Leon nodded without hesitation.
Helena placed one tentacle on Leon and held it there. After a long minute she withdrew. “The nanites are nearly depleted, but they will be enough to reverse the worst of the heatstroke.”
“Thank you,” he said. “You are?”
“Helena.” She gestured. “This is Tony, a former agent of Adam who I’ve convinced to help us. His partner Slim will arrive shortly. We’ve come to join forces to destroy Adam. But first…” She executed an eerily graceful bow to Leon. “I wish to offer gratitude for creating my kind.”
“I didn’t make you,” he said.
“You created the ability for us to live, when others wanted to create the conditions to ensure that we would not.”
He bowed his head. “You’re welcome.”
Helena turned to Cat. “You fight as a true warrior, but you do not possess strategy experience. With your permission, I will tell you my plan to attack Adam.”
“Wait,” Leon interrupted. “First, where’s Mike?” His voice demanded, but his eyes displayed fear.
“Ack!” Cat jumped up. “Be right back.” She ran through the kitchen, out the pool door and over to the hot tub.
“Oh, God!” she cried.
While nanobots operated using stores of energy, sometimes they consumed nearby material to build more of themselves or other structures. She assumed that’s why Mike’s head had transmitted the request for MakerBot solution: the tiny bots needed the elements for some task.
But everyone’s worst nightmare was the possibility that something might go wrong with nanotech, creating runaway grey goo: robots endlessly replicating, turning all matter, possibly the entire earth, into a seething mass of the microscopic bots. That was why nanotechnology was so tightly restricted in the first place.
Mike’s head and the MakerBot solution were gone, the hot tub empty, and a gaping hole in the pool descended into darkness.
Cat might have doomed the planet.
She peered down the hole, unable to see the bottom. “Hello?” she called.
“Hello!” a voice yelled back. “Who is that?”
“Catherine Matthews. Who are you?”
“Mike Williams.” Pause. “Did you put me in this hole?”
“No, I, uh…” She panicked. “Hold on, I’ll get a rope … or something.”
She ran into the clubhouse, searching for anything useful, and found heavy drapes covering the tall windows. She grabbed with both hands and yanked, but they didn’t budge.
“Can I help?”
Cat whipped around. Helena had rolled silently into the room.
“Yes. Come with me.” She led the bot outside. “Mike Williams is down there. Can you get him out?”
Helena gazed at Cat with four eye stalks, then glanced at the hole in the concrete. “You people are both liberal and careless with experimental technology, a dangerous combination. You didn’t use enough solution and the nanotech kept going until it got the elements it needed to finish its program.”
Helena let out something approximating a sigh, then levered herself into the dry hot tub. Holding onto the rim with four tentacles, she lowered her body into the cavity. The limbs extended, growing impossibly slim, like fine black ropes, then the process reversed until Helena popped out. A few seconds later a naked man emerged in the grasp of her arms.
He blinked in the late afternoon sunlight and crouched. “Do you have clothes?”
Cat nearly fell in shock. He was alive, looking like a normal, healthy man of his age, indistinguishable from his photos. She’d put a disembodied head into the pool, and technology rebuilt him.
Mike coughed. “Clothes?”
Right. Cat ran into the building, and came back with a server’s uniform she found hanging in a closet. “Meet us inside after you’ve gotten dressed.”
Mike nodded, and Cat and Helena went in. Distressed by the incident, Cat held onto Helena for support.
“You know what he is?” Helena asked.
“I put his head in that tub with MakerBot solution. I’m guessing he had nanotech in him. It formed a protective core around his brain and then reconstituted his body.”
Helena’s optics swiveled and clicked. “Yes,” she hissed. “It’s highly illegal. Unethical.”
“You’re a fine one to talk about ethics,” Cat said harshly. “You came after me in a bar full of people, who are mostly all dead now.”
“No, I mean you reconstituted him with mineral sludge,” Helena said. “You were supposed to use a blood path so his tissues could be re-cultured. The MakerBot protocol is an untested, extreme backup. Now he’s a bot inside instead of biological, and he’s got to live like that. Forever!”
“Look, I’m not running a freaking hospital here.” Cat was going to lose it. She should be in school, not conducting secret operations against a power-crazed artificial intelligence. Cat poked the military bot with one finger. “I did the best with what I had. He’s alive.”
Helena turned toward Mike. “But, still…”
“It’s fine. He doesn’t even notice.”
Helena stared. “He will soon.”
63
They gathered in the dining room of the clubhouse.
Mike strolled in, dressed but looking puzzled. He walked over to Leon. “How’d we get here, who’s the bot, and why was I in a hole outside?”
“Cat rescued us after we fell unconscious from heat exhaustion. The bot’s on our side, and I don’t know about the hole.” Leon smiled, looking better already, his complexion returning to normal.
Cat wanted to avoid the conversation, so when she sensed Slim arriving, she said “Pizza’s here. I’ll go.”
She met Slim at the door and carried half the food into the room. She could eat a pie herself.
Seeing Leon still on the floor, Cat brought him two slices. All the humans dove into their food except Mike.
“Aren’t you hungry, dude?” Leon said to Mike. “I’m starving.”
“No, for some reason I’m not.” Mike rubbed his stomach. “I feel good, amazing actually.”
Once everyone was eating, Helena moved to the middle of the group.
“I studied Adam by interrogating humans and mimicking the expected AI in Tucson. Based on packet routing and observed human traffic patterns, I believe Adam lives in the University of Arizona’s Computer Science building. He may hold access to a supercomputer cluster the department maintained as of a year ago.”
Tony nodded vigorously. “We’ve seen it.”
Slim punched him in the side. “Adam is gonna kill you.”
“You met Adam, his actual body?” Helena asked, rolling closer.
“Yeah, he’s on the seventh floor. He’s a little utility robot, about this high.” He held a dripping slice of pizza four feet up. “He was plugged into these black boxes.”
“The computing cluster,” Helena said.
“He doesn’t sound like much of a threat,” Cat said. “Can we go in and disconnect him?”
Helena wagged a tentacle. “Negative. I believe he’s used the supercomputer to break processor execution keys, and is in control of everything computerized in Tucson: all bots, military vehicles, and computers.”
“Impossible,” Leon said. “He couldn’t crack the encryption codes. Not even a Class IV is strong enough. Oh…” Leon stood for the first time since he’d been overcome by heatstroke. “The supercomputer would give him sufficient power.”
“Computers aren’t the only problem,” Cat said. “He controls all the people too.”