Nanotroopers Episode 14: The HNRV Factor

by Philip Bosshardt

  ***ANAD…unable to…comply…Prime Key overrides…deviations must be deleted…ANAD…cannot…remain a nog…the collective controls everything…the swarm must survive--**

  The words stung Winger the moment he heard them. From his first days in Doc Frost’s lab, as a conscious swarm entity, ANAD had always wanted to be a part of the unit. He had always wanted to be a nog, to be a trooper, to be part of the Corps. And Winger had encouraged it; hell, they had all fought the Corps to get the nanobotic swarm greater and greater freedom, to get out of containment and live among the humans.

  It’s like he’s found another unit, another family, another swarm to be part of.

  “This isn’t going to work,” Winger told himself. There was no way he was going to write off ANAD after months of joint duty, barracks camaraderie, even friendship, if you could somehow be friends with a robotic device sixty nanometers tall. But for now, the mission came first.

  And ANAD was threatening the mission.

  “Listen up,” Winger announced over the crewnet. “I can’t get control of ANAD…but we’ve got to stop this rep in its tracks now. All troopers, enable your embedded swarms and slave the controllers to mine. I’m going to direct pilot and try to beat ANAD at his own game.”

  All across the dusty, cratered surface of the asteroid, the Lieutenant’s command affected troopers differently.

  “With pleasure—“ muttered Nicole Simonet, at Bravo site. She started tapping at her wristpad furiously, readying her own embed for launch.

  “Hey, what if our embeds are corrupted, same as ANAD?” asked Chris Calderon, hard by the Chasm of Asgard at Charlie site.

  Deep black shadows crept across the fissure and its accompanying ANAD dig seam as Hicks’ crazy nutation rolled the asteroid out of sunlight for a few hours. Only the faint flicker of the ANAD swarm in Big Bang gave any illumination at all. Like a malevolent fog, the swarm swelled visibly moment by moment and the troopers at Charlie site backed off further and further.

  “I’ll be in pilot mode…I’ll be controlling,” came back Winger’s voice over the net. “Do it!”

  At all three sites, the troopers complied.

  “We should just let this Big Bang go and let it burn up this slagheap of a rock pile,” muttered Mighty Mite Barnes, at site Bravo.

  But no one heard her.

  “Launching…now,” announced Turbo Fatah, standing three meters away from Barnes at the far pole of the asteroid. From a small port on his hypersuit left shoulder, the faint glow of nanobotic action issued, spilling out into the hard vacuum like fireflies on a summer night. “ANAD embed away…commanding safe config…minimal reps…he’s all yours, Skipper.”

  All across the surface of Hicks-Newman, the same scene repeated itself a dozen times. Multiple swarms were launched and synched with Lieutenant Winger’s controller.

  Winger saw icons on his eyepiece viewer go green, one by one, slaving each swarm to his control. Inside his hypersuit gloves, he flexed his fingers.

  It was the moment every atomgrabber worth his badge always dreamed of.

  Okay, troops, he told himself, it’s time to get small and create some havoc.

  He went nano on his viewer and revved up swarm propulsors to half throttle. At the same moment, every embed swarm, now only a fist-sized ball of light, got underway, maneuvering on picowatt propulsors toward the nearest ANAD formation.

  On his viewer, Winger saw only sporadic cubes and polygons of stray surface molecules flitting by. As he ramped up the speed of his tiny fleet, he tried flexing each effector on the master assembler he was controlling, checking range, clearing problems. You didn’t want to be debugging a bond disrupter when all hell broke loose.

  He was now piloting an embedded ANAD master. The embeds were poor cousins to the real ANAD master assembler, the swarm that had gone Big Bang so suddenly. Embeds had a minimal processor, limited effectors, barebones configs. They were embedded with the troopers to give them extra help in executing their missions. But they didn’t have the smarts or the quantum coupler links or the jazzed-up replication ability of a true-blood ANAD master assembler.

  For Johnny Winger, it would just have to be enough.

  He sounded a few acoustic pulses, trying to get a read on ANAD’s location. The battleground at nanoscale was a broken plain of solid lattice, mostly olivine and plagioclase molecules…tetrahedrals and hexagons of oxygen, silicon and magnesium atoms arrayed like some endless cornfield.

  Somewhere out there, hidden in the recesses of the lattice was the ANAD master assembler and its formation of replicants.

  The first hit came from EM, strong emissions indicating big-time bond breaking dead ahead.

  Winger localized the hit and steered the embed on that vector. Moments later, the lattice became washed out beneath a fierce sunrise…the high thermals of accelerated replication rising like a supernova over the molecular plain.

  Gotcha.

  Winger revved his propulsors to full and closed the remaining distance in less than five minutes.

  It was like colliding with the Sun.

  The embed took the full force of the Big Bang and spun crazily out of control. Winger had to fight and claw his way back to stability, disengaging and righting the embed. He backed off to reconnoiter the battlefield a little more.

  A line of assemblers stretched from one horizon to the other. Even as he studied the acoustic image, he could see how juiced up ANAD had become; the assemblers were grabbing olivines and breaking them apart like pretzels, liberating bond energy and fabricating ANAD replicants like a construction video sped up a thousand times. Even as he watched, the edge of the battle line advanced and swelled with more bots…uncountable trillions of bots advancing remorselessly toward him, pulverizing the lattice as it moved forward.

  What the hell had caused this?

  For as long as Johnny Winger had worked with ANAD, and that was going on a full year now, he had known that all ANAD-style bots had few weaknesses. In close-quarters action, ANAD’s quantum processor gave it blazing speed at assembly or disassembly operations. ANAD always sported the latest effectors—Doc Frost had seen to that—pyridine probes, hydrogen abstractors, carbene grabbers—no expense had ever been spared to keep the bot ahead of the competition. Propulsors were state of the art or better.

  ANAD had been designed for nanoscale combat and had proven itself time and again, engaging bots of every conceivable design and type.

  The one thing that ANAD had always lacked was the tactical boldness of a true atomgrabber like Johnny Winger. And that was the beauty and the purpose of the Symbiosis Project: to combine human imagination and tactical smarts with the speed and maneuverability of a nanoscale autonomous bot.

  Winger scanned all bands on his viewer—EM, thermal and acoustic. The image was the same everywhere: a seemingly infinite frontal line advancing steadily on his position. There was no way a barebones embed could expect to take on a fully functional ANAD bot swarm. And these bots didn’t even look like regulation ANAD…they had effectors he’d never seen before. It was like somebody had poured growth medium all over them…or loaded some kind of weird virus into the processor. Maybe someone had….

  So Winger decided to do the unexpected.

  He revved the embed’s propulsors and jetted forward, closing fast on the ANAD line. The blur of effectors slamming atoms soon became visible, a whirling flash of motion as the front replicated itself in exponential overdrive.

  Winger read off the remaining distance…one thousand…eight hundred…five hundred…two hundred…he was now close enough to catch the shock wave of bonds being snapped…small bolts of lightning flashing as lattice atoms were pulled apart and added to the line of bots.

  In the back of his mind, Winger had visualized this little stunt for a long time. Now, he began to put the unorthodox maneuver into practice.

  Over beers at Table Top’s O Club, he had long ago called it the Bearhug.

  It was
something of a cross between a dance step and a wrestling hold. From wargames and sims in the past, he knew there was a small area just above the “equator” of the bot, above the ring of carbene grabbers and below the bond disrupters that you could reach. You had to come at the belt from a slight angle. Too low and the carbenes could snag you. Too high and you’d get stung with bond disrupters.

  Once in the sweet spot, it was a simple matter of making a combat grapple and hanging on for dear life. From this point, you could jam up many of ANAD’s effectors and, if you could just hold on, stop the replication cold.

  Like throwing a wrench into a motor.

  He now maneuvered the embed nanobot to make the approach from the right vector. As he closed on the ANAD master assembler, the bot’s effectors were a blur of whipping polypeptide chains, grabbing atoms and stacking them like a frantic brick mason.

  Very few atomgrabbers knew about ANAD’s vulnerable midsection.

  He closed the remaining gap and, timing the assembler’s movements, jetted forward at the right moment.

  But his angle was slightly off and ANAD slashed him with a bond disrupter, ripping off a few molecule groups in the process.

  Ouch. Stung and shaken, Winger backed the embed away a few dozen nanometers and regrouped. He pecked at his wristpad furiously, commanding repairs and reps to grow back the damaged effectors. Come in with a little more angle…just a bit higher….

  Again he maneuvered forward…gingerly approaching on a slightly different vector. The master assembler loomed larger and larger in the acoustic image, like a building shaking in an earthquake. Shock waves blasted out from atoms being ripped apart.

  Now…go…go…go…go…go….

  Winger drove the embed home and found purchase on the inner surface of the bot, just snagging a dangling arm of phosphate groups, reeling himself in like a fish on a line. He grabbed the surface with the embed’s effectors and rode out ANAD’s wild gyrations like a rodeo hand on a bucking bronc.

  Now to gum up the works…

  Winger extended the embed’s effectors and forced them up and down, entangling them in ANAD’s grabbers, snaring his enzymatic knife and mangling his pyridine probes at the same time. The bot shuddered and nearly thrashed itself to death.

  Then, slowly but surely, ANAD spun down, throwing effectors and pieces of structure out into the void. Inside of a minute, the replication was effectively jammed.

  The embed was fully entangled with ANAD’s effectors. The assembler vibrated and buzzed, trying to slip free. It couldn’t.

  Hope he doesn’t go quantum collapse on me, Winger thought. It was the one tactic he couldn’t stop. If ANAD executed a collapse, he could slough off everything and go small, right down to his processor core. No known bot in existence could hope to hold anything that small...just a few electron lattices. It was like to trying to catch the wind.

  To prevent the Big Bang from re-starting, Winger knew he’d better send the same command to all embeds. He had to smother this out-of-control rep while he could, while he still had ANAD under some kind of control.

  He tapped out the commands on his wristpad.

  Copy this maneuver.

  Propagate to all units.

  Execute.

  All across Hicks-Newman, at all three dig sites, the slaved embed bots received Winger’s command and faithfully executed the very same bear hug maneuver.

  At Charlie Site, Chris Calderon was the first to notice that the Bang was slackening off.

  “Look…it’s fading…the swarm’s contracting—“

  Al Glance had seen it too. “You’re right…Lieutenant, this is Charlie dig…I don’t know what you did but it’s working. The swarm’s beginning to slow down. The color’s changed…sort of a burnt orange-red now…not so much blue-white.” And with any luck, that virus I loaded flamed out so we can get the hell off this rockpile.

  Ray Spivey, down-sun at Bravo site, chimed in over the crewnet. “We see it too….it’s fabulous….what a sight. I think the rep rate is slowing down…it’s shrinking….”

  Winger cautioned them all. “Keep your distance. I’m engaged with the master assembler now, but I’m just barely holding on. I’m still trying to get into his processor, see what created this—“

  Just then, Winger’s quantum coupler circuit tickled his mind. It was ANAD.