44. Chapter 44
Chapter forty-four
Day 20 Washington, D.C.
Clark snatched up the cell phone before the first ring faded. Hope crashed and burned when he saw the caller ID. Christopher Lovett .
Not Kuznetsov, then. Dammit. The Russian was still ghosting him. This shouldn’t surprise him, not after finding his nanobot weapon for sale on the dark web. But it didn’t look like the weapon had been sold. Or if it had, it hadn’t been deployed. There were no reports of people going crazy and killing each other. So, there was still an outside chance Kuznetsov had listed the nanobots for sale in the expectation that Clark would turn the weapon over to him soon.
But if that was the case, why wasn’t the Russian returning his calls? Time to admit his pet arms dealer had gone rogue or been captured. His eyes and ears in Admiral Hurley’s office swore they didn’t have the Russian. But that didn’t mean much. Someone else could have got to him.
It was bad enough Kuznetsov wasn’t the one calling, but the name on the caller ID sent tendrils of tension through his chest. His head started pounding. He clenched his hand around the phone and fought the impulse to ignore the summons.
The only reason Lovett would call was with more bot-related bad news. They were long past any bot-related good news. The kill switch programing still wasn’t working and nothing they’d dropped into the tank had killed the NNB26 prototype. Not for long, anyway.
He forced himself to punch the talk button and lifted the cell to his ear. “Tell me you’ve finally discovered a method that will kill the damn things.”
They’d had high hopes a liquid nitrogen dump would freeze and shatter the bots. Which it had. Except they’d reformed and reassembled once they’d thawed. The portable MRI hadn’t phased them. And as he’d feared, a localized EMP burst hadn’t affected the hardened technology. It hadn’t even slowed the fucking things down.
What the hell did they have to do to destroy them?
This was the first time in his long, money-making career he regretted being so good at his job.
“You better get down here,” Lovett said, his voice so tight Clark didn’t recognize it.
“What’s wrong now?”
Nothing had gone right with the damn things since they’d reactivated. They were microscopic organic robots, for God’s sake. Regardless of the hundreds of sci-fi and horror shows portraying robots running amok, in reality, robots were engineered to be turned off, to be controlled. So why couldn’t he regulate the fucking things?
“They seem to be…vibrating.” Lovett’s voice tightened even further. He sounded terrified.
“Vibrating?” His eyebrows rose. That was new.
“Yes, vibrating. And the vibrations are getting stronger, sliding in and out of various frequencies. They’re able to move their tank through the vibrations. A very slight amount, to be sure—but my God, that tank weighs a couple of tons—for them to move it at all is….” He paused and took an obvious breath. When he continued, his voice shook. “Quite disturbing.”
“Yes. Quite.” Clark tensed, his heart suddenly racing. Why did this news feel so ominous? “I’m on my way.”
For the first time, as he descended inside the bright elevator, the car seemed to close around him with claustrophobic pressure, intensifying his feeling of dread.
For fuck’s sake! What the hell were the damn things up to now? These vibrations Lovett spoke of, they were deliberate. He instinctively knew that. They served a purpose. What purpose, he didn’t know, not yet. But his little robots were adapting, mutating in response to their environment. After each attempt to eradicate them, their ridges expanded, thickened, turned into some kind of fucking armor.
Currently, the only thing in his favor was that the prototype was contained.
The observation went through him like an electric shock. Was that the purpose behind the vibrations? Were they trying to free themselves? Lovett had said the five-ton containment tank had moved. Impossible to believe, yet everything the nanobots were doing was supposed to be impossible. What if they were trying to vibrate it off its table, hoping to crack it open and escape? Was that even possible?
Were his NNB26 prototype nanobots that intelligent?
At the lab’s security panel, he punched in his code and bent for a retinal scan. The door unlocked with a pressurized hiss. The lab seemed colder, more sterile and eye-poppingly brighter than he remembered, even though he’d visited two days earlier. It was also empty—other than Lovett. Clark had transferred the rest of the lab personnel to other projects in other buildings.
The heavy, silver door closed behind him, sealing him inside the room with acres of stainless steel and bright white light. He heard the vibration Lovett had mentioned the instant he stepped inside. The humming emanated from the center of the room, where the silver tank sat on its thick, stainless steel table. The vibration reverberated throughout the lab, alternating between a deep, guttural buzz and a high-pitched hum. Even from a distance, he could see the tank shiver.
The sound reminded him of a hive of extremely pissed off bees.
He’d left his laptop in his office, so Clark crossed to the computer terminal across from the tank. The interior of the tank, magnified by 400,000x through the EMC, was already displayed on the screen.
“Any idea what they’re doing?” Clark asked, studying the NNB26 bots.
“Not even an inkling,” Lovett said, watching the trembling tank with an uneasy grimace.
Clark frowned, staring at the screen. The bots had mutated on the heels of the liquid nitrogen bath. They looked tick-like now, with triangular bodies, multiple legs—or appendages that resembled legs—and a turquoise-colored shell. Currently, they were clustered on top of each other in an oblong ball. The sphere shivered and churned, which had to be what was causing the vibrations.
He’d read that bees shivered their flight muscles and wings during winter. The combined shivering of thousands of bees generated enough heat to keep the hive warm during cold weather. Was that what the NNB26 bots were doing? Were they generating heat with their vibrations?
Clark lowered himself into the chair in front of the terminal and rolled it closer to the screen. Were his eyes playing tricks on him, or was the ball of bots getting bigger…rounder? “When did the vibration start?”
“As soon as they reformed after I dosed them with liquid helium. The intensity of the vibrations has grown throughout the day.”
Hmm…interesting. If their vibrations were about creating warmth, they could be reacting to the minus 269 degree Celsius temperature of their recent bath. Not to mention the temperatures of their earlier liquid nitrogen dosing. Perhaps they were still recovering and mutating from the extreme cold temperatures they’d been subjected to. He accessed the saved video and backed through the footage.
After several minutes of scrolling through the tapes, he leaned back in his chair and stared at the computer screen. There was no doubt—the bot swarm was getting bigger. The ball was markedly smaller in previous footage.
What the hell were they doing?
“What about the bots in the clean room vat? Are they vibrating too?”
“Not that we’re aware of. I’ve been checking the big tank periodically. So far, no vibrations in there.”
The buzzing in the testing tank suddenly deepened to a roar. Clark shot a look at the computer screen and froze in shock. What the fuck? The bot ball had tripled in size. How had they done that so quickly and with no new components to replicate themselves?
The five-ton tank shook.
Jesus Christ!
Clark stared in shock as the tank slid closer to the edge by a solid inch. The roar increased. The NNB26 prototype cluster tripled again.
Good God! Clark gasped.
“Watch out!” Clark shouted as the container shot forward, straight toward Lovett.
Instead of ducking to the side, as Clark had expected, the doctor shot out a hand, as if to stop the tank from flying off the table. Which was instinctive and insane. The tank weighed ten thousand pounds. Lovett couldn’t stop it.
Except the tank lurched to a stop at the exact moment Lovett’s palm hit the exterior. A static crackle joined the roar.
Lovett seized, his entire body twitching. His eyes bulged. His mouth contorted into a silent scream. His hand and arm blackened, smoke curling up from his clothes and the charred flesh beneath. Urine soaked Lovett’s crotch. Then he dropped like a sack of bones, hitting the tile floor with a weighty thud.
Clark gagged as the smell of burning flesh and cloth filled the lab. His legs shook as he rose to his feet and stumbled over to the smoking bundle of cooked meat. It was instantly obvious there was nothing anyone could do for the man. His eyes weren’t even fixed. Or staring. They were just puddles of white goo.
Surprised that his legs were holding him up, he backed his way to the computer chair without taking his gaze off the tank. The bot container was still now. And silent. Ominously silent. He collapsed into his chair and stared in dumfounded disbelief at Lovett’s smoking body.
That’s what the fucking things had been doing, electrifying their prison, making it impossible for Lovett to douse them again. Clark swiveled his chair and stared at the computer screen. The bot ball had shrunk to its normal size and spread out across the bottom of the tank.
The evolutionary leap he’d just witnessed was inconceivable. The NNB26 prototype had gone from passively restoring themselves to actively protecting themselves.
In the process, they’d deliberately taken their first human life.