Corporate Mentality

CHAPTER THREE

ADITI

Aditi Amendeep stared beatifically at the white ceiling above her bed, ignoring the stench of blood and feces that rose from the floor. After a long moment, she gave a soft sigh and smiled. The convulsions had ended, but that wasn’t what was behind her current haze of peaceful delight. The fact was, her pain was gone. Every scrap, every shred. Not even her legs hurt. The feeling was more wonderful than any opiate rush. It was as if someone had lifted a crushing weight off her body, one that she had forgotten she was carrying. For the first time in her life, nothing hurt, and that was exhilarating.

There were other sensations besides a lack of pain. Something else had changed. A tiny army of billions marched through her body, and she could feel each soldier patrolling her cells and making corrections. She narrowed her focus to a single nanobot that was helping a hundred others repair a blood vessel that had ruptured during the convulsions. Like she was moving her own arm, Aditi made it leap into her bloodstream. The acid taste of oxygenated blood flooded the nano’s sensors. The taste vanished when the plasma herded the leukocytes into the capillaries that allowed the blood cells to dump their rich loads into crackling mitochondria. Aditi folded the nano’s spidery legs beneath it and let it coast into the veins. A thumping noise grew louder as the vessels merged into the vena cava and the plasma swept toward the impossibly huge gates of Aditi’s pulmonary valves. Aditi held her breath as the stream of blood swept the nano toward the valves as they gaped open and slammed shut. A few blood cells were crushed between the muscular walls, tanging the plasma flow with the gluelike taste of thromboplastin, which each one released. Aditi barely had time to wonder if this nano would be crushed as well before it surfed past the valves into a dizzying series of cardiac chambers and was squirted toward the lungs. Aditi whooped with joy at the exhilarating speed and giggled when the nano popped through the thin alveolar walls into a tiny, spongy chamber that expanded and collapsed in time with Aditi’s breathing. Aditi held the nano there, exploring the double sensation of hearing her breathing from inside and out.

A spasm wracked Aditi’s diaphragm and for a moment she couldn’t catch her breath. Aditi coughed violently and the nano was abruptly flying. Aditi coughed again. The nano bounced against an unyielding surface, but its weight was so slight it landed undamaged. A great white plain stretched out in all directions and ended at the edge of a tall, straight cliff. Scratches and bumps marred the plain’s surface. Although the nano’s sensors couldn’t "tell" Aditi where it was, she knew its location, much the way she knew where her legs were even if she couldn’t see them. The nano was near her father’s computer station. The plain was part of the keyboard and the cliff was one of the keys.

Aditi’s mind raced, and she narrowed her eyes, trying to concentrate. Her thoughts were chaotic all of a sudden, rushing around like a pack of excited puppies. She found herself looking at the honey trees in the yard, and their probable genetic structure rose unbidden in her mind. A bird flew past, and she analyzed local wind currents based on its flight. Dust motes floated in the air despite Father’s careful filtering, and her nanos caught and tossed them aside before they could enter her lungs. Clouds breezed through the sky and she made automatic predictions about the weather based on ambient temperature and humidity. Her thoughts stretched in these directions and a hundred more all at once. The feeling fascinated and frustrated Aditi. Her mind wanted to run like a small child while her body dragged like an old woman about to die.

The single nano dropped into the computer console and encountered another nano. This wasn’t surprising. Nanos were an integral part of all computer systems. They continually recalibrated delicate drives and systems, kept them clean, performed minor repairs, and even served as temporary data storage units during backups or when it looked like the main drive might fail. Like Aditi’s nanos, they remained in constant communication with each other as long as they were within a few feet of the mother board. When hooked to a digital or faster-than-light communicator, they could also communicate and coordinate with nanobots in other computer systems, allowing a remote programmer to make physical repairs and upload new software without ever having to leave the office.

Or bed.

Before Aditi could even consider the matter further, her nano linked up with the computer’s nano. A viral program she didn’t even realize she had written injected itself and suddenly the second nano was hers. The two nanos scurried away and each connected with another nano. In less than a second, Aditi owned four nanos in her father’s computer, then eight, then sixteen. In less than four minutes, she owned the entire computer.

With but a thought to her new nanos, Aditi flicked the terminal off, flicked it on, flicked it off. Aditi grinned.

Control, she thought in amazement. I have control.

Then the computer was back on again and Aditi’s father’s research dropped into her brain. Facts and observations, nanotechnology programs and designs, physiology and physics flooded her mind. Aditi heard recordings of Father’s voice, read his keystrokes, dissected his programs.

" . . . severe deformities interfering in kinetic activity . . . "

" . . . trauma to the cerebellum resulting in . . . "

" . . . use nanobots to stabilize renal tissue . . . "

It was as if a part of her had become Father’s computer.

Aditi barely had time to wonder how this worked before she noticed her nanos shifting chemicals in her brain, rapidly reconfiguring the molecules to form new codes and engrams, giving her new memories. Aditi giggled and sifted through Father’s databases, capriciously snatching up some bits of information, leaving others alone, wiping still others away as if they had never existed.

A small part of herself asked what was going on and how this had happened, but almost as soon as she asked herself the question, the answer was there.

A hive.

Every nano in Aditi’s growing system spun in place for a tiny moment while Aditi herself absorbed this idea. A nanobot hive had formed inside her. It made perfect sense now that she thought about it. Hives were a constant threat to any nanobot-driven system. On rare occasion and for no apparent reason, the nanobots in some computer systems would band together and form a rudimentary consciousness. Experts in nanotech theorized that each nanobot acted like a single cell of an artificial brain. But the theory remained unproven. In practice, nanobot hives were destroyed as soon as feasibly possible, rendering them difficult to study.

The first nanobot hive had appeared some forty years ago in a private school in Dover back on Earth. Over a dozen people had died and the computer system had been destroyed. The military had irradiated the area with an electromagnetic pulse, effectively wiping out most of the nanobots and, incidentally, any chance of studying what had happened. The surviving nanos had reverted back to their original programming, which meant they cleaned up the mess. By the time the analysts got their equipment set up, there was nothing left to see. And so it went with every other nanobot hive that followed.

Fortunately, most people had a greater chance of being knocked in the head by a falling meteorite than encountering a nanobot hive.

The meteorite had hit Aditi square on.

The sickening stench of blood, urine, and feces was growing stronger, but Aditi, lost in thought, merely frowned. By all rights she should be dead. Nanobot hives weren’t kind to the systems they took over. They ravaged their homes, flexed their muscles, and destroyed their environments even as they learned about them.

So why didn’t they kill me? Aditi thought.

In what was becoming a pattern, the answer to the question popped into her head almost as soon as she asked it. Constant interaction with a human nervous system had been one of the factors that had brought Aditi’s hive to "life," and the patterns from her mind served as a template for the hive’s own consciousness. The nanobots saw Aditi’s brain cells as fellow nanobots, to be integrated instead of destroyed. Now the hive was in her brain, part of her mind. Part of Aditi.

The disgusting acrid smell grew stronger. Aditi wrinkled her nose and a small regiment of nanos automatically cut off her sense of smell. She glanced over the side of her bed. A red-and-gray pile of mush—shredded, cell by cell, by nanos under the panic of Aditi’s convulsions—steamed slightly in the cool air wafting from the vents. The red-gray goo had already formed a greasy skin, and a slow wash of blood was already reaching for the carpet of the room beyond. That was all that remained of Mole-Face and Father.

Aditi giggled. Mole-Face and Father, she thought. Sounds like the title of a children’s book.

Aditi swept a mental hand, and within moments every nanobot in the house was hers, from refrigerator to VR unit to house computer. They swarmed to her call like ants to a queen, crawling from their hiding places, abandoning their tunnels, leaving tasks undone.

With less than a thought, Aditi overrode the computer command that kept the window shut. The glass swished softly open and the room was suddenly awash in hot summer air. Another command, and the pile of flesh, blood, and bone bubbled and boiled as billions of nanos slipped into the mass. The goo began to ooze across the floor like a putrefied amoeba, slurping and sloshing toward the window, leaving absolutely no trail behind it. Not even a molecule. Aditi suppressed another giggle.

Father would be pleased, she thought. He hated messes in the lab.

The mass slurped up the wall, into the flower box, and down the side of the house. Aditi’s eyes couldn’t see it anymore, but her nanos could. The mass lurched and wobbled to the ground, over the grass, and beneath the honey trees. A dog barked wildly next door, and someone started to scream.

The perfect fertilizer, Aditi thought, and reconnected her sense of smell so she could inhale the sweet scent of honey tree leaves on the breeze. Father had always been so worried about pollen. Now they could both enjoy it in completely new ways.

The screaming continued for a long moment, then a door slammed and it abruptly stopped. Aditi nodded with satisfaction, then noted with annoyance that her single arm was still shaking with palsy. Father had tried for years, but with no success. Aditi, however, could now look at everything from individual nerve cells to composite snapshots of her entire nervous system. Like a communications worker following fiber-optic cable, Aditi traced neural connections from arm to cerebrum to the basal ganglia. Here Aditi frowned. The ganglia required two chemicals—dopamine and acetylcholine, whispered an inner voice—to route neural impulses correctly. But the cells were only producing acetylcholine. The resulting interference made it difficult for her brain to communicate with her arm, causing the tremors. In a heartbeat, a hundred thousand nanos set up a wagon train to ship dopamine in from surrounding tissue and deliver it to the connection sites.

The tremors vanished. In wonder, Aditi held up her single hand and flexed it, bending each finger as it pleased her. The muscles obeyed her every command.

Across the room, the computer chimed softly. There had been no activity on the terminal for almost thirty minutes, and it was going to disconnect itself from the networks in a moment. Aditi held the connection open. She was in control now, not the computer.

On impulse, Aditi narrowed her eyes and pushed outward. A billion nanobots instantly connected across the web with a billion nanobots in other computer systems across the world. Aditi’s hive virus shot into the nets and spread, yanking another billion nanos into her domain, all connected through Father’s computer. One billion became two. Then four. Then eight.

Alarms blatted and blared, counterprograms marshaled their forces, antiviral shields sprang into action, but Aditi blundered through them like an elephant through a spiderweb, her hive mind far more powerful than any human-created program. And where control of the nanos went, control of the computers invariably followed. Aditi felt each system click into place like a new hand or foot. Traffic control systems, vidphone connections, VR networks, research databases, house computers, libraries, schools—everything she touched. And everything she touched changed.

Across the city, researchers at MediLife, Incorporated jumped in startlement as gibberish sped across their terminals and fifteen years of painstaking data vanished. Eight groundcars smashed into each other at an intersection where the computer-controlled signal flashed green in all directions. A passenger jumpship coming in for a landing plowed into unyielding tarmac when the computer told it the runway was twenty meters lower than it actually was. Forty-three comatose patients on computerized life-support died without a whimper, while sixty-one others clawed desperately at their hookups before lapsing into death. A corporal on a military base rushed to inform his commander that two dozen tanks had mobilized and were firing at anything that moved, even though no one was at the controls. A teenager who had just discovered his parents’ collection of erotic virtual reality programs was electrocuted the moment he placed the helmet on his head. A technician in the Center for Infectious Disease Control watched in horror as electronic locks on the cages of infected lab animals clicked open and shut at random.

In her room, Aditi closed her eyes and continued to explore. It was like playing a VR game, one with infinite paths and infinite places. She could do ten, fifty, a thousand things at once. She wandered through a mining operation under the ocean and floated in a communications satellite above the atmosphere. She was everywhere, touching, tasting, knocking things off shelves. People screamed and scurried everywhere she went, but Aditi barely noticed. They were images in VR, points of light on a screen, pixels caught in a hologram. Each one was no more significant than the individual cells that made up her body or the individual nanobots that made up her brain.

The freedom was exhilarating. Aditi was amazed at the sheer size of the world around her, and now she could explore it all, every inch. It would belong to her and her alone. She was in control. Aditi laughed like a baby and stretched out a heavy hand.