“All right,” I agreed.
She gave me a kiss for being so cooperative, then whispered, “I really do want to keep you satisfied,” in my ear.
I knew she was still talking about her methodology, but not one I cared to have Manny and Anna observe.
History 101 continued:
Toward the end of the 20th century product safety testing was becoming an increasingly important concern. It had to be, because if some dolt managed to poke his eye out while trying to clean his contact lenses with his electric toothbrush there was a better than even chance that the courts would award him a settlement large enough to bankrupt the manufacturer.
All right, perhaps I’m being a tad facetious. For every company sued because there wasn’t a warning label on the chainsaw instructing the operator to not hold it by the end with the sharp whizzing chain, there was another company selling something that was badly designed, shoddily manufactured, inadequately labeled, and put out there with a criminal indifference to the safety of the consumer.
The thing to remember is that we abnotechs aren’t stupid, incompetent or careless—if anything we tend toward the opposite because we learn early on that almost everything in our environment can turn on us. Believe me, being cornered in your crib and reviled by a walking, talking teddy bear run amok can scar you for life. But because of the problems we have with things we often get unfairly lumped in with the blase, boneheaded and braindead.
Anyway, as more and more companies become concerned with product safety, product testing became an integral part of their operations.
Dr. Jameson was one smart cookie. Not long after she documented the existence of abnotechnia she realized just how useful those of us at the high end of the scale could be in product testing. After all, if there was any way for a device to go wacky or do something that would give the manufacturer’s legal department ulcers it was almost certain to happen when an abnotech got their hands on it.
That’s how JTL—the Jameson Testing Labs—was born, and a lot of us who tested at 7 or above ended up as safety testers.
I suppose this was a good thing—though nights when I’m lying awake and grinding my teeth I do wonder. Once Jameson Testing was widely accepted, it closed quite a few career tracks to us 7 and overs. No longer were we allowed to hold technology-dependent jobs where our effect on the equipment could spell disaster. That meant we weren’t allowed to operate any sort of public transport or work traffic control for such transport, or become power plant personnel, or lay hands on heavy-duty networked computer equipment, or have much of anything to do with manufacturing, or—
Well, you get my drift. We couldn’t even holler discrimination because no abnotech with half a brain wanted another abnotech flying the plane they were riding in, or running their life-support equipment during surgery, or operating the chemical plant upwind of them.
Jameson posited and others proved that the more complex a device became the more likely an abnotech was to have an effect on it. A hand-operated can opener can malf in only so many ways. An electric one can malf in more. Put a high-speed netted computer in the hands of a 10. If it continues to function well enough to cause trouble it can cause real trouble, like the Great Minnesota Tax Wipe of ’99.
By about 2017 Jameson Testing had become a standard procedure, making JTL into one of the twenty largest businesses on the planet. It was at about that same time the first NT based devices were submitted for testing.
This proved to be a whole other kettle of piranha. Obviously in the hands of an abnotech a poorly designed entie-based anything could easily do something or become something its designers never envisioned even in their worst anchovy pizza nightmares.
JTL knew entietech was the future, and had no immediate plans to be left in the past. The problem was that their Risk Assessors ran their software, and the idea of mixing us and enties had come up with more red flags than an old Commie May Day Parade. If a contracted abnotech’s influence turned an entie strain dangerously weird and it got loose, all sorts of catastrophic and highly actionable things might happen.
Jameson herself went to the UN, which was thinking along these same lines itself. That’s how UN-NTSTOA—the UN Nano Tech Safety Testing Oversight Agency became another bowl of alphabet soup on its table, and how it built and JTL staffed our deeply buried, completely sequestered enclave down under Crater Billy.
Ten years later the worse-case scenarios haven’t come true. Yet. Nanotech construction takes a certain amount of precision and sophistication to begin with, and knowing what they built was going to be abnotech-tested made manufacturers careful. We’ve helped them learn a lot about designing fool- and abnotech-proof entie-based devices. But new devices and new generations still have to go through our mill if they want a full safety rating.
Children are Jameson-tested at age two, although 8s and up have been known to proclaim themselves in utero by their effect on fetal monitoring equipment; the sonogram machine suddenly showing “Gilligan’s Island” reruns, for instance. Most of us who tested at 7 or above started working as part-time safety testers while children; a young abnotech can generate malfs no adult could ever hope to duplicate. Those of us who’ve turned pro have spent our entire lives as professional guinea pigs.
As Chief Safety Officer it was my job to worry about this new item we were going to test.
It hadn’t even been at Crater Billy for two whole hours and already I was working overtime.
“Well. What do you think?”
I scowled at Gloria a moment, then went back to glowering at the Mercedes-Motorola MicroWerks Model 1-INT airlock. “I hate it.”
“You already said that. Why?”
“Why? We’re living on the god-dammned Moon, Gloria! The air outside ain’t! Lock failure could kill us all.” I waved my arm at the thing. “Just look at it! Call me old-fashioned, but I think airlocks should have nice heavy doors that clang when you shut them, and simple, foolproof latches. Not like that, that thing.”
The thing in question had been set up by the far wall of the testing chamber. It consisted of a burnished steel frame about two and a half meters tall and one and a half wide, a simple control pad on the right side. There was no sign of nice reassuring steel or even polyplast doors inside that frame. Instead there was this faintly gleaming black surface like a curtain made from some heavy metallic cloth.
I was getting the willies just looking at that black barrier because I knew it wasn’t solid like rocks or wood or metal, it was just billions of separate, fallible nanomachines hanging on to each other because they’d been told to, like all the dogs on Earth told to sit at once.
I shook my head. “You’re not getting me anywhere near that thing when there’s vacuum on the other side of it.”
She grinned at me. “Too late, Dave. There’s a storage chamber on the other side of it that’s already been pumped out to surface normal.”
I was aghast. “Are you trying to get us all killed?”
She looped an arm around my waist, probably to keep me from running away. “I don’t want to die. After all, I’ve got a hot date tonight.” A squeeze. “Will you let me give you chapter and verse on the setup before you work yourself into a heart attack?”
“You’re the one giving me a heart attack.” I said accusingly.
She winked. “Maybe later, lover. But trust me, you’re perfectly safe right now. Come on and I’ll show you.”
I let her lead me over to a tabletop display terminal and watched her call up a schematic.