***General Winger…if you will pardon me for saying so, I detect emotional distress…analytics indicate forty-five percent increase in skin conductance, combined with stress lines in your face…spikes in ocular saccades beyond baseline…perhaps there is some way I may be of assistance?***
Winger watched the swarm drift slightly across the study. It really was an excellent likeness of Doc Frost. The same dimples in his cheeks. The same faint smirk…saying ‘I know things you don’t know and I’d love to tell you,’ the same slightly off-kilter nose, a childhood injury, now faithfully reproduced by the config engine that formed up the swarm.
Doc III was no angel, in any sense of the word, but he was of the same ilk. A cloud of nanobotic mechs…literally, an autonomous swarm of assemblers at nanometer scale, controlled by a configuration processor and programmed to form up any likeness for which a decent template existed.
“I’m sorry, Doc…I do feel a little down. Hell, I actually feel like a dinosaur.”
Johnny Winger and the Europa Quandary Page 21
