While I have writings going back to childhood, I didn't start creating them for any purpose beyond my own entertainment until I was at least nineteen. I was introduced to tabletop role-playing games, and from there came a love of shared world building and group story-telling.
I love crafting worlds to explore with friends, or characters to play in another person's fantasy. Many of my posts will be snippets of those worlds or the characters in them.
One of my many settings was called "The Glitter". It was developed 2012-2013 after reading Alan Weisman's "The World Without Us". His book discusses the question of what happens to Earth if humans were gone. I elaborated from there into imagining what would happen if 99% were eradicated in a grey goo style scenario.
From that came Johnstown. A bastion of survivors. How did they survive? What was their world like? What was the world past their borders like? I and some of my compatriots set out to tell those stories. Here is one I wrote about the moments leading towards the end of the world.
The Pulse
Construction:
A crushing blanket of silence filled the building. In the distance booming explosions shattered the nights peace; punctuating the heartbeats pounding in the ears of the rooms occupants. The room was stripped barren of everything considered unessential to the project at hand. A full complement of tools hung orderly along the side of the room under the second floor gantry. The center of the room contained one device and a myriad of parts.
The room was large enough to hold its usual complement of three dozen scientists and engineers. It was eerily quiet with only three uneasy occupants. Echoes of shoes moving across immaculately clean concrete floors echoed through the chamber.
Doctor John Logain, Department Head of Bioengineering for Human Dynamiks labored wordlessly with his two dearest colleagues. Their ideas had been mulled over in secret and shadow during the chaos of the last two months. Now they were bringing them to life. The advantages that came with his position with H.D. were not lost upon Jonathon. It was only through his company resources he had been able to so quickly and quietly pull together the materials for this project. Hell, it was the only likely reason any of them were still alive.
A particularly large boom shook the room.
“That one was closer.” His wife, Marigold finally pierced the veil of silence that had been covering them for hours.
“We’ll be fine, neither side would dare damage this facility...” replied their lanky companion, Dr. Oswald Marchand.
“They may not want to damage the building, but that doesn’t mean they won’t send a squad of supes in here to secure the facility, we have to get this done.” Doctor Logain spoke with a hushed tone while hunkering over a control panel.
Marigold sighed, and Oswald shrugged, walking to pick up his next tool.
The characters on his workstation were beginning to jumble together into an unintelligible mess of code. John closed his eyes for a moment, the rigors of the last few weeks washing over him. He hadn’t slept in a week now, if it wasn’t for his nanites keeping the inside of his body clean and orderly, he doubted he would be standing. He allowed himself a moment of rest; two minutes should be enough to clear his head. He gave his swarm the signal, and allowed them to shut down his thoughts.
He dreamt...
John sat in his apartment drinking a beer. The kids were at grandmas in the country and they had the night to themselves. Marigold was on the couch with him, legs pulled underneath her as she dozed on his lap. Her long golden hair spilled across his legs. They were watching the nightly news broadcast. A warm breeze flowed in from their north window, rustling the blinds and wafting in the sounds of the city. Living in the top stories of skyscrapers had never lost its luster for Marigold, she loved being able to look over the city. There was some traffic, John disliked the hover-cars screaming by his building, but nights like these he couldn’t imagine closing the windows. War rhetoric and posturing screamed from the press conference on the vidscreen. John allowed his thoughts to drift away from the threats and horror, holding Marigold close despite the warm summer air...
John opened his eyes, two minutes exactly. A short repair cycle for his nervous tissue, the damage he was doing with his insomnia was being held at bay, but he would need to sleep for a day or two when all this was over. It took a moment to shake loose the cobwebs.
Marigold had noted his short rest, and gave him a knowing, intimate smile when she saw him rouse. He smiled back; she was even more beautiful than she had been in his dream. She wore black flats, simple yet elegant. Her long blonde hair was done up in a bun, a playful mess held together with a pair of chopsticks someone had left unused from their takeout chinese food in the department breakroom. Her blouse was tousled; none of them had been given any rest or a chance to change clothes for the last two days. She wore a pair of black capris, not within dress code, but John had not given them much advanced warning before he had sequestered the three of them to begin construction.
The device itself was not large, roughly the size of a refrigerator. It was a tangled mess of dangling wires and strange bulbs. In the beginning, a moderate electromagnetic pulse was enough to shut down a swarm. In the last couple years however, cross-evolution had allowed the dissemination of military modifications. There wasn’t a swarm left that didn’t resist emp, or at least recover very quickly. What they were building was something new, something different, something final.
A panel was open, and Oswald was soldering a series of circuit boards. John stood in front of a computer terminal with dozens of wires crisscrossing back and forth from the machine. Marigold was pulling parts out of the ever shrinking pile of boxes and was bolting them into place.
A flash of light from outside illuminated the room to the point of blinding for a moment. In the bright glare their glittering skin gave John a moment of apprehension. All three of them had the telltale signs of extensive coadaptation. He pondered how much longer they would be able to work at this pace. It would have taken a team of unenhanced technicians months to engineer and build a device with this complexity level. They were putting it together like legos.
Nanotech changed everything. As prominent members of a powerful nanotech corporation, John and Oswald had access to the most innovative and powerful swarms created by their company. Marigold was a psychologist, but with her swarm improving her cognitive and intellectual capacity, an unexpected expansion of John’s own swarm coadaptations, there was no technical dialogue or that went over her head anymore. She had learned everything she needed to function at the level of a Ph.D. nanotech scientist in a matter of weeks.
The battle outside was reaching a fevered pitch. John assumed both sides were air-dropping squads of coadapted super soldiers behind the lines of skirmish. Spinning whirlwinds of destruction and death, their nanotech coadaptations left them nearly unstoppable. Short of the deployment of a similarly outfitted super soldier or a warmech, it was unlikely they could be stopped by traditional weapons. It seemed from the booms and flashes in the distance that both sides were now responding to these threats with nuclear precision strikes, radiation be damned.
Another flash of light in the distance was followed by a shockwave that shuddered the building to its foundations. Strange warmth washed over John’s body. He shuddered as he felt his swarm release anti-radiation countermeasures. Momentary dizziness staggered all three of them.
“I’m turning on the vidscreen...” Oswald stretched his arms and walked over to a blank wall.
Jonathan went to grumble, but before he made a sound Marigold’s reproachful eyes stopped him. He managed to mumble out “staying focused...” but trailed off and went back to his work.
Oswald didn’t note the exchange, and was already gesturing with his hands to activate the capacitive vidscreen that wrapped around the entire south wall. A few gestures later and he had pulled up the live coverage from the front.
Vid-capture bots flew around the battlefield, and against all odds the news broadcast was still running. Images flashed across the screen, regular units of soldiers were desperately trying to stay alive amongst a battlefield that no longer needed them. The news commentator was discussing the various pieces of new war technology that each side was implementing, and his panicked pitch betrayed his terror.
Super soldiers and war-mechs did battle on an entirely new scale. They bounded up the sides of buildings and took flight, all the while raining precision destruction. Lasers and flames and bullets flared across the vid-screen until John spoke up, breaking Oswald’s trance.
“Turn it off Oz, we know what’s happening...” John stuttered out.
“Yea, sorry...” Oswald gesticulated, and the screen blinked off. He spoke under his breath: “Just thought maybe they would be talking about something useful...” He turned and walked back to his work, resuming his inspection of the miniscule circuit boards. “Do you think this even matters? If we shut down the nanotech, stop the rejection process, what the hell do we even have left now?”
Marigold spoke first: “Of course it matters Oz, no one else is doing anything to stop the rejection. No matter who wins, we lose, remember?”
John followed: “If they knew how to stop it they would Oz, this is the only way, and we’ve talked about this.”
“It’s all just insane... Nanites being turned against mankind, killing civilians. It has to have been someone at Precipice; I can’t imagine who else would have had the resources to set something like this in motion.” Oswald said, looking pensive and leaning away from his soldering for a moment.
“Precipice, Kunlao, Sony, Weyland-Yutani, Tyrell Corp, Soylent, Cyberdyne, Ingitech, and maybe a dozen more Oz. Hell, for all we know someone at Dynamiks could have done it. Just because you didn’t like Doctor Lee doesn’t mean his team at Precipice are trying to end humanity...” John replied.
“Yea, I suppose... Still, I just feel like they’re the most likely. I mean think about it John, who could code for such a complex reformation in such a comprehensive listing of nanotech. We all saw the analysis: it doesn’t even overwrite, it creates an entire new set of command structures.”
“And creates a set of criteria that excludes ninety-nine percent of humans, killing those it rejects. Bla bla, you guys really want to go over this shit again?” Marigold huffed, pulling a loose strand of hair that had escaped her chopsticks back behind her ear.
“It’s brainstorming hun, if we could unravel who started this ball rolling maybe we could stop it with less drastic measures.” John spoke, defending Oswald. “And he’s right, there are probably less than a hundred people on earth with the knowledge and resources to do something on this scale.”
“And what about individuals with new forms of coadaptation? What about any one of the hundreds of extremist groups that have been protesting nanotech?” Marigold was frustrated now. “There is absolutely no way to point blame now. People are dying, war is tearing this country apart, and frankly, I am not sure our race will survive if we don’t finish this...”
Silence fell back over them; flashes from distant explosions punctuating the light from Oswalds solder gun, and the booms growing more distant. They worked in relative silence, until the outside world grew eerily quiet, the stillness outside beginning to match the stillness of the three scientists. After what seemed like hours, daybreak struck. The sun began to beam in through the eastern windows.
John stood and stretched, walking up the gantry to peek out into the daylight. Warily peering outwards, he shuddered and fell to his knees. Tears streamed down his face for a moment, and Marigold moved to comfort him.
The city was in shambles. Ruined buildings were crumbling in the distance. The structural devastation from the conventional fighting was horrific enough, but with his nanite enhanced visual cortex, John was able to pick out hundreds of nearby corpses with a glance. Small tactical nuclear weapons had left precision strikes pocking the city, with craters two hundred feet across, leveling buildings at the edges and vaporizing them at the center of the blast.
The fighting had moved further away, but staggered soldiers and super soldiers still meandered just at the base of the building and beyond. The regular soldiers John could pick out were screaming insanely, scratching at their skin as the rejection took hold.
“We need to hurry” Marigold said, ushering john back down the gantry. There was no way a regular soldier could pick them out from all the windows on the forty-fifth floor, but if a super soldier or war machine had noticed the movement, they might be inclined to investigate.
Oswald wiped his brow, rising from the crouch he had held for the last few hours. “All done here. How is the interface coming?” He asked John.
“It’s fine, it’s good.” He dried his tears and covertly moved back down the gantry and away from the windows. “What’s the charge ratio looking like Mary?”
“It’s good for now, we’ve pulled enough off the generators for a functional radius, but we’ll need pretty significant power if we want to go any wider.” She replied. She noticed herself trying to subtly scratch what was becoming an intolerable itch, but chose to say nothing. If the rejection was taking hold, there was no way to know how long she had left, and her only hope was finishing this project.
John noted her scratch, half listening to her report. Before she had finished speaking, an insistent beeping struck the room like a gong. The wall length vid-screen flickered to life, an array of security cameras showing the building interior were pulled up automatically. Oswald had insisted that they ensure that security had been rerouted and pre-programmed to respond only to the remaining members of their team.
All of the surviving employees of Human Dynamiks had been evacuated before the fighting. Every major nanotech power was making whatever makeshift changes they could to try to stop the rejection. No one had been entirely successful thus far, but the changes bought time. Nanotech specialists and their resources were far too critical for either side to risk harming. Most were still dying of the rejection virus however.
The activation of the internal defenses could mean only one thing. Someone outside was forcing their way in. They had been noticed. The screen showed a lone super soldier moving carefully through the front lobby, coadapted to the point that his skin was almost entirely metallic. His eyes shone with an eerie red hue and his hair seemed to be replaced by thick scaly metallic dreadlocks. Oddly placed inhuman bulges pressed his flesh outward at odd angles, betraying advanced enhancement systems put in place by his swarm. He had clearly been hit by explosive ordnance. Though his flesh had regenerated, his uniform was reduced to char, dangling off his rippling, nanite constructed musculature.
“Shit. Shit. Shit, they saw you.” Oswald began to panic.
“Calm down.” John snapped. “We have to get the device out of here. We have plans for this, we just have to get to the sub-level. The tramway should be intact, I didn’t see any nuke strikes over it’s route.”
“They shouldn’t threaten H.D. employees, they won’t kill us Oz.” Marigold said, attempting to reassure Oswald.
“They’ll just try and take us into their commanding officers...” Oswald began to stutter out, before he was interrupted, as a second monstrous hulk of a man appeared on an alternate camera. The first had not noticed the second, but the newcomer was clearly hunting him. A blast of light exploded from some form of weapon embedded in the hunter’s hand. The blow glanced off the first monster’s shoulder, shuddering the building as the force of the blast slammed into the walls.
Marigold let out a yelp as the floor shook underneath them.
“God damnit they are gonna tear the whole place down around them.” John hollered, waving dust away as the roof shuddered.
Oswald grimaced, his face belying the fear they were all feeling. “But, their orders should be to preserve nanotech experts at all cost. It shouldn’t matter what side they're on.”
“Well maybe their orders don’t matter now... Or maybe they don’t know we’re here.” John replied warily, concern creeping into his voice.
Wordlessly, Oswald walked slowly to the capacitive screen, forcing each step. He began pulling up the command system for the building intercom.
The speakers crackled to life, a slight feedback from the doctors hand resting on the screen jarring the doctors. “Attention unidentified combatants. This is Dr. Oswald Marchand, Assistant Director of Bioengineering, and member of the board of directors for Human Dynamiks. I am still in the building, please stand down.”
Hearing the announcement, the bitter conflict paused, each warrior holding their pose for a moment before lowering their respective in-body weapons and standing down.
“Responsible for destroying humanity or not, being a nanotech expert has its uses...” Oswald sighed, obviously relieved that the programming in their cybernetics and nanotechnology overrode whatever emotions the two once-men felt downstairs.
A series of high pitched chirps escaped from each soldiers mouth, and a long antenna pushed out of the clavicle of the hunter. It slid upwards, slick with blood, and the soldier dropped to a crouch. Through the security system, they knew it was transmitting a signal, or at least attempting to reach its superiors. Whether it had any superiors left alive, who could say.
It stood again retracting it’s slender antenna into its body once again. In the voice of a young man, it spoke in a soft tone: “Doctor Marchand, I have been given orders to escort you from the conflict zone. Please meet me on the first floor. You have five minutes.”
The man he was fighting turned to leave the building. The survival of Doctor Marchand was obviously considered a higher priority to both sides than killing one another. They didn’t even consider initiating a conflict over possession that could potentially kill him.
“Well that worked.” Marygold sighed out relieved. “Now what, we have to get the machine to the tram.”
“I’m going to go down.” Marchand was shaking, his skin pale. He was obviously terrified at the notion. “You heard him, five minutes, I have to go down...” He trailed off, tears welling in the corners of his eyes.
Marigold balled her fists. “No Oz, No, we can find a way out of this.” She was trying to convince Oswald against it, but her faced showed that she hadn’t yet fully convinced herself. She pleaded with him, but had no alternatives to offer. If he didn’t go down, the monster would start looking for him. If it didn’t find him, there was no telling what it would do, but the destruction one super-soldier alone was capable of was incalculable. If it did find them, escape would be impossible.
Marchand turned and hugged Marigold, and they wept as they held one another close. She kissed him on the cheek, and they relented. Marchand extended a hand to Logain, and was pulled into a bear hug.
“Thank you.” Marchand said tearfully. “I love you both. Be happy, get to your children, remember me.”
“This isn’t the end Oz, you know where we are going. You can still make it for the test.” Jonathan gave his best smile. Holding his friend by the shoulders.
Oswald did his best to return the smile, and began walking out of the room. They had managed to keep the generators up, so it was only one elevator ride between him and his unknown fate. With no further goodbyes, Oswald left.
The Logains worked wordlessly to pack up their invention. Marchand had bought them time, but once he was successfully out of the building, the conflict would most certainly erupt around them again. They managed to sequester their machine into a service elevator, and began their descent for the tramway...
---------------------------------------
Family:
Elaine watched the night sky with concern. She was traditionally a worrier, her face was etched with deep worry lines, but todays worry went far beyond her usual fretful fare. The night was quiet. Crickets chirped, and occasionally faint booms were barely discernable in the distance. Off to the south she could just make out flashes of light. Like distant lightning bolts, she felt a creeping terror with each new flash.
She sipped her tea. The kids were asleep, Michael had spent the day in wonder of the animals. Gazing like only a city kid can at the sheep and chickens meandering through their pens. Julia was just beginning to walk, and Elaine had spent most of her day keeping her out of things. It had been a long time since Marigold and her sister were babies, she loved it, but it was exhausting.
Many of the farms chores had gone by the wayside. The animals were getting cranky at the lackadaisical care they had been receiving in the last three weeks. For a moment, she considered once again how much simpler things would be if she had invested in some of the more advanced technological advancement in husbandry and agriculture tools. She let out a light sigh as she reminded herself of the devastation and death that so called “technological advancement” was wreaking in the distance right then.
She listened as intently as she could for any signs of activity on the road, but heard nothing. Most of her neighbors were miles away. Those neighbors that had embraced new technologies had already died. She had argued with her friend William Mason, one of her closest neighbors, years ago when he had first brought nanites onto his farm. It improved every aspect of a person, made life easier. Or so he said. He and his entire family had died from rejection four days ago.
Elaine had opposed it from the start. Her daughters had called her a luddite, making their feelings quite clear that being behind the times with technology was ensuring the death of relevance in this modern age.
She remembered her father’s stories warning against such things. They had nearly lost the farm in a lawsuit with Monsanto. The genetics company had “accidentally” crossbred their pesticide resistant strain of wheat into the local crops. Only a handful of local farmers had willingly bought Monsanto brand seeds. But against the design of the genetics experiment, tested out on a massive scale, the modified seeds has cross-germinated with the local crops. Now all the farmers had patented genetic code, biotechnology, in their crops and Monsanto wanted their due.
Elaine had done everything she could to remain distant from the emerging nanotechnology. After the news stories had started coming out, she was very happy with her decision. At first it was a small number of people being made sick by some seemingly random software virus in their particular nanite swarm. Within the next couple weeks, the rate of infection had increased exponentially, and the first death occurred. It was as if a dam had released. The deaths started and no power of man could stop or slow the onslaught.
She had considered herself safe from the apocalypse. She planned to sustain herself, tend her farm, and wait for a peaceful death. Until her daughter called and asked her to take possession of her children. She talked rapidly and excitedly, growing frustrated with her unadapted mother’s slow wit and too thoughtful responses. A chance to save mankind she had said. Marigold wasn’t one to beg, but her tone made it very clear that there was no other choice. Without someone to watch Julia and Michael, away from the conflict, there was no guarantee they could survive the war.
And now she was infected. Being in close proximity to someone with a swarm for any length of time almost guaranteed infection. There were supposed to be a hundred different safeguards in place to prevent just such things from happening. But in the face of the rejection, none of the promises by those in support of nanites seemed to hold true.
Apparently Johnathan’s company had made some changes. They had instituted whatever small patches they could to counteract the rejection. But it wasn’t enough. She scratched idly at a small cluster of silver glitter on her left wrist. A death sentence, no way to know how long she had left. Without the patches from Human Dynamiks she had heard horror stories of the pain and torment that the rejection process entailed. She supposed she should consider herself lucky. She could still die relatively comfortably.
Michael was beginning to understand. He had early physical signs of coadaptation, and could just barely grasp what that meant. His swarm was small, immature, and had not yet begun interfacing with his nervous system. But he knew it meant he would die. He had begged her every night since they had come to take the bad machines out of him. She wished she knew how. Once a swarm was in the body, there was no way left to remove it. Every method and technique used to remove nanites was completely impotent now. The authorities had made it very clear that they were working on the problem, but had no solutions to offer now. Remain calm. Always more alerts to remain calm.
She sipped her tea, it was cold. She had come out to watch the distance after the kids had lain down for bed, but now she was beginning to grow exhausted herself. Any day now... Her daughter would come home... any day now...
---------------------------------------
I love crafting worlds to explore with friends, or characters to play in another person's fantasy. Many of my posts will be snippets of those worlds or the characters in them.
One of my many settings was called "The Glitter". It was developed 2012-2013 after reading Alan Weisman's "The World Without Us". His book discusses the question of what happens to Earth if humans were gone. I elaborated from there into imagining what would happen if 99% were eradicated in a grey goo style scenario.
From that came Johnstown. A bastion of survivors. How did they survive? What was their world like? What was the world past their borders like? I and some of my compatriots set out to tell those stories. Here is one I wrote about the moments leading towards the end of the world.
The Pulse
Construction:
A crushing blanket of silence filled the building. In the distance booming explosions shattered the nights peace; punctuating the heartbeats pounding in the ears of the rooms occupants. The room was stripped barren of everything considered unessential to the project at hand. A full complement of tools hung orderly along the side of the room under the second floor gantry. The center of the room contained one device and a myriad of parts.
The room was large enough to hold its usual complement of three dozen scientists and engineers. It was eerily quiet with only three uneasy occupants. Echoes of shoes moving across immaculately clean concrete floors echoed through the chamber.
Doctor John Logain, Department Head of Bioengineering for Human Dynamiks labored wordlessly with his two dearest colleagues. Their ideas had been mulled over in secret and shadow during the chaos of the last two months. Now they were bringing them to life. The advantages that came with his position with H.D. were not lost upon Jonathon. It was only through his company resources he had been able to so quickly and quietly pull together the materials for this project. Hell, it was the only likely reason any of them were still alive.
A particularly large boom shook the room.
“That one was closer.” His wife, Marigold finally pierced the veil of silence that had been covering them for hours.
“We’ll be fine, neither side would dare damage this facility...” replied their lanky companion, Dr. Oswald Marchand.
“They may not want to damage the building, but that doesn’t mean they won’t send a squad of supes in here to secure the facility, we have to get this done.” Doctor Logain spoke with a hushed tone while hunkering over a control panel.
Marigold sighed, and Oswald shrugged, walking to pick up his next tool.
The characters on his workstation were beginning to jumble together into an unintelligible mess of code. John closed his eyes for a moment, the rigors of the last few weeks washing over him. He hadn’t slept in a week now, if it wasn’t for his nanites keeping the inside of his body clean and orderly, he doubted he would be standing. He allowed himself a moment of rest; two minutes should be enough to clear his head. He gave his swarm the signal, and allowed them to shut down his thoughts.
He dreamt...
John sat in his apartment drinking a beer. The kids were at grandmas in the country and they had the night to themselves. Marigold was on the couch with him, legs pulled underneath her as she dozed on his lap. Her long golden hair spilled across his legs. They were watching the nightly news broadcast. A warm breeze flowed in from their north window, rustling the blinds and wafting in the sounds of the city. Living in the top stories of skyscrapers had never lost its luster for Marigold, she loved being able to look over the city. There was some traffic, John disliked the hover-cars screaming by his building, but nights like these he couldn’t imagine closing the windows. War rhetoric and posturing screamed from the press conference on the vidscreen. John allowed his thoughts to drift away from the threats and horror, holding Marigold close despite the warm summer air...
John opened his eyes, two minutes exactly. A short repair cycle for his nervous tissue, the damage he was doing with his insomnia was being held at bay, but he would need to sleep for a day or two when all this was over. It took a moment to shake loose the cobwebs.
Marigold had noted his short rest, and gave him a knowing, intimate smile when she saw him rouse. He smiled back; she was even more beautiful than she had been in his dream. She wore black flats, simple yet elegant. Her long blonde hair was done up in a bun, a playful mess held together with a pair of chopsticks someone had left unused from their takeout chinese food in the department breakroom. Her blouse was tousled; none of them had been given any rest or a chance to change clothes for the last two days. She wore a pair of black capris, not within dress code, but John had not given them much advanced warning before he had sequestered the three of them to begin construction.
The device itself was not large, roughly the size of a refrigerator. It was a tangled mess of dangling wires and strange bulbs. In the beginning, a moderate electromagnetic pulse was enough to shut down a swarm. In the last couple years however, cross-evolution had allowed the dissemination of military modifications. There wasn’t a swarm left that didn’t resist emp, or at least recover very quickly. What they were building was something new, something different, something final.
A panel was open, and Oswald was soldering a series of circuit boards. John stood in front of a computer terminal with dozens of wires crisscrossing back and forth from the machine. Marigold was pulling parts out of the ever shrinking pile of boxes and was bolting them into place.
A flash of light from outside illuminated the room to the point of blinding for a moment. In the bright glare their glittering skin gave John a moment of apprehension. All three of them had the telltale signs of extensive coadaptation. He pondered how much longer they would be able to work at this pace. It would have taken a team of unenhanced technicians months to engineer and build a device with this complexity level. They were putting it together like legos.
Nanotech changed everything. As prominent members of a powerful nanotech corporation, John and Oswald had access to the most innovative and powerful swarms created by their company. Marigold was a psychologist, but with her swarm improving her cognitive and intellectual capacity, an unexpected expansion of John’s own swarm coadaptations, there was no technical dialogue or that went over her head anymore. She had learned everything she needed to function at the level of a Ph.D. nanotech scientist in a matter of weeks.
The battle outside was reaching a fevered pitch. John assumed both sides were air-dropping squads of coadapted super soldiers behind the lines of skirmish. Spinning whirlwinds of destruction and death, their nanotech coadaptations left them nearly unstoppable. Short of the deployment of a similarly outfitted super soldier or a warmech, it was unlikely they could be stopped by traditional weapons. It seemed from the booms and flashes in the distance that both sides were now responding to these threats with nuclear precision strikes, radiation be damned.
Another flash of light in the distance was followed by a shockwave that shuddered the building to its foundations. Strange warmth washed over John’s body. He shuddered as he felt his swarm release anti-radiation countermeasures. Momentary dizziness staggered all three of them.
“I’m turning on the vidscreen...” Oswald stretched his arms and walked over to a blank wall.
Jonathan went to grumble, but before he made a sound Marigold’s reproachful eyes stopped him. He managed to mumble out “staying focused...” but trailed off and went back to his work.
Oswald didn’t note the exchange, and was already gesturing with his hands to activate the capacitive vidscreen that wrapped around the entire south wall. A few gestures later and he had pulled up the live coverage from the front.
Vid-capture bots flew around the battlefield, and against all odds the news broadcast was still running. Images flashed across the screen, regular units of soldiers were desperately trying to stay alive amongst a battlefield that no longer needed them. The news commentator was discussing the various pieces of new war technology that each side was implementing, and his panicked pitch betrayed his terror.
Super soldiers and war-mechs did battle on an entirely new scale. They bounded up the sides of buildings and took flight, all the while raining precision destruction. Lasers and flames and bullets flared across the vid-screen until John spoke up, breaking Oswald’s trance.
“Turn it off Oz, we know what’s happening...” John stuttered out.
“Yea, sorry...” Oswald gesticulated, and the screen blinked off. He spoke under his breath: “Just thought maybe they would be talking about something useful...” He turned and walked back to his work, resuming his inspection of the miniscule circuit boards. “Do you think this even matters? If we shut down the nanotech, stop the rejection process, what the hell do we even have left now?”
Marigold spoke first: “Of course it matters Oz, no one else is doing anything to stop the rejection. No matter who wins, we lose, remember?”
John followed: “If they knew how to stop it they would Oz, this is the only way, and we’ve talked about this.”
“It’s all just insane... Nanites being turned against mankind, killing civilians. It has to have been someone at Precipice; I can’t imagine who else would have had the resources to set something like this in motion.” Oswald said, looking pensive and leaning away from his soldering for a moment.
“Precipice, Kunlao, Sony, Weyland-Yutani, Tyrell Corp, Soylent, Cyberdyne, Ingitech, and maybe a dozen more Oz. Hell, for all we know someone at Dynamiks could have done it. Just because you didn’t like Doctor Lee doesn’t mean his team at Precipice are trying to end humanity...” John replied.
“Yea, I suppose... Still, I just feel like they’re the most likely. I mean think about it John, who could code for such a complex reformation in such a comprehensive listing of nanotech. We all saw the analysis: it doesn’t even overwrite, it creates an entire new set of command structures.”
“And creates a set of criteria that excludes ninety-nine percent of humans, killing those it rejects. Bla bla, you guys really want to go over this shit again?” Marigold huffed, pulling a loose strand of hair that had escaped her chopsticks back behind her ear.
“It’s brainstorming hun, if we could unravel who started this ball rolling maybe we could stop it with less drastic measures.” John spoke, defending Oswald. “And he’s right, there are probably less than a hundred people on earth with the knowledge and resources to do something on this scale.”
“And what about individuals with new forms of coadaptation? What about any one of the hundreds of extremist groups that have been protesting nanotech?” Marigold was frustrated now. “There is absolutely no way to point blame now. People are dying, war is tearing this country apart, and frankly, I am not sure our race will survive if we don’t finish this...”
Silence fell back over them; flashes from distant explosions punctuating the light from Oswalds solder gun, and the booms growing more distant. They worked in relative silence, until the outside world grew eerily quiet, the stillness outside beginning to match the stillness of the three scientists. After what seemed like hours, daybreak struck. The sun began to beam in through the eastern windows.
John stood and stretched, walking up the gantry to peek out into the daylight. Warily peering outwards, he shuddered and fell to his knees. Tears streamed down his face for a moment, and Marigold moved to comfort him.
The city was in shambles. Ruined buildings were crumbling in the distance. The structural devastation from the conventional fighting was horrific enough, but with his nanite enhanced visual cortex, John was able to pick out hundreds of nearby corpses with a glance. Small tactical nuclear weapons had left precision strikes pocking the city, with craters two hundred feet across, leveling buildings at the edges and vaporizing them at the center of the blast.
The fighting had moved further away, but staggered soldiers and super soldiers still meandered just at the base of the building and beyond. The regular soldiers John could pick out were screaming insanely, scratching at their skin as the rejection took hold.
“We need to hurry” Marigold said, ushering john back down the gantry. There was no way a regular soldier could pick them out from all the windows on the forty-fifth floor, but if a super soldier or war machine had noticed the movement, they might be inclined to investigate.
Oswald wiped his brow, rising from the crouch he had held for the last few hours. “All done here. How is the interface coming?” He asked John.
“It’s fine, it’s good.” He dried his tears and covertly moved back down the gantry and away from the windows. “What’s the charge ratio looking like Mary?”
“It’s good for now, we’ve pulled enough off the generators for a functional radius, but we’ll need pretty significant power if we want to go any wider.” She replied. She noticed herself trying to subtly scratch what was becoming an intolerable itch, but chose to say nothing. If the rejection was taking hold, there was no way to know how long she had left, and her only hope was finishing this project.
John noted her scratch, half listening to her report. Before she had finished speaking, an insistent beeping struck the room like a gong. The wall length vid-screen flickered to life, an array of security cameras showing the building interior were pulled up automatically. Oswald had insisted that they ensure that security had been rerouted and pre-programmed to respond only to the remaining members of their team.
All of the surviving employees of Human Dynamiks had been evacuated before the fighting. Every major nanotech power was making whatever makeshift changes they could to try to stop the rejection. No one had been entirely successful thus far, but the changes bought time. Nanotech specialists and their resources were far too critical for either side to risk harming. Most were still dying of the rejection virus however.
The activation of the internal defenses could mean only one thing. Someone outside was forcing their way in. They had been noticed. The screen showed a lone super soldier moving carefully through the front lobby, coadapted to the point that his skin was almost entirely metallic. His eyes shone with an eerie red hue and his hair seemed to be replaced by thick scaly metallic dreadlocks. Oddly placed inhuman bulges pressed his flesh outward at odd angles, betraying advanced enhancement systems put in place by his swarm. He had clearly been hit by explosive ordnance. Though his flesh had regenerated, his uniform was reduced to char, dangling off his rippling, nanite constructed musculature.
“Shit. Shit. Shit, they saw you.” Oswald began to panic.
“Calm down.” John snapped. “We have to get the device out of here. We have plans for this, we just have to get to the sub-level. The tramway should be intact, I didn’t see any nuke strikes over it’s route.”
“They shouldn’t threaten H.D. employees, they won’t kill us Oz.” Marigold said, attempting to reassure Oswald.
“They’ll just try and take us into their commanding officers...” Oswald began to stutter out, before he was interrupted, as a second monstrous hulk of a man appeared on an alternate camera. The first had not noticed the second, but the newcomer was clearly hunting him. A blast of light exploded from some form of weapon embedded in the hunter’s hand. The blow glanced off the first monster’s shoulder, shuddering the building as the force of the blast slammed into the walls.
Marigold let out a yelp as the floor shook underneath them.
“God damnit they are gonna tear the whole place down around them.” John hollered, waving dust away as the roof shuddered.
Oswald grimaced, his face belying the fear they were all feeling. “But, their orders should be to preserve nanotech experts at all cost. It shouldn’t matter what side they're on.”
“Well maybe their orders don’t matter now... Or maybe they don’t know we’re here.” John replied warily, concern creeping into his voice.
Wordlessly, Oswald walked slowly to the capacitive screen, forcing each step. He began pulling up the command system for the building intercom.
The speakers crackled to life, a slight feedback from the doctors hand resting on the screen jarring the doctors. “Attention unidentified combatants. This is Dr. Oswald Marchand, Assistant Director of Bioengineering, and member of the board of directors for Human Dynamiks. I am still in the building, please stand down.”
Hearing the announcement, the bitter conflict paused, each warrior holding their pose for a moment before lowering their respective in-body weapons and standing down.
“Responsible for destroying humanity or not, being a nanotech expert has its uses...” Oswald sighed, obviously relieved that the programming in their cybernetics and nanotechnology overrode whatever emotions the two once-men felt downstairs.
A series of high pitched chirps escaped from each soldiers mouth, and a long antenna pushed out of the clavicle of the hunter. It slid upwards, slick with blood, and the soldier dropped to a crouch. Through the security system, they knew it was transmitting a signal, or at least attempting to reach its superiors. Whether it had any superiors left alive, who could say.
It stood again retracting it’s slender antenna into its body once again. In the voice of a young man, it spoke in a soft tone: “Doctor Marchand, I have been given orders to escort you from the conflict zone. Please meet me on the first floor. You have five minutes.”
The man he was fighting turned to leave the building. The survival of Doctor Marchand was obviously considered a higher priority to both sides than killing one another. They didn’t even consider initiating a conflict over possession that could potentially kill him.
“Well that worked.” Marygold sighed out relieved. “Now what, we have to get the machine to the tram.”
“I’m going to go down.” Marchand was shaking, his skin pale. He was obviously terrified at the notion. “You heard him, five minutes, I have to go down...” He trailed off, tears welling in the corners of his eyes.
Marigold balled her fists. “No Oz, No, we can find a way out of this.” She was trying to convince Oswald against it, but her faced showed that she hadn’t yet fully convinced herself. She pleaded with him, but had no alternatives to offer. If he didn’t go down, the monster would start looking for him. If it didn’t find him, there was no telling what it would do, but the destruction one super-soldier alone was capable of was incalculable. If it did find them, escape would be impossible.
Marchand turned and hugged Marigold, and they wept as they held one another close. She kissed him on the cheek, and they relented. Marchand extended a hand to Logain, and was pulled into a bear hug.
“Thank you.” Marchand said tearfully. “I love you both. Be happy, get to your children, remember me.”
“This isn’t the end Oz, you know where we are going. You can still make it for the test.” Jonathan gave his best smile. Holding his friend by the shoulders.
Oswald did his best to return the smile, and began walking out of the room. They had managed to keep the generators up, so it was only one elevator ride between him and his unknown fate. With no further goodbyes, Oswald left.
The Logains worked wordlessly to pack up their invention. Marchand had bought them time, but once he was successfully out of the building, the conflict would most certainly erupt around them again. They managed to sequester their machine into a service elevator, and began their descent for the tramway...
---------------------------------------
Family:
Elaine watched the night sky with concern. She was traditionally a worrier, her face was etched with deep worry lines, but todays worry went far beyond her usual fretful fare. The night was quiet. Crickets chirped, and occasionally faint booms were barely discernable in the distance. Off to the south she could just make out flashes of light. Like distant lightning bolts, she felt a creeping terror with each new flash.
She sipped her tea. The kids were asleep, Michael had spent the day in wonder of the animals. Gazing like only a city kid can at the sheep and chickens meandering through their pens. Julia was just beginning to walk, and Elaine had spent most of her day keeping her out of things. It had been a long time since Marigold and her sister were babies, she loved it, but it was exhausting.
Many of the farms chores had gone by the wayside. The animals were getting cranky at the lackadaisical care they had been receiving in the last three weeks. For a moment, she considered once again how much simpler things would be if she had invested in some of the more advanced technological advancement in husbandry and agriculture tools. She let out a light sigh as she reminded herself of the devastation and death that so called “technological advancement” was wreaking in the distance right then.
She listened as intently as she could for any signs of activity on the road, but heard nothing. Most of her neighbors were miles away. Those neighbors that had embraced new technologies had already died. She had argued with her friend William Mason, one of her closest neighbors, years ago when he had first brought nanites onto his farm. It improved every aspect of a person, made life easier. Or so he said. He and his entire family had died from rejection four days ago.
Elaine had opposed it from the start. Her daughters had called her a luddite, making their feelings quite clear that being behind the times with technology was ensuring the death of relevance in this modern age.
She remembered her father’s stories warning against such things. They had nearly lost the farm in a lawsuit with Monsanto. The genetics company had “accidentally” crossbred their pesticide resistant strain of wheat into the local crops. Only a handful of local farmers had willingly bought Monsanto brand seeds. But against the design of the genetics experiment, tested out on a massive scale, the modified seeds has cross-germinated with the local crops. Now all the farmers had patented genetic code, biotechnology, in their crops and Monsanto wanted their due.
Elaine had done everything she could to remain distant from the emerging nanotechnology. After the news stories had started coming out, she was very happy with her decision. At first it was a small number of people being made sick by some seemingly random software virus in their particular nanite swarm. Within the next couple weeks, the rate of infection had increased exponentially, and the first death occurred. It was as if a dam had released. The deaths started and no power of man could stop or slow the onslaught.
She had considered herself safe from the apocalypse. She planned to sustain herself, tend her farm, and wait for a peaceful death. Until her daughter called and asked her to take possession of her children. She talked rapidly and excitedly, growing frustrated with her unadapted mother’s slow wit and too thoughtful responses. A chance to save mankind she had said. Marigold wasn’t one to beg, but her tone made it very clear that there was no other choice. Without someone to watch Julia and Michael, away from the conflict, there was no guarantee they could survive the war.
And now she was infected. Being in close proximity to someone with a swarm for any length of time almost guaranteed infection. There were supposed to be a hundred different safeguards in place to prevent just such things from happening. But in the face of the rejection, none of the promises by those in support of nanites seemed to hold true.
Apparently Johnathan’s company had made some changes. They had instituted whatever small patches they could to counteract the rejection. But it wasn’t enough. She scratched idly at a small cluster of silver glitter on her left wrist. A death sentence, no way to know how long she had left. Without the patches from Human Dynamiks she had heard horror stories of the pain and torment that the rejection process entailed. She supposed she should consider herself lucky. She could still die relatively comfortably.
Michael was beginning to understand. He had early physical signs of coadaptation, and could just barely grasp what that meant. His swarm was small, immature, and had not yet begun interfacing with his nervous system. But he knew it meant he would die. He had begged her every night since they had come to take the bad machines out of him. She wished she knew how. Once a swarm was in the body, there was no way left to remove it. Every method and technique used to remove nanites was completely impotent now. The authorities had made it very clear that they were working on the problem, but had no solutions to offer now. Remain calm. Always more alerts to remain calm.
She sipped her tea, it was cold. She had come out to watch the distance after the kids had lain down for bed, but now she was beginning to grow exhausted herself. Any day now... Her daughter would come home... any day now...
---------------------------------------
Comments
Post a Comment