There was more. A middle-aged woman went shopping and the displays showed her food content, including fat and salt and additives. A driver slept behind the wheel of his car while it drove him home; his blood-alcohol level clearly showed that he was intoxicated. A military doctor doing emergency surgery on a wounded soldier worked along with a small but sophisticated field robot, and the doctor’s display guided him through a difficult chest incision while showing him all crucial data on the patient, and also linked him to a top cardiothoracic surgeon at the Mayo Clinic. A child being bullied in a schoolyard had alerts going out to teachers and school security, which came running. A woman being assaulted in a parking garage had 911 on the phone while the camera in her eyes ran facial-recognition programs on her assailant and one of her fingernails collected DNA; then a panel in the woman’s wrist opened and hit the man with a small but powerful electric sting.
There were many others.
John stood and watched the people in the audience as they watched the screen.
Finally he said, “And this is just a fraction of personal use once we and the machines become a single and harmonious unit. This is a millionth of a percent of the potential for meaningful, productive, uplifting, and inevitable mutual growth. Business, industry, health care, sports, insurance, banking, exploration, farming, manufacturing, investments, development, climate management, education… well, really, is there any area of our lives that could not be improved?”
The screen faded to silver and the house lights came up.
“The technological singularity is coming,” he said. “The question is whether we resist it, fail ourselves in not keeping pace with it, or embrace it so that we are what evolves.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
“Jesus H. T. Oliver Christ,” I yelled, sitting up so fast my bare feet slapped against the concrete floor of the deck. Ghost whined sharply, alarmed at my tone. “Nanobots? You’re sure?”
“That’s what Doc Jakobs said, Joe. They’re really tiny, though,” said Sean. “Doc almost missed them during the post, but you know how thorough he is. He doesn’t miss anything.”
“What was the yield?” I asked.
“The what?”
“How many nanites? What was the concentration?”
“Um… not many, I guess…?” he said uncertainly. “I don’t have the number. It’ll be in Doc’s lab report. Does the concentration matter?”
“Maybe,” I said. “Did Doc Jakobs actually say that the nanites were the cause of death?”
“In a way, but the actual cause of death was complicated. There was unusual trauma in the motor cortex and brain stem, and that triggered a myocardial infarction.”
“She had a heart attack?”
“Yes.”
“At fourteen?”
“I know,” said Sean. “I don’t understand the medical parts, and maybe I’m telling it wrong. Something about the nanobots damaging key nerves or nerve centers in the brain. Something like that — Doc can explain it. Oh, and here’s another weird thing. Doc’s sure that the rabies caused her erratic behavior, but there wasn’t the right amount of degenerative damage that he expected to find in someone with the behavioral symptoms. It was like the rabies was dormant and suddenly kicked in at some ultrahigh level. I asked him if the nanobots could have done that, maybe amped the rabies up in some way, but he didn’t know. Frankly, I think he’s afraid to even look into it. He’s afraid to ask around about it, and I don’t blame him.”
“Why’s he afraid to ask?”
“Yeah, well, there’s more,” said Sean slowly. “And maybe I called you as much about that as about the robots. Joe, you see… someone’s been following me.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yeah.”
“How sure?”
“Very,” said Sean. “But, whoever it is, they know how to tail like a pro and they’re slippery as fuck. I spotted them twice, including on my way back from Dad’s. I called units for backup both times and we tried to box the car, but they slipped us like they could read our minds. We’d coordinate something, and they were gone. After the first time, we used alternate radio channels in case they had a police scanner, but they still outfoxed us. Black SUVs both times. Couldn’t see the plates.”
Black SUVs were one of the vehicles of choice for a lot of government agencies and organized crime. Lots of room for a crew, cargo space, easily armored, and they have smoked windows. Plus, there are a zillion of them on the street.
“Have you checked your phones to see if they have you bugged?”
“I did. The radio in the car is clean, but I’m pretty sure my home phone is tapped. Maybe Dad’s, too. There’s an odd clicking on the line every now and then, though. And, don’t think I’m crazy, but it feels like someone’s listening, you know?”
“Yeah. Shit. What about your cell?”
“I think it’s clean.”
“You think it’s clean?”
“I opened it up and didn’t find a bug.”
I wasn’t worried about someone tapping our call, because we had that covered. Anyone making a call to a DMS phone gets included in a kind of scrambled loop. Anyone listening in on an unauthorized second line or via an electronic bug hears nothing but very loud white noise. Funny thing was, the technology was actually developed by Hugo Vox, the late and unlamented former head of the Seven Kings. It was part of the surveillance and jamming tech he used against us. We borrowed it. Everyone else who had access to the tech is dead. Finders keepers.
Even so, I said, “Listen, Sean, go buy a burner and use that from now on.”
A burner is a disposable cell phone. It’s nearly impossible to trace and can be discarded after use. Great for tourists on vacation, but the primary market seems to be criminals and terrorists. And there’s no way to regulate these phones. In this case, at least, a burner could keep Sean safe.
“Okay,” he said, though he didn’t sound happy about it. He was in that zone between pissed off and scared. “When I found the bugs at the house, I had Ali take the kids to Uncle Jack’s farm for a couple of days. She fought me on that, so I had to tell her a little of what was going on.”
I wished he hadn’t, but I understood why he did. I made a mental note to have one of my guys from the Warehouse swing by Sean’s place to do another sweep, but with the equipment we have. Our new Anteater surveillance-detection system is absolute state of the art, and it was a lot more sensitive than anything the Baltimore PD could ever hope to afford. Again, thanks to Hugo Vox. Oh, yeah, rot in hell.
I decided that I’d also see if someone from the Warehouse wanted to spend a few days in the country watchdogging Sean’s family.
“Joe,” said Sean, “after Doc showed me those nanobots on the microscope I asked him to go through the records to see if there are any other cases similar to Holly, and, there may be as many as four.”
“Jesus.”
He laid it out for me. In the past eleven months there had been four deaths with unusual brain damage. Three girls and a boy, all under the age of sixteen. The deaths happened in different parts of the city and, in the case of the boy, in another town. In each case, there had been some extreme violence but no murders. The cases involved self-mutilation, a savage rape of another teen by one of the victims, stabbings, general mayhem. All very nasty and all very sad. Even though all the victims survived, all the teenage perpetrators died. Heart attacks in two cases, a blood clot in one, and a suicide by leaping out a window.