***Yes, Base, these fragments are Major Winger…the master bot I helped create when Config Zero overwhelmed us. Check my registers. You’ll find a file labeled Configuration Buffer Status Check. All bond geometries and energy state data for Major Winger is in this file***
Kincade was having a hard time with the idea. “You mean to tell me that Major John Winger has been reduced to a file and a few pieces of nanobotic debris?”
Mighty Mite Barnes related how Winger had voluntarily allowed himself to be deconstructed by Doc II, as a way of surviving Config Zero’s onslaught and finding new life as a saboteur inside the mother swarm. “He gave himself up, sir, for a greater mission in the future. If Doc says he’s got the Major inside that file, with bot fragments in his grabbers, that’s good enough for me. Now we just have to find out how to get the Major back.”
Lofton was skeptical. “You mean like grow a new one? Grow another Major Johnny Winger? Is that even possible? That’s insane.”
Givens spoke up. “It may be possible, sir. There’s an engineer…a Dr. Ryne Falkland at Northgate…who’s been working on reconstituting people who’ve gone through Assimilationist booths…been deconstructed into atoms. You know…so they could be taken up when the Mother Swarm arrives…all that baloney. He might have some ideas.”
Lofton looked at General Kincade. “Sir, I recommend we contact this Falkland and bring him to the Mesa immediately. If he could somehow re-grow…is that even the right word?—Johnny Winger and make him some kind of angel, able to change configurations like we do with ANAD now, we’d have the greatest spy and saboteur ever created.”
Kincade chewed on the idea, along with the ends of his moustache. “If it gives us a chance to destroy or neutralize Red Hammer and their benefactors, I think we don’t have a choice, do we? Get started.”
Dr. Ryne Falkland peered at the monitor, watching as Dr. Brad Winger shifted and situated himself to be more comfortable inside the Configuration Scanner.
“All comfy in there?” he asked.
Winger was dressed in a light gown, covered in wires and pads. “This is how I want to spend my vacation, Doc. All wired up and crammed in a tunnel. Hope you’re not planning on disassembling this creaky old body. Let’s get going.”
“Very well.” Falkland pressed a few keys and the medbot whirred up to Winger’s bed, a syringe extended and its effectors brought the needle into contact with an IV stent. “Here goes….” He pressed one button. The medbot responded by loading the IV tube with anesthetic. In seconds, Falkland could see Winger’s eyes flutter shut. EEG and EKG showed him deeply under in less than a minute. Now the fun begins, he told himself. Five hours of it.
Upon arriving at Mesa de Oro and going over the procedure with General Kincade and Major Lofton, Falkland had advised the officers that the procedure required a genetic and structural match, someone with the same DNA and phenotype. “The scanner works better if we can get as close a match as possible,” he had explained. Kincade had studied Johnny Winger’s file and his brother Brad, now an MD in Washington, DC seemed the best choice. Dr. Brad Winger was contacted by officers of Quantum Corps in his Bethesda home and, after some discussion as to why this was necessary, had agreed to fly down to the Mesa and be a genetic template for Dr. Falkland’s little experiment. For that’s what it really was…an experiment.
Falkland studied the readouts on Brad Winger closely. The subject needed to be well under and moving into Stage III sleep, completely immobilized, for some four to five hours, in order for the scan to be good. If all went well, the new Config Scanner would detect and build a detailed image of its subject’s atomic configuration, including atomic species, bond energies and bond geometry. This massive database, once populated, was the core of the config driver and engine, the device which would later grab atoms from feedstock to re-construct the original pattern. That pattern would then be loaded with the files Doc II had formed when Johnny Winger had been deconstructed.
That was the plan.
Falkland had tweaked and adjusted this scanner and config engine over the last few months to a point where he could now routinely disassemble small animals and more or less reconstruct them into a nearly exact likeness of the original. Not that there weren’t occasional hiccups, as had happened with his two dogs, Jiggs and Simon. But that’s how Science advanced, in fits and starts, three steps forward and two steps back.
To do this with organic matter or living creatures was in fact a stunning achievement, if not yet fully appreciated, due to UNIFORCE security restrictions. Never before, in the ten year history of nanobotic technology, had anyone been able to do this. Of course, since his earlier subjects had been animals, nobody knew if they really were like the originals…the principle of Continuity of Consciousness had clearly been violated and the reconstructed animals might have been just extremely realistic simulations, commonly called angels, and not the real thing.
That’s why a human subject was needed. That’s why this was really still an experiment.
Falkland was sure this technique, using an imposed memory field on raw atomic matter, would give him a good pattern on the original Johnny Winger. He’d recommended that close relatives, preferably more than one, let themselves be scanned. Then with some tweaks and adjustments to the database that he accumulated, he was sure he could get pretty close to the original pattern…blending genomic data from the original scans with the pattern data and sort of averaging out the data should, he theorized, provide a good foundation pattern to reconstruct Johnny Winger.
Of course, it would then be necessary to load Winger’s basic personality and memory, the very things Doc II had captured in the Configuration Buffer Status Check file. The patterns Mighty Mite Barnes had hopefully swiped when she’d fled the council chamber at Paryang.
Not even Ryne Falkland would hazard a guess as to what would happen then.
For the next four hours and forty two minutes, Falkland’s config scanner did its job, methodically scanning and recording the position of every atom and molecule that composed Dr. Brad Winger. Absolute immobility was critical. After Winger was fully under, the medbot secured the cardiologist tightly in his bed and closely monitored the snoring form for any sign of out- of-tolerance motions, intervening quickly whenever Winger tried to move or shift or fidget in the bed.
It was a tense, nerve-wracking time and Falkland was relieved when the chime sounded gently, signaling the end of the scan. He checked the database and found it populated with exabyte after exabyte of scan data. Routine integrity checks determined that the data was clean, within tolerances and fully useable.
It was time to wake Dr. Winger up.
“Both scans went extremely well,” Falkland reported to Kincade. A medbot accompanied Falkland into the recovery room and busied itself checking monitors, IV attachments, medicine quantities and the bedding. It clucked like a disapproving maid at the covers lying askew on Winger’s bed and proceeded to straighten them out. “The data look clean and well behaved. All I have now is two days of analysis and reformatting and I can load the pattern buffer. I’ll have a new, sort of composite memory field, and I’ll be ready to impose that on Major Winger’s structure.”
Brad Winger sat up and accepted a cup of something from the bot. It tasted brassy but went down smooth. “I’d like to see him. I haven’t seen Johnny since his nog days at the Academy.”
Falkland studied the medbot’s report screen, sucking at his lower lip as he went over their vitals. “In another hour or so. You need a little more recovery time…and more fluids. I’ll have Betty here bring in a tray for you.”
The bot followed Falkland out like a loyal pet and the door was shut. Winger finished off the liquid and decided he needed to lie down again.