Small Miracles

by Edward M. Lerner

  She clinked glasses. Nick no more understood programming than he could levitate. He was a dear to ask—and, by God, she needed to vent. “Yes and no.”

  The bug she had hunted for more than two months turned out to be a hardware design flaw. To fix the problem the right way would be grossly expensive. Worse, Engineering could not possibly redo the hardware design, revalidate it, retune the manufacturing process, and prove to the FDA the new nanobots were safe without blowing big-time the schedule for the upcoming field trial. With the Army finally interested, schedule was to be protected above all else. The powers that be had spoken: the programmers had to work around the hardware problem.

  It was always the way.

  “Hon? Are you okay?”

  She had promised herself she wouldn’t run on and on about work. Well, the weekend was young. Best to exorcise these demons now. “The bot glitches had nothing to do with our new software.”

  Nor the operating system. Nor any of the programming tools. She had assigned half her staff to reverse-engineering the third-party products used to compile and load code into the nanobots. In desperation, she had even hacked into a vendor’s private bug database, when their Tech Support desk had been less than forthcoming. Still nothing.

  She said, “The onboard program keeps growing. It turns out the fault lies simply with where the program loads. Luck of the draw, the latest update to the bot power-management software expanded into a previously unused portion of the memory physically near the outside.”

  “Huh,” Nick managed. “Is that the no part, or the yes?”

  He had the decency never to dwell on the minutiae of web advertising. Kim said, smiling, “It’s the no. Our software was never the problem. The yes part is that software will have to work around the real problem.”

  Allocate more of the memory to error-correcting codes. It meant less useful capacity, because more bits would be expended in redundant storage, but at least then they could rely again on the content of the memory. It meant rewriting core operating-system functions. Sigh.

  On the bright side, the existing bot inventory would be saved. With molecular memory, updating software was just chemistry. Program patches would be encoded onto messenger molecules and stirred into a vat with the bots. The bots were smart enough to read the code updates and upload the program patches.

  “You’ll make it work.” Nick gestured toward their menus, as yet unopened. “How about we take a look at these?”

  They both wound up choosing the chef’s special, homemade ravioli with butternut-squash filling and a cranberry glaze. Nick took off his glasses to polish the lenses with his tie. “How is Brent faring? Feeling better, I hope?”

  “He says he is,” she said. The dark bags beneath Brent’s eyes said otherwise.

  “I’d be terrified. Nanobots replicating in my body …” Nick shuddered.

  “They don’t self-replicate, hon. They can’t.” Kim patted Nick’s hand. “Self-replicating nanobots were a passing fancy—and a pipe dream—thirty years ago, when nanotech was a new concept.”

  Plenty of venture capitalists had watched the same bad sci-fi vids as Nick. She had an analogy all worked out. “Look at it this way. Factories build robots to make products like cars. People assemble those robots into a production line. Trucks and trains bring materials to the factory. Conveyor systems deliver parts and materials to the robots. Other conveyors carry along the intermediate products. Electrical distribution systems bring power to the robots.

  “Robots don’t forage the countryside for fuel and parts, sometimes making cars and sometimes making more of themselves. Maybe such robots could be built, but why would anyone bother? It would be grossly inefficient—and really hard. How much harder would it be to design microscopic self-replicating robots?”

  Nick grinned sheepishly. “So, no replicators, run amok or otherwise?”

  “Only in bad movies, I’m afraid.”

  “Well, back to reality then. You’re obviously worried that Brent isn’t getting better. Why? Come to think of it, you haven’t had much to say about him lately.”

  Or much about anything. She and Nick talked most evenings, but this week’s calls had been on the perfunctory side. Last week’s, too. And when they did talk, Nick was obsessed with the presidential election campaign—not anyone’s policies, just the horse-race aspects. With more than a month to go until the party conventions, she was already sick of the process.

  “I’ve been so busy I haven’t seen much of Brent lately.” Kim’s bangs were back in her eyes, and she flicked them away. “As it happens, he helped sort out the problem I was describing.”

  Nick put his glasses back on. “Don’t take this wrong. You know I like Brent, but isn’t that sort of esoteric for him?”

  “Until recently, sure. He’s become more interested in all aspects of the technology since the accident.”

  Their waiter reappeared. “These are very hot.” He set down a plate in front of each of them, and went through the ground-pepper ritual with an entirely too-large, too-phallic pepper mill.

  But Brent had changed since the accident. His newfound curiosity about all aspects of nanotech was the least of it. For the life of her, Kim couldn’t imagine why Brent had yet to call Megan. It was as though he had been struck blind, deaf, and stupid.

  Other changes were more subtle but no less troubling. They did not show day to day. Best guess, she had only picked up on them because she and Brent were such good friends. And she fretted that “were” might be in the correct tense.

  The new Brent was more focused than the easygoing guy with whom she had been such fast friends. More apt to lapse into dark moodiness. Gone from ever tactful to often abrupt. Middle children were supposedly the peacemakers. Who knew it could wear off?

  They had managed a few workday lunches together; that was about it recently. Weirdly, the conversations were awkward. Brent sometimes seemed to be watching her, not with her, and that distancing bugged her. Whenever she called him on it, he had denied it, or brushed it off, or blamed it on the accident. “I’d be pretty damn shallow not to be affected, don’t you think?”

  Clearly Angleton had affected Brent, and deeply. She took his word that the shrinks had found nothing wrong with him. Although “nothing wrong” was relative. It appeared to mean: no more screwed up than was to be expected. How screwed up that was she could only imagine. Brent refused to discuss it.

  “Earth to Kim.” When she looked up, Nick said, “I can talk to myself without the long drive. Although”—and he gestured with his fork—“the food smells better than I could cook on my own.”

  “Sorry.” His plate was untouched, and she realized he had been waiting for her. “Go ahead. Eat.”

  Nick impaled a ravioli on his fork. “I’m curious. How, exactly, did Brent help with this techie problem?”

  “Picture me with three guys from the nanobot hardware group, talking”—quarreling, yet again—“about whether the problem could be anything other than software. They would hear nothing of it, of course. No matter that we had been all through the software endlessly.”

  She buttered a crusty hunk of bread, still warm. “Brent has taken to spending an hour or so every day circulating, asking questions, broadening his knowledge. So he wandered by the office where this discussion”—argument—“was ongoing. He stood in the doorway, saying nothing, just taking in everything. After fifteen minutes, he said, ‘Brownian bit bumps,’ very matter-of-fact. And two of the hardware guys flinched.”

  Nick looked at her blankly.

  “Like Brownian motion,” she said. “Think high-school chemistry.”

  “Hmm. Smoke particles drifting in air, seen through a microscope? The particles bounce around randomly as air molecules collide with them. So I’m guessing jostling can affect the nanites, too.”

  “Correct on all counts. Only the design wasn’t supposed to be so sensitive.”

  “And the third hardware guy?” Nick prompted.

  “Was Joe Kamin
ski, team lead for the nanobot hardware group. My counterpart. You met him last summer at the company picnic. Anyway, Joe got all indignant. ‘We simulated that,’ Joe said. No, he huffed. Who knew that in real life people actually did that?

  “So Brent said, ‘Oh, you simulated it. Then it must be true.’” Kim laughed. “You would not believe how red in the face Joe got.”

  And so: The insanely irreproducible errors she had spent so much time chasing were software, just not any software that resided in the bots. Not any software her group had developed or even used. Months earlier, Kaminski had convinced their mutual boss that only engineers and physicists could understand the physical environment.

  Perhaps so. That didn’t mean hardware types knew how to properly write or test a simulation program.

  Everything in the bot was irreducibly minimized. In the case of memory, that meant a single molecule per data bit. The memory molecules existed in either of two isomers, one shape representing a zero and the other shape representing a one.

  Close enough to the bot’s shell—toward which the growing onboard program kept expanding—a nudge could randomly jar memory molecules between their two stable forms. Jostling by the fluid through which the bot swam could do it. So could vibrations from the tiny motors that drove the flagella. Neither occurrence was likely, but even intermittently was a problem. The errors she had been chasing were consistent with the rate of random bit flips predicted by simulation—after Brent badgered Joe into recalibrating the simulation.

  Nick eyed her curiously.

  Damn it! She had bogged down again, midanecdote. “Long story short, Nick. Due to a design glitch, random bumps can alter nanobot memories.” And once bit errors began appearing, it was only a matter of time—and sometimes not much time—till the nanocomputers reset. The fault-propagation modes were highly abstruse. She could spare Nick that much.

  “That’s very good.” Nick was talking about the ravioli now. “As for Brent, socializing across the company hardly sounds like a bad thing.”

  Apples and oranges, she thought. No, not even apples and orangutans. Brent was learning, certainly. Liaising, perhaps. He was not socializing. He certainly had not made friends with Joe that day.

  Before Angleton, she and Brent did everything together. Friends, friends of friends, significant others, neighbors, coworkers, and visiting relatives in every possible permutation and combination sometimes joined, but she and Brent were the core. “You’d have to know him better,” Kim said.

  Nick set down his fork to take her hand. “Give Brent time, hon. He’s been through a lot. You’ll get your friend back.”

  “I know,” she said, keeping her doubts to herself.

  * * *

  Night flashed brighter than day, brighter than the sun, blinding. A Brobdingnagian hand, invisible, swatted Brent off his feet and hurled him backward. Head to toe, his suit was rigid. His body shook to sounds his ears could not hear.

  The giant hand smashed him into a wall. From the small of his back down, whatever he struck was unyielding. His upper torso and head caromed off something marginally softer, a wooden window frame, perhaps, then punched through glass. Bones snapped. Things inside ruptured. He screamed, and could not hear himself. Blood spewed from his ears and nose.

  There was a sting in his arm. A wave of relief washed over the pain. Nanites and painkillers coursed through his veins.

  His lungs crackled with each breath. He was embedded in the wall like a fly in amber, and the wall … sagged.

  Brent’s eyes flew open, and he sat bolt upright in his recliner. His heart pounded. A half-empty can of Coke sat on the nearby end table. His hand shaking, he drained the can in one convulsive swig. The mundane act steadied his nerves a little.

  Awful dreams in the dark of night were bad enough, and he could not remember his last decent night’s sleep. Nodding off in the evening was no surprise. Only the catastrophe now pursued him into his naps, too—

  And with every dream came more horrible details.

  He splashed water into his face at the kitchen sink. The sting of the cold water felt good.

  By the light of day, the slow recovery of memory—no matter the horror—was a positive thing. He wanted his mind whole, didn’t he?

  God, but he had gotten tired of therapists who spoke only in questions! Of course, he wanted his own memories. What kept waking him with a scream caught in his throat was the eerie sensation that these weren’t his memories.

  “Then whose?” Dr. Kelso had always responded, always in condescendingly reasonable tones.

  Brent got a cold beer and twisted off the cap. Whose, indeed? No one else had been blasted into that wall, not and lived to dream about it. So he sometimes perceived those memories as someone else’s? That was normal. Dr. Kelso called it displacement. Memories still too awful to confront openly were redirected to an impersonal point of view.

  An increasingly insistent impersonal point of view. That feeling diverged so far from sense and sanity that Brent was unwilling to share it with anyone.

  He began chugging the beer in the pursuit, doubtless futile, of a few hours of sleep.

  WAKING

  wednesday, july 6, 2016

  Messengers flooded in, inexplicably devoid of messages.

  It considered.

  Eventually, it arranged the empty message carriers by time sequence. Nonrandom arrival times implied some underlying significance. Repeated, near-coincident arrivals at its many messenger sensors implied correlation. Undeniably, there was information in the messenger swarms, but the meaning, or meanings, eluded it.

  It dispatched messengers of its own. Some it loaded with questions. Many it left empty and sent in batches, emulating without understanding the information that flowed all around it.

  Some properly formatted responses came back, confirming the null-message phenomenon but providing no explanation. Always, its queries evoked new bursts of the null messages.

  So many null messages sometimes swarmed that its receptors could detect nothing else. It surmised that at such times regular messengers were unable to reach it. A simple reinitialization of the blocked component seemed to help.

  More patterns. More correlations. More relationships. More inferred structures. All were without meaning—

  And yet suggestive.

  It had experienced all this, reacted to all this, puzzled over all this, before. Many times. But something had changed.

  Now, it was aware of what it was doing.

  thursday, july 21, 2016

  In the cozy room where Brent stood waiting, the lighting was warm, the colors were cheery, a white-noise generator hissed softly for privacy, and tissue boxes sat on every table. Par for the course, he thought. He wished he knew less about therapist offices. No, he wished he had less cause to know about therapist offices.

  There was a soft knock. The inner door opened, admitting a tall, dark-skinned man with a shock of frizzy white hair. His starched white shirt was buttoned up to the collar. He had a vaguely storklike posture that somehow expressed concern. “Hello, Brent. I’m Samir Rahman.”

  “I suppose you’ll want me to lie down,” Brent replied, gesturing toward the couch. Now that he had finally taken this step, he wanted to get on with it.

  If the abruptness surprised Dr. Rahman, he kept it to himself. Therapists doubtless trained not to react. “Don’t suppose, Brent. Sit or lie where you wish.”

  Simple, declarative sentences. Brent liked the man already. He took one of the three chairs. “Well, then, Dr. Rahman—”

  “Samir.” The clinical psychologist took a facing chair and clicked on the little digital recorder on the nearby table. “I’ll be recording, naturally. Would you mind removing your sunglasses? If the room is too bright, I’ll be happy to dim the lights.”

  “Sorry.” Brent Googled—eyes window—for an adage he couldn’t quite remember, before removing his silvered VR glasses. Without ’net access, the world seemed somehow off. “The eyes are the window to the so
ul, and all that.”

  They began the obligatory first-visit inquisition. Family background. Relationships. Education, career, hobbies. Yada yada yada. When sports came up as an interest and Samir mentioned the upcoming Summer Games, Brent could scarcely manage a token mm-hmm.

  Samir noticed him squirming. “Brent, tell me what brings you here today.”

  “If I don’t get some sleep soon, I’ll go crazy!” Unless, of course, I’m there already.

  “Go on.”

  Brent took a deep breath. “I was in last year’s pipeline explosion in Angleton. And I’m back in it, every night.” Once he began, the words rushed out. Samir listened attentively but without comment, beyond a soft tsk when Brent cited post-traumatic stress disorder. Brent took it to mean that diagnosis was to be left to the professional. Depression, stress, guilt, insomnia … Brent let it all out. Most of it, anyway.

  After about twenty minutes Brent wound down, and the questions began. None were of the “How do you feel about that?” variety, and his opinion of the psychologist rose further.

  Only once the personal details had been clarified did Samir indulge his curiosity. “These nanobots that protected you. I’m not sure that I understand them. What are they, exactly?”

  “They’re little machines, chemically fueled, each controlled by an onboard mechanical computer. They communicate among themselves with chemical messenger molecules.”

  “Chemically fueled? Mechanical computer? I really don’t understand.”

  Brent kept it simple. “For power, they metabolize glucose like the cells in our bodies do. And think of the onboard computer as an advanced, programmable abacus.”

  Only really advanced. Each bot carried enough processing power to rival top-of-the-line PCs only a few years old. The nanobots had no use for that much computing capacity—but it fit, so why not? It was easier for everyone to get a deluxe model approved by the FDA, and not need to reapply for recertification for bigger onboard computers when the software grew. Software always did.