Nanotroopers Episode 12: The Symbiosis Project

  ***Base, recommending Spinning Jenny maneuver…this maneuver is tactically sound and prevents frontal assault against ANAD***

  He knew ANAD was right. You never approached an unknown bot head-on. Spinning Jenny was sound doctrine, right out of the tactical manual. Give the enemy nothing fixed to target. Sneak up on a tangent, and grab something vital. Float like a butterfly and sting like a bee.

  “Negative,” Winger decided. He wanted to close and recon the bastard a little more closely.

  But as ANAD sidled up to the bot, the thing spun away and jetted off into the distance, poking in and out of view behind some dendritic branches of nerve fiber.

  What the hell?

  “ANAD, go to half-propulsor. Home on target ahead. I want to make an inspection pass.”

  He could tell from the sounder image that ANAD was closing the distance. But the enemy wouldn’t play ball. Time and again, ANAD made an approach, from a variety of bearings, and each time, the Dana bot would spin away and thrust itself off into the distance.

  “ANAD, pursue the target. And replicate more mass. Let’s try to outflank these bugs.”

  ANAD did as commanded. Winger toggled the rep command and ordered the assembler to replicate more copies of itself. The plan was to approach from multiple vectors, surround and flank their quarry and encircle it, then close for inspection and a kill.

  But the Dana bot would not cooperate. Even as ANAD jetted forward, Winger could see the bot image dwindling in the distance, growing fainter in the murk of the tangled nerve net that was Deeno’s cerebral cortex. Winger kept reminding himself where he was.

  Need to minimize collateral damage here, he told himself. This isn’t Mali. Or Lions Rock. It was a nanotrooper’s brain.

  The chase was on. Dana bots dwindled and scooted off into the distance, even as Winger commanded ANAD to full propulsor and folded effectors to streamline his casing.

  “I wish I knew where the hell we were.” He could try a long-range shot. Too much chance he’d hit something vital. It was like counter-swarming in the middle of a busy city.

  Then it hit him. “ANAD, project target’s current track. Give me a heading.”

  The assembler crunched on that for a moment, then ***Target is transiting outer C1 layer and Betz cell complexes. Entering lateral geniculate nucleus. Estimating intercept of optic chiasm and optic nerve fibers in forty thousand microns, current speed and heading***

  “That’s it! That’s where she’s heading.” A chill went down Winger’s spine. He knew the optic nerve led to the lachrymal ducts, the tear ducts. It was a well-known exit point for nanobots inside a human brain. “She’s going to try and leave the party. ANAD, plot an intercept course and go to max propulsor. We’ve got to head that force off and keep them from leaving Deeno….” If the Dana bots managed to exit the lachrymal ducts and went airborne, containment cell B could be in a world of hurt.

  The chase lasted ten minutes, but ANAD could never close the distance. Whatever they were, the Dana bots—he chastised himself for calling them that but he knew the mechs had somehow spalled off the Dana Tallant angel—were fast and highly maneuverable, using the dendrites and axons of Deeno’s cerebral cortex like a forest, popping in and out view, changing course, doubling back, the small swarm dispersing and re-congregating like a ghostly mirage.

  Winger decided there was no way ANAD could catch their quarry. He dragged himself out of ANAD’s nano view back to the macro world, fought off a wave of nausea and signaled Sergeant Gavin to ready the injectors.

  “They’re coming out! Flood the cell if the bastards come out--!”

  Gavin was at a console just outside the hatch. He could see Corporal D’Nunzio still moaning, writhing with mild convulsions as the enemy swarm lit off dopamine cascades everywhere it went…thalamus, ventral tegmentum, they were all lighting up like Times Square on New Year’s Eve. Gavin shook his head. This was bad, real bad. Deeno’s ventral tegmentum was the central switchboard of pain and pleasure, just above her brain stem. As Winger steadied himself back into the macro world, ANAD’s sounder image momentarily sharpened to a dense, hazy forest of neural tissue. Uncountable millions of neurons throbbed with pulses, while the Dana mechs pumped the gaps with dopamine, and sucked them dry just as fast. Each cycle sent D’Nunzio into shudders and spasms.

  “Lieutenant…I can’t…not with you still inside—“

  The safety inhibits! Winger swore. “Gavin, bypass the freakin’ inhibits! Get ready to blow this cell to smithereens—“

  But before he could even finish his words, Deeno’s face was suddenly enveloped in a pulsating red-orange fog, as the mechs erupted out of her eyes. The master bot had clearly triggered a big bang and the entire gurney was quickly smothered in flickering, flashing thunderstorm of a swarm.

  Winger batted and flailed and backed away from the bed, stumbling, then falling heavily to his side.

  Gavin had his orders. He was just about to stab the FIRE button, flooding the containment cell with trillions of electron volts when hands firmly clamped onto his shoulder. He turned around.

  It was Mighty Mite Barnes and Oscar M’Bela. Doc Frost hovered right behind them. Mary Duncan too.

  “Not yet, Sergeant. Hold off—“ Barnes’ face was a mix of horror and determination. “That’s Lieutenant Winger in there. And Deeno D’Nunzio. We’ll take it from here—“

  “Open the hatch,” M’Bela ordered. Doc Frost was about to object, but the Nigerian’s tone of voice brooked no dissent. Gavin cycled the lockout. “We’re going in—“

  Frost said, “I wouldn’t…that’s a max rate replication going on in there—“

  Barnes held up a small-bore pistol-shaped weapon. It was a short-range HERF gun. “That’s why I brought Shorty here…now, move aside. Gavin, cycle it open…now!”

  The sergeant did as ordered. As soon as the heavy hatch swung wide enough to slip through, both troopers dashed inside, swatting and batting at the swelling cloud of bots now filling the cell. Barnes lit off her HERF gun and the rf thunderclap boomed off the walls, deafening both of them. Fried bots tinkled onto the floor by the million, but the bubble of clear air lasted only seconds. Behind them, Gavin slammed the hatch shut.

  Johnny Winger lay on the tile floor on his side, beside the bed. On top of the bed, Deeno still thrashed and writhed in uncontrollable agony, her face contorted in pain.

  M’Bela rushed toward the writhing form of Johnny Winger.

  “Lieutenant…Lieutenant Winger!” M’Bela bent over the prostrate form, swatting at the cloud of mechs descending on them, pinning Winger to the ground as he thrashed and flailed about.

  “My head—“ the Lieutenant was trying hard to rip his own head off at the neck. “They’re in…inside…it’s my head!!!” He squirmed, fighting off both troopers, who waved frantically for help. More troopers from outside the Containment bay had cycled themselves in and came running from every direction.

  M’Bela put his full weight on Winger’s chest, before stepping back and helping hoist Winger’s squirming body up into a makeshift litter.

  “Get him to the next cell…fast! Other side of the hall!” Barnes yelled. Winger was hand carried. Then, inside Cell C, he was forcibly restrained on a portable gurney.

  “Get this cell sealed, pronto!” Barnes barked at the others.

  “My ANAD’s still initializing,” M’Bela told her.

  “I don’t care…get a shield up now! We could be assaulted any second!”

  While M’Bela worked to power up his own embedded ANAD and launch a shield force of mechs, Barnes pressed her face close to Winger’s. “You got mechs inside you…just hold on—we’re prepping ANAD now—“

  Winger’s face was contorted in a grimace of pain, his lips moving but no sound came out. With effort, he croaked out a few words.

  “What…how…what…our shields?—“ He tried to lift himself up.

  “I
don’t know what happened,” Barnes told him. She pushed him back down onto the bed. She felt tremors pulsing through his body, one after another, waves of tremors like small seizures. The mechs were systematically penetrating critical motor circuits deep inside his brain, bit by bit taking firm control.

  It was a race now, she realized, a race between the mechs inside his head and Witchy M’Bela, who was working furiously to get his own ANAD ready to go. Time was short, growing critical. Barnes tried to comfort Winger in between seizures.

  “We’re going to put ANAD inside you,” she told him, bending closer to his shuddering face. “Search and destroy—“

  Winger managed a weak smile. “Watch out…what you destroy—“

  Barnes helped turn him over so M’Bela could fit up the injector tube.

  “I…want to…to pilot—“ Winger gritted out the words with difficulty. “I can—“

  “No you can’t.” Barnes was firm. “Witchy’s a perfectly capable pilot. He can grab atoms with the best of them.”

  “Not…inside my…brain, he can’t,” Winger grimaced. “Look—“ he strained against the restraint straps, clawing at Barnes’ tunic. “—look, it’s Dana Tallant…I know it…it has to be…I know her…I know where she’s going…seen the bots…their tactics—“

  M’Bela was ready for launch. “With all due respects, Lieutenant, your hands are shaking too much. You could hurt yourself…pretty bad—“

  Winger fought the straps so vehemently that Barnes had to relax them. He struggled up to a sitting position, still shivering, his forehead wet with perspiration, his eyes glazed over from the fiery buzz burning in the center of his skull.

  “Give—“he stretched out his fingers toward the IC panel. “…I can do it, I tell you! I can—“but his face screwed up into a mask of pain and his outstretched fingers curled into a quivering fist. “…can…I can…pilot this thing—“

  Barnes didn’t want to. It was a bad idea, dangerous, fraught with too much risk. But she couldn’t find the courage to say no. She took a deep breath, glared at Winger, then at M’Bela, even back at the porthole, where Frost and Duncan peered in helplessly. Nobody else was senior, nobody else had command authority. Winger’s own embedded ANAD was likely toast. It was her decision, thrust on her by events.

  “Give it to him.”

  “Sergeant, it’s too—“

  “Give it to him!”

  M’Bela moved the IC panel closer to the gurney.

  Moments later, the injector tube was hooked up to the skinpinch, the tube was enabled, and the pressure pulse from the containment cylinder snapped through the linkup, sending the ANAD master hurtling in a slug of compressed solution inside Winger’s carotid artery. M’Bela worked side by side with Winger at the panel, managing config, while the Lieutenant gently grasped the joysticks, trying to calm his fingers long enough to grasp the controls. The rest of the detail looked on anxiously.

  Somehow, Johnny Winger had to guide ANAD into battle with renegade Dana Tallant mechs active deep inside his own brain’s limbic system, mechs already replicating rapidly to seize control of critical neural circuits. As ANAD cruised deeper into his bloodstream, M’Bela sent signals to begin replicating for battle.

  While he did that, Johnny Winger alternated between moments of lucidity and moments of wrenching convulsions.

  He could barely make out the imager through eyes blurry with pain and shaking. Somehow—maybe M’Bela had done it—ANAD had transited the carotid artery and the blood-brain barrier and was inside Winger’s cortical tissues, heading down, deeper into the midbrain, past the finger-like projections of the hypothalamus, past the amygdala and the hippocampus, cruising through the nucleus accumbens at the highest speed possible, until at last the pea-shaped ventral tegmentum was straight ahead. The imager view was a blur of spidery axons and dendrite projections, tangled into dense jungle growth, with cascades of flickering light tracing paths in every direction at once.

  ANAD cruised on his picowatt propulsors for a few moments, playing hide and seek among the projections, tacking against fluid currents among the axons, steering clear of dense knots of fiber, while Barnes and M’Bela helped the Lieutenant operate the controls.

  “Sounding ahead, sir,” M’Bela muttered. “Let’s see what’s out there. How do you feel now, sir?”

  Winger was dizzy, disoriented. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he knew millions of Dana Tallant mechs were seizing control of critical circuits deep in his ventral tegmentum, setting up shop to commandeer the reward pathways of his mind and stimulate pain and pleasure on demand.

  “Like I got the worst hangover in the history of man…where are we?”

  Barnes took a hack off the vascular grid and computed their position. “Sixty thousand microns off the parietal approach to the tegmentum. Sir, I recommend we config ANAD for Threat 1 defense.”

  “Do it,” Winger slurred. He shook off the drowsiness, clearing his head for a moment. How long the clarity would last, he didn’t know. They were in a race now, a race against an enemy inside his own brain and the grand prize was control of Johnny Winger’s own limbic system.

  This is one race I can’t afford to lose.

  “Picking up pressure changes, Lieutenant,” M’Bela said. He tweaked the sounder, focused in on the bearing of the hit.

  By habit, Winger slowed ANAD to half power and cycled his outer effectors. “Bond disrupter’s ready, Sergeant. My carbenes are itching now…something’s out there and it’s not far away.”

  The telltale signature of an enemy force maneuvering deeper in the forest of axon fiber was easily enough detected. ANAD rapidly closed the gap, nosing his way through the fiber mats easily.

  “Slowing to one-quarter,” Winger gritted out. The convulsion hit one second later.

  The Lieutenant shuddered and nearly twisted off the bed onto the floor of the containment cell.

  “Hold him up!” Barnes yelled. Hands reached in and supported the Lieutenant, steadying him as the seizure took hold. His body was rigid, his hands curled into shaking fists, as he rocked and shook violently. M’Bela knocked his hands away from the controls to keep him from crashing ANAD into a critical structure, perhaps doing irreparable damage to vital tissues. Barnes hugged the Lieutenant tight, as the spasm worked its way down the length of his body. Wave after wave of convulsions coursed through his limbs.

  M’Bela gritted his teeth. To hell with recon, he told himself. The Lieutenant needs help before he breaks an arm.

  He nudged ANAD forward, ignoring the splash of soundings made by the dense axon forest, barreling toward his best estimate of the enemy’s last position.

  “Range…to…target…” Winger grunted out, squirming in the grasp of two people.

  “Now four thousand microns…large returns…big returns…many hits…looks like the enemy’s dispersing…”

  Winger felt the spasm beginning to subside. They’d probably provoked it sending ANAD in so fast. He’d just have to live with it…knowing the enemy wouldn’t give up without a fight.

  “Just keeping an eye…on us…” he gritted out. As his body relaxed, Barnes and M’Bela relaxed their hug and let the Lieutenant breathe a little better. Their eyes met his. “Thanks…guys…”

  “Big hits ahead!” M’Bela said. “Dead ahead…right through that gap—“ He indicated a fissure in the thicket of axons ahead, a reef of tissue held open by cranial fluid currents. The imager wavered, careened, then began settling down. “Sorry for the blur, sir…that’s your head rocking back and forth. Like a typhoon inside the midbrain—“

  “Tell me about it, Sergeant—“

  “There they are!”

  Winger watched tensely as the imager showed a blurry picture of a mech floating in for a close-up look. The mech looked for all the world like an ANAD clone, same tetrahedral core, same effectors, same bulb in the center of the lattice, housing the nanoprocessor. Even the same propulso
r layout, whirling like propellers as the device glided by.

  Jesus Christ, it is ANAD!

  Just a few microns closer—

  “Now! Re-config now, Lieutenant! Assault One…give ‘em a taste of knuckles and fists!”

  As ordered, Winger stabbed a button and the config was squirted off to ANAD. Slaved to the master, millions of replicants re-configured themselves into attack mode, baring carbene grabbers and pyridine probes, ready to close for battle.

  “Enable your bond disrupters,” Barnes muttered.

  “I’ve got the master!” Winger added. He pulsed his stick and ANAD closed the gap, turning immediately on the curious mech. The screen thrashed violently in the ensuing combat, as the forces closed for battle.

  Instantly, he felt the beginnings of another convulsion, a seizure coming on, fierce unrelenting pain like a billion needles jabbing into his head.

  “Arrrgghhh!” he cried out, but somehow, he was able to keep the pain confined in a box and focus on maneuvering ANAD. Behind him, Barnes reached out with strong hands to grasp his shoulder. Winger shrugged her off. “No…I’m okay! I’m okay…I can handle it—“

  “Lieutenant…we’re just—“

  “Really…I’m…okay—“ he gritted out. Another spasm, more needles, tongues of fire. The box was breaking down.

  He concentrated for a second on rebuilding the box, cramming the beast with no name back into it.

  Remember El Dorado cave…remember Diablo Lake…remember Bailey…he’s there…he won’t let go of you…just follow the winking red light—

  Fighting this battle on two fronts wasn’t going to be easy.

  “We’re engaging now!” M’Bela said, following the chaotic scene on the imager. “The whole front, looks like.”

  The battlefront seemed a vast, endless forest of fiber and tissue, yet its entire length was barely half an inch in extent. Deep inside dense groves of axons flickering with light, ANAD and his force slammed headlong into the enemy formation, gathering and bending atoms to build structure, quickly fashioning its programmed arsenal of weapons: electron lens, bond disrupters, enzymatic knives.

  The cytoplasm frothed and churned with furious combat.

  Winger squinted through bloodshot, pain-filled eyes at the melee unfolding before them. By instinct and training, his hands twitched and tweaked the stick and propulsor controls, battling nearby mechs blindly. Concentrating with all his might, squeezing out the needles that were jabbing his head, he entered the infinitesimal world of nanoscale war and became one with ANAD, whirling like a Roman centurion with halberd and sword at enemies in every direction.

  Come on, ANAD…it’s you and me, pal…you and me against all these poor suckers—

  ANAD seized a phosphor group at the outer edge of the nearest mech and twisted atoms until the bond snapped. Liberating thousands of electron volts, the disrupter zapped the mech and shattered its outer shell, ripping off probes left and right. The mech seemed to shudder from the assault and spun with the pulse, then re-engaged to fight off another bond snap. Throughout the forest of the ventral tegmentum, trillions of ANAD replicants duplicated the same tactic.

  “Go, Lieutenant! You got ‘em on the run!”

  Winger zeroed in on the mech’s inner core, the throbbing pod at the center of its lattice. This was the heart, the brains of the device. If he could get past the inner effectors, if he could rip through more of the phosphor and carbon groups, dodge the van der Waals buffeting….

  “I’m going for the jugular, Sergeant—watch my ass—“

  M’Bela made sure the immediate vicinity was swept clean of Dana Tallant bots, pummeling a few mechs, ripping a gash through a cloud of atoms around the ANAD master.

  “You’re clean, sir…give ‘em hell!”

  He fought his way in but Dana was an elusive foe. Time and again, ANAD and the enemy mech feinted and parried, engaged and disengaged, struck out and withdrew, each time closing to within bondsnap range, then dancing away just in time. Winger grew more and more frustrated with the maneuver, clenching his fist at each near miss.

  “It’s like the damn thing knows what I’m doing…like there’s more intelligence here than we thought—“ He clenched his teeth, driving ANAD forward, barreling through, slammed and torqued by rough forces and currents. “I’m just not strong enough to break in—“ More than ever, he was sure he was dealing with something beyond nanoscale intelligence. He was dealing with another nanotrooper now, though she was only a few nanometers in size. The Dana master had all the training and smarts of a cadet just out of nog school; how many times had they dueled in war games out at Hunt Valley?

  “Someone’s driving this baby,” he told them. “It has to be…it just doesn’t make any sense otherwise…it’s like she’s just playing with me.”

  Another convulsion, this one lighter in strength, wracked his head. “Mmmm—“ Winger clenched his teeth. He was getting close, he had to be, and Dana was fighting a desperate rearguard action. He shuddered and shivered for a few moments, while ANAD circled his prey, looking for a way in.

  What was it Doc Frost used to say--?

  Know the enemy and know yourself; then you shall not fear even a hundred battles.

  Suddenly, he had an idea. “Configuration one!” he told Glance.

  “Config one? Lieutenant—we’re right in the middle of the enemy—“

  “Do it!” he got out, wincing, squeezing his eyeballs shut, willing himself to be still, feeling Barnes and M’Bela’s hands gripping his shoulders. “It’s an old tactic…it’ll work. It’s got to work!”

  Against his better judgment, M’Bela complied, sending the signals to ANAD to safe and store all effectors, to sheath all weapons. On the imager screen, the churning plasma began slowly clearing. All throughout the axon forest, ANAD replicants suddenly shrank back from their engagements and stowed their weapons.

  “Lieutenant—I don’t—“

  “We’re going to draw them in real close,” Winger told him. “Surround us, envelope us completely.”

  “If we do that,” Barnes was wary, unsure of the Lieutenant’s mind , “it’ll be over in minutes. We let her flank us…we let these buggers encircle us and ANAD’ll be swamped. We’ve got to engage again and fast.”

  “No, I know what I’m doing.”

  Now, he remembered Doc Frost saying something else. Frost had long been a student of military history…and a devoted protégé of Sun Tzu.

  Reconnoiter first. He who is skilled hides in the most secret recesses of the earth.

  The seizure was subsiding. They were less and less frequent now and less and less vicious. ANAD had diverted Dana from her primary mission. The enemy mechs had vacated their positions among the synapses of his tegmentum to do battle with ANAD. Everything seemed clearer, brighter.

  More and more, he was sure this was the right tactic.

  “Now for the coup de grace,” Winger told them. From somewhere deep in his memory, he remembered a trick he’d once played on Dana Tallant at Hunt Valley. If the bot inside his head was truly all that was left of Tallant and if it somehow had her training and smarts, this trick should work.

  “Send configuration one eleven,” he muttered to M’Bela, screwing his eyes shut to fight off another wave of pain.

  M’Bela was puzzled. “Config one eleven…Lieutenant, there is no such config. I’ve never heard of such a config.”

  “It’s a caging technique…send it!”

  M’Bela found the config file and sent it. The ANAD master replicated off a few more copies and then went hunting.

  “Got to…got to find the master!” Winger got out. His mind was clearer but he felt dead tired. “Look for highest thermals…big-time atom grabbing—“

  “Got it,” M’Bela said. He and Barnes studied the returns from ANAD’s sounder, found activity highest along one vector and commanded ANAD in that direction.

  Soon enough, the density of
enemy bots had increased to the point that ANAD had to slow down. Winger studied the returns, decided the master had to be dead ahead…and then he ‘saw’ it. The queen bee. Tetrahedral casing, effectors out the ass, this was the prize. He maneuvered and side stepped and squeezed and tacked his way forward, caroming off replicants until he was only a few thousand microns away.

  “Now for C-111…” He told ANAD to replicate a small group, slaved directly to him. Approaching the master, bouncing and thrashing his way through the botstorm, poking along a nerve fiber flashing with thoughts in the making—his own thoughts, he realized—Winger tickled the joystick that M’Bela kept centering in his grasp, twisting and guiding ANAD through the melee…it was like fighting through a concert crowd to get to a front-row seat. Finally, he was close enough to the master to make a lunge.

  “Okay, ANAD…let’s do this! Grabbers out full, the whole enchilada. We’re going to bracket Dana here and form up a small cage…go go go!”

  Inside his own thalamus, the snatch and grab was made quickly, with only minimal interference. Some of the special ANAD group set their effectors to form the ‘bars’ of a small cage, then took up position around the master bot, nudging and zapping enemy bots that tried to fend them off. It was a crowd riot at atomic scale, fists and kicks flying in all directions.

  When the perimeter bots were in place, Winger drove the ANAD master forward to complete the entrapment.

  “GOTCHA!” he exulted. The trap was closed.

  “Bingo!” yelled Barnes, pumping a fist. “Slick maneuver, Lieutenant!”

  “Pure sweetness,” M’Bela agreed. “Now to get the hell out of there—“

  The caged master bot squirmed and fought from inside the cage of ANAD bots, and her own defenses threw themselves like crazed drones from the outside, but ANAD held firm and slowly, but surely made its way out of the riot.

  “Head for the optic nerve, Lieutenant,” Barnes said. “You’re about sixty thousand microns anterior to the epithalamus. I’ll get you a vector. There’s a junction nearby…paramedian thalamic artery, according to the grid. From there, you can make it to the optic nerve.”

  Winger took the vector, used ANAD’s bond disrupters to force his way through a gathering swarm of bots and headed along the route Barnes had given him. The trip took half an hour and he had to replicate more bots to give ANAD a flying wedge, like a football team’s offensive line, to make it.

  Finally, ANAD made the lachrymal duct and cruised on ahead with its catch, exiting the ducts through his lachrymal sac and ampullae. There Mighty Mite Barnes used a small suction tube to grab their prisoner and slam it into a small containment chamber nearby.

  Winger slumped into the depths of his bed, exhausted.

  “I’m wasted,” he muttered, to no one in particular. “I feel like I just swam the ocean, underwater.”

  “You just about did, Lieutenant. But I think it was worth it…we’ve got the ANAD cage and its contents in containment now.”

  “We’ll have to analyze your catch more fully,” M’Bela added, “but offhand, I’d say you grabbed the master bot of that swarm. Good hunting, sir. And I want to know more about that cage configuration, too.”

  Winger closed his eyes and the exhaustion washed over him. What exactly have I caught? He wondered. Dana Tallant…or what was left of her? Deeno D’Nunzio had somehow become infested with the thing ever since she had received her own embed. Likely the Dana bots had hitched a ride on him when he had encountered Tallant at the Custer Inn and the crossover had come during Deeno’s procedure.

  Now Dana Tallant or whatever she was was contained. Doc Frost could proceed with the embed procedures, while their newest catch was studied and picked apart.

  Winger wondered what they would find. He wondered if he even wanted to find out.