Small Miracles Read online

  People tended not to get that bots were dirt cheap. Bots were so tiny, containing so little material—there was no way they could cost much. Except for the first one: coming up with the design and building the equipment to churn them out … that took serious money.

  “Within the human body,” Samir said, still dubious.

  Brent nodded. “Nanobots are smaller than corpuscles. They can go anywhere blood goes, fueling themselves with glucose or glycerol from the bloodstream.”

  “That’s small.” Samir considered for a moment. “Well, the important thing is, they saved your life.”

  “Sure.” Silence stretched awkwardly. Catharsis went only so far. “Samir, I wondered about something to help me through the night.” Something strong. Something to stop him from waking in the dark, oddly convinced that in his sleep he had been watching himself.

  “Drugs? I don’t think we’re quite there yet,” Samir said.

  Not there yet! He had just spilled his guts about the horrors in his memories and the horrors that denied him sleep. Only—

  He no longer knew which were which.

  “There’s one other thing.…” How could he even put this into words? “Samir, sometimes I don’t think the dreams are mine.”

  “I don’t understand, Brent.”

  Brent averted his eyes. “Much of what I relive in my dreams could be based on my memories—I mean, they’re about what happened at Angleton. I just don’t remember remembering them, if that makes any sense.”

  “Go on.”

  “I understand the mind makes stuff up, fills in the blanks. I understand that memory loss like mine can result from concussion, and that memory sometimes returns as the swelling goes down.” He knew lots of things, little of it seeming helpful. “I know …”

  Samir unclasped his hands and took a pen from his shirt pocket. A note waiting to be taken? Subtle encouragement or just fidgeting? “What’s the matter? What really bothers you?”

  The words burst out of Brent. “Why do I dream sometimes with a nanobot’s point of view?”

  Click went the pen. “You came in saying you needed sleep, or you would go crazy. That wasn’t entirely candid. You worry you’re already there. My guess is you’re afraid to sleep, unless it’s dreamless.”

  “Yes! I need something to knock me out.”

  “Drugs are the easy answer—until you try to get off of them. Let me ask you something, Brent. Your previous therapist, the one you saw in Chicago. Dr. Kelso, I believe. What did he say about the dreams?”

  “Those dreams hadn’t started yet.” Samir just looked until Brent couldn’t take the silence. “Well, I had lots of dreams early that were out-of-body. It was like I experienced the accident from outside, with a bird’s-eye view.”

  “Now you watch from inside, with a bacterium’s-eye view.”

  “Right.” Somehow that made the new dreams less of a change, and more like the PTSD relapse Dr. Kelso had all but promised would happen from time to time.

  “We’re almost out of time this session, so I’ll go out on a limb.” Samir closed his pen and clipped it back in his pocket. He never had taken a note. “I’ll bet your last therapist told you that displacement was natural. And that in therapy, when confronting your memories got rough, he sometimes told you to step back, to view things as another person would.”

  “Uh-huh.” Brent shivered.

  “It’s a standard approach,” Samir said. “I use it all the time, myself. But whose viewpoint? There were people around you in that catastrophe, but guess what? They were all dead. They didn’t have a point of view. Here’s something to ponder.

  “Maybe your very adaptable mind substituted the bird’s-eye view. That provided a bit of separation—but you would still be watching horror. There’s your last doctor telling you to ‘distance yourself. Step back.’

  “But step back to where? There’s no living person to whose perspective you can switch. There’s no way even to imagine another person there, other than as another charred victim. The bird’s-eye view, all that carnage, is horrific. So whose viewpoint is left? Who else was there, Brent?”

  “The nanobots,” Brent mumbled.

  “What’s that?”

  “The nanobots,” Brent said again, this time speaking up. “But the bots’ point of view is ghastly in another way.”

  “You’ll have to help me here, Brent. Do the bots have a point of view?”

  “Sure! They move among cells, and sense chemically, and—”

  “No, Brent,” Samir interrupted. “Let me be precise. My question isn’t about senses and measurements. I’m asking about perspective. Can a nanobot feel? Is it aware of anything?”

  “N-no.”

  “Then why does the passing of a nanobot, its job complete, disturb you?”

  “It doesn’t … well, it does. But I take your point, Samir. It shouldn’t.”

  “And anyway, the bots are all gone, eliminated by your immune system.”

  In Brent’s mind’s eye, the white cells—excuse me, Charles, the leukocytes—swarmed anew. The good doctor gave one hell of a demo, not to mention the testing he had done back in Angleton, while Brent had still been in surgical recovery. “Yes, the bots are gone.”

  And so, miraculously, was Brent’s anxiety.

  Well, some of it. Still, he dissembled when Samir followed up gently with a suggestion for further sessions. That decision could wait until Brent saw whether catharsis alone brought sleep any more easily.

  Outside the medical office building, road construction had brought traffic to a crawl. Brent slipped on his VR glasses, pulled up a local map and NYSDOT traffic cams, and set off onto a circuitous but probably best-available route back to the office.

  monday, october 17, 2016

  Brent’s new gig in the nanosuit design team did not last, but for a good reason. He had been discovered.

  His suggestions for an upgraded nanosuit were the start. The “Brownian bit bumps” incident had quickly become legendary. Then came the third incident.…

  Another of his learning-by-wandering-around excursions brought him to the Quality Assurance conference room, packed to overflowing. Although it seemed QA had called the meeting, departments across Engineering were represented. Nanobot hardware designers. Programmers, both system-software types from Kim’s group and medical-application specialists. Biophysicists. Biochemists. Biologists. No one had a clue why the latest variety of nanobots weren’t performing to expectations. These were an early-stage model for in-body cellular repair, like correcting DNA transcription errors.

  He slipped into the back of the room and listened. On the main screen, nanobots swam among or clung to corpuscles going in the desired direction. Every lab test showed them working exactly to spec—until they got injected into an experimental animal. Then performance went all to hell.

  He took it all in for a while, less hearing the increasingly unproductive bickering than staring at the screen. Nanotube cilia rippled in rhythmic waves, propelling the bots like tiny Roman war galleys. Imagining a nanoscale drummer pounding out the cadence, he chuckled.

  “So you have a suggestion?” Joe Kaminski snapped.

  And Brent did. It came out of nowhere, as many of his best ideas did these days. “You’re recycling the propulsion software from the first-aid generation of bots. Correct?”

  “Yes,” someone admitted cautiously.

  “The bigger the blood vessel, the more serious the potential first-aid issue.” Brent pointed at the screen. “To do their jobs, these guys may have to navigate the smallest of capillaries. The diam—”

  “We know,” a chorus intoned. Roving know-it-alls were not welcome.

  Only when Brent persisted, it emerged that the testing had been through capillary-sized glass tubes in the lab. Actual capillaries had irregular wall features and often plaque buildup. In an actual capillary, a bot faced the steady battering of corpuscles deforming themselves to enter a tunnel half their normal diameters, then struggling through in sing
le file. Bots hitching a ride on corpuscles were as likely to be knocked loose as carried through. Two days later, more realistic simulations showed that in actual capillaries, grab-and-pull locomotion along the wall worked far more dependably than swimming or ride hitching.

  Four days later, Brent found himself appointed technologist at large. He was encouraged to go anywhere and to inquire at will. He was empowered to examine everything and to commandeer any test gear. His only duty was to report whatever he considered interesting to Dan Garner himself.

  Perhaps general engineering wasn’t a useless discipline. And certainly tapping the Internet and company intranet through VR glasses didn’t hurt, especially now that he seemed to have mastered speed-reading. His retention had never been better.

  But in the dark of night, this sudden success was as mysterious to Brent as to everyone else.

  saturday, october 22, 2016

  On her sporadic visits back to Virginia, Kim described Utica’s climate as having only three seasons: winter, July, and August.

  It wasn’t much of an exaggeration. Snow in late October was unusual but not unheard of. Another couple weeks and she was prepared to declare jogging over till spring—whatever Brent did. Struggling to keep up with him, she was ready to declare him fit.

  She had proposed for a week that they hike up into the Adirondacks. The foliage was past peak color, but still gorgeous (even here in this city park, she conceded). In past years, the trick would have been to keep Brent from such a jaunt. This year, he could not be interested.

  As the sun—another late-October rarity—glinted off Brent’s silvered glasses, she guessed she knew why. He and the Internet could not be parted during waking hours. His newest VR glasses did WiFi and WiMax; he had mobile connectivity anywhere across the city, but he would be offline in the mountains. She had joshed with him about going cold turkey; he wasn’t amused. Truth be told, he was increasingly humor-impaired these days.

  “Hey, slowpoke,” he called. Turning a bend in the jogging path, he had finally noticed her lagging behind. Watching who knew what in cyberspace, instead.

  What was she, chopped liver?

  “Have pity on an old lady,” she panted.

  He circled back to her, jogging in place. “I meant to ask you about the last locomotion software upgrade. In the scheduling table—”

  With the damn VR glasses, did Brent ever stop working? And now a handful of people at the office, inspired by his newfound quickness, were experimenting with VR glasses. The new Brent remained in a class by himself, though: see all, know all.

  Not now, she almost snapped at him. Time to change the subject. Not football, lest he bore her to tears. Not current events. They had long ago agreed to disagree about the upcoming election. What could be gained anyway talking about the latest terrorist bombing or the wars across the Middle East or the upcoming military tribunals? “I meant to tell you. Nick says hi.”

  “Hi back to him.” Brent started up the jogging path. He had yet to regain all the weight and muscle mass, but you would never guess that watching him. “Enough loafing.”

  A runner’s high, Kim decided enviously. She only got runner’s aches. With a groan, she set out after him.

  “So how is Nick?” Brent called over his shoulder. “I haven’t seen him in a while.”

  “Nor I.” She saved the details—and her breath—for about a hundred yards, until they came to a downslope. “He’s been busy on a new promotion, working with a customer in Manhattan. Some sort of viral marketing campaign.”

  “For cable TV?” Brent said.

  “Uh-huh.” Even downhill, she struggled to keep up.

  “A rumor campaign, propagated through YouTube, right?”

  With a wheeze like a rusty gate, she sped past Brent to the end of the circuit. “End of lap. End of run.” Wheeze. “And you’re right about the campaign. How much did Nick tell you?”

  “Mars Base Alpha, right? The chatter has his touch. Miniseries or regular show?”

  Brent hadn’t answered her question, meaning Nick wasn’t the source. “How could you possibly know?”

  “I just thought I recognized your boyfriend’s work. Is that okay?”

  “Sure,” she said. No need to bite my head off.

  Only she didn’t believe he had recognized Nick’s work, not without some slick trick like correlating vocabulary against campaigns Brent knew Nick had handled. So unless Brent suddenly had a computer in his head, he had worked it out while jogging, writing a program as they ran, by eye flicks to a virtual keyboard. And since she had been bugging him to disconnect occasionally—witness his surly reply—he was not about to admit how he had done it.

  Brent went into a stretching routine. “Want to go out for some lunch?”

  “Can’t. I’ve got errands to run.” The lie was far more politic than the truth: Brent was beginning to scare her.

  sunday, october 23, 2016

  More and more, the empty-messenger patterns made a limited kind of sense.

  It categorized the patterns, arranged them, and rearranged them. New correlations emerged among the patterns. It formed theories about the behaviors of patterns. It emitted empty messengers of its own, varying the frequencies and concentrations, to test its theories.

  And because nothing in the message streams suggested the presence of anything like itself, it labeled itself “One.”

  Through trial and error One deduced the stimuli that iterated previously experienced empty-messenger patterns: memories in an unfamiliar format. It did not know the source of those memories. Properly timed, One found its messenger swarms could even write new external memories. This newfound external storage operated slowly and lacked the precision and fidelity of its internal records, but—again, unlike its own storage—repeatedly accessing the data somehow enhanced the quality of the external memories.

  The more One probed, the richer the external data streams became. So it probed more. And more. It categorized and mapped the memories in the external storage. It copied some of the most interesting external memories into its internal storage for faster playback.

  It learned to identify external data streams yet to be stored as memory. It had sensors that served the same purpose: they provided new information that One sometimes chose to record. One concentrated its analyses on these external information sources—

  And suddenly, One had eyes.

  monday, october 24, 2016

  Data scrolled from a graduate-level microbiology courseware file. The text moved past at about two thousand words per minute, faster than Brent could have flipped pages had he had physical pages to turn. From time to time he blinked through to a related topic, reference, or enlarged image. Genetic transcription. Protein synthesis. Energy production. Signal transduction.

  All around, background to the scrolling text and flashing graphics, colleagues filtered into the executive conference room. The walls were dark walnut, always richly polished, and hung with tastefully framed Impressionist prints. The beige carpet was plush. The table was a massive slab of mahogany, lustrous beneath the recessed ceiling lights, and ringed by leather captain’s chairs. Once, this room had intimidated Brent.

  “The bigwigs are coming. The bigwigs are coming.” Kim plopped into an empty seat beside him, setting a laptop on the table. She had changed into the business suit that usually hung behind her office door just for no-warning management summonses like this.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “What’s up?” she persisted.

  “You know,” Brent said, with a vague sweep of a hand. Parallel processing was his mantra these days, and his attention remained on protein synthesis. A flick of the eye and a blink retrieved an atomic-level structural model of an amino acid. Tiny as was the actual image drawn on his lenses, it looked far bigger than anything in any dead-trees textbook. Clever optics made the image seem projected out into the room, with the apparent display area of a wall screen. The courseware let him rotate the image, but it lacked the animation features tha
t would show the molecule polymerizing.

  “Would you care to elaborate on that?”

  Brent jerked, not at Kim’s question, but from the poke in the ribs that had accompanied it. He froze the text paging past his right eye. “Sorry. Just finishing up some reading.” And semi-amazed at how fast it went. Why would anyone not study with VR specs? He had never been this productive.

  His one concern as his skill grew was the accelerating rate of the screens. When he was twelve, a Pokémon episode on TV had put hundreds of Japanese kids into the hospital. Apparently—the episode was never shown again—one point in the story involved lots of flashing lights. It induced convulsive epileptic seizures.

  Thirty seconds’ research shot down that worry. Not only was epilepsy rare, with no history of it in Brent’s family, but photosensitive epilepsy accounted for only a few percent of cases.

  Kim opened her laptop, frowning as it took its time coming out of hibernation. “Prep for this meeting?”

  “Hard to say, unless you have a better idea than I why Garner called us here.”

  “You’re Dan’s fair-haired boy these days. Why would I know?” Kim turned to her other side, where Tyra Kurtz, the CTO, had taken a seat.

  Tyra was forty-five and looked a lot older. Black hair streaked with gray was only part of it. She had worry lines, and bags beneath her eyes, and slouched. She just looked weary all the time. A surly teenage son and raging-hormonal prepubescent daughter could do that, Brent supposed, especially since Tyra’s husband traveled a lot.

  “Hi, boss,” Kim said. She and Tyra began discussing some upcoming software tweak in the nanobots.

  That topic lasted about fifteen seconds, until Tyra set her “new” cell on the table. It was a slab almost a half inch thick, like the relic Brent’s father persisted in carrying. “Another battery recall,” Tyra complained. “Really, who needs a phone exploding or catching fire in her pocket? More and more energy crammed into less and less space … it’s no wonder the energy density in the latest battery packs puts a hand grenade to shame. You don’t want one to overheat.”