Destiny's Choice (The Wandering Engineer) (32 page)

“I
do?”

“It's
got basic things like a scanner and a pair of shears and it even has a
cauterizer.”

Bryan
blinked, suddenly looking interested. “Oh. Well, I was thinking something like
what he's got here. The probe,” he pointed to the probe the chief had pulled
out.

“A
tricorder you mean,” Bailey said with a snort. “You got those too.

“Want
me to pause it?” Everette said exasperated.

“No,
I'm fine,” Irons answered. He turned and snagged a tablet from a nearby table.
The owner protested with a yelp.

“Just
a sec.” he tapped the controls and then handed it back.

“What
the...” the kid looked down at it and then at the Admiral in sudden amusement,
annoyance forgotten. “What the heck did you do?”

“What
did he do?” the exec asked, looking over his shoulder.

The
young man angled his shoulder so the exec could see. When he took his right
hand off the control some of the displays stopped. “Huh?”

“Vitals.
Most tablets can do basic vital functions. So if you don't have a tricorder
handy, link to it and use one.”

“Um...”

“Seriously?”
Bryan asked, suddenly interested. He got up and looked, crowding the kid. “Ah,
I see,” he pointed. “BP, heart rate, pulse, respiration, even blood oxygen
level. Interesting.”

“Biometrics.
Some have a cameras. Depending on the camera you can use it to do other things
like check for soft tissue contusions or bone breaks. Even organ damage.”

“Cool,”
the paramedic said, smiling. “I'll have to remember that.”

“So
what's with the multi-tool?”

“Admiral
gave it to me.”

“Why
would you have one Admiral?” Everette asked, slacking off from the game.
Everything was going according to plan. His scripts were producing units back
at his base. Once he hammered through the Admiral's formidable defenses he'd
follow up with waves to overwhelm him.

“I
wasn't born with implants you know,” Irons said with shake of his head. He
expertly danced his scouts around, just out of range of the kid's forces, while
adding to his tech tree and shelling out soldiers. His workers were adding more
defenses to the choke point but Everette's armor had arrived and were beginning
to pound it.

“Got
you now,” the computer nerd said with a smug grin.

“Don't
count your victories until their won son,” Bailey growled, watching the main
screen where the spectators could see the Admiral's offensive force hook up and
out of view of Everette's army and then back down to the main path. His brows
knit when the force split. One went to the base while the other stopped just
out of sight range of the kid's army.

“It's
in the bag,” Everette said, as his main mecha came up and began to saturate the
choke point defenses with an artillery barrage. In moments the defenses were in
ruins. His friends cheered as he marched his forces through and then spread out
to take the Admiral's base.

“Not
quite,” Irons said, tapping a key. A worker carrying an object trundled toward
the force. It dodged Everette's fire, zigging and zagging back and forth. When
it got in range it set off the nuke.

The
holo flashed as Everette's forces flashed into rubble. He groaned as EMP
dropped the surviving forces. “What the hell?” he said as the Admiral's weak
looking soldiers came in behind his force and began wiping his force out.

“Not
that it'll do you any...” he switched to his base as alarms began to ring.
“How!” he blinked as Irons forces got through the token defenses he had set up
and pounded his production facilities into ruin. “What?”

“Balanced
forces, offense and defense. I told you. And scouting,” the Admiral replied.

“The
scouts told him what you were doing so he tailored his strategy to respond to
it,” Sprite said as the kid sat back and shook his head, stunned.

“I
so had you...” he muttered.

“Nope,
in your dreams kid,” the exec said, smiling. “He is an Admiral after all, he's
probably done stuff like this for oh, your entire life time.”

“More
like four point six times his lifetime sir,” Sprite said with a sniff. “He's
older than he looks.”

“Old
enough to know better, young enough not to care,” Irons responded with a snort.

“That
IP thing you mentioned earlier...”

“Yeah
chief?” Irons asked as the game wrapped up.

“Good
game,” Everette said grudgingly.

Irons
turned his attention to his opponent. “Remember what I said. You've gotten your
hot keys and scripting down, you're fast, so you can keep up with me even if I
ever interfaced. But don't fall in love with your own strategy. Be flexible. I
think Sun Tzu said that a warrior must be flexible like a blade of grass.”

“Maligning
the quote terribly but close enough for an organic,” Sprite said dryly. Her
holo avatar turned to the group at large and then to Everette. “He's saying you
need to be adaptable. Don't be in love with...” She glanced at Irons.

“Don't
be in love with a heavy hitting frontal assault. Sometimes the simple tools are
best,” he said with a shrug, nodding to the multi-tool. “That thing is great
but if it breaks...”

“You're
back to square one.”

“But
it can adapt to do different things.”

“I
think you're confusing the kid. You're sure confusing me. Jumping all over the
place.”

“It
happens,” Irons yawned theatrically and stretched. “Rematch?” he asked.

“Later,”
the kid said shaking his head. He waved and walked out, shaking his head.

“How
much you want to bet he'll go back and replay the entire match?” Sprite asked
amused. Bailey chuckled softly.

“He'll
be useless until he beats you, you know that right?”

“Everyone
needs a hobby,” Sprite answered with a grin.

The
next morning he sipped coffee with the chief while they watched the cargo
supers orchestrate their ballet of cargo pallets and lifting platforms. One
good snarl and they both winced as things piled up and chaos erupted.

Of
course Irons was getting the occasional baleful look. They had thought they
were done shipping stuff down to the planet. His last minute additions had thrown
that schedule out the lock. The captain had backed him too. Of course the extra
time meant some people got more downtime ground side. That was an added benefit
he wasn't getting any credit for.

“So
your arm...”

“What
about it chief?” Irons asked over the cup of coffee. His eyes were on the mess.
Pallets had upturned and cargo was scattered all over the deck. His cargo. He
wasn't happy about the way they were treating it.

“It's
not like the multi-tool is it?” the chief asked. Irons glanced around to make
sure the coast was clear.

“No,
no it's not.”

“Thought
not. nanites?”

“Yes,”
Irons admitted making sure no one else was in ear shot before he admitted that.
“That and yes, some other things I can't get into because they remain
classified.”

“Oh.”

“nanites
get a bad rap,” Sprite said, entering the conversation. Her holo image erupted
from the Admiral's right arm. “Sure there was one incident in the AI war, but
that was handled. And they did more damage with the nukes than the nanites
did.”

“The
nukes cauterized the wound before it consumed the world Sprite.”

“More
like using a sledgehammer to hit a fly,” the AI retorted. “They could have
found alternatives. Programming nanites to kill them, fight fire with fire...”

Irons
waved a dismissive hand. “Old argument, millennia old Sprite. What's done is
done.”

“True,”
she said grudgingly. “But the media had a big hand in the backlash. Hype.”

“Hysteria.
Yes, I know,” the Admiral growled. What she wasn't saying was that nanotech was
also used in the Xeno war. By both sides, and with predictably horrifying
results. That had added to and reignited the hysteria. Seeing a planet being
consumed by little tiny robots tended to do that to a surviving population
after all.

“Fill
me in?” Bailey asked, looking from one to the other.

“The
media, that is the news organizations and the scripted shows and movies you
could download and watch were big on building up a threat. They loved to scare
people.”

“Which
is perfectly natural, organics do that all the time. Try yelling shark on a
beach sometime,” Sprite said.

“True,”
Irons said shaking his head. It was a sore spot for Sprite for obvious reasons.
The early stages of humanity's evolution of artificial intelligence had been
peppered with the entertainment industry of the time finding the best and worst
about a sentient computer. Something that had unfortunately proven true during
the first AI war. The chief sighed patiently. He rolled brown eyes and opened
his mouth. Before he could ask Sprite explained what she was talking about. “A shark
is a predator in the sea. Big ones can get up to five or more meters long. With
sharp teeth.”

Bailey
winced. The imagery there... of being in water and being eaten alive... yes it
did scare the hell out of him. It was like being trapped in a compartment in
the dark with a Dilgarth. He shivered.

“Yeah,
think about someone...” Irons paused and shook his head. “We're drifting off
topic. But to tie that thread into the main one, the threat of a predator was a
theme for many movies and other things.”

“Something
that can eat you without warning would make a good horror flick.”

“Which
they did. Thousands. Millions. The public loves to be scared of something. But
after a while they get over their fear and turn it into curiosity of the
unknown.”

“Another
strange organic thing,” Sprite said with a sniff.

“Organics
fear what they don't understand at first. Remember the material in the early
nineteenth and twentieth century on AI? Some of it turned out to be true right?
There is a grain of truth there, but it's buried in supposition. To get to the
truth you have to get over the fear and take a long hard look at the subject
and study it.”

“Knowledge
is the light that...” Sprite shook her head. “Never mind.”

“Philosophical
discussion later. But getting back to nanites, with the hysteria firmly in mind
the governments at the time put in controls to prevent accidents. They also
firmly limited research and that kept us stagnant. I... well, I may have
covered it before.”

“Just
a bit.”

“We
were getting over the fear of nanites when the Xeno war broke.”

“I
gathered that,” Bailey said with a nod.

“It's
one thing to speculate about nanites as evil. They are just robots. They are
used by evil people, or ignorant people to prey on others. The fear does even
more damage than the actual bot.”

“True.
But you've never been... well, torn apart.”

“You'd
be surprised,” Irons said grinding his teeth a little. The chimp blinked.
“Later chief,” he waved it away. “But the fear of it can make people do stupid
things. Remember what I said about shark earlier? Imagine yelling nanites in a
crowded room?”

This
time the simian did wince and then shivered. “Shit, they'd panic, stampede for
the doors.”

“Right.
And trample anyone in their path. Which is what happened during the war.”

“There
were different nanites used. Three actually. Disassemblers, those tore apart
stuff. Then their were the virals. They either were direct, infecting
everything right away and killing it, or they were time released. The last was
a zombie bug. Turn a person into a robot.”

“Brrrr.”

“Right.
Not a pleasant thought. The interesting thing though is that all that
speculation, all that hysteria building up to the Xeno war gave people ideas on
what to do if something like that happened. They weren't always right, nine
times out of ten they were wrong, but they gave others ideas as well.”

“Ah,
so counters were in place.”

“Well,
not in place but in mind. Many viral nanites could be countered. Fight fire
with fire like Sprite said.”

“True.”

“Same
for the disassemblers. Or an EMP could be used to wipe out mechanical nanites.
Organics could be starved of food, power, or oxygen.”

“Ah.”

“So
yeah, there are counters. But when people panicked they spread it fast than it
could be contained in their flight.”

“Crap.”

“Which
is why harsh quarantine measures were enacted. Nasty, but necessary,” he
grimaced in the familiar pain of having to kill panicking ships trying to flee
a quarantine zone. He didn't want to do it, he still had nightmares, but he'd
also known that if he hadn't other worlds would have fallen.

“And
that's the digest on nanites. At least from our perspective. Neither friend nor
foe, just a tool to use. Treat them right and you'll be fine,” Sprite said in
the silence as he gathered his thoughts. He glanced at her and then nodded.