Vanadium Dark

by Ben Sheffield

  Building Vanadocams like cameras is impossible.

  They must build themselves, like eyeballs.

  —Excerpt from Vanadocams Demystified, 3rd Ed, University of Nebraska Press, 2039

  Leavenworth

  Anzor woke up to the sound of an electronic key beeping and a cell door opening. Almost immediately, he was wide awake. His eyelids shot open, blinding his eyes with the sting of light.

  If this was a random cell search, he might be in trouble.

  He had none of the things the bulls normally looked for—no cell-fermented alcohol, no toothbrushes sharpened to shivs, no contraband narcotics smuggled in between the ass-cheeks of corrupt guards, none of those faggy Vanado-Bracelets. There were an incredible number of them in prison, to Anzor's ongoing confusion. Why give a shit about Vanadocams when you're already behind bars?

  But he had his Georgian books as well as his Georgian writing practice. That might be a problem. Prisoners at Leavenworth were forbidden from communicating in any language besides English.

  But it was not his cell that was being opened. It was James's.

  It had been a week since James had committed suicide. The penitentiary had banned the sale of twine and installed wire meshes over the bayonet sockets, lest his trick be repeated.

  Otherwise, the universe had not marked James's death at all.

  Goodbye, man. You finally found a way off the swing.

  Anzor blinked and looked again. One guard held the cell door open, Taser in hand. Another escorted a handsome blond young man into the cell. Prison meat.

  No wonder you ended up here, Anzor thought. Bet a pretty kid like you was getting passed around like a joint in the general population.

  The blond man was shoved into the open cell, and the guard threw a rucksack of his personal belongings in after him. “Best hotel room you ever had, son! Good security, no check out time, and best of all, it's government comped!” He paused for effect, as if he expected the young man to laugh.

  Anzor wanted to beat the shit out of the guard.

  When they were alone, the young man said, “Well, let's do names. I'm Lucas. You?”

  Anzor wondered if he should use a fake name. He'd done it before, when he thought his life might be in danger if the other person knew who he was. But the kid looked harmless.

  Even if he wasn't, steel bars made everyone harmless.

  “I'm Anzor Khujadze.”

  “Holy shit.”

  “Yeah. America's most hated man, at your service.”

  “They told me you were somewhere in this prison, but I never thought I'd end up next to you. Holy shit. This is wild.”

  Anzor waited to see what would come next.

  Rage. Insults. Accusations of being a terrorist, a traitor. A cold, judgmental silence. There were many options on the menu.

  “Hey... can I have your autograph?”

  I'm dreaming, Anzor thought. I'll look at him, and he'll have morphed into my mother.

  “Huh?”

  “I've got a pen. I filled it with tattoo ink. If I shove my rucksack over to you, will you sign it through the bars?”

  There seemed no harm in it.

  Anzor signed the bag.

  “Thanks. Wow. Wasn't expecting this.” Lucas looked positively star-struck. “Sorry, I'm probably freaking you out.”

  “Hey, I had a guy chop off part of my finger so he'd have something to remember me by. This is pretty good, as introductions go. So what did you do to end up here? You're an idiot if you answer that, by the way.”

  Lucas began unpacking his rucksack. There wasn't much to unpack, nor many places to unpack it to.

  “I'm an analyst, or I was. I got a general court marshal under the Espionage Act.”

  “So you got handed classified documents and couldn't keep your mouth shut.”

  “Pretty much.”

  “I have to say, you seem pretty comfortable around me.”

  “The past's dead and gone. You did the crime, now you're doing the time, so why shouldn't we talk as equal men?”

  “That's very philosophical. I must warn you, though, if you're expecting me to talk about... well... that... I can't.”

  Lucas examined a pair of socks. “Fuck. Some of the tattoo ink seeped through into these. So why can't you talk? Too painful?”

  Anzor smacked his knee in irritation. “Too painful? Hell, no! I'd shout the truth all across the barracks from a megaphone if I could. But I'm forbidden. Topic off-limits.”

  “What happens if you talk?”

  “I'll get moved back to general population. Obviously, I would be in great danger there. What's more, some gears get set in motion, and some obscure UCMJ rulings get dusted off in order to relocate me to a shittier prison.”

  “What kind of prison?”

  “The kind of prison where people will straight-up try to kill me, and the guards will look the other way. It's a stick they have to keep me silent.”

  There was a moment of silence then Anzor broke it again.

  “I'll say this, though. I did not deserve this rap. I am an innocent man. That's my final word on the subject.”

  Lucas was still trying to rescue his socks. “You sound like a solid guy, Anzor. It's a shame I can't believe you.”

  “Yeah, and I know why. Because Project Elephant found me guilty. Can't argue with that, can you? The nearly full clip in my gun didn't matter. The two guys backing up my story didn't matter. If the Vanadocams say you had your hand in the cookie jar, you're fucked. End of.”

  “Hey, calm down.”

  But he couldn't calm down. He felt repressed anger surfacing. “Mine was the first indictment ever made on Vanadocam evidence. I was the precedent setter, the proof of what the technology could do. Whenever people feel doubt about Project Elephant, whenever they ask 'hey, why do we need the government spying on us twenty four hours a fucking day?'...they'll remember me. They'll remember how I'm a psycho, and the Vanadocams led to my arrest. But you know what? None of that changes the fact that I didn't do it.”

  Quiet.

  “I never told you that. Forget I said it.”

  More quiet.

  Finally, Lucas spoke.

  “Hey, I bet there's one good side to you being the nation's most hated man.”

  “Yeah? What's that?”

  “You don't have to tell anyone how to pronounce your name.”

  Anzor did a double take. Then he smiled. Then the smile showed teeth. Then he laughed.

  “Oh, man, you have no idea how fucking true that is. I used to have to pronounce 'ann-zer kuh-yahd-zay' twenty times a day for people. Not since my arrest, though. Everyone can pronounce my name now.”

  “Almost makes it worth it, doesn't it?”

  “If my name had just one extra syllable, I think it would.”

  Lucas joined his laughter, and the day seemed a little lighter.

  Anzor wondered if Lucas was right, and prison did have an ability to change the past. Probably not, but it was a nice thought. James Waller could have gone back to being a staff sergeant, his rapes erased. Lucas could have gone back to being an army analyst, before he became a traitor. And Anzor could have gone back to being an enlisted man on the DOD's security detail, before it had all gone wrong.

  Before a gunman had opened fire, shooting the famed Korean scientist, Sun-Hi Shin, on the day her nano-camera network went live.

  Before those same cameras had proved that Anzor had been the man behind the trigger.

  Colophon 2

  The Vanadocams are dependent on various technological fields working in synergy: nanotechnology, optics, virtual reality. They rely on ideas as diverse as the hairy ball theorem and Brownian motion.

  They were never invented in a single “Eureka!” breakthrough. However, there were some key points in their development.

  First came the concept to have circuits self assemble inside vats, a bold idea—and another one drawn from nature.

  Apparently, Sun-Hi Shin's inspiration was the snowfla
ke, a crystalline structure that starts out as a single droplet and grows into fairly intricate hexagonal fractal shape. Suppose free-floating particles could be made to join together in the shape of a circuit trace? You'd have circuit boards that build themselves.

  An experiment proved that this would work. Small particles of metal were propelled with turbines through an anaerobic “soup” of liquid and made to stick to other particles travelling in other directions. Through complex modeling, you could theoretically produce a circuit of arbitrary size. However, this was the first of six years of hurdles.

  First, the circuits had a high failure rate. It was too easy for an atom to be misplaced. Tiny imperfections in the turbine blades, invisible to the naked eye, had immense consequences throughout the soup. Machining and milling them was a never-ending nightmare.

  Second, what sort of metal should they be made of? Some were too dense, some were too light, some were not conductive enough, some were too conductive and hence, too vulnerable to sunlight and static discharge in the air.

  Various metals were tried, most with substandard results. The one that seemed to work the best was the transitional metal Vanadium, and when it came time to name the nanocams, they were accordingly dubbed Vanadocams. (It should be noted that the modern Vanadocams are not made of Vanadium, as it's too expensive and rare. Current-generation Vanadocams are made from a graphene alloy.)

  But the failure rate remained. It was pointless to release trillions of nanocameras into the air if 99.5% of them were faulty. Getting nature to build circuits is one thing. Getting nature to quality check circuits is entirely another.

  The problem weighed on the nascent Project Elephant like an anchor. For a few months, it seemed the entire enterprise was fated to die at the 100-yard mark, unable to overcome the final challenge.

  Then Sun-Hi Shin came up with the idea that was probably responsible for her receipt of the Nobel Prize in 2032.

  The flagellum motor.

  She adapted the nanocam design to include a whip-like tail, just a few atoms wide. The tail was powered by a piezo-electric receiver, attached to a few tiny wires—each one a single graphene atom wide.

  When ultrasonic sound waves reached the receiver, it rapidly expanded and contracted, causing the wires to compress and flex, causing the tail to thrash. Due to the design of the Vanadocams and fluid mechanics, they usually ended up going upward. With the tail flagellating to the ultrasonic waves, they'd propel themselves straight up out of the soup and into the air.

  This would only happen if the circuit were complete and functional. A malformed Vanadocam would simply sink to the bottom.

  It was a self-winnowing process. You'd blast the finished Vanadocams with ultrasonic waves. The working ones would rise into the air. The non-working ones would sink to the ground, and from then on, could be dissolved and recycled. The flagellum motor was also useful in the air, as it allowed for more rapid movement.

  If there was ever a “Eureka!” in the project, this was it.

  —Excerpt from Vanadocams Demystified, 3rd Ed, University of Nebraska Press, 2039

  The Pentagon

  It was an exceptionally rough day.

  A hour before knock-off time, Viktor called an end to the Handling. His hands shook. He kept hitting wrong keys. His heart thudded painfully in his chest. He looked at the face reflected in his wristwatch and it was nearly green. Caffeine and high-stress work were killing him.

  “See you, Joyce.”

  “I'm sorry? You're slurring.”

  “I'm done for today, Joyce. See you tomorrow.”

  “But you're in the middle of a case.”

  “It's not...” He gaped for a full ten seconds before his pulped brain supplied the word. “...time sensitive. It can wait. Feel free to wake me up if there's an emergency, and I'll feel free to beat the shit out of you if you do.”

  She squawked indignantly. He found he didn't give a fuck about her any more. He just wanted to get out of here.

  He strode past her, nearly collided with a marble column, and walked out the door.

  Goddamn it. This is a disaster. How can I be this fucked up on my first week?

  He was pushing himself too hard, he realized. He had to pace himself.

  He needed some Sycorax. He'd run out yesterday, and he hadn't yet paid a trip to the pharmacy. This was his first day since high school without the desensitizing drug.

  Soon, he wouldn't need to work these kinds of hours.

  No doubt a constitutional amendment would be rammed through at some point, allowing there to be more than one Handler. It was a ridiculous rule, anyway—a rule instituted as a token offering to the paranoid.

  It had no place in a world where support for Project Elephant's funding was at 87%.

  He left the Zoo, feeling the door close behind him like a kiss of air on the back of his overheated neck. Was he really overheated? He didn't know. He felt like a feverish person and a hypothermia victim somehow sharing the same body. His system was in shock.

  He signed himself out for the night at the management console then went straight to his private rooms in D ring. As he walked, he stared at the ground, hoping he wouldn't have to talk to anyone. Putting on foot in front of the other seemed like advanced calculus.

  His sleeping quarters were Spartan and minimal, granted with the understanding that he would have little time to make use of them.

  He looked for Sycorax in his medicine cupboard. There wasn't any. He took an Ambien instead. It wasn't the same.

  He went to the shower and started to run water, his vision blurring slightly. He took off his shoes, took off his socks, and stepped under the flow.

  He retreated inside himself, replaying fractured simulacra of the day's work in his head—man beaten with a pipe wrench, got to find who did it... man falling out of an apartment balcony, got to find if he was pushed... black van with out of state plates parked outside public library, got to find if owner has politically extreme views—as the water beat down and plastered his thinning hair to his skull. He wondered what the dragging, wet weight plastered all over his body was...

  He realized he had stepped into the shower still wearing his clothes.

  Laughing at his stupidity, he disrobed, leaving the wet suit on the floor. He would send for another one in the morning. He lathered himself, dried off, took a final caffeine-inspired piss, swallowed a second Ambien—my final act of better living through chemistry for today— and went to bed.

  Sleep came, but no rest.

  Instead, he found himself in a dreamscape of utter horror.

  He was still in bed, yet he was able to move, able to explore. It was as if he had the Vanadocam mainframe wired directly into his head.

  Yes, that was right. He was Handling. But he was not solving a crime. And there was no sense of mastery, of being the ruler of an electronic surveillance army.

  Now the Vanadocams all seemed to watching him.

  Judging him.

  Their billions of eyes all seemed to be lasered at him, monitoring his every movement.

  Please leave me alone.

  He realized something: he could see them.

  They were just a few nanometers big. Utterly tiny.

  Increase the size of everything by 10,000. He would be a man twenty kilometers tall. A bacteria would be a huge, squirming, room-filling blob. A drop of water would fill the swimming pool in the Pentagon gym.

  The Vanadocams would still be too small to see.

  Yet he saw them or sensed them in some way that his tired brain processed as sight.

  They were a fine gray cloud, like funeral ashes, like TV static. He watched them seethe in the corners of his room, watching them as they watched him.

  The gray clouds swirled and swarmed like insects, as though communing and communicating, even though their circuitry was just a few atoms of silicon.

  He wanted to get up, to shoo them away.

  Then he realized that there was no point.

  Untold quadrillio
ns of Vanadocams now blanketed the nation. They floated through the air, seeing all, judging all—

  A nanoscopic race that held the humanity it purported to serve by the throat.

  The atmosphere was thick with them. Vanadocam Assemblers pumped out trillions of new ones every day to replace those that were blown out to sea or fried by radiation. Pandora's box now stood far open. His country had given up their privacy forever. No way to shovel this much shit back into a horse.

  He sat there, not daring to move, hardly daring to breathe. He felt that he was not just being watched by blind nanomachines, but by a race of intelligent beings, a nation that outnumbered the population of earth by several factors.

  A low moan escaped his throat as he realized that the Vanadocams were gathering in a way that couldn't be random.

  They converged at the foot of his bed, drifting together like iron flakes caught by a magnet.

  The dark gray cloud thickened, growing darker. Finally, Viktor looked at a squirming, boiling column of Vanadocams six feet tall.

  Sections of the pillar split, forming humanoid arms and legs.

  The face was next.

  Viktor watched the sharp cheekbones appear, the small pointed nose. A chin appeared, the excess Nanocams planed off by the invisible force of their own volition. The features changed, refined, and improved themselves.

  Two cavities sunk into the blank space above the nose. It did not need eyes. It already was eyes.

  It was all eyes.

  The thing looked revolting, a ridiculous facsimile human. It was warped, distorted, and malformed. The proportions were all wrong. The face was detailed, but it landed straight into uncanny valley.

  It's like a robot's idea of what we look like.

  Viktor's brain made the critical connection.

  I saw you before, he thought. That video of the missing girl. You were the man who drove the car.