Corrupting Power
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Quaranteam: Book 2, Chapter 32
🕑 Added 2024-10-08 01:10:36 +0000 UTCChapter Thirty-Two
May 11th, 2021
“You’re completely sure this guy is safe, Phil?” Linda asked as she drove the car away from the White House, Melody up in the front seat, Violet and Lexi in the back, Ming, Andy, and Phil in the middle. They’d decided to make an unscheduled visit to someone Phil thought might be able to answer some questions about the virus and the serum, from a neutral observer’s point of view.
“Safe might be a little bit of a stretch, but he’s the person we need to go and talk to, especially since we’re in town,” Phil sighed. “He’s a little bit paranoid of phones. And the internet. And communications systems in general. Last time I heard from him, it was in an actual handwritten letter, wax sealed and everything. John can be… a little out there.” He shrugged and offered a mysterious smile for a moment. “All that said, he did predict basically all of this, in one level or another.”
“The whole DuoHalo thing?” Andy asked. “That seems unlikely.”
“No no, just our reliance on nanobots to get us out of a crisis,” Phil said, as Linda took the car further and further away from central D.C. “John likes to talk on global scales and big timelines, and that makes a lot of people very, very nervous, especially since he tends to be right on many of these things. They’ve got him surrounded by his own little private security squadron.”
“How the hell do you know this guy, Phil?” Linda asked.
“John was one of my adjunct professors in college, and the advisor for my doctorate thesis. He’s been one of the preeminent big brains in the nanotechnology field for decades, before we really even had a name for it,” Phil said, the buildings around them starting to turn to warehouses instead of block housing and apartments. “All that said, the last few years haven’t been kind to him. He lost both of his kids to the Kill Zone right at the start of the pandemic. His son, Alex, was only a couple of months from turning eighteen when he died in March of 2020. If we’d known what we know now, we could’ve gotten him secluded into some kind of protection bubble until he was old enough to take the serum, but we didn’t know in time. His daughter, Opal, was fifteen. Both very bright kids, but the deaths were so sudden, back-to-back, that John and his wife, Lau, didn’t even get a fair chance to grieve.”
“That’s horrible,” Violet whispered quietly.
“It was important to keep John around, so he was one of the very first people outside of the New Eden group to get partnered up and on the Quaranteam serum. The first batch we sent to Washington had five thousand doses, enough to take care of everyone in Congress, the White House and a handful of earmarked ‘top priority’ people. John was at the top of that list.”
“How come this is the first I’m hearing of this guy, Phil?” Linda asked. “I feel like he should have his own security detail and be under as much scrutiny as you are, just in a different way.”
“He is, Linda,” Phil said with a wry smile. “The reason you haven’t heard about him is that all of this predates you having total access to my entire life. We set it up early and then did everything we could to keep his presence off the radar, especially with his knowledge about nanotech. He’s got an independent security team to keep him safe at all costs, and their mandate is to keep his research and studies off the grid and out of the sight of basically anyone and everyone. Like I said earlier, his last communication came a few months ago in a physical envelope with a wax seal on it. It was about twenty pages of very promising research in terms of what he’d been looking into with the Swerve. He’s got some fascinating theories on nanobots relaying information back and forth, establishing their own internal networks and communications protocols, maybe even their own languages, which is jiving with the kinds of things I’ve been seeing. It’s important to have independent research going on, so that everyone is coming to their own conclusions and not just relying on the ideas coming out of New Eden. I wanted to take the research we’d gathered from the Ibanez variant out to him, see if he can make head or tails of it better than I can. The last thing I want to do is leave LP and everyone else over there with that shit floating around inside of their minds like unexploded land mines.”
“You think this friend of yours will be able to do something with it?” Melody said. “And if so, you think it might also be able to help me get this shit out of my head?”
“I wouldn’t be surprised if John can figure it out at some point. It’s just a question of when, and how many other things will come up along the way,” Phil said. “Like I said, genius of a man, terrible at maintaining focus.”
“How many partners does he have?” Linda asked. “The last thing I want is this guy under protected and his—”
“Twenty-eight,” Phil replied, cutting her off.
“That… That’s… Jesus, Phil…”
“Yeah, just two shy of our current record holder, Isaac Gosher, who, as of last week, is at a nice round thirty, and having to eat like a goddamn whale to keep up with his metabolism,” Phil chuckled. “One of his girls found out the girl she stayed with during her semester studying abroad in Spain wasn’t paired with anyone, so we ended up making a special Funnel Cake request, even though that program’s starting to wind down now. I think if anyone suggests Isaac take on anyone else, he may very well lose his temper, which is amazing for a guy as amenable as that. He’s having to eat like nearly 20,000 calories a day to keep up with his body’s metabolism. When I asked him how he was doing, he asked if I could put him on a pure sugar drip so he could have a good day off, without any eating or fucking.”
“And this other guy is on twenty-eight?” Andy asked.
“Yeah, John’s always been popular with the ladies, so it wasn’t too hard to get women volunteering to pair up with him, even with his age.”
“How old is he?”
“Mid-sixties, I think,” Phil said. “He’s from Hong Kong originally, and I feel like he’s resisted the aging process better than anyone I’ve ever met.”
Their vehicle reached a checkpoint that seemed a bit out of place, with a couple of women stationed at the gate holding AR-15s. It was clear they were military, but they were out of uniform, trying to be semi-discreet. Linda rolled down her window and slowly reached for her credentials. “Lt. Colonel Hayes, here escorting Dr. Phillip Marcos from New Eden, and Andy Rook, from the Civilian Oversight Group. We’re here to meet with Doctor John Lam.”
“You all security detail?”
“All except her,” Linda said, pointing at Ming. “She’s one of Andy’s partners but not on security detail. We just came from a debrief over at the White House.”
“Hang on, let us do our jobs and sweep the vehicle and then we’ll have you on your way,” the woman in charge said, an African-American woman in her early 40s. The sweep of the car took a couple of minutes, checking for bombs mostly, it looked like, as they were clearly armed, but the paperwork had cleared them of that. “Hey, you’re that dude from television,” she said, gesturing at Andy. “The one married to that chick from those magic school movies.”
“That’s me,” Andy said with a slight smile, being that he was for the first time getting recognized as Mr. Emily Stevens, rather than himself. He’d figured the 60 Minutes story had done enough work for him to be his own person in a lot of minds across America, but apparently there were some that just saw him as ‘those famous actresses’ husband. “She’s off filming a tv show in the UK, I’m afraid, so she isn’t with us this trip.”
“Are they planning on making any more of those Dagger Academy movies, sir? Has she told you?” the woman asked while her colleague completed her sweep of the car.
“They don’t have any more books to base them off of,” Andy told her. “Plus, I think a decent number of those actors died in the Plague. So making more of them wouldn’t be that easy to do. But she’s got more stuff coming up. The series she’s filming right now in the UK will be out next year.”
“Yeah, okay,” the woman sighed. “Sorry, sir. Don’t mean to bum you out. Those books just meant a lot to me as a kid, and I was hoping she’d write another to try and give us more hope.”
“I don’t know E. F. Winston, but I’m sure Em knows how to contact her, and I can have her send a message that the fans could use another book,” Andy said with a soft smile. “No idea if it’ll have any effect, but we can try.”
“All anybody can ask for Mister… Rook,” she said, fishing for Andy’s name before it came back to her. “Okay, looks like you’re good to go. Straight ahead, park in the designated visitor’s spot, and then head straight up the stairs to the red door right in front of you. Do not attempt to wander away from the building, or you may be shot. Clear?”
“As mountain spring water,” Linda said, as she shifted the vehicle back into drive, and started pulling the vehicle away from the checkpoint, heading towards the building ahead, rolling up her window. “You think that woman knows Winston’s outed herself as a bit racist?”
“She’s against immigrants in the UK, Linda,” Violet sighed. “It might be a little racist, but it’s not super racist.”
“It’s pretty damn racist,” Andy grumbled. “I know everyone’s all attached to her as an author who wrote this beloved series of books for children, but I’ve read her editorials and her interviews, and saying shit like ‘we need to take back our country’ and ‘Britain is for the British’ isn’t healthy for fucking anyone. I know the whole Leave referendum wasn’t really any of our business, but she can’t go through a single goddamn interview without talking about how she doesn’t feel safe in her own country because there’s an immigrant on every corner. It’s part of the reason Em’s had such a hard time talking about those films – she doesn’t want to seem ungrateful, but she also can’t endorse that kind of ridiculous xenophobic shit.”
“How come Em doesn’t come out about it in interviews?” Phil asked him.
“She might,” Andy sighed. “She doesn’t want to bite the hand that feeds, and the Dagger Academy books brought in shitloads of money for everyone involved. Rumors are Winston’s even thinking about writing a sequel series, now that the prequel series she wrote has run its course. The problem is that all that anti-immigrant shit has come out, and I think Winston doesn’t want to run the risk of providing a sequel that they’d have to completely recast, since none of the original actors would want to come back again.”
“They could probably get away with it, considering the number of actors Hollywood lost to the Pandemic,” Linda said.
“Maybe, although Phil will be the first to tell you, the actors were surprisingly the cohort that got hit the least in terms of the pandemic,” Andy said with a laugh. “Everyone talks about how they’re going to be preppers, how when the apocalypse comes, they’re going to be ready, but it turns out those folks ain’t got shit on the paranoia of performers from Hollywood. They took an overabundance of caution to levels unheard of by just about anyone else. Directors? Not so much. Producers? Ha! Them fuckers died off quick. General crew? About half and half. Even screenwriters, who are a notoriously cagey bunch, only survived at slightly better-than-average numbers. But actors? They had the perfect mix of suspicion and finances to enable that suspicion which guaranteed that they did well. They’ve got survival numbers comparable to doctors, and those folks knew how to protect themselves.”
“You know what’s even funnier?” Phil said as she pulled the car into the parking spot. “Because of how the actors were taking care of themselves, that sort of survivalist mentality spread to a lot of their friends and support networks, most notably chefs and restaurants. In fact, having seen the data, if you want a great place to eat in America, regardless of what kind of food you’re looking for, I’m betting Los Angeles is currently the place to go.”
“I’ll take Jenny’s home cooking any day,” Andy said as they all got out of the car.
“You know Jenny’s a world-class chef, right, boss?” Melody asked him with a grin.
“She’s right, you know,” Lexi laughed. “Calling what Jenny does ‘home cooking’ is like calling Em and Sarah ‘local talent,’ in terms of acting. The words are accurate – Jenny’s cooking in a home, and Em and Sarah are from around here – but the context you’re framing them in is deceptively wrong and sells them way short.”
“Suddenly everyone’s a goddamn writer and wants to argue word selection,” Andy smirked. The building looked like a typical warehouse, although Andy could hear a sort of soft insistent humming off in the distance. They were met at the door by an Asian woman in her mid-fifties, dressed in a military style jumpsuit with no patches, no insignia, no markings of any kind and no indication of rank. “Hello there.”
“Good afternoon, Mister Rook, Doctor Marcos. He told me you’d be coming, yesterday. He just wasn’t sure when. I think you’re an hour or two earlier than he expected,” she said. “I’m his wife, Lau Lam, and his chief of staff.”
“Pardon my asking, Lau, but how did he know we were coming yesterday? We only just decided to come by today,” Phil asked her.
The woman turned to walk them into the building, waving her hand in the air dismissively. “I’ve learned not to ask my husband how he knows the things that he knows.”
“Afraid he might tell you?” Lexi asked.
“No, no might about it. He’d certainly tell me if I asked. That’s why I don’t ask anymore. The answers are… well, I think I’m being generous by calling them answers,” Mrs. Lam said to them. “You’ve known my husband a long time, Dr. Marcos. The last few years have only made him… more indirect than he used to be. I love my husband a great deal, but he’s gotten hard to reason with over the past few months. His research has… taken him down some interesting pathways. I am starting to think he needs less scientific assistance and needs more religious assistance. He says he’s talking to the machines inside of our blood.”
Phil very quietly said, “He might be.”
That stopped the woman walking as she turned to look back at him. “Excuse me?”
“We’ve… gotten reports of a few individuals being able to talk with the nanobots, at least in extremely limited form,” Phil said. “That’s partly why I’m here. I figured if anyone would know about that kind of thing, it would be him. I know he’s been doing research with the information we’ve been sending him, but he… hasn’t been great about sending reports back.”
“Wonderful. Simply wonderful. As it turns out, my husband isn’t losing his mind, but I might be losing mine,” she sighed. “I know our research has already displayed great flexibility in interacting with the nanobots, but I hoped communication from them beyond basic informational queries might be a step too far. Come on, let us go see him and you can see what he can teach you today.”
They were led down a passageway that was nondescript before opening into a large, almost warehouse like open area, with several people standing around near mannequins or near chunks of machinery. The inside of the walls was lined with a steel mesh that Andy recognized as a Faraday cage, something to prevent signals from going in or out, although that didn’t seem to deter people from their experiments. At one point, it looked like a young woman cupped her hands, and a small electrical bolt jumped the inside of hands into a mannequin, something that made them all jump, entirely uncertain what had happened. To Andy’s eyes, it almost felt like they’d walked into Q’s workshop in an old James Bond movie, and he half expected Desmond Llewelyn to walk out from around a corner.
Instead, an Asian man in his mid-sixties wearing a bright blue and white Hawaiian shirt and beige khaki shorts clapped his hands as he spotted them entering the room. The man wore socks and Birkenstocks, and Andy couldn’t help but wonder why no one had told him how weird that looked. His hair was cut short, and Andy imagined the good doctor must’ve been quite popular with the ladies when he was younger until he glanced around and realized the dozen or so women scattered around the lab were probably all his partners. “Ah! Phillip! You’ve finally arrived! Knew it wouldn’t be too long before you came knocking on my door!” Professor John Lam’s voice still had a hint of a Hong Kong accent, but the man spoke eloquently and confidently. “You’ve come to talk about my research into the nanobots, I take it?”
“You haven’t been doing great about keeping me abreast of the research you’ve been doing into my nanobots, Professor,” Phil said with a laugh. “I mean, we’ve been sending you all the data out of courtesy, mostly, with the hopes that you might be able to give us some ideas but barring the pages on the Sergei Swerve you sent me in a goddamned sealed wax cylinder a few weeks ago, you’ve been radio silent. I’d started to think I was sending them for nothing.”
“We’ve been busy, busy, busy, Phillip. Not just me, but all the others, as well. Did you really think the New Eden group was operating without any kind of peer review, Phillip?” the professor asked with a sly smile, a toothpick resting at the corner of his mouth. The professor, Dr. John Lam, had been one of Phil’s instructors at Cal Tech, someone who’d specialized in what would eventually be called nanotech, someone who’d always been one step beyond the horizon, thinking not of what the tech could do now, but where it would be years, even decades from that moment in time. Phil had often talked fondly of the man, even if he did sound occasionally batshit crazy. Greatness always came at a cost, Phil said, and sometimes that cost was a few irregular moments of insanity here and there. “The project’s had about a dozen different research teams studying what you’re working on, trying to see if we can split off from it, built our own variants of it, or iron out some of the more… unusual kinks you’ve picked up along the way. One group in the FBI, one group in the CIA, each branch of the military has a couple of groups, and there are a few ‘free thinkers,’ like this group, although nobody else is really going as experimentally blue sky as we are.”
“I knew there were other groups working on offshoots,” Phil grumbled, “but I wasn’t aware you were leading one of them. Hell, nobody will even tell me who the other groups are or what they’re focusing on. We just recently came across a general who’d had a variant made that allowed her to imprint instructions, using some sort of variation on the Sergei Swerve.”
“Yes, the Ibanez Variant,” the Professor said, shaking his head. “We’ve heard about it. Dreadful thing. I have to confess I was a little disheartened that you didn’t shoot her fatally, Mister Rook, instead of aiming to wound, or so the after-action report made it out as.”
“Sorry, professor, I’ve gotten this far in life without being a murderer. I don’t see that changing any time soon,” Andy said, glancing past the professor as he saw people hovering near a mannequin, examining what looked like a freshly smoldering handprint on part of it. “Have you had any luck with trying to find a way to negate the process?”
“We’d already been looking for a way to extend past the Sergei Swerve, but the only thing we’ve found is something of a dead end…” the professor sighed. “It could be used in the direst of circumstances, but I wouldn’t recommend anyone use it. Not at least until we’ve had a chance to try and remove the most dangerous side effect it has.”
“What’s that?”
“So, we have a serum we’re calling The Last Resort,” the professor said, scratching his chin. “It can be used to reset a woman back to a completely default state and let her accept a new partner, even after the Sergei Swerve, or using a Dead Man’s Switch. It will remove any programming the nanobots have been given by any variation, and her imprinting won’t have any complications beyond the big one. You could say anything to her during the reimprinting and it wouldn’t take.”
“And yet, you named it ‘The Last Resort,’” Lexi said, “so I’m guessing there’s a very bad side effect, one so harsh that you don’t want to let the serum out of your sight.”
“Sorry Professor. These are my partners and bodyguards, Linda and Violet, and these are Andy’s partners and bodyguards, Lexi and Melody, and his newest partner who isn’t part of his security detail, Ming,” Phil said, introducing everyone. “She’s from China and has just recently come over to our side from the mainland.”
“Very nice to meet you all,” the professor said. “I would introduce everyone on my team, but they aren’t all here, and to be honest, I’m still having trouble remembering all of their names without them being in proximity of me, at which point it isn’t a concern.” He smiled mysteriously, tilting his head a little bit. “I actually didn’t even need you to introduce yourselves, but it seemed rude to not allow you to do so.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
A younger woman, maybe thirty, of Indian descent, beautiful, dressed in more business attire than researcher work clothes, although the top few buttons of her shirt were open, a black sports bra visible on beneath it. “It means if you want, we can teach you how to do what we’re calling a ‘handshake’ between nearby nanobot swarms,” she said, offering her hand to Phil, shaking it. Her voice very much had a British accent associated with it, and Andy wondered if she had been part of Operation Funnel Cake or had arrived on her own some time before. “He’s talked a lot about you, Dr. Marcos. You were one of his favorite students. Still are, I think.”
“And you are…?”
“Why don’t you tell me?” She took her hand back and crosses her arms over her chest. “Concentrate on reaching out, as if your nanobots are attempting to get information from my nanobots. Nothing invasive, just a basic identification check. I’ll even turn off my defenses for the moment.”
“I’m not entirely sure what I’m—”
“Whoa,” Andy said, as the area floating in space around the woman lit up with a small window of floating text next to her, something he was fairly confident only he could see. The letters were glowing, as if to make sure Andy could see and read them against the background without preventing his ability to still see his surroundings. “It says here your name is Ghita Ram, and you’re originally from Cornwall, England. Blood type: A negative. You’re allergic to shellfish. You’re 32, you’re the 8th member of Team Lam, you were paired up with him, oh! In August of last year, it says here. It lists him as the primary, obviously, and says the last time you, ah, well, the last time you fucked each other was three days ago. It says all further information is restricted.” Andy reached his hand up into the air by his face and swiped at the text with the flick of his wrist and the information dissipated like gold dust, vanishing into an invisible wind. “How the hell did I do that?”
“Anyone from a team of fifteen or larger can do it, although it’s also not that hard to block out. Anyone from a team of ten or larger can do that, at least once they figure out how,” Ghita said, placing her hands on her hips smugly. “John posited that since it was clear the nanobots were communicating among each other anyway, there might be ways we could use that for our own personal benefits.”
“Oh hell,” Lexi said. “I see it now. How do we block this?”
“For us, it’s been as easy as thinking ‘handshake: no’ and that’ll lock it down, so it’ll only provide your name,” Ghita said. “We haven’t found any way to get it more tightly constrained beyond that, although if you want to give someone, a doctor for example, a complete look at your medical history, you can think ‘handshake: medical’ and that’ll temporarily open your nanites to provide any medical information they have, from the moment they were first injected into your body to now. To just give basic information to people, think ‘handshake: yes’ and you’re giving the information I’ve currently got on display.”
“Jordan’s going to nuts about this,” Phil muttered to himself. “She kept telling me that the nanobots frequencies were constantly in communication, but she hasn’t quite been able to translate their language yet. This should help her immensely.”
“As cool as that is, can we get back to The Last Resort?” Melody asked, a hint of frustration creeping in around the edges of her voice. “I’ve got a couple of accidental programs running in my head from the Sergei Swerve, and I’d rather they weren’t there.”
The professor frowned a little, taking one of Melody’s hands in his own. “While it would remove your instructions, Melody, it would come at too great a cost. Anyone who uses The Last Resort can’t be paired to anyone else again. Ever. The dead man’s switch won’t work. We may be able to find a way around that at some point, but if you took it, and Andrew here were to die, within a couple of weeks, you too would die, and we would be completely powerless to stop that. The Dead Man’s Switch wouldn’t work for you, and your last days would be extremely painful, unless we were to simply give you a medical execution. I’ve read about your case, Melody, and while I know it isn’t optimal, your condition isn’t so debilitating that you should look at this desperate option as a viable one.”
Melody frowned, then nodded, looking away from the professor. “You’re right. That’s too high a cost to pay. I appreciate your honesty, professor. I’ll keep my hopes up that you’ll develop some kind of way out of my situation at some point.”
“Not just yours but all those women who are in situations beyond their control,” Professor Lam said, patting her hand before letting it go. “I feel confident within a few years, we’ll have worked something out. We’re learning so much every day, I am astonished with how far we’ve come in such a short period of time.” He pulled away from her and moved over toward Phil, his eyes a little wild and unstrung, as he moved across the space. “Phillip, you wouldn’t believe some of the things we’ve learned here, piggybacking off your nanobots,” he said, grabbing Phil’s hands now, his tone growing a little frantic and overly excited. “They’re capable of so… SO much… Knowledge transfer, experience sharing, linked perceptions, self-defense abilities…”
“Dr. Lam,” Phil said, trying to keep his tone even. “Do you know about the decelerated aging?”
“Decelerated aging?” The professor’s eyes got a far away look for a moment, as if he was stretching to find the piece of information rattling around in there. “Oh! Oh yes, yes, of course. We discovered that in October of last year. I assumed it was an intentional part of the design, naturally, a stroke of genius on your part, by setting it so the default regeneration abilities were always counteracting the natural degradation by aging. I’m still not even sure how you configured it that way. The nanobots seem… especially resistant to providing them with additional programming. The Sergei Swerve seems to be a naturally occurring alteration to the nanobots, so we know they can be interacted with on a fundamental level, but whatever parameters are hardcoded into them from the start seem to be almost inflexible, unchangeable, as if it defines their very nature. Was that a result of your handiwork or Dr. McCallister’s?”
“A little of each, I think, definitely some of Bill McKenna’s handiwork is in there as well, although I don’t think any of us knew we were going to be affecting the aging process when we set them to be in a constant state of repair for the host. We started out as a military project, trying to develop a crash recovery field serum in tandem with the Air Force, and from that came… this…”
“Well, for all the chaos you have caused, my former student, this is an evolutionary leap forward in nanorobotics in a way that I don’t think anyone truly understands yet,” Dr. Lam said to them, shaking his head. “And we’ve survived a one-in-a-generation plague thanks in no small part to you, my former student. But I assume you have some questions about your own creation, which is why you’ve come to me, hoping the old man still has some tricks up his sleeve. Well, go on, ask your questions and maybe I can help you with them.”
“The key/lock system that McCallister built in there – you seen any way to get it out?”
The professor shook his head with a sigh. “It’s down at the very fundamentals of the nanobots’ core functionality. It’s impossible to remove without destroying all other uses for the nanobots. The regeneration, the restoration, the resistance to the DuoHalo virus… it’s all tied in there. You can’t pull one strand – the entire thing will fall apart. I’m sorry, Phillip. I cannot help you with this problem. I do not think anyone alive can. We’ve been trying, but without even the smallest of successes. It’s quite the consternation, to be frank with you.”
“That’s okay, Professor,” Phil said with a sigh. “It was a long shot effort at best, maybe. I’m trying to figure out what to do about our kids, seeing as they won’t live as long as we will.”
“That problem’s years and years out, Phillip,” Professor Lam said with a slight smile. “Worry more about the concerns that will be springing up in the next few years, especially when the nanobots start making decisions for us without telling us. That’s not too far in the future, you know…”
Phil and Andy both turned to look at him in astonishment. “You’re kidding, right?” Phil asked. “What do you mean when you say they’re going to be making decisions for us?”
“Well,” Dr. Lam said, tilting his head a little. “Perhaps ‘decision making’ is a little strong, but they’re going to start trying to take more care of us, to protect us better, even from ourselves. You’ve probably noticed some of that already – increased metabolism, to keep the caloric in/out scales leveled; tweaked levels of testosterone and estrogen, to keep the conflicts low and the Daniels Effect in constant buffering; definite automatic restoration work done after a child is born; a sense of tribal identity amongst the members of a Team, thinking of themselves as a collective, and if the Team is lacking a particular skillset, then a concerted effort will happen, often even without thinking, to try and fill that skillset and fill the hole.”
“Yeah, we’ve noticed that, particularly among the larger Teams,” Phil said.
“Well, the nanobots consider larger Teams success stories,” Dr. Lam said with a soft laugh, rolling the toothpick from one side of his mouth to the other. “I just saw the report about the Teams from Spain and France basically abducting people to fill missing spaces, a reaction to some individual strain of DuoHalo that’s triggering a sort of acquisition reaction… yes yes, I know it’s meant to be classified news, but I was just reading the reports a friend of mine in the French research community sent to me about it. I still have friends in other countries who consider scientific knowledge more important than silly government secrets. It sounds like that particular strain of DuoHalo is contained, at least for the moment, and not easily transmissible, so that’s something, I suppose. But in the next year or two, when we’ve finally reached a sense of global stabilization, the nanobots may start trying to optimize us, to see if it can find ways to improve our Teams for us…”
“You’re serious, professor?”
“Phillip, they’re just starting to think… but they are starting to think…”
Comments
DocEGJ
I thought I missed something the first time I read this so I went back and read it again. So they just left Fi at the white house bc from the first paragraph she is missing.
Graham Cairns
As always, this raises some intriguing possibilities. As Kaywye says, there's a serious risk of the nanobots ending up with a "With Folded Hands" scenario .. which would be even worse than the bots (or a variant strain) being actively malevolent. I also enjoyed the satirical swipes at JK Rowling :-) Cheers
J N
I think that the children will have an updated version of the nanobots in their own blood systems seeing as how the mother's body supplies the fetuses everything during gestation. And the duohalo epidemic has been refreferred to in another story set a few hundred years or more in the future.
Kaywye
The idea of having the bots not only making their own decisions, but trying to influence ours is both exciting and terrifying. It starts innocently enough, trying to get us to make better dietary choices, etcetera but where it gets truly scary is when they start making moral judgements. Punishing a host for smoking or doing drugs? Removing the high we get from those activities. (As a smoker I am both intrigued and frightened by this idea)
Dennis McNulty
I like these rabbit holes. Like Whitney's character: as Andy's IT person, her nanobots might allow her to interface with her computers and the smart house. Endless possibilities. Pretty soon Andy might just have to blink his eyes and see which of his ladies is due for dosing. Looking forward to more of this great story.
Drew
Was half expecting his old professor’s initials to be JT…
Fumtu
Jeez! This chapter opens up the playing field quite a bit; looking at the long term, I'm wondering why, exactly, children of folks with the serum wouldn't receive the same benefits, so EVERYONE alive would live much longer? I figure that the bots would want to help ALL of humanity, not just DuoHalo survivors. I'd forsee that what "humanity" would eventually be a term to describe the symbiotic relationship between Humanity, Version 1, and the bots, and Humanity, Version 2 would be a team of one male (version 1) and many Version 1 women, each group having different personalities, based on the group's composition. For the immediate future, this means a lot more families getting bigger for a while, but the number of families growing MUCH slower; otherwise, we'd have to find more planets and/or build structures like Larry Niven's RingWorld. I DO think that each V2 unit should have a fair amount of independence, since otherwise things could get pretty boring, which wouldn't be much fun for anyone. That's enough speculation for one evening, I think. I think the even Phil is not looking far enough into the future, where John Lam is going...
J.D.
That chapter was seriously trippy. It’s one thing for Phil to drop a little info here and there to Andy but they just got a dump truck emptied right into their brains. Gotta love how they can communicate by floating gold dust information that can be waved away. Authors and their imaginations astound me sometimes. It’s like growing up but keeping that childlike thinking running in the background to be brought out when called upon. Once again another impressive and fun read.
