At the end of it Tom filled his cup with a second round of black coffee and smiled. “So then, I guess I don’t need to worry about you making me dive Bimini Road anymore?”
“No. But we have work to do.”
“She wants you to find the nest?” Tom guessed.
“They’re still out there. And they’re evolving fast. Right now they’re harmless, but in the future they might work out a way to attack again.”
“So, how do we find them?”
“The same way as last time. Elise has been given control of a series of satellites specifically to search for it,” Sam said.
“There’s a lot of sea to cover.”
“Elise has developed a program to specifically search for fast growing plankton and phosphorescence.”
“And once we find it?”
“Veyron’s developing a plan to kill the microscopic machines.”
Chapter Seventy Six
Two weeks later they’d failed to find any signs of the nanobot hive. Samples of live plankton had been retrieved in more than forty locations throughout the Atlantic Ocean, focusing on areas along the equator where conditions were perfect for plankton proliferation. Three unusually large algae blooms were noted, but each one came back negative for nanoparticles.
At 8 a.m. Sam called his entire team to the mission room to discuss their next step. He sat down at the head of the table. It was rectangular and he sat down at the end of it. He valued everyone’s opinion on board, but his job was to receive the best information and then make a decision with it. Elise was the last person to sit down.
“Okay, is there a possibility the nanobots have simply perished?” he asked.
“Yes. It’s surprising, but not impossible.” Veyron switched on the overhead projector. He slid his hand over his laptop and opened up a document. On the wall, an image of statistics opened up. “I have four samples from our own hive of nanobots that Mr. Bower retrieved from the Mississippi. The first is the healthiest. As you can see, I have provided it with both organic nutrients for the host plankton and building materials for the nanobots to use. The hive is multiplying rapidly and as a consequence, I’ve been able to use them regularly for further tests to see how to destroy them.”
Sam looked at the numbers. It had grown from a 1 gram hive two weeks ago to now having a mass of 4 kilograms. And that hadn’t even taken into account the fact that Veyron had been sourcing his sample nanobots to experiment on from that hive. “That’s a frightening image.”
Veyron continued. “In the second one, I have provided nutrients for the plankton only and no building blocks for the nanobots.”
“That’s more promising,” Tom said. “The plankton hasn’t multiplied at all.”
“Technically, Mr. Bower, the plankton has continued to multiply every 24–48 hours as they would in normal conditions. However, the nanobots have simply moved from older, and weaker cells to younger cells. 1 gram of nanoparticles, without further building materials, can only ever weigh 1 gram.”
Sam nodded his head. The concept made sense, although it was a bit of surprise when he first saw the results.
“Now, in the third sample, I have deprived the plankton of organic nutrients.” Veyron smiled. “This is interesting. It also shows how dangerous these machines can be. Anyone care to guess whether the number of plankton increased or decreased?”
“They decreased,” Elise replied. “The same equation as the nanobots without building materials. They can’t reproduce without the materials. There can never be more than there were to begin with. Of course, I would assume they would lose a few more cells than the opposite equation because, although the cells could cannibalize their own proteins, with each equation of mitosis, cellular waste products would be lost from the equation.”
“Correct, but only partially so. You were right about the amount of cells being slightly lower, but would you believe the hive became stronger. Can anyone care to guess why?”
There was a row of shaking heads throughout the room.
Veyron smiled and pressed the play button on his computer screen. “This is a digital recording of the cells dividing without additional nutrients.”
The plankton began attacking each other. The nanobots quickly determined the strongest cells and removed the weaker ones. They didn’t wait for the mitosis to provide dead cells to scavenge from; they simply killed the weak cells for their materials. By the end of it, although some of the plankton had been lost, the hive of machines hadn’t decreased. In fact, the remaining cells are now functioning better than before.
“And the fourth sample?” Sam asked.
“In the fourth sample I deprived the single gram of nanobots and plankton of both organic nutrients and building materials.”
Sam grinned when he saw the results. “The entire hive died out.”
“Starvation’s a bitch,” Tom said.
“Okay, so back to the original question. Do we think the main hive is dead?” Sam persisted
“No,” Veyron replied. “Although I said it was possible, it’s highly unlikely. The question is how much access they have to optimal conditions of growth, such as warmth and sunlight, and can they obtain organic nutrients and building materials?”
Elise connected her laptop wirelessly to the projector. She then opened up a document titled Weather Reports — Atlantic. “If you look at the weather, the mean temperature of seawater is up by 2 degrees Fahrenheit for the regions surrounding our last known sighting of the hive for five hundred miles. These are perfect conditions for plankton to proliferate.”
“Okay, so they have the right conditions, but do they have organic nutrients?” Sam persisted, looking for a reason, anything that might lead them to believe the hive was truly destroyed.
“There’s no reason to suggest they don’t.” Elise brought up images of three large algae blooms within the area. “These are all plankton growths that have proliferated to dangerous levels, suggesting the seawater is currently teeming with organic growth.”
“Any chance those could have killed the hive?” Tom said, hopeful.
Veyron laughed at the thought. “If you were a betting man, would you put money on the nanotech enhanced cells losing to the regular drifter cells?”
“No, but that doesn’t mean that the large areas of plankton growth didn’t starve them out. We all know that red algae blooms can kill everything within the sea by depriving them of oxygen and sunlight.”
Veyron thought about it. “Elise, bring up the locations of those recent algae blooms.”
The overhead projector showed an area spanning the opening to the Gulf of Mexico, out towards the Bahamas and as far north as Bermuda.
“You know if we suffocated the areas here and here with the algae— then anything south of Bimini Island would have been stifled,” Veyron pointed out.
“Okay, it’s a pretty big if. But we might have gotten lucky.” Sam turned to Elise. “I want to keep monitoring this thing. I’m looking at this like I would a wild fire. You can put out ninety-nine percent of it, but it’s that other one percent that causes spot fires.”
“Understood. It’s also important to remember, even though we’re effectively starving the nanobots of building materials with the destruction of the Bimini Road, they’re able to keep replicating by cannibalizing themselves. In theory, they could remain dormant for years and then our luck could change when a ship carrying microchips sinks, at which point the nanobots would swarm again.”