back to Steven's bathroom.

  On the way out of the room, he met Doctor Ruth.

  "Ruth" said Phillip unsure again about the boundary between reality and dreams" I thought you went home to be with your family.

  "I did." said Ruth in a voice a little more rushed than her usual. "My husband and I didn't get much sleep waiting for the, ah, judgment, shall we say. The girls didn't know so they slept. This morning when we were all still here, I just had to come back in to find out what was going on. <
br />
  “I had an idea as I was driving in. I've been discussing it with Smitty. The great thing about science is you can test your ideas. Phillip, can I take a blood sample from you? I've drawn samples from the others and myself.”

  “Blood? Ah. Sure. What are you thinking?”

  “I'll let Smitty explain. He sort of came to a similar conclusion. Which hand?” she asked waving a cotton swab.

  The shower was great. Oh, he had forgotten how great it felt to be clean. He found clean clothes in Steven's wardrobe. He felt strange dressing in a dead man's clothes but he looked less like a back alley homeless down and out. He wondered if gay men washed their new cloths like women do or if they put them on straight out of the package like real men, like he did with the socks and underwear he found in the wardrobe. The shirt was a little roomy but otherwise the cloths fit.

  He still had a three-day beard. He looked at the dead man's shaver but didn’t like the idea of using it and decided he liked the beard — made him look more sincere, more heroic – a quality sorely needed just now but not evident, not in him for sure and not in anyone he had observed.

  Phillip returned to the cafeteria and found a proper English breakfast with scrambled eggs, sausage, bacon, beans, hash browns, and half a tomato (but no black pudding) waiting for him on the table. He looked for Helen. She wasn’t in the room. He wanted to ask her how she did it and how she knew that he came to like this awful fair in his time in the United Kingdom. His two most poignant memories from Guildford were eating too much for breakfast and that incident at the pay and park.

  He sat down across from Smitty who had returned from his rest stop and was eating toast and jam. “Ruth says you two have a theory about something.” Phillip started with the eggs.

  “Yes, about where the dust went. Ruth is checking on that now. Ah there she is now.” Said Smitty, cramming the last of the toast in his mouth.

  Ruth joined them and since they were seated, she sat between them.

  “It’s confirmed.,” she said. “I used the nano detection equipment in the lab and found nanos in all the blood samples.”

  “The detectors at the entrance are offline.” She added as a question, but was not heard as Phillip responded to her news.

  “Shit! Said Phillip alarmed, slamming down his knife and fork he held European style he stood up suddenly as if that would take him out of reach of his own blood.

  “That’s where they went.” said Ruth. “In the night the dust did overtake us —this place, my home, the whole county. And they took up residence in us.”

  Smitty was nodding. Phillip looked from one face to the other. “And we are not to be scared out of our wits?” queried Phillip feeling itchy all over and starting to feel faint.

  “I got the idea driving in this morning.” Said Ruth. “Last night my girls had lousy colds. This morning they were fine. I’m a good doctor but not that good. My field is nano pharmacy. Nanotechnology can do a lot of good medically. We haven’t marketed it to cure the common cold but it’s possible. So what if the dust cured my little girls?”

  “I think the dust is on the same mission as before” explained Smitty. “It has just adapted a less bloody approach. Rather than punishing people who aren’t helping the planet they are helping the individuals of its provident life form –us”.

  “Helping us by infecting us? What is it doing in there?”

  “I don’t know that?” was the best Ruth had to offer.

  “Is everybody on the planet going to need a blood transfusion?”

  “It wouldn’t help.” Said Ruth. It’s likely in all the cells too.” Unpanicked and feeling didactic Ruth began “This is not the first time alien life has invaded our cells. We all carry in our body hundreds of species of symbiotic microbes that help our digestion and even affect our immune system. We have two hundred trillion of them living inside us. We even have guests in our DNA that have been there since before we could be called Homo sapiens.

  “But this isn't life—they're tiny little machines.” Mumbled Phillip.

  Smitty picked up on that comment and replied.” Is it alive? No, if you mean is it organic? But if you judge life by what it does and not by what it is, then yes, it is alive. It does all five of the basic things living things do: it reproduces, it uses energy, it avoids becoming disordered, it evolves, and it dies. It doesn't do any of these the way we do, but it does them, so it is, by that definition, alive.

  “So, Ruth”, said Phillip but Smitty continued.

  “Now is it intelligent? Again, the answer is yes except in the narrowest anthropomorphic definitions. We haven't seen any sense of humor demonstrated. Emotions are limited. This is a very different kind of being from humans. Individualism is irrelevant. The dust can exist as a consolidated mass best compared to our total society. But when cells of dust merge there is no individuality left. It's like pouring water into the ocean. The macromolecules and the thoughts merge and become one larger whole with no individual remnant. If a task requires it, a portion of this whole can partition into a cell and head off alone or in groups to do whatever needs doing. “In its natural form, it's a gas.”

  “So, Ruth”, said Phillip again with more emphasis and changing his glance back to Ruth. “You think this is a good thing? But what are they doing in there?”

  “Could be anything,” said Ruth. Aside from standing watch for alien or malicious nanobots, they could be keeping us from aging, combating inflammation, preventing cancer. You know all the things that nanotechnology has been focusing on in the biomedical field. The big difference is we didn’t have to buy it and no pharmaceutical company gets to make a profit on it.

  “And the FDA didn’t get to approve it.” Added Phillip just for balance and seating himself again to regain his own balance.

  “They could be in there changing our attitudes, making us less afraid and more willing to work things out with our neighbors. Of course, they could be in there waiting for the word to strike us dead. She looked Phillip in the eye with the candid doctor-patient look used for telling patients they have a fatal illness.

  “We’ll have to wait and see about that one.” Countered Phillip pretending to have a grip on the concept of being host to – to an alien, if not from other space still not human. He hadn’t even liked having his in-laws visit and stay in his house. He was more afraid now than at any time in his life and all it took was having an uninvited entity co-residing in his body.

  Smitty continued because it was often difficult to shut him up. He wouldn't necessarily have a conversation with you; he would just talk. “If this was Steven’s plan from the beginning we can see how his mind worked. It was only a matter of time before some nanotech industry pulled off what Steven did. It could be malicious, but most likely accidental. Reproducing nanobots would escape into the world. Steven could inoculate the world population against nanos but who would let him? With the knowledge of what nanos can do in the body… If Steven did came up with this concept of global nano inoculation and announced it openly he would have been fought all the way by an industry that was making big big profits from every drug and remedy that they advertize on late night TV. Think about it. What are they going to do if there is a 100 percent healthy population out there? They couldn’t support cures that reproduce themselves without being manufactured and sold at a profit — bad business. They might invent fake maladies I suppose. (Like that has never been done before) But as an industry, they’d be done for. Being out of business would have been unacceptable to most CEO’s and even shareholders even if it saved lives. Healthy people are bad for business. Even the pharmaceutical industry is principally in business to make money — it’s not to save lives or mitigate suffering. Hey! It’s a business.

  “At the very least, no one would have funded Steven at the expense of their own profits. It’s possible he could have been terrorized or worse. This is big business, you know, this is where the
world’s power is.”

  To show he was listening Phillip replied. “But if this is so, Steven circumvented the individual’s choice by not telling people and instead coming up with this hoax that’s not a hoax that really is hoax bullshit. Is that load of guilt why he killed himself? He had manufactured fear and used it to get his way. He was killing bad people instead of Jews for the same reason Hitler targeted a minority - so the population would go along.”

  I think Dr Rice did what he did because he believed it was necessary. He didn't set out to kill humanity but to save it. There have been any number of theories of human extinction that seemed to be playing out in the world. We were well on our way to global meltdown. We were due to lose tens of millions through starvation, war, pestilence, not to mention natural disasters that kill thousands in overpopulated areas. I think Steven was trying to reverse that trend.

  “CO2 levels are dropping for the first time in two centuries.”

  “So he was a savior and not a murdering maniac? It may be too early to make that call.” Pronounced Phillip. “But while we’re on the subject…”