Fantastic Voyage : Microcosm

by Kevin J. Anderson

  Devlin locked down the Mote's systems and strode to the compartment where the environment suits were stored. Tomiko practically leaped from her chair, ready to go. She shot her anchor harpoons into the nearest membrane wall and tethered the vessel in place.

  “Sorry, Doc,” Devlin said as he passed Tyler's seat. “Now it's time for my expertise.”

  “But why are you two going?” Freeth's voice was tinged with concern. “Not that I'm volunteering, believe me.”

  Devlin smiled cryptically at him. “Because, Mr. Freeth, Tomiko and I are the ones who wear the red shirts.”

  Tyler looked at them strangely. “What do you mean? Neither of you is wearing red.”

  Freeth rolled his eyes, showing a mixture of alarm and humor. “I'll explain while they suit up.”

  Chapter 24

  Mission clock: 2:40 remaining

  Inside the Mote's suit locker hung four slick exploration garments. Director Hunter had required one for each crew member, although in any scenario that forced everyone to suit up and abandon ship, Devlin figured that their best alternative would be to bend over and kiss their butts good-bye.

  Tomiko took out the slimmest garment for herself, then handed a larger one to Devlin, teasing. “Just for you, a workman-like coverall designed for engineers and lumberjacks.”

  “Roger that. You've got me pegged—as long as it has plenty of pockets.” Devlin groaned inwardly. Had it been so long since he'd tried to flirt with anybody? He didn't even remember how to do it.

  He knew Tomiko must have had her share of boyfriends. Such an intelligent and beautiful woman would certainly have plenty of admirers. He supposed she found Garrett Wilcox fun, sometimes… but the cocky pilot had about as much depth as a film of oil on asphalt. She needed a man who was interesting enough to be her match.

  As he watched Tomiko slither (he could think of no other word for it) into her silvery suit, Kelli's snapshot seemed to be eyeing him from the cockpit panel. He didn't think she'd disapprove after all this time.

  But he was on duty. Time enough to let his imagination run wild later. Maybe. After Team Proteus accomplished the mission objectives.

  Devlin climbed into his suit, yanking the tough but flexible fabric over his uniform. The expedition garment was a cross between a scuba-diving outfit and a spacesuit. Intelligent fiber threads sensed his body temperature, his pulse, his blood pressure. The suit could trigger heaters or release coolants to keep him as comfortable as a miniaturized human being could be.

  He pulled the snug hood over his unruly dark hair, attached goggles and breathing apparatus. He flexed his arms, tugged on the gloves and wiggled his fingers. He adjusted the life monitors and powerpack at his waist, then strapped on his toolkit, just in case. When he assisted Tomiko in checking her suit, he noticed how well it fit her curves, but didn't dare comment.

  Through the suit radio, Tomiko's voice was rich and clear in his ears. “Okay, let's go look at some nanocritters.”

  “Nanocritters?”

  Behind the goggles, her dark eyes crinkled; the curve of her lips was barely visible above the breathing apparatus. “They're smaller than a micron, Marc. I don't want to dignify them with some formal-sounding word.” She pushed a button, and the airlock door slid aside.

  Pantomiming a gentleman's bow, he gestured for Tomiko to enter the cramped chamber. Egress was via a crude mechanism, like the hatch in an old U-boat. Devlin preferred simple things that were easy to fix, rather than increasingly complicated systems that had few advantages, but broke down more often. He got into the small chamber with her.

  “Not much bigger than a telephone booth,” Tomiko said as she sealed the door.

  He reached down and undogged the hatch. “Ready to get your feet wet?” When the seal breached, external fluid gushed inside, filling the tube.

  “That's usually the way to start an important job.”

  Standing next to Tomiko, Devlin thought longingly of when he and Kelli had taken long, slow showers together. Perhaps his hormones should have miniaturized as well. He forced himself to concentrate on the controls in front of him.

  The airlock chamber filled, the fluid level rising past knees, waists, and then over their heads. When the alien liquid reached equilibrium in the cramped chamber, Devlin dropped down and swam out of the Mote.

  Ahead, the junkpile of nanomachines waited for him.

  With languid strokes, Tomiko swam past while he reversed and tugged the hatch back into place. Somewhat awkwardly at first, Devlin paddled through the viscous bath, acclimating himself to the new environment.

  Tomiko glided beside him, making him feel clumsy. “Come on, Marc. We need to do this and be back inside. The clock is ticking.” She swam ahead, kicking powerfully. “Catch me.”

  The fluid around them felt thicker than he had expected, with strange, unpredictable currents. When he tried to move, he didn't go precisely in the direction he anticipated. “Takes some getting used to.”

  Showing off, Tomiko did a graceful somersault. “Must be atomic effects, Van der Waals forces, maybe molecular attraction, and let's not forget the ever-popular Brownian motion.”

  Devlin looked curiously into her faceplate. He could feel coolants circulating through the snug fabric he wore, the buffet of fluid molecules fizzing against his suit with random atomic motion. “That's a pretty sophisticated analysis for a muscle-minded security specialist.”

  Her coy laugh came over the line-of-sight radio link. “Don't tell anybody that I'm smarter than I let on. Got to keep up my image.” With a slow-motion gesture, she pointed a gloved hand toward the cluster of nanocritters still some distance away. “How far before we separate from Mote's miniaturization field?”

  Devlin turned away from the ship and looked toward the motionless devices constructed of fullerene lattices and nanogears, perhaps as many as a hundred of them lined up like cars in a parking lot.

  “The subsidiary field generators on our suitpacks keep us linked for quite a distance. When we remain part of the field, we're in our own relative spatial anomaly, confined in this size.” He spread his arms, then lost his orientation and had to kick his feet furiously to return himself to an upright position.

  A transmission came from the ship. Arnold Freeth sounded very concerned, though perhaps it was only uneasiness at being left alone with Cynthia Tyler. “Are you both all right out there? We've got only two and a half hours left.”

  Though the two had gone only ten shiplengths from the Mote, heavy static crackled through Freeth's transmission. Devlin could hear a dull thrumming in his ear speakers, an undulating pattern just at the edge of the system's pickup ability.

  “On our way, Mr. Freeth.” The more Devlin thought about it, the more convinced he was that the interference came from those dormant but still functional mechanical devices. Perhaps the background signal was a standard carrier wave or a standby transmission.

  Stroking his way forward, Devlin approached the geometric shapes with caution. Tomiko fanned her hands and feet to maintain her position, coiled and wary, prepared to lash out if necessary. If the nanocritters posed any threat, she looked ready to take them apart using only her gloved hands.

  Each machine was half the size of the Mote. The angles were squared off and clumsy looking, functional rather than aesthetic. Devlin recognized the stacked assembly of spherical baskets, tubes, toruses, and spindles, interlinked hexagonal graphite grids that formed a wire-frame skeleton for these machines.

  “Look at the complexity. The design is awesome.” Nested buckytubes contained metal atoms, forming circuits that were the equivalents of nerve fibers; other strands looked like muscles. He had heard that, depending on the direction a carbon sheet was rolled into a buckytube, the components could exhibit either semiconducting or metallic properties.

  Interlocking pistons and nanogears comprised the mechanical parts, simple clockwork mechanisms that turned and moved using hydraulic power, articulated joints that bent crablike arms. Each component was ma
de up of hydrocarbons and metals, impurities added for specific properties, one atom at a time. The gear teeth were probably made of benzene, the claw tips of pyridine.

  Devlin scrutinized the range of machines with an engineer's eye. He saw the same basic body core, graced with more than one type of manipulative apparatus. Some of the claw arms were large and bulky; others branched out and got smaller and smaller until they became feathery grasping digits. “I think each of these devices was designed for a specific purpose.”

  On such a small scale, the machines would have to operate on straightforward mechanical principles. They reminded him of Victorian contraptions powered not by steam engines but by microscopic atomic batteries, which the nanocritter could convert into usable kinetic energy.

  “But for what?” Tomiko asked. “Why are they here, and why are they all shut down?”

  “I'm still working on that part.” He took a deep breath from his respirator, then swam forward, pulling the toolkit from his hip. “I'm going to tinker a bit.”

  “See if you can get one of those things to make me a cappuccino.”

  “It'd have to be a very small cup.”

  “In that case, make it an espresso.”

  The closest nanomachine did not react to his presence. Devlin circled, and reached out slowly, carefully, until his fingers touched the side wall composed of carbon lattices. It was like a machine built out of macramé. Through the thin flexible gloves, he ran his fingers along the hull. The giant fullerene molecules seemed strange and insubstantial.

  “The carbon grid has a lot of metal inclusions— iron atoms, maybe, or other elements added for conductive properties.” He pushed, and the side wall buckled slightly, buckytubes bending and adjusting. The front intake chute was a shovel-like opening through which the nanocritter could “eat” raw materials.

  He flexed one of the articulated buckytube arms, which swiveled on a ball joint. Pistons and rolling gears moved like contracting muscles. He shifted the components, prying open side walls to study how the engine was put together. “A thermal power source… exhaust-heat radiator fins.” He had no idea what to call the strange curved shapes, bulbs and spheres like internal organs, inside the belly of the nanomachine.

  The bottom surface of the casing was an embroidery of electronic paths on a thin wafer of hard crystal. “A self-patterned circuit board, much denser than anything we've been able to achieve. I think it's a diamond memory chip, layered with fluorine and hydrogen molecules.” Tiny whiskers of carbon tipped with pyridine were raised, as if poised to read data imprinted on the crystal circuit.

  Tomiko swam under the nanocritter to see the patterned brain. “Stop drooling Marc. We're on a tight schedule.”

  “Roger that. Five more minutes.” Devlin contemplated the nanocritter's intake chute, the self-patterned circuit board, the processing machinery. “I bet it has the capability to gather resources and build a copy of itself. Looks like it can imprint a new circuit board and assemble an identical offspring. At this scale, a nanomachine could run around and pick a few molecules at a time, scooping them up with atomic-force apparatus.”

  Judging from the shape of another component atop the wire-frame chassis, Devlin figured it might be some kind of beacon, a signal emitter and receiver. On such a small scale, though, the generator would be nearly the size of the transmission wavelength itself.

  Curious and perplexed, he crawled over the exoskeleton to determine just how much power remained in the dormant device. The signal generator was connected to the power source, large mechanical circuit breakers, and metal lines with closeable gaps, like crude knife switches. He could hear the throbbing standby signal in his ears, much louder now that he was in among the alien devices.

  “Careful, Marc. Don't know what these components do.”

  “Now you're sounding as overprotective as Felix. It's just a simple machine.” Moving sluggishly in the fluid, he unsealed his toolkit to withdraw a screwdriver, intending to use it as a prybar or a probe. “Let's see what makes you tick.” He used the long end of the screwdriver to prod the ultra-small components, tracing the circuit paths in the complex self-replicating brain systems. He went back to the knife switch next to the signal generator and studied how the component was connected to the power source. “Pretty straightforward.”

  “Don't get cocky, Marc. I don't want another Wilcox on my hands.”

  He waved her away. “I know what I'm doing… I think.”

  With just the briefest of contacts, Devlin touched the long end of the screwdriver across the gap in the metal connecting leads, effectively closing the switch. A bright blue spark jumped the gap; on an electron scale, it was an incredibly small fibrillation.

  The nanocritter's metal connector clicked into place, holding the circuit closed.

  Devlin yanked the tool away, but the connection had been made. The tiny electric arc crackled. Fine whiskers of pyridine and carbon moved, like the fingers of a blind man reading the Braille of fluorine and hydrogen molecules on the diamond memory wafer.

  Startled, Devlin kicked backward, careful not to drop the screwdriver.

  Another spark connected, and a second switch closed, like a falling line of dominoes. Sensor lights flashed inside the mosaic grid of the nanomachine frame, glowing like eyes. The manipulator arms began to move.

  “I don't think you were supposed to do that,” Tomiko said.

  The chain of awakening circuits continued to build. With a jolt, the nanocritter twitched. Its mechanical pistons and arms jittered as power surged through the linkages.

  As the nanosystems surged to full readiness, the dull background tone became a powerful burst of noise, a deep encoded pattern of instructions. The hammering signal undulated in his ears, rising to a skull-shattering peak before warbling down in complicated melodies and octaves. It sounded like a foghorn through Devlin's helmet radio.

  The other nanocritters began to vibrate, glow, stir.

  “Whoa, you don't actually want me to go back and turn it off?” Devlin asked. “Do you?”

  “Won't do any good. That thing already sent out a wake-up call.” Tomiko spun around in the fluid. “The other machines are activated now.”

  Layer upon layer of transmissions echoed in his head, not just from the one nanomachine, but from others. Many others.

  Arnold Freeth sent a message at such high volume that he broke through even the head-crushing signal. “What just happened? What did you do out there? Are you safe?”

  “Affirmative. We're both… intact,” Devlin said. “But I think we'd better get back inside the ship. Right now.”

  The clustered nanomachines flexed their segmented arms. They oriented their sensors and prepared for whatever mysterious mission lay inside their programming.

  “So much for a non-intrusive exploration.” He and Tomiko swam forward, racing for the ship's external

  hatch as if microscopic sharks were chasing them. “I think our mission just got a little more complicated.” Devlin cranked open the hatch, and they plunged back into the refuge of the Mote. The nanomachines began to move.

  Chapter 25

  Mission clock: 2:31 remaining

  He couldn't touch the alien directly. His assignment was just to stand and wait and watch, but even so, Rajid Sujatha was proud to be part of the mission.

  Team Proteus had only two-and-a-half more hours to map the wilderness of the extraterrestrial body. Holding his breath to hear better inside his anti-contamination suit, he had listened to Major Devlin's intermittent progress reports, though static washed out many of his words.

  While Dr. Pirov busied himself rearranging the various medical instruments on their trays, trying to keep busy, Sujatha pressed his gloved fingertips against the curved glassy material of the lifepod window. How he wished he could communicate with the being inside. Are you a lonesome traveler? An exile? An ambassador? Or were you just lost?

  He never tired of looking at the smooth skin, the large sleeping eyes, the strange features
. Through the misted capsule windows, he imagined what lay beyond the tantalizing glimpses. The alien looked so placid, so peaceful…

  Suddenly, the lifepod vibrated and hummed. A hiss of vented gas burst through an unseen crack.

  Sujatha jerked his hands away. His heart leaped as he staggered backward. “Dr. Pirov! Come and look at this, please.” He raised his voice into the suit microphone pickup. “Director Hunter, sir, observe the alien's lifepod.”

  Pirov whirled, his watery and bloodshot eyes suddenly alert. A sequence of glowing lights and sparkling pathways appeared along the opaque side walls of the container. Another crack opened; more gas vented. Reddish illumination shimmered from deep within the pod.

  Outside, everyone reacted quickly. Deputy Foreign Minister Garamov rose to his feet in dismay, fearing that his prize had been damaged. Congressman Durston glanced around as if searching for someone to blame.

  Director Hunter scanned the readings on the auxiliary control panels in the VIP observation deck. He flicked on the intercom. “Did either of you trigger any of the systems?”

  “Not me, sir,” Pirov said. “I was not close. I touched nothing.” The Russian pressed down on the lid of the activating lifepod, then ran his gloved fingers over the vibrating surface. His pale blue eyes brightened with alarm, like ice chips sparkling in sudden sunlight. “I do not believe we can turn it off.”

  Sujatha raised both of his gloved hands. “I also activated no controls, sir. I do not know what caused the change.” With all the chamber's fail-safes, backup seals, and anti-contamination lockouts, evacuation was not an option for them. He and Pirov were trapped inside with the extraterrestrial being … no matter what happened next.

  Pirov leaned closer, searching for visible changes within the pod. “Maybe Team Proteus did something from inside.”

  A new droning sound came from the capsule's interior, growing louder. Previously unseen slits appeared, along with control markings like illuminated glyphs of an incomprehensible language. Indecipherable phosphors blinked along the sides, shimmering from within the metal.