A Stranger in Paradise

by Edward M. Lerner

  For one ’bot to detect another’s flailing laser beam took time, but link by link the network took form. Random distribution meant gaps, but the third ’bot-swarm release plugged the holes. They could see and hear much that transpired in the control room of the Syndicate’s main orbital fabrication facility.

  Then they sent scouts through the ducts to explore the secret labs.

  Scant meters short of their ultimate goal, they were stuck. Repeatedly. For want of a microwatt the gnatbot was lost. . . .

  His sarcasm weighing on his conscience, Jason opened his eyes. “There’s hardly any free surface area, Bill. I can’t add enough photocells to matter.”

  Bill made no comment, letting silence speak for him: You’re the expert. Make it work.

  Jason hummed. He studied the ceiling for a while. He whistled tunelessly. He drummed fingers on the dayroom table. He gave up the tapping to stroke his chin in thought. There had to be a way. “Unless . . .”

  Sherry sat up. “Unless what, hot shot?”

  “Unless we build the ’bots from diamond,” Jason said.

  “You’re kidding, right?” Even Bill’s optimism knew limits.

  “Actually, no.” Jason stretched as much as the cramped dayroom would allow. “It’s an easier problem than nanite-grown hulls. I don’t know anyone making microbots from diamond, but synthetic diamond is used for special-purpose computer chips.

  “Carbon atoms are smaller than silicon, so we can shrink most everything in the ’bot. Expand it back to its current size, and there’ll be some uncommitted surface area for photocells.”

  Jason warmed to the idea, his words tumbling out faster and faster. “Another thing. Diamond bearings will mean less friction in the micromotors. That’ll reduce power use.”

  Bill emerged from the galley with the inevitable coffee bulb. “Can your friends Dirtside make diamond ’bots for us?”

  The K-State labs had the necessary equipment; motivation was the question. His buddies knew only that he was away with Sherry—and when he went back, they expected to hear all the prurient details.

  That was the least of his worries. He had more serious matters to lie about.

  Jason thought about his tech-junkie friends back on Earth. He considered the practical challenges in making a diamond ’bot. The fun. “Yeah,” he said, smiling. “They’ll do it. Count on it.”

  A package for Jason arrived from Dirtside. An imperious summons followed close after.

  The Syndicate heralded its messages, no matter how trivial, with high-priority tones. The ominous brass cadenza preceding this message had to signify a communication from a Syndicate bigwig. With a shiver, Jason opened the message.

  Barbara Shaw, the station director, appeared. “I’ve scheduled ten minutes for Jason Grimaldi at 14:15 Station time.” That was in twenty minutes, barely time to put on fresh clothes and reach her office. “Be prompt.”

  Shrewd eyes peered at Jason from the end-of-message still frame. He did not relish feeling that gaze in person. “Sherry, Bill . . . I can’t explain that call. I’ve never met the woman.”

  To Jason’s surprise, Sherry laughed. “You kicked up a stir Dirtside at the Syndicate regional office. Maybe Ms. Evil Eye means to resume the conversation you started with her campus recruiter.”

  He goggled. “You knew?”

  “That you visited the local Syndicate office after I approached you? Yeah, we knew that. The receptionist is one of us.”

  “Then why am I here?”

  Bill fielded that one. “Our agent listened in by intercom. You got into a nasty fight with the company man. You kept working with Sherry, so we decided you were on our side.”

  Jason looked away, red-faced. “Sherry gave me a lot to think about, but I had to make up my own mind about the Syndicate. You couldn’t have known that. The scene could have been staged for your benefit.”

  Sherry squeezed his hand. “It could. I told Uncle Bill I didn’t believe it had been. I trust you.”

  Jason had to know. “Why?”

  She winked. “You talk in your sleep.”

  The director took a call just as an aide escorted Jason in. She waved him to a seat, her attention on the call.

  The butter-soft leather of the autochair molded itself to Jason. Its gentle embrace, not a mundane seatbelt, held him in place. Like everything in this luxurious office, the chair reeked of affluence.

  There’s an interesting expression, he thought. Pre-Sherry, did I ever consider affluence capable of reeking?

  Not important, Jason. If this woman learned what he, Sherry, and Bill were up to, they would all be in the station’s brig. Could Sherry be right? Was this merely a continuation of his argument with the Syndicate recruiter? Why would Shaw bother?

  The office was oak-paneled, with plush oriental rugs over an Italian marble floor. Merely the chair that nestled him would cost his parents a year’s salary. To lob such opulence up from the bottom of the gravity well? It was a brazen display of wealth. (Display? Another interesting word choice.) Jason could not fathom the mindset that valued such ostentation while a breathtaking view of Earth went unappreciated behind Shaw’s desk.

  At first glance, Barbara Shaw looked little older than Sherry. That had to be ReJuv shots; she could surely afford them. Her level, penetrating gaze spoke of many years in command. Despite microgee, Shaw’s drifting, flowing hair somehow stayed coiffed. She probably spent more on her hair than he spent, Dirtside, on rent. He fought—unsuccessfully—the urge to squirm in the autochair. It buzzed softly, remolding itself to him.

  Shaw finished her call. “Thank you for coming, Mr. Grimaldi.” She tapped at her computer console. “Ah, there you are. Tough classes, good grades, significant dissertation project. And very resourceful.”

  Jason had not come expecting compliments. “Excuse me?”

  “Picking a fight with a Dirtside recruiter to raise your visibility, then coming to a Syndicate Station. Ever since the system flagged your name on a passenger manifest, I’ve been expecting your call. I had begun to wonder if you’d gotten cold feet.

  “Naturally, the system has followed you since Tom Paine’s arrival. Zero-gee sports”—the station’s tourist annex was famous for them—“seemed a bit extravagant for a grad student.” Shaw arched an eyebrow. “Although I imagine you and Ms. Nilsson have another zero-gee sport to divert you.

  “When the cargo manifest for today’s shuttle named you as receiver of a gemstone shipment, I understood the delay: careless packing.” Shaw smiled broadly at him. “Gifts aren’t necessary, of course, but I won’t say no.”

  Damn the guys anyway, declaring the diamond ’bots as gemstones. No doubt they thought they were being clever.

  How could the occupant of this office want a bribe from an entry-level applicant? “Uh . . . so Mr. Chrisp was negative about me?”

  She laughed heartily. “You actually compared the Syndicate to the British East India Company?”

  “Yes. Are you offended?”

  “Flattered. Commercial control of the subcontinent pushed the state of the art in the 1700s.”

  Like commercial control of a planet today? The chair fought Jason as he leaned forward abruptly. “Then you admit it!”

  “You have something against profits? That’s not an attitude I look for in employees.”

  Jason said, “I’m normally all for profits. It’s monopoly profits I question.”

  Shaw frowned. “What are you suggesting?”

  “License your nanotechnology. Allow some healthy competition.”

  “Nanites give us a technological edge, Jason. Why give it away?”

  It was wasted breath, but Jason felt compelled to try. “Licensing isn’t giving it away. You could earn substantial fees without stifling all competition, and the solar system would get settled much faster.”

  She sniffed. “Li
censing offers only a pittance. We’ll make a lot more keeping the technology to ourselves.”

  “The technology should never have been exclusively yours. Just like the British East India Company, the Syndicate is a political monopoly. Oh, what you have is more subtle than a royal letter of patent, but it’s a political creation none the less.”

  Sherry had spent years deconstructing a system of subsidiaries, joint ventures, shell companies, strategic investments, corporate alliances, political obligations, and research foundations. Jason summarized as best he could. “There’s Syndicate funding behind every alarmist, lunatic fringe, anti-nanny group on Earth. Your ‘edge’ comes from hobbling nanite competitors more than from your own research.”

  He ignored her deepening glower. “The Smithson bill to stop nanotech work Dirtside will give you an insurmountable lead. Your ships will drive all the other companies, and all the independents, from space. And then won’t we be surprised when prices rise—not quite to the levels that would let another megacorp back into space.”

  Shaw leaned forward. “We’re done, Mr. Grimaldi. With your attitude, I can’t imagine why you bothered coming here.”

  Jason stood to leave. And I hope, he thought fervently, that you never do.

  The Tom Paine’s bridge felt hotter and more cramped than ever. Perspiration coated Jason’s face, beads of sweat floating free from time to time, as he willed forward another tiny robot. They were working round the clock, certain that Director Shaw would invent a reason for canceling their berthing privileges.

  Jason drove their tiny scout faster than he had ever before dared, telling himself better camouflage made that safe. Random defects induced on the diamond surface scattered light and suppressed reflections. The translucent material took the color of any surface on which the ’bot found itself.

  And thanks to Bill’s brainstorm, this scout had begun its cross-room scurry with its batteries fully recharged.

  “Go, baby, go,” Sherry urged.

  The holo view crept along by another tiny step, and another, and another. The ’bot crawled along the wall to a corner. Then a second corner. Then down the third wall onto an instrumentation shelf. They cheered as the ’bot neared a testing port for the immense synthesis vat. The vat itself abutted the station, unseen beyond the bulkhead. Inside the vat the ninth Europa-class cruiser was taking shape.

  Bill clasped Jason’s shoulder. “A lot rides on this, son, for the planetful of people below and a few more offworld. They’ll never know what happens here. But mostly I’m thinking of good folks who died in the Trojans, Sherry’s parents and brothers among them.

  “Sure, they came for the money, but that was only part of it. A small part. They believed humanity’s future was in space. Not the Syndicate’s future, but mankind’s.

  “We mustn’t allow them to have died in vain.”

  Sherry hugged her uncle, leaving an arm draped across his shoulders as the ’bot took its final steps. The virtual bull’s-eye lay perfectly centered in their display. In a corner of the image, a timer counted down.

  The moment, when it came, would be too brief for human reflexes. Now everything depended on software.

  There. A sampling port slid open. The automated quality-assurance probe stabbed into the aperture. Just as rapidly the ’bot thrust itself through the opening. They glimpsed dark turbulence before an eddy swept away the ’bot. The holo dissolved into static.

  With one keystroke Jason switched their point of view. From the fly-on-the-wall perspective of the nearest relay, they watched the service port slide shut.

  Jason squeezed the leathery hand that still gripped his shoulder. “Now, we wait.”

  Macromolecules swam purposefully through stygian darkness, grazing on glucose dissolved in the murky fluid. The breaking of chemical bonds provided power; the carbon atoms liberated from the nutrients were retained as essential building material. One by one, their carbon receptors sated, the nanites switched to delivery/construction mode.

  Molecular programs sensed and adapted to past progress. And while each nanobot worked alone, placing one carbon atom at a time, they numbered in the trillions. Together, they built with amazing speed.

  A structure of marvelous complexity emerged.

  Freed of their carbon cargo, programming sent the tiny machines back into the solution to gorge and build anew.

  A process so massively parallel entailed many missteps. Only less-than-microscopic bits of the evolving construction ever came within range of any one constructor’s chemical sensors. Decisions made from such limited data were often incorrect. A single atom bonded to the wrong place might miscue other constructors, and lead to more mistakes. Errors would propagate . . .

  Quality assurance nanites prowled the border of the ever-expanding structure, comparing whatever they found to hull blueprints encoded in their molecular memory arrays. These fixers tagged and snipped out the anomalies that inevitably crept into the construction.

  Scavenger nanites, like white blood cells, hunted foreign substances suspended in the solution. They engulfed stray contaminants and swarmed scraps tagged by the QA ’bots, before plunging sacrificially, clutching their prey, into a sticky entrapment filter.

  A scavenger nanite, one of billions in the synthesis vat, encountered something unusual. It hunted the unexpected and its software anticipated many possibilities, but no programmed response suited this discovery. Diamond fragments were to be expected, but not with traces of phosphorus, boron, and aluminum. Creeping along the immense object, apparently millions of angstroms in length, the scavenger reached a decision. The object did not belong. The scavenger prepared to release a stream of chemical signal markers. It would need many helpers to engulf the diamond fragment.

  It never got the chance.

  A vortex formed in the fluid. Other nanobots, closer than the scavenger to the turbulence, were immediately swept away. The scavenger struggled, its flagella flailing, against the suction. Even at full power it could not resist. The nanite was sucked through a tunnel into a vast cavity. The tunnel disappeared, sealed by a diamond slab. Emergency programming took control and the scavenger darted in all directions without effect.

  It took no solace from its chemically sensed company: a herd of constructors, a smaller set of fixers, and other scavengers. It did determine, as it reflexively swam and grazed, that enclosed with it were sufficient dissolved nutrients for a lengthy stay.

  “Kashmir?”

  “Yes, Ms. Shaw,” answered Keith Higgins, the director’s flustered, balding deputy. “The cryptogram to Grimaldi’s woman companion originated in Kashmir. Remember the spokesman for the Kashmir Liberation Front? Something Umar. He was at the independence talks in New Delhi. The tall, swarthy guy with the scruffy mustache. He’s the new Kashmiri foreign minister.”

  Accessing the private message was illegal and contrary to Syndicate policy. Barbara Shaw shrugged. Self-defense was a higher policy.

  She could picture Nayeem Umar, all right. So: The local malcontents were dealing with a Third World terrorist. Clearly, she should have taken more seriously the name Tom Paine, in honor of the infamous colonial radical.

  “Time for our own ‘Common Sense.’ Let’s see that recording, Higgins.” She wondered how much computing time had gone into cracking the cryptogram.

  Umar’s message was terse. “Salaam, my friend. I’m pleased to say the cabinet has completed its debate. We accept your Tweedledee proposal. Succeed, and the sum we discussed will be invested in your enterprise. Good hunting. Allahu akbar.”

  Tweedledee? Why, Shaw wondered, not Tweedledum? She could never tell them apart.

  In a way, that was the point. Newly independent Kashmir must be planning to bootstrap its economy through the methods pioneered by Singapore, South Korea, China, and Vietnam.

  Unauthorized copying.

  Within the body of the swimming gnatbot, on ne
arly frictionless diamond bearings, tiny gyroscopes spun. Despite currents and turbulence in the synthesis vat, the gyrocompass maintained range and bearing to the access hatch used by the quality-assurance probe.

  Its sampling complete, the ’bot swam back to the QA portal to await the hourly opening.

  Despite maximum magnification and computer enhancement, the three conspirators could see no sign of the overdue scout.

  “Move closer,” Bill urged.

  Jason resisted the temptation. Any time the relay moved, it chanced losing its grip on the bulkhead—and with it, any hope of relinking with the missing ’bot.

  They wanted a better view. They needed an operational comm link.

  “Sorry,” Jason said. “It stays.”

  They stared and wondered and worried. The QA sampling had happened right on schedule. Their scout should have emerged then from the vat, clutching the probe needle. It should have reestablished communications minutes ago. Where was it?

  An emergency siren howled. Jason twitched; only a loosely fastened seatbelt kept him in his chair. He slapped the ACCEPT key. “Tom Paine.”

  The synthesis-chamber anteroom shrank into a corner of the holo. A balding man with a smirk took its place. His blazer bore a Syndicate crest. “Good day. Captain Nilsson, please.”

  Bill leaned in front of the camera. “Speaking.”

  “Keith Higgins, here, Manager of Station Operations. I’m afraid, Captain, I have some inconvenient news for you.”

  “You’re awfully wordy for an emergency,” Bill said.

  Higgins shrugged. “Your comm is queuing routine calls. Rather than leave a message, I thought I’d get your attention. You might appreciate the lead time.”

  Bill sighed. “Get to the point, please.”

  Higgins’s sneer broadened. “Beta port is overdue for maintenance. At this time, our other ports are either busy or reserved for incoming Syndicate ships. Bottom line, the Tom Paine must undock by midnight, station time.”

  Midnight was scarcely ten hours away.

  Flickering in a corner of the holo caught Jason’s eye. He passed a scribbled note to Bill: Follow my lead. To the camera Jason said, “That’s impossible, I’m afraid. Our main radio blew its power transformer.” He looked expectantly at Bill.