Nanotroopers
Episode 2: Nog School
Copyright 2016 Philip Bosshardt
A few words about this series….
1.Nanotroopers is a series of 15,000- 20,000 word episodes detailing the adventures of Johnny Winger and his experiences as a nanotrooper with the United Nations Quantum Corps.
2.Each episode will be about 40-50 pages, approximately 20,000 words in length.
3.A new episode will be available and uploaded every 3 weeks.
4.There will be 22 episodes. The story will be completely serialized in about 14 months.
5.Each episode is a stand-alone story but will advance the greater theme and plot of the story arc.
6.The main plotline: U.N. Quantum Corps must defeat the criminal cartel Red Hammer’s efforts to steal or disable their new nanorobotic ANAD systems.
Episode # Title Approximate Upload Date
1 ‘Atomgrabbers’ 1-14-16
2 ‘Nog School’ 2-8-16
3 ‘Deeno and Mighty Mite’ 2-29-16
4 ‘ANAD’ 3-21-16
5 ‘Table Top Mountain’ 4-11-16
6 ‘I, Lieutenant John Winger…’ 5-2-16
7 ‘Hong Chui’ 5-23-16
8 ‘Doc Frost’ 6-13-16
9 ‘Demonios of Via Verde’ 7-5-16
10 ‘The Big Bang’ 7-25-16
11 ‘Engebbe’ 8-15-16
12 ‘The Symbiosis Project’ 9-5-16
13 ‘Small is All!’ 9-26-16
14 ‘’The Serengeti Factor’ 10-17-16
15 ‘A Black Hole’ 11-7-16
16 ‘ANAD on Ice’ 11-29-16
17 ‘Lions Rock’ 12-19-16
18 ‘Geoplanes’ 1-9-17
19 ‘Mount Kipwezi’ 1-30-17
20 ‘Doc II’ 2-20-17
21 ‘Paryang Monastery’ 3-13-17
22 ‘Epilogue’ 4-3-17
“Primate Ops”
Table Top Mountain, Idaho
September 15, 2048
8:45 a.m.
The official name of the course was ANAD Operations and Maneuvers in Live Subjects. Everybody at Table Top called it “Primate Ops”. When Johnny Winger entered Containment Chamber C4, he soon saw why.
He was there with seven other cadets, newly admitted. Standing right next him was Deeno D’Nunzio, the trash-talking New York muscle gal, who was never at a loss for words.
“Jesus, Mary and Joseph…” D’Nunzio muttered. Two instructors, Lieutenant Burke and Lieutenant Walz welcomed the cadets inside with malevolent smiles.
Containment C4 was built like a submarine hull, with thick plated walls, doors two feet thick, seals, locks and heavy gauge paraphernalia mounted everywhere. The place fairly screamed strong…as in standing up to a hurricane strong.
Four gurneys were spotted around C4, each one surrounded by mobile consoles on wheels, all of them draped with thick ganglia of wires, hoses, tubes and cables. Strapped to each gurney was a single macaque monkey, macaca Sylvanus to be official, as Lieutenant Burke told them. The monkeys seemed identical: each one a small, four foot light brown simian with a thatch of white fur on its stomach and chest. Each macaque was fully anesthetized, completely motionless, well-restrained and its head was enveloped in a grid-like cage of thin wire, with tracking antennas mounted on the grid.
Lieutenant Burke—Deeno was already labeling him Lieutenant Quirk, behind his back—assembled the cadets for the setup briefing.
“The purpose of this exercise is the following: to perform a normal insertion of an ANAD master into a live subject, conduct routine navigation and basic operations, hunt down and render safe an OPFOR bot we’ve planted inside…this will be a kind of ‘denatured’, barebones ANAD analog, capture the bot, extract, safe and contain said bot and withdraw your own ANAD master. There is a time limit of one hour. Plus—“ here Burke smiled that mirthless smile that was so endearing—“Lieutenant Walz and I have planted a few surprises inside your live subjects…just to keep things interesting.”
“Excuse me, sir--” piped up Oscar M’bela, the cadet from Cameroon, who always sported trinkets and cowry shells in his pockets, spirit things he could fondle and commune with at all hours of the day and night. Deeno called him ‘Witchy’. Deeno had names for everybody. “—why are we doing inserts and extractions and ops in a live subject?”
“Well, Cadet M’Bela,” Burke leaned forward to spy the name on Witchy’s nameplate, “because sometimes the battlefield for your ANAD ops won’t be some far away jungle or forest or the South Pole or the bottom of the ocean. Sometimes, you’ll have to go inside actual people, while they’re alive and kicking and probably trying to strangle you. The enemy could be inside someone’s noggin….or their heart or lymph nodes. Every atomgrabber has to know this stuff. It could save your life someday.”
The cadets looked dubious, so Burke made the pairing assignments and checked his wristpad. “Okay, boys and girls, it’s now 0845 hours. At 0945 hours, I’m pulling the plug. Your ANADs are already in containment, ticking over, ready to rock and roll. Go to it!”
Winger and D’Nunzio had been assigned as Team Alpha. Deeno seemed hurt by Winger’s less than enthusiastic face.
“What’s the matter, Wings. Can’t handle a little ol’ New York gal?”
Rather than trade insults, Winger said simply, “Check all parameters, will you? Is our little guy ready for launch?
"Config complete, my master. ANAD reports ready in all respects."
"Launch ANAD," Winger gave the order.
Silently, the ANAD master infiltrated the subject monkey’s epidermal layer right at its neck line, just above its shoulders, parting lipid molecules, burrowing through the outer tissues, heading for the nearest capillary network, powering itself down toward the carotid artery itself, the fast track to the brain, on picowatt propulsors.
Winger and D’Nunzio watched an acoustic image on the sounder screen.
All around them, the other teams were doing the same.
“Look at that sucker go,” someone said.
“Kick ass, my little friend,” M’Bela muttered.
ANAD slipped through the carotid wall in good order, parting a dark curtain puckered with spheres and polygons. Johnny Winger shifted his eyepiece with a nod, overlaying a tactical map on the image.
"Probing now," Deeno announced. She was manning the console, tracking ANAD wherever it was inside the body of the macaque.
Winger shook his head. He was itching to engage, locate the OPFOR bots and grab the cookies before anything nasty popped. "To hell with recon…let's just punch through and get our butts up to the limbic cortex and see what's happening there. All replicants responding?"
"Normal signals, Wings."
Winger piloted ANAD through a bog of hemoglobins, swollen sacs of oxygenated blood born on infinitesimal currents toward the macaque's brain. Long tendrils of plasma proteins undulated in the currents with the ANAD swarm. Winger steered for the center of the arterial highway, driving ANAD ever deeper, aiming for a narrow declivity in the distance.
Several minutes passed, as ANAD coursed its way closer and closer to the blood-brain barrier. On his eyepiece, Winger saw a split screen. One side showed the acoustic image from ANAD's sounding. The other side showed the grid position inside the monkey's arterial network, a moving dot of light inching its way toward the cranium.
"Lipid ducts ahead," D’Nunzio told him.
Winger saw them at the same time. "Endothelial cells in the brain capillaries. We're almost in. The blood brain barrier's right there. One of the tightest squeezes in the whole body. Only two ways in: squeeze between
the lipid cell walls. Or hitchhike on another molecule of the right type."
He checked ANAD's config status and sent a command to add another length to his forward grapplers. "Better leverage. I've seen that kind of twisted peptide chain before. Pulse through here--?"
Deeno nodded, satisfied. "Minimum permeability, looks like. Give her a shot." She indicated a seam between throbbing cell walls.
ANAD and its swarm went through the duct in no time, revving its propulsors in heavy plasma.
A dotted line to the tegmentum appeared on the grid image.
"Neuron city," Winger breathed. "That's where we want to go."
The cloudy pulp of the tegmentum loomed ahead, crisscrossed with spidery stitching of dendrites and axon fibers.
"Looks like the Black Forest," Deeno muttered.
"In we go," Winger said. He took brief note of Lieutenant Burke hovering off his right shoulder. In the background, the training officer uttered a barely muted Hmmmm.
Winger was impatient. He decided to do a little scouting around.
A few minutes later, the dark mass of the tegmentum materialized into view.