Oblivion (15 page)

“Which isn’t to say you won’t get nailed if she catches us working on this,” Bradshaw said.

“Right,” Cross said. “Unless we find something really good.”

Portia sighed. She eased herself into a chair. Lantine adjusted his beret. Brown flopped beside Portia.

“We did find something good, right?” Cross asked.

“It depends on your definition of good,” Bradshaw said.

“Anything that’ll help us win this next battle,” Cross said. “Or prevent these things from working.”

“We’re not miracle workers,” Lantine muttered.

Portia punched him in the arm. He glared at her, rubbed his rubbery bicep, and said, “I mean, we’ve only had a week, sir.”

“Actually, I think we’ve got a lot,” Portia said. “It just isn’t what you need yet. But we’ll get it.”

“What do you have?” Cross asked. He turned his fullest attention to her because she was the real whiz kid in this group. Her office—which was in a different part of this building— was decorated in early chocolate and stuffed animals. But she was no child. She had one of the most far-reaching minds he’d encountered in all his years in the sciences.

She glanced at her colleagues. “Everyone okay with me telling this?”

“You’re the one who found the stuff,” Brown said. There was no animosity in his tone. “We’re just here to ask the questions that get you going.”

Portia laughed. She got up and went to the nearest screen. On it, one of the nanomachines rotated slowly. It was clearly a model. She picked up a laser pointer and turned its red beam on the screen.

“What’s bugging me the most are those marks,” she said. “I think they’re a language, and I’m not a linguist. Still, I look at them and wonder if I’m missing something.”

“Tell me what you do have,” Cross said.

“Okay,” she said. “This is a simple machine, just like I told Edwin from the fossil he showed me. It’s designed to harvest. Matter goes in, gets processed and the good stuff stored, and the waste comes out. That’s all.”

“These things can’t fly or move on their own?”

“Nope. They’re like a single-celled organism. They may have a molecular attraction to their target, like a magnet to metal, but they have one function and one function only. Harvest.”

Cross nodded. “That’s good news, right?”

She shut off the laser pointer. “I don’t know. These things are really, really efficient. Once they’re dropped, they go to work, and they don’t quit until their little bellies are full.” “Bellies?” Cross said.

“Portia anthropomorphizes everything,” Brown said, fondly. “She’s saying that they eat until there’s nothing left. That’s why it’s good these things don’t move around much.” Lantine stretched out his legs. “And don’t reproduce themselves from what they eat. When we discovered that part, I had this nightmare that these little buggers grew legs, reproduced, and started walking. And when I woke up, I got even more scared, because I thought about it, and if they did, they’d have gone through more than the California coast. They’d have eaten their way into Nevada, and up into Oregon, and down into Mexico, and God knows what they’d’ve done under the ocean, and we’d have no hope at all.”

Cross felt his shoulders tighten. “No hope?”

“None,” Lantine said. “Kabingo, we’re dead. These things eat organic material. If they walked, reproduced themselves as they went along, nothing would survive. I’m just glad they don’t.”

“We’d have designed them to move more, I’m sure,” Brown said.

“Remember,” Portia said to Bradshaw, “when I looked at that fossil, I said these things were designed different than people would design them?”

“I remember,” Bradshaw said quietly.

“Jamison said the same thing to me just last week,” Cross said.

“Well, that’s one of the things I meant,” Portia said. “We put a lot of emphasis on equipment that moves on its own. I’m guessing that movement is less important to these aliens. Having the harvesters have a molecular attraction is more than enough to make them efficient.”

“Interesting hypothesis,” Cross said, “but I’m loathe to make generalizations based on one bit of equipment. After all, we know these aliens are good at other kinds of movement, like using their spaceships. Just because they didn’t design their nanomachines in the way we would doesn’t mean they’re that different from us.”

“They’ve got to be different,” Brown said. “We’d never devastate a planet like this.”

Cross had to prevent himself from snorting. Bradshaw looked at Brown as if the boy were the most naive person on the planet.

“You need to take a class in archaeology,” Bradshaw said. “Archaeology, hell,” Cross said. “How about the history of food? Take a look at what the introduction of farming did to this planet.”

“Not to mention certain methods of hunting,” Bradshaw said.

“We’re notorious for stripping land bare—on our own planet,” Cross said.

Brown held up his hands. “I stand corrected.”

“Better sit, then,” Lantine said.

“Are you boys done?” Portia asked.

Cross grinned at her. She smiled back, then ducked her head shyly, her bangs falling across her eyes.

“Sorry, Portia,” he said. “What else have you got?”

She tossed the laser pointer from one hand to the other. Lantine grabbed a small stuffed dog, about the size of a golf ball, from a nearby table and tossed it at her. She caught it and nodded her thanks.

Cross suppressed another smile. The team knew one another well. Whatever Portia had to say, it bothered her, and Lantine knew she needed comfort. He also knew the dog would provide it.

“Okay,” she said, taking a deep breath. “Dr. Cross, I’m not sure we can turn these harvesters off.”

“They stop, don’t they?”

She nodded. “But only when they’re full. Once they start chewing or dissolving or whatever they do, they keep doing it. I have not been able to find an intercept.”

“No emergency shut-off valve?” Cross asked.

“Not that I can find ” She cupped the dog in her right hand and rubbed a thumb along the dog’s nose. Cross half expected it to wag its stuffed blue tail. “And I’m not even sure these things shut off in the way that we’re thinking.”

“What do you mean?” Cross asked.

“I think they shut off when they’re full, like I said. But there’s no way to test it. Because they seem to be full when the organic material goes away.”

“In other words,” Brown said, “they stop running when the food is gone.” “But if there were unlimited food,” Portia said, “I’m not sure they would stop until they were completely full.”

“Like the locusts of Biblical fame,” Bradshaw muttered.

“What?” Lantine asked.

“You know, the ones that God sent against the Pharaoh,” Brown said.

“Actually,” Bradshaw said, “I was thinking of the one mentioned in the Book of Joel.”

“It left the land barren,” Cross said. His gaze met Bradshaw’s. “You think they saw these things?”

Bradshaw shrugged. “I don’t know. It might have been actual locusts. But I was thinking about the devastation, how nothing was left and there was starvation all over the land.”

“If they drop more of these things,” Lantine said, and then stopped.

Portia was staring at all of them. Her hand had closed around the dog. The poor thing looked as if it were strangling. If, of course, it had actually been alive.

“If they blanketed the entire United States,” she said, “we’d have nothing left. It’d look like it did in South America. We’d be gone, and there’d be dust everywhere.”

“And that’d be all that’s left of us,” Brown said.

Cross shuddered. Not all. There’d be zippers and earrings and buttons, and concrete, and cable, and steel. Enough for archaeologists to sift through a thousand years from now and misjudge what the entire society was about.

“Okay,” Cross said. “Let me get this straight. Either these things stop when they’re full or they stop when they run out of material to chew.”

Portia nodded.

“Can you make them think they’re full?”

“Or think they’re out of raw material?” she asked. “I don’t know. This technology is truly alien, Dr. Cross. I mean, they have spaceships and we have spaceships, but that doesn’t mean one of our astronauts can get into their ship and fly it.” “Not without some study,” Cross said.

“Right,” she said. “And I’m just beginning work on this.” “We don’t have a lot of time,” Cross said.

“She knows.” Bradshaw now sounded fatherly, as if Cross were pushing too hard. “These kids have already managed to cram a year’s worth of work into a week, Leo. You’re expecting miracles.”

“We need miracles.” He leaned against the desk and stared morosely at the slowly rotating image of the nanoharvester. Whoever thought that destruction of the human race might come from machines so tiny that they were almost impossible to see with the human eye?

“There’s one more thing, Dr. Cross,” Portia said softly.

He looked up. She had opened her hand and was still petting that little dog. She looked like a girl who was asking for the keys to her dad’s car, not about to explain a scientific discovery.

“It’s really clear that these nanoharvesters can be programmed.”

He felt his heart leap. “By us?”

She shook her head. “By the aliens.”

He frowned. “What do you mean? I thought you said these harvesters had only a single purpose.”

“They do,” she said. “They’re harvesters. But they don’t have to harvest organic material. They can harvest anything. What they harvest is programmable.”

“How’d you figure this out?”

“Don’t ask,” Bradshaw said, meaning he already had.

But Portia had turned toward the third screen. A set of the nanoharvesters was shoved to one side, next to several of the fossils. “Edwin’s been teaching me how to examine fossils,” she said. “I looked at the fossils we have and compared them to the harvesters we have.”

Cross’s stomach was jumping. He wasn’t sure he liked what was coming next.

“About four thousand years ago, we have a fossilized harvester preserved with the body of a small rodent,” Bradshaw said. “I didn’t think anything of it at the time. But when we got back from Brazil, I looked at it. And this was one of the few cases where we had a written record. The aliens needed something special. The harvesters fell, but they took minerals out of rock instead of organic material. At least, that’s what I’m guessing.”

Cross peered at the harvesters and then at the fossil. “I don’t see a difference.”

“There is none,” Portia said. “That’s what I’m saying. These aliens can program these things. If the aliens need organic material, they take that. If they need water, I’ll bet they can take that. If they need only ocean salt, I’ll bet they can take that. All with these things.”

Cross stared at those alien machines. They were growing more and more hideous, the more he heard about them. “So,” he said. “If they want to take all of Earth’s resources, they can.”

Portia nodded. “I think so. If they have enough harvesters. And enough time.”

“My God,” Cross said. How come the more they discovered, the more difficult things became?

He stood. “See if you can find a way to shut those things off,” he said.

“We’re doing our best,” Brown said. “It would help if we knew what our military colleagues were doing.”

“I know,” Cross said, “but I don’t think we’ll know any time soon. Just assume you’re working alone on this.”

“There are some great nanotechnology guys in other labs,” Brown said.

“Bring them in,” Cross said.

“We’re a for-profit company,” Lantine said.

Cross stared at him for a moment.

Lantine raised his hands in a gesture of surrender. “I know, I know. If we don’t survive, profit won’t matter. But if we do—”

“You have my permission to patent your findings. This is a rogue operation anyway. You may as well make use of it.” Cross again had the feeling that, if the Earth survived this threat, he and the others were creating a culture he wasn’t sure he was going to like.

But he’d rather take that—a culture he hated—than a silent Earth blanketed in dust.

May 6, 2018
20:34 Universal Time

161 Days Until Second Harvest

The old glide paths were dust covered and rusted. Cicoi was able to use his glide platform for only half of the distance. For the rest, he had to pick it up with two lower tentacles, and cross debris, gingerly, with the remaining eight. The Elder who had been assigned to him waited in the air before him, flapping his own ghostly tentacles, as if Cicoi’s slow progress irritated him.

Cicoi had no idea where they were going. All he knew was that his Elder, who refused to tell Cicoi his name, had simply said, inside Cicoi’s brain,
You shall come with me.

Of course Cicoi obeyed. All of the Commanders obeyed the Elders, and did not discuss their hesitations, although Cicoi had many. He assumed the others had many as well. The Elders seemed to have taken complete control, and they didn’t seem concerned about the destroyed ships, the lack of food gathered on the First Pass, or the decreased possibilities for the future.