Chapter 12 - In which things progress more or less according to plan

In which things progress more or less according to plan.

‘Austenitic stainless steel’ is what it is called, apparently. Because, as I said, I am not a metal alloy specialist or have a degree in physics, I had glossed over many parts of the NanoRep blueprints.

The government agency that had developed the self-replicating nano-robots apparently knew their metals, though. Of course they would think about detection by CAT-scans or X-ray. Of course they would consider corrosion and magnetism and radio-signatures and all manner of aspects I was too uneducated or simply too unimaginative to think of. I felt like a dunce when I read the footnotes and appendices. Of course they would think of that. Of course.

Aside from making me feel like a complete idiot, having been so brash as to infect probably more than half a million people with the nano-replicants without considering what could happen to them other than from a pecuniary perspective, this gave me some comfort, however. Because they were designed by military experts who were most likely just as good in their respective fields as I was at designing intuitive computer interfaces, the NanoReps would probably exceed my expectations in many other respects that I was not even aware of. They would be very nearly impossible to detect, even under a microscope, that much I understood from the technical descriptions once I sat down with a dictionary and deciphered them. Because they were so small, and because the structures they built were generally meshes of long filaments, the human eye would not be able to see them even using an optical microscope. Bacteria were visible like that, but not viruses, and the NanoReps were virus-sized. Only if I forced them to form thin sheets would they become visible to the human eye, otherwise they would need to place tissue samples in electron microscopes to see them. No surgeon or undertaker would accidentally see them.

Because I had made them construct circuits that worked on common wifi-frequencies, they would be easily detectable for anyone with a wifi antenna, but I had designed my first batch of bots to communicate using an unusual protocol, and definitely to not respond to any normal network handshake commands. People would have to know what to look for. I was probably out of the woods there.

Time would have to tell, but I could probably breathe a sigh of relief.

I spent the next week working on many projects, dividing my attention between them. One was to look for suitable properties to buy near prestigious universities. The climate needed to be right, neither too warm nor too cold. There needed to be good high-schools nearby. In a part of the world where I understood the language and where the population was large and diverse, so as to give me a large pool of potential girls to select cuties from. Better to take my time than to make the wrong choice here.

Then there was the problem of living up to my promise to Marie, to find and cure those who suffered from debilitating depression. I had exaggerated the ease with which I would be able to use my NanoReps to detect the disease, not only because I needed to come up with a piece of software to run, that could collect data and interpret it correctly, but also because I needed to connect to half a million NanoReps to install that software. It turned out to be so hard that I needed to consult experts in the field - reading about the neurological signature of depression didn’t cut it. I had read an incredible amount of literature on the brain already, but I was more of an expert on topology than on diseases of the brain. A professor over at the largest hospital in the city turned out to be very cooperative, once I used his NanoRep system to convince him that I was an old colleague who needed help with a project. Once I was done with him, I zapped his hippocampus and went about constructing the data collection and analysis software that could run on the NanoRep circuits. I made a few test-runs, using a group of patients at the hospital that I knew were depressed - I had put the therapist in zombie mode while I looked through her files - and a bunch of presumably healthy people picked at random. When I knew the program worked well, I went to a local radio broadcast station that had antennas capable of adequate output, persuaded the technician in charge to help me connect my computer and then ran the code update for the whole city at once, before thanking him for his assistance and toasting his hippocampus for a while to make him forget.

The NanoRep systems that detected depression of a certain severity would execute a set of commands that made the infection permanent and then build the necessary hardware to apply the right kinds of anti-depressive pacemaker jolts to the reward centres and to block certain negative emotions to a degree, and to adapt the treatment to the patient so as to not make anyone deliriously happy and manic, but just cut away the worst hedonic lows in order to facilitate a return to baseline. In anyone that didn’t suffer from severe depression, the NanoReps would dissolve into the urine as originally planned.