by Jeff Carlson
The vaccine was only the same technology refined. It was no more intelligent than its brother. That was why the early models were imperfect. The vaccine had only the slightest capacity to discriminate between the plague and other molecular structures. That changed when the science teams in Leadville improved the vaccine’s ability to think. It was a real chore to bestow the faculties of awareness and decision upon machines this size without crimping their operational speed, but as soon as the vaccine was able to outpace its rival, U.S. forces gained a small advantage over the Russians and Chinese.
Unfortunately, the nanotech was too ethereal for the U.S. to keep to themselves. The final version of the vaccine spread as inexorably as the machine plague itself. Whenever a soldier loaded his weapon, each time ground crews rearmed a jet, their breath, sweat, and blood were thick with microscopic machines — and so another benefit was carried to the enemy, too.
Days before the bombing, Leadville also developed a nanotech called the booster. Again, its core was based on what they already knew. The booster used the same heat engine, and it made more of itself only by disassembling the machine plague, but this nano had the true beginnings of intelligence. The discrimination key that served the vaccine so well was at last becoming something more profound.
The booster was intended to read its host’s DNA and to reinforce that information. Ultimately, it would even correct and maintain those codes. A man who received a perfect booster in his twenties would always be in his twenties, immune to viruses and infections and protected from the slow deterioration caused by age, poor diet, or genetic miscues like diabetes, heart disease, and cancer. The first model of the booster was light-years short of this magic, but it had given Ruth, Cam, and many others some protection from radiation poisoning on the outskirts of the Leadville crater.
Again, the nanotech had spread. The booster was now worldwide exactly like the vaccine, available for everyone to use and study. Ruth knew there was also a fourth fully functional nano, because it was hers.
The parasite had no benign features whatsoever. It was a violently simplified model of the booster combined with a new discrimination key, a rough, bare bones machine designed to attack the vaccine instead of the machine plague. This was the doomsday weapon she’d created in Grand Lake. It would have left everyone vulnerable to the machine plague again, laying waste to the armies on all sides as they scrambled for elevation.
Ruth couldn’t say what avenues were being pursued by other allied researchers. As for herself, she just didn’t have the stomach for more killing. She’d set aside her own efforts at weaponized nanotech to develop new spin-offs of the booster, pursuing medical technology that would not only prevent disease — it should also heal wounds such as Cam’s old, body-wide injuries. There were hundreds of thousands of people with plague scarring, and thousands more still struggling with radiation sickness or burns. Ruth wanted to help. Now that decision seemed like a criminal error. The other side had pulled far ahead when she might have been the one to destroy them first.
“The nanotech is Chinese,” Ruth said, calling to the walkie-talkie. She’d set it on the desktop to free her hands as she worked a UV lamp over her equipment. “The style is too similar to everything else of theirs I’ve seen. That wasn’t much, but Leadville was studying enemy programs as closely as possible.”
“You’re sure, Ruth?” Greg said.
“Yes. The nanotech is Chinese.” She tried to irradiate every nook and seam, which was especially difficult among her paperwork, her laptop, the two microscopes, picoamme ter, and power cords. She had to ruffle through her gear with one hand as she held the lamp with the other.
The light seared her eyes even though she kept her face half turned, using her helmet as a shield. The purple-white heat felt like a small sun. It was no accident that she targeted her gear and the desk first, because the lamp might compromise the material of her suit. In fact, it could melt through the plastic sheeting if she wasn’t careful.
Ruth heard another thump and lifted her head. Had that noise come from outside? She turned back to her desk. Every drawer was suspect. She opened the first one and shone the light inside, pushing her other hand through a few pencils, file clips, and a voice recorder. The next drawer held her working notes, and the third was empty. She had so little to show for her time in this place.
“I don’t know how it’s replicating,” she said, “but it’s closely based on the booster tech. The heat engine is similar, even the general structure, except they’ve added a lot of bulk. It’s bigger. More sophisticated. At a guess, I’d say this thing is made of nearly two billion AMU.”
No one questioned the acronym. Atomic mass units. Most of them had soaked up as much technical knowledge as possible, and Bobbi said, “If it’s using the same heat engine, can’t you reprogram the vaccine to attack it, too?”
What had Cam told them?
“We can try,” Ruth said. “It’s a very different machine. I also subjected it to low air pressure and I don’t think it has the hypobaric fuse, so it won’t self-destruct above ten thousand feet.” She paused over her desk, then aimed the UV lamp at the walkie-talkie, too, uncertain if it would fry the radio.
There was another clunking sound in front of her and this time she was sure it was from outside. Good.
“Cam?” she said.
“What is the nanotech doing to us?” he asked, and Ruth smiled with relief that the walkie-talkie was fine. But her smile evaporated in the harsh light. “I don’t know,” she said. “It goes for the brain, obviously. Maybe the nervous system, too. It’s some kind of biological warfare.”
“I’ll get a work crew together,” he said.
“Thank you.” Oh, God, thank you, she thought. Then she turned the radio over and irradiated its other side.
The UV bath wasn’t guaranteed to pulverize the nanotech. At most, it should damage the invisible machines. It would be more effective in combination with X-rays, but they hadn’t been able to find what they needed in the small hospital in Steamboat Springs. Like electrical generators, the most common medical equipment had been scavenged long ago. They hadn’t even been able to buy one on the local market.
Trying to scour the light over every millimeter of her suit was infuriating. The tanks on her back nearly threw her on her head when she tried to reach her boots. Once she pressed her knuckles against the plastic on the floor, yanking the lamp away just in time. She knelt against the desk just to keep her balance, working the lamp over every crease in her legs, neck, and sleeves with cold-blooded precision.
Ruth pointed the lamp sideways across her faceplate, too, with her eyes scrunched tight against the purple heat. She twisted to aim the light up and down her air tanks, contorting her upper body. Finally she turned to the tent itself. She was patient, sweeping the light back and forth like a paintbrush.
In the other room, Patrick continued to worm against the floor. Bam. Scraaatch. Bam. Bam.
“Huuh,” Linda groaned. “Huuh.”
“I’m going to turn on the fans,” Ruth said. “You guys should back off in case something goes wrong.”
“Ruth, wait,” Bobbi said, just as Greg said, “No! You have to tell us more.”
“That’s all I know. Where is Cam?”
“This isn’t a good idea!”
“Greg, it would take me days to pull the nano apart with this AFM. What I have is a surface scan. It’s in my laptop. I can keep trying to make sense of it, but I’m coming out.”
She hoped Cam would say something, too. Anything. She ached for reassurance and a friendly voice. She just wanted to make contact again. Didn’t he realize it might be for the last time? But he must have been busy redistributing their guards and finding tools.
“I’ll call you when I’m ready,” she told Greg. Then she punched the emergency switch bolted to her desktop.
The room jumped. Ruth almost fell. Loose pages ripped up past her face as the plastic snapped tight on all sides. Behind her, it ballooned outward
like a sail. The tent was secured to the ceiling, floor, and three of the four walls, where hundreds of carpenter’s staples had been shot through reinforced patches, but the airlock and the decon tent were only tied to the floor. That end of the tent wanted to pull free. Her suit leapt in the same way. The chest piece hiked up against her collar and her sleeves trembled in the cyclone.
There were two square metal frames set in the tent, a small one in the ceiling and a larger one beneath her. They’d bolted a heavy-duty exhaust fan into the floor and an air compressor overhead. The fan was nearly four feet wide. Eric and Cam had taken it from a press shop, where it was used to vent bad air away from the shop’s employees. Here, it fed clean air into the room through two openings hidden in the cabin’s foundation. They hadn’t wanted to seat it in the wall where it might raise questions if the military ever came through town.
Ruth rubbed her hands over as much surface area as she could reach in quick, arcing motions, hoping to scrape free any nanotech clinging to the tent.
Suddenly the plastic on her right tore loose from its staples, bumping her shoulder and hip. Ruth screamed. “Aaaah!” The plastic itself was intact — only the stapled patches on the outside had torn — but if any more of the plastic came free, the tent might collapse around her like a net — or it might rip.
Either accident would probably kill her.
Don’t stop, she thought, clapping her gloves together as she glanced up through the howling channel overhead. Then she began to scrub feverishly at the plastic again.
The A-frame roof of her hut was sturdier than it needed to be. It was designed to bear the weight of snow, but the beams in the ceiling also supported the air compressor and duct work leading to a storage tank about the size of a small car. They’d found the compressor in the garage of a pipeline testing company. It was powered by the huge diesel engine from a Peterbilt truck, which they’d hidden in a cellar beneath the cabin, running a drive belt and an exhaust line into the roof. Ruth couldn’t hear the engine because of the fan, but it was probably adding to the dangerous vibrations throughout the building.
The compressor was rated at 2,700 cubic feet per minute. That meant it could swap the air out of her lab in seconds, again and again and again, but it was impossible to ensure that the room was safe. Even if 90 percent of the contamination was sucked away in the first minute, and, in the second minute, 90 percent of the remainder was taken, there would always be a miniscule amount left behind.
Unfortunately, the tent wasn’t holding up well, and Ruth worried about the rest of the system, too. If she continued to subject it to full power, the compressor might blow out or the ducts might leak, which was why they’d situated her hut on the southern edge of Jefferson. This cabin was generally downwind. An accidental discharge should be carried away from town.
What if it wasn’t?
Shaking from exhaustion, Ruth climbed onto the desk with a fold of plastic from the repair kit. It shook and leapt in her hands like a flag. The vent in the ceiling was already partially blocked by wads of paper and she let go of her patch, clogging the vent completely. Then she kicked her boot into the emergency switch and turned off the system.
The fan died before the diesel engine sputtered and quit. There was no need to hold the patch in place. Most of it had been sucked tight into the grill and Ruth taped the edges as fast as possible, securing it to the ceiling of the tent.
She repeated the process with another, larger square. Then she got down and surveyed her lab. The tent was still secured to the wall behind the desk. That wasn’t the wall she’d intended to have them chop open, but it would have to do. Outside the tent, the room itself hadn’t been decontaminated. She would need to melt and seal the plastic to the wall before they cut their way in.
She found her walkie-talkie. “I’m okay,” she said, leaning over the desk to knock on the wall.
Cam said, “Ruth? Jesus, Ruth, it sounded like the whole place was coming apart.”
“Change of plans. I want you to come through this wall instead.” She knocked again and was answered by a dull chak like a pry bar hitting the wood. There must have been a group of them outside and she yelled, “No, stop! Stop!”
Cam echoed her. “Stop it! Stop! We need to make sure we’re in the right place!”
Ruth looked away from the wall, feeling wistful and scared and glad. He was always so fast to understand her, except when she tried to talk about her feelings — but there was another reason for them to hold off. “I want to hit the entire lab with UV again,” she said, reaching for the lamp. “Give me ten minutes.”
Twenty minutes later, she realized she was only delaying the inevitable. She had to trust the decontamination. She was out of options. This was it.
“Cam,” she said to the walkie-talkie, but everyone else was listening, and Allison’s body lay just a few feet away in the other room. It wasn’t right to say anything. Still, she wished she could tell him so many things.
“I’m here,” he said. “We’re ready.”
“Wait for my signal,” she said lamely. She shut off the lamp and cracked the seal on her collar. The moist heat surrounding her body wooshed out of the suit. Ruth couldn’t help but hold her breath even as she closed her eyes, not only to protect them but to savor the soft, cool air on her face.
Did I get all of it? she wondered.
Standing alone in the plastic, separated from him by just a few feet, Ruth waited to see if she’d lose her mind.
9
Cam was uncertain at first when Ruth’s face appeared in the gash in the wall. Her curly hair was matted and sweaty. Her skin looked bright red in their flashlights, and her eyes were bloodshot. Some of the men stumbled back. They banged against each other as Greg stiffened with his rifle. “Ruth!?” Greg shouted.
“I’m okay,” she said.
There was a sunburned patch across the right side of her face that began as a remarkably square corner on her temple. Cam realized it was the same shape as the faceplate in her helmet. She’d done it to herself with the UV lamp.
He pushed through the others to reach her. “Careful,” he said. He was still armored in his goggles and face mask, and yet Ruth tried to meet his gaze in the white beams of the flashlights. Then she smiled and ducked back inside with a noise like a laugh.
“Wait!” he yelled.
Her euphoria seemed out of place. Cam wondered if he had the guts to club her if she popped her face into the gap again. Was she infected? But she’s talking, he thought.
“Here,” she said, filling the hole in the wall with her laptop. Her hands fluttered once and then vanished. The black Dell would have fallen if Cam hadn’t dropped his crowbar and caught the laptop instead.
Through the wall, he saw her lab and the plastic tent. Ruth stood very close to him, yanking at something on her desk with lithe, harried movements. Cam finally realized how eager she was to escape and he thought of other times when she hadn’t acted her age, either. Sometimes her intellect was overshadowed by her emotions. In fact, Cam thought that energy was tied directly to her IQ. Part of Ruth’s genius was her ability to tap deep into herself, but her moods could be dangerous, too, childish and loud.
“Help me,” he said, holding the laptop out to the group. No one took it and he barked, “Help me! There’ll be more stuff in a second.”
A man named Matthew grabbed the laptop and Cam turned again just as Ruth muscled her AFM into the gap in the wall.
The atomic force microscope wasn’t much bigger than his thigh, a white metal cylinder with a stout base and a tapered white cone that rose to a single black eyepiece. Cam had always marveled that something so small could design machines of such consequence, but, by its very definition, nanotech was infinitesimal. The AFM housed a power system and a shovelful of microprocessors, yet most of its bulk was only necessary to provide optics and controls that could be used by human beings. The heart of the machine, its computerized tip array and work surface, filled a space no larger than a dime.
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The AFM weighed forty pounds, though, and Ruth shoved it through as hard as she could. Cam slumped beneath the device, catching it at an awkward angle against the wall. “Wait!” he shouted. Owen shouldered in beside him. The two of them lugged the microscope away through the debris on the ground. Cam nearly twisted his ankle when he stepped on a chunk of wood and then some loose bricks.
From the corner of his eye, he saw Matthew go to the hole in time to catch two notebooks and Ruth’s containment suit, a yellow wad that spilled its legs and sleeves over Matthew’s body. The air tanks tipped out of Matthew’s grasp and pulled the suit to the ground.
“Jesus, Ruth!” Cam shouted, but she wasn’t listening.
“Cam!” she yelled. “Where is Cam?”
He left the AFM with Owen and another man, running back to the hut. Ruth held a piece of paper. Matthew made as if to grab it, but Ruth shook her head in one violent, sideways motion.
“Cam?” she said, trusting the paper only to him.
He recognized it in a glance. A map. After the war, they’d carried the vial of the parasite nanotech with them. What else could they do? At first they needed it as a goad against the enemy and their own government, forcing both sides to stand down, and then they were caught in another kind of trap. They found a small shockproof case for it, a plastic clamshell meant to hold a pair of glasses, but if the parasite broke loose in an accident — if they were robbed or killed — it would destroy the world again. The vial was too dangerous to leave behind. They wanted to bury it, but what if rain or erosion brought it to the surface? Someone might open it.
They hadn’t found a solution until they settled in Jefferson. They bought an iron box in Morristown and stenciled warnings on it in English, Hebrew, and Russian. Now the vial was buried twelve feet down in the foothills west of town. It would have to stay there. They couldn’t spare two or three hours to dig the box up again, even if the parasite might be exactly what they needed to threaten the Chinese. Could they still bluff the enemy?
