***ANAD understands…commencing solid-phase destructive disassembly…hold on to your hats, folks***
Moments later, a vast, deeply felt rumbling could be heard and felt up and down Paryang valley. A great crashing roar occurred as landslides and avalanches pummeled the ground from the high slopes around the parked geoplanes.
For protection, Barnes decided it was best to submerge Gopher about fifty meters below ground. Gibby agreed.
The geoplane’s treads were engaged and her nose angled slightly down as the borer plowed through the snow and bit into the hard, frozen ground. In moments, they were below the surface, crawling forward toward the rendezvous coordinates.
The tremors had started, a continuous wave of tectonic plate motion and upheaval, shattering everything within kilometers of the Paryang valley and its ancient monastery.
Soon, the battle at Red Hammer’s central base would be joined.
Inside Paryang Monastery
December 7, 2049
0400 hours
Johnny Winger had a dilemma. The human being that had once been called Johnny Winger was now a dematerialized cloud of bots, what most people would call an angel. He was circulating around the Net, surfing bytes and packets and he knew he had a mission. His assigned mission was simple: to find Config Zero and insert the INDRA virus in its main processor.
It was just like a fist fight in a sleet storm, this combat down at the level of atoms. As an atomgrabber and a nanotrooper for years, Winger had worked with ANAD systems and driven bots through every kind of environment you could think of, including solid rock. Now he was one of them, living and fighting with the molecules that made up this crazy, roller-coaster world.
It was better than riding the Cyclone at Daytona Beach.
“Doc, maybe your ancestors were right…this is cool stuff. It’s a little bit like swimming uphill, or tacking against strong winds in a sailboat, but once you get the hang of it, it’s a real head trip.”
Doc II chimed through on the coupler circuit. ***Multi-config is the way to go, Major…we’ve always maintained there’s nothing like it…***
Winger found maneuvering through the packet stream inside the Net was something like fighting currents in the ocean. As a child, he remembered riding the waves on a board, tumbling end for end as the waves broke into a crescendo of foam and slammed him headfirst into the sand. You could fight the currents or you could flow with the currents. Just dodging the speedway of cotton balls was tricky enough, for that’s what the packet stream seemed like to him.
It was time to exit the Net.
Johnny Winger set his propulsors for the nearest node. Doc II had given him a vector and he made up the distance in a few minutes. From a tactical map in memory, he knew this node, Node 3371, was inside the Server Bank Eight room. He closed on the node and pushed through the connector grid, flowing out of the lines and into a smoking, wreckage-filled space crammed with toppled server racks, smashed cabinets, and loose pieces of cable and ceiling tile.
Well, I see the geoplanes have started their end of the assault.
Johnny Winger toggled configuration C-2 and began slamming atoms to gather himself into something more closely resembling a human being, what the bots had long called a Normal. You had to laugh at that. What was normal and what wasn’t now? Everything in existence was made up of atoms. Some configurations just had more atoms than others.
The process took about five minutes. When it was done, there stood alongside the rack containing server node 3371 an angel being that closely resembled Major Johnny Winger. In fact, it was Johnny Winger in all the ways that mattered…memory, identity, habits and thoughts. Doc II had seen to that.
Now it was time to see to his real mission…what he had come here for.
He sensed a dense form nearby…likely a Normal…and configged his photon lens to bring the form into clarity, probing ahead for thermal, electromagnetic and acoustic signatures.
It was a human.
Zhang Wutien had been an IT tech at the monastery for only a year and had spent much of that time buried in the server racks on the fifth subsurface level of the complex, troubleshooting disk problems, maintaining firewalls, building and allocating directories. The last thing he expected to see on the first anniversary of being hired was a small stream of sparkling smoke issuing from Node 3371 of the T-7 hub in the corner.
“Crap,” he muttered to himself. “Third disk failure this week—“ But when the stream of smoke began to solidify and form up a recognizably human shape, Zhang froze in his tracks and dropped his tablet clattering to the floor.
When Johnny Winger spoke gently to the young IT tech, suggesting it was time to leave, Zhang fled the server room in terror, knocking stacks of disks and other equipment from nearby shelves and racks. He left the door to the server room wide open and streaked off down the hall, shouting and waving about the ghost he had just seen.
“Well, Doc, that went well. Can you give me a bearing to our target?”
***Detecting massive decoherence wakes, Johnny…strong quantum disturbance…bearing zero eight five degrees, below our level***
“Must be a floor below us. Doc, I know we were here before, but I don’t recognize anything.”
***Johnny, all structures inside this complex are nanobotic elements…reconfiguration is easily possible…home on the target bearing….that should be Configuration Zero…that source should be constant***
Winger, operating as a human-like angel, reconnoitered passageways and corridors for a few minutes, earning a few stares from other inhabitants but no alarms sounded. It was Doc who suggested he resume a loose, amorphous state.
Nanotroopers Episode 21: Paryang Monastery Page 17
