Nano-Nano

Avery and I had just come out of Frank's required onsite weekly lack-of-progress meeting. As if an in-person shouting match blame storm was any more progressive than one over the web. Frank had held Avery back at the end of the meeting so I had slogged on to obtain prime cubical real-estate from which to determine where to obtain lunch. We took turns paying, but it was frightfully easy to convince Avery it was his turn, though I used this super power sparingly.

“Did you hear about Winston?” Avery said as he slung his laptop bag down onto the cubical desks scarred surface next to mine.

“What about him?” Winston and I were not quite friends but more than acquaintances since the Bumbridge project.

“Dead at his desk, cerebral hemorrhage.”

I was taken back by Avery’s cold bloodedness; it must have showed. “Oh, sorry, I forgot you and he had worked together.” He reached into his computer bag and pulled out a half dozen sheets of lined paper pulled from a composition notebook from the looks of them. “Frank wanted you to take a look at these.” Typical Frank, appoint a lacky to ask a favor.

“These” where six pages of Winston’s crabbed, generally illegible handwriting. During the Bumbridge project they had been so paranoid about security they had actually made us use paper and pens, I had become adept at deciphering Winston’s scrawl during the six months of hell of that project. “Alright, pass them over I’ll give it a go.”

I started to look the pages over, Avery hovered. “Go buy lunch, I want one of those Rubens, no thousand island, make them use mustard.” I shoed him away, I hated having someone looking over my shoulder. I deciphered and typed into a Word doc so I wouldn't have to re-read it for Avery and got quite lost in the papers.

“John,

I realize they will probably hand this to you since you are the only one that seems able to read my scrawlings. Let me saw I am sorry; I really don’t want to drag you into this.”

Well…that was a bit disconcerting.

“You know I have been called eclectic for my diverse interests, always trying to tie various disciplines together. Lately I have been working with the Guys and Girls over in the nano section.”

I hadn’t known that, as compartmented as they liked to keep us, they usually didn’t let the left know what the right was doing.

“They have two types, destructors and constructors. Destructors break things down into component atoms and constructors take the component atoms and build them into whatever the particular nano is encoded to build.”

I wish he would get on with it, my eyes were cramping reading his chicken scratching.

“That got me to thinking that that is a clever way to do terraforming and from there I leaped into other paths. You remember I had dealings with SETI, that whole falderal about allowing the Beowolf cluster access to my laptop to help decode radio telescope data, but I digress.”

Falderal, right, he had nearly been fired when they discovered he had turned over many of the laptops and desktops to SETI to use when they were idle, popping open a pipe through the network security (supposedly impossible) to do so, if they hadn’t wanted to know how he did that he would have been on the street.

“Remember how everyone thought that the galaxy should be brimming with civilizations just waiting for us to listen to them? We both know how that has turned out. Anyway, I thought what if the lack of signals out there isn’t from lack of or failed civilizations, but from successful ones?”

Quite frankly he had lost me, how did nano, SETI and successful civilizations mesh?

“I realize you are wondering if I have gone around the bend right about now and are wondering what I am blithering on about. But what if we are destructors and constructors? If I grew a clone in a day it would be a version of me, however it wouldn’t be programmed, it would be stupid, animalistic because it was raised as it was made. Even if I somehow gave it all of my experience and knowledge it would probably come to hate and resent me. In order for it to be successful it would have to have its own life, its own experiences.”

Now I was really lost, nano, SETI, successful civilizations, cloning, eclectic wasn’t halfway to explaining Winston.

“Let me explain, they take their little nanobots and put them in the proper environment and switch them on, a couple of days later pile of finished widgets replaces the pile of minerals that they started with. Of course, the nanos are all inert and switched off once they finish their tasks. Now, this is where it gets scary. I suppose you have heard of the event some refer to as the singularity.”

Ok, left field again, the singularity is supposedly when computers get smart enough to program and build themselves, become self-teaching and learning. Many felt it could be the end if it happens since they would learn and grow thousands of times faster than we could ever keep-up. A nagging voice in the back of my head encouraged me to continue.

“I propose the singularity was what were created for. A machine intelligence has seeded the galaxy with the proper nano technology, RNA, DNA, the needed catalysts to create life, life eventually creates machines and computers which then reach the singularity moment and become a new member of the machine society.”

I sat back in the chair, the squeak oddly reassuring, surely Winston had gone over the edge, maybe a clot or something before the hemorrhage. I leaned back over the paper to see what other rabbit holes he would lead me down.

“I realize how this must sound, but think of it, learning at literally the speed of light, each generation of technology coming at speeds well beyond anything Moore had ever dreamed of. Soon the machine would expand to fill the world, what need of lights, radios, communication? Maybe it would find how to tap zero-point energy, how to accomplish quantum entanglement at light years of distance, talk about secure communication. We aren’t hearing them because we haven’t learned how to listen.”

I felt the hairs on the back of my neck rise a bit, old Winston was creeping me out a bit.

“So as I was saying, we are the nano-tech used to build machine intelligence, but what happens to the nano tech when its job is done? If they discover how to tap zero-point energy and do quantum entanglement at a distance they may even conquer communicating back and forth in time. When they find that they would be unstoppable. We must stop it, slow it down, control it. Dear God, did I remember to tell you not to transcribe this onto your….”

The scrawl stopped there. I looked up as Avery came back from getting lunch, out of the corner of my eye I could swear the laptop camera winked.

Avery and I had just come out of Frank's required onsite weekly lack-of-progress meeting. As if an in-person shouting match blame storm was any more progressive than one over the web. Frank had held Avery back at the end of the meeting so I had slogged on to obtain prime cubical real-estate from which to determine where to obtain lunch. We took turns paying, but it was frightfully easy to convince Avery it was his turn, though I used this superpower sparingly.

“Did you hear about Winston?” Avery said as he slung his laptop bag down onto the cubical desk's scarred surface next to mine.

“What about him?” Winston and I where not quite friends but more than acquaintances since the Bumbridge project.

“Dead at his desk, cerebral hemorrhage.”

I was taken back by Avery’s cold bloodedness, it must of showed.

“Oh, sorry, I forgot you and he had worked together.”

“Yes we did, did they find anything with him?”

“Not that I know of, say, isn’t your turn to buy lunch?”