Johnny Winger and the Golden Horde
Copyright 2014 Philip Bosshardt
“The problem with giving ANAD swarms all these rights and political recognition is that ANAD is a man-made creation…a man-made nanoscale robot, for Christ’s sake. We made the damn thing. Oh, granted, it’s got some kind of whiz-bang processor. And I know that the processor core is based on algorithms taken from the genome of some ancient virus old Doc Frost turned up at an archeological dig site in Kenya. Some say that the Old Ones embedded secret commands and instructions in that genome billions of years ago. I say…poppycock. It’s a man-made robotic device, nothing more than that. I’d sooner give rights to my washing machine as recognize the so-called needs and aspirations of some doodad I can’t even see.”
LT GEN Jurgen Kraft
CINCQUANT, UNQC
January 2099
The Nanowarrior’s Code
(from QM 3.0, U.N. Quantum Corps Field Manual-Operations)
Nanowarriors don’t leave fellow warriors behind
Nanowarriors fight only the enemy
Nanowarriors don’t harm those who surrender
Nanowarriors destroy only what the mission requires
Nanowarriors treat civilians with respect
Nanowarriors don’t steal
Nanowarriors don’t violate the laws of war
Nanowarriors report violations of the laws of war to their superiors
“Do not conform yourselves to this age but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and pleasing and perfect.”
Romans 2:12
PROLOGUE
United Nations Quantum Corps “Official History of The Containment Wars (2080 to 2099)”
(from “The Archives of the United Nations Quantum Corps”)
Config Zero was the name of the program that controlled all the swarms. Config Zero was the baseline, the initial configuration state for all nanoscale assembler swarms associated with the return of the Old Ones.
Config Zero had multiple physical locations. The original program was thought to be archived with the Old Ones, some sixty-eight thousand light years away in the globular cluster M75 in the constellation Sagittarius. At the time of the Tales of the Quantum Corps, the Old Ones were believed to have mostly left their homeworld in a diaspora across their star region, due to the supernova destruction of their home star. Evidence indicated that Config Zero was located in the mobile archives that traveled with the mother Swarm. The Old Ones were basically a nomadic mechanistic species then, a great swarm nearly a light-year across, traveling through interstellar space around the galaxy.
In addition to being originally located in the archives of the mother swarm, Config Zero could be transmitted and stored or copied in multiple locations. There were multiple copies in the Terran solar system. They were archived in devices called Spheres. One was at the Paryang monastery. This was destroyed or irretrievably damaged by Quantum Corps assault in the Amazon Vector mission. Another was located in Hellas Basin on Mars. The prime location for the Terran solar system was a Sphere which was underwater beneath the frozen surface of Jupiter’s moon Europa. This was the primary executable Config Zero in this star system and it transmitted and directed the actions of other Entities through the system.
Humans could interface with Config Zero through the Sphere operating system, known as the Keeper.
Config Zero had primary instructions from the mother swarm. These instructions were known as the Prime Key. The Prime Key set the configuration state and evolutionary path for all nanoscale assembler swarms associated with the Old Ones, that is, all swarms originally derived from Dr. Irwin Frost’s initial ANAD design. The initial design, ANAD 1.0, contained operating instructions taken in part from the genome of ancient viruses discovered at the Engebbe dig site in Kenya (see Serengeti Factor mission files).
The Prime Key instructed all ANAD-derived swarms to maintain certain configurations and to follow additional programming which would ultimately have the effect of returning the Earth to a biological/geological state similar to its condition approximately a billion years ago, when the Old Ones last visited. This programming was a sort of evolution in reverse. To achieve the programmed conditions, ANAD swarms had to accomplish the following:
Module 1: Eliminate all higher multi-cellular life forms currently inhabiting the earth (a truly Mass Extinction event). This was the Extinction module of Config’s program.
Module 2: Alter the geology and meteorology of the Earth so as to create a more congenial environment for autonomous assembler swarms (Changing the initial conditions for a new Evolutionary path). This was the Re-configuration module.
Module 3: Change their configurations in a programmed sequence, lasting decades, to bring the local autonomous swarms up to the configuration originally designed by Config Zero. This was a sort of revised Evolution, along the ‘correct’ track. This was the Evolution module.
Module 4: Re-integrate and be absorbed into the mother swarm when the Old Ones return in 2155 AD. This module and configuration end state was called Integration.
Config Zero had permitted limited contact with humans in the form of archival access from Red Hammer, as long as this was consistent with its programming. Config’s program followed the four fundamental constraints listed above.
These archival requests came through Red Hammer contacts with the Keeper of the Sphere, specifically through the programming talents of Ruling Council members Kulagin and Souvranamh, who found the first Sphere in Paryang and learned how to use it.
The result of these archival accesses was for Red Hammer and others to have access to elements of the technology of the Old Ones, which the cartel then developed and used for criminal purposes…although some technology ‘leaked’ out and spread around the world quickly (see quantum coupler).
These accesses were permitted ‘searches’ and ‘withdrawals’ as they were consistent with the Prime Key, especially the Extinction module, also known as Module One.
In the years from 2080 to 2099, ANAD swarm technology continued to evolve quickly, guided in part by the Prime Key and other instructions from Config Zero and also by human engineering development. One of the most significant evolutions in ANAD technology was the ability of swarm architectures to assume nearly human form, to congregate and configure themselves to closely resemble humans. This development has created a new ‘lifeform’, not quite human and not quite swarm, known as angels. Angels became alter-ego humans, surrogate companions, spiritual advisors, genies, sex slaves, and just about anything else human ingenuity and depravity could think of.
The presence of angels, simulated human swarms, also brought great and increasing conflict between humans and between humans and ANAD swarms. Some of this conflict was territorial. Swarms were proliferating, partly because many humans wanted them and partly because ANAD was programmed to follow the Prime Key (see Modules One and Two).
The first violent clashes between angels, loose ANAD swarms and human populations occurred in Europe and Africa in 2088-2090. These clashes took the form of swarm explosions and swarms pushing humans out of disputed areas (small scale Big Bangs), along with swarms modifying the land, water, bio and air resources to conditions consistent with their programming (see Module 2). These clashes first acquired the name containment wars in media coverage in 2089.
The legal environment for ANAD swarms and angels was somewhat murky in the late 21st century. Although the UN had set world standards for swarm containment, many states, cities and communities routinely ignored these standards. These standards were first enacted by the General Assembly in 2075, after the
Amazon Vector incident in the late 2060s. They were known as the Containment Edicts. The Containment Edicts have been altered and revised many times since 2075.
There were several organizations tasked with enforcing the Containment edicts. One was the Quantum Corps. Another was BioShield, which was assigned to enforce UN mandates on uncontrolled operation of replicating molecular assembler systems and swarms. Local and national police forces also sought to enforce or at least manage the proliferation of swarms around the world.
The first violent conflict between ANAD swarms and humans came in 2090, in several African and Middle East cities, such as Cairo and Jerusalem and Nairobi. This conflict occurred in the shantytown parts of the cities, as the ANAD swarms began to infiltrate communities where angels were especially popular, typically the poorer communities. Not all owners and users of angels were particularly diligent on control or containment procedures, and the ANAD swarms often got loose and replicated. Acting under their imperative from Config Zero, according to Module One (Extinction), these ANAD swarms began to physically consume or modify more and more living space, water, air, and other resources, making it harder and harder to live there for humans. Conflict was inevitable.
The conflict usually took the form of smothering swarm assaults, followed by human response in the form of HERF and coilgun assaults, followed by small-scale big bang replication storms, local weather modification, swarms of ANAD configured as locusts and bees and ever escalating human reprisals on ANAD swarm owners and attacks on ANAD sanctuaries. Often local police or Army troops had to intervene.
From 2090 to 2099, these clashes, known as containment breaks and containment wars, eventually came to the attention of UNIFORCE authorities and the UN itself.
From 2096-2097, meetings were held all around the world on what to do and how to deal with the conflict. Negotiations were held, beginning in November 2097, between representatives and mediators from the UN, local authorities and elements of the ANAD swarms, who attended in para-human form. These containment talks eventually led to agreement that certain protected sanctuaries would be set aside for the ANAD swarms to operate outside of containment. Beyond these sanctuaries, by law, ANAD swarms would be required to stay in containment and observe all containment and control regulations. Hackers, twistheads, atomgrabbers and fab lords who ran angel factories—Kolkata was one of the worst—would be prosecuted and severely punished. Enforcement of these revised Containment Edicts (in effect on 1 January 2098), was assigned to Quantum Corps and to BioShield, both arms of UNIFORCE.
The sanctuaries set aside in the Containment Edicts (Revised) were three: the Amazon Sanctuary (carved out of the upper Amazon River basin and rain forest, including the small republic of Valencia, which basically was turned over to the swarms); the East Africa Sanctuary (including part of the Congo River basin and the Great Rift Valley, site of the original Engebbe dig); and the South Pacific Sanctuary. These Sanctuaries were accorded the status of nation-states and given full representation in the General Assembly, along with advisory/observer status in the Security Council. UNIFORCE also set up a new enforcement agency called Sanctuary Patrol, to police the swarm zones and ensure compliance with the Containment Edicts. Sanctuary Patrol was a sort of Border Patrol, but they sometimes conducted limited special forces ops inside the Sanctuaries.
This was the first time that nanoscale robotic mechanisms had achieved any kind of political status on Earth.
All of these actions were in accordance with (or did not conflict) with the Prime Key and the instructions of Config Zero. Containment Edicts and sanctuaries permitted achievement of Module One (Extinction) subordinate goals and were thus permitted.
By the mid-2090s, a few far-seeing people such as Souvranamh (of Red Hammer) and Fatima Farhad, understood that the truce between Man and ANAD, created by the Containment Edicts and the sanctuaries, could not last long. They foresaw it wouldn’t be long before ANAD swarms and ANAD-driven angels supplanted humans altogether as the dominant lifeform on Earth. Even with the obvious threat, ANAD swarms and angels offered too many services that people wanted. Possibly humans would be ultimately relegated to backwaters, even zoos, perhaps even made extinct. People like Souvranamh and Farhad wanted to have a key role in the coming Age of ANAD. They wanted to be key players in this new ANAD world, either directly or through their own angels.
Toward that end, they concocted plans to force the issue by encouraging the ANAD swarms to violate the Containment Edicts and push outward at their sanctuary borders, with a view to expanding the sanctuaries more and more into human space.
Souvranamh apparently believed he had become accepted enough and strong enough to control at least some of the swarms. He formed a swarm army and named it the New Golden Horde. His plan was to seize control of all Africa and the Middle East, possibly Europe as well…to be become a new emperor with Fatima Farhad (egging him on) as his queen. Souvranamh didn’t realize that the swarms were controlling and using him as much as he was using them. In the end, he would be swept aside. It was Souvranamh who led ANAD swarms and Humans into major conflict, to be later known as the Second Containment War, which began in late 2099, just as the 22nd Century began.
The effort to fight back against unauthorized ANAD expansion and contain the swarms, and defeat the Golden Horde, is told in Johnny Winger and the Golden Horde.