“Hey, hello, am I on?” This new voice spoke almost as fast as Gustavo, trained by months of power shortages.
“James,” Ruth said. “I hear you.”
“I have—”
The other voice on the ground intervened. “This is a secure call, ISS communications. Please clear the channel.”
“Roger that.” Gustavo turned and winked at her before he swam toward the exit. So far, she’d chosen to share every piece of news with the rest of the crew, classified or not. She felt they deserved it. Why keep secrets anymore? The soldiers down there only bothered because it gave them something to do.
Ruth opened her mouth to speak but there was a low, menacing click. Gus had identified the sound as recording equipment and it raised gooseflesh up the back of her neck.
* * * *
She yearned for clean air, a horizon, new faces, but felt it would be sinful to envy anyone on the ground. She was among the safest and best-fed members of the human race.
They had been informed that the situation in Colorado was stable, yet Ruth caught hints of a different truth in these conversations — unexplained delays, obvious shortages, names that seemed to have permanently disappeared. She’d tried to chitchat, digging for more, but was usually interrupted and once had been cut off entirely. Power conservation, they said. Other times, the scientists she spoke with deflected her questions or ignored her outright. Why?
If she’d known any of them, if she had any friends there, she might have pressed. But their relationships were as narrow as the thin umbilical connecting her headset to the radio.
* * * *
James said, “I have good news and I have good news.”
“Well I always say hear the good news first.” Ruth tried to make her smile show in her voice. Too many of these contacts were litanies of despair.
She had actually met James Hollister at a convention in Philadelphia, years ago, and had a vague image of thick glasses and a great Moby Dick of a desk-belly. Her memory of his published work was stronger. He’d led a new approach in nanobiotic medicine, using synthesized amino acids to pierce bacterial membranes and thereby kill infections. That was a field related to the current problem only in the loosest sense, but James was no dummy and had brought a unique perspective to their efforts to build an anti-nano nano. ANN.
He’d volunteered for this coordinating position to free up others with more appropriate skill sets, and Ruth was glad. She talked to him six times out of ten and no one else made jokes anymore, not even sorry little puns like good news, good news.
“We’ve redesigned our engine,” he said, “pushing burn efficiency up almost 5 percent.”
“Great.” Chemical science was his specialty, after all. “I suppose that’s great, James, but what does it matter? We can just enlarge the ANN if we need more capacity.”
Silence. Static.
She almost didn’t say it. “You’re wasting time, getting fancy. We have a functional rep algorithm. We can go as big as we want—5 percent, 10, it doesn’t matter. I thought we agreed to focus on discrimination.”
“Ruth, we needed something we could point to, something real. LaSalle’s bug tested solid and the president’s council is talking about reassigning everyone to him.”
“What! Did he run real-world or in lab conditions?”
“Lab, if it matters.”
“Of course it matters! We test out in controlled conditions, too. What did you tell them?”
“I told them our burn efficiency was up 5 percent.”
This time it was Ruth who didn’t answer immediately. Then she laughed. “Okay, I guess that is good news.”
There had never been a consensus on how to deal with the situation. Everyone wanted to destroy the locust, of course, but at present there were no less than three competing proposals— and twice that many concepts had been discarded in the past months. A shortage of equipment meant much of their work was theoretical anyway, and nanotech developers in any field tended to be both visionaries and a bit wiggy about their favorite ideas. The end of the world hadn’t changed that.
The end of everything had probably made it worse. Too much was at stake, and the name of the person who defeated the machine plague might become greater than Muhammad or Christ.
“LaSalle’s an idiot,” Ruth said, and her earpiece rattled with two thumps, maybe James shrugging.
Or maybe it was whoever else was listening.
She didn’t care. She said, “I guess he’s still shouting from the rooftops that discrimination is a waste of time?”
“He’s got half the council agreeing with him.”
“James, there’s no way it can work otherwise. He can’t ignore the issue just because it’s inconvenient.”
Any real-world nano had to overcome three major hurdles, and integrating each solution into a functioning whole was in a sense the fourth and most difficult challenge.
First was how to power something so abysmally tiny. Ruth’s teachers had called this the Tin Man Problem — if we only had a heart. Dozens of possibilities existed using synthesized fuels, proteins, live current, heat. The trick was to dedicate as little capacity as possible to energy storage and/or generation.
Second came the Scarecrow — if we only had a brain. Nature’s oldest, most fundamental intelligence was based on chemical reactions like those of RNA and James’s amino acids, simplistic and neat, enough for some biotech, but it was a real chore to bestow the faculties of awareness and decision upon machines this size without crimping their operational speed.
The third problem, known in polite company as the Wicked Witch, was how to create enough nanos to accomplish a goal of any worth. Manually assembling one gear composed of five hundred atoms could take a person sixty hours, depending on the material and equipment used. Automation might accelerate the process but it wasn’t economically viable, spending millions of dollars to build factories to build the nanos.
A leading school of thought had been to bed the Scarecrow with the Witch. Nanos capable of fulfilling instructions should also be able to assemble more of themselves. Their function was their form. Once again, the infinitesimal scale had hindered efforts to master this approach, but crude kilo-atom prototypes had been doing it since before Ruth entered college.
No single aspect of the locust was revolutionary. What made it so efficient was how well it had been put together.
For a power source the locust used the body heat of its host, which required only a few receptors at key points in the locust’s structure. As for a brain, the locust’s creators had overcome this hurdle by dodging it altogether. The machine was remarkably straightforward. It infested warm-blooded tissue because it was unable to function in any other environment, and it assembled more identically limited yet aggressive creatures because it had been told to do so. Period. Everyone agreed that the locust as they knew it was just a test model, and yet Gary LaSalle wanted to adopt this method for his ANN.
What a joke. Igor, fetch me a brain! Ruth must have taken her ribbing too far, though, because two months ago LaSalle had quit talking to her on the radio.
He was right that the locust functioned quickly because it lacked complex instructions, but the man was a complete boob if he thought they could sweep the planet clean with an ANN lacking discrimination. The job was too big, the battlefield too varied. More importantly, out there in the world, below 10,000 feet, the locusts had no more hosts and would be in hibernation. They were inert, inactive targets and even a slowly replicating ANN would eventually destroy the vast majority.