"Not really."
"That’s honest."
"And are you honest?"
"I am," I say. Eye contact. I have been graced with long lashes, for a guy. And naturally full. Bless my eastern Mediterranean DNA.
"It’s hard to believe."
"Which bit?"
"Okay." She takes a suck from her glass. Some green stuff gets clogged in the end and makes a rattling sound, which I can forgive. "The nanomachines…"
"Nanobots."
"Those, I can kind of understand. But these nanobots, clumping together in the brain and forming some kind of… alien mind parasite…"
That’s a good line. I must give that to the squad. Nanonauts versus Alien Mind Parasites!
"… that kind of has its own agenda, and a plan, and wants to take over the world…"
"It is a slow plan. It’s taken years to evolve. But once it gets to a critical mass, everything goes at once. Why do you think certain people all seem breaking weird at the same time? Nanobots."
"All the… megarich?"
"And the Pope."
"It does make a kind of sense."
"Trust me, I’m doing this for all of us. For the future."
"I think I might need another drink to get my head around this," she says.
"Try the martini," I say. "It’s classy."
The President is reading to kids in an elementary school in rural Ohio while the Eagles of Screaming Death tear apart phalanxes of death-sub attack drones swarming down the infundibular stem of the pituitary stalk. We’ve almost burned out our helical flagella on the run up the anterior cerebral artery. When you’re piloting a drone a few microns across, the human body is a big place. The cerebral artery is a river wider than a dozen Amazons, longer than a hundred Niles. And every millimeter of the way, we are under attack. Wave upon wave of jihadis—nanobots recently converted by the death-subs to suicide attackers—throw themselves at us. We tear them apart with our biochemical blasters, drive through the glittering wreckage. We surf the wave of hot, pumping presidential blood. But each wave is a delay, and with each second lost the death-sub drill rigs dig a little deeper into the blood-brain barrier.
"To the hypothalamus!" Elis cries.
I’m going to use the "S" word now. Singularity. There. That’s been said. We always thought that when the machines woke up and became smart, it would be the defense grid or the stock market or the Internet or something like that. Big and obvious. We never imagined it would be a revolution too small to see: the nanomachines that the one percent (more like one percent of the one percent) put into their bodies to make them healthy and long-lived and smart—we never thought that those millions and billions of robots would link up, and evolve, and get smart. Things that aren’t intelligent in themselves, in their connections and numbers becoming intelligent. Like the neurons in our brains: individually zombie-stupid; together, the most complex and glorious thing in the universe. A mind. Nanomachines, building brains inside the brains of our rich and powerful. Brains with their own personalities and values and goals. Moving and shaking the movers and shakers. Making the world right for them and their hosts. The tiniest singularity.
A cry. Bakemeister Owain is down. I see death-sub sticky missiles swarm his point-defense molecules. He kills ten, twenty, a hundred, but there are too many, too, too many. His sleek, shark-shaped drone turns fuzzy and gray as sticky after sticky clings to his hull. Within moments he is a ball of fuzzy wool. Then I hear the worst sound in the world: the sound of hull plates being wrenched apart as the stickies contract. Like bones snapping. Like a spine ripped from a living body. Owain is down.
I flick out of the simulation for a moment to see him push up his goggles with a "Shit!" and haul himself out of his chair. He shakes cramps out of his thighs and wrists. We have reserves inside the President, but it will take a few minutes to log them into the sim, and by the time Owain pilots a backup to the combat zone it will be all over. One way or another.
"Fight on!" Elis shouts. "We’re almost at the diaphragma sellae!"
Ahead of us are insane ranks of death-subs, arrayed wave upon wave.
I arm my torpedoes, fire up the flagella to maximum, and hurl myself toward them.
"Alala!" I yell; the goddess whose very name was the war cry of the ancient Greeks. "Eja! Eja! Alala!"
"I mean, you can’t actually see inside the President’s body."
This is a good point, and it takes a moment for its intelligence to sink into me. Or it may be the martinis.
"That is true," I say. "Some of the nanoscale weapons we use are on the angstrom scale, so they’re in fact only visible in the X-ray or gamma ray spectra. Or even scanning electron microscopes."
This is the three martinis talking. Rein in, rein in, rein in the guy tech-piling the girl when she starts to show some science.
"But humans are visual animals, so we operate the ROVs through a screen-based analogue, but in reality, it’s all chemicals. We really hunt by sense of smell. Like sharks. Sharks hunt by chemical trails in the water. And electrical fields. That’s us. Top predators."
"I was thinking of those dogs they have in France," she says. "The ones they train to hunt down truffles. I read someplace that they’re better than pigs, because they have better noses and they don’t eat the truffles like pigs do."
"I would rather be a shark than a truffle-hunting dog," I say. "And a pig? What are you saying?"
She giggles. She covers her mouth with her hand when she giggles, like she is scared some of her soul may spill out. I love that in a woman. And we’re even. Tech-dump versus ego-puncture. I’m starting to think where to take her afterward.
"It is kind of clever," I say. "They paid a bunch of animators from Pixar to come up with the interface. It looks like a game. I suppose, in a sense, it is a game. One of those types where you have to work your weapon combos to get the max effect, because the AI learns from you and adapts the bosses to your fighting style."
"I’m not really that into gaming. My housemate’s got that Kinect thing and it’s fun, but all it really gets used for is Dance Yourself Thin."
For a moment, a dread moment, a sick-up-in-your-heart moment, I feared she was going to mention a boyfriend. The male roomie. Then it’s dancercise and I am sailing clear. There’s a Latin American place with a dance floor upstairs and a good DJ. Tango never fails. It’s the combination of passion and strict discipline.
"Well, it’s like that but with a lot more screens, and we use pull-down menus on a 3-D heads-up display rather than bashing the X button. But we have gamer chairs. You know? Those low ones where you’re more or less on the floor, with built-in speakers? And we wear our own clothes."
"Really?"
I flash my lapels, which are narrow and correct for the season.
"This is my superhero suit. The thing is, it’s really not like a war at all. I mean, a war means someone shoots back. I mean, they take out our drones. But they’re only nanodrones. No one shoots back at us. We just sit there in our chairs in our really good clothes and shoot things. So it is like a game, or comics. No one really gets hurt."
"I’m glad," she says.
Time. It’s time. I lean toward her and the light from inside the bar gleams from my cross. And she, too, leans toward me.
"Do you like Argentinian food?" I ask.
"I don’t think I’ve ever had it," she says.
"It is the food of passion," I say. "Red and raw and flamboyant."
"Are you asking me on a date?"
"We could go there. I know a place. Not far from here."
"Okay," she says. "I think I will. Yes. Let’s give the spirit of old Buenos Aires a try. But first, I owe you another drink."