It takes a moment to get my bearings and get a good look at the city. There. The roiling mass has expanded since the news footage from earlier today. Now it infests more than nine city blocks in the area between Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi River. Has it reached the river or any of the canals yet? No. Good. Maybe it can still be contained.
The nearly perfect circle tells me that the bots are running algorithms like the dumb version in St. Louis. They’re mostly staying together in one main mass, and they’re not flying up into the air. There are a few tendrils following richer materials, but something in the way they’re coded makes them prefer to stay in one body rather than spread out.
I thank Mom and whatever other angels might be out there that the day is overcast and the weather is cool. With full sunlight on a warm day, half the city might be covered by now.
To All: Evan, Jen, and, Erik, take your groups to the north side of it. That’s the side towards the lake. Andrea, you’ve got the west with Marc and Stan. Louise, Phil, and Lisa, you’re on the East side. Becky and Steph, follow me. Everyone stay with your group leads.
The falling cluster of siblings spreads out, still plummeting at breakneck speed. A parachute pops from the top of the crate as Louise guides it in her direction.
To All: Remember: get it shaded, get it contained, and starve it of anything with refined metals. Save lives wherever you can, but don’t worry about property. Do as much collateral damage as you need to, just get a perimeter around it.
I accelerate downward, pulling Lin and my two sisters with me. Becky and Steph follow suit, their Roadbuilder and Doctor charges in tow. We land a block south of the edge of the roiling mass. My breath frosts as my flight suit dissolves. I feel the chill on my skin. I didn’t dress for this temperature. With a thought I suit back up, nanobots encasing me up to my neck. The mass of wild bots has sucked the heat down to near the limits of the endothermic reactions that let it pull ambient energy. That’s hopeful. Its growth should be throttled way down.
“Can we start clearing?” I hear Steph shout.
My cloud spreads out, giving me an awareness of everything around me.
“Wait,” I call back. “I’m seeing a lot of people still inside these buildings, we need to get them out first.”
Bystanders are all around, shivering on the street and peeking between buildings to get a view. Police and fire crews are trying to get everyone to back away, but they’re vastly outnumbered and don’t seem to be having much impact. News crews are all over the place. Hopefully Sheryl is doing something about our PR, but I don’t have time to care about that. Inside the run-down apartment buildings between us and pure chaos, people are clustered around windows looking out on the disaster side.
I need to get these buildings out of the way now, and get these people out of here. I start thinking of how to do it when a giant mushroom cloud explodes in the air over the tops of the buildings. I fully expect to die in the orange inferno. General Whitman did it. That idiot dropped a nuke and doomed us all.
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But I don’t die. Nothing happens at all. There’s no heat, no blast wave. Just a panicking mass of humanity running as fast as they can away from the slowly growing doom.
From Marc: Don’t worry, the nuke is from Andrea to scare off the bystanders. It’s just a projection.
Andrea, you are brilliant. It looks so realistic.
“Becky, Lin, Roadbuilders, get us some shade,” I shout. “Doctors, start demolition. That building is almost empty now. Anything metal or plastic, get it away. Ignore wood, stone and brick on the first pass, get it later.”
I focus on getting the last straggling bystanders clear, willing or not. Most of the street is empty, and people are bolting out of the buildings with whatever belongings they decided were most worth saving. I ignore the ones leaving on their own, and cocoon up the rest. Some are too shocked to struggle as I haul them swiftly away from their deaths. The rest give me the same weird feeling that Fiona did, bugs struggling in my hundred hands. I feel Andrea’s influence on my far left and Louise’s way off to the right. They’re getting the innocents out first too.
“All clear,” I call. “Wreck and move as fast as you can.”
I feel Lin and my siblings complying, roughly shoving down buildings towards the street we’re standing on, away from the goo. I feel the slowly growing line of wild bots, breeding and feeding as they come. I grow too, consuming everything in front of them that’s at all usable for replication. It’s energy intensive, so I spread tendrils out to where it’s warmer so I can get the power I need to maintain the effort. Soon I have a steady stream going out for recharge and coming back with enough juice to share with the rest of my cloud.
General Whitman or somebody else must have done something about our fake mushroom cloud, because the first responders don’t try to come back anywhere near us even after Andrea’s gargantuan pyrotechnics are replaced with the growing sun shade. Hopefully, they’re evacuating the city by now. The last thing I need is to see fire crews or police getting in harm's way here. Every now and then, I feel an especially brave and stupid reporter or camera crew entering the area. I cocoon and flick them to the far edge of my range whenever I notice them.
All the while, I continue to swell and grow. I surround and defend. I am my cloud, an infinite spread of tiny points. I’m jetting through space, gripping, tearing, breaking, consuming. They’re still coming. I chew into them, but for every one I get, there are a billion more behind it. Slow as they are, they’re coming faster than I can ever stop.
“Perimeter is clear,” I hear from somewhere far away. Back near my body, that distant thing I barely feel now. I let my focus snap back, allowing the automated tactics to run for a moment and hold the line. The day has turned to night with the sun shield above covering everything. I can barely see the edge of it.
“Good,” I shout. “Move in. Start clearing. Try to get under it. We've got to cut off every path to raw materials.”
It’s still growing. We’ve slowed it, but it’s still growing. I feel out the other fronts. They’ve got a good wide firebreak like ours, a city block wide all the way around with nothing much usable for bot building. But they’re not pushing it back either. I’ve grown immense—larger than I’ve ever been—but it’s still not close to enough.
I push out, gather the materials we’ve pushed out of the way. Growing, growing. Using all the energy from my feeding streams and setting up hundreds more. I feel the surface of the Mississippi River freezing behind me. I push my feeders further out, spreading, taking all the heat and light I can find. I drill down, pulling as much heat as I can from the moist ground below. I am everything. I am everywhere.
It’s still not enough. The mass continues to grow.