by Joseph Rhea
“Then why work here at all?”
“No real choice,” she said. “The Government banned all use of self-replicating nanotechnology after the Plague. They currently don’t even allow any form of controlled testing, which is why he spent so much time in here.”
“They’re just worried about the ‘Gray Goo’ scenario,” he said, dusting off his suit.
“What’s that?”
“Nanotech out of control. Someone creates a bunch of carbon-based nanobugs that do nothing but replicate themselves as fast as possible, and releases them into the world. Some people have estimated that such a swarm would replicate so fast that it would consume every atom of carbon in the Earth’s biosphere in less than five years. All that would be left of the Earth would be a dead planet covered by thick gray film of nanobugs. That’s the gray goo.”
“I’ve never heard of that. Your father made the objectors to nanotechnology seem like a bunch of Neanderthals.”
“Well, since this suit is silicon-based instead of carbon, there’s no chance of that happening. Besides, if things go bad in a simulation, you can always just make a new one.” He shaded his eyes from the bright desert sun and stared at the sky. “So, do you have any idea how we get back up there?”
“No idea,” she admitted. “But, as long as we’re here, we might as well look around. These survey ships had a number of aircraft, so some of the crew might’ve escaped before the ship went down.”
“If we find a working aircraft, maybe we can fly back into that opening,” he said as he looked around at the desert. “All right, where do we start looking?”
She started to walk toward a large crack in the side of the saucer, but then stopped and looked back at him. “It would probably be faster if we split up. I’ll look inside the ship.”
“So, what should I do?”
“You check out that fort. If any of the crew made it out alive, they might be in there. If not, someone there must’ve witnessed what happened.”
She started to walk away but he called after her. “People are bound to ask me what I’m doing here, and how I got here. What do I tell them?”
She smiled back at him. “You’re a clever boy—you’ll think of something.” When he didn’t smile back, she added, “Don’t worry. I’ve spent a lot of time in these simulations and the people are quite harmless.” With that, she turned and entered the ship.
He wondered if he should follow her. Would she think him a coward; too afraid to venture out on his own?
“Put your hands in the air and turn around slowly,” a deep voice said from behind him.
Alek turned around and saw a dozen large men dressed in tattered desert clothing. They each had a rifle pointed at his chest. Oh yes, he thought as he carefully raised his hands, quite harmless.
o o o
As soon as Maya entered the Survey Vessel, she realized that what she told Alek wasn’t quite true. Maybe I should’ve said “mostly harmless,” she thought to herself, remembering her last harrowing time in one of Cyberdrome’s simulations.
She considered going back for Alek, but then realized that this wasn’t the same world, and he could take care of himself. Instead, she headed straight for the computer center. If it was still intact, she could download the sensor records of the last few minutes before the ship lost power. That might tell her who was onboard before the crash and where they had gone.
With all the internal damage, it took her twenty minutes to reach the computer center. She found the huge vault-like door open, which baffled her, since it was the most secure room in the ship. She slipped inside the opening and quietly surveyed the room. The power was still on, which meant that at least one of the ship’s half dozen reactors was still operational.
The room appeared to be empty but she didn’t want to take any chances. She took the small floor-lift up to the second level and checked all of the back rooms, looking behind doors and under tables, before going back down to the main level.
The glowing green tower of the Fluidal Computer loomed over her. The Survey Vessels were, for the most part, exact copies of the Cyberdrome facility, but not everything was identical; there were no simulations inside this computer.
What if there were? She imagined going back down to the neural interface room and interfacing with a simulated environment. That would be a simulation within a simulation. What if that simulation also had a Survey Vessel containing another working interface room? How deep could the nested levels go? At what point would you simply go mad wondering if you were really out or not?
One simulation was enough to deal with, she thought as she activated an input terminal. After ten minutes, she gave up. All sensor logs were empty—apparently erased—even though the main computer appeared to be undamaged.
She started to walk away, but then remembered that her boss, Mathew Grey, stored all of his research inside Cyberdrome, presumably on one of the Survey Vessels computers. Like many people in the company, he believed that virtual computers were far more secure than physical ones, and since all of the Survey Vessels were interlinked, there were always 99 backup copies of your work in case something happened to the originals. The only drawback was that if you had to shut down Cyberdrome in an emergency, you lost everything.
She thought about what would happen to Mathew’s work if they ever did manage to make it out of Cyberdrome, and realized that his research could still be useful in fighting the plague in Utah. The thought gave her clarity and a renewed sense of hope.
She considered getting Alek to help her search, but decided to try it herself first. She ordered a system-wide query for any documents containing keywords such as nanotech, plague, or Grey. The results came back faster than expected.
Twenty-seven Terabytes of data were stored under a directory called, “Mathew Grey’s Private Research,” right inside the main computer. No access restrictions were evident and the data wasn’t even encrypted. Obviously, Mathew hadn’t expected anyone from the outside world to access his data in this manner.
Then she decided that she was being paranoid. Mathew was a scientist, not a spy. He obviously left his data accessible, just in case something happened to him. That thought brought up the memory of Mathew lying dead inside his interface chamber. There was nothing peaceful about his face, or the nature of his death. Nothing to make her believe he was in a “better place,” as her mother used to say.
She put those memories aside and called up a mining program to scan the database. Two minutes later, it displayed a summary of Mathew’s efforts to combat the Utah nanobugs. As she read through it, she started to hope that it was, in fact, a fake. According to Mathew’s own notes, he believed that there was no way to stop the spread of the Plague. His projections showed that once the nanobugs escaped the quarantine, they could potentially kill every human being on the Earth within three years. Then she saw a note near the bottom of the summary; a cryptic message saying that if the plague was going to kill all humans, then humans would have to evolve.
What did he mean by that?What was he planning? She performed another search of the data, this time indexing by date. She had the mining program gather up all files recorded in the final days before his death. The results shocked her even more.
Mathew apparently had a plan to protect humans from the unstoppable nanobug plague after all. He called it “Project Chimera” and it involved combining human DNA with that of other mammals in an attempt to evolve humans into something not quite human, thereby making them resistant to the human-based plague.
The term was Transgenics, and as a biologist, she knew the idea was madness. Back at the turn of the century—in the early days of genetic research—scientists combined a rabbit’s DNA with that of a phosphorescent jellyfish, creating the first in a horrible line of glow-in-the-dark pets. Ever since the Human Genome Project database became public, legitimate researchers had to fight the public image of being mad scientists.
She suddenly saw her former boss in a different light. He was succes
s-oriented, of course, which was why she came to work for him. Like most Type-A personalities he also had difficulty accepting failure, but this Chimera work showed that he flat-out refused to accept it, even at the expense of common sense.
I’m just like him, she realized with a start, and heading down the very same road. Could denying your own failures blind a person so completely from the truth?
Failure is a part of life, a voice in her head told her. Knowing it and embracing it is how we learn. It’s how we evolve into something better. The voice was her mother’s, or maybe her own. Either way, she knew it to be the truth—one that both she and Mathew Grey had refused to accept.
A small flashing message on the display screen caught her attention. It read, “Unauthorized access in progress— Wildfire initiated.”
Before she could wonder what ‘Wildfire’ meant, she heard a strange gurgling sound coming from the Fluidal computer. She looked toward it and saw that the once-green liquid inside the tube had darkened and turned a dull gray. It now looked like a solid metal tower.
This isn’t right, she thought just as the metal tower began to sag. Streams of thick gray liquid began flowing down the sides of the tower and across the floor. What’s going on? As she backed away from the material, she noticed that the liquid wasn’t expanding uniformly. It was reaching out tendrils and pulling itself along the floor. It looked alive.
“Gray goo,” she said aloud. Carbon-eating nanobugs. She looked toward the exit and saw that it was too late—the goo had already cut off her only escape route. The river of microscopic machines had sealed her in and now moved directly toward her.
She ran inside the Cartography room and sealed the door. Carbon-based nanobugs consumed carbon, Alek had told her. Just like most of the ship, her body was made out of carbon, even if it was just an Avatar and the carbon was digital. If the bugs touched her, they would consume her, and quite possibly, she would die in the process.
She looked around the room for another way out, even though she knew there was none. The Cartography room had only one exit, and that was back in the now-flooded main room. She heard a hissing sound and turned to see the door beginning to melt near the bottom. She knew she probably had only a few minutes left of her life, but her thoughts jumped to Alek. Was he all right?
The door finally gave way at the bottom and the nanobug mass flowed into the room. Maya jumped up onto one of the holographic display tables just before the substance touched her feet. It rapidly covered the floor and began to climb the walls. They had surrounded her and she had nowhere else to run.
She looked above her. A light fixture hung over a meter above her head. There was no way for her to reach it. She looked back down just as the gray goo crawled over the edges of the table.
She screamed and jumped straight up with all of her strength. Her fingers touched the wire mesh of the overhead light and she grabbed on tight. The mesh was hot and her fingers felt like they were being seared by the light, but she hung on.
Below her, the table was already covered and being pulled down into the goo. She looked all around her. The walls were covered and the goo was now creeping along the ceiling toward her. She thought about just letting go. How much would it hurt? How long would the pain last?
A tendril of goo on one of the walls reached out for her. She instinctively kicked it and was surprised when it broke off and fell to the floor. She looked down at her foot. The nanobugs in the goo should’ve attached themselves to her foot and begun eating. Maybe she was lucky, she thought. Maybe it had happened too fast for the nanobugs to grab hold.
Another tendril reached out for her. She kicked it with her other foot, this time more gently. It pulled back into the approaching mass. The nanobugs should’ve grabbed her that time, she realized. What’s going on?
“Silicon,” she said aloud. “You bastards eat carbon and my Omnisuit’s made of silicon.” More than that, she realized, it’s made of silicon nanobots.
She looked at the floor beneath her. It seemed to be alive. Alive and hungry. In its current configuration, her suit didn’t cover her face or hands, so she would have to be careful not to fall.
She released her grip on the light and dropped to the floor. She landed on her feet, but then fell to her knees. She almost reached her hands out to balance herself, but stopped just in time. She was correct—the carbon-nanobugs surrounding her feet were unable to get past the silicon in her Omnisuit. How long her suit would protect her was anyone’s guess, but she certainly wasn’t going to wait around to find out.
She began moving cautiously toward the door, which the goo had now completely dissolved. It felt like she was wading through a thick carpet of moving snakes. The inside of the computer center was now a solid gray mass, and she could see holes opening in the walls as the nanobug machines pulled the carbon atoms out of the steel, feeding its unstoppable need to grow and reproduce.
She found a large opening in the wall near the sealed door and climbed through it, being careful not to touch anything with her exposed hands. The gray mass had already made it halfway down the hall in both directions. She headed in the direction of the hangar, pulling her legs along as if she was walking in deep mud.
At last, she saw the edge of the expanding mass just ahead of her, moving steadily down the hall. When she finally stepped out of the goo and onto solid floor, she began to run as fast as she could. If Alek’s story about gray-goo was correct, then these carbon-eating nanobugs would be reproducing exponentially. That meant that they would soon devour the entire ship, and eventually the entire world.
This is Mathew’s doing, she thought as she ran, some sort of failsafe device to keep his work secret. Under normal conditions, deleting a simulated world would have less than dire consequences. However, since both she and Alek were unable to leave this world, the situation was exceptionally dire.
She realized the fastest way out of the ship was one floor up on the Hangar deck. She sprinted up a flight of spiral stairs and bolted through one of the open airlock doors. She stopped in her tracks when she saw a woman sitting on top of a wrecked Dragon on the far side of the room. She appeared to be naked and covered head to foot in some sort of green paint. Her hair was the color of pure copper.
One of the locals, she guessed. Must have wandered into the hangar after the crash, took off her clothing, and then painted herself green. Real people did strange things when stressed beyond their breaking point, so why not simulated people. Human-modeled programming was probably too good at times, she realized. Digital people should not have to suffer like this.
The woman slid down from her perch and approached Maya, staring at her with a puzzled look on her face. She was beautiful, Maya thought, but the color of her skin wasn’t right. The green was not paint, she now realized. Her skin was almost translucent and there were patterns woven deep into her flesh, almost like fabric. Almost like Javid’s, she realized. Could this be another Sentinel?
The woman looked down at Maya’s body and then reached out and touched her lower abdomen. Maya stood there for a moment, shocked at the woman’s actions. She was about to push her hand away when she felt a warm tickle of energy surge from the woman’s hand and into her body. It felt wonderful.
Time seemed to stop and all thoughts of the carbon-eating nanobugs lifted from her mind and floated away. She was keenly aware of the woman’s nudity, and it too, felt incredible. She felt herself leaning toward the woman, her lips opening slightly.
“No,” she said, stepping back from the stranger. As soon as the woman’s hand left her stomach, the feeling that had almost overwhelmed her was gone.
“You carry the Gift,” the woman said. Her voice sounded unreal, almost as if flutes were playing in the background.
“Gift?” Maya asked as she looked down at her stomach and then back up at the woman. “I don’t understand.”
“You carry the Gift,” the woman repeated. “I have to protect the Gift, because it will save us all.” She swept her hands around t
he room.
Maya glanced over the woman’s shoulder, and for a moment, she thought she saw people behind her. Hundreds of them, crowded all around her. She could see right through them. Ghosts, she thought. She blinked once and they were gone.
The woman reached for her abdomen again, and this time, Maya didn’t try to stop her. As she made contact, Maya heard flutes playing and her body vibrated to the strange music. She looked down and saw the woman’s green hand buried up to the wrist inside her body. How was that possible? A vision appeared in front of her, blocking out everything in the room. It was her own body.
The view before her began slicing through layers of skin and muscle. It was like one of the surgical simulations she worked with back in college. The only difference was that this body was hers.
The view stopped in an area she recognized immediately. It was her uterus. She recognized the scar tissue on the right fallopian tube from the surgery she had years before.
The image then sliced through the uterine wall and then increased magnification. She could see a small sphere, half buried and growing on the inner surface. Inside the sphere, she saw cells dividing and multiplying. The sphere was alive.
Suddenly she was back in the room, standing in front of the green woman. She stumbled backward and held her abdomen with both hands. “This can’t be right,” she whispered.
“The Gift,” the woman repeated.
I’m pregnant, she realized. But, how? She did a quick calculation in her head and figured that she had been somewhere in the middle of her ovulation cycle when the mission started. That would mean that Alek was the father, but that was impossible. The embryo inside her was several weeks old, and it had only been a few hours of real time since she and Alek had made love.
