Chapter 2
“Know Thyself”
UNQC Western Command
Table Top Mountain, Idaho, USA
January 27, 2049
2120 hours
All of the embed surgeries were completed in a day and Doc Frost pronounced himself satisfied with the results. When M’Bela was finally wheeled out of the surgery suite into a recovery room, still inside the Containment bay, Frost came out too and pulled Johnny Winger aside.
“No problems with the insertions,” Frost reported. He was clad in surgical scrubs. Mary Duncan was still inside Containment, prepping one of the ANAD systems for loading later that day. “We do the first loading this afternoon. Upgraded ANADs all the way around.”
Johnny Winger studied the imager screen on the side of the containment chamber. Suspended in a nutrient bath inside, the ANAD master looked like some kind of futuristic space probe. The basic polyhedral structure was still there, but scores of molecule chains undulated gently in the bath currents, chains Winger didn’t recognize. He looked in vain for the bond disrupters, the enzymatic knife, all the tools he’d become familiar with.
“He’s changed, Doc. I don’t recognize all those chains…he’s got gizmos I’ve never seen before. Are they new effectors or what?”
Frost smiled. “I regenerated a new master, Johnny. I’ve been tinkering under the hood, as you like to put it.”
“I’ll say…” Winger pointed to a pair of linked hydrogen radicals on the screen. “And these doodads--?
Frost ticked off the changes. “New and improved, Johnny. Those are stiffened diamondoid effectors, with ‘stickier’ covalent bond ends, radicals and carbenes. Better grabbing ability. Look just above the effectors…see those U-shaped gadgets?”
Winger looked, turning to Frost with a puzzled look. “Some kind of grabbers?”
“Extensible fullerene hooks, for more secure grasping and attaching. I modified a ribosome design I had seen. Sort of improved on Mother Nature.”
Winger shook his head. “ANAD’s really souped up, Doc. What about under the hood?”
“Faster quantum processor, with a faster executing basic replication algorithm. Plus I’ve added direct sequences from several viral genomes…nobody replicates faster than viruses.”
Winger’s brow wrinkled. “Is that safe, Doc?”
Frost shrugged. “As safe as any weapon…in the right hands. Plus ANAD’s interface and communication system has been upgraded. Your Intel people—Q2, I believe you call them—found some interesting things at Engebbe. But there is something that troubles me, Johnny.”
“What’s that?”
During each surgical insertion, one of your Containment techs, a Corporal Gavin, I believe, kept reporting he was picking up intermittent decoherence wake signals from nearby. You did sweep the containment cells clean before we started, didn’t you?”
“As far as I know, everything inside Containment was swept clean yesterday. That’s normal protocol. There shouldn’t be anything inside…deco wakes, that’s a quantum signal, isn’t it? Did you have an ANAD system inside?”
“ANAD is still in a separate containment vault, on the other side of the building. And none of the masters have been activated yet. They’re completely dormant…or should be. I’m heading over to Bay Two right now, to make sure.”
“Something with ANAD, Doc. It has to be. What about your patients? Can I make a few visits?”
Frost smiled. “D’Nunzio and Nguyen are probably awake now…check with the duty nurse in Rehab. You can visit for a short while…no more than few minutes. I wanted to get them both prepped for ANAD loading bright and early tomorrow.”
Winger cycled through all the biometrics and wound his way through the labyrinth of rooms inside Containment, until he came to the Rehab hallway. He peeked into one room.
Deeno D’Nunzio was propped up in her bed, a heavy bandage draped over her left shoulder. She winced, then tried to smile when Winger came in.
“How long was I out?” she murmured. There was a soreness in her left shoulder and upper back. She soon became aware of a large bandage back there.
Winger checked his wristpad. “About four hours, Deeno. It’s night time now. How do you feel?”
D’Nunzio smiled sheepishly. “Not too bad. But that was some dream I had…right when I woke up, I had a dream…I was in a sleet storm, a driving blizzard only the sleet was all different. Different colors and shapes, much bigger than normal. It was weird.”
Winger’s face now came fully into view. “That was no dream, Corporal.”
“It wasn’t?”
Winger shook his head. “It’s normal. I had the same experience...it’ll take some getting used to. It’s your limbic system…picking up stray signals from the interface. There may be some…how best to say this--” Winger gazed off at the window for a moment, seeing the lights of other buildings across the base, “…there may be some unusual emotions the next few days. Sometimes, the interface doesn’t completely convert all the signals…some of them spill over and trigger reactions elsewhere. They’ll be monitoring you all the time for the next few weeks…just to make sure.”
D’Nunzio eased herself into a sitting position. “Growing up in Brooklyn was never like this. If that wasn’t a dream, what was it?”
Winger smiled. “Actually, it was probably sensory data from ANAD. You were coupled for awhile, part of the testing…what ANAD sees, you could also see.”
“But the sleet—“
“This is going to take some adjustment, Deeno. You’ll be in rehab and training for a month. The sleet wasn’t really sleet. You were directly sensing molecules and atoms the way ANAD sees them.”
Her eyes widened and she sank back in the bed. “Jesus—“she shook her head. “I’m familiar with the acoustic imager and how to perceive through that. But to actually be there…with ANAD….” She closed her eyes. “Man, that was weird. But the dream went away…how come I’m not seeing it now?”
Mary Duncan came in, to shoo Winger out. She had heard D’Nunzio’s question and cleared her throat. “Corporal D’Nunzio, a new containment capsule has been implanted. In your shoulder. And the quantum coupler too. They’re hooked up but there will be a training period, several months, where you’ll learn how to access ANAD directly, as well as through normal means. ANAD’s no longer in the capsule. He’s back in the TinyTown pod inside another containment cell. Dr. Frost has just gone to retrieve him.”
D’Nunzio was puzzled. ‘Then what about the dream?”
Duncan explained. “We put ANAD into the capsule in your shoulder for about an hour, to calibrate the interface and the buffers, to see that the links worked. Then we extracted him. What you saw was a residual trace, left over.”
She felt gingerly at the bandage over her left shoulder. “How long?”
Duncan took a deep breath. “The bandage can come off in a week. Your containment capsule has a port for ANAD to enter and exit by, along with the interface chip and containment bath. Anytime ANAD’s inside the capsule, it’ll be just like he’s in containment inside TinyTown. The capsule’s designed to provide the right nutrients, the right conditions for him to survive. You’ve got a very small TinyTown embedded in your shoulder. The physics and chemistry of the implant are pretty straightforward. What takes time is learning how to talk to ANAD when he’s contained in the capsule, through the interface. How to turn the link on and off, how to…I guess ‘interpret’ is the best word, what ANAD sends back and somehow integrate it into what your brain normally does. You and ANAD will be almost like a mother and child, in some ways. You’re going to have to learn how to talk to each other, how to understand each other, how to get along in this new way.”
Winger agreed. “It’s like being a new mom, Deeno. That’s what will take time. And to be truthful, since you’re only the second trooper to undergo the implant procedure, we really don’t know how that
’s going to happen. You’ll have to help us understand what we can do to help you.”
“For now,” Duncan said, gently pushing Winger away from the bed, “you rest. In another day or so, we’ll go over the details of rehab and recovery.”
D’Nunzio tried to relax but it wasn’t easy. In her mind’s eye, she could still see the sleet storm and feel the buffeting of wind gusts…or were they ocean waves? Hard to say for sure. She grinned up at the two of them.
“I guess it’s my first exposure to van der Waals forces and Brownian motion, huh?”
Mary Duncan nodded. “I’m afraid so.”
“It’ll be like learning to walk and talk, all over again. Just like I’m a baby. Or maybe a new mom, like Lieutenant Winger said. Except my baby’s the size of a molecule. I guess I won’t be rocking him in my arms anytime soon.”
“A very special baby, to be sure. Quantum Corps has spent a lot of money and time on you now.”
D’Nunzio’s head swam with the possibilities. She couldn’t suppress a grin. “Almost like being born, all over again. Like getting a second chance. I’ll have to re-learn all the basic ANAD operations…replication, rendezvous and docking, launch and capture, all the effectors and probes, navigation…” she shook her head, her mind thick with the magnitude of the work ahead. “I never dreamed…” but she caught herself, chuckling. “Well, I guess I did dream…in a way. True symbiosis, just like the Major said.”
“Rest now,” Mary Duncan insisted. Duncan poured another cup of her special tea and offered it to the atomgrabber. “This will help. Tomorrow, we’ll get started, sorting out all the new stuff.”
D’Nunzio sipped from the cup and tried to relax. But the image of the sleet storm kept coming back, that and a sobering realization:
When you were the size of a few atoms, you spent your whole life fighting forces and currents that bigger objects, like human beings, took for granted. When you were all of sixty nanometers tall, you couldn’t take anything for granted.
Johnny Winger waved at her and left. Duncan firmly shut the door behind them. After a few minutes to absorb all the new feelings and sensations, she closed her eyes, understanding now for the first time, just how much she had to learn from ANAD.
D’Nunzio started to lie back again and try to get some rest, as the doc had suggested. But something seemed to be active inside her shoulder capsule. It hurt—maybe it was just the incision—but there seemed to be something there. She wondered if she should ring up an orderly or Dr. Duncan.
Probably just my imagination, she told herself. Residual memory effects of an earlier coupling. D’Nunzio closed her eyes and tried to relax.
She couldn’t wait to feel her new ‘baby’ kicking around inside the capsule tomorrow, when ANAD was scheduled to be loaded.
Johnny Winger visited each trooper in turn, when they had regained consciousness: D’Nunzio, Barnes, Nguyen, and M’Bela. Each reported similar symptoms…some soreness, odd sensations that something had been inside the capsule, snippets of dreams.
Doc Frost decided that it was time to begin ANAD loading.
Deeno D’Nunzio would be first. Inside Containment Cell B, Frost and Duncan worked with the nanotrooper, while outside the cell, Johnny Winger sat with Tech Sergeant Gavin, monitoring the initial insertion.
The first order of business was to make sure ANAD could be launched and captured properly into containment in the small capsule, then to make sure a comm link could be established through the interface. The shoulder capsule was a secure environment for the autonomous nanoscale assembler/ disassembler, able to provide proper conditions of pressure, pH, and temperature for ANAD to survive. It was essentially self-sustaining, as long as Deeno didn’t do something foolish.
Doc Frost had already prepped the TinyTown pod in the Containment chamber for ANAD’s launch.
“Sit there, Corporal,” he said. There was a reclining seat nearby. Electron beam guns surrounded the seat, just in case. After she had made herself comfortable, Mary Duncan helped orient her so ANAD would have a clear path to be captured into containment in the implanted capsule.
“We tried it several times, during the surgery,” she explained. “We had you in every possible position…sitting upright, lying on your side, on your stomach—“
“Even propped you up like a mannequin,” Frost added. “Some positions were better than others.”
D’Nunzio gave that some thought. “I don’t remember any of it.”
“You were under deep anesthesia at the time.”
D’Nunzio studied the setup. “Seems to me that I’m likely to be standing or running in most captures…especially in combat.”
“You’re probably right,” Frost said. He tinkered with the interface controls, getting ANAD ready. “But this is a test. We’ve got to make sure ANAD gets into the capsule without problem and that he can establish a comm link. Mary--?”
“He’s ready,” Duncan replied.
Frost scanned the IC panel and was satisfied. The containment cell was secure at Level Four containment—negative air pressure, active seals, electron beams primed…just in case something went wrong. And the cell was buried deep inside another layer of security inside Containment Bay 1. “ANAD reports ready in all respects. I’m enabling….I’m launching—“
A faint whoosh of air escaped from the exit valve atop the TinyTown pod.
For a few seconds, nothing happened. ANAD’s instructions were simple for the purposes of the test: replicate a few times—merely an exercise to flex his rep algorithm and effectors, then configure for capture and transit into the capsule in D’Nunzio’s shoulder.
A faint keening whine could be heard as the rep counter ticked over.
“…showing replications now—“ Frost announced, reading the display. “Just a few thousand, to make sure everything works…now, he’s reconfiguring, folding effectors, getting ready for insert—any moment now—“
Mary Duncan put a calming hand on Deeno’s head, noting how tense the atomgrabber was.
“Just relax…it’s all very routine—“
And it was over before she knew it. One moment, a keening whine could be heard. The next moment, there was a brief sting of heat as the ANAD master fluffed off its replicated daughters and burrowed into the shoulder capsule.
The whine died off, the sting subsided and that was that.
Deeno D’Nunzio looked up expectantly. “That’s all there is?”
But before Frost could reply, a chirp sounded inside her head.