“Where is he these days?”
“I met him in Farmington last year, but he moves around a lot. You want the message?”
“Sure.”
Faster than he could react, she put an arm around his waist and a hand behind his neck, kissed him vigorously, and then pulled her face back slightly and murmured, “Wyoming.”
A bit dazed, he said, “You want your gum back?”
She let go, laughing. “Glad I didn’t take his bet. He said you’d keep your head enough to say something funny.”
“Is that the whole message? ’Wyoming’?”
“He said you’d figure out the rest. Bye.” She turned and strode down the street, owning it.
Toby stared after her for a few steps, then turned and looked at May.
She looked amused and interested and just a touch annoyed. “That happen to you a lot?”
“Hardly ever.”
“Who’s William Connors?”
“Artificer. He designed the atom sorter for Littlemeade’s first nanos. He left us over creative differences. Jesus, he’d be in his nineties now. I don’t know how he’s still going. He wasn’t that healthy when we met. Usually used a power chair.”
“Accident?”
“Poor choice of grandparents. Allergies, metabolic faults, and stuff that happened when the rest worked together. He could work maybe four hours a day without getting sick, but
damn,
what he accomplished in four hours!”
“Ladies’ man?”
“From a motor chair?”
May said, “Benjamin Franklin invented the rocking chair. I doubt it was to knit. And she acted like
she
knew what he could do in four hours. Good kisser?”
“How the hell would— Oh. Uh, yeah, she is.”
“Thought so. I think she’s had some work done. She’s older than she looks. Walking like that takes practice, I don’t care what music channels you watch. I do enjoy a challenge.”
IV
I am always at a loss to know how much to believe of my own stories.
—WASHINGTON IRVING
He didn’t remember being this good.
Eventually she broke the mood: she asked about what was working in her body.
Toby was delighted to lecture. “The core of the nano is a buckyball of the first order, a regular polygon made of sixty carbon atoms. There’s a big atom of … call it kryptonite, trapped inside.”
“Kryptonite? Toby, you don’t keep secrets well at all.”
“Just say it’s a big, heavy atom. It doesn’t react chemically. The buckyball holds it like a cage. The nano needs an anchor. A, a cornerstone. It doesn’t behave right, it flexes into the wrong shape, if the kryptonite atom isn’t in there. We grow the nanos in a sea of kryptonite, precise temperature and pressure. Ideal conditions, and we still get a few duds. We separate them by luring the working ones to a holding tank where there isn’t any kryptonite, and we watch. There’s never been a batch that reproduces then, but if there was, we’d dissolve it in fluorine and recycle. We do that with the duds.
“When the nanos go into your body, the only kryptonite around is in the nanos. A nano dies, another can, hypothetically, reproduce. Not all of them can manage, so they keep a census. After they pull the crap out of a diverticulum, they turn it loose and crawl downstream, so to speak. The crap leaves you the usual way. The dose moves in a slow wave down your gut, maintaining its numbers until it’s out. Except that you’ve got a reserve now. The first target was your appendix, and they’ll be crawling out of there for months.”
“What happens when, ah…”
“The dose finishes the tour, he said tactfully? It breaks down. Fast. In principle you could build a nano that has a coating to protect it from ambient oxygen, but you’d face the same problem they get when oxygen starts combining with the surface. Poor mobility. Like a kid wearing two snowsuits. With the Briareus nanos, more like three, the outer one made of sapphire. They are mostly aluminum.”
“So why don’t evolved— Never mind.”
Toby grinned. “Evolved microbes have had a billion years or more to adapt to the presence of oxygen, and you’ll kindly notice that they’re still not articulated. Those don’t sort, they just glom on to stuff whole and spit out what they don’t want.”
“So you made an atom sorter.”
“With Connors, yeah. Connors came up with the method, but he didn’t have the dexterity or training to do any of it himself. He called it a ‘scratch-n-sniff.’ Pop off an atom with a diamond chisel, poke it with photons to see what it will and won’t absorb, and now you know what element it is. Give it a shake to find its weight, pigeonhole it in the slot for that isotope, and pop off another atom. I’m waving my hands a lot here.”
“It sounds awfully slow.”
“It’s a lot faster than cells do it, and all the unstable nuclei end up in the power plant. That was one of our arguments. He didn’t want to use chemical power at all. Sunlight and radiation only. The D-1 breaks down cellulose for fuel, and I’m sure he’d have pointed out that the added sugars contribute to weight problems. Can’t have them touch fats; most of the brain is fat.”
“Explains why supermodels always look drifty. —You two argued a lot?”
“May, in five minutes the man could have made Mother Teresa start looking for a ruler. And that was his polite mode. I got to see him lose his temper with an ‘adviser’ an investor sent once. Guy was an MBA from Yale. After fifteen minutes I thought he was going to cry—the Yalie, I mean.”
May’s eyes were wide enough to be conspicuous even in the faint light. She’d dealt with Ivy Leaguers. “My God, what kind of language was he using?” she laughed.
“Not a bad word. Never raised his voice. Started by asking the man’s history as if checking for qualifications, asked a few more questions to draw out detail, and then delivered a little parable about Jesus going to work for the Roman Empire and using his abilities to keep Tiberius Caesar healthy. I wish I’d been recording. Even if I remembered the exact words, I still wouldn’t have the delivery.”
“What did the guy say?”
“Nothing. For the next couple of days. Then he made one suggestion, about a guide to keep joints from getting twisted. Connors just nodded at him, said, ‘That could work,’ and started drafting it on his screen. Guy phoned his boss and we got more money the next day.”
“Wow. —You don’t think he set that up, do you?”
“No. Manipulation wasn’t in his toolbox. He was terrible with people.”
“Didn’t understand them, huh?”
“Understood them perfectly. Didn’t enjoy it. He was smart, and had no patience with any kind of stupidity. The thing is, he was so smart that when he showed you any respect, it felt like you’d gotten a medal.”
“What finally made him leave?”
“Didn’t like the division method of making nanos. Too much wastage from errors. And that was after we’d gotten it down to three percent per stage. He wanted to build one set of nanos and have them link up for quality control, then copy themselves directly from the resource mass. Zero defects. The work to build those nanos would have taken us another year at least.”
Littlemeade had barely made their money stretch long enough to get launched. May said, “Turns out you were right.”
“Maybe. He had ideas for what we could do to keep the cash flowing. Selling power from nano arrays set in glass. Sifting mine tailings. He plowed every cent he had into Littlemeade. Came to me once to apologize for having to sell a few shares to buy better painkillers.”
“God. What did he do when you had to declare bankruptcy?”
“Phoned me to see if he could help. Geniuses can be a lot like kids. The better sort of kid. Impulsive, open, not many filters. React to everything. I once talked him out of disintegrating selected politicians as a method of social reform. I think I did. I haven’t noticed anything, anyway.”
“Were you looking?”
“Well … now and then.”
He couldn’t tell if she was amused or alarmed. “You said he didn’t build them, but you also gave him credit. What, exactly, was his job?”
“Mostly he sat around and thought about stuff.”
“What kind of stuff?”
“What stuff you got? Practically all the man could do most days was think, and he thought about everything. Know what he did after he left?
Advertising
. Remember ‘The food babies ask for by name!’ and ‘Not available in all locations’? Those were his. Made more money than I could pay him.”
“How did he get his job at Littlemeade?”
Toby smiled. “You ever see
The Man in the White Suit
? Alec Guinness. Genius designs a monomolecular fiber, can’t get anyone to listen, gets a job packing and lifting at a textile factory, shows up in the lab one day delivering a piece of equipment nobody can figure out but him, and they ask him to stick around to help with it. Unlike the boss in the movie, I noticed him pretty quick, asked the gang some questions, and put him on salary. He’d been living on disability. First day on the payroll he came in and told me we needed to include three encrypted records of the finished product in every nano. Three different encryption methods, used to check each other. No errors. Damn near everything he came up with was completely obvious—after he said it.”
“Except ‘Wyoming.’” Yes, she was definitely alarmed.
“What’s wrong?”
“I don’t know. But after twenty-five years he suddenly sends a pretty girl to stick her tongue in your mouth? Why?”
“Why not?—
Holy shit!
”
V
And the plan of Zeus was being accomplished.
—HOMER
NOVEMBER 2027
The Wyndham disposable second stage made low Earth orbit without incident. Wyndham’s sensors on the orbiter watched Slots One, Two, Five, and Six open.
Something like a metal stork emerged from Slot Two and unfolded into a small reflecting telescope. Briareus One emerged like a shadowy bug, but the telescope’s unfolding dish obscured anything Wyndham’s cameras might have seen. From Briareus Five came a ruby twinkling, a laser signal aimed at Jarvis Island.
Wyndham’s people waited for packages to launch on springs or compressed air. That didn’t happen. The other slots remained closed.
May Sherbourne Wyndham phoned Toby Glyer, lately at Littlemeade, currently at Watchstar. “Toby! Any problem?”
May knew nothing of Watchstar’s man beyond his voice. Toby had a deep, oratorial voice: he sounded irritatingly like a radio preacher. “No problem so far. Good launch, May!” Today he sounded satisfied, even excited. “The Briareus modules aren’t supposed to separate. We booked with Wyndham because we want the disposable final stage.”
“Yes, but we want data from the flight recorders. Damn.” The signals were getting fuzzy. Wyndham’s people, four underpaid grad students, continued testing their receiving systems. May Wyndham watched while she spoke. “Two of your slots didn’t open—”
“One’s the nuclear power source. The other’s the master computer.”
“Oh.”
“May, our contract doesn’t say we’re swapping data.”
The signals were dying.
“We don’t have to share,” May said. “What we’re getting wouldn’t be of interest to you anyway. It just tells us if our vehicle is healthy. Dammit—”
“We don’t share either,” Toby Glyer said.
May realized she’d missed the point. “No, you sure don’t, but we don’t need to know anything except that launch was successful. And we pay penalties if your package doesn’t reenter within three years. The Crassen-Bodine Law classes Watchstar as an orbital hazard.”
“The mass will be out of orbit on schedule.”
“Is your package all right?”
“We won’t know that for a while. Years, really. But it’s in place. Well done, May.”
* * *
Mode One, the first set of instructions, was already in place.
Slot One opened. Briareus One crawled out, tasted, and began to eat. The operator was a meter long and looked like a traditional child’s toy, boxy and crude.
When Briareus One reached Wyndham Launch Systems’ antenna it kept eating. From the residue it built a copy of itself at half linear scale. The proto-nanobot—call it a hemibot—gave birth and immediately started another infant.
The firstborn, Briareus One-a, crawled back into Slot One. The protective hatch closed over it.
Briareus One-b clung to the hull, tasted, and began to eat.
Briareus One’s children were half its length, an eighth its mass. They were rather specialized. They avoided the carousel and Watchstar’s payload package because of the coating that had been added at Watchstar Labs. They ground everything else they came across into fine powder, processed what they could, then pushed the residue into the hole they had made in the orbiter’s empty propane tank. They absorbed and digested only the aluminum alloy hull structure.
They needed trace elements that weren’t in the Wyndham hull. They tasted at Briareus Six as if it were a salt lick. Briareus Six held less than a ton of additives, enough to get through Phases One and Two. After that …
They call it an experiment because it can fail.
Briareus One’s children were already making copies of themselves at half scale. A third and fourth generation began to nibble at the hull. Then they all ran out of aluminum alloy.
Now there was nothing left of the orbiter save a propane tank full of dust, the carousel, and a crawling mass of nanites in a wide range of sizes.
Briareus One and its children stopped moving.
Their
children ate Briareus One.
Each of their descendants ate whatever was four times their linear size, sixty-four times their mass, or larger. Each made about five hundred half-sized, one-eighth-mass copies of themselves, losing a little mass-energy with every iteration.
Briareus One’s descendants—the
operators
—came to less than ten billion atoms apiece by the time anything smaller couldn’t function. When the operators could no longer sense anything to eat, they went quiet.