It’s so quiet out here on the water. Something about the smell of the salt spray makes my normal flow of worries and regrets seem far away. We’re going over 70 knots, but the water seems smooth. I owe another thanks to the dev team; these catamarans are amazing. Here on the rear deck, we’re sheltered from the whipping wind. It’s still a few hours out to the first collector site, and the autopilot knows what to do with the rudders and motors. I stare off into the endless blue of the morning sky. I check my tablet again for work that I need to do, but the latest email that came in over the satellite internet link is still the report from Alan telling me that everything is handled and I should enjoy my time here.

My cloud is back to a normal size again with most of the excess material deposited into the dozens of catamarans following ours. Evan put together some deck chairs for us and is still sleeping, eyes covered by sunglasses he picked up at the little shop near the dock. Andrea sits next to him in the same chair where I slept last night. She’s already sporting a bikini despite the cool morning air. She’s making gestures and staring at her hands, which means she’s cooking up something cool that I’m sure I’ll see later. I’m trying hard not to look her way. It’s a little awkward with her showing that much skin and being as beautiful as she is. I wonder if it’s like this for people that knew their siblings before they were adults.

I’ve got better things to focus on anyway. I’ve been tempted to try something and I think this trip is the right time for it. I put in a reminder for three days from now to read my daily brain dump, then I remove the regular daily reminder. I set up some timed blocks in the index entries relating to Father and Jeff, then make sure that I can’t access anything in my standard logs that I don’t absolutely need to see for solving the problem of plastic buildup in the Pacific. I’m taking a vacation from myself. I’ll wake up in the morning and only learn what I need to know for the mission at hand. I’ll get a few days without the crushing guilt of killing Father and betraying Jeff. I know it’s not fair that I can do this, and honestly I’m not sure what will happen, but I need to try. If I keep going like this, I’m going to end up giving my cloud a command to put a hundred holes through me.

Oh, shit.

I think I might be suicidal. I never admitted that to myself before, at least not that I wrote down.

That’s what I get for taking some time for introspection, I guess.

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I send a pair of eyes up the bridge deck to check our progress. Another fifteen minutes to the first build site. The garbage patch isn’t what I had thought it was before I started doing research on it. It’s not like a giant dump floating on the water with big clumps of trash floating around and bumping into each other, at least not in most places. It’s the millions of little chunks of plastic and other trash that span thousands of square kilometers. Many of the chunks are microplastics that are too small to see at all, but still big enough to wreak havoc on the ecosystem and threaten human food supplies through the fish that we eat.

I review the mission plans. I should know them, because I wrote them, but my condition makes everything a new and shiny surprise for me every day. We’ll be setting up a series of accumulators, each one with a large smart net that will catch up trash and contain it while letting marine life pass through. This is probably the most complex system we’ve ever deployed in the field, almost as complex as the water filters for the Mekong trip we’re planning. It has to handle the navigation and propulsion that let it fight the current, the production systems that let it turn the trash into a larger platform, and the collection systems that tell the difference between trash and everything else so it can part the net as needed to let sea life through. If it works right, the several dozen small platforms we build will each slowly grow into large floating stations that will be viable for research, fishing, or people that want to build really unique vacation homes.

We’re not likely to get the whole hundred thousand tons of trash that are flowing through the ocean’s massive gyre, but if things go right we’ll make a good dent in it. If we can make money on selling the platforms like I think we can, then we should be able to get the for-profit part of SynTech to adopt and continue the program. That’s the ideal outcome. That would give us an ongoing cut of the proceeds and free us up for other projects.

Ten more minutes to the high density garbage spot that we picked for the first platform. I climb up to the small bridge deck above the main cabin to get a better view with my human eyes. The bot vision is good, and highly functional, but it doesn’t ever quite feel the same as looking with the eyeballs I was born with.

Wait, what is that on the horizon? Is someone there already? I send a contingent of bots rushing out ahead the dozen kilometers to the site, feeling the long chain of the mesh network connecting me to the furthest ones out. Yeah, there’s a boat already there. A big one.

And something that feels familiar, but wrong. Something is broadcasting on the same frequencies that our nanobots use to talk to each other. No, not something, lots of somethings. Millions of somethings sending little blips of messages to each other using digital encodings that my cloud doesn’t speak.

That’s nanobots out there, bot clouds running on control channels that I don’t recognize. Who is using Father’s tech out here, and why don’t I know about it?