I touch down a few meters away from the edge of the end of the world. It’s growing, but not as fast as I feared. I check my overlays to see how they’re coordinating, but they’re not communicating on any of the channels. They’re each just running their own code, and whatever algorithm Jeff gave them is prioritizing growth over mobility. They’ve been expanding out in a circle from where we found the body earlier. Despite the hot, early-summer sun angling down at us, the air is frigid. The swarm has been pulling ambient heat for the energy it needs to grow.
Good, there’s still a chance.
I dissolve my flight suit and put the bots to work. I immediately start cutting a swath through the adjacent storage units, launching the roof and contents as far back away as I can. One has a car which I shove out of the way just in time before the wild swarm starts in on it. The other is full of bicycles and boxes which I unceremoniously start flinging out and away. The concrete underneath and cinder block walls are poor sources of materials for the bots’ self-replication, so I start clearing those last. I’m just glad no one is anywhere nearby. This place seems to be pure self-serve and as far as I can feel, no one but us has been here all morning.
I have all my bots pull as much energy from the ambient heat as I can and form an opaque disk in the air above the growing swarm, blocking the sunlight. If I can slow the supply of energy and materials the rampaging bots have access to, I might be able to contain the swarm and eventually clear it out. Evan arrives as I finish clearing a firebreak of about a meter around the growing circle of annihilation.
“Push the perimeter back and take over the sunshade,” I shout. “We’ve got to starve it.”
“On it.”
I watch carefully for any bots jumping the break to get to the richer materials, but don’t see any. They seem content to chew up whatever is closest at hand, which leaves them clumped in a giant ball digging into the concrete below them now that the other materials are out of the way. None of them are flying upwards either, which means that Jeff probably disabled their flight routines when he hacked them to grow on their own. Apparently he did mean to leave this as a solvable problem to keep us off of him and not an apocalyptic event.
I start to dare to hope that the world won’t end today. I let Evan continue to push boxes, bikes and building wreckage back away and focus all of my bots into a tight ring around Jeff’s storage unit. I command growth, and target the wild bots as the only acceptable resource. My bots start feasting on Jeff’s uncontrolled ones. Nothing provides the materials for bots quite like bots. His wild bots seem to have the same idea, but since they’re not coordinating with each other, mine easily surround each of his as they approach and destroy them one by one.
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The circle stops expanding outwards, although I’m sure the hole they’ve excavated into the ground is deepening by the second. It’s all I can do to contain them around the perimeter. If this goes on, they’ll expand out under my feet and we’ll be lost.
“Evan, I’ve got them held at the edge of where they are now! Start pushing back in!”
I see his bots stop their work clearing the area and start joining mine at the edge of the circle. I slide my bots in the area to the side to let him take a chunk of the perimeter, which allows me to destroy the wild bots faster than they can replicate along the parts of the border that I’m pushing back on. I’m making progress now, and with my cloud slowly growing as the swarm shrinks back, we should be OK. Eventually.
It still takes a lot of concentration, but it’s not consuming my whole consciousness anymore. My mind goes back to Jeff in the river and I’m tempted again to try to make another effort to catch him now. But the Mississippi is a good ways off, and chaining a mesh network out that far would cost me way more of my cloud than I can afford to lose right now. Damn Jeff and his clever, psychotic mind.
“Lin,” I say.
“I’m still here, Noah,” her voice in my ear reassures me. “Are you OK?”
“Yeah, we’re OK,” I tell her. “I don’t know which parts you heard of Jeff’s video, but he left a gray goo trap for us in the storage unit. Nanobots programmed to expand uncontrollably. We’ve got it contained, but from where the center of the swarm was, I think he left the trap inside the corpse. I need you to have any of the sibs with a cloud get to Topeka as soon as possible and make sure that the other bodies weren’t trapped. Tell them to look for fully dormant bots. They won’t show up on overlays.”
“Got it,” she says. “I’ve been watching the police dispatch from Topeka and they discovered the crime scene early this morning. By the time we get anyone there, the corpses will probably be with the police or a medical examiner.”
“Better send a few then. Maybe from the Geologist class. Get them on a flight as soon as you can. I don’t care if it’s commercial or if you have Cindy bring the jet over, whichever is faster. I don’t know what the triggers would be for the traps, if there are any at all, so have them be really careful. Just get them there soon. If there are traps and someone triggers one before we get our people there, we’re all in big trouble.”
“I understand,” Lin says. “I’ll take care of it. Are you going after Jeff?”
“I wish,” I exclaim with a sigh. “At the rate we’re going, we’re going to be stuck here for at least another hour to stop this swarm. Jeff took a dive into the river, and all our gear is still sitting back on the bridge. I don’t think we even closed the van doors when we left. It’s probably all stolen by now. We’ll need to track that stuff down and figure out where Jeff went. Want to get Alan working on it? Maybe he can find some local private investigators to help us with both of those things.”
“I’ll take care of that too,” she says. “You keep saving the world.”
“You’re the best, Lin.”
“I know,” she says.
She disconnects. I turn my focus back to the slowly shrinking swarm.