Fantastic Voyage : Microcosm

by Kevin J. Anderson

  “Like putting a car in long-term storage,” Devlin said, still working the engines to maintain their position. “You drain the fluids, disconnect the battery, let the air out of the tires, and raise it up on blocks.”

  Freeth's freckled face was ruddy with enthusiasm. “Judging by all this activity, the nanomachines are trying to jump-start their host. Maybe they're fixing whatever tissue damage occurred en route, even giving the body a tune-up before it awakens.”

  Nearby, another group of nanocritters worked industriously. Like cowboys, three of them rounded up an indigo blood cell and stripped off its outer protein sheath. Cooperating like an assembly line of butchers, the tiny devices pulled out the organelles and gulped raw materials into their hungry maws.

  Orange heat shimmered from their bottom furnaces, waste thermal energy generated by their furious labors. Mechanical arms and legs moved in a blur as the devices broke down the entire blood cell to separate out desirable resource molecules and protein chains, then discarded the rest of the material. Other nanomachines extruded buckyball chains, fullerene cylinders impregnated with specific elements and molecules at appropriate lattice points. Building blocks.

  In fascination, Devlin watched the devices assemble the components based on the blueprint burned onto their reproducible diamond-memory circuit boards. In less than a minute, the construction crew had constructed four nanocritters from scratch, and turned them loose.

  Two of the new machines propelled themselves toward the work cluster on the cardiac wall. A third device departed through the widening exit valve and into the bloodstream. The fourth new nanocritter remained within the assembly area and began gathering raw materials from more captured blood cells to build additional nanomachines.

  “With a reproduction rate like that, they'll have this alien stripped down to nothing within a day,” Tomiko said, “maybe even hours.”

  “Unless they go outside the body to grab external raw materials.” Devlin felt a cold twist in his stomach as he realized the implications of what he had said. “Whoa! Think of how fast they could spread.”

  The sub-heart contracted again, ejecting a load of blood through the opposite valve. The nanomachines and the Mote anchored themselves in place and weathered the flow.

  As the jostling blood cells drained out, Devlin drifted close to the industrious nanomachines that were busily building copies of themselves. A resource-processing device moved toward the vessel, swinging its sensors—not sure what kind of blood cell the Mote could be, but obviously hungry.

  Suddenly worried about his precious ship, Devlin added more power to the engines, backing cautiously away. “To a nano-construction crew, we must look like a treasure trove of raw materials.”

  “Keep your distance, Marc,” Tomiko said.

  With a spurt from its own driving engine, the nanomachine slammed into the Mote, spreading a crablike array of jointed metal legs and claws.

  “Hey, don't mess with the ship,” Devlin shouted.

  Loud tapping sounds echoed through the hull as the device touched the armor plates with pyridine-tipped whiskers, sensor pads, and analysis grids, like a fly sampling a particularly good piece of garbage.

  “What is it doing?” Devlin asked. “Leave that alone!”

  Freeth backed away from the rear window, where the spidery machine skittered past, clicking and scratching. It banged on the hull with a heavy, grasping claw, searching for weak points.

  The sub-heart muscle pumped again, and another gush of blood poured in to fill the chamber, increasing the turbulence around them.

  “I'll take care of this, Marc. Don't worry.” Before the device could tear off and taste the Mote's armor plates, Tomiko casually blasted the nanocritter with the laser cannon, hurling carbon-lattice debris into the construction area. “No need to take chances.”

  Suddenly, the swarms of busy nanomachines paused in their work—all of them—as if she had just tripped an alarm. Sending tiny flickers at each other, they pulsed signals through their crude transmitters.

  “Or… maybe I attracted too much attention.”

  The swarm of micro-builders dropped their half-assembled machines and moved through the blood fluid, converging toward the debris of Tomiko's target. One half-completed machine struggled to keep pace with the others, a quivering monstrosity trying to follow fragmentary programming.

  “That's all the time you're going to get, Doc,” Devlin said to Tyler. “I'm getting us out of here before these things get a taste for my ship.”

  Now nanocritters dropped away from the sub-heart muscle to join the attack squadron. More and more of them, each one intent on the Mote.

  “Looks like a lynch mob.” Tomiko prepared to shoot again, but Devlin stopped her. He increased the impeller motors to a high-pitched whine and shot toward the exit valve. The sub-heart had already begun its next contraction. Blood fluid jetted around the Mote's hull.

  As the trifold intake valve opened again on the far side of the sub-heart, Freeth said, “More nanomachines coming in!”

  Like police rushing to the scene of a crime, a new flood of tiny devices pushed into the sub-heart chamber, all focused on the same goal. Within moments they could overwhelm the Mote. Some of them slashed indiscriminately through crowds of blood cells.

  “Looks like the cavalry. And we're the bad guys,” Tomiko said.

  Before the reinforcements could approach, the sub-heart ejected a load of blood. Devlin drove the Mote at full velocity through the widening valve into a large outbound artery. “Time to get out of here.”

  On the far side of the valve, a new squadron of nanocritters swirled in the plasma fluid, fighting their way upstream. Even outside the sub-heart muscle, the tiny devices crowded toward them from the junctures of veins and arteries.

  “I'm afraid that by shooting one machine, you've just activated the alien's defensive systems, Ms. Braddock,” Tyler said. “Now, instead of ignoring our ship, the nanomachines see us as a threat.”

  Flustered, Tomiko looked at Devlin. “What was I supposed to do—let the critter eat us for lunch?”

  He muttered out of the corner of his mouth, “Just don't get on my case about my stupid stunt that woke them up in the first place.”

  “Deal.”

  Behind them, the pumping station valve opened again, shooting a stream of microscopic devices directly at them. Devlin accelerated blindly into the labyrinth of the alien's body.

  Seeing their prey, the coordinated nanomachines closed in for the kill.

  Chapter 30

  Mission clock: 1:25 remaining

  Inside the VIP observation deck, a burst of static came over the comm system, a roaring sound that engulfed distant, distorted words. Felix Hunter could discern a faint voice, lost in the background like a drowning man in a storm. The rest of the message was completely incomprehensible.

  Nevertheless, this was their first word from Team Proteus in forty-five minutes. The crew was still alive… but maybe in trouble.

  He looked intently at the technicians in the adjoining control room.

  The skinny communications officer listened on headphones, replayed the burst, and shook his head. “No distinct words, sir.”

  “Process that and clean it up. Boost the signal to sort out what Major Devlin was trying to say.”

  “It may take a while, sir.”

  “Then get started.”

  Garamov squeezed his long fingers together, massaging his knuckles. “Why has the static increased so dramatically? We need to know what the exploration team is seeing.”

  “It could be faulty communications equipment,” Durston suggested, as if looking for someone to reprimand.

  “I highly doubt it, Congressman.” Hunter tried to find another reservoir of patience. “We knew beforehand that the alien's body itself exhibits some kind of jamming field.”

  He stared at the mission chronometer on his control panel, counting down the minutes, and wondered what dire emergencies Team Proteus might be encounteri
ng. And he couldn't do a damned thing about it.

  Marc can handle it. I'm sure he can.

  Five minutes later the comm specialist hurried up to the observation level, sweat glistening on his dark skin. Congressman Durston half rose to his feet, as if expecting that the message must be for him.

  The thin black man ignored him and rushed toward the Director. “Sir, with signal-cleanup algorithms we've processed out some of the static from the Mote's transmission.” The skinny specialist handed over a small playback pad and pressed the button. “I thought you might want to listen to this up here, rather than over the intercom.”

  Garbled words came out, distorted through numerous layers of massaging, enhancing, and processing. It was a weird approximation of Marc Devlin's voice. “… infestation ### nanomachines ### trying to stay clear ### swarms.”

  Hunter sat up quickly, ignoring the puzzled looks from Garamov and Durston. “Did I hear that right? Does this mean the alien's body is infested with nanomachines? Is Major Devlin requesting an immediate extraction?”

  The technician shook his head. “We couldn't get anything more out of the message, sir. Too much interference. Sorry.”

  Hunter stifled a groan and sat back in his chair. “Thank you. I'm impressed you could squeeze that much out of the transmission. Dismissed.”

  Durston nearly choked on a mouthful of questions, but Hunter silenced him with a chop of his hand. His thoughts reeled, and he turned to the Russian Deputy Foreign Minister. Nanomachines might prove even more deadly than the release of extraterrestrial microorganisms from the alien's body.

  “This raises the stakes considerably,” Garamov said, deeply concerned. He badly needed a cigarette.

  With the lifepod wide open, Sergei Pirov leaned over the extraterrestrial body as if he wanted to make love to it. He conducted test after test, while the cameras and Deputy Minister Garamov watched his every move.

  Hands steady now, Pirov pried back the wide fleshy eyelid to study a bottomless black eye and shone his bright penlight onto it, as he would have with a comatose patient. “Still no photonic response. I cannot find the pupils, so I am unable to measure any dilation reflex.”

  On the other side of the pod, Rajid Sujatha played a handheld resonance scanner over the alien's body, scouring every centimeter. They had no idea where the miniaturized Team Proteus had gone or what they were doing. Using sensitive thermocouples to search for a microscopic heat source that could be the traveling Mote, he tried at the same time to detect tracer ions the microscopic exploration vessel should have been emitting.

  “Most unusual.” Sujatha recalibrated the scanner and tested again. “I am detecting multiple energy sources, pinprick heat reservoirs that move. Many, many more than could possibly be the Mote.”

  Pirov looked at him, startled by the interruption.

  Sujatha continued to use his scanner, perplexed at the readings. “I detect widespread thermal spikes in various internal locations, perhaps pinpointing important organs. However, the body's signal distortions continue to confound any detailed analysis.”

  Pirov ran his gloved fingers along the grayish skin, but he could feel little through the protective fabric. “According to the readings, the alien's body is growing warmer, well above ambient levels. A fever, perhaps? I hope it is not beyond the normal parameters for this species.”

  Sujatha moved along the alien's chest and legs, without touching the scanner to the skin.

  Pirov looked through the corner of his obscuring hood up to the observation deck. Director Hunter sat beside Garamov and the American congressman.

  Though he only reluctantly pursued this work, Pirov knew this was their one chance to make genuine progress. He poked and prodded and probed wherever he was allowed.

  Somehow, he would understand this alien.

  As Pirov's neoprene-sealed anti-contamination gloves brushed the dermal surface, thousands of revived and replicated nanomachines emerged from the alien's pores. They flooded past the safeguards of ferocious skin pedicels, their cooperative allies. Swarms of microscopic machines reached the air, searching for a target.

  A specimen.

  A host.

  Nanocritters climbed like lice over the fabric of Dr. Pirov's gloves and streamed up the coated fibers, searching for a way inside. The devices used sharp molecular-tipped claws and segmented diamond cutting apparatus to hack through the polymer coatings to the threads below.

  Chewing, tunneling, burrowing.

  One of the scouts sent a signal, and the swarming devices converged toward a target point—the pinprick where the Russian doctor had accidentally stuck himself with the hypodermic needle.

  Given time, the tiny machines could have dismantled even the tightest seam of the protective garment. But to them, the pinprick was a gaping doorway as large as a crater. A route inside.

  Thousands of alien nanomachines flooded through the hole in the thick layer to the whorled and ridged tip of the doctor's finger. Waves of the relentless devices streamed down the length of his finger to his hand, penetrating the skin.

  Once they reached the first capillaries, the nanomachines flowed with the blood and circulated throughout Pirov's entire body.

  Within minutes, pumped by the Russian's heartbeat, they had spread out and established primary clusters, transmitting unified commands among the swarms. From cellular base camps, the machines grabbed bits of raw materials from dismantled human blood cells and began to multiply according to their mission programming.

  The nanomachines penetrated the nuclei of Pirov's cells. They burrowed into the chromosomes and assessed the human genome.

  Then the devices set to work performing the required modifications, slicing out nucleic-acid components that did not fit the prescribed pattern. Using available base pairs, they rebuilt chains of nucleotides in a predetermined order until they crafted another strand of DNA that matched the template carried on the diamond memory wafer of their computer brains.

  Based on Earth biochemistry, using only the amino acids, proteins, and base pairs available in human genetics, the design would not be exact. But it was similar enough to the alien's target DNA. The result was within mission parameters.

  In a geometric progression, the nanocritters reproduced themselves and diligently worked, modifying and rebuilding. It was an immense task that required millions of microscopic machines to sweep through every biological system inside Dr. Sergei Pirov.

  Before long, cell by cell, the thriving mechanical infection would remake this human body into another image, one compatible with the schematics of their creator…

  Chapter 31

  Mission clock: 1:23 remaining

  If the army of nanomachines hadn't been trying to destroy them, Devlin might have enjoyed the mad race through uncharted biological territory. He'd always liked to test his reflexes—often to Kelli's dismay. Despite the earlier need for repairs, he was totally confident in his ship, and the Mote performed beautifully, like an extension of him.

  As he careened along the alien's bloodstream, dodging corpuscles and choosing branch paths, his reactions were pumped. Devlin couldn't remember having experienced any greater rush of excitement, short of experimental test-flight training for the Air Force.

  Nobody else on board considered it fun, though.

  “Three more, corning after us!” Freeth called, staring out the window.

  Devlin jerked the rudders and lurched the ship to one side, avoiding the new trio of nanocritters that streaked out of a juncture of arteries. The Mote collided with a rubbery wall, ricocheted off, and smashed two of the fullerene-constructed devices into scrap.

  Making snap decisions, he guided the ship down membrane-lined passageways, between tissue walls. He turned the micro-vessel sideways to slip between the smallest cracks of fibrous muscles. He left the remaining nanohunter far behind, but the microscopic device appeared to be transmitting signals, calling for reinforcements.

  “More behind us,” Dr. Tyler called.

&nb
sp; “And one up ahead. Fasten your seat belt.”

  The nanocritters swarmed after them like pursuers from an old-fashioned Pac Man game. As a young cadet, he'd spent his share of hours playing videogames (strictly to develop strategy and hand-eye coordination, of course) … as well as too much time at home, when he could have been doing things with his wife. Now he hoped all those wasted hours would serve him well.

  Without compunction now, Tomiko used her lasers to blast at the aggressive machines. Components of wrecked nanocritters lay strewn in the alien's tissue, a wake of metal parts, as if a squad of robot Humpty Dumptys had fallen there.

  But the remaining microscopic hunters refused to break off the chase.

  Devlin took the Mote on a frantic flight along a striated forest of muscle fibers. The long, smooth cells looked like a packed mat of seaweed hanging down, thick and soft and red. When he couldn't dodge fast enough, Devlin crashed straight through the organic macramé, leaving scattered cells behind. He followed grooves and contours of tissue, away from the converging fleet of artificial devices.

  But the nanocritters kept coming.

  The ship glided through a filmy layer between the muscle mass and subcutaneous fat. When he passed over a wide rip in the musculature, two nanomachines burst out from below, where they'd been lurking in the crimson shadows. One struck the Mote's bottom hull like a cannonball, but ricocheted off without finding purchase for its articulated arms.

  Devlin swerved violently. A few loose instruments clattered to the deck of the main compartment. Tomiko fired her lasers, but missed as he spun through evasive maneuvers. “I can't believe this! They were waiting in ambush. How could they have known we were coming?”

  The stunned nano-attacker reoriented itself and joined the second carbon-lattice machine as they streaked into the filmy fluid on an intercept course. The nanocritters used no caution now, did not extend sensors, did not try to probe or understand.