She slammed the approaching storm with everything she had, one HERF round after another. By all rights, no botswarm should be able withstand that. The others did likewise and the ground shook as thunderclap after thunderclap burst over the grounds. But the swarm seemed unaffected.
Jeez, what the hell beast is this…the sky ought to be raining fried bots about now—
It was soon abundantly clear to Lieutenant Dana Tallant that Bravo Detachment was facing something they were completely unprepared for. Tallant didn’t know exactly what type of bots the swarm was made of and she didn’t have time to get small and engage at molecular level. She had an embedded ANAD in her shoulder capsule but she didn’t have time to get a counter swarm going. Still, if the HERFs and the mags had no effect—
She opened a coupler circuit and screamed “ANAD, launch now! Max rate reps…C-2, C-2 right now--!”
She fired another volley of HERF and saw the red light on the barrel indicating final charge. Angrily, she slung the rifle into the dirt and felt the sting-snap of her shoulder port coming open. Though it was lost in the glare of the flood lamps and the choking dust, a faint flickering mist had already emerged from her containment pod. Her ANAD master bot had launched and was even now grabbing atoms like a frantic brick mason, replicating structure, trying to build mass to counter the onrushing swarm.
It was a numbers game now, numbers of atoms, mass and nanobotic bodies and ANAD was way behind the curve. Already the first tendrils of the enemy swarm were almost there, closing rapidly on her position. She backpedaled, kicked and flailed, swatting and swiping at the keening buzz that was even now engulfing her.
Arrggghhh…can’t breathe…can’t…get off me, you bastards!
But the swarm rolled on and Bravo Detachment was soon engulfed completely. In her last moments of consciousness, Dana Tallant thought she could hear the screams of deconstructing troopers being disassembled molecule by molecule, skin flayed from bone, faces ripped from skulls, legs and arms shredded like tissue paper. Only one trooper managed to escape…Ozzie Tsukota, who scrambled stumbling and crawling back toward camp.
Then…and then… and then it came. A snap flash, like a camera going off. An image of geometric forms—icosahedrons, polygons, trapezoids—all compressed into a tunnel, a long curving corridor and she found herself hurtling at breakneck speed down this corridor, until—
She landed on her butt with a hard, neck-jarring bump…somewhere….
When she was six years old, Dana Tallant had nearly drowned in the ocean. But this wasn’t like that. Not exactly. No, this was like being in a warm bath, surrounded by bubbles, the water caressing your skin gently. No, that wasn’t quite it either. Maybe snuggled under the covers on a cold snowy Saturday morning.
The feeling was hard to put into words. Pretty embarrassing for a nanotrooper from Nebraska. Maybe she should just report what he was experiencing, sort of like a Captain’s log of sights and sounds.
I think, therefore I am. At least, she thought she was thinking. I have a mind. I have thoughts. But there was more. Something more than her thoughts. Was somebody else in here? That was ridiculous.
I have sensations. Hot, cold, hard, soft. Try to analyze this.
A snatch of memory came to her: Personal identity is the unique identity of a person existing through time. That is to say, the necessary and sufficient conditions under which a person at one time and a person at another time can be said to be the same person, persisting through time. In the modern philosophy of mind, this concept of personal identity is referred to as the diachronic problem of personal identity. The synchronic problem is grounded in the question of what features or traits characterize a given person at one time.
Where the hell did that come from? I must have read that.
Now, she was sure of it. There was someone else in here. Just a snatch of voice, a snippet—
***Do you recognize me?***
Recognize you? I can barely hear you. Yet, there was something—
An image came to mind. It was fuzzy at first, but with effort, it sharpened. It was a man, a dark-skinned man, with a thin black moustache.
Symborg.
It was Symborg.
***You do recognize me***
It was a statement. Dana was forced to agree. And there was more. Like whispers…she strained to make them out—
***…within the mother swarm…you are one with us…you are part of us…***
Dana found herself thankful for something to concentrate on. She was intrigued and somewhat relieved that here was something she recognized…at least, she had some idea of where she was and what she had become. Symborg was familiar. Symborg was known.
She had come through. She had been disassembled and now…
What was she?
Symborg was saying something…or maybe the words just came floating up. It was a quote. Something from her grad school days, before the Corps, something from Plutarch….
“The ship wherein Theseus and the youth of Athens returned from Crete had thirty oars, and was preserved by the Athenians down even to the time of Demetrius Phalerus, for they took away the old planks as they decayed, putting in new and stronger timber in their place, in so much that this ship became a standing example among the philosophers, for the logical question of things that grow; one side holding that the ship remained the same and the other side contending that it was not the same.”
Yes, yes, she remembered that. The Ship of Theseus. The old conundrum. If an object was disassembled piece by piece and rebuilt piece by piece over time, was it the same object? Did the pattern remain?
Dana Tallant understood after this that the same thing had happened to her. Over time, the truth sank in. Like the Ship of Theseus, she had been disassembled, bit by bit, atom by atom and re-assembled somewhere else, as something else.
She understood somehow that she was now part of something greater. Symborg had always called it the Mother Swarm.
Again, Symborg came to her. This time, he had specific instructions.
***Your patterns have been preserved. We have a mission for you. You are to become a great leader***
Dana was puzzled. “I’m a soldier. I have so many questions.”
***You must be patient. In time, you will understand***
“What is this mission? I’m not a leader…I’m a trooper…I follow orders…fight enemies—“
***You will be given a new configuration. You will appear to be Normal, to be human, as I appear. You will lead a resistance movement. You will help implement the Prime Key. And you will prevent other Normals from interfering with this imperative***
“This sounds like some kind of action-adventure vid…I’m not a leader. I’m just a soldier—“
Now Symborg’s words came at her with more emphasis, as commands.
***Once you receive your new configuration, you will enter the WorldNet. You will combat efforts by the Normals to remove, quarantine, destroy or immobilize entities coming from the Keeper. These entities are critical to implementing the Prime Key***
Dana didn’t understand. “But how can I do that? I don’t know what to do. I don’t even know what I am.”
Now, Symborg’s voice was more comforting, more understanding, almost fatherly.
***Think of yourself like a sheriff from the American Wild West. Think of yourself as Wyatt Earp…I see you have this in your memory***
An image of the frontier lawman floated into Dana’s consciousness, slicked back hair, bushy moustache, the silver badge…Wyatt Earp.
***This is a very important mission. The Normals are like outlaws. You are the Sheriff. You will spend part of your time as a human-like angel and part of your time disembodied, inside the Net. Your patterns will be maintained until this mission is completed, until the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral has occurred***
Dana was still intrigued, even mystified, with all her new sensations. She didn’t kn
ow what to feel. “I’m not sure about all this. I don’t even know how to get around. Do I have arms? Legs? How do I do things?”
***Your new configuration is almost ready. When it is downloaded, all your questions will be answered. Everything will be clear. I will instruct you how to operate your new configuration***
“It will be like learning to walk all over again…this is pretty exciting. But I have a million questions.”
***In time, your questions will be answered. For now, know that you will be part of a small group, a sub-element, that works from within the Net. You will go to a place called Table Top Mountain. It’s in America. There, you will complete your mission***
Table Top. She knew that place. It was familiar. She still had millions of questions, but Dana felt herself getting sleepy. It came up like a faint breeze, like snuggling deeper under the covers on a snowy, Saturday morning.
Then she woke up. Was it a dream? She looked around.
This was no soft bed on a Saturday morning.
Dana Tallant came to with a violent start. She was lying in a street gutter. Trash and dead rats and broken glass and empty cans were everywhere. It was dark. It was cold.
She learned, or maybe somehow she knew, that she had awakened in downtown Boise, Idaho. Some side street. She sat up. Light snow flurries drifted down. What the hell had happened?
Then she had a vague memory of the assault at Engebbe…all the HERF volleys, the mag rounds, the scrambling, the approaching swarm and the pain, the stinging, the bots slicing into her. Sitting up, she could see some kind of rally grounds down the street, torn bunting, smashed fences…had she fainted? Or was she just hammered, stupefyingly drunk? And how did she get from Engebbe, Kenya to Boise, Idaho anyway? She didn’t remember drinking anything.
Maybe I got knocked out and got medevac’ed here, then the ambulance crashed in this gutter.
She dragged himself to her feet, clinging for balance to a light stand and meandered down a sidewalk. She nearly ran into a sign: Lynx and Foxx. It was a women’s clothing store. Mannequins posed in the store front. And there was a mirror. Might as well inspect the damage.
Dana studied her reflection for a few moments. Maybe there was something on the storefront glass, a smudge or something. Her reflection looked funny, kind of fuzzed out.
She found that her appearance had changed, in subtle ways. That’s what these missions will do to you, she surmised. She raised a hand to what looked like a bruise on her temple, only to find that her hand smeared out, like a bad photo. What the hell? She waved her hands around. No, she hadn’t imagined it. Then she looked at her hands directly.
It was a hand, five fingers and a palm, but it appeared blurred, out of contrast. Yet when she held her hand still, it solidified and seemed real enough. But when she moved her hand or any of her fingers, the blurring came back. Same thing with her other hand. What on earth—
Her hand looked like a horde of bees or flies, sparkling in the yellowish street light. Both hands did. As she looked closer in the display front mirror, she saw her face had the same look.
Somehow, her skin was malleable, like dough, soft, kneaded, flashing with little pinpricks of light.
Then it came to her, clear as the winter night sky. She had been deconstructed by the Engebbe swarm. She was like an angel. She was a swarm of nanobotic entities.
You have a very important mission. The words appeared in her mind like a flashing sign. And whose voice was that, anyway?
By playing with her hands, by concentrating just so, she found she could change her face, her shoulders, her legs, anything she wanted. She could make herself a comic-book stick figure. She tried it. She could make herself Mr. Potato Head. She could make herself an ogre. She could make herself a vid star. She could flatten her head, elongate it, distort it. Anything she wanted.
Cool. And a bit scary. She could shape herself into just about any form she wanted, just by thinking of it in a certain way, a way given to her, by Symborg, she now remembered.
Now she felt compelled to move. To leave, to go somewhere. Without fully understanding any of this, she knew somehow that she had to be somewhere else, somewhere nearby. And it had something to do with a project, an important project…the words came to her now: a symbiosis project.
You have a very important mission.
She re-sculpted herself into a basic human form—that wasn’t so hard, she was getting the hang of it now—and set off down the street. She came to an intersection, noting on a clock over a nearby bank that it was almost 3:00 am and spotted a taxi, parked by the curb.
She went to the taxi, woke up the groggy driver and told him she needed to get to the airport. The cabbie sat up straight and fingered sleep from his eyes.
“Sure thing, miss. Hop in. No traffic at this hour. We’ll be there in ten minutes. You got any bags?”
Dana told him she did not.
The taxi sped off toward the airport, heading out Idaho Street toward 184.
“Where ya headed at his hour, miss?”
Dana looked up into the driver’s face, a mustachioed little moon in the darkened rear view mirror.
“Table Top Mountain.”
End
About the Author
Philip Bosshardt is a native of Atlanta, Georgia. He works for a large company that makes products everyone uses…just check out the drinks aisle at your grocery store. He’s been happily married for 25 years. He’s also a Georgia Tech graduate in Industrial Engineering. He loves water sports in any form and swims 3-4 miles a week in anything resembling water. He and his wife have no children. They do, however, have one terribly spoiled Keeshond dog named Kelsey.
To get a peek at Philip Bosshardt’s upcoming work, recent reviews, excerpts and general updates on the writing life, visit his blog The Word Shed at: https://thewdshed.blogspot.com.
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