Marcus looks out at me from the video chat window on my screen. He’s a squirrely-looking guy: skinny, twitchy, and nervous. Chuck, the other dev team lead, is his polar opposite, jolly as old St. Nick and with a physique and beard to match. In contrast to a lot of the meetings I have to go to, I love talking to these guys. They’re competent, friendly, and completely unpretentious. They don’t even seem to notice my age. Once they realized during our first meeting that I knew what I was talking about, they’ve treated me like an equal ever since. The two of them fill one of the screens on my desk, while their weekly progress report fills another. I scan through the report and get a few pops from the index in my head.
“Hey, guys,” I greet them. “Before we get into the meeting, I wanted to pass along a message from Chad. Great work on the flight suit changes. He’s loving the extra speed.”
“Glad to hear it, boss,” Chuck answers with a grin. “We’re real excited about everything he’s doing over there. It makes the hard work we’ve put in really feel worth it. The whole team’s been watching the news for when they show what he’s up to. Morale over here is at an all-time high.”
“Excellent,” I reply. “I’m glad he’s keeping up your spirits with what he’s doing.”
“Well, you did your part too,” Chuck says. “I don’t think they’d all be half as excited if you hadn’t cancelled the layoffs that we heard were coming up this year. It’s amazing how much better we can keep the team running when they’re not trying to figure out who’s on the chopping block or which company to jump to next.”
I had forgotten about that until just now. Father had thought that the development of the bots’ software had reached a level of maturity where he could downsize the dev team to cut costs. Stupid. The fact that Louise and I had been able to hack as much of the interface security as we had tells me everything I need to know about how close to done the software is. Once I told Chuck and Marcus about the vulnerabilities, they kicked off an effort to make the whole system much more secure that more than made up for the winding down of new features for the cloud.
“Good. Glad things are going well for your team. Your people are essential to our whole save-the-world plan, so you guys should get as much credit for what’s going on as we do. So how’s the security refactor coming along?” I ask as I look at their report for that section.
“It’s going very well,” Marcus replies in his nasal voice. “The issues you found were caused by a developer who could barely differentiate between authentication and authorization. Can you believe it?”
His laugh makes me smile. Something about him reminds me of the things I liked about Father. He has that same super-geeky sense of humor.
“Anyway,” Marcus continues, “he left the team a few years ago, but it looks like no one caught those bugs until you pointed them out. I’ve assigned a hand-picked team to go over everything he ever wrote. I’ve also put together another task force from our team that will take a break from regular development to work exclusively on penetration testing the system. If there are any more vulnerabilities in there, I guarantee that we’ll find them.”
“Great. On to the new feature work then,” I say, looking at the next item on the meeting’s agenda. “I need any upgrades to the catamaran builder functions to be finished by next Thursday if we’re going to use them. Are you still good to push out the regular weekly firmware update a day early for that?”
“Yeah, boss.” Chuck says. “We’re on track. But I tell you, we will need to start shifting gears to focus on the water filtering systems soon. I think we’ll have to end up pushing some of the bulk mineral extraction automation routines to late this year or next like we talked about last week, is that still OK?”
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“Sure, that’s fine. It just means we need to do the extraction manually when we do it for now. The big mining operations aren’t planned until almost a year from now, so we should be fine as long as it’s still going to be done by then.”
Chuck smiles his Santa Claus smile.
“Then we’re good,” he says. “Oh, and the brain-in-a-box kicked out some more materials variants that are plastic-focused like you asked for. It’ll be baked into the environmental autodetection stuff in the next update. The details are in the report if you need them.”
“Perfect. Keep up the good work guys.”
“Thank you,” they say in unison as they disconnect from the call, with Chuck throwing a “boss” in at the end.
The brain-in-a-box, as Chuck calls it, is the last remnant of the machine learning algorithm that was responsible for the initial creation of our nanobots. It achieved some primitive form of self-awareness before Father tricked it into lobotomizing itself. He kept the basics of the algorithm intact and contained in a server farm in some super secret location somewhere in the Midwest. Disconnected from any external networks like the Butler Treaty laws require, now it mostly just does theoretical nano-chemistry, working out new combinations of materials we can make the bots out of.
Sometimes we’ll feed it some other tricky problems we’re having trouble with. Once it comes up with solutions, someone from the security staff moves the results out by sneaker-net and the dev team applies them to the production code. Then the brain goes on to the next problem. I sometimes wonder if it’s still self-aware. Do we have a thinking robotic mind as a slave? Is this another one of Father’s crimes I should have added to my mental list when we executed him?
My reverie is interrupted by a cheerful ding as Sheryl sends me a message asking about scheduling locations for the press conference in Cambodia. I pop back an answer and start working on one of the dozen emails I’ll need to send today for that trip to make sure that I have everything set up with the governments of China, Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam.
Getting permission from the Chinese is my current sticking point. They don’t seem at all impressed with what we’ve been doing in Africa, and pollution from their heavy industries in the upper basin of the river is a big part of the problem. They also seem to think that we’re going to mess with their dams, which we don’t plan to. They love having the option of cutting off the water to everyone downstream if they ever feel like it, so having independent foreigners with super powers working around their dams is a sticking point.
Blah, politics suck.
Father thought that General Liu of the Chinese People's Liberation Army might be the key to breaking through the red tape. He seems to be well connected enough that he has the clout to smooth things over with the dozens of people we need to get on board, and since his daughter is slowly dying of an inoperable brain tumor, we have some unique leverage we can bring to bear. She hasn’t had any success with treatment from any of the conventional forms of medicine, and her condition has only gotten worse in the year and change since Father started looking into their family.
Louise has been diving deep into Father’s technical notes, and she thinks that she and Evan can pull off some of his old nanotech medical magic. It’s all totally illegal, of course. We’re practicing without anything like a medical license. But when all the other treatment options fail and you want to save your kid, you might consider some out-of-the-box options. The General already lost his wife to the same cancer several years ago, so according to our best intel, he’s starting to get desperate now.
The trick in the negotiation, according to Father’s old notes, is to make the offer sound less like a quid-pro-quo trade and more like a generous gift from us in hopes of a strong friendship later on. Then we very subtly hint at how we’re already friends with China and we’re planning to help their poor neighbors, not them of course, with some pollution problems with our unique solutions. All without ever implying that anything is their fault or that our tech is better than theirs.
I get started on the first of many messages to the General that will need to be just right to pull this off. If I put down the wrong word and offend any of the dozens of people involved, we can kiss that whole part of the operation goodbye. No pressure, it’s just the health and safety of millions of people for the next century or so on the line.
DOPE_ME
I can do this.