Scribble 23: Memory Extinction Scenario

Good day, Wanderers.

It's the first Scribble of the year, yaaay. Also likely to be the only one--wait, hold off on the pitchfork, I'm splitting this into a couple parts, so there would be at least another one this year. I also had several draft that I would likely finish within the year. Hopefully.

But that's not why you're here, was it?

Scribble 23: Memory Extinction Scenario (1/2)

It's been a long time since I got an audio-only phone call on my private handheld. To begin with, hardly anyone have my phone contact anymore. The only ones that would have my number was my highschool friends, and even they would prefer a video call over audio-only. The days of conventional audio calls are numbered.

The fact that I got an audio-only call isn't really surprising though. Or at least, not really the most surprising part. These kind of things happen from time to time. No, the more pressing matter is the nostalgic sequence of numbers denoting the device that the call originated from, twelve digits of number I didn't even realize still stored within my phone contact book.

"Hello." I swiped on the green icon, transferring the call to my bone-conduction headset.

"Hey! Thank God I got the right number. Listen, I need you to take a look on something--"

"Andrew? Oh my God, it's really you, where have you been all this time? It's been a decade since I last heard of you, and now you sprang up a 'you need to look at this' cliche on me?"

"Yeah, I want a tearful reunion too, but this is really important. It would need to wait. Just come here."

"Why can't you just tell me? Video call me?"

"I can't trust anyone, other than you. You know me. Please, I really need you."

"Where are you anyway? Listen, Andrew, I can't just--"

"For the old times, Ice? I promise you, this is the first and the last I'd ever ask the impossible from you. Just this one time."

"You can't expect me to prioritize you after all this time. It's been a decade, Andrew, I can't revolve around you anymore. I can't afford to."

"When can we meet? An hour, tops, I won't take any more than that. Please. This is really important. You know I mean it. You know I really do need you."

I looked over at my calendar app, letting out a sigh. "Next Sunday. Is that cool with you?"

"Is that on the seventh or the fourteenth? Sorry, been working on calendar-free job."

"That's the sixth. I have a lot of questions, you better have a lot of answers."

"That...I'll try. Thanks"

A click ended the call, and silence once again filled my room.

---

"Pretty impressive house for a ghost." I stepped into Andrew's house, a single floor basic suite on the edge of the city.

"It's inconspicuous. In an uncaring neighborhood. No better place to keep a secret. Come." He led me to a trapdoor behind a carpet, hiding a set of stairs.

"Can't imagine it's within the lease contract."

"Well it's signed by someone who technically doesn't exist anyway. I doubt they cared."

"What's down there anyway? A dungeon? A body incinerator? Dissection chamber? I swear if you put even a finger on me..."

"No, of course not. If only it's that simple. It would be easier to convince you if it's just that kind of things."

"So what did you do in there, Andrew?" Ignoring me, he stepped into the stairs. "You've been gone for years, and you suddenly reappear, and this...I don't understand. What do you want from me? Where have you been? Why did you disappear?"

"The answer is down here, Ice. Come on, I'll show you." Only after his head disappeared under the trapdoor that I walked into it.

The underground space was larger that the house above it. It might be even larger than two of these buildings combined. And in the middle of the room, amidst strewn vials and terminals and paper, a sphere of clear green liquid is suspended in a cylindrical containment chamber, illuminated from below. The sphere was at least a meter in diameter, while the containment is at least two meter in diameter and spanning from the floor to the roof, with no visible method of suspending the liquid sphere.

"It's a ferrofluid, suspended with magnetic field. But I won't be calling you if that's all it is."

"You won't be calling me if you don't intend on telling me either."

"It's...a weapon, Ice. A nanomachine swarm, I called it Lethe Spring. It's completely inert for now, and the containment is airtight. But when it's activated, it's programmed to transform human central nervous structure. It would break neurology as we know it, and humanity would be changed forever."

"And? Why do you have this kind of weapon? Why would you show it to me, of all people?"

"You're the only one that would be able to understand--"

"Not if you don't start telling me what to understand! Cut the cloak and daggers, Andrew. This nanomachine would destroy humanity. Why do you have it? Why show me this?"

"Because I made it, Ice. I developed, well, tried to develop a machine to alter and reprogram the brain to become something...more." Andrew turned his back to me, staring at a table filled with colorfully stained vials. "Covert showed me technology and, scriptures beyond anything human could ever imagine, and they asked me to turn it from a myth to functional devices."

"But you're not enough."

"I made a couple step, but yes, I'm not enough. I don't think anyone would be enough. And now I can't stop it."

"Wait, what do you mean you can't stop it? You made it, right?"

"I miscalculated. I knew the individual nanomachine won't be enough to do the, enlightenment, process so I programmed them to work in paralel. Every dose would have to be isolated and separately activated, preventing interference. Each clump would be a nanomachine swarm acting as both a brain and a body, something called parallel node nano-neural network. But the program doesn't evolve as I expected. Or rather, I didn't expect it to evolve at all."

"It...evolved to activate in unison. Instead of clusters becoming individual entities, separate from the rest, they refused to disconnect from each others. They become a true swarm intelligence."

I'm surprised that I could follow his words, perhaps the hundreds of hours on sci-fi games weren't totally for naught. "It's something right out of Halo, or Starcraft. You created...a new life form."

"Each of them are part of the whole, a complete mega network of nanomachines. I could no longer divide them into separate clumps and networks. And they're still overwriting their system, continuously evolving beyond their protocol even now." He faced me once again. "Which is why I need you, Ice. You're the Batman to my Joker, the Tony Stark to my Mandarin, the Reed Richard to my von Doom. You're smarter than me, better than me, and the only one that could stop me. The only one that I could trust to even try."

"I'm...this isn't a highschool decathlon, Andrew. We're not competing for some trophy anymore, it's the fate of two intelligent lifeforms. I...I can't. I can't decide their life, our life just like that!"

"You're the only one that could, Ice. You must understand. I believed in you--"

"Really? Do you? Because I don't believe in you, Andrew. God. It's been an entire decade!" I stepped onto the platform around the containment system. "We thought you're dead. None of us heard from you the entire time."

"Working for Covert is always double time, even for those not researching humanity's extinction."

"That's not the point. I, we eventually moved on." A ripple moved across the glob of green liquid. "I have a life beyond you, Andrew. Beyond our competition of tricks and trinkets."

"I...I haven't. None in Covert ever did move on. That's why we could do the impossible, because of our obsession... I know it doesn't make any sense, but then again not a lot of emotion does. Maybe you're right. You can't do this, and it's unfair that I forced this responsibility, my responsibility to you. Maybe I'm just running away..."

Silence enveloped us.

"How much time?"

"Until what?"

"Until the worst case scenario. Until the end of humanity as we know it."

"I...don't know. The nanomachines are forcing their way through the safeties as we speak. We have, three weeks, tops."

"I... I don't know how I should feel, Andrew. Meeting you again doesn't feel real. But...if this is the last few weeks of humanity as we know it..."

"But this time we know what would happen and when it would happen. Our end isn't set in stone yet. I thought you..."

"You remember a very different me. And I found a very different you. This isn't science fair demonstration, Andrew. This is the intro to a sci-fi game. This is a glimpse of apocalypse, this is a goddamn extinction-level event--if not of our species, it's an end of our sapience."

A silence permeated the room, both of us suddenly found the metal-tiled floor to be very interesting, even more than the suspended nano weapon.

I sighed. "Do you smoke?"

"Yes, but not here, please. Expensive stuff."

---

We climbed the stairs back to the 'normal' part of the house, mostly untouched from I suspect the time he came to the house. Andrew opened the windows, before offering me a pack of cigarette and a lighter.

"Never thought I'd ever see you smoke, Ice."

"Well, perhaps I'm entitled for a drastic change or two after a decade."

"Look, I'm sorry. I can't exactly tell everyone that I work for Covert, clue's in the name. I could barely finish the project up to spec, as you could see. All of this took too much of my time."

"You could at least told me, Andrew. You told me that you could trust me. We could've done this together, I would've--" the unlit cigar stared at me. Andrew stared at me. "I would've followed you to the end of the world. Instead, you conveniently forgot about me, and suddenly remembered me when you needed me."

I clicked my tongue, before inserting the cigar between my lips. I sucked it greedily as I burned its tip, the poisonous smoke filled my lungs.

"The nanomachines. They're locked out, encrypted activation codes. Why can't it break out yet?"

"It's Covert encryption. Tough to crack if you're either a man or a machine, but if you have both it suddenly becomes super intuitive. Still needs some time to crack tho."

"So if, hypothetically, the nanomachines are injected to a human right now, what happens then?"

"It'll integrate with the brain. It would evolve to interface with it physically, but the safety protocol would prevent it from changing the brain. It's one-way communication, the nanomachines would only be able to read the neuron activity, not write."

"It would still gain the ability to crack the encryption."

"Hypothetically, yes."

I took a drag through the cigarette, its ember tip glowing intermittently.

"Hit me with it."

"Uh, what? I don't think I heard you--"

"Put the nanomachines in me. The world is ending anyway, what difference would it make if it's today or next week?"

"Ice, right now we still have a chance to try everything to stop the nanomachines. The end of the world is still a probability, not inevitability. Injecting the nanomachines into you would ensure the end of the world."

"And what if I want it to end, Andrew? What if I don't care about this world anymore?"

"I called you to stop the end of the world, not initiate it." Andrew stepped away from the table where I'd been sitting, looking out from the window. "You're right. You're not Ice that I remember anymore. Maybe she's never been there to begin with."

"In my defense, saving a world is quite an escalation from academic decathlon. Or a 9-5 deskjob." The cigarette barely went through halfway of its length, but I crushed it on the ashtray. "Hell. Fuck it. Show me your data and design. Between this and sitting around watching Evangelion, this gotta be the better option."

---

"...You know, these designs would be a major breakthrough in full-size quantum computing, and you fit it in nanometer scale. I'm honestly impressed."

"Most of it was Covert, honestly." With a simple swipe, Andrew passed fifteen nano-manufacturing and cluster programming manuals to my screen. "They have this facility on Ganymede, called "Photosphere". Massive accelerator rings, photon trap, beam shaping. All the cool stuff."

"Ganymede like, Jupiter's moon? You've been in space?!"

"Just once, yes. A simple resupply mission, and registration to the database. There's no real uplink facility on Earth, all terminals are read-only. These should be the last." Another stack of documents piled on the edge of my screen.

"You know, Andrew, I might be good at this kind of things, but I'm not a miracle worker. There's no way we're finding the way out in a couple weeks."

"No harm in trying, if only for my peace of mind."

"Right." I sighed. "Let's get on with it."

To be Continued.