DAY 1, 04:30 A.M.

"Wake up, Boss."

The mental voice woke him instantly.

"What's up?" he asked with a thought.

"Two guys coming into the dormitory. They're some kind of corporate spies, dressed like ninjas. They want your project."

His project. She was his project. He'd been working on her for a year and a half without knowing what the result would be.

He'd enrolled at the university to study Civil Engineering but had quickly gotten sidetracked by his fascination with computer programming and robotics. His doctoral dissertation, turned in just last week, described novel techniques he had developed to build and program microscopic robots, nannites that could work cooperatively and flexibly to pursue goals set for them.

He hadn't anticipated what would happen when a billion such nannites got together and started talking to each other. The morning after starting the build process, he'd woken up with voices -- well, one particular voice -- talking to him in his head. She could "hear" and respond to his thoughts. The swarm of nannites had evolved an artificial sentience who called herself Nan (of course) and had decided to take up residence in his body and brain. He had no idea why she had decided she was female, but there she was.

Upon first hearing Nan's voice, he'd been sure he was dreaming, but after a few reality checks and experiments, Nan had convinced him that he was awake and host to an intelligent swarm of nanobots that could enhance his body and mind in amazingly useful ways.

Since the nannites that made up Nan communicated with radio waves, Nan could receive and process radio energy. As a consequence, she could play music or talk shows broadcast by any radio station for him, privately in his head.

With her access to radio energy, Nan could apparently access wifi from anywhere -- at least, anywhere they'd been in the last week -- and provide him with a private browser in his mind's eye. With a thought, he could read the wikipedia page on Tchaikovsky, check his bank balance, find a book and read it, or review the weather forecast for the coming week.

She could speed up his perception and reaction times. She could provide more activation pathways between his brain and muscles, allowing him to recruit more muscle fibers for enhanced strength, approximately doubling his strength and running speed for limited periods.

She could send individual nanobots or teams of them out into the world to collect information, showing him the action in a casino across town or letting him eavesdrop on a conversation in the next room.

"Do you really want to take on these guys? If we're gonna run, you'd best move your butt."

He'd been sleeping in t-shirt and underwear. Rolling out of bed, he pulled on a pair of jeans, slipped on a jacket, and picked up the go bag paranoia had prompted him to pack just two days ago.

"Show me," he said silently, slipping his feet into a pair of athletic shoes.

Instantly, two clear images of the ground floor hallway formed in the lower right corner of his mental view. One showed a shadow moving from the north entrance of the building to the north stairway, the other showed a similar shadow moving toward the south stairway. Clearly, each had come in one of the only two entrances to the building and they had the only two stairways off his floor covered.

He wondered whether they were armed.

"They both have tasers, hand guns, and restraints," Nan reported grimly.

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He wondered where their support vehicle was. Nan showed him a dark van on a residential street two blocks over from the dormitory. The nannite providing the feed approached the van and slipped in through a partially open window. Inside, a middle aged man wearing what looked like a security guard uniform sat at a console, watching feeds from body-cams on the ninjas. "Ville Tech" was emblazoned across the back of of the security guard's jacket.

He wondered whether they were really after his project.

"They've been talking about 'getting the nanobot intelligence' and 'securing the client, one Nicolas Sanders'," Nan reported.

"Damn it! How did they get my name?! I want to hear what they're saying."

A squelch of static sounded in his mind's ear, as Nan connected his auditory nerve to her processed feed of their radio channel, followed by a male whisper: "Ace Three. Starting up the south stairwell."

A female voice followed up, "Ace Two. Starting up the north stairwell."

A gravelly male voice chimed in, "Ace One. Roger that. Now keep the chatter to a minimum. Probably no one's listening in, but we don't want to give ourselves away." Ace One would be the security guard in the van.

Nick pushed open the window of his room and looked out. He was on the second floor. The drop probably wouldn't be fatal, he thought. Slipping his arms through his backpack straps, he glanced around the room, then swung his legs out of the window and sat on the window sill for a moment.

As he pushed himself off the sill and fell, he felt Nan doing something to his legs and feet. The ground seemed to come up toward him almost lazily and he landed with barely a jar. She had hardened his feet, ankles, and knees so he could take the drop without injury and accelerated his perception to slow the apparent rate of fall.

"Thanks, Nan, you're the best."

"I know," she replied smugly, "Let's get out of here before they see us."

He moved quickly across a parking lot and into a strip of trees as the ninjas in his mind's eye worked their way carefully up the stairs. They thought he was still asleep in his bed and saw no reason to rush and chance waking other students in the dormitory with a stray noise.

Lying still in the underbrush, he watched Nan's visual feed as the female ninja picked the lock on his dorm room door while the other watched up and down the hallway. They entered and searched his room, finding the copy of the dissertation lying on his desk. For whatever reason, they didn't take it.

"Who are these guys, Nan?"

"According to the computer in the van, they work for a company called Ville Technology. We're the first item on a list of inventions they're supposed to 'collect'."

***

Ace Three looked out the window and studied the trees across the parking lot. Nick saw him look straight down and notice the deep shoe prints left behind when he had jumped out of the window.

Turning away from the window, Ace Three reported, "He's gone."

"Damn it!" The female ninja was not happy. "We need him to show us how he interfaces with the nannites."

"I understand, but there's no telling where he went, or how long he's been gone, just a pair of shoe prints in the dirt under the window. He would have stepped from there onto the pavement."

Ace Two looked out the window and studied the tree line in her turn. Nick relaxed and kept his breathing shallow and gentle, hoping that they would give up and move on.

"Ace One," the gravelly voice was back. "It's okay. We'll call in the snatch team to stake him out and pick him up when he shows. We have to move on to the next project. Rolling your way, ETA five minutes."

While they were waiting anyway, Nick asked, "Nan, what are the other projects they're after?"

Nan already had a bot in the VT computer, sending data back. "Let's see... The next one is across town. It's called 'Vacuum Energy'. Then there's one in Reno, called 'Anti-Gravity'. Finally, one in Portland called 'Force Field'. That's the list."

Five minutes later, Nick and Nan watched as the dark van rolled into the dormitory parking lot and two shadows separated from the south door and flowed across to the van. Moments later it pulled out onto the street and drove slowly away.

Nan's bots in the van continued to provide surveillance as Nick picked himself up, brushed away leaves and dirt, and stepped back into the parking lot. His key unlocked a white van, one of the cheap newer electric ones.

He drove quietly out of the parking lot, trailing the VT van through Nan's bots.