Nanotime

by Bart Kosko

“That’s what they do. Did you know that Southern California now wants to impose a new communication tax every time you speak in the state if the wireless message you send passes through its airspace? You believe that? Every time you speak?”

  “John. I am serious. And I mean your federal government. Odds are they are trying to crack this line right now.”

  John felt it in his solar plexus. The state was watching him.

  He knew they had watched him in college. That much they had not blacked out from the FBI file that he had fought to get under the old Freedom of Information Act. The law said the Federal Bureau of Investigation had to give him his file within two weeks. It had taken them almost three years. They blamed the delay on case backlog. Yet they gave one of John’s classmates her file in two months even though she and John had filed in the same week.

  The state had files on John all the way back to his birth to an unwed Southern Baptist teenage girl who believed in adoption over abortion and whose name the state would never tell him. John had taken the name Grant from the last of three couples he had lived with by the time he had moved into an apartment in Phoenix with some older friends.

  That was when he was 14. The Grants were now an older couple in their early 60s. John had not seen them since they surprised him by coming to his high school graduation. He sent them copies of his bachelor’s and master’s degrees on the days he got them and thanked the old Grant couple again for their name.

  Now the state was watching him again.

  “Maybe it’s all the time I spend in Boulder City with Ramachandra and those civil servant fucks.”

  “No. This goes beyond routine security. Za’hal confirmed it.”

  “The IDF confirmed it? So is my government watching Richard too?”

  “Not that we know. That’s why you have to keep this to yourself. We think it may be industrial espionage.”

  “On whose behalf? Your Texas oil friends?”

  “Who knows? But you have to redouble your security procedures. Don’t tell anyone except Richard that we have moved up the demo. No mistakes.”

  “Not even my fiancée?”

  “Not even her.”

  “Is this why you moved it up? To beat the spooks?”

  “John. Try not to be so paranoid.”

  “Why? The Saudis wiped out your test lab and my government is watching me. Is there anything else I should worry about?”

  “No. See you on Thursday.”

  “Will you be there?”

  “By remote. Have to go now. L’hitra’ot.”

  “Wait,” John said.

  “What?”

  “Did you ever study alpha-stable neural nets?”

  “As a kid.”

  “They didn’t have those when you were a kid.”

  “Is this business-related?”

  “Maybe. I’m trying to track down a neural theorist in your neck of the desert. Hamid Tabriz. Remember him? I’m sure you have files on him. Whatever happened to him?”

  “You belong to enough cults already. You want to join his?”

  “I want to see if he has published any more neural theorems. We might use them for the intermediate reactions.”

  “John. Never cast a hook at a fisherman. But I will tell you something about Dr. Tabriz that you don’t know.”

  “But not what I want to know.”

  “If you want to know more, then come join the Israeli Army.”

  “Then I could really take orders from you.”

  “Do you want me to tell you or not?”

  “Yes.”

  “Tabriz once killed an old man in a rival Sufi brotherhood.”

  “No shit,” John said.

  “No shit. And he was just 13. What were you doing when you were 13? Shalom.”

  The windshield turned to white snow and popped back to the quilt of windows of WNN channels. A smiling Jism flashed on the windshield and then dissolved.

  “Jism. Did you add that to your neural intuition?”

  Yes. Dr. Tabriz seems as precocious in his socialization as he was in mastering the art of constructing derivations correctly.

  “Jesus. I can’t believe they killed Alon. And now they’re watching us. I told you they were. Can you noise up our comm lines?”

  Yes.

  “Make sure you don’t grow any stochastic resonance. That will just boost our signal strength to them.”

  Of course. John. I am on your side.

  “That’s good to know. What about Eytan? Is he on our side? How much did Mr. Potbelly lie this time?”

  He spoke the truth only 77% on average in terms of his patterns of vocal stress. The pattern of distruth was almost constant throughout the conversation. In fairness to Eytan I have to point out that we have only a low confidence measure of this estimate. He has exceptional self-control.

  “Jism. You are truly a man’s best friend. I would sure hate to swim through the multimedia sea without you.”

  Thank you. Shall I resume the Bruckner?

  “Yeah. Thanks.”

  My pleasure.

  “So Eytan and his self-control fed us a stack of 23% lies this time. And he jumps up the demo date on us and I still have to go by and see Denise. Did you hear what he said? ‘We’ll mourn later.’ Alon used to joke that Eytan was his illegitimate uncle. He said Eytan would keep the bad guys off him. Shit. Eytan couldn’t care less that Alon is dead. Eytan just wants to do his soldier’s duty and turn in a good report at the end of the year. He doesn’t even have any equity in the deal. That Eytan is a real son of a bitch.”

  He has a completely fashioned will.

  Chapter 9

  Boca Raton

  Florida

  The blue Gulf Stream flows past Miami and then moves closer to shore on its way north. That was why the scuba diving and snorkeling was better at Boca Raton than at Miami. The Gulf Stream kept the water cleaner and bluer and helped feed the coral reefs. Most tourists thought it was because Miami had more trash and nanotreated sewage in its waters.

  Now the Cuban oil tanker El Hombre sailed up the blue stream on its way from Galveston to an oil refinery in Savannah.

  Captain Jorge Alvarez sat in the control room of the Hombre and flew over Boca Raton in his virtual-reality headset. Real-time satellite data gave him a true bird’s-eye view of the green beach resort city and the old pink Boca Hotel. The view took him back to his youth in Florida with the Cuban exiles.

  Alvarez had once worked in Boca Raton as a golf caddie. His baker father had gotten him the summer job from one of his rich Cuban-exile customers. Alvarez loved walking through the soft green golf courses then and he loved flying over them now. The VR system had to interpolate its own fine detail from the satellite data to maintain the privacy of the golfers.

  Alvarez swooped down into the soft green fractal grass. He lay in the false grass and touched the ribbed muscles of his false stomach. His real stomach was a poor mix of flab and black hair but it was now hard and hairless to the touch.

  A siren pierced his lucid dream.

  First mate Ron Garcia ran in the control room and helped Alvarez take off the VR helmet.

  “Leaks!” Garcia said. “There are holes in the ship!”

  Alvarez followed him to the door and stopped short. Dozens of small gray holes covered the aluminum deck of the green tanker. The holes grew as he watched. The holes dripped gray goo at their edges and left only empty space in their centers. The larger holes grew faster than the smaller ones.

  Crewmen shouted and ran around the holes to the two lifeboats that hung on the port side of the ship. Two crewmen held chrome fire extinguishers and sprayed the large gray hole on a steel staircase. The hole ate the white carbon dioxide foam along with the cast steel.

  Just then a young black crewman from Guyana screamed when he slipped. His right foot passed through one of the growing rings of gray goo. His boot and foot became part of the goo. The smart superacid ate his leg faster than the gray ring grew. In seconds the goo had eaten throug
h his stomach. Only then did he pass out from the searing burn on his way to full molecular disintegration.

  Alvarez knew then that he was up against a superacid and that he would lose.

  Superacids had once helped produce high-octane unleaded gas. They froze rapid chemical reactions among charged hydrocarbon molecules and had friendly trade names like Magic Acid. Yet even the early superacids based on fluoride compounds were still trillions of times more acidic than sulfuric acid. The new smart superacids could freeze select reactions and speed up or change others. Computers could program them to destroy target compounds and to ignore or even enhance neighboring compounds.

  The smart superacids filtered matter.

  Alvarez ran back to the control room and told the chief engineer to send an all-band SOS message and to beam the deck video images of the nanomeltdown to the U.S. Coast Guard Atlantic satellite. He turned and saw a gray hole the size of a nickel in the middle of the floor. He gave the order to abandon the ship and strapped on an orange life preserver.

  Captain Alvarez followed the control crew out the door and saw that the Hombre had started to sink.

  Again he stood at his command post in the doorway and watched the huge holes grow at a geometric rate as the ship jerked now from side to side. He looked down at the deep blue water of the Gulf Stream and saw the black oil pour into it. The oil would paint the rich beaches of Boca Raton black and end his career.

  Right now his career did not matter.

  Alvarez ran down a staircase to join the men jumping overboard. The boats from Boca would get there in minutes to pick them up. Let the new Cuban government jail him. He just did not want to burn to death as the young black crewman had and who was now part of the dripping gray goo of disassembled molecules.

  Twenty crewmen fought to get in the first lifeboat before it had lowered. Captain Alvarez ordered the men to disperse and jump in the sea. They ignored him.

  He pushed two of the men overboard. The others still ignored him and the ship made loud wrenching sounds as it rolled and started to come apart. Alvarez wanted to jump but he had always sworn he would be the last to leave the ship.

  So he tried to push a third Cuban off the edge.

  The Cuban panicked and slammed the metal clasp of a clear plastic clipboard through the bridge of Alvarez’s nose. That knocked the captain off his feet. Alvarez stood but just as quickly had a short blackout from the lack of blood to his head. He fell to the deck in his own blood. Alvarez stood and fell three more times and then resigned to crawl to the edge and roll off.

  He did not see the blue TV helicopter that hovered above him and filmed his ordeal.

  The two women in the helicopter turned to watch two giant holes merge into a large empty figure-8. When they looked back at Alvarez his hands were gone. He found the strength to crouch and jump overboard but that did not stop the superacid. He never surfaced.

  The Hombre sank in pieces in less than a minute.

  The superacid had disassembled each piece long before it would have sunk to the bottom. The word spread quickly among the growing ring of ski and fishing boats that the mysterious acid did not eat oil or water. It did not even eat the crewmen who had made it safely to the salty blue water.

  The superacid left only a huge surface puddle of over five million gallons of crude oil.

  Chapter 10

  Near Homer Mountain

  Mojave Desert

  California

  “Jism! That looks like my molecule!”

  I am afraid that I cannot agree. There are no lasers to sustain the intermediate reactions. This molecular agent seems self-sustaining.

  “But the shearing force. Look at that tanker!”

  John. Stay calm. Mere agreement in effect does not constitute agreement in cause.

  “Yeah. You’re right. And it leaves the water alone instead of taking it apart.”

  John Grant watched the gray goo eat and sink the Hombre. The image took up half his windshield. Most of the windows on the other half showed the meltdown from other points of view. One small window still showed the WNN report on overpopulation in Africa and South America that John had been watching before Jism brought him the news flash on the Hombre.

  John looked up as the Jeep slowly braked for the border crossing.

  The Jeep worked its way even more slowly to the system of small brown air-conditioned guard booths. Two electric cars shot past from the other side of the highway as they crossed into Nevada without stopping. John’s Jeep was the only car to enter the state of Southern California from the Nevada side.

  The Caltrans Authority computer took control of the Jeep’s road sensors and navigation units and guided the Jeep to the one manned guard booth.

  “I still don’t like the timing,” John said. “Why this kind of environmental nanoterrorism just after a nanonuclear blast at the Dhahran oil fields? It looks like a pattern with the same cause.”

  I share your suspicion. The use of a new nanodisintegrator is disturbing in the extreme.

  “That smiling crook,” John said as he looked through the border crossing to the welcoming sign on the other side.

  Governor Juan Torres smiled at the left side of the large clear plastic sign that read

  Welcome to the 51st state in the Union!

  SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA

  The Compassion State

  Please follow all rules

  John could just glimpse the four signs behind it that listed the rules for driving through the East Mojave Desert Park. The glimpse made him shake his head.

  He would never make it at this rate.

  John needed a full million dollars to buy his freedom from the United States federal government. That would more than pay for his share of the national debt. And it would pay for the stiff exit penalty that a Green Democrat senator from Montana had charged for his swing vote on the bill.

  A million dollars would free him of federal sales and income taxes. It would also free him of almost a third of the laws in the hundreds of thousands of pages in the Federal Register. The FBI could still arrest John if he robbed a bank or kidnapped someone or broke some other federal law against fraud or violent crime. But they could not put him in their active files until then. The buyout came with one free use of the FBI and a discount rate for services after that. He would still have to obey all the laws of his state of residence. That was least hardest to do in Nevada.

  Now the Saudis had bombed his Eilat test site. John suspected something else was wrong but he was not sure what.

  There was always the problem of money. John had no more savings left than when he had gotten his master’s degree. The patent had gone through after three years but John had had to borrow from Denise to pay for it and to build and market the prototype software system.

  Denise sat with Richard and John on the three-person board of their three-person company. She held only stock options now and no stock yet. John never knew if she would side with him or against him on the board. She and Richard had already made him change the firm’s name from Black Sun to Water Dragon. Soon the child would come and Denise would goad John to marry her and live with her full-time in Southern California. He feared she would do many things to his fleeting liberty and do them in the name of the child.

  “Jism.”

  Yes?

  “Did you ever think I would get married? Or have a kid?”

  Jism’s blue-eyed image flashed on a small windshield window. Jism smiled.

  Of course I did. A family will help you grow.

  “The old ball and chain. I’m too young to get married. Jism. You got married. I’ve asked you this before but I keep coming back to it in my head. How did you estimate the costs and benefits of that loss of liberty?”

  John. Those brief years made up the happiest moments of my life.

  “You don’t hear that said much these days. Hardly anyone gets married except Mormons and Catholics and movie stars. But people sure don’t let that get in their way of putting new branches
on their gene trees. Just keep adding a couple hundred million more babies a year to the world. Jism.”

  Yes?

  “There still is something you have never told me. How old were you when you lost your cherry?”

  Jism only grinned.

  “You don’t know how many goddamn biographies on you I read looking for the answer to that. Not one mentioned it. And you know damn well that when and how you lose your virginity is one of the bricks in a man’s character. I think you married as a virgin but I can’t prove it. But let me ask you a serious question. Why didn’t you and Harriet Taylor ever have children?”

  There was not enough time.

  Jism faded and John felt like a fool for talking to his intelligent agent. He knew he should not pry into the private life of another man. And he felt sorry for the great mind that had never passed on its genes.

  John wanted to turn back and just let Richard send him the movie and the dam demo programs. There was still time to go back to Searchlight and hike up the hill to the old man’s gold mine. But that would risk the whole deal with the Israelis.

  It would also defy Eytan Baum’s new orders about the demo and their contract also forbade such public transmissions. Israeli intelligence would find out. Then Baum would find out and that would be the end of Water Dragon. Baum joked a lot but he would not stand for someone ignoring his orders. John knew he had to go Los Angeles and prepare the demo for Baum and sleep with Denise and get back to the dam. He had less than two days to do it and do it all right.

  The Jeep stopped next to the manned brown guard booth.

  “Window,” John said.

  The window went down and John swung his feet around and sat up.

  A thin old man in a green uniform leaned out of the booth. He pointed a black MRI gun at the left side of John’s head and kept his eyes on his console screens. The gun pulsed radio and magnetic waves that realigned the hydrogen atoms in John’s head. The raisin in John’s ear could detect some of the electric field that the atoms sent back to the gun.

  “Don’t be nervous,” the guard said. “Nervousness shows up in purple. Okay. Any fruits or vegetables?”