Stealthy Steps

by Vikki Kestell

  He eyed me. “Like I said, you are astute, Gemma. I’ve known Imogene since our early days at Virginia Tech. She was ROTC then. And we were, well, once upon a time we were, er, close.”

  Ah.

  “So you’ve known her how long?”

  “About thirty-five years. She’s an engineer—did you know that? And quite a superb strategist. When she graduated VT, she went into the Army as an officer and we drifted apart. What I’ve always known about Imogene, though, is that, above all, she is ambitious. Ruthlessly, relentlessly ambitious.”

  He shifted in his chair. “I made the mistake of sharing my dreams with her back then. She never forgot. She knew that I would someday make a contribution to science that would change the world. She’s dogged my career ever since—followed my research, read my publications, tracked my employment.”

  Dr. Bickel stared at me, imploring me to believe him. “I need to show you what I’m protecting here, Gemma. I need you to understand why General Cushing won’t ever stop searching for me, why she had me declared dead after my body wasn’t found in what was left of the AMEMS lab, and why I can never appear in the open—at least not until I am ready. Until they are ready. And until I have a means to keep them from being misused.”

  He stood up and gestured for me to follow him. We skirted the tables and headed for the corner of the lab closest to my entrance to the cavern.

  While we walked, I looked around and asked, “How did you get power down here for all this?” My mind was still crunching the information Dr. Bickel fed me, sorting it, filing it, questioning it.

  “The base provides electricity to the tunnels already. We tapped into it.”

  “But—”

  “Yes, I know; my work uses a lot of power, and a spike in usage would raise the military’s red flag.” He chuckled. “So much is automated anymore, you know. I hacked into PNM’s network. I programmed a little job to run after Kirtland’s meters are read and fed into the system. Each month my program adjusts the mountain’s usage in the system, capping it at what it was for the same month the previous year. The program then adds or subtracts a randomly selected one to three percent so the usage isn’t exactly the same as last year. That, too, could raise eyebrows.”

  “But how do you account—”

  “For the power the lab actually uses? My program distributes the excess usage across the remaining meters on the base. The meters themselves don’t reflect the increase, of course, but once the metered amounts are in the system, my program adjusts them. Across the entire base, the added amount is incremental, hardly noticeable.”

  He looked pleased with himself, and I had to admit the level of planning and execution was simple yet staggering. Dr. Bickel stopped and I stopped beside him. He smiled and gazed up at a glass case, perhaps ten feet square.

  I stared into the clear glass case. It could have been empty, but I soon perceived that it wasn’t. I took a step backwards and scanned its interior.

  I could hear . . . humming, clicking, buzzing. A faint haze inside the box shifted. Dissolved. Came back together. Reminded me of how mercury, when released on a plate, will flow and form new shapes. Only this, this thing was “flowing and forming” in midair.

  “Do you see them?” Dr. Bickel asked. I turned toward him. He was beaming, I thought, as only a proud papa could beam.

  “Them?” I was confused.

  “I know you’ll appreciate them, Gemma, when you see all they can do, when you know all that they are.

  “Gemma, in this glass case is the fruition of my years of work: Nanomites—complete, fully functional robotic systems at the true nanometer level. Their program algorithms are the most complex, most sophisticated, most encompassing ever devised. Their systems—”

  I tuned him out for a minute, my attention taken entirely by what was in the glass box. The humming/buzzing coming from the box creeped me out a little—but what the haze within the glass box did next creeped me out a lot.

  My mouth opened to a stunned “o” as the silver haze resolved into blue letters.

  H E L L O

  Dr. Bickel hadn’t pressed any buttons. Hadn’t said anything. Hadn’t gestured.

  He grinned. “Ah. They’ve noticed you. They know they haven’t seen you before.”

  Chapter 9

  “Well, I wish they wouldn’t notice me!” I choked on the words, my eyes fixed on the glass case.

  “You have nothing to fear from them, Gemma,” Dr. Bickel reassured me. “They are hungry for information, not for people.” He laughed at his joke.

  I didn’t appreciate the humor.

  He launched into a longwinded description of the nanomites and their capabilities and I realized how much he craved, perhaps needed, someone to share this great achievement with him.

  His tired eyes shone with pride. “The mites are invisible to the human eye, of course—but there are so many of them that they can sometimes be seen as a nanocloud. I smuggled the nanocloud out in two carryalls—customized satchels—when I fled the lab. It was close quarters, even for their tiny size.

  “They have a need for space, you see, for room to move about and function, just as you and I do. And they did not appreciate being separated into two groups in the two carryalls. It was as disruptive to them as losing a leg would be to you or to me.”

  I kept my nervous eyes on the always-morphing, always-fluid—nanocloud?—in the glass case. The congregation of nanomites all but disappeared and then reappeared in a sparkling, shimmering mist. Within the mist, in contrasting blue, they again spelled out the word “hello.”

  “Raise your voice just a little and say, ‘Nano, hello.’”

  “What—I’m supposed to talk to them?” The skin on my arms went all goosebumpy.

  “They already understand print English; I recently began teaching the mites spoken English, single words and short commands at this point. They don’t have audio receptors of any kind; rather, they are able to receive and interpret sound waves.”

  He looked at me. “I’ve programmed them to recognize ‘Nano’ as the signal of direct address. When they hear you say ‘Nano’ they will pay attention to what you say directly after that.”

  He kept looking at me, waiting, so I cleared my throat and muttered, “Nano. Hello.”

  The mist (that’s how I thought of them) glowed a little brighter, expanded to fill the case, then re-formed into the smaller haze.

  It was all very interesting. I was even leaning toward “fascinating.” Until the mites spelled,

  N A M E ?

  “Remarkable. They want to know your name. Well, I suppose that is to be expected since you are only the second person they have ‘met’ and they know my name. Well, Gemma, pronounce your name first and then spell it for them. Keep your tone uniform and your speaking pace steady. They don’t yet know how to interpret verbal nuances.”

  “I’d rather not.”

  No, I’d rather not be on a first-name basis with them.

  “Please, Gemma?” he asked again.

  I could tell it meant a lot to him, so I—grudgingly—cleared my throat again and spoke out. “Nano. My name is Gemma. G. E. M. M. A.”

  Nothing happened. After about thirty seconds of waiting, I was relieved.

  Until the cloud glowed brighter, shifted, flew apart, and re-formed. It began to spell. G E M M A

  So now it knows my name, I mocked.

  K E Y E S

  It spelled my name again, my full name.

  G E M M A K E Y E S

  I felt sick.

  “Astounding,” Dr. Bickel breathed. “I made a copy of the training database from the AMEMS lab and brought it with me. The mites have full read rights to the database. They recognize your name and made the association on their own.”

  “I’m in the database?” I croaked. He had no idea how shaken I was.

  “Well, of course. Everyone associated with the project has a profile in the database—including you. The sole purpose of developing the training database wa
s to teach the nanomites, and I used every available piece of information associated with the lab as a means of introducing the concepts of human connections to them. I’ve spent my three months here doing nothing but teaching them and recording their progress.”

  Inside the glass case, the glowing letters of my name faded. I said nothing as I worked at processing the astounding revelations Dr. Bickel offered with such nonchalance.

  “The nanomites are the first of their kind, Gemma, the first true nanoelectromechanical systems—NEMS—ever developed,” he whispered.

  “Why do you call them nanomites?”

  “Because their ‘built’ size is roughly that of a dust mite—between ten and twenty nanometers.”

  The comparison curdled my milk, so to speak.

  Yuck and double yuck!

  Dr. Bickel didn’t notice. “What should I tell you about them first? Where should I start? Well, I should say that between each other and among their tribes they share data and language acquisition (human, machine, and mathematical languages), and rule themselves cooperatively.”

  “Er, tribes?” Shaken or not, I was a bit intrigued.

  “Ah, yes. Tribes. I suppose I need to explain the concept of roles.”

  “Roles?”

  “Yes, roles, because the mites are not all the same. The nanocloud—the collective sum of the nanomites—performs optimally when the work of the sum is divided into five distinct roles, each role essential to the cloud’s functional growth and well-being. Every mite is equipped to perform a specific role and, by virtue of performing that role, becomes a member of the ‘tribe’ that owns that role.

  “And, oh! How they learn!” he enthused. “I encoded their system programming with, among others, adaptive population-based incremental learning algorithms based upon a multi-objective particle swarm optimization design.”

  I nodded. Slowly.

  Everything he’d said after “And, oh! How they learn!” was like undercooked pasta hitting a wall. Did. Not. Stick.

  “I gave the members of each tribe specialized hardware (in addition to their base hardware) and a complementary set of algorithms designed exclusively for that role. So the entirety of the nanocloud consists of a very large population of nanomites divided among just five tribes, with every mite performing the role assigned to its tribe for the overall good of the cloud.”

  Dr. Bickel warmed to his topic. “What the world has, until now, presumed to call ‘nanobots’ are no more than mere submicron ‘dumb bots’—single functioning, unable to learn, and unable to adapt. They possessed no computing capabilities, while just one of my nanomites’ integrated circuitry is as powerful as any personal computer on the market.”

  He may have realized that he was bragging a little. He coughed and, with a more modest air, asked, “Are you familiar with the concept of ‘system on a chip,’ Gemma?”

  “Yes, roughly.”

  Meaning ‘not at all.’

  “A ‘system on a chip’ or an SoC, is an assemblage of integrated components built on the same platform that, together, comprise an entire functioning computer or other processing operation. Think of an SoC as an entire computer on a chip.

  “Everyone uses SoCs without realizing they do—in ‘smart’ phones, tablets, and other mobile devices. Every year the functionality and processing speed of a single chip increases exponentially.

  “Now envision a state-of-the-art SoC and a powerful NEMS device (a nano-sized robot)—manufactured as one unit. The resulting creature has all the mechanical functions of a complex NEMS device and all the processing power of a computer. Enter the first ‘smart’ nanomites, one billionth the size of a meter, one hundred thousand times smaller than the thickness of a piece of paper. Your DNA, Gemma, is 2.5 times wider than of one of my nanomites!”

  I nodded, but my skin itched and my stomach hurt.

  Dr. Bickel raked his hands through his thinning hair. “Consider this, Gemma. We’ve been manufacturing integrated circuits—computer chips—on silicon, gallium, or other substrates for some time now by laying down a patterned layer and etching the channels and gates of the circuits out of the layer.”

  He huffed. “The process of stamping a mask onto a wafer and then etching out the circuitry must be repeated again and again, layer upon layer in a production line environment. To achieve a ‘system on a chip’ in this manner requires over two hundred layers! The process is tedious! Plodding! And fantastically expensive! Why—”

  I had to interrupt his rant. “But isn’t that how the MESA fabrication facilities work? Semiconductor manufacturing? Isn’t that the direction of the MEMS lab?”

  “Let them plod away,” he barked. “Let them ignore and avoid the real question: How do we manufacture a NEMS device and its system circuitry together, as one? How do we integrate them in the manufacturing process? Conventional production line semiconductor processes will never be able to manufacture an integrated NEMS/SoC device. I knew this a decade ago! That was the real problem!”

  He stared around, as though framing his thoughts for the next stage of his lecture. “You see, what was needed, Gemma, was a complete departure from ‘production line manufacturing’ and its limitations.”

  He slanted a sly look in my direction. I could tell he was ready to make the big announcement—and he was. “I determined that the solution was additive manufacturing—a process that adds only what is needed rather than etching away what is not needed.”

  He waited for me to respond, but I didn’t get it.

  “Digital, three-dimensional modeling and printing, Gemma! It’s why we split off from the MEMS lab to form the AMEMS lab!”

  I was more confused. Printing a nano-whatever device? I wasn’t there yet.

  He tried a different tack. “A computer-generated design incorporates all aspects of the device—all of the articulating mechanisms of the NEMS device and the system circuitry—into a single, perfect 3D model. The computer ‘slices’ the model into thin, horizontal layers so that the device can be built a layer at a time upon a ‘backing,’ a temporary foundation of sorts.”

  “All riiight.”

  He snorted. “Do you know what a 3D printer is?”

  “Of course I do!” I frowned, still not making the leap.

  “A conventional printer, one for printing documents, uses ink. Three-dimensional printers, in place of ink, use a more substantive material. The most rudimentary of 3D printers use a material such as plastic. In such a scenario, plastic filament is melted and fed into the printhead. The printhead extrudes the melted plastic filament as its ‘ink.’”

  Dr. Bickel’s explanation took on a sing-song, rhythmic quality, as though he were recording a child’s lecture. “The computer, following the design of the ‘sliced’ 3D model, directs the printhead to add fine lines of liquid plastic “ink” to the object’s backing to make the first layer of the product. As the plastic cools, it hardens, yes? When the first layer is complete, the computer directs the printer to lay down the second layer. And so on. Like laying a complex pattern of, say, Legos.

  “All these layers are built, one atop the other, in a single chamber. The printer adds only the material needed to make the object—rather than depositing an entire layer and etching away what is not needed.

  “And if the printer needs a different color of plastic? The printhead is connected to multiple sources of plastic filament, each source a different color. The computer tells the printhead which source to draw upon for the correct color at just the right time.”

  He saw that my uncomprehending stare this time was real and patted my hand.

  I slapped it away.

  “Fine!” I snapped. “That gets us a multicolored plastic ashtray. How does that get us a ‘smart’ nanobot?”

  “Very good, Gemma, very good,” he soothed. “Let’s take the next logical step. We are printing tiny objects now so, instead of liquid plastic, we require a different sort of ‘ink.’ What physical properties do we require of our ink?”

 
; He answered his own question. “We require materials, such as a variety of liquid polymers, suitable for manufacturing a robotic device and all its moving parts: gears, pulleys, wheels, arms, tiny mechanisms, and tools. The idea is that, whatever material is required to manufacture a functional electromechanical device, is fed into the printhead and extruded at the correct time and in the correct place onto the backing.

  “Remember how with our plastic example we needed different colors of the same liquid plastic to build our, er, ashtray? Because we are building circuitry onto and into the nano-mechanisms, the printhead also requires separate sources of conductive and nonconductive materials, primarily metals. We make several sources available, some doped with positive charges, others with negative charges.”

  I was intent on Dr. Bickel’s words, a glimmer of perception out there on the horizon. The far horizon.

  “The computerized design directs the printing, and the printhead adds only the material needed to produce the design; nothing is etched away and nothing is wasted. All this happens in a clean, sealed environment under vacuum. During printing the nanostructures are fused to the backing wafer for support. Then, when the printing is completed, the many nanomites built upon the same wafer at the same time are cut apart by a digitally controlled laser.”

  He paused to take a breath.

  I paused to allow my brain’s overheated circuits to cool, but he plowed on.

  “During the last five years, I built three working prototypes of my 3D printer. All three moved me in the right direction with limited but encouraging results.

  “Then eleven months ago, eight months before Prochanski and Cushing blew up the lab, we—Rick and Tony and I—completed development of my most recent 3D printer—and it was, at last, working at the level I wished.

  “Since we were now printing at the nanometer level, materials had to be extruded through a nanopore, a membrane with a nano-sized hole. The printhead I designed had five thousand nanopore-sized extrusion points to accommodate the materials needed. We used a simple six-inch silicon wafer as our backing.