Plague Year (7 page)

Ruth clipped on the earpiece and realized her hair was growing long again, starting to curl. Good. An astronaut’s buzz cut made her look like a monkey.

“Leadville,” Gus said. “Leadville, Leadville...”

During the late 1800s, at the height of the Gold Rush, Leadville had been a boomtown of thirty thousand frontiersmen attracted to central Colorado’s rich silver mines. In the twenty-first century, shrunk to just 3,000 residents, the modern claim to fame had been that at 10,150 feet elevation it was the highest incorporated “city” in the United States.

Now it was the U.S. capital, and a rough census put the area’s population at 650,000.

NORAD command shelters under Cheyenne Mountain had originally housed the president, the surviving members of Congress, and the most prominent men and women in nanotech. The subterranean base sat far below the barrier but was equipped with a self-contained air system to protect against radiation or biowarfare, and most of Ruth’s communications had been with NORAD until the locust got loose from a laboratory inside the complex.

“ISS, this is Leadville,” drawled an unfamiliar voice, calm in her ear. “Stand by.”

Gustavo chattered, “Roger that. You wanna power down?”

“Stand by.”

The partial evacuation of the NORAD base had reduced their working capacity by a full order of magnitude, just as the original plague had done. Once there had been more than a thousand researchers nationwide, then hundreds, finally mere dozens—and aside from India and a displaced Japanese team on Mt. McKinley, Alaska, no one else was even trying. Across the Alps, the Germans, French, Italians, and Swiss were embroiled in war with starving refugee populations and each other, lost like the Russians, and the Brazilian scientists in the Andes had stopped broadcasting before the end of the first winter.

Ruth reached for the lists of contacts plastered over the nearest wall but stopped short of disturbing them. So many names and places had been crossed out, she wondered how Gus could stand the constant reminder. Gruesome. Yet clearly something in him was satisfied by surrounding himself with data, and with physical barriers.

“Hey, hello, am I on?” This new voice spoke almost as fast as Gustavo, trained by months of power shortages.

“James,” Ruth said. “I hear you.”

“I have—”

The other voice on the ground intervened. “This is a secure call, ISS communications. Please clear the channel.”

“Roger that.” Gustavo turned and winked at her before he swam toward the exit. So far, she’d chosen to share every piece of news with the rest of the crew, classified or not. She felt they deserved it. Why keep secrets anymore? The soldiers down there only bothered because it gave them something to do.

Ruth opened her mouth to speak but there was a low, menacing click. Gus had identified the sound as recording equipment and it raised gooseflesh up the back of her neck.

* * * *

She yearned for clean air, a horizon, new faces, but felt it would be sinful to envy anyone on the ground. She was among the safest and best-fed members of the human race.

They had been informed that the situation in Colorado was stable, yet Ruth caught hints of a different truth in these conversations—unexplained delays, obvious shortages, names that seemed to have permanently disappeared. She’d tried to chitchat, digging for more, but was usually interrupted and once had been cut off entirely. Power conservation, they said. Other times, the scientists she spoke with deflected her questions or ignored her outright. Why?

If she’d known any of them, if she had any friends there, she might have pressed. But their relationships were as narrow as the thin umbilical connecting her headset to the radio.

* * * *

James said, “I have good news and I have good news.”

“Well I always say hear the good news first.” Ruth tried to make her smile show in her voice. Too many of these contacts were litanies of despair.

She had actually met James Hollister at a convention in Philadelphia, years ago, and had a vague image of thick glasses and a great Moby Dick of a desk-belly. Her memory of his published work was stronger. He’d led a new approach in nanobiotic medicine, using synthesized amino acids to pierce bacterial membranes and thereby kill infections. That was a field related to the current problem only in the loosest sense, but James was no dummy and had brought a unique perspective to their efforts to build an anti-nano nano. ANN.

He’d volunteered for this coordinating position to free up others with more appropriate skill sets, and Ruth was glad. She talked to him six times out of ten and no one else made jokes anymore, not even sorry little puns like
good news
,
good news
.

“We’ve redesigned our engine,” he said, “pushing burn efficiency up almost 5 percent.”

“Great.” Chemical science was his specialty, after all. “I suppose that’s great, James, but what does it matter? We can just enlarge the ANN if we need more capacity.”

Silence. Static.

She almost didn’t say it. “You’re wasting time, getting fancy. We have a functional rep algorithm. We can go as big as we want—5 percent, 10, it doesn’t matter. I thought we agreed to focus on discrimination.”

“Ruth, we needed something we could point to, something real. LaSalle’s bug tested solid and the president’s council is talking about reassigning everyone to him.”

“What! Did he run real-world or in lab conditions?”

“Lab, if it matters.”

“Of course it matters! We test out in controlled conditions, too. What did you tell them?”

“I told them our burn efficiency was up 5 percent.”

This time it was Ruth who didn’t answer immediately. Then she laughed. “Okay, I guess that is good news.”

There had never been a consensus on how to deal with the situation. Everyone wanted to destroy the locust, of course, but at present there were no less than three competing proposals— and twice that many concepts had been discarded in the past months. A shortage of equipment meant much of their work was theoretical anyway, and nanotech developers in any field tended to be both visionaries and a bit wiggy about their favorite ideas. The end of the world hadn’t changed that.

The end of everything had probably made it worse. Too much was at stake, and the name of the person who defeated the machine plague might become greater than Muhammad or Christ.

“LaSalle’s an idiot,” Ruth said, and her earpiece rattled with two thumps, maybe James shrugging.

Or maybe it was whoever else was listening.

She didn’t care. She said, “I guess he’s still shouting from the rooftops that discrimination is a waste of time?”

“He’s got half the council agreeing with him.”

“James, there’s no way it can work otherwise. He can’t ignore the issue just because it’s inconvenient.”

Any real-world nano had to overcome three major hurdles, and integrating each solution into a functioning whole was in a sense the fourth and most difficult challenge.

First was how to power something so abysmally tiny. Ruth’s teachers had called this the Tin Man Problem—if we only had a heart. Dozens of possibilities existed using synthesized fuels, proteins, live current, heat. The trick was to dedicate as little capacity as possible to energy storage and/or generation.

Second came the Scarecrow—if we only had a brain. Nature’s oldest, most fundamental intelligence was based on chemical reactions like those of RNA and James’s amino acids, simplistic and neat, enough for some biotech, but it was a real chore to bestow the faculties of awareness and decision upon machines this size without crimping their operational speed.

The third problem, known in polite company as the Wicked Witch, was how to create enough nanos to accomplish a goal of any worth. Manually assembling one gear composed of five hundred atoms could take a person sixty hours, depending on the material and equipment used. Automation might accelerate the process but it wasn’t economically viable, spending millions of dollars to build factories to build the nanos.

A leading school of thought had been to bed the Scarecrow with the Witch. Nanos capable of fulfilling instructions should also be able to assemble more of themselves. Their function was their form. Once again, the infinitesimal scale had hindered efforts to master this approach, but crude kilo-atom prototypes had been doing it since before Ruth entered college.

No single aspect of the locust was revolutionary. What made it so efficient was how well it had been put together.

For a power source the locust used the body heat of its host, which required only a few receptors at key points in the locust’s structure. As for a brain, the locust’s creators had overcome this hurdle by dodging it altogether. The machine was remarkably straightforward. It infested warm-blooded tissue because it was unable to function in any other environment, and it assembled more identically limited yet aggressive creatures because it had been told to do so. Period. Everyone agreed that the locust as they knew it was just a test model, and yet Gary LaSalle wanted to adopt this method for his ANN.

What a joke.
Igor, fetch me a brain!
Ruth must have taken her ribbing too far, though, because two months ago LaSalle had quit talking to her on the radio.

He was right that the locust functioned quickly because it lacked complex instructions, but the man was a complete boob if he thought they could sweep the planet clean with an ANN lacking discrimination. The job was too big, the battlefield too varied. More importantly, out there in the world, below 10,000 feet, the locusts had no more hosts and would be in hibernation. They were inert, inactive targets and even a slowly replicating ANN would eventually destroy the vast majority.

The idea was simple: release their best work, then wait and watch. But who would be the savior?

LaSalle’s ANN, more like a chemical reaction than a machine, was composed of oxygen-heavy carbon molecules intended to bond the locusts into nonfunctional, supra-molecular clusters. Fast and dirty. James had helped pioneer the process, “snowflaking,” before declaring it unstable—and yet LaSalle’s ANN remained the smallest and the quickest to replicate, a fact he’d constantly harped upon when he was still trying to enlist Ruth’s help.

Another faction, perhaps the most ambitious, imagined a parasite ANN that would deliver new programming to the locusts, take advantage of the locusts’ extra capacity, and turn the damned things against each other. This group was still cranking out diagnostics and computer simulations, however, and no one else believed they’d advance beyond the planning stage.

Ruth belonged to the third team, which consisted mostly of techs with military and government backgrounds like her own. They had constructed a hunter-killer whose entire life cycle was based on disassembling locusts. A true weapon. It would burn a portion of a locust for fuel while using the rest to build more ANN like itself, and this design had been the early front-runner until the president’s council grew understandably desperate.

There was one big problem with all three concepts.

In creating more of themselves, locusts pulled both carbon and some iron from the tissue of their hosts; and as a substance, each locust was hardly distinguishable from any other life-form.

One very big problem. ANN designed to target locusts in mass would also attack human and animal cells.

“Show them your figures again,” Ruth said. “If LaSalle’s bug lumps together every speck of organic carbon in the world, everything else that’s happened so far is going to seem like a roller disco in comparison.”

“Roller—?”

“We’ll all be dead, everywhere.”

Her earpiece thumped once more and she wondered if James was smiling, pacing, shaking his head. She wished she could see his face. His voice, like always, conveyed only quiet strength. “The council has a way to protect us from any ANN,” he said, “in case something goes wrong. Incorporating the hypobaric fuse into every design is mandatory now, even if that sets everyone back.”

“A fuse won’t stop LaSalle’s bug from affecting plants or insects or whatever else is left below 10,000 feet. Any environmental balance the planet still has will be shot! We need an ANN that can discriminate.”

“Actually the other good news is somewhat related.”

“What? Then what are you getting me worked up for?” Ruth’s grin was real but she forced a laugh for his benefit. “Zap me the file, this is perfect!”

They had the beginnings of a brain. Another member of their group had proposed targeting the hypobaric fuse itself rather than locusts in general, using this unique structure as a marker. Unfortunately, so far their best-developed program was less than 30 percent effective in a pressurized capsule where decoys and debris outnumbered hibernating locusts only two to one.

“It’s better than that,” James said. “The FBI got a team into Denver. They think they have a new lead.”

Ruth flexed her arms and legs, an involuntary surge of excitement. She struck the wall with one knee and set herself rotating, and jammed her palm against her headset to keep it from pulling off. “When? How?”

“They just cleared enough highway to start flying again—”

She nearly interrupted.
How much highway?
The shuttle required more than twice the landing strip of most airplanes.

“—took a group into town and pulled more computers from the field office there, the public library. They think they have full records on manufacturers’ sales now.”

Before the plague there had been forty-six university nanotech labs nationwide, seven private groups, and five more working for the government. That number had not included Ruth, or at least two other covert federal operations she was aware of—nor had it included perhaps a dozen independently funded labs who were also keeping their heads down, mining the public data but not sharing their own advances.

Only thirteen companies had manufactured microscopy and nano-fabrication equipment, however, and such big-ticket items hardly sold like the stock shares of those companies.

Even before the locust burst through the quarantine lines around northern California, FBI data crunchers had unearthed two private groups in the region. Agents swept through those labs and the six more operating publicly in the area, confiscating everything, even the few lab techs who could still be found.