Nanotroopers Episode 22: Epilogue

Nanotroopers

  Episode 22: Epilogue

  Copyright 2017 Philip Bosshardt

  A few words about this series….

  *** Nanotroopers is a series of 15,000- 20,000 word episodes detailing the adventures of Johnny Winger and his experiences as a nanotrooper with the United Nations Quantum Corps.

  *** Each episode will be about 40-50 pages, approximately 20,000 words in length.

  *** A new episode will be available and uploaded every 3 weeks.

  *** There will be 22 episodes. The story will be completely serialized in about 14 months.

  *** Each episode is a stand-alone story but will advance the greater theme and plot of the story arc.

  *** The main plotline: U.N. Quantum Corps must defeat the criminal cartel Red Hammer’s efforts to steal or disable their new nanorobotic ANAD systems.

  Episode # Title Approximate Upload Date

  1 ‘Atomgrabbers’ 1-14-16

  2 ‘Nog School’ 2-8-16

  3 ‘Deeno and Mighty Mite’ 2-29-16

  4 ‘ANAD’ 3-21-16

  5 ‘Table Top Mountain’ 4-11-16

  6 ‘I, Lieutenant John Winger…’ 5-2-16

  7 ‘Hong Chui’ 5-23-16

  8 ‘Doc Barnes’ 6-13-16

  9 ‘Demonios of Via Verde’ 7-5-16

  10 ‘The Big Bang’ 7-25-16

  11 ‘Engebbe’ 8-15-16

  12 ‘The Symbiosis Project’ 9-5-16

  13 ‘Small is All!’ 9-26-16

  14 ‘’The HNRIV Factor’ 10-17-16

  15 ‘A Black Hole’ 11-7-16

  16 ‘ANAD on Ice’ 11-29-16

  17 ‘Lions Rock’ 12-19-16

  18 ‘Geoplanes’ 1-9-17

  19 ‘Mount Kipwezi’ 1-30-17

  20 ‘Doc II’ 2-20-17

  21 ‘Paryang Monastery’ 3-13-17

  22 ‘Epilogue’ 4-3-17

  Chapter 1

  “Ship of Theseus”

  “The role of the infinitely small is infinitely large.”

  Louis Pasteur

  Mesa de Oro

  Yucatan State, Mexico

  December 30, 2049

  1230 hours

  Dr. Ryne Falkland pointed to the imager display, revealing a faint scaffolding in the center of the screen.

  General Wellman Kincade, base commander, squinted at the sight. “Looks like a flower trellis. What’s that dark mass…looks like a bunch of grapes.”

  Falkland tweaked the resolution of the imager. “We’re growing a new Johnny Winger in there, General.”

  Kincade made a sour face. “I don’t suppose it’s like growing tomatoes, is it, Doctor.”

  “Not exactly. In fact, it’s quite a process. First we have to build the core module, with all the memory modules, the buffer, the config translator. Then comes the main platform and actuator mast, the casing and all the effectors, sensors, the propulsors. It’s pretty involved.”

  “What kind of time frame are we looking at?”

  Falkland gave that some thought. “If all goes well, probably a week. And then come the tests…learning in the comm centers, basic replication, launch, recovery, elementary swarm ops, that sort of thing. It’s a bit of an art form, General.”

  Kincade growled. “I’ll never get used to this…,growing nanotroopers like geraniums. What’s that ship model about?” He indicated a small wooden model of a Greek trireme on top of a nearby cabinet.

  Falkland chuckled. “A bit of joke, I’m afraid. That’s the Ship of Theseus.”

  Kincade was puzzled. “What’s that…a Caribbean cruise ship?”

  “Not exactly. More of a philosophical conundrum. The ancient Greeks had a ship called the Ship of Theseus…a famous craft that they really treasured. They wanted to keep it up, so from time to time, they had to replace the ship’s planks. The philosophers got into an argument about whether, if all the planks were replaced, was their ship still the same ship?”

  Kincade scowled. “What’s that have to do with Major Winger?”

  Falkland shrugged. “Not much. Some have made the same argument about angels and nanobotic creations. Once I re-grow Winger, is the new model the same as the old one? That’s the conundrum.”

  Kincade said, “Thinking like that makes my head hurt. I’ll stick to commanding this base. Keep me posted, Doctor.”

  “Sure thing, sir.”

  The general left the containment cell, cycling himself out through all the locks and biometrics and headed up to the Ops Center. It was sunny, hot and humid for the day before New Year’s. Kincade had about a million things to do and reports to write for UNIFORCE, dealing with the aftermath of the Himalaya Strike mission. He wanted his 1st Nano commander, Major Winger, back whole and hearty for the days of debriefing that he knew would be coming.

  Even if Winger had to be grown from a vat.

  The big day came and Kincade gathered with Dr. Falkland outside the containment chamber. Inside the chamber, a small bed had been placed, for Johnny Winger to lie on when ‘he’ was fully assembled and formed. Just in case, electron beam injectors were primed and ready.

  “We can’t violate safety protocols, even in this situation,” Falkland explained.

  Kincade rubbed his sandy moustache nervously. He glanced up at Falkland. “I know you’ve done this before, Doc, but I’m still not quite sure how to feel about it.”

  Falkland nodded. “Of course, I understand completely, General. It’s natural to feel a little…nervous? Is that the right word? Perhaps, a mixture, I think. Something between fear, anticipation, anxiety and hope. A cocktail. Shaken not stirred.” He smiled at his own little joke.

  Kincade was doubtful but said nothing, while Falkland scanned his board and made some adjustments. “I’ve got the Config Engine loaded now. From the scans we did before, we have lots of data. I had a quite a time massaging and tweaking and converting all that data, trying to get something clean. You don’t know it, but I’ve already run some tests…yesterday. Things looked promising.”

  Kincade was curious. “What kind of tests, Doc?”

  Falkland was reluctant to go into details now. Clients were sometimes sensitive about these matters. “Oh, just little tests. I extracted some of the data and ran it through the Config Engine…you know, assembling small things, simple structures.”

  “Of Major Winger? What kind of simple structures?”

  “It was just a test—“

  “What kind of structures, Doc?” Kincade asked, a little more firmly.

  Falkland shrugged, went back to his instruments. “A finger here, a hand there. Really, it went well.”

  Kincade nearly choked. “A finger? You assembled one of the fingers? And a hand? What happened—“

  “The test went fine. The Config Engine performed as expected. I examined the…er, the structures and found them well formed, molecularly correct, consistent with the templates from your data. It was…what can I say?…a finger.”

  “And a hand.”

  “Exactly.”

  “What did you do with them?”

  Falkland looked surprised. Sometimes, he figured it was better if the clients didn’t know all the details. People reacted differently. “I let it go. That is, the Config Engine broke them down, disassembled them. Back into feedstock.”

  Kincade swallowed hard. Maybe Falkland was right. Normal commanders shouldn’t be able to just conjure up limbs and fingers of their troops. But then again, since nanobotic assemblers had been invented, maybe they could. It was all very confusing.

  “Okay, Doc…I guess I really didn’t need to hear about that
. What’s next?”

  Falkland turned back to his control station. “Next is releasing the feedstock into the chamber.” He pressed a few buttons and on the monitor, a faint mist began issuing from a row of ports. The chamber quickly filled with the mist. “Just raw stock. A bunch of atoms and molecules…standard stuff…oxygens, irons, phosphorous and nitrogens…you name it. Ingredients for the cook….” Immediately he wished he hadn’t said that. Every client reacted differently. And this one was base commander at Mesa de Oro.

  The filling took about three minutes. “All the templates of Major Winger are loaded in the Config Engine now. When the previous…uh, version was scanned and disassembled, I took a memory field map of all those atoms in structure and created these templates. We should be able to put together a new Johnny, better than ever.”

  Kincade just shook his head. “This is just creepy, Doc, hearing one of my troopers talked about like this. Get on with it—“

  “Of course.” Falkland pressed a few more buttons.

  Inside the containment chamber, the master assembler had just been released. The master was a nanobotic device that orchestrated assembly of feedstock atoms and molecules into whatever structures were contained in the template.

  The monitor showed a mist filling the chamber, like an early morning fog, only this mist sparkled as if a billion fireflies were embedded. The mist thickened until the bed was lost to view. Minutes passed. Falkland followed his instruments, adjusting the Config Engine on the fly.

  “Threshold density,” he announced. “Memory field steady….all parameters in the green.”

  The first hint of structure emerged from the fog, in the form of a faint, translucent, almost ghostly hand, alongside the edge of the bed. Fluctuations in the fog caused more structure to become intermittently visible: several fingers, part of a forearm, a brief glimpse of a knee. From these structures, Kincade silently estimated where Johnny’s head and face should be. But nothing was visible yet.

  More minutes passed. Then, the general sucked in his breath. He pointed.

  The barest outlines of a face materialized into view, slipping in and out of the fog like a wraith. There was the upturned nose, the same mole beside his nose. And the lips—

  “It’s him!” Kincade watched in amazement as more and more structure came into view. From everything he could see, it was Johnny Winger. He knew how the technology worked. Falkland had done this before, several times. He understood how assemblers slammed atoms together according to a template. As base commander of a battalion of nanotroopers, he’d run more configs than Falkland had ever dreamed about. But this…this was different.

  The thing seemed as real as the wooden Ship of Theseus model on the cabinet.

  Falkland watched the monitor and his instruments carefully, making some minor adjustments. “Config still stable. No alarms…no issues. He’s coming in beautifully. Everything within tolerances, right in the middle of the band. I’m adding more feedstock… we’re approaching minimum density….what do you think, General?”

  Kincade let his eyes play across the prostrate form of his company commander, inside the containment chamber. Part of his mind told him this couldn’t be Winger…it was a sim, a near-perfect likeness, but still a likeness. But his own feelings overruled that hard logic and he felt a lump in the back of his throat. It couldn’t be Johnny Winger.

  But it was Johnny Winger.

  To keep control of himself, Kincade focused on the instruments, on the swarm inside the vault, on critiquing the process, on config stability, anything to smother all those feelings that were bubbling up.

  “How long, Doc?”

  Falkland studied the board, watched as more and more of Johnny Winger emerged from the mist into solid structure. “Well, scans are showing about sixty-five percent complete. This should be done in about two more hours. After we reach target density, I’ve got to run some tests. See how stable the config is. Make sure the pattern buffers are cleared out. And we’ll spot check the config against the original memory field. Plus there’s still loading from the file Doc II made…neural patterns of memory and personality. That’ll be another hour.”

  “This is so unreal,” Kincade said. “He looks so lifelike….”

  By mid-afternoon, Falkland pronounced himself satisfied. Looking through the portholes of the containment chamber, Johnny Winger was lying on his side on the bed, seemingly asleep. He seemed to be breathing; his chest rose and fell with a rhythmic pattern. Wellman Kincade knew full well that it was part of the config, in effect, a breathing simulation program was running on the main processor. But the physical impression was so real, it was so easy to imagine—

  “I think it’s safe to let him out now,” Falkland decided. “The loading from Doc II’s file seems to have gone okay…I’m not detecting any anomalies so far.” He enjoyed the look of anticipation on Kincade’s face. He also took a quick peek at the electron beam injectors, just in case. Angels sometimes developed glitches and hiccups in their program during assembly. It happened. You couldn’t take too many chances. “I’m shutting down security systems. Latches coming un-done.” A few clicks, pops and squeaks sounded at the hatch. Then a hiss, as pressures equalized. Falkland went over and dogged the hatch open.

  Kincade pushed past him. He could hardly believe his eyes.

  Major John Winger was sitting up in the bed, looking around. It was Johnny, in every way they could tell…the same blond buzzcut, the same blue eyes, angular cheeks, the mole by his lips. Except….

  When Winger reached up to brush back a lock of hair, the tips of his fingers sparkled and flashed, as the bots didn’t quite track accurately. A faint trail of light swirled across his face.

  Falkland cleared his throat, a bit embarrassed. “I can fix that…just some tweaks to the algorithms.”

  Kincade came up. “How do you feel now, son?”

  Johnny Winger shrugged, jammed his hands under the covers. “Maybe a bit spacey, General. Like I’m not all quite here.”

  “Well said, son…well said. Dr. Falkland, is he up to a little walk? We just got new mission tasking from UNIFORCE and I need his knowledge from Paryang.”

  Falkland studied a portable scanner in his hands, probing the instrument up and down the length of the angel. “I don’t see why not. Give me five minutes to adjust some things and I’ll do a limited release…Sergeant Givens can go with him…just in case.”

  Falkland spent the next five minutes, after shooing everyone else out of the room, modifying the replication routines in Johnny’s master processor. “It’ll smooth out some of the jerkiness, Major. Your core is solid, but some of your extremities aren’t tracking smoothly.”

  Winger lay back on his pillow, trying to put into words what it felt like, to be an angel.

  “It’s like floating in a warm bath, Doc. I really don’t feel anything.”

  “It’s all in your basic algorithms, Johnny. We’ve spent weeks trying to get those right.”

  Shortly after two in the afternoon, Falkland authorized the Johnny Winger angel for release. Sergeant Ed Givens, one of the containment techs, would accompany him. Givens carried a portal config generator to change and adjust Johnny on the fly. He also carried a concealed HERF side arm, just in case.

  The two of them walked resolutely across the grassy quadrangle alongside the Barracks/BOQ building, catching other troopers saluting but giving them a wide berth.

  Kincade had mentioned a new THREATCON had just come in from UNIFORCE.

  Europa

  December 30, 2149 (Earth U.T.)

  On Europa, there is only ice…to the naked eye. Ice cliffs and ice valleys. Ice ravines and ice canyons. Ice bergs, buttes, badlands. Ice continents. Above the ice is the vacuum of space. Below the ice is a vast ocean, black as night. Normally, the two don’t mix.

  In the late fall of 2049, as people on Earth reckon time, a small channel of sluggish,
slightly warmer ice surged upward through the badlands of Conamara Chaos, embedded in a column known to geologists as a diapir, and burst through the surface crust. A geyser erupted into space, not in itself an unusual occurrence on Europa. However, this geyser extended over several square kilometers, flinging tons of ice and steam into the heavens.

  This geyser caught the attention of observers on Earth and at Korolev Crater’s Farside Observatory, on the Moon.

  After the HNRV asteroid deflection mission some months before, an orbiting detection network had been put into place between Jupiter and Mars. Known as Jupiter-Eye, it was designed to provide intelligence on the comings and goings of asteroids and comets as they traversed Jupiter space on their years-long orbits through the inner solar system. The network contained numerous instruments: visual cameras, mass spectrometers, neutron flux devices, radiometers.

  On the first day of December, Jupiter-Eye detected evidence of some kind of vast disturbance under the ice of Jupiter’s moon Europa. Increased thermals, spikes in electromagnetic activity, even acoustic signals well above baseline were detected and processed through SpaceGuard Center at Farside.

  There was no consensus on what the signals meant, just a growing suspicion that something seemed to be stirring after centuries of quiescence. Analysts at SpaceGuard Center, vidconferencing with their colleagues at the UNISPACE Watch Command Center in Paris, concurred that something was happening on the surface of Europa, something different, something unexpected. An unanticipated spike in decoherence wake activity from below the ruins of the Paryang Monastery in Tibet made the analysts even more uneasy. Paryang had been destroyed only a few months before…or so it was thought. It became harder and harder to ignore the conclusion that something at or under Paryang was talking to something under the icy surface of Europa.

  Visual analysis from Jupiter-Eye was inconclusive. But it was plain to see from the imagery streaming back from Jupiter’s huge satellite, that a newly formed geyser had just erupted on the surface. After some discussion, UNISPACE analysts finally decided to log the event as an icequake, a shifting of ice plates and ice continents, that had opened up a channel to pressurized water beneath. That water, rising through the newly formed channel from the Europan ocean, was now sublimating into space, in a series of spectacular geysers. The phenomenon seemed to be mainly centered along a series of ice grooves, known as linea, starting in the Conamara Chaos and ending at the southern end of Radamanthys Linea, longitude 192 degrees, latitude 12 degrees north.

  Or so they thought. The report issued to CINCSPACE made the conclusion that the geyser field was nothing more than an unusual series of ice plates shifting about, despite growing evidence of massive movements in the ocean below. Jupiter-Eye would continue to observe and record the event, providing thesis material for astronomers and geologists and glaciologists for years to come. Farside and UNISPACE would continue to monitor the activity that had roiled the surface of Europa.

  But the report was firm in its principal conclusion: natural forces were responsible for a series of new ice geysers erupting on the surface of Europa. It was more violent and spectacular than before, but nothing the investigators hadn’t seen before on countless worlds, even on Europa itself.

  What Jupiter-Eye could not see, however, was what was actually embedded in the main geyser, hidden from view, obscured by the violence of tons of ice sublimating into space every second. A vast and alien swarm was no longer submerged in Europa’s ocean of night. Instead, the swarm had bored through more than thirty kilometers of ice and risen to the surface of the satellite. Now residing in a steep ice ravine, surrounded by towering ice cliffs, hidden by geysering spouts of water, the vast swarm boiled away like a festering sore, slamming atoms to maintain itself and expand in the maelstrom of erupting ice and water.

  As it settled onto the icy surface, the alien swarm had begun to bud off trillions of replicant bots from its main structure. The swarm was shedding parts of itself.

  These bots sloughed off and drifted upward, some riding on droplets of water, particles of ice sublimating into the vacuum. Most of the bots managed to achieve escape velocity through infinitesimal nano-scale thrusters, using the available water as propellant. Orienting themselves toward the Sun, the swelling swarm of nanobots soon entered a steep, elliptical heliocentric orbit, an orbit which would intersect the orbit of Earth in less than six months.

  Disguised by the geysers, the swarm escaped Europa and the Jupiter system completely. They now drifted sunward…and Earthward.

  Farside Observatory

  Korolev Crater, the Moon

  June 25, 2050

  0100 hours U.T.

  Third-shift astronomers Nigel Course and Lilly Fong knew of no better word to describe what they were seeing than dread. Pure, unaltered, rock-in-the-bottom-of-your-stomach dread.

  Both were pulling late shift today…tonight…whatever the hell it was. Tending the radars and telescopes of Farside Array, scanning sector after sector of the heavens for any little burp or fart worthy of an astronomer’s interest. The High Freq array had just gone through a major tune-up last week and it was Course’s job to give her a complete shakedown for the next few days.

  At the moment, she was boresighted to some distant gamma-ray sources somewhere in Pegasus…where exactly he’d forgotten.

  While Fong peeled a banana and stifled a yawn, Course took one last look out the nearest porthole and begrudged the final wisps of daylight before Farside was fully enveloped in the nightfall. At that same moment, he heard a beeping from his console and turned his attention back to the array controls.

  What the hell…

  Nigel Course looked over his boards, controlling the positioning of the great radars out on the crater floor and the optical and radio telescopes that accompanied them. He quickly pinpointed the source of the beeping…Nodes 20 through 24…the south lateral array…was picking up some anomaly.

  He massaged the controls and tried to focus the array better, get better resolution on the target. SpaceGuard didn’t beep without reason.

  A quick perusal made the hairs on the back of Nigel Course’s neck stand up. The system displayed a list of likely targets, based on radar imaging and known ephemerides. He scanned the list, mumbling the details to himself.

  “ Hmmm….right ascension 22 degrees, 57 minutes, 28 seconds. Declination 20 degrees, 46 minutes, 8 seconds---“ Just as he was about to consult the catalog, SpaceGuard threw up a starmap.

  Lily Fong dropped her half-eaten banana.

  “What the hell--” she murmured.

  Course’s fingers were flying around the keyboard. “Lilly, now don’t get your panties in a wad. We need to study this thing. It’s an all-sector alarm, I’ve got returns on all bands. Whatever the hell it is, it’s big. Ginormous, in fact. A quarter of the sky, centered on 51 Pegasi, but not fifty light years away. In fact, it’s right on our doorstep…”

  “Anything on Doppler?”

  Course finagled with more buttons. “Bearing…toward the inner system. Margin of error puts it within a cone approximately two astronomical units, centered…” he tapped more keys, “…centered on us or near us.”

  Fong shuddered. “It’s here. Billions of kilometers away but it’s here. Can we get some resolution on the thing?”

  “We can try.” For the next few minutes, the two astronomers worked together, manipulating the instruments that comprised the SpaceGuard net, a vast detection grid orbiting the sun beyond the orbit of Mars, a grid designed and placed to alert UNISPACE to any threats coming from certain suspect bearings…like Europa. The design parameters never mentioned the Old Ones or little green men or extraterrestrial monsters from outer space by name, but no one was fooled.

  SpaceGuard was designed to do exactly what it seemed to have just done.

  After half an hour, Fong sat back in her chair. Her face was pale, the blood had drained out when the alarm had gone off. A she
en of sweat beaded up on her forehead and drops fell to the keyboard. She ignored them and looked wordlessly over at Course.

  “You know what we have to do.” It wasn’t a question. “The protocol’s pretty clear when we get a Level One alert.”

  Course ran down the results of the last scan, the one that made Fong so pale. “I read the analysis this way, Lilly…just so we’re clear on the details in case questions come up. After washing the raw data through ALBERT three times, do you concur that the detected anomaly…we’re calling it EUROTOP for now…Europa Transiting Optical Phenomena…is a diffuse mass of small particle-sized objects with a thermal signature of a large swarm?”

  Fong nodded silently, staring at the graphs and plots on her panel as if they were contaminated. “I concur,” she whispered, weakly. “It has to be the leading edge, Nigel. That’s all it can be. We studied and simulated this possibility for months, every which way we can. Most of the runs converge on results very similar to, if not identical, to this. ALBERT doesn’t lie.”

  Course stood up and went over to a porthole, which gave onto a constricted view of the nearest arrays of the Submillimeter Interferometer, and a shadowy backdrop of Korolev crater’s steep craggy walls beyond. A triangle of blazing sunlight still illuminated the upper rim, last gasp of the lunar day.

  “I still don’t get it--“Course shook his head, turning back to the consoles. “Europa’s been deader than dirt for months…Jupiter-Eye’s never showed anything. Now, all of a sudden, BLAM! Energy spikes all over the place. We should have seen something before…rising X-ray, rising gamma levels, something. Black holes don’t just appear out of nowhere, not under the ice of Europa.”

  “ALBERT doesn’t say it’s a black hole, Nigel. That’s just wishful thinking.”

  Course shrugged, staring at the velocity scans superimposed on each other, silently willing the data to say something else, anything else. “If it’s not a micro, then what is it? What eats whole worlds?”

  Fong pointed to the graphs on her display. “That does. There’s your answer. ALBERT doesn’t care whether we like it or not. Best match with the data from Jupiter Eye. Really, the only match.”

  Course took a deep breath. “I know, I know. I’m just trying to make sure what we have is airtight. Every time we’ve raised a flag, UNISPACE winds up hitting us over the head with it. Ice quakes…asteroid impact…Type I sublimation event…they’ve always got another explanation. But this time—“

  “I’m sending a NOTAP to Gateway. The Watch Center needs to see this. Maybe they’ll have some ideas.”

  Course nodded. “Do it. I’ll set SenDef Three. Sentinel Defense Condition Three. That’ll wake everybody up at Gateway and Station P…pretty much everybody from here to Mars.”

  The Notice of Astronomical Phenomena went out from Farside moments later. It was like setting off a firecracker at a funeral. In less than five minutes, the dense grid of comm links from Earth to the Moon to Mars had erupted into a furor, buzzing and vibrating with questions, answers, expletives, exclamations, proclamations, bad jokes and nervous posts.

  All Nigel Course and Lilly Fong could do now was wait…wait for the inevitable call from UNISPACE Headquarters in Paris.

  Chapter 2

  “EUROTOP”