Nano Man

by Dean C. Moore

  “Might I ask what you want to do with the shape shifter once you get your eyes on him?” Tremelio asked. Did he plan on dissecting him? Brainwashing him? Applying leverage to cajole him to do what he wanted, perhaps by holding Jane hostage?

  “I have from now until then to fantasize. Be sure to ask me again. This kind of strategic asset is what generals like myself live for. I assure you I will be up to the task when the time comes.”

  “Not everyone who has them on their radar is going to be trying to capture them. Some will only want to destroy them to give themselves time for their own prototypes to come to market.” He advised as much because he had to continue to bolster Korsakov’s thinking in order to justify their codependence, though it sickened him at this point to do so.

  Once again Korsakov sighed. “This is true. We just have to hope those two are cleverer than the opposition. I’m not willing to risk another war just to invade American air space to take them out.”

  “But there are no shortage of corporations established in America that will be happy to do that for you.”

  Korsakov chuckled. “God, I love those guys. Pity we’re on opposite sides of the table on this one.”

  ***

  Russian Model KS-7 scrutinized the landscape of endless dunes before him. His mission to do no more than endure this hell on earth had proved instructive for all its monotony. For one, the sand, which at first reminded him of the gruel his mother fed him as a child, could now be made to taste like anything, simply by visualizing it. When he had trouble visualizing anything due to the sun beating down on him with the severity one might expect surfing the sun’s corona on a beach board, the nanites in his stomach quickly excreted a chemical cascade that protected his fragile biological brain.

  At first he didn’t know how he was surviving out here, but the nanites, sensing he was going a bit stir crazy from tracing the lines at the top of the dunes as if they were part of a more meaningful maze pattern, isolated a route to his medulla oblongata, the part of his body responsible for autonomic functions. By doing so they were able to illuminate his higher mind on exactly what was going on within him on a biological level. He could get as detailed as he liked with his experimental observations, the nanites providing him with HD images suitable to the most powerful of microscopes, if he so desired.

  The nanites also lent KS-7 the scientific acumen to make sense of what they were doing and to even participate in the experiments. It seemed making him a good deal smarter and more imaginative and more of a co-conspirator than someone merely along for the ride, a mere meat puppet, contributed to their mutual survival. So the nanites were only too happy to do what they could for him.

  But now that he had been made more aware, the realizations came with a price. The nano informed him that they had done about as much as they could do for him while trapped in his stomach. There appeared to be limits to his carbon based lifeform that they could do little more about now that they had maximized his potential. To go the next step they needed out of his stomach. They were asking his permission to commence the grand exodus.

  A bit fearful of the prospect, he nonetheless conceded. He wouldn’t be alive without them, and he’d be one angry son of a bitch, angry at the world and at himself for getting into this situation if they hadn’t kept his mind good and occupied. So in short, while he didn’t entirely trust them, they were the best friends he ever had, and more of a saving grace than the general who had promised him a new life, a chance to escape grinding poverty. A chance to go from being an obscure and irrelevant footnote in life to someone who actually shaped history. Forget that life in Russia, even in the dead of winter, surviving on rats, and sleeping inside walls, where his “blankets” were the insulating brick wall to one side of him, and the stucco to the other, felt like Shangri-La compared to this.

  When the general finally decided to deliver on his promise it came at a curious time. KS-7 had just received orders, by way of a satellite transmission sent directly to the nanite hive mind in his stomach, to head to a black, off-grid region, where he would meet another nano-enhanced soldier and subdue him. Had the order come through a few minutes earlier, KS-7 would likely not have complied with it. He was feeling rather independent from the army, from his superiors, and from life’s constraints in general now that he’d found a more empowering relationship with the bacteria-sized nanobots in his gut.

  But the nanites had since migrated to the rest of his body. What they hadn’t told him prior to that migration was that once they were fully dispersed throughout his entire person, attending to far more duties than they were able to from inside his stomach, that they would also now be more taxed to their limits.

  Suddenly, his augmented intelligence was gone. He was cut off from the mental stimulation that had kept him from going insane wandering the desert. When he asked the nanites what they could do about it, they informed him that there was little they could do beyond making him the best, most adaptive soldier he could be. To their thinking, making him smarter was secondary to his higher destiny as a soldier, which was to survive long enough to complete his mission. And now that mission had changed.

  Other unwanted information had since been brought to his attention by the nanites themselves. They could not reproduce; they could only repair themselves. That meant no chance of further mental stimulation short of getting into another situation that would encourage the nanites to migrate to his brain, sacrificing some of his “survivability” to keep him sane, to keep him from taking his own life.

  Suddenly getting to Alaska, to the black region he’d been assigned looked a lot more tempting. There’d be plenty of time to go positively stir crazy up there before Michael Murphy showed up. He guessed he’d be living during the interlude moments between assignments from now on. His boosted intelligence only accessible during times when the nanites deemed keeping him mentally occupied trumped mere survival.

  He was curious about the nanites ability to evolve only within limits, to never go beyond their original dictates. They tried to explain it to him, showing them their coding, but it no longer made sense. He just wasn’t that smart anymore.

  So it was with a heavy heart that he began running to Alaska. He stripped off his shirt and ate it, piecemeal, as he darted forward to provide fuel for his body without him having to slow his pace more than necessary in order to bend down to scoop up sand. He issued commands to the nano to lighten his weight, make his body more like an aerogel, so gravity had less effect on him, so he wouldn’t keep sinking into the soft sands of the dunes, which slowed his pace. They could make his body dense again once he was finally off of this terrain and back on more solid ground.

  Taking note that the heat of the sun was only rising, even past noon, he issued orders to the nano to convert the cells on his periphery to make use of the solar rays for fuel. The greening of his skin’s surface looked a little peculiar, as those cells became distinctly more plantlike, but the nano trick was doing its job, saving him from having to interrupt his sprint to scoop up sand.

  The perspiration clinging to his skin, serving to cool him, was also dripping its saltiness into his eyes, irritating and inflaming them and wasting water and energy by his having to constantly flick it off. So he advised the nano to distribute the moisture more evenly across him to avoid it pooling to such a degree anywhere. What’s more, he wanted them to reflect the sun’s heat better, whatever rays he didn’t need to produce food, to reduce the need for the cooling measure, just conserving water, but also making his running more efficient, less taxing on all his systems. To do that, he imagined the necessary nanites would migrate to his exterior, and while clinging to his skin, act as miniature mirrors, angling themselves to the sun accordingly. But without access to his augmented intelligence, and the HD visualizations the nano once provided him as to what was going on inside him, he was just guessing.

  During his migration from the Sahara to Alaska, KS-7 would appropriate whatever he needed as opportunities presented themselves, w
hatever vehicles might speed his way, from motor cars and trucks to small planes and boats. Luckily for him he’d been fairly mechanical before his “upgrades.” He could get working and make sense of most anything with a motor, and that included figuring out how to operate the vehicle it propelled. Because from now on, beyond his super-endurance and added strength, heightened reflexes, and general survivability, he was back to relying on his own cunning and limited mental resources to survive.

  KS-7 was now just like those rats in Russia who did a much better job at surviving than he did most days. The few he’d likely ever caught and bested were probably just on their way out, the sick and infirmed of the lot. In a way the general had been true to his word; he had made him better than he was, he had made him not just able to impact history but rise above it; he had made him into the rat.

  SIXTEEN

  “We may have a problem,” Truska’s chief techie said, leaning into the monitor. His manga cartoon inspired, handsome, chiseled features, which included a narrow chin, lent ironic testament to his presence in this world; by all rights he should only exist on the other side of the monitor. They both hailed from the same province in China, both natives, though Truska’s far more rounded features by comparison made them look like they actually originated on different planets.

  Truska footed it over to his station, saw the freeze-frame of the werewolf. “Run it.”

  He pressed a button on the console, and she watched the transformation of Nano Man into werewolf form for herself, and his rather efficient dispatching of the cyberenhanced soldiers. “If this continues,” the techie said, “‘reality’ will be every bit as exciting as Digital Nirvana. And no one will want to upload themselves to escape a boring, mundane world that can never live up to the hype when compared to hyper-reality.”

  “I don’t think so. If this tech becomes widely disseminated, people will need digital backups of themselves like never before. Even if Digital Nirvana isn’t their first option, it’ll be their backup option.”

  “Maybe we should set it up so the backup communicates regularly with the original in the here and now. If they develop a habit of swapping war stories, then it won’t be long before the original is hankering for a better life himself.”

  “It’s a good idea. Maybe slip it into the contract under the pretext of keeping both original and copy psychically in tune. Otherwise the original might not recognize himself come time to awaken in Digital Nirvana.”

  “Consider it done.”

  “Only, that’s not what needs doing, is it?” She turned to focus on the guy in the chair, the helmet being fitted to him to facilitate scanning and uploading to the Digital Nirvana servers. No sooner was the device engaged than he began screaming and fighting against the restraints. His squirming became so violent he broke his own right arm; the bone jutted clean out of his forearm, but he couldn’t feel it. He was too preoccupied by the pain he was feeling in his head.

  Scanned Man’s face distorted next, as if he was in a wind tunnel, and leaning against the pressure of the current was just too much for his muscles to bear. Shortly after that his head exploded.

  “Yeah, looks like we still have some fine-tuning to do on the magnets,” Truska’s chief techie said. “He did better than the other guy, though. The other one’s entire body exploded, took us a week just to de-gunk the place. I think there are parts of him still around somewhere.”

  Truska grabbed her hair and let out a primal scream. “If we don’t perfect this technology there’ll be no recapturing the market lead from Gunther. We have to give people a third option. There has to be something besides human hybrids with their cybernetic enhancements and all out robot bodies for people to choose from. Otherwise he’ll own us sooner rather than later, same as he owns most everybody else.”

  She left the penthouse lab and climbed the ladder to the roof to clear her head. Once outside, she could see the complex for herself. The “City of the Future,” as it had been billed, looked to be on the surface everything it promised to be. Designer perfect. Architecturally dazzling. Something more likely to be sitting on the moon than on planet Earth. Nothing else in China even approached it, not even modern day Shanghai, some distance to the south. All the “residents” commuted to and from “work” in flying cars, or by monorail or electric motorbikes. Integration with nature was enough to excite any environmentalist to the core of their beings. The tops of the skyscrapers all sported rooftop gardens. Many of the buildings themselves appeared to be little more than vertical greenhouses. Tree lined boulevards. Everyone coming and going without the least stress. Sidewalk cafés alive with laughter. It was all a big sham, of course, staged for the auspices of the American flyby satellites, and anyone else who’d care to take a closer look.

  In point of fact she was overlooking the largest server farm in the world. The dressing of humans and trees just covered what was really going on inside the buildings which stored the largest number of parallel arrayed computers anyone had ever strung together. Working collectively, the resulting sentience of the AI was enough to coordinate this planet and several others. Which was precisely why it was denied access to the grid. The security was in place just as much to keep her in as to keep spying snoops out. They wanted her overseeing Digital Nirvana, orchestrating designer lives for uploaded people, ensuring their fantasy lives in Digital Nirvana far surpassed anything they could hope to live out in the real world, regardless of how rich and prominent they were.

  The buildings themselves were bomb proof, even against bunker buster bombs, as well as radiation proof. But should they get on someone’s radar, and should that party be determined enough to wreak havoc here, the “city” was not without other defenses as well, all kept tucked neatly underground for now for fear of setting off alarms around the world after they’d gone to such trouble to avoid doing so.

  No, far too much money had been invested not to succeed. One way or the other, Gunther would be taken out as the market leader, moving America to second place in the battle for mindshare for the future, and China solidly into first place. And in a post-Singularity world, first place was the only place that mattered. Everyone else was falling behind too rapidly into insignificance on the artificial intelligence learning curve to be any threat at all.

  SEVENTEEN

  “Times Square at night, really?” Jane couldn’t believe the light show. It was a wonder Vegas could still draw crowds. Still, she had to admit, if it was garish, it was also garishly romantic.

  “What can I say? I like to lay it on thick.” Mike dashed around in front of her, froze her in place by grabbing her at the shoulders and gazed into her eyes. “Yep, just as I thought. All the lights reflecting off you don’t add any more sparkle to your eyes than is already there.”

  She smiled. “Nice try. You weren’t lying about being new to romancing girls.”

  “Why? What did I do wrong?” he said, taking her hand again and walking by her side. The textured, soft-leather-like touch of his skin, its warmth, triggered a cascade of other visceral sensations, causing her to notice her own fragrance blending with his, like Mexican winter orange with Spanish marjoram.

  “Don’t try so hard, for one.” She noticed his eyes checking out the reflections off the store windows. So that was why he’d chosen Times Square. He was feeling protective, and it gave him eyes behind his head with all the shiny, reflective surfaces. He was playing bodyguard first, boyfriend second. Well, she couldn’t fault him for being chivalrous. And for trying to relax her even as he maintained an eternal vigilance. She decided not to call him on the guard duty thing. Instead she shifted the topic to, “Why don’t you try and get to know me better?”

  “Okay. If you were afraid you’d never see me again after tonight, what would you tell me about yourself to make sure I always found my way back to you?”

  She thought about it. Most of the things that came to her mind she rejected out of hand for one reason or another. “I had this chemistry teacher one time, who just had it out
for me. He didn’t like girls excelling so much in his class and making his best male students look bad. So on the high school field trip I messed with the swimming pool. Shouted over at him, ‘Hey, teach! Look what I can do!’ And I proceeded to walk on water. Of course I had messed with the viscosity of the liquid beforehand. Wasn’t exactly water in that pool. The setting sun throwing all sorts of weird colors on the water helped mask my subterfuge. He was too freaked out in any case to realize he’d been had. When he did figure it out the hate game was really on. I just kept punking him with pranks and making him look like a fool until he finally relented.”

  He laughed. “So, basically what you’re saying is payback brings out your creative side. That could come in handy.”

  “No, no references to our life on the run, remember? This was supposed to be an escape.”

  “You’re right. My mistake. By the way, I used to do the same thing to my sergeant in Afghanistan. Me and the guys used to charge his tent at all hours when he was fast asleep, dressed up as Afghans, shooting up the place and hollering. Every time he reached for his rifle to return fire he found it mysteriously jammed. Eventually he took the hint and eased off on the peckerwood stuff.”

  “So, what you’re saying is we’re more alike than we care to admit?”

  “Yeah, I guess. You’re still playing nice, right? As opposed to being mean. I swear, it’s so hard to tell with you.”

  Jane lowered her eyes guiltily. “I deserved that. My parents ran hot and cold. They’d be all lovey-dovey one minute, ripping each other’s eyes out the next. All their drinking made them moody as hell, like living with Jekyll and Hyde. No surprise their daughter grew up to find herself dating her own real life beast man.”