Thu 06/30 07:02:04 PDT
SynTech OS v.3.0.2.0462
IMPLANT INTERFACE INITIALIZED
DEBUG INTERFACE INITIALIZED
“There,” Father says. “The update is finished. In addition to getting your cloud today, you’ll also have access to the new box of toys that all your siblings just received.”
“Great,” I say.
“Are you excited, Noah?” Father asks, his eyes gleaming with intensity. “This is a very big step for you.”
“Yes, Father. Very excited.”
“Good.” His face breaks out in a smile. “I am too. We’re going to start small, just a few hundred bots. The growth interface will let you create more once you are comfortable with them. The thing most of your siblings struggled with at first was all the extra input to the brain. You’ll want to take it easy at first. With the new implant hardware, you’ll have even more sensory connections than they did. Don’t be afraid to put the bots into sleep mode if you feel overwhelmed. It takes some getting used to. Stick to a few hours a day at first, then build up from there.”
“I’ll make sure to do that,” I assure him.
“Excellent.” He turns to type some commands into his computer. “I’m connecting them to your interface now. You should start to feel them. I’m going to turn on the inputs, one by one.”
The sensation is weird. I can feel them. They’re me, but they’re not me.
“It’s like I have an extra patch of skin I can feel through.”
“An apt analogy,” Father says approvingly. “The tactile sensations give you basic status indications for the health and location of the cloud. You’ll feel where they are in relation to you. If your bots are damaged, you’ll feel it like a little prickle in the direction where the bots were lost. Here, I’m going to break one of them so you’ll know what to feel for.”
He glances into the air next to him and I feel a pinch on my new non-skin skin.
“Ow!” It doesn’t really hurt, but it surprises me how real it feels.
“Just a pinprick, enough to get your attention. You’ll also feel pressure when they push up against something. The feedback makes it easy to position them when you want to use them to exert force.”
He looks at me expectantly and I give him a nod. He turns to his cabinet and pulls three brightly colored blocks from one of the shelves. “Let’s practice, then. Use your bots to push each of these to the floor.”
He lays them out on the smooth metal surface of his operating table.
“Do your best on this, son. And don’t worry about accidentally hurting yourself or me. The limiters on the speed and force the bots can exert will keep you from doing any real damage.”
I flip on the selection mode like in the emulator and see the bots light up in my vision overlay, floating in the air above Father’s desk. I know it’s just an overlay provided by the console, but it looks just like each one is glowing with a warm red light. I use my eyes to draw a selection block around all of them and make them into a group.
“Good progress. Now how are you going to approach the task of clearing the table?”
I issue a series of commands pulling a single bot from the group, turning it blue in my overlay. I navigate it to my fingertip and then command it to attach there. It’s a strange sensation at first, feeling the bot against my finger and my finger against the bot. It’s so alien, feeling my own skin from the outside.
I wave my finger and the blue bot stays firmly attached. Father looks on in anticipation. I think he has an idea of what I’m about to do. I could have taken the simplest path, put the bots into formation and used the vision follow mode to push them against the blocks, but what fun would that be? I pull another bot out of the main group. The overlay turns it green as I make it attach to the base of my finger. I give my hand a little flex and a wave, both bots stay in place.
“May I assume based on your attention to your hand that you are considering a gesture-based control scheme?” Father asks.
“Yeah, I put a bot here and here, and now I have reference points. With those, I can do a little math and navigate the bots in three-space without needing to use the vision follow system. I took the liberty of writing a little bit of code for this and testing it in the emulator. Let’s see how it does in the real world.”
I form the rest of the bots into a glowing red sphere and enable the finger controls. I wave my finger and the red ball of bots floats through the air, following where I point. I retract my finger and the cluster comes toward me. I flick out and the ball moves away. I bring it back in close and hold my hand still, letting it hover. Father is almost jumping in anticipation.
“Ready?” I ask him. He nods eagerly.
I aim my hand at the first block, then flick forward. The ball of bots jets out and knocks the block from the table. I point at the second one and retract my finger, knocking the block toward me as the ball returns to hover right in front of me. I point and flex my finger to swing the bots back, stopping them just before they hit the third block. I make them slowly approach it, feeling them just kiss the surface. I flex my thumb, triggering another program that I bound there. The ball of bots flattens itself against the block and each one grips the microscopic variations on the smooth-looking surface. I give my finger a twirl. The bots spin around in a circle, pulling the block with them until the spin on it makes the edges a blur. I twitch my hand upward, kicking the ball so that it arcs up into the air just shy of the ceiling, then catch it as it falls.
“Very nicely done, Noah,” Father proclaims as I hand him the hollow plastic cube.
“Thanks. I worked hard on it.”
“I can see that you did. Technical expertise and just a bit of showmanship. An exceptional performance. Now go practice. Don’t limit yourself to a single control system. There are many situations where gesture based controls like this are nice, but you’ll want to experiment with other techniques as well. Use your imagination. I expect great things from you.”
”I’ll do my best,” I promise him. My loving Father reaches over to his desk and picks up my phone, pulling the cable from it as he does.
DEBUG INTERFACE TERMINATED
The murdering old bastard hands me my phone. I take it with my very best fake smile. It’s good to have my thoughts back to myself again.
“I’m proud of you, son. I’m so pleased to have your help. You and I will do great things. Great things.”
“Thank you, Father,” I tell him, forcing my voice into the cheerful tone I use with him. “And thanks again for trusting me with a cloud. I’m excited to save the world with you.”
That should keep him happy for a while. His face does that crooked smile and I swear I see a little droplet of a tear forming in one corner of his eye. I leave him to think about what a great father he is to his long-lost stolen son.
The little two-finger control scheme I used in the lab wasn’t bad for a start, but I’m looking forward to seeing what I can actually do with these bots with some real time and effort.
Mon 07/04 10:32:33 PDT
“Ready!” Father calls. “Shields up!”
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SHIELD
I duck and tuck as my cloud swarms into action. The dirt under me gives way as the bots consume the material to provide extra bulk to the shell they form around me. A light glow suffuses the inner surface as the morning sun disappears, then that goes away too, and I’m trapped in blackness.
“Safe,” I hear in my earbud from Chad. Of course he’s first. No one can do blind obedience quite like Chad.
“Safe,” I call out.
“Safe,” Louise claims third.
“Safe.” Evan is right behind her.
An affirmative hum comes through the earpiece from Andrea.
“Safe.” Marc gets his done.
“Safe.” Jeff is last, as usual. I think he has trouble ducking and pulling in his arms with his own muscle power since his whole cloud is occupied building his shield.
“Better that time,” Father declares. “Excellent work, my children. All tucked away in less than thirty seconds. Come on out now.”
I release the shield. A groaning cheer rises up as we each climb out of the shallow holes our shields made. No one likes shield practice. They might keep us alive in a pinch, but they’re not at all comfortable. The shell is permeable enough that we won’t suffocate, but it gets hot and claustrophobic inside.
“I’ve talked to some of my old friends in the Air Force,” Father says as he fills all the holes with a wave of his hand. “We’ll be bringing in some volunteers from the base at Nellis to provide a live fire drill in a few weeks. I want you ready for a real emergency scenario.”
He’s bringing in soldiers to shoot at us for practice? I’m not sure if he’s crazy or just trying to make sure we all inherit his god complex. If things go wrong, I guess he has enough spare children that it’s worth the risk. All of us are just guinea pigs.
“Construction time again,” Father calls. He tears down our first round of builds with another wave of his hand. It’s unnerving seeing him level buildings with no apparent effort and knowing that’s what I’m up against when I finally strike. “Jeff, Andrea, and Evan, dig a well there. Chad and Marc, give us a shelter there. Louise and Noah, a solar farm there if you would, please.”
The solar panels are easy. Really, all the construction is. The plans are pre-programmed so you just have to aim your eyes and run the function.
“You get the base, and I’ll get the panels?” I ask Louise.
“Sure.”
Louise is a good partner for the training exercises. Not quite as good as Evan, but I’m just glad it’s not a Chad or Marc day. Louise turns to look at the ground behind her and the parched desert dirt starts roiling. Through a miracle of nanochemistry, the minerals in the dirt ripple and slowly transform into something like a concrete slab. It’s not quite as sturdy as the real stuff, but it’s easily solid enough to support the panels of the solar array. I direct my gaze at the large pile of dirt and rock that is starting to pile up where Evan’s team is digging the well.
GATHER(SOLAR)
The bots swarm out and start gathering and refining silicon and trace metals. I have a pile about the right size when Louise is done with the foundation.
“Ready?” she asks.
“Yeah.”
I look at the slab she built and outline the area with my eyes to tell the software where to build.
BUILD(SOLAR)
My bots start hauling the sandy material over and printing the panels in place, layer by layer. While they work, I look around the barren landscape. It's not so different here in Nevada from some of the places we’re going. A few hundred yards away, the lush, manicured green of the campus commons peek through the open gates of the Institute. Life from the desert. That’s what we’ll be creating.
“Should we set up maintainers?” Chad calls over to Father.
“Yes. We’ll be doing that for all the installations, so we’ll want to practice doing it that way. Looking good there, Chad. Marc, you need to wait until the foundation is complete before you start. It needs a level surface or the software can’t build a stable structure.”
I’m not sure how Marc manages to botch his build every time. It’s amazing how many different ways he can figure out to fail. At least he doesn’t seem to be repeating the same mistakes, so maybe he’s learning.
MAINTAIN(20)
I feel the now-familiar prick on my non-skin as a batch of twenty bots reprogram themselves to maintain the panels and detach from my cloud.
I get a slack feeling as my bots finish their job and spread out into their idle default configuration.
“Done over here, Father,” Louise calls.
“Are we doing a flywheel or battery for storage?” I ask as Father comes over to check our work.
“Let’s do a flywheel this time,” Father replies. “Not all the sites we’ll work will have the trace metals we need for batteries.”
Building batteries requires access to any of several specific sets of minerals, but we can build the flywheels out of pretty much anything. The implant’s overlay lets me see Louise’s bots spread out and start scrounging the metallic elements we’ll need for the electronic hardware.
BUILD(FLYWHEEL-CASING)
My bots rush to the square that my eyes trace out and build the enclosure. It’s finished just in time for Louise to start on the motor/generator and magnetic bearings at the base.
BUILD(FLYWHEEL)
Tiny bits of material start flying through the air between the pile of dirt from the well and the enclosure. The dots form into concentric rings as the materials are sorted by density and then fused into a disk a meter across. A second disc forms above it, then a third, each one fusing to the one below. A dozen discs later, the flywheel is complete and mounted. Louise caps it and covers the enclosure. A hiss escapes as the pump she creates pulls all the air from the box. Running in a vacuum like that, the flywheel should be able to store all the solar energy our panels can gather for several days. Or until Father wipes everything down so we can practice building it again.
“Good, now run the lines to the shelter,” Father calls out, seeing that we’re finished.
BUILD(WIRES)
I aim my eyes along the path between the panel’s electrical leads and the leads at the base of the shelter, with a little jog to connect the flywheel. The cloud rushes along the path, finding and fusing conductive minerals and then sheathing them in ceramic shielding. We walk over as the light in the shelter turns on. Marc and Chad finally got it all put together. Andrea walks in carrying a bottle of clear water pumped from the new well. Jeff and Evan trail behind her.
“Good work, everyone,” Father declares.
He’s right, it was. Despite all the dust and the heat of the morning sun, despite the sweat running down my back and the start of the sunburn on my neck, I’m feeling good. I’m excited to do this where the water and power will change people’s lives.
Father dismisses us, but we all linger to watch as he tears everything down again with another slow wave of his hand. The building tears itself down to rubble, which turns into sand before our eyes. The sand levels itself out, leaving our work zone as neat as a playground sandbox. He leaves the well. I wonder why for a moment, then I see some of the nursery kids coming out through the campus gates. Father chuckles as he turns on the well pump and watches a spray of water arc up and over the sand.
“What would you say if we made the Fourth of July a beach day?” he asks no one in particular.
So they do celebrate some holidays here. I wasn’t sure. This place is so weird, but the little kids don’t care. The trickle of small sibs turns into a flood as word spreads. Soon, the toddlers are having a ball running in and out of the shower of water and stomping in the sandy puddles. A pool starts forming under Father’s gaze, only a foot or so deep but that seems to be plenty for the little ones. Shoes fly off as the kids jump barefoot into the water. Sandy mud flies everywhere. Nannies look on from a safe distance, smiling at their charges.
“Happy holiday!” Father declares. “Today, we celebrate!