Ruth Ann Goldman hadn’t entered the field of nanotechnology because it promised to revolutionize manufacturing, cure all disease, eradicate pollution, and even scrub the sky clean of greenhouse gases, although she’d always dazzled interviewers with such possibilities before the recruiter from the Defense Department came along and she quit publishing. The truth was more basic. Ruth had an IQ of 190 and was easily bored, and developing functional machines on the nanometer scale proved challenging enough that she often forgot herself.
At the turn of the millennium, top researchers had been thrilled merely to push, etch, chemically induce or otherwise manipulate atoms — individually or by the millions — into tubes, wires, sheets and other inanimate forms.
While Ruth was still an undergraduate, sneaking into the lab at night to indent hey good lookin or elvis lives onto her colleagues’ test surfaces, those first crude tubes and wires were fashioned into processors that would power a hyper-quick new generation of computers.
By the time she’d acquired her Ph.D., those new computers and related advances in microscopy had been used to construct actual nano-scale robots, albeit moronic ones capable only of expending energy as they meandered aimlessly in a sterile bath.
The most arrogant scientists and most hysterical pundits had long compared nanotech to playing God, but Ruth found this analogy rather goofy — and ironic, that anyone would confuse an ability to direct change on the molecular level with the capacity to create universes. Nanotech was precisely the opposite, a fine, exacting degree of construction — nothing more.
Ruth chose to focus her efforts on recognition algorithms — brains, essentially. Assembling microscopic robots still posed a catalogue of interesting hurdles, but the groundwork was well established and every Jack and Jill in the world wanted to put together a machine twice as fancy as the next guy’s. Ruth didn’t see how that mattered. Without direction, the most elaborate robot was only a curiosity, not even usable as a paperweight.
She used her certainty and her considerable powers of sarcasm to obtain grant money and a platoon of grad assistants of her own, then settled in for a lifetime’s work.
It helped that she was a patient, obsessive freak whose idea of time off was to wedge herself under the sink in the men’s room and wait there in order to scare the bricks out of a rival. She had one affair with a fellow lab rat, more convenience than genuine lust, and banged her stepbrother too at Hanukkah. Meanwhile her efforts earned sixteen patents and ultimately saved her life. She was thirty-five when the man from the Defense Department waltzed through security into her office.
Government operations tended not to be as flashy as private labs, and Ruth was sufficiently self-aware to realize she’d thrived on the attention that came with publishing her accomplishments. It was fun being hot stuff. She also had qualms about working for the military, clichés about destroying rather than creating, but the man from the Defense Department was either a romantic or a well-schooled actor. He envisioned Ruth as a bold and clandestine vanguard, kind of like Batman, equipped with billion-dollar equipment and more computer power than most small nations, poised to counter the attacks and accidents of enemy labs and garage scientists in colossal duels of talent versus talent.
He also offered the chance to craft micro-and zero-gravity experiments at the taxpayers’ expense. It had long been theorized that freedom from Earth’s pull would benefit nano design, as it had so many structural sciences. Ruth saw a fat opportunity to stay ahead of the pack. Yes, she said, and enjoyed five months of incredible resources as well as her first NASA classes before the machine plague erupted in California.
The locust was not military, despite the rumors. Nor did Ruth believe the three or four terrorist fronts who’d claimed responsibility, one of which hastily retracted its statement as the infections spread beyond control. Even if a fringe group possessed the necessary gear and training, the design was far too complex if the goal had been mere devastation.
The locust resembled a long, viral hook rimmed with cilia, rather than taking a more basic spherical or lattice shape — and nearly a third of the locust’s capacity remained unused. The machine as they knew it seemed to be only a prototype, with room left for additional programming. The damned thing was biotech, organic, built to fool the human immune system. Also, a weapon would have been created with a life-clock to keep it from proliferating without end. Instead, the locust had a fuse that was as useless as a control outside of lab conditions.
The magic number was 70 percent of a standard atmosphere. At that pressure, locusts self-destructed. Unfortunately, 70 percent of atmosphere occurred at 9,570 feet elevation, and normal changes in air density meant that the locusts routinely functioned as high as 10,000. On August 19th, a pristine and sunny day, Colorado had recorded infections up to 10,342 feet.
Ruth considered 70 percent to be a somewhat peculiar number. Her guess was that the design team had rounded up from two-thirds to avoid the clumsy math of 66.6 percent — and Lord knew how many lives that had saved. At high altitudes, each percentage point covered a lot of ground. Two-thirds of standard atmosphere would have put the barrier well above 11,000 feet.
It was a small clue to their thinking, part of an overall trend toward brutal efficiency. The locust was brilliant work, representing both conceptual and engineering breakthroughs that exceeded anything Ruth had done to win so many accolades.
She would need to confront the machine plague face-toface if she was ever going to master its secrets.
5
Mission Specialist Wallace, Bill to his friends, unstrapped from the exercise bike as soon as Ruth entered the med/life sciences node. The timer still showed twenty-seven minutes, but he pushed up from the seat and pulled off the wrist cuff and didn’t wipe it clean.
That short rip of Velcro and two chimes from the heart monitor were their only conversation.
The interior of the ISS offered less room than a four-car passenger train, though it was squashed into a maze of separate areas. They never managed to avoid each other completely. Wallace was an ex — Navy defensive back with too much time on his hands, and Ruth found that nothing cleared her head like a good sweat, and exercise aboard the station was limited to the bike and an adjacent pulley system. She might have come here regularly for no other reason except that the drawers and storage units that made up the walls were dotted with red and orange emergency labels, and some of the European medical supply cases secured to the ceiling were hazmat yellow — and in this small, metal world, she was always starved for color.
Bill Wallace was no one’s idea of a recruiting poster. He had hair like rust and freckled cheeks pockmarked in adolescence by machine-gun acne, yet he’d been close to breaking the American record for hours in space before their long exile and, like Ruth, kicked ass at his job. He was an entire engineering team unto himself, electrical, mechanical, a fact that had kept him aboard the ISS when three of the seven-member crew were evacuated by the shuttle Discovery to extend the available oxygen, water, and food for Ruth’s benefit.
He pushed closer without speaking or even bothering to telegraph his intent with a gesture. It didn’t matter. They’d performed this dance a hundred times. Ruth moved aside and Wallace rudely bumped past.