Nanobots, Murder, and Other Family Problems

And I get my mind back to myself. I hope I played that right, putting the right amount of concern in my voice, putting the right amount of urgency in the transmitted chunk of my log that Father now has sitting on his computer. I need to amplify his worry, get him to defer Jeff’s upgrade, but not take any other serious actions yet. I hope I threaded that needle right.

“Excellent,” Father finally says, his voice returning to its usual annoying cheerfulness. “Everything is looking very good, and I’ve opened up a new set of tools for you. The self-defense libraries are now available for your access. Let’s discuss what they are, how they work, and how to make the best use of them. Then I’ll walk you through some simple use cases.”

He steps over to his whiteboard. We spend the next hour going over all the defensive features of the cloud and how they work. I index all of it in my database for reference later.

“Enough theory,” Father declares. “Let’s put this into practice.”

He leads me out of the lab and into a hall I’ve never been down. He opens a large steel door to reveal what looks like a shooting range with three rubbery looking dummy torsos at the other end.

“Let’s get the scary part over with first. Stand over there, if you would, please,” he says, waving toward the dummies at the end of the range. “And go ahead and form some earplugs with your bots. The bullets won’t do you any harm, but you don’t want any hearing loss.”

With more than a little trepidation, I comply. I pull my bots in toward me from where they’ve been spacing themselves out across this part of the campus. I want all of them handy if he’s going to do live testing of what he just explained. I trigger the routine that plugs my ears up and try to keep my cool as he unlocks a tall safe on the wall near the door. He pulls out a rifle, aims it at my head, and fires.

Even with the earplugs, the report is deafeningly loud. I feel the pinprick of destroyed bots on my non-skin. It worked! Just like Father said, my cloud recognized the gun as it pointed in my direction and automatically formed a point shield hovering in the calculated path of the bullet, ready to deflect the shot to the side. I turn and see Father’s bots in my overlay already repairing the damage to the reinforced wall behind me.

Father points at his ears and makes a pulling motion. I guess he’s only going to shoot me once. I dissolve the earplugs, letting the bots fan out.

“Come on over here, son,” he says, as if he hadn’t just shot at me. “You may be feeling invincible now. I know that I did the first time I tested this out. Don’t be too confident,” Father warns. “This was a small caliber rifle, and your mileage may vary with larger ordnance. Your best defense is your own vigilance.”

I nod, not sure what to say.

“Now, other weapons, the sort that could cause blunt force trauma or lacerations, they’re handled with defenses that are more reliable. Let’s give them a try.”

He steps back to the safe and pulls out a wicked-looking blade. The sort you’d see a soldier using in an action movie.

“Hold your arm out, please.”

I raise my arm to shoulder level and he lifts the knife to hack at it. My bots respond without any effort on my part, interconnecting in multiple layers in a rigid configuration just outside my skin in the path of the knife. The blade bounces off harmlessly. The shock absorbers make it so I barely feel a thing. He swings again, twisting the knife at the last second and dragging it along the length of my arm, against the armor that forms faster than his hand can move.

“See, Noah.” He smiles his proud-dad smile. “Nothing to worry about from weapons like these. The software does a good job of detecting anything that might cut or crush you by analyzing velocities and accelerations of the objects all around you. I wouldn’t go picking a fight with an army, but if you have a standard-sized cloud you’d be fine against a pack of ruffians equipped with anything less than military-grade weaponry.”

He turns the knife in his hand and offers it to me handle-first. I warily pick it up. I hope he doesn’t want me to do the same back to him to prove a point. If I start stabbing at him, I’m not sure I could make myself stop.

“Touch the blade to the skin of your hand,” he instructs. “Don’t incise, just touch the skin.”

Nothing happens as I let the tip get near the palm of my hand. I press just enough to dimple the flesh.