Chapter 2
“Defector”
Kurabantu Island, the south Pacific
November 21, 2048
1100 hours
Nigel Skinner had worked at the Red Hammer compound on Kurabantu Island for nearly a year. His job was simple, relatively straightforward: to release, monitor and control small swarms of nanobots into the air over the island. It was all part of the Project, always the Project, and Skinner had been diligent and reliable for the most of the year he had been there. Nobody could say otherwise.
Today was different. Skinner had been having second thoughts about the Project, about being part of Red Hammer, even being assigned to this lush tropical island, for quite some time. He kept his doubts to himself. Hong Chui, or Red Hammer as it was more often known around the back alleys of East Asia, was notorious for secrecy and security. You opened your mouth at your own risk. Skinner wasn’t afraid of dying; on the contrary, he was afraid of living, living a single day longer in the belly of the beast that the Project had become.
The truth was that Skinner had been planning to defect for some time now. Just when the idea had formed in his mind, he wasn’t sure. You had to be careful when you had a halo, for even subversive thoughts could get you in trouble. He had worked out the rudiments of a plan to defect and contact UNIFORCE, to let them know what was going on deep within the bowels of a small island in the Marquesas chain of the south Pacific.
Why? Revenge, perhaps. Souvranamh and the Ruling Council wouldn’t allow him to transfer out, wouldn’t allow him up to the mountain in Tibet, where the real work was done, and where some of his questions could be answered. Conscience. Bad dreams, though that could have been the halo at work, snooping along trails of glutamate molecules inside his brain, hunting down thoughts and memories that shouldn’t have been there. Maybe a little fear too.
Unfortunately, Skinner had been prevented from pursuing any ideas about escape by the presence of Red Hammer’s halo…it was something every member of the organization hosted. An embedded nanobotic control system infesting his mind and body, a hammer that would keep him from disrupting the Project or performing acts disloyal to the cartel.
Everyone had a halo. It was a personal shield that went wherever you did. Made sure you did what you were supposed to do, that nothing and no one could interfere. Another member he had met once, an American Indian named Windsinger, had put it this way: “I think and my halo acts. Like the great spirit of the mountains, always watching over me. My shadow, my armor…even my soul.”
It was the price of membership in Red Hammer.
But Skinner had discovered a fatal weakness in the halo and the time had come to take advantage of it.
Earlier that night, after the sun had gone down, he had slipped out of the residential quarter tucked into the foothills of the island’s great volcano Tuontavik, and made his way through steep forested ravines and narrow dirt paths to a headland of rocky cliffs overlooking an isolated beach on the northwest flanks of the island. With him, he carried a small pod, not much bigger than a loaf of bread. It was a portable containment cylinder, filled with nanobotic organisms, well secured inside the cylinder.
Skinner was, of course, well aware of the existence of UNIFORCE’s BioShield nanobots circulating in the lower troposphere of the Earth’s atmosphere. He knew as well that BioShield was especially sensitive to the presence of rogue or unlicensed ‘bots. Knowing that, it was a small matter of concocting a batch of the mechs inside the lab, not enough to warrant concern but sufficient to trigger a reaction from BioShield and bring unwanted attention to what was going on at Kurabantu Island.
He had worked out the plan in scraps and pieces, so far successfully compartmentalizing the details enough to avoid intervention from the halo. There had been probes and jabs, to be sure, often coming late at night when he was trying to sleep—he could feel them—but so far, nothing serious had happened. The halo, if it had detected anything, hadn’t found a pattern to interpret.
Skinner prided himself on knowing how the blasted thing worked, knowing how the ‘bots sniffed out residual trails of glutamate molecules, the freight carriers of memory, and constructed crude renditions of memory traces inside a brain, even up to fifteen days after the trail had been laid down. He knew the halo ‘bots were designed to shuttle around inside your head like a bunch of bees, sniffing out calcium sinks in every neuron, looking for equal concentrations, down to the parts per trillion. He knew that everywhere the concentrations were equal was a pathway, burned in, a sort of memory trace, like an echo. The ‘bots looked for that, sent back data on whatever they found—calcium levels, sodium levels, activation times, lots of data. In the master ‘bot’s processor, all that data could be re-constructed into a very crude version of what had originally laid down the trail.
He knew all that, but knowing it and defeating it were different things. Still, he had to try.
Only a year and a half had passed since Skinner had been sponsored into Red Hammer membership and allowed himself to be halo’ed. He’d signed on with Red Hammer, South Asia division, only in the fall of ’47, sponsored by none other than Souvranamh himself, the neurotraficante of the Ruling Council. He’d been put to work on something known only as the Project; with talents in environmental engineering, nanoswarm control algorithms and meteorological engineering, Skinner figured he’d be a worthy addition to the effort.
Assigned duties at Kurabantu station, Skinner plunged into the details of his work: generating and maintaining nanobotic master assemblers, improving their capabilities, initiating and maintaining swarm dispersion for atmosphere modification. He had no other life anyway. He was rootless Brit, like so many of his ancestors had been in the Colonial Service of the Empire. Born in Birmingham (ca. 2003). Something of a child prodigy in school. Honors and letters from Cambridge in Chemistry and Environmental Sciences.
He had lived in India most of his life. Both parents had died in a lifter crash in 2040. For the last ten years, he had lived in a New Delhi high-rise, worked for the Interior Ministry in freshwater remediation, met engineering and nanobotic pollution abatement.
He’d joined BioShield in 2045 after the Serengeti plague, worked on swarm communications and controls, and had been released in ’46 on suspicion of embezzlement and misuse of agency resources (even now, Skinner could hear his own voice rising in anger at the hearing: “this charge of unauthorized tampering with core ANAD BioShield algorithms without approval is patently ridiculous…nothing but a witch hunt—“)
But he was out on the street, nonetheless, and he thirsted for a way to embarrass BioShield and get back at the pinheads who had thrown him out on some kind of technicality. That was when Skinner learned through the New Delhi underground of something called Hong Chui.
His highest level contact inside Red Hammer had always been Souvranamh’s deputy Kawati Chandrigarh, a musician turned gene designer whom Skinner had taken an instant liking to. One day, curious and frustrated by the lack of detail about his job, Skinner had asked Chandrigarh about the Project.
Chandrigarh had thick, bushy eyebrows that framed a cat’s face with ludicrous animation. He explained the Project was an effort to discredit UNIFORCE and the Quantum Corps by making BioShield ineffective, so UNIFORCE would have to use Red Hammer designs under license.
Skinner had done his job well enough. By the end of the year, though, he had become increasingly uneasy at the planned extent and depth of atmosphere modification being undertaken. He related his concerns to Chandrigarh, his discomfort with the extent of the modifications, wondering if “we really need to go this far.”
Chandrigarh told him not to worry.
Later, Skinner had an attack of conscience and tried to weaken the control links and blunt some of the worst effects of the swarms.
That’s when his halo went off.
It was his first experience with Red Hammer discipline and it wasn’t pleasant. Skinner b
egan to suspect he had made a mistake joining Hong Chui, suspecting he had gotten into something he couldn’t get out of.
He was a competent enough nanobotic engineer, though, so he decided he ought to be able to figure out how to ‘dial back’ the worst effects of the swarms. The Project wasn’t what he thought it was…somehow it had gone beyond teaching UNIFORCE a lesson and had entered new territory…now people were dying, lots of them, and growing swaths of the planet’s atmosphere were becoming toxic and uninhabitable. Serious, perhaps irreparable damage was being done to the Earth’s atmosphere. The ransoms would come later, he’d been told.
Chandrigarh chided him for being naïve. “Don’t be so dense…that’s the whole point of it,” the Indian scientist had said. That’s when Skinner first learned of rumors concerning the leader of Red Hammer, the Keeper of the Sphere. Not even human, they said. A machine. A spirit. Something halfway in between. At first, Skinner didn’t put a lot of stock in the tales.
With conditions worsening, angels exploding in popularity, Symborg a new menace and a global crisis brewing, Skinner tried several times to modify and weaken the swarms, but his halo wouldn’t let him. To join Red Hammer, he had given up free will and control of his mind. By early ’48, he knew he was effectively a prisoner.
Out of desperation, he began looking for a way out, a way to escape. Completely opposite to his original disgust with BioShield, now he wanted out of Red Hammer and somehow, he had to let UNIFORCE know what was going on. Revenge was no longer so important. With the halo, it was more a matter of survival.
But first he had to find a way to beat the halo. After investigating and experimenting, he learned that the nanobotic control system embedded in the ventral tegmentum of his brain became effectively useless at the point of death. The brain’s ‘death chemicals’ could override the halo and blunt its effects.
Skinner didn’t want to die. He just wanted to come as close as possible to it, so he could be rid of the halo forever. He figured if he could come close enough to death to cascade a flood of death chemicals throughout his brain, the halo would be weakened enough to succumb to a quick shock injection of something like ANAD.
Late one evening, on a walking trip to the limestone cliffs on the northwest side of Kurabantu Island, he began formulating an incredible plan….
Now standing on the high bluffs overlooking the rocky surf a hundred meters below, Skinner eyed the steep drop under his feet. Waves crashed and hissed over the reefs. A few clouds scudded across the sliver of moon low in the eastern sky. Otherwise the stars had already materialized overhead.
He began opening the containment cylinder, full of ‘bots, turning the screws and knobs by feel, as he had practiced so many times before. First, the pressure release, then the biobarrier knob, then the protective shield of ionized air. The cylinder hissed, then beeped, telling him a dangerous mechanism was about to be let loose.
Was it a mechanism, he’d often asked himself. Or was it an organism, half virus, half computer? It didn’t matter now. All that mattered was escaping from Kurabantu, from Red Hammer, from the Project, and especially from the halo. If he could somehow trigger a massive UNIFORCE response to an outbreak of rogue bots, all of these things could happen.
There was a barely audible whoosh of air as the last barrier was dropped and the master ’bot transited the opening and escaped into the stiff breezes above the cliff.
There. It was done. Even as he felt the first twinges of pain in the back of his head, and dropped to his knees, he saw out of the corner of his eye the faint blue-white iridescent glow of replication, like a shimmering mist hovering ten meters over his head. The bots were already in overdrive, mindlessly copying themselves over and over again, grabbing atoms and building structure as fast as they could. With any luck, BioShield would pick up the signature in less than an hour.
Skinner’s head felt like it was caught in a vise and he writhed in agony on the ground. The halo had reacted and the first fires of dopamine hell were already roaring between his ears. He screamed out loud, bit through his tongue and blood poured from both sides of his mouth.
Deep inside the ventral tegmentum of his brain, uncountable trillions of mechs were stirring the dopamine soup, pumping synapses with the stuff and sucking them dry just as fast, working the synaptic gaps like a musical instrument. Each cycle sent Skinner into shudders and spasms.
He jerked across the top of the limestone cliffs, staggered up to his knees and promptly went into convulsions, back-snapping contortions. The halo was bad shit, no two ways about it. When you had the buggers in your skull, you weren’t yourself anymore, more like a robot or a lab rat. His brain was infested with gazillions of the bastards, all working in unison, all stimulating and massaging the neural pain and pleasure circuits.
A symphony of agony played out on Skinner’s contorted face. Even as he fought the halo, he knew he’d eventually lose the battle. But Skinner had planned on this and he knew what he had to do.
Half blinded by pain, he crawled closer to the edge of the cliffs. Below, waves crashed and hissed over coral reefs that formed a barrier across the northwest approaches to the island. From a pocket, he withdrew a small hypodermic, already loaded.
Inside the hypodermic chamber were a swarm of new nanobotic devices, called respirocytes. Experimental devices. When deployed in your lungs and bloodstream, the ‘cytes would allow you to breath in places humans couldn’t normally breathe. You could even be resuscitated from near death, if they worked right.
But first, he had to ‘die.’
Skinner was well aware of the risks, but there was no other way. If he could take his body to a point near enough to death, all the way to Stage 7 it was said, the halo ‘bots would no longer have any control of his pain and pleasure circuits. Scuttlebutt was that when the brain was flooded with death chemicals and the catatonia and unconsciousness finally came, the halo ‘bots would exit the body and you’d be free.
Skinner then figured the respirocytes would revive him, sending blood and oxygen into his brain and lungs, manufactured right from seawater.
He felt cold, shaking and shuddering, as he groped his way further out to the edge of the cliff. In the skies overhead, the bad bots had already exploded into a nebula of coruscating, shimmering, pulsating lights, exponentially replicating. He grimaced at the sight, knowing the risk, but it was like sending up a rescue flare. Soon enough, BioShield would pick up the signature. UNIFORCE would then descend on this little hellhole of an island and put a stop to this madness.
Gripping the hypo, he injected the primal stream of ‘cytes into an artery in his left arm.
Then, Skinner stared for a moment out to sea, and down at the foaming waves hissing onto the beach below.
He took a deep breath, then leaped into space, plummeting down into the deep hiss of the waves several hundred meters below.