***Antique jalopy, if you ask me, Boss. That version couldn’t break a hydrogen bond if his life depended on it***
Winger smiled. “Just got a raspberry from ANAD, guys. He doesn’t think much of ANAD 3.0 either. SOFIE, “ he commanded the sim system, “display locations of all atmospheric perturbations detected by BioShield in the last forty eight hours.”
The concave displays of the sim tank flickered and a map projection of the world came up in pieces. Small whirlpools danced along the upper Amazon, among an island chain in the south Pacific, in the central Congo and in the highlands of Tibet.
“Isolated pockets,” Kraft observed. “Widely separated.”
“For now,” Winger said. “SOFIE…best prediction for disposition of these disturbances over the next seventy-two hours….”
The displays changed again, this time showing larger whirlpools and more of them.
“I was afraid of that,” Kraft said. “BioShield data says the disturbances will grow…maybe even link up.”
“We’ve got to find out what we’re up against,” Winger said. “Where’s that toxic gas coming from…what’s modifying the air.”
“And is it a natural process,” Tallant added. “…or something else?”
“Red Hammer,” Winger shook his head. ‘I’d bet money on it. “
***Those demonio creatures have me worried, Boss….colonies of nanoscale mechanisms…gives me the creeps…***
“ANAD’s right,” Winger added. “We’ve got to find out what’s behind these creatures Dr. del Compo found.”
“Captain Winger,” Kraft looked curiously at the atomgrabber, “I know we approved implanting ANAD into containment in your shoulder, but hang it, it’s friggin’ bizarre when you get involved in one-way conversations.”
“Yeah, Wings,” said Tallant, “think you could clue us in once in awhile?”
Winger shrugged. “ANAD was just saying those creatures, demonio or whatever, that Dr. del Compo found give him the creeps.”
Kraft hmmpphhed and commanded SOFIE to put up the raw investigative files from the BioShield ‘bots that had detected the disturbances. “How can a device the size of a molecule get the creeps, for Chrissakes? It’s starting to act like my teen-aged daughter.”
Winger found himself defending the little assembler all the time. “Doc Frost says ANAD’s processor is that powerful…he’s got the cognitive abilities of a small child.”
“And the temperament too, sounds like,” Tallant said. “But what if you have to spank him?”
Winger reddened. “It’s not like that at all—“
“Never mind,” Kraft interrupted. He paced about the tank, studying the displays SOFIE had put up. Real-time feed from BioShield nanobots patrolling the Earth’s atmosphere showed up as undulating virtual cloud masses, as swarms of the nanoscale mechanisms probed and sniffed for illegal nanobotic activity, biohazards and environmental outlaws, all part of UNIFORCE’s new mandate in the wake of the Serengeti Factor pandemic a dozen years before. Isolated pockets of disturbances were highlighted, with the nature of threat attached as floating tags around dancing whirlpools. The whirlpools over central South America and the other places Camois had mentioned had no descriptive tags at all…only blank fields hovering nearby, as if BioShield couldn’t figure out what was going on.
“We’ve got to get a handle on this before it spreads too far,” the Battalion commander said. “Winger--?”
“Yes, sir?”
“You sit down with Tallant and put together a full ANAD team for insertion. People, equipment, tactics, the works. Pull from 1st Nano, and 1st Bio as well. We might just be looking at a counter-twist mission here and I want to be ready.”
Thinking of the demonios, and how severely the epidemic of twist, or pirated, rogue DNA had infected parts of the world, Winger nodded gravely. “You thinking these things could be a gene experiment gone bad, sir?”
“I don’t know what to think anymore. All I know is what I can see: BioShield’s run into something it can’t figure out and it can’t stop and people are dying because of it. That’s all we need to know. CINCQUANT’s given us our orders…now we have to execute.” His stomach churned at the scenarios they’d already played out…none of them had a happy ending. “UNIFORCE has given this thing a UNICON Plus priority. That means we move fast. Captain, I’m forming an ANAD detachment immediately. You’ll be in command but I’m pulling elements from anywhere I can. Get over to Mission Prep and get your gear ready for a little recon trip to Valencia. I’ll notify a hyperjet to stand by.”
“On my way,” Winger said. He and Tallant hustled out of Ops to head over to the Ready Room at Mission Prep, across the quadrangle, to go over personnel and gear.
On the sprint across the grassy expanse of the quad, Winger and Tallant ran headlong into Holt and Reinhart, from 1st Bio.
“Hey, Wings,” called Holt. “I hear you’re off to South America, with half my people. Sure you don’t need some help with all those creepy-crawly things?”
Winger was deep in thought, listening to ANAD chatter over his internal neural circuit.
***Looks like the real creeps are here, Boss. I guess virus-lickers can’t help it…what are they qualified for anyway…wiping cow’s asses? That’s all a virus is…a stupid cow…all bubble head of DNA and some lipids, grazing in a field of cells***
“I think we can manage it, Holt. Maybe your guys will learn some manners after a few missions with 1st Nano.”
They hustled along the pebbled path to Mission Prep, where expeditionary equipment for ANAD detachments was housed: hypersuits, HERF guns and coil-gun rounds by the thousands in the ordnance bunker, plus racks of Super-Fly entomopters for recon, MOB-net canisters for immobilizing the enemy, camou-fog and fully enabled interface controls ready to go.
Beyond the roof of the bunker lay the three liftjet hangars, A, B, and C, and beyond that, perfectly framed by the snow-covered mountain backdrop of the Snake Range, lay the north liftpad, where a sleek black hyperjet was veetoling in for a vertical touchdown.
“There’s our ride now, Holt. Hope your guys don’t mind riding rear seat to the elite.”
Holt snorted. “Elite, my ass. I’m just waiting for a chance to show you nano guys what a real combat outfit does for a living. Why don’t you stand down and let the adults take over? No sense assigning kids to do what real men do better.”
Winger tapped the soft skinpatch where the ANAD capsule had been implanted in his shoulder a year ago. “You want me to show you what my little brother here does to real men? It takes about two and half minutes…then we have to call Facility Services to come clean up the puddle of protoplasm that’s left.”
Dana Tallant turned and faced the 1st Bio puke nose to nose. “Look, Holtzie, lay off, will ya? This deal’s UNICON Plus…and you’re not invited.” She brusquely shoved the taller man back down the steps as they went inside.
“What a creep!” Winger said as they wound their way through corridors to the Battalion Ready Room.
***Let ‘em have it, Boss…me and my friends eat scum like that for breakfast***
Winger smiled at that. “Maybe so, ANAD, but right now, we’ve got some packing to do. You and me are taking a little trip across the Pond.”
Tallant veered off to sign herself into the ordnance bunker and check out enough ammo to cover the mission. Winger headed for the hypersuit lockers…they’d need twelve at least, and the programming still had to be updated.
***Hey, Boss, I’ve been thinking about those demonio creatures. I’ve got a theory--***
“Shoot, ANAD. I’m listening.” Winger pressed a few buttons on the wrist keypad of the first ‘suit and its servos whirred as it clamshelled open.
***The doctor said it was a colony of nanobots, kind of like me. I’ve got a theory why maybe BioShield didn’t detect any such bots until it was too late***
“And what might your theory be, ANAD
?”
***Just this: what if the ‘bots that make up the creature don’t really look and act like nanobots? What if they don’t produce the heat signature and atomic activity that I do when I replicate? What if they look just like ordinary molecules of air and dust, floating around like normal? Would BioShield even see them?***
Even though he had the cognitive ability of a twelve-year old, once in awhile ANAD hit on something that made you think. Johnny Winger paused in his checkout of the first hypersuit, dropping his head back out of the helmet and sitting on the bench seat that served as the control center of the suit.
“Maybe not until it was too late. I don’t know, ANAD…I hope that’s not true. From the very beginnings, BioShield was installed to be able to detect and prevent illegal nano outside of containment, just to keep the world safe, you know. The whole thing’s predicated on being able to detect nanobot activity….all assemblers produce atomic debris, heat, that sort of stuff. If you’re right and we’re dealing with ‘bots that can go about their work and leave no detectable trace—“ Winger shook his head. “—that’s bad news. Really bad news.”
***Sorry to bring bad news, Boss…but if I can think of it, somebody else can too***
CHAPTER 1
Northgate University, Pennsylvania, USA
Autonomous Systems Lab
October 2067 (one year earlier)
The theory was simple enough to state, though damnably hard to implement. The whole purpose of setting up the 1st Nanospace Battalion was to put into place an organization that could field a combat-ready unit of symbiotic man-machine fighting soldiers, fully ANAD-ized man-machines with augmented capabilities, able to fight at all levels from the world of atoms to outer space. The general thrust of the evolving relationship between the humans and the ANAD assemblers inside 1st Nano was to meld and merge them ever more tightly into a symbiotic but still cohesive and effective fighting unit.
Dr. Irwin Frost, of the Autonomous Systems Lab, and the engineers of Quantum Corps were looking for true combat symbiosis, allocating to the human those tasks that he did best and to ANAD those tasks the assembler did best.
Johnny Winger was to be the first guinea pig.
Winger was detailed to Northgate University in the early fall of ’67, for the purpose of undergoing a unique, history-making operation. If all went well, when the operation was done, Winger would wear in his shoulder an implanted containment capsule within which would reside a fully-capable ANAD master assembler. The plan was that Johnny Winger and ANAD would evolve toward a symbiotic combat system.
After the operation, the development plan called for a steady stream of tactical wargames and experiments to test the combat capabilities of such a blended and augmented soldier.
But first, the operation had to succeed.
The Autonomous Systems Lab was located on the fourth floor of Galen Hall. Galen was one of Northgate’s first buildings, anchoring one corner of the original grassy quadrangle. A turreted, neo-Gothic monstrosity, the building had been turned over to the Lab and several non-degree granting departments several years before. Below the fourth floor, freshmen English students struggled with term papers on Dante’s Divine Comedy. Above them, the maze of tanks and piping of the Lab’s Containment Facility would rival any freshman’s nightmare vision of Hell itself.
Dr. Irwin Frost was chief of the Autonomous Systems Lab, birthplace of the original ANAD. He was mid-sixtyish and balding, with a love for old flannel shirts beneath the dirty smocks he seemed to sleep in. Frost had invented autonomous nanoscale assemblers in the early ‘50s and was unquestionably the driving force behind ANAD and the growth of the nanomech world. He had a father’s love for his infinitesimal creations and an avuncular manner with his latest protégé, Captain Johnny Winger.
For Winger, coming back to Northgate was always like an old homecoming. Even Frost’s associate, Dr. Mary Duncan, a petite Scotswoman, was on hand.
Johnny Winger studied the imager screen in front of him. Suspended in a nutrient bath inside Containment, the ANAD master looked like some kind of futuristic space probe. The basic polyhedral structure was still there, but scores of molecule chains undulated gently in the bath currents, chains Winger didn’t recognize. He looked in vain for the bond disrupters, the enzymatic knife, all the tools he’d become familiar with.
“He’s changed, Doc. I don’t recognize all those chains…he’s got gizmos I’ve never seen before. Are they new end effectors or what?”
Frost smiled. “I regenerated a new master, Johnny. You didn’t leave me with a whole lot after Serengeti Factor. I’ve been tinkering under the hood, as you like to put it.”
“I’ll say…” Winger pointed to a pair of linked hydrogen radicals on the screen. “And these doodads--?
Frost ticked off the changes. “New and improved, Johnny. Those are stiffened diamondoid effectors, with ‘stickier’ covalent bond ends, radicals and carbenes. Better grabbing ability. Look just above the effectors…see those U-shaped gadgets?”
Winger looked, turning to Frost with a puzzled look. “Some kind of grabbers?”
“Extensible fullerene hooks, for more secure grasping and attaching. I modified a ribosome design I had seen. Sort of improved on Mother Nature.”
Winger shook his head. “ANAD’s really souped up, Doc. What about under the hood?”
“Faster quantum processor, with a faster executing basic replication algorithm. I’ve been doing my homework, Johnny, studying what makes INDRA and Serengeti and other assemblers tick. Plus I’ve added direct sequences from several viral genomes…nobody replicates faster than viruses.”
Winger’s brow wrinkled. “Is that safe, Doc?”
Frost shrugged. “As safe as any weapon…in the right hands. Plus ANAD’s interface and communication system has been upgraded. That quantum coupler you seized at Engebbe Valley, from the Red Hammer agent, was quite a device.”
Mary Duncan sipped gently at a cup of steaming tea. “It had us stumped for a long time, it did. But we manage to reverse-engineer the blasted thing.”
“—finally got it to work,” Frost said proudly. “Now ANAD has one too…you’ll be able to effect some control over his basic operations just by direct thought…once you’ve been trained properly.”
Winger shook his head. “This whole idea gives me the creeps. Don’t get me wrong…ANAD and me are pals. We understand each other well. We kind of think alike, I guess, like brothers. Except I never had a brother—“
Mary Duncan put a hand on Winger’s arm. “Don’t fret, Johnny. The operation will go fine. We’ve done countless sims over the last few months.”
“That’s what worries me. All the sims in the world can’t equal the real thing. How’s this quantum coupler work? It seemed like magic to me when we ran into it at Engebbe.”
Frost diagrammed his explanation on a board. “The coupler allows ANAD to send extremely large bandwidths of information of all types—all senses, such as visual, olfactory, audio, tactile as well as direct sensing of the molecular environment—directly to a special hypersuit headset that connects with the proper sensory channel of the wearer or directly into a special ANAD junction inside the wearer’s skull, a sort of server that routs the data stream to the corresponding lobes of the brain.”
“You mean I could see…sense…exactly what ANAD senses?”
Frost nodded. “In a way. You and ANAD will be coupled in a quantum sense…exchanging entanglement states, to use the correct wording. ANAD now has a quantum coupler and multiplexer embedded in his processor core. The quantum states that represent what he senses go through this coupler to an interface, which will be part of your implant. This interface will disentangle the quantum state signals from ANAD, send the signals on to a buffer that transforms them into something your brain can accept—specific voltages and ionic concentrations—and then splits the buffered signals into patterns of firing neurons for d
ifferent sensory channels, the final direct coupling into your sensory cortex.”
Winger’s head spun just thinking about it. “If you say so, Doc. I have just one question…will it work?”
Mary Duncan laughed softly. She handed him a small cup. “Just drink this, Johnny. It’ll relax you. Here, why don’t you go ahead and lie down and get comfortable.”
Winger hoisted himself onto a gurney and lay back, sniffing the liquid Dr. Duncan had given him. “What is it…some kind of Scottish ale?”
“Just a spot of Burma tea,” she told him, fluffing pillows as he situated himself. “And a bit of glasseye mixed in.”
Winger downed the drink and lay his head back, closing his eyes. But before he had a chance to open them again and ask another question, he was already spiraling down a very, deep dark black hole.
The operation was a success but the patient awoke dizzy and disoriented. The first thing Johnny Winger remembered seeing was a blizzard. He lay on the gurney and let the sensations flood over him.
It was sleeting but the sleet was different. Different sizes and shapes careened at him, as if blown by wind, buffeting him with cross currents and gusts. He leaned forward, squinting to see, but it was too strong. Johnny dropped to his knees and began crawling, then swimming, against the surging flow that surrounded him. The sleet pelted and stung with every imaginable shape, cubes and pyramids and polygons and weird octahedral lattices, streaming by in a roaring wind.
Then he opened his eyes.
The first face he saw was that of Dr. Mary Duncan. Other faces were nearby, but they were fuzzy and indistinct. Duncan’s grandmotherly smile materialized out of the sleet. She offered a paper cup of some liquid, which he accepted, swallowing experimentally, then with more assurance. It tasted brassy but warm, and it soothed him.
Time seemed congealed but it passed and with the passing of time, consciousness settled into something more familiar, like trying on old clothes.
“How long was I out?” he murmured. There was a soreness in his left shoulder and upper back. He soon became aware of a large bandage back there.
Dr. Duncan and Doc Frost were both there, gazing down at him. “About four hours, Johnny. It’s night time now. How do you feel?”
Johnny Winger and the Amazon Vector Page 3