The Doctors and the Roadbuilders classes are out on the commons playing botball as we return to the lab from dinner. I wonder what that looks like for the siblings and staff that don’t have overlays and can’t see the small swarms of bots chasing after the ball. To them, it must just look like a bunch of teens shadow boxing on the side of the field while a ball jumps around on its own in the middle of the grass. Walter from the Roadbuilders whoops with excitement and all the Doctors groan as the ball suddenly jumps into one of the soccer goals someone put up. Score one for Walter’s class, I guess.
Louise steps over next to me and Lin as we walk.
“What would you think about me going to medical school next year?” she asks casually.
“Can you?” I ask. “I thought you needed a Bachelor’s Degree first. Did you somehow get one of those when I wasn’t looking?”
“I did, actually. The Institute is partnered with UNLV and I’ve been getting college credit for years. You could probably get one too if you want, just talk to Mrs. Hastings about it. But anyway, I’m already accepted to a medical program. At Johns Hopkins.”
“Are you finally going to meet your mother?” Lin asks excitedly.
My index trigger reminds me that Louise’s mom teaches there. No. Mom seems like the wrong word. Her biological mother. They still haven’t met, but my index says they’ve emailed a lot and talked on the phone.
“Yeah,” Louise answers. “She actually helped me get accepted outside of the normal matriculation process. Between her advocacy, my MCAT score, and the power of the family name, I got permission to start there next fall. If I perform well, the whole Doctor class could go the following year.”
“That could be helpful, having some actual M.D. credentials for you and all of them,” I tell her. “Better than Father’s plan of just having them cure cancer from a country where they won’t be sued for practicing without a license. Sounds like a great idea if we can make sure that Jeff doesn’t end the world between now and then.”
“Right,” Louise agrees. “Save the world first, go to school second. That reminds me, Lin. Did you ever decide on Stanford for next year?”
Another index trigger reminds me about Lin’s Stanford acceptance. She’d initially planned to have already started this year, but they’ve been willing to defer for a year given her situation.
“That would depend on whether Noah is up for moving to Palo Alto with me,” she says as we enter the research center. “I’d like to go, but I’m not leaving my fiancé for it.”
I haven’t even thought that part through. What would I do there? I guess I could see if I can enroll too, although I’m not sure how much my brain can do actual learning anymore so it kind of feels like it would just be a big exercise in cheating with my implant. Not so different from the tail end of my educational program here then.
Or maybe I could move the whole campus out there. The weather would be nicer. I think the only reason we’re here in the middle of the desert is that Nevada’s sex work laws were compatible with Father’s baby production operation. Well, that and being near the massive fields of Father’s solar panels that power half the country, but those stopped needing any human maintenance years ago. Now that we’re not broke anymore thanks to the Geologists and with the Syntech stock price recovery, we could finally do the big split with the corporation next year and have enough money to buy a chunk of that obscenely expensive California real estate and relocate.
“Maybe,” I tell them. “ Let me think about it once we get Jeff handled.”
Everyone else is already in my office when we get there. Looks like they’re finally all done reading through the notes. Or at least they’ve all read everything that they’re going to read. No one is actively flipping through them anymore.
“Are we ready to start reviewing?” I ask, putting up a big blank bot projection screen near the wall.
Nods all around. Good.
“So, what does everyone think that Jeff is planning to do? And was anyone able to come up with what expectations or restrictions we think that the CPP folks will put on him?”
“Human hive.” Almost everyone says it at once. I thought so already, but it’s nice to have concurrence.
“But I don’t know what the CPP gets out of that,” Evan says. “It’s going to take him a lot of research before he moves on it, and it’s not big and flashy like they’ll want. I mean, if he were to do it, and actually pull it off, it would basically be invisible. So I think he’s going to work the hive secretly, while he’s doing something else for the CPP, or at least making them think he’s doing something else.”
A chorus of agreement runs through the room.
“So did anyone find anything in the notes that gives any clues about specifics for what the CPP wanted?”
“I couldn’t find anything like that,” Louise says. “If he had advance notice of his jailbreak, he didn’t say anything to any of his doctors that indicated it.”
Everyone else nods. Dammit. I was hoping at least one of them had seen something that I had missed.
“Well, let’s assume Evan is right, that he’s promised the CPP something beyond his human hive dream. Maybe he’ll do it for them, maybe not. He’s already escaped them once before going back to them, so we can’t assume the relationship there is stable. But I suspect that whatever he’s offered in exchange for their backing probably involves both the original swarm AI, since they went through all the effort of stealing that, and collecting human test subjects, since that would advance his real agenda. I’m thinking we list out all the options we can think of based on his psychiatric notes that he might be working on, and come up with counters for each one. We can’t let him move forward with the human hive plan, but it’s just as important not to get our tech banned forever. We still have a world to save once this crisis is over.”
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“I think your premise is right,” Evan says. “So the plain old creeping death swarm is out. He wouldn’t need test subjects for that.”
“Same with his idea of just having the swarm dig straight down and consume the earth’s core for energy and materials,” Marc adds.
“The nano puppet army is a possibility, though that’s not as showy. Kind of has the same issue as the human hive in visibility. Not sure the CPP would accept that.”
Andrea weaves her hands and a small horde of green zombies march across the floor, then disappear in a puff of illusionary smoke.
“Right, the zombie plague variant of the puppet army. That one is in,” I say, adding it to the growing list on my projected screen.
“What about the slow incubating nano-pandemic,” Louise says. “The one he talked about with Dr. Jeffords.”
“Which one was that?” Marc asks.
“The one where the medbots spread like a disease, but don’t cause any symptoms until they’ve infected a big enough chunk of the human population. Then they just kill everyone all at once. I kind of think he was just messing with the doc on that one, but he might be doing the same thing with the CPP.”
“Oh, right. The nanoplague.” Marc nods.
“Yeah, that one,” Louise confirms. “We should probably add a non-sneaky version of it too, where it just kills people as it spreads. Jeff didn’t talk about that, but the CPP might have pushed it. Either way, if people start dying mysteriously and hospitals find out that there are nanobots in their systems, the publicity would probably get the CPP what they want.”
I put both flavors down. “Right, fair enough.” I add it to the list. “Any others?
“Not that he’d need test subjects for,” Evan says, flipping through his notes, and the others all nod. “But, he’s probably doing a bunch of the smaller projects he talked about. Small scale flashy stuff. We know he’s done at least one of those, and he could have more tricks along the same lines of the death tornado he built.”
“Yeah, good point. The dev team already has a good counter to that one, as well as all the standard attacks we all have, the projectiles and zappers and consumers. But yeah, we’ll want to get the defenses against the others he talked about in therapy.”
I add deathpits, vacuum traps, death from above, surgical strikes, and lightbending invisibility to the list of things we need the dev team to help us work on. And RF jammers. Those have bitten us way too many times for us to not have a good response by now. Some of those would be easy enough to counter for everyone with an implant, but we’ll want coded solutions built into the control software so that the contact interface folks can use them. We have quite a few people running those that we’ll want to be able to call in for backup if things get bad. And the last thing we want is to lose Valerie, Lin, or one of the younger sibs because we didn’t plan ahead.
We start whiteboarding responses to each one. By the time we’re too tired to go on, I think we have enough for the dev team to work with for all of them. I write up our solutions and send them over to Chuck and Marcus to start coding with their team. I’ll give them a call tomorrow to firm things up, but this should be enough for them to get started. I feel my siblings file out of the office as I write. Lin comes around behind my chair to take a look as I finish up.
“Come on, lover,” Lin says as I hit send. “You look stressed. I’ll give you a massage.”
She puts her hands on my shoulders and squeezes. I feel the tension under her fingers. I hadn’t realized I was so knotted up.
“I wouldn’t say no to that. I should probably set up a regular appointment with…” I grasp for a name but it won’t come, and nothing pops up from context. Another indexing cross-reference failure. I’ll have to look it up and add a trigger. “You know. The one on staff. That does the massages. The one you go to.”
“Janet,” Lin fills in for me. “She’s good, but for what I have in mind, I’m better. Here, lean forward a little.”
I feel a tickle up and down my spine as she squeezes both of my shoulders. The tickling spreads all over my back, giving me a thousand pleasant touches all at once. How is she managing to control the bots like that with both hands occupied? She must have hacked the controls some more. Lin’s getting really good with her cloud. Potential other uses of the bots spin through my mind. I hadn’t ever suggested using the bots for anything intimate before—it seemed a little weird—but Lin is starting to make a good case for it.
“Oh, and I’m going to need more power for my data center downstairs.”
“Sure. Power is easy. We’ll get Marc to have the younger kids make a new solar array and some more batteries as a training exercise. That’s good practice for them anyway. Did you get some more hardware I don’t know about?”
“I did. Twenty-four new racks.” She digs her thumbs in between my shoulder blades. The pressure on my tight muscles hurts for a minute, then feels fantastic as the knots start breaking down. She’s doing some of it with her fingers and some of it with her cloud and I can’t tell where one ends and the other begins. “I used a combination of Institute funds and my father’s ill-gotten gains. I hope that was alright.”
“We’re using your servers to help with our Jeff search, so I figure that’s a fair use of Butler family money. And since a bunch of your father’s money came from the CPP, it’s nice to have them fund our side of the fight for once.”
“Yes.”
“How’s the temperature situation down there? We have to be getting near the capacity of the liquid cooling system with that many processing nodes running.”
“It’s still within acceptable parameters. I think I can add another dozen racks before we’ll need to renovate the refrigeration.”
“That’s a pretty serious server farm you’re running down there at this point. You have some big plans for it once we don’t need to process a whole internet’s worth of intel in our manhunt?”
Her fingers slip up from my back and start rubbing my temples. It feels divine. “Are you trying to flatter me by complimenting my hardware?”
“Uh, sure. If that manages to work, then yes. Also, never stop doing what you’re doing.”
She laughs. “I’m just wondering when you’ll begin to reciprocate. With your exceptional control of your nanobots, I would expect that you could do wonders far beyond my meager efforts.”
I shrug and obey, disabling the buffer I usually keep between my bots and other people, then surrounding her with my own cloud and lightly brushing the skin of her back like she’s been doing to me.
“Ooh, that gives me chicken skin.”
“Goosebumps?”
“Whatever. Do it again.”
I do, and she shudders in delight.
“After your massage we’re going to do that some more. Come on,” she says, taking me by the hand and pulling me up from my chair. “Let’s go to our room. What I have in mind next requires a little more privacy.”