Nanobots, Murder, and Other Family Problems

Tue 10/04 11:19:24 PDT

"So, what do you think?" Evan asks as we get out of earshot. "Robot mind-slave?"

"No, just chief cultist in the sect of the pater familias."

He nods agreement and we make our way to lunch. The food here is so much more bland after our time in Africa. I eat about three bites before I lose interest, but I like hanging out with Evan so I stick around. He's reaching for my uneaten pudding when we hear the commotion from out on the commons. I send out a pair of eyes to see what's going on.

It's Chad, of course.

He's got a few hundred glowing balls juggling through the air, changing colors as they spin and morph from spheres to cubes to flattened oblongs and back again. Whatever the new controls involve, it's not just writing code to get the bots to do what you want. Chad couldn't program anything this complex if his life depended on it. He's got his movie-star grin on his too-handsome face as he shows off to a growing crew of younger siblings. I swear his standard holier-than-thou attitude has transfigured itself into a full-on god complex.

"Anything I need to worry about out there?" Evan asks. He knows me well enough to recognize the vacant look on my face that I get when I'm paying more attention to my robotic eyes than my physical ones.

"Just Chad being Chad," I say. "Only more so. The new controls must be pretty good, though."

He nods and takes another bite of my pudding. Outside, I see Marc practically prostrating himself before the almighty super-Chad. Chad gives him a magnanimous smile and says something I can't hear but must have been nice because Marc beams. Chad being nice to Marc? Maybe he is a robot mind-slave, but if the swarm AI is twisting him this direction maybe it's not all bad. Or maybe Chad finally filled that hole in his soul with a glut of Father's attention and a massive jolt of pure power.

Jeff catches my eye from his table in the corner. He looks worried. I turn on my bot detection overlay and see a couple of his eyes floating outside. He's seeing what I'm seeing. I think he's holding tight to his theory. At least he's eating with his hands and utensils instead of streaming pre-chewed food with his bots. The trip was good for him.

"Come on," I say to Evan. "Let's go see the Chad show. You know he's not going to be happy unless we all watch at least one episode."

"Fine," he grumbles, "but then we go play some foosball."

"Sure, but just a game or two. I've got a lot of homework."

I don't really, since my text capture system and new math solver are saving me a ton of time in both teachers' classes. But I want time to work on my database. Even if Father's upgrade does wonders for your bot control, I doubt it does any of what I'm planning. With any luck, in a week or two I'll be rocking a working memory support system that should make it so I don't have to manually look things up in my log anymore.

Outside, Chad stoops down in the center of a ring of nursery kids gathered around him on the field, whispering something to them. We get to the cafeteria doors just in time to see him spread his arms wide and start slowly rising into the air. Hanging there he looks like a frat boy on a crucifix, minus the cross. I do a quick calculation in my solver to figure out how many bots he'd need to lift himself like that, and it's a bigger cloud than he's ever run before, even on our trip. The new software must have a better version of something like Jeff's cloud size optimizations. Or Jeff is right about Father running AI on the bots. Either one.

I can't deny that the idea of floating is kind of cool. I've never seen Father do tricks like that, but he's always been more about substance than style. I wonder if we'll be able to fly with the new stuff. If Jeff ever gets that going, he'd probably never walk again. Too bad. I think all the exercise on the trip has been good for him. His long, sticklike legs almost have a little muscle on them now.

"You'll see when you get yours," Chad tells Marc with a smug grin. "I don't want to spoil it for you. It's awesome though. Everything is so much easier. And so much more powerful. I feel like I can do anything. I'll try flying for real later today. You guys can come watch me. It's so godlike, I love it."

Well, that answers that. I'll keep an eye or two out here while I code this afternoon, just in case he does something funny like crashing and breaking his neck. For anyone else, I'd be tempted to assume that a rogue AI had gone to his head. But Chad's always been a megalomaniac narcissist, so this is actually about what I'd expect from him.

Marc is hanging on every word, not even talking much. It's like he's included Chad in his personal pantheon now along with Father. I'm watching them closely enough that even with my two fleshy eyes and eight robotic ones, I don't notice Jeff silently gliding up next to me until he's there.

"Definitely AI," he whispers to me. "I'm sure of it. We will need to act as soon as we are able."

"All right," I whisper back.

"It is anything but all right, Noah." I turn and see that his face is full of genuine, intense fear. "It is all wrong, all wrong."

All wrong unless you really want your siblings to help you get revenge for your mother's death, then it's going pretty well.