The Nanotech Network

The NanoTech Network.

Science-Fiction Novel by Alexander Lazarevich.

DISCLAIMER NOTICE.

The intent of this notice is to antic.i.p.ate possible accusations against me that I am trying to create a distorted notion about historical characters, both still alive and dead, by ascribing to them the words they never actually said. I hereby state that the text following after this notice is a product of my imagination. The words that I put into the mouths of historical characters of the past or the present only represent my idea of what these characters might have said, had they found themselves in the imaginary situation described in the following text. To the best of my knowledge they never actually said these words.

As far as I know, the events described in this text did not take place in reality. However, the latter statement should not be construed to mean that the events described hereinafter could not have happen in reality, or that they will never occur in the future.

The author END OF THE NOTICE.

Part One: Cyborg-Bacteria

1.1. Dissemination. May 15, 1997, 11:35 AM, Moscow subway

Around noon, as usual, the subway car was full of foreign tourists. A group of American high-school students, maps of Moscow subway in their hands, were unsuccessfully trying to p.r.o.nounce the Russian names of the stations written on the map in English transcription. Closer to the door there stood an elderly j.a.panese couple, video cameras and other high- tech gadgets hanging from their necks.

A middle-aged man, who looked like a Russian, and who did not at all look like he was suffering from a cold, suddenly sneezed, bespattering the Americans with his saliva. "Excuse me" said he in English with a strong Russian accent, and started getting through to the door. At the door he sneezed once again, this time bespattering the j.a.panese. Apparently he did not know any j.a.panese, so he just excused himself in Russian. The train arrived at the station, he got off, and was forever lost in the crowd...

The next day, 2:50 PM, Moscow International Airport "Sheremetievo"

An elderly j.a.panese couple, who dropped by a duty-free souvenir shop to buy a Russian nested doll before leaving Moscow, approached the salesgirl to pay for the souvenir.

When proffering his credit card to the salesgirl, the j.a.panese man unexpectedly, even for himself, sneezed. So unexpectedly, in fact, that he did not even have time to cover his mouth with his hand. Extremely embarra.s.sed, he started jabbering rapidly in his own tongue, hurriedly bowing. The salesgirl impatiently waved her hand, meaning "That's OK"...

The j.a.panese couple flew out to their j.a.pan, without even suspecting what other souvenir, besides the nested doll, they were carrying from Moscow...

Same place, an hour later.

The salesgirl in the duty-free shop suddenly sneezed. She had not felt any symptoms of an incipient cold, not a hint of a headache. She just had suddenly wanted to sneeze, without any apparent reason. "Probably some kind of allergy"

- thought she, while aloud she apologized to an Arab-looking customer, whom she seemed to had bespattered. After the Arab came a Latin-American, then came an African, and after the African came a Chinese. All the world was coming. Everybody was going home, to hundreds of countries on all the continents. Each of them was to take along some invisible souvenirs and to become the sources of dissemination in their own respective countries...

1.2. Detection June 25, 1997. Center for Communicable Decease Control, Atlanta, USA

- "It's hard to say now who was the first to spot them.

It might have been that schoolgirl during a biology cla.s.s who was looking through a microscope and suddenly asked her teacher: what's this? And the teacher could not answer. In appearance they are not very different from conventional bacteria, but at high magnification, or rather, at a relatively high magnification, the highest magnification a conventional school microscope is capable of, if you look very carefully you could see some particles inside that have regular geometric shapes."

The deputy director for science of the center for communicable disease control put the first of the photographs on the director's desk. At first glance there was nothing extraordinary about them. The usual a.s.sortment of all kinds of bacteria that one can see wherever one points one's microscope. Some of the bacteria were marked with a felt pen circles, and inside those one could indeed see some rectangles and geometrically perfect spheres that were interconnected by some strings and pipes.

-"The teacher contacted us. At almost the same time we were also contacted by some lab a.s.sistants who had been doing some routine medical a.n.a.lyses and also noticed something unusual. It is worth noting here that they all live in different states, hundreds of miles from each other.

They have mailed us some samples. But I'm afraid, they were too late."

-"How do you mean, too late?" The anxiety in the director's voice increased.

The deputy director for science took one more photograph out of his folder, and hesitated for a moment, as if not daring to put it on the director's desk. After a momentary pause he said: -"This photograph was taken this morning. It has nothing to do with the samples that we received. We just took some water out of tap, out of the city water works, and took a picture through a microscope."

He went silent and put the picture on the desk. The director gingerly took the picture in his hands. He had braced himself for the worst. But what he saw was a shock to him. Almost a third of all the bacteria in the picture had been marked with a felt pen by somebody's slightly shaking hand.

-"Do you mean to say "-said director in a constrained voice-"that they are already... everywhere?"

-"They are anywhere you look. If you washed your face and brushed your teeth this morning, I bet your have millions of them in your bloodstream by now. Just as I have in mine as well."

-"Is this dangerous?"

-" We don't now. We have gone through all the epidemiology reports for the last week from all over the country. There don't seem to be any new unknown diseases, no unusual symptoms. So if we a.s.sume it to be an agent for some exotic disease, its incubation period is apparently longer than one week. The only thing it seems to be doing now is just breeding like h.e.l.l. Although, some data suggest that it may cause sudden fits of sneezing - that seems to be its method of propagation. But no other symptoms. There is, however, one strange fact that transpires from these reports..." - the deputy director for science hesitated for a moment.

-"I'm listening. Go ahead." -said the Director.

- "It's unlikely that it has anything to do with these...

"things". Most likely it's just a coincidence. The mortality rate throughout the population went down. Earlier in the week it dropped just a little, within the normal statistical fluctuation range, but by the end of the week its value plunged far beyond usual statistical variations and continues to go down. There are lots of reports about terminal cancer patients whose condition unexpectedly improved during this week. There was also a steep decline in the number of deaths related to heart attacks and strokes."

-"A bacteria that does not cause diseases but rather cures them - that's something new. We've got to stop this epidemic before all of us medical folks are out of our jobs"

- nervously joked the director.

The deputy director did not even smile at the joke: "The most terrible thing is - and I've been saving the worst news for the end - it is that this "thing" just is not a bacteria at all. Or, rather, not quite a bacteria. We have managed to photograph it through an electron microscope. Have a look at this."

What was shown in the picture looked a little bit like a spa.r.s.e forest made up of industrial robots in place of trees, photographed from a helicopter. Mechanical manipulator arms, a little c.u.mbersome in appearance, looking as if they were made of thick gla.s.s, stuck out here and there from the surface of a great pain.

-"This is a close-up of one of the areas on the surface of this so-called "bacteria". Just to give you an idea of the scale of this picture, let me point out that the grapple on this manipulator arm is merely several tens of atoms of carbon thick."

-"But this means that... that..." - the director was momentarily at a loss for words - "This means that this thing is artificial!"

- "In a certain sense it is. The first one was indeed created by somebody, but after that they multiplied by themselves, by making copies of their own selves. They are half bacteria, half self-replicating engineering systems. We nicknamed them cyborg-bacteria. Look at the next picture.

This is what they have inside. This here is an ordinary cell nucleus, although the number of chromosomes in it is somewhat higher than one would normally expect to find in a bacteria. But all around the nucleus..."

All around the nucleus, there were strange structures floating in the cell's cytoplasm, that bore a remote resemblance to some kind of s.p.a.ce stations interconnected by a maze of tubing."

-"But who created them?" - asked the director.

-"No idea. Or, rather, there are several options. The first thing that comes to mind when looking at these photographs is an extraterrestrial invasion. But this option seems to be so implausible that one's mind involuntarily searches for a different explanation. For example, this could be a new type of weapons - a combination of biological weapons with the latest in nanotechnology, a sort of microscopic time bomb that will come into action as soon as they have sufficiently multiplied. Of course, I use the word "bomb" figuratively. For example, they might suddenly start to produce a toxin. It may well be that we are under an attack launched by a hostile nation, or by terrorists. And there is also the most rea.s.suring option - this thing just inadvertently escaped from some secret lab and it is not meant to be activated."

"In any case, one thing is clear: we've got to keep all this in strictest secrecy." - said director - "If it turns out that this thing is indeed of an extraterrestrial origin, just imagine the panic that will break out when people learn that they have millions of alien-made robots circulating in their blood streams! But if it's just a leak from some top- secret lab, once again, the government is not going to pat us on the back for exposing a closely-kept military secret.

You've got to think up some kind of official hog-wash to feed to that schoolteacher and all the others. In the mean time, I'll try to contact the military and the CIA."

1.3. Investigation. July 3, 1997. Nanotechnology lab at MIT, Ma.s.s, USA.

- "You know, Professor" - said the plain-clothes man - "what baffles me most is that in your lab, where you have all these microscopes that are, according to my sources, the best in the world, n.o.body ever noticed the cyborg-bacteria until you were specially notified of their existence."

-"Nothing baffling, really. If you walk around our facility, you'll see that we have quite a system here for protecting us against any extraneous contaminants. We are working here on objects that are millionths of a millimeter in size, that is, nanometers, which is comparable to the size of individual atoms. A bacteria, about ten thousand times larger then this and containing billions of atoms is, from our standpoint, a whole mountain that can wreck all our work. It could never, in principle, enter our microscopes.

Even the first, the coa.r.s.est air filters would screen it out. But when a week ago you told us about them, and asked us to investigate, we let them under our microscopes. What we saw there, nearly cost some of our people their sanity.

We have been working in the field of nanotechnology for the last fifteen years, and we have always considered ourselves the leaders in the field. We did make some things we thought we could be proud of. We were, or we thought we were, the first to produce a few gears where each tooth consisted of only 20 atoms. We have even built a fully functional electric motor less than one micron in size. But what we saw inside the cyborg-bacteria was a real shock to us. This was an entirely different level of technology.

Whoever it was who made them, these guys are ahead of us by twenty to twenty five years."

-"Are you sure that it is only twenty and not a thousand or a million?" - asked the man in plain clothes.

Professor gave him a wry smile: "If you are still thinking in terms of extra-terrestrials, forget it. This thing is of an earthly origin. A significant portion of genes in the nucleus of the cyborg-bacteria are borrowed from common bacteria."

-"So, you believe that you yourself could make something similar in about twenty years time?"

-"Even earlier than that, if only I had unlimited funding. It is hard to imagine the amount of man-hours of highly-skilled, highly-paid labor invested in the design of this cyborg and the manufacturing of the first model. This work must have involved the efforts of thousands of first- cla.s.s engineers and scientists. It is incredibly expensive.

The costs must be comparable to the costs of Manhattan Project or Apollo Project."

-"I want to make sure that I got you right: you say that most of the expenses in this business are caused by the labor costs, not the cost of hardware? Are you sure? This could be very important for figuring out who did it - there are some countries in the world where the labor of highly- skilled scientists comes very cheap."

-"Well, of course the equipment is also expensive. But you need it only in the initial phase, the one that we, by the way, are not through yet. This first phase consists in the development of the first self-replicating micro-robot capable of manipulating individual atoms. As soon as you have it built, this very robot becomes you primary tool.

You'll need virtually no other equipment after that. The only other piece of equipment you'll still have to use will be your own brains, because you'll have to know precisely what atom you want moved and where you want it placed. You enter into an entirely new technological ballgame. It's a technological breakthrough that is beyond comparison to anything in the previous history of mankind. The creation of the first microrobot is the barrier beyond which lies a wonderland. He who has pa.s.sed this barrier comes into possession of seemingly magic powers that defy all imagination. For example, he can create absolutely new genes by directly manipulating the sequence of amino acids - something which is still impossible for the present-day genetic engineering that has to be content with mere cutting and pasting of fragments of the already existing genes, and what is worse, genes cut only at certain specific locations, rather than at locations chosen at will. Well, coming back to where we started, it looks like somebody on our planet Earth has already pa.s.sed that barrier, and does things which are unthinkable from the standpoint of conventional technologies.

You asked me the question of whether it was twenty years or one million. To give you a perfectly correct answer I should say that time estimates like this are only applicable to a steady growth phase in the evolution of a technology.

They are absolutely irrelevant in the situation of a technological breakthrough of this scale. In a situation like we have here, twenty years are as good as one million.

They are past the barrier, while we are still not, they are omnipotent, while we are powerless. Do you know what the mechanical structures inside the cyborg-bacteria are made of? Of diamond! Of course, this could be expected, since the only construction material available to them is carbon. But the very fact that they take carbon dioxide molecules out of the atmosphere, extract from them atoms of carbon that they then put together into a diamond lattice at ambient temperature and pressure, seems to be a miracle from the standpoint of present-day technologies requiring crushing pressures and searing temperatures to create a diamond."

-"They put diamonds together atom by atom?"

- "Not quite so. Although they do seem to be capable of doing this as well, this would still be a very slow process, while they multiply very fast and need a lot of construction material. The solution their creators have found is absolutely amazing - they put together a gene for producing an enzyme that promotes the a.s.sembly of carbon atoms into a diamond lattice. And I suspect that this gene is not the only artificial gene inside the cellular nucleus of the cyborg-bacteria. For all we know, their genes may contain the complete information on the design of both the biological part and the "engineering" part of the cyborg- bacteria. Although we cannot be certain about this yet. The matter is, the engineering part of the cyborg-bacteria includes not only purely mechanical end effectors. In our latest scanning electronic microscope photographs, one can see a structure inside the cell which we provisionally named the "on-board computer". Have a look at this. See this field in the picture, dotted with a mult.i.tude of tiny light and dark specks, located seemingly at random? Each speck is just a few atoms in size. And here you can see a picture of the same field taken just a few seconds later. As you can see, the pattern of the specks in the upper right corner remained the same. We provisionally called this area "ROM", which stands for the "Read-Only Memory". But the partern of specks in that other area over there has changed beyond recognition. That is why we provisionally named it "random access memory". Although, for all we know, this might actually be a microprocessor. Or what I would rather call a "nanoprocessor".

-"And what about these straight lines going all the way across the field?"

-"Our provisional nomenclature for them is "wiring".

These seem to be leads for data input and output."

-"Wires? Made of metal?"

-"No metals here. Everything made of carbon. Carbon is the most wonderful of all the chemical elements in the periodic table. Put the carbon atoms together in one way - and what you get is a graphite, a soft, electrically conductive material. But re-arrange the atoms in the crystal lattice just a little bit - and you end up with the hardest material in the world, and the best electrical insulator as well. And these are just the two extremes of the whole range of properties. In between, you can find materials with virtually any desired properties, the only thing you need to know is the pattern of the carbon atoms. And here we are talking about an element that can be "mined" directly from the ambient air, that is exactly what all the plant life on Earth does every day - mining carbon from air. This element is the basis for all the living things on Earth, and this explains the ease with which the creators of the cyborg- bacteria were able to combine seemingly incompatible things: live creatures with inanimate matter, organisms with mechanisms. They joined them so seamlessly that we cannot even figure out how they breed: whether they do it by conventional biological cell fission (this would mean that all the information about the cyborg's mechanical part is stored in the genes), or whether the mechanical part of the daughter cell still has to be completed using mechanical manipulator arms of the mother cell. We have not yet observed the latter, while the former is too hard to believe in."

The plain-clothes man looked at his watch: "Professor, what you are telling me is terribly fascinating, I would even say, fascinatingly terrible, but I've got to catch a plane to Washington - tomorrow morning the President calls a secret meeting to discuss this issue, and I've still got to put together an executive summary for that meeting. So, could you please summarize what you have been able to learn during the last two days. We have heard some frightening rumors about the cyborg-bacteria's power source, and about their ability to communicate with each other. The latter is of special concern to the President. The existence of an unknown global communications network, which is independent of the Internet, and which carries no one knows what kind of data, is a serious potential threat to the United States national security. Do you have anything to say about this?"

- "First a few words about their power supply. Initially we a.s.sumed that they extract their energy from organic substances which they take from their environment. Simply speaking, we believed that when they swim in the water they eat, for example, green algae, and when they enter animal or human circulatory system, they feed on nutrients available in the blood. However, even the first rough estimates showed that if they had used as their power source the organic matter from the environment, they would not have been able to breed as fast as is actually the case. We have made an experiment: we put one cyborg-bacteria in a gla.s.s of germ- free chemically pure water, containing no organics, and then put the gla.s.s into a hermetically sealed box in complete darkness to rule out any possibility of photosynthesis. In one hour's time the water in the gla.s.s was teeming with cyborg-bacteria, while the level of helium in the air inside the box had risen, by a very small amount, at the sensitivity threshold of our instruments, but it did rise, all right. You can tell the President we are almost certain that the source of power used by the cyborg-bacteria is the cold-fusion reaction of hydrogen atoms. Since they extract hydrogen directly from the water they swim in, they have a virtually unlimited power source at their disposal.

We still do not know any details of this process, but we think that there must be some "power plant" inside cyborg- bacteria, which breaks up water into oxygen and hydrogen, then picks up individual hydrogen atoms and brings them into a certain relative position required to trigger off their fusion into atoms of helium. The energy released in the process is then apparently used to build up the organic molecules necessary for the normal operation of the organic part of the cell, to generate electric power for the cyborg's mechanisms, or maybe that energy is directly transmitted to the mechanisms in the form of mechanical work without intermediate conversion to electrical power - we still don't know the details. Of the greatest interest here is the cold fusion reaction itself. In the cold fusion, the most important thing is the proper relative positioning of the atoms. If we manage to trace this process, we'll eventually be able to reproduce it, and our country would get a new environmentally clean power source. But we need additional funds for this research. I would like you to draw the President's attention to this."

-"Sure I will," - nodded the man in plain clothes - "but at the moment the President is mostly concerned about the second issue I mentioned."

-"I was just getting to that. We have indeed managed to establish that cyborg-bacteria are capable of communicating with each other by sending and receiving narrow-beam infrared pulses."

-"You mean they communicate with each other using the same infrared rays as an ordinary TV remote control?"

- "Not quite so. The frequency range they use lies a little bit lower than the one used in the IR remote controls. The cyborg-bacteria's range is closer to microwave radiation. But the princ.i.p.al differences lie, firstly, in modulation. The data throughput of an ordinary remote control is negligibly low because is uses a very primitive method of carrier-wave modulation. But in fact, the electromagnetic waves of such high frequency are capable of carrying huge amounts of data, and as far as we could see, the cyborg-bacterias use this capability to the fullest extent possible. We are talking here about tens of megabytes, or maybe even gigabytes per second. Secondly, they have a very narrow beam radiation pattern. Although individual bacteria also use omnidirectional radiation to communicate with their closest neighbors at the distances of up to a few millimeters, the strength of such signal is very low and it cannot be used for communications at a long range of, say, tens of meters. For long-range communications, groups of neighboring bacteria cooperate with each other to create, for the time of a long-range communications session, a sort of phased antenna array with a pencil-beam radiation pattern. In other words they radiate in a very narrow beam, where the signal strength decreases with the distance ever so slightly. In this way one group of cyborg-bacteria may communicate with another at distances of up to hundreds of feet."

- "But a hundred feet is not very much."

- "It is more than enough."

- "Enough for what?"

- "Enough for any cyborg-bacteria located at any point on Earth to be able to communicate with any other cyborg- bacteria located at any other point on the globe, even at a distance of tens of thousands of miles. You've got to understand that by now the cyborg-bacteria have spread all over the Earth. Wherever you might happen to be, with a possible exception of a desert, you will always be able to find within a hundred feet range from you either some living thing, or a pond, or at least a puddle. If those cyborg- bacteria that live inside you, wanted for some reason to communicate with their cousins in Europe, the only thing they would need to do would be to call the cyborg-bacteria that live inside that water faucet over there in this room.

Those would pa.s.s on their message to other bacteria living further down along the water-pipe, those other ones would pa.s.s the message to still other ones, and so on, all the way to the Atlantic Ocean. And the ocean is teeming with these bacteria, so from there on the message would be traveling very fast."

- "Are you certain that such things are actually happening?"