Tallant nodded. “You guys are inseparable…like brothers or best buddies. I can’t imagine life in 1st Nano without ANAD. Hey, maybe I should put in for the procedure too. Then, I’d have a buddy of my own.”
Winger lay back and closed his eyes. “Who needs a buddy…you got me.”
Have I? Tallant wondered. Have I really?
The lifter settled to the ground on its skids with a firm bump.
Two hours later, aboard hyperjet Mercury, Johnny Winger was snoring loudly in his bunk, his face turned to the porthole that looked out over Pacific islands strung out like jeweled necklaces from the near-space altitude of the jet. Nearly a hundred miles above the Pacific, Mercury sailed silently through space on her two-hour suborbital skip and hop across the globe. Soon enough, she would be settling belly first back into earth’s wounded atmosphere, spiraling down into the denser air and relighting her engines for the last few minutes of descent into Table Top.
For Johnny Winger, the gilded spectacle of a mid-Pacific sunrise held no beauty at all. The exhausted atomgrabber slept through the whole trip, deep in a blissfully dreamless sleep.
But deep inside the containment capsule inside Winger’s shoulder was proof that the commanding officer of 1st Nano was not alone.
The barest atomic remnants of ANAD, little more than a faint cloud of electron probability waves, ticked over like a faintly beating heart, mindlessly cycling from one state to another, awaiting only the right signal to collapse again into the living core of an autonomous nanoscale being.
While Johnny Winger slept like a dead man in his bunk aboard hyperjet Mercury, that signal finally came. It did not come from Table Top Mountain or from any human quantum engineer.
The signal, when it came, stirred ANAD’s ethereal probability waves toward collapse to a formal state, toward becoming sentient and alive once more.
But this signal came from far beyond the Earth.
Epilogue
January 1, 2069
1330 Hours
Paris
The Jardin des Suisse was only one of dozens of cafes along the Champs Elysees but for Johnny Winger and Dana Tallant, it was the most important place in the whole world.
Winger hoisted a goblet of wine—a vintage 2044 Chardonnay by the bottle label—and toasted 1st Nano.
“Here’s to us,” he said. “All of us.”
Dana Tallant returned the favor. “The best damn outfit in the whole Corps…no atomgrabber’s ever going to top these last few months.” Her head inclined a bit lasciviously and her eyes fell on the gleaming sunburst emblem of the UNIFORCE Order of Victory with oak leaf clusters that had been pinned to Winger’s chest by UNSAC only a few hours before. “Wings—“ she slurred dreamily, “that medal’s a beautiful thing but couldn’t you at least take off that jacket…a girl likes to see some male pecs once in awhile.”
Winger smirked. Their time would come…tonight, in the Dorsay Hotel, the Imperial Suite. The less the Corps knew about that, the better. He smacked his lips at her and she burst out laughing.
“I’m still not sure how to link in, Wings.” Tallant frowned and cocked her head, trying to snap her own quantum coupler into operation, the way the docs had tried to teach her, after the surgery. “Maybe I don’t quite have the hang of it…you want to show me again?”
“You’re hopeless,” he decided. “Just kind of roll your head like this—“ he tossed his head just so “—and as you do that, tighten your chin. Think of something hot—something burning—Doc Frost said that’s an easy memory trace to tag.”
“Ooooh,” Tallant’s face brightened. “oh…I think…yeah…yeah…I think I’m in…Jeez, Wings…it’s like rolling in the ocean…the waves are—“
“That’s it,” he told her. “Hold on…I’ll see if I can link in too—“
The two nanotroopers lolled the afternoon away at the café table, alternately sipping Chardonnay and probing each other’s ids through intermittent coupler links.
It was a deliciously new way to grope and both took turns exploring each other’s limbic fantasies in great detail.
Dana Tallant’s implant was less than two weeks old and she sported the capsule port in her left shoulder like a new set of earrings. Major Kraft had approved the procedure as a continuation of the same experimental effort that had been started on Winger himself months before. It was the goal of the Project, after all, to eventually bring the whole of 1st Nano into the Project, to implant containment capsules in all nanotroopers as a normal part of their equipment.
Dana Tallant was now the second data point, a blended symbiotic ANAD/human combat system. She had already discovered some new uses for the implant.
“Ooooh--“ Tallant purred, as she finally made the connection. “That’s cool…it’s like flying through a snowstorm…all the shapes…kind of weird—“
Winger understood. He’d seen it often enough himself. He decided to try something—a trick he’d learned about the coupler connection. All he had to do was think of a certain animal…in a certain position.
Tallant’s face had been lit up with a blissful sort of smile. When Johnny’s love note came across, however, the smile at first faded, then evolved into a lascivious little smirk. Her eyes opened and she leveled an even gaze at Winger.
“Wings, you’re sick…but I love it anyway. Nobody should be able to do that. It’s physically impossible.”
Winger laughed and finished off his wine. “That’s the beauty of a coupler, Dana. Any image you can think of, you can send it out, if you know how. It’s all just quantum waves. Anything’s possible, once you focus on it.”
Tallant squirmed a bit, as her mind’s eye streamed in more of the imagery. My God, first they’re polar bears, then they’re rabbits. “Captain Winger, you are one sick bastard.”
For the next hour, they explored the new medium of quantum-coupled, assembler-mediated sex, in halting, groping stages, while all around them, crowds of tourists surged up and down the Champs Elysees. For any who cared to look, the two nanotroopers might have been a typical pair of tourists, overawed by the sights and sounds of the City of Light. Their faces were blank, save for occasional smirks and giggles. Yet each had touched the other in ways more profound and meaningful than any lovers ever had before.
Later, when they had returned to the hyperjet Charioteer for the suborbital trip back to Table Top, Winger and Tallant met with several others from 1st Nano in the tiny galley of the ship. A well-deserved beer and bitch session had been underway for some time. Reaves and Barnes were there, Tsukota and Deeno too. The Tectonic Strike mission and its after effects were the main topic of conversation.
“The first reports are pretty encouraging,” Reaves said. “ANAD’s been engaging Amazon swarms all around the planet. He’s kicking ass now that the control system can’t direct the swarms. It’s all under direct BioShield control.”
The troopers saw Winger and Tallant approaching. “Hey, Skipper—“ it was Deeno, her mouth full of snacks, dribbling crumbs like a five-year old. “—what’s the word on the ANAD master? Scuttlebutt around Table Top says the little bugger’s got some new doodads, after he regenerated.”
Winger gave Tallant a look. If they only knew, his eyes said.
“Master assembler is online and functioning normally, as designed,” he told them.
Reaves was curious about Tallant’s experience, after the implant. “Is it as weird as we hear? Major Kraft hasn’t released the schedule for the rest of us. Me personally—I’m ready. I kind of like the idea of having my own personal swarm. It’ll be like having guardian angel.”
“Yeah, I’ll bet,” groused Deeno. “You’ll have the buggers configged like some kind of prize stud in no time. Your own personal stud farm...that’s what you’ll have.”
“It’s different…takes getting used to,” Tallant admitted. She was still officially in her adaptation period. Three months, minimum, Doc Frost had
told her. “It’s like having a voice in your head, maybe like a conscience. Sort of comforting and a bit weird at the same time. And linking in…now that really is bizarre. Like flying through a snowstorm, or swimming in a hurricane.” Tallant shrugged, feeling the capsule port through her uniform, knowing an ANAD master assembler was inside, ticking over, waiting for the command to launch. “It’s pretty sobering to think how much more you can do now. Pretty powerful stuff. I feel like a walking army. It’s like Major Kraft said: ‘One trooper can do the work of a battalion now.’”
“Yeah, but you don’t get a battalion’s pay,” Deeno observed. “I’m not so sure I want another—thing, consciousness, whatever you call it—stuck in my shoulder. I don’t need to be hearing any more voices than necessary.”
“Deeno,” said Mighty Mite Barnes, “no ANAD implant could ever compete with that voice of yours.”
“Anyway,” Reaves continued, “it looks like the new ANAD is able to handle Amazon. Reports I saw last night said huge swaths of Earth’s atmosphere were already effectively cleared of the bots. UNIFORCE and BioShield are already working hard to restore the atmosphere to its natural state.”
“It’s going to take awhile,” Winger said. “Amazon did a lot of damage, killed a lot of people, these last few months.”
“Probably several years,” Reaves said.
“Skipper,” Tsukota was curious, sipping at a scalding cup of tea, “you think we really destroyed that quantum generator? And that sphere…the Master Sphere?”
Winger had wondered the same thing himself. “I don’t know, Ozzie. I certainly hope so. Maybe it doesn’t matter, if ANAD can continue to be successful against Amazon Vector.” He shuddered, remembering what had happened when he had tried linking in with the sphere, coupling directly to the Keeper. He never wanted to experience that again.
“Anyway,” Dana Tallant was saying, “if earth’s atmosphere goes bad again, we can all just hike up to Mars and live there, start new lives with ANAD respirocytes to help us breathe.”
“Maybe not,” Tsukota muttered, quietly perusing a news feed on his wrist receiver. “Look at this…something from Hellas base on Mars. Looks like they’re having some kind of environmental problems of their own….”
The exhausted but satisfied nanotroopers of Quantum Corps didn’t know it of course, but the Master Sphere was still very much alive and transmitting, despite being buried under thousands of tons of rubble and despite being seriously damaged.
Using quantum channels still at its command, the Sphere had already transmitted a slightly damaged copy of its Keeper operating system to a sister Sphere buried under the desert sands of distant Hellas Basin on Mars.
From there, the Keeper would still be able to communicate with surviving members of the Ruling Council of Red Hammer…and with others beyond Earth itself.
And from there, the self-healing Keeper of the New Sphere would be able to continue its preparations, its ancient encoded duties…following commands laid down eons before to modify Earth, Mars, indeed the entire Solar System, even the Sun itself, to make worlds more suitable for the arrival of its programmers…for the coming of the Old Ones themselves.
Even as Johnny Winger and his fellow atomgrabbers toasted the success of Tectonic Strike, while hyperjet Charioteer rocketed across the top of earth’s atmosphere toward Table Top Mountain, the Keeper of the New Sphere received a faint but still discernible signal.
The signal had traversed some two billion light years in the blink of an eye, and it had come from the direction of the northern summer constellation Lyra, from a galaxy known in the star charts only as M75, a faint smudge of light even in the largest telescopes.
The signal—received, processed and saved, told the Keeper when to expect next contact…when to expect the arrival of advance elements of the Old Ones. The Keeper stored this date and immediately initiated the next phase of its programmed activity. It also started a timer, counting down the years, months, days and hours until the Old Ones arrived.
The time was set. June 2, 2155 was only ninety years away and the Keeper still had much work left to be done.
About the Author
Philip Bosshardt is a native of Atlanta, Georgia. He works for a large company that makes products everyone uses…just check out the drinks aisle at your grocery store. He’s been happily married for over 20 years. He’s also a Georgia Tech graduate in Industrial Engineering. He loves water sports in any form and swims 3-4 miles a week in anything resembling water. He and his wife have no children. They do, however, have one terribly spoiled Keeshond dog named Kelsey.
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