Nanoswarm, page 4
“The flight attendant. I used her, claimed her body, to save the pilot. But when I left… Liza… I think I killed her.”
4
Anonymous
“ My name is Harrison. I’m an alcoholic.”
“Hi, Harrison,” the group of twelve said in response.
Everyone knew his name already. It wasn’t only because, until recently, he’d served as the President of the United States, either. He’d made these meetings every day for ninety days straight—an accomplishment represented by the forest-green coin he now rubbed between his thumb and forefinger.
There weren’t nearly as many Alcoholics Anonymous groups as there used to be. Nanovax had taken care of the primary problem that most whoever joined such a twelve-step program hoped to address. That was the only condition of membership, after all, was the desire to stop drinking.
But of all the twelve steps, only the first one mentioned alcohol at all. The rest were about living life on its own terms. Committing to principles of personal responsibility, making amends for one’s wrongs, and developing a relationship with the God of one’s understanding.
It wasn’t the God thing that was difficult at first. Harrison grew up believing in God—even if he didn’t totally embrace all the dogmas his church taught him. It wasn’t the making amends part, either, that he struggled with. It was the principle of rigorous honesty. After all, for the better part of the last thirty years, Harrison had been a politician and a successful one at that. It was under his watch that Nanovax was adopted and mandated to the public. It was based on his cabinet’s actions, which he signed off on at the time, that the algorithm was implemented. He only learned recently, though, that it was also one of his own most trusted cabinet members—Dr. Archimedes Flat—who orchestrated the very terrorist attacks that he used to justify the implementation of the algorithm to begin with.
After that, particularly since Flat had enabled Harrison’s drinking problem to the point that he wasn’t as attentive as he could have been, Harrison couldn’t remain President. Not in good conscience. His Vice President, now President Regina Davis, accepted that mantle of responsibility.
No one sitting around the table wore one of the inhibitors. Most of them might receive one when the second batch of the devices was released. Harrison, himself, was offered one, but he didn’t need it. Ever since Flat made his move to expand the nanoverse, to take control of not only the government but humanity itself, the nanobots in his system were defunct. They didn’t connect to the nanoverse. They wouldn’t even heal him anymore. Now, they were just foreign objects flowing purposelessly through the former President’s bloodstream.
Harrison felt a vibration in his pocket. He always kept his phone silenced during meetings. He wasn’t the President anymore, after all. There weren’t any real emergencies that might require his assistance. President Davis had everything she needed, even the advice of his former Chief of Staff, Rowland Fuentes, who’d had the foresight to warn about the dangers of Nanovax from the start. Warnings that Harrison now regretted he didn’t heed.
Harrison ignored the vibrations as he did his best to focus on what Barbara, one of the group’s members, shared about her struggle to re-build trust with her daughter. After twelve years of sobriety, you’d think that her daughter could forgive her. Nonetheless, the wounds inflicted by an active alcoholic cut deep. If anyone knew that, it was Harrison. He hadn’t just wounded people he cared about. He harmed the nation he loved, the one he’d once fought to protect as a soldier before he went into politics.
Harrison’s phone vibrated a second time. Again, Harrison ignored it. Whoever it was could wait thirty minutes. The meeting was half-over, anyway.
Barbara finished sharing. An ex-biker, Ralph, started to share. He might have been an ex-biker, but he still wore his bandana and the usual Harley Davidson leather jacket that Harrison had seen him wear every meeting since he’d started coming. Ralph had twenty years of sobriety. Why in the world, Harrison thought the first time he heard that, would someone with so much sobriety keep coming back? There had to be a reason—and Harrison was starting to discover that reason now that he’d eclipsed his three-month mark. There was so much more to what these groups did for people than helping them quit drinking.
Harrison’s phone vibrated a third time. Harrison sighed. Anyone who called three times, in rapid succession, must’ve had something urgent that needed to be discussed. Harrison stood from his seat at the table and ducked into the restroom down the hall. He didn’t have to use the room, but it gave him a semblance of privacy. It wasn’t a privilege that Harrison often had. Due to the anonymity required for A.A., though, Harrison insisted that even his Secret Service personnel assigned to him for life on account of being a former president remain outside.
The name on his phone was one he knew well. It was his former Chief of Staff, Rowland Fuentes. Harrison slid his thumb on the phone. He and Rowland were two of only a few people who still used such devices, given that most people communicated via the nanoverse. Rowland didn’t trust the injections, and Harrison’s nanobots didn’t work. Even if someone was calling from the nanoverse, Harrison could receive their communications via his phone.
“Rowland?” Harrison said, placing his phone to his ear after sliding his thumb across the screen to pick up the call.
“President Neuhaus,” Rowland said. “I’m afraid we need your assistance.”
Harrison snorted. “My assistance? I’m not the President anymore, Rowland.”
“Be that as it may be,” Rowland said. “There’s been an incident. Haven’t you heard?”
“An incident? When? And what kind of incident?”
“Within the last fifteen minutes,” Rowland said. It made sense that Harrison hadn’t heard anything. He’d been in his meeting, his phone silenced and in his pocket, for the better part of the hour. No one else in the group, while they all had nanobots in their systems, connected to outside channels during meetings. “There’s been a problem with the inhibitors. Everyone who has received one has either died or had to remove the inhibitor to heal.”
Harrison gulped. Could this be happening? The inhibitor project was one of Harrison’s final initiatives as President before his resignation. Did he really screw that up, too? “How did this happen?”
“We’re not sure,” Rowland said. “But there are accidents all over the country. Planes crashing. Cars crashing. It’s like the Day of the Fifteen all over again.”
“This shouldn’t have happened,” Harrison said. “There’s nothing in the inhibitor that could cause that so far as I was told.”
“It’s not the inhibitor that’s the problem,” Rowland said. “Larson believes it’s something that Flat programmed into the nanonetwork before the first batch of inhibitors was distributed. Something triggered when the inhibitors were implanted in the subjects.”
“Wait,” Harrison said. “How is President Davis?”
“That’s another reason I’m calling,” Rowland said. “I’ll fill you in on the details when you arrive. She needs you to return to the White House. We need someone here who knows what’s happening, someone unaffected by the nanobots.”
Harrison shook his head. “I don’t have any authority. I’m not sure how much I can do to help.”
“But you can serve as an advisor,” Rowland said. “We just can’t trust anyone who has been injected right now.”
“You weren't injected,” Harrison said. “You were the one member of the cabinet who didn’t receive the shot, just in case something like this might happen.”
“That’s true,” Rowland said. “But even I shouldn’t be making all these decisions alone. It isn’t only President Davis who would appreciate your return. I could use you, too, Harrison.”
5
Resistance HQ
Brian and Liza returned to the resistance headquarters. The only reason they continued to use the old, abandoned asylum after the government rescinded the Nanovax mandate was that even though everyone there had the nanobots in their systems, the lead-lined walls prevented any communication between the nanobots in their bodies and the nanoverse itself. Combined with first-edition inhibitors—mostly prototypes that Larson had made before the government bought his design and put them into mass production—there wasn’t much that the algorithm, before, or Flat now could do to the resistance from afar.
It looked like Brian wasn’t going to get the kind of action he was hoping for that night. Not that there wasn’t plenty of action. He was simply hoping for more of the… arousing than the death-defying kind of action. The date went well. The flirtations back and forth were evident. He and Liza had chemistry—even though they hadn’t gotten off on the right foot when they first met. After several ass-kickings at the hands of Liza and a joint adventure saving Carlos, then Susie, the tension between Brian and Liza faded, and a new, more desirable kind of tension emerged. A tension marked by unfulfilled desire. Brian had hoped to relieve that tension later in the evening. If he’d judged her flirtations correctly, he suspected Liza hoped for the same.
It clearly wasn’t going to happen, not after all that happened.
Keith “Bonecrusher” Koontz was pacing back and forth. Like Brian, Keith had received an experimental dose of Nanovax during the war. It saved his life. Still, for whatever reason, Keith’s injuries didn’t result in the same response to Nanovax that Brian experienced. He couldn’t harness the nanobots in his system. He couldn’t take flight in a nanoswarm or engage other people’s nanobots. He couldn’t “possess” others, like when Brian seized control of the central nervous system in the flight attendant’s body. Brian couldn’t do that again.
Not without risking the life of the person whose body, whose nervous system, he manipulated. Doing so on the plane saved dozens of lives. Even if it cost the flight attendant hers. Brian knew that everyone would have died on that plane if he hadn’t intervened. But that didn’t assuage his pangs of guilt. Brian knew what it felt like to take a life for the sake of a greater cause. He’d done it before, many times, as a soldier. He never forgot a face—of the men whose faces he saw, anyway—from among those he’d killed in the war. Sometimes, they appeared in his dreams, haunting Brian’s recollections of a time in his life that he never really spoke about. It was a topic he only discussed in the company of other soldiers, those who’d been through a similar hell, like Bonecrusher.
Brian and Liza entered the control room—hardly anyone seemed to notice them. Only Father Ezra Pulowski gave Brian a friendly nod as they approached Seneca, who was huddled over one of his monitors, scrolling through pages of code in a fury. Bonecrusher wasn’t there. He was probably still with Susie, watching Brian’s daughter for the night.
John and Eloise Larson watched from the middle of the room as the codes Seneca examined were duplicated on a large screen in the front of the control room.
Brian couldn’t read the code. Not exactly. When he was in the nanoverse, he only saw what the code represented. He sensed it. He knew what it meant. Now, though, he might as well have been staring at Sanskrit.
“They’re trying to figure out the origin of Flat’s new program,” Ezra said, wearing his usual black shirt and clergy collar, as he stepped to Brian’s left side. Liza was standing on Brian’s right, a little closer than she ever had before. Her shoulder lightly grazed Brian’s triceps as she stood, focused as everyone else, on the codes scrolling across the monitor in front of them. So long as Brian knew, Liza couldn’t read the codes any better than he could. Still, anticipation was in the air. Brian expected something obvious, some kind of revelation, to pop up on the screen at any moment. Judging from the expressions on Seneca’s face—twisted, contorted, his brow furrowed—nothing that explained what was happening appeared.
“Is something bothering you?” Father Ezra asked, tilting his head up and to the side. Brian didn’t turn to make eye contact. Brian didn’t look back. He still stared forward, the numbers flashing on the screen indiscernible but hypnotic.
Brian heard what the priest said. He didn’t have a thing to say. Instead, he nodded his head.
“Would you like to talk about it?” Father Ezra asked.
Brian grunted. “I don’t talk about things like that.”
The priest shrugged. “You don’t. Maybe you should.”
“Marines are taught to bury their emotions,” Brian said. “I’ll be alright.”
The priest huffed. “Feeling your emotions, you know, that’s what makes you human. Bury your emotions, and you’re more machine than man. And if you’re going to engage the nanonetwork, if you’re going to resist being absorbed into the code, you can’t deny your emotions. You need to embrace them, express them, allow them to fuel you. It’s what sets you apart from the code. It’s why you’re different than Archimedes Flat.”
Brian sighed. “I used the nanobots within a woman, a flight attendant, to prevent a plane crash. When I left her, she died. I think it’s my fault.”
Father Ezra placed his hand on Brian’s back. “Come with me, son. We aren’t needed here.”
Brian glanced at Liza. She smiled back at him. “He’s right. Go. If we need you, I’ll come to get you.”
Brian sighed, turned, and followed the priest down one of the corridors to his room. All the rooms at resistance headquarters were plain. Soldiers like Brian and Keith weren’t the sort who prioritized decorations. The only decorations Brian had in his room were for Susie’s benefit. Most of them featured Disney princesses.
Ezra’s room was different. He had a single, wooden crucifix affixed to his wall. The carved corpus was intricate and life-like. A rosary, with alternating dark and light wooden beads, hung from his bedpost. A single image, an icon of the resurrected Christ, two fingers raised as if bestowing a benediction, and a halo above his head, was set in a frame resting on the priest's nightstand. Next to that, the Catholic breviary and a bible.
“I must confess,” the priest said, “for the sake of full disclosure, Larson wanted me to talk to you. I would have anyway. But he wants me to convince you of his plan.”
Brian huffed. “Of course. There’s always an agenda.”
“Perhaps,” the priest said, sitting on the edge of his bed and gesturing toward a small wooden chair sitting against the opposite wall. Brian took the hint and sat in it as Ezra continued speaking. “If we’re honest, though, we always have an agenda of some kind. Without an agenda, without motivation, no one has a sense of purpose. The question is not whether I have an agenda, or if Larson does, but whether our agendas are the same or at least compatible.”
Brian snorted. “So, what’s your agenda?”
“To give you a chance to process what happened.”
Brian shrugged. “I’ve killed before. In the war. This is war.”
“But have you ever killed someone who wasn’t your enemy?”
Brian sighed. “I haven’t. But, you know, what is an enemy? We’re taught, in our culture, that the world is full of heroes and villains. We root for the good guys to win. But from the perspective of the other side, from the vantage point of our enemies, they are the heroes of their story. To them, we are the villains.”
Ezra smiled. “So, now that a woman died who didn’t deserve it, you’re questioning whether you’re the hero or the villain?”
Brian nodded. “I suppose you could say that.”
“You’ve done something similar to that in training before without incident. You had no reason to suspect that it would harm her. Tell me, Brian. Did you intend to kill that woman?”
“Of course not. But I read her mind. That woman had a son. I don’t think my intentions are worth a hill of beans to that boy. If he knew I did it, even if by accident, I’d always and only be the one who killed his mother. No matter what I intended.”
Father Ezra nodded. “He may never know. But if he does, that’s his journey. We are all set on a path, Brian. Our path is always our own. Certainly, at times, our paths cross with others. Perhaps, a part of that boy’s story will be to learn to forgive, to learn grace, to honor his mother’s death as more than a loss but as a sacrifice that saved dozens more.”
“I agree,” Brian said. “Which is why, no matter what happened, I have to press forward on my path. I need to leave it behind and stay on mission.”
Father Ezra shook his head. “Our paths are not straight trails, without fork or deviation. Events in our lives change our course. The roads we follow on our journey will fork. Sometimes, our roads will dead-end, and we need to backtrack to find another way forward. That is what we call, in the Church, repentance. Our emotions are like road signs. They show us where forks are coming so we can prepare for what comes next. If you don’t pay heed to your emotions, Brian, you’ll be lost when you try to move forward.”
Brian sighed. “So what am I looking at here? Is it a fork in the road, a dead-end, or what? It feels like a warning, like slippery when wet.”
“Perhaps it is a warning and a fork. I cannot tell you what your signs mean, Brian. I can only encourage you to pay heed to them. Listen to your conscience. Pray on the meaning of it all if you're the praying sort.”
Brian shook his head. “I don’t know how to read my emotions. I don’t even know what I’m feeling.”
“That’s because you're so accustomed to denying your emotions, burying them, that when you see them on your path, it’s as if they’re written in a language you don’t know. We learn to read our emotions the same way we learn to speak a language. Sure, you can study your emotions, read books about what they mean and their significance. You can learn languages that way, too. But it’s not the most efficient way. Do you know the best way to learn a language, Brian?”
Brian shrugged. “I suppose it’s the way you learn your first language. You observe, you listen, and you repeat.”
Ezra nodded. “Or, to put it another way, you immerse yourself in the culture, in the language itself. They say that you know you’ve truly mastered a language when you find yourself thinking in that language. Say you were to go to Mexico. You learned Spanish from a book. How long would it take before your thoughts were no longer in English but in Spanish?”
