Chapter 48


The truck was part of a small convoy. The Conspiracy and the Standard Model were house-sized mobile labs, each staffed by a dozen Resistance specialists who lived on the road for months at a time. Maintaining half a kilometer separation, they had missed the attack. A roadworthy building, the second lab was the first to reach the Matterhorn of white smoke. They immediately saw the police wouldn't be able to handle this. Five years ago they had been unable to stop a giant truck rampage before it ran out of fuel. A thousand homes had been pulverized, though most of the residents had gotten out in time.
  A soft hiss emanated from the fog, probably randomized sounds from within. The Resistance believed in the power of shields. Human-level technology (lasers and active armor) could always defeat the microscopic kind, even if everyone had to live behind hermetic walls. The lab crew ran their checklists, and launched a wire-guided drone over the fallen cloud. It looked solid from above. Maybe the robot was converting all the matter underneath. They sent the drone into the fog, ready for anything.
  Thirty meters below, the driver refused to leave his seat. He said the attack had been a simulation, and there was no robot. Rick knew the impacts and camera views had been too realistic.
  He wasn't completely sure, of course. At least five bizarre news stories had been widely ignored as hoaxes until today. In the past month, two people had vanished from moving cars, and three buildings had been rearranged overnight. Rick suspected Millipol had eliminated the first of its future enemies.
  He climbed over the dashboard, and lowered himself down the truck's fender until he felt moss under his boots. When he turned around, reality faded like a white wall. He couldn't see his hands anymore. Damon helped Janet to the ground. They heard a distant thump. The truck would further delay the robot.
  Damon led the way. The two Resistance experts carried heavy backpacks, while Rick took the laser and a portable fuel cell. Pike and Janet performed dozens of tests, probing the recent past. They generated an overlaid terrain map, as seen by the truck before it had released the fog. The map faded as they advanced, and they had to maneuver by touch and Damon's directional stereo beacon.
  After a few seconds, the white light began to seem like darkness. Rick wasn't aware he had closed his eyes. As the environment simplified to zero, something waited for him to fail.
  He thought he heard whispers, and remembered yesterday's revelations. Tarek had been right: minds without limit, inhabiting universes uncounted - the true meaning of reality. Beyond empathy, they knew all patterns, including whatever he was thinking right now, but they couldn't affect him in any way.
  Secure in his artificially stabilized personality, Rick found it a comforting thought. Tina would have wondered about all the endless social details, while Damon probably found it infuriating.
  Most possible minds were so large their pattern regressed toward the mean: endless egocentric chaos. Like a gray fog, they couldn't simplify themselves any further. Gray was a good color.
  Finally, he perceived the void that surrounded them all, multiplying forever, each mystery replaced by a larger one, at the end the all-consuming gap of absolute ignorance. Infinity was so complex he couldn't even make a false statement about it. His own existence was the most ephemeral fluff imaginable. People under the influence of drugs or imminent death had stranger feelings, but none this profound. Life was the illusion that the combined accidents of nature added up to something average.
  "That's right," a voice seemed to say.
  After an unknowable delay, Rick stumbled and almost fell. He hurriedly reactivated his visor screen, and jumped up and down. Damon asked if he was all right.
  The fog cleared ahead of schedule, barely two minutes after the crash. Tree outlines showed up like veins in his eyes. Moving gaps in the crumbling cloud had odd shapes, green curtains with shards of sky. The local trees were smaller and brighter than the Russian forests. He crossed an old dirt path, gone in a blink. If one of the Air Forces attacked now, many small bombs would arrive at once. To do his job, he had to ignore such thoughts.
  "I've lost contact with the truck," Damon said. "Standard Model reports a wave of dust has cleared the fog."
  Something shimmered around them, like overlapping panes of glass. The sky looked red, and the air felt thicker.
  The robot was here, a ghost that could affect them. Floating microns created patterns in the air and the soil, influencing each other with moving charges. Rick's skin itched and tingled.
  At worst, every human within five kilometers would be disassembled where they stood, absorbed into a sudden wasteland of ash and steam, becoming raw materials for a new generation of sentient weapons. Made of microscopic wires and diamond needles, a few thousand floating tumbleweeds could kill everyone on Earth.
  More likely, the microns might combine into sensitive body scanners, and trigger top-level neural pathways, the "sprites" that competed to form thoughts. Rick worried he had already been compromised or copied, a piece of software in a world turned to dust. He would try to resist, even if he had become a zombie. He was fully aware of his own thoughts, which meant his mind hadn't been simplified.
  Fortunately, the robot had only been a prototype. Technology this advanced might actually be harmless. That was their only hope.
  Ten meters behind the others, Pike glided over the green carpet, ready for movement from any direction. He looked much thinner without his overcoat. Dozens of screens overlapped in his vision. He had never been busier.
  His body armor was covered with hair-thin needles that trembled in waves, guiding an electromagnetic field more sensitive than a shark's nose. It would sense the residual motion in a block of ice, which could still contain enough heat to vaporize two similar blocks. A few faint signals had leaked through the fog. The air itself had become conductive. He knew the floating microns sensed him too. To him they resembled Starter technology. Someone was trying to shock and intimidate mankind.
  When a cold ring appeared around his waist, Pike thought it had to be a coolant leak. Then he saw a blob slowly climbing toward his face, like static on an old television screen. Pike remembered walking through a spiderweb or a communications string. His armor shouldn't have transmitted the sensation.
  His only defense was his determination not to be captured alive. Pike armed his suicide button.
  "Don't damage the sample!" Damon shouted. Jogging along, he used a gun swab to collect some of the microns approaching Pike's neck joint: 100% genuine metamaterials. Damon also carried a liter of acid, but Pike's armor was already weakened. He lit a forced-air torch that shrieked as the flame turned blue. "Controlled burn."
  "Can't it wait until I'm dead?"
  "No time," Damon replied. "Don't worry. Your armor has a high specific heat index."
  He waved the torch over Pike's chest, who felt a flash of heat. Then came a rainbow of colors, and a snowflake pattern as the tiny robots drew closer, forming a protective layer. The microns had interlocking arms and hooks of flexible plastic. In some cases they flowed faster than water. Bubbles erupted in the glue-like substance, covered with strange flames. One bubble expanded, changing color until it was one layer thick, a marble ball rolling upward.
  "I'm beginning to get slightly annoyed," Damon said, a famous movie phrase. Actually, he wasn't.
  Weighing less than a gram, the micron balloon disconnected from the armor, and floated between the trees. It turned transparent as the microns tried to recombine into bullet-sized rotors, spirals, butterflies. The code didn't exist yet, and only dust glistened down.
  "They're everywhere," Pike said.
  Artificial hummingbirds darted through the woods, colliding with patches of fog. The next generation might be immune. A few minutes ago, they had still powered the tentacle. Larger craft flew overhead, guiding the others with pheromone gradients or radio beacons. Grotesquely asymmetric, they would soon become obsolete.
  With less than a minute to live, the micron swarm tried to impose its pattern on every atom in the forest. Entropy reversed itself, as magnetic domains formed in the weeds, the branches, the dry soil. Tiny sparks danced between leaves. There would be no more noise, heat, or vibration. Only pure order remained. Unlike Tarek's entropy scanner, this was the real deal, allegedly developed in Anonymous's mansion. Damon had rejected the few rumors of its existence as utterly implausible.
  The system would need approximately one eon to become fully operational. How much damage could the charged microns do in the few seconds they had left? For a moment, Rick thought the robot was reforming itself ahead, a skeleton with too many arms. Fear was intensely familiar yet brand-new, as if the danger had never existed before. Then the shape turned into a tree.
  The attack was once again being broadcast from the mobile labs. Total viewership had passed one billion. Finally, something impossible was happening. Unwilling to be manipulated, some people refused to watch. From above, the remnants of the fog looked like floating statues.
  On a dozen radar screens, the micron swarm looked almost solid, with brief flashes as temporary configurations reflected the beams. Hundreds of nearby cell towers and repeaters received the signals.
  Once enough bandwidth became available, the swarm revealed its true purpose. Like a one-hectare galaxy, the remaining microns burned all their fuel in an electromagnetic chain reaction. Transmitting for only six seconds on every frequency that could penetrate Earth's atmosphere, the swarm broadcast its own pattern in uncompressed analog: the attack robot blueprints, how to convert it into a micron swarm, and everything it had learned in the past five minutes.
  It was a relatively small amount of highly scrambled data, with hundreds of main beams and sidelobes to provide ample redundancy. The Net audience recorded every frequency band. Within a few months, all the telemetry would have been processed and reassembled, and the robot might return stronger than before.
  The response came ten seconds too late. A gray blur rolled out of the sky, with a sound like falling sand. To Rick, the sudden darkness felt like fainting. There was dry heat as tiny drones rained against his armor, and he smelled chlorine though his breathing mask. Micron ashes settled like snow.
  The Standard Model had launched a tower of chemically activated fog over their position, burning whatever remained of the swarm. On the live broadcast, parts of the cloud broke into avalanches rolling down the flanks. Within minutes the crew would be arrested for their efforts.
  Damon grabbed the laser, and lit a green flare. "Don't everybody help us at once!" he shouted.
  The Resistance vertol arrived a minute late. Branches cracked as it landed in its own downdraft like a falling dragon. The trillionaire who owned the craft had insisted on flying it personally. A door opened in the darkness, and they saw a circle of luxury couches.
  "Now comes the hard part," Damon said.

  It was almost a shock to sit down again. Climbing into daylight, Rick watched the instant replay of the battle. Shining faintly through the fog, the robot had contracted into a new shape, and leaped across the road. That part of the video had to be a simulation. The landing was too smooth to be real. The Resistance had tried to fire a probe into the robot, before testing their secret weapon.
  Officially, it was a universal antenna, a UN-sponsored project. Powered by the lab's brake generators, the tightly packed sphere of needles had been designed to detect certain types of concentrated information: microns, viruses, perhaps even dangerous thoughts. At present, it could only cause distant sparks.
  The lab had driven into the undergrowth, dislodging three drive wheels and bending its frame, while the antenna generated chaotic interference, 100 Hertz to far-infrared, seeking a lethal resonance. Small fires had started in the woods, birds fell on the ground, and the drivers still stranded on the nearby highway got headaches. Many also had breathing problems from the fog.
  Micron paste used van der Waals' forces to organize and sustain itself. The tentacle and muscle layers required perfect timing. When the antenna had disrupted the interlocking arms and magnetic data domains, the robot instantly froze. In the enhanced view it still looked blurred, its texture changing from stone to sand to mud. It began to shrink and disperse into a shimmering swarm, a purely instinctive response.
  The husk had caught fire and collapsed. The Resistance probed the fog with wire streamers, and sprayed foam over the remains.
  The floating microns hadn't been designed to fight back. They could only watch and learn. The lab had measured low-temperature Alfven and magnetosonic waves, the music of magnetic field lines, unstable knots and pressure traps. The swarm's destruction had generated a brief but magnificent signal. A solid wall of overlapping emission bands, particles moving in perfect harmony.
  As the vertol climbed, Rick's head sank in the pillow. A news copter passed with a flash of sunlight. He barely heard the ducted rotors as the five-minute war replayed in his mind. They still wore their body armor, which would have to be decontaminated.
  His final insight struck him like a brick to the head.