Comments:
The NanoTech Network Science-Fiction Novel by Alexander Lazarevich Copyright (c) by Alexander Lazarevich, 1997, 1998. This text is hereby made available for non-commercial use only. You may copy this text and freely distribute it, provided that: 1) no money is charged or received in the process by neither you nor any third party; 2) no alterations are made to the text. If you want to obtain commercial publishing rights to this text, please send an e-mail to Alexander Lazarevich at lazarevicha@online.ru DISCLAIMER NOTICE The intent of this notice is to anticipate 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 pronounce the Russian names of the stations written on the map in English transcription. Closer to the door there stood an elderly Japanese 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 Japanese. Apparently he did not know any Japanese, 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 Japanese 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 Japanese 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 embarrassed, he started jabbering rapidly in his own tongue, hurriedly bowing. The salesgirl impatiently waved her hand, meaning "That's OK"... The Japanese couple flew out to their Japan, 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 class 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 assortment 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 assistants who had been doing some routine medical analyses 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 assume 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 hell. 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 sparse forest made up of industrial robots in place of trees, photographed from a helicopter. Mechanical manipulator arms, a little cumbersome in appearance, looking as if they were made of thick glass, 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 space 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 reassuring 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, Mass, 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, nobody 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 coarsest 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- class 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 passed 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 passed 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 assembly 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 multitude 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 assumed 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 glass of germ- free chemically pure water, containing no organics, and then put the glass into a hermetically sealed box in complete darkness to rule out any possibility of photosynthesis. In one hour's time the water in the glass 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 principal 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 pass on their message to other bacteria living further down along the water-pipe, those other ones would pass 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?" - "Of course, this is just a speculation, but a very plausible one. Judge for yourself: the capacity of random access memory per one cyborg-bacteria is estimated at hundreds of megabytes. A glass of water contains at least several hundred thousand cyborg-bacteria, which means that cyborg-bacteria in just one glass of water can hold in their memories the whole Library of Congress. And their memories do hold something, and it seems that a considerable portion of those memories differ from one bacteria to another. So, where do all these data in their memories come from? The only possible answer at the moment is that all the cyborg- bacteria are joined together in a single global data network with a continuous data traffic. To verify this hypothesis we staged the following experiment: a single cyborg-bacteria was left alone to multiply in a container shielded from infrared and microwave radiation. The container housed an electron microscope that was taking pictures of the newly formed bacteria. In this case, where we cut all the external data links, the contents of the random access memory inside all the new cyborg-bacteria turned out to be the same. At least the pattern of light and dark specks in all of these pictures is the same." The man in plain clothes glanced at his notepad: "Well, to make sure I understood everything that you've just told me, let me summarize. So. At this very moment, all over the world there have spread microscopic self-replicating devices (so-called cyborg-bacterria), capable of living in the water and in the human and animal blood streams. They are an advanced product of nanotechnology and genetic engineering. Their origin: unknown, presumably - a country with cheap but highly-skilled workforce. Their purpose: unknown. Material: carbon in all its forms -diamond, graphite, fullerins. The source of material: carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Power source: cold nuclear fusion. Fuel: hydrogen from water. They exchange data using narrow-beam electromagnetic radiation in a range between microwave and infrared radiation. The content of the data being exchanged is..." - the man in plain clothes shot an inquiring look at the Professor. - "Unknown." - responded the latter. And after a short silence, added: "You left out one more item - micro-robotic arms on the cyborg-bacteria outer surface. We have not yet seen them in action, but there must be a reason for their existence. And this may hold the key to the secret of cyborg-bacteria. For now they are just multiplying and waiting for something. But sooner or later a time will come when a signal passes throughout this whole global network, a signal for them to do some job. What kind of job - we don't know, who will issue the signal - we don't know either. But something of this kind must eventually happen, otherwise, what we see now just doesn't make any sense at all." 1.4. The President holds council. July 4, 1997. Electromagnetically shielded room for secret meetings, White House, Washington D.C. The President: "Gentlemen, I'm perfectly aware that on holiday everybody would rather be at home, but today the United States are facing a crisis of such proportions that it dwarfs into insignificance even the Carribean missiles crisis of 1992. Over the last few days we have been observing an absolutely incomprehensible phenomenon, which potentially poses a tremendous threat to the national security of the United States. My understanding is that CIA Director has something to say on the subject." CIA Director: "Central Intelligence Agency's experts have done a study reviewing all kinds of hypotheses about the cyborg-bacteria's origins and their possible impact on the US national security. What I'm going to give you now is a summary of their report. First, a few words about the possible origins. Our experts have reviewed all the four regions in the world, that had sufficient scientific and industrial potential for developing a nanotechnological system of this kind: Western Europe, Japan, China, and the former Soviet Union. Western Europe and Japan were dismissed by our experts almost immediately: the costs and manpower required for the development of such system are so great, that they are virtually impossible to hide in a democracy. If they had tried to conduct such work in secret from us, it would have become known to our intelligence before long. Then our experts considered China, but in the end they had to dismiss this possibility as well, because under the current conditions it would be difficult to imagine a political rationale for such an action. The current Chinese leadership builds its relations with the West on a pragmatic basis. Provoking the West by putting it under a threat is not consistent with the current Chinese interests. So we are left with the only option: the former Soviet Union." - "You mean, it was done by Russia?" - exclaimed the President. - "Russia?" - the CIA director made a wry face - "Who said anything about Russia? Russia is a country with collapsed economy, dying science, and disintegrating educational system. Russia is in principle incapable of doing anything in the field of high technologies. But the former Soviet Union was something absolutely different. In that country anything was possible. In the Soviet Union of the 1970-ies, science was officially proclaimed to be "a productive force of the society". The Kremlin rulers regarded science as a possible solution to all their problems and were pouring into it inordinate amounts of money received from oil sales. During that period, fundamental research in the USSR enjoyed better funding than anywhere else in the world at any time in history. They built up a tremendous scientific infrastructure, something beyond any comparison - thousands of research institutions, millions of scientists, most of them working under strictest security. The Soviet Union have never published any scientific papers on the subject of nanotechnology. Of course, to explain this fact one could assume that they never did any research on that subject at all. It could be assumed, but it is very hard to believe. A country that played the role of a superpower just could not afford to ignore nanotechnological research, since its military ramifications are too important. Our agency has some circumstantial evidence that in 1983 a western company, that was suspected of acting as a front for KGB, smuggled out of Japan a consignment of equipment banned from export to socialist countries. This equipment included scanning tunneling microscopes. I think I should explain here that a scanning tunneling microscope is an instrument which not only allows to observe individual atoms, but also allows to manipulate individual atoms, putting them together into almost any desired configuration. This is the principal tool used for building up nanotechnological devices. So we are almost sure that the Soviets did work on nanotechnology, and that Russia has inherited from the Soviet Union some fairly advanced projects." - "Is this supposed to means that we do indeed deal here with a hostile act of the Russian government?" - asked the President. - "Hostile acts towards us are just as bad for the best interests of the Russian government as for the best interests of any other country. What we believe we have to deal with here is an act committed without the knowledge of the Russian government. In simple terms this means that we are dealing with conspirators or terrorists. With the sort of chaos reigning in today's Russia, it is no problem to sneak materials out of a secret lab. That could be done by anyone. And this is especially true of a nanotechnological lab working on products that can hardly be seen under a microscope. After the dissolution of USSR in 1991, the power in Russia was seized by a government that absolutely does not care about scientific research. The only thing they want is to sell raw materials to the West and live in the same way as, say, Arabian sheiks live on their petrodollars. We encourage this, since we see here a double advantage to us: on the one hand, our economy gets access to a new source of raw materials and a new market for our products, and on the other hand, in a few year's time, when Russia completely loses its intellectual potential, it will never again be able to regain its power and become a dangerous military adversary to us, and we will be able to live free of the nuclear war fears. But there is always a fly in the ointment. In this case it's the problem of what we are supposed to do with this huge Soviet scientific infrastructure, with all those millions of scientists, for whom there is no use under the new policy. The money that used to be spent on their salaries nowadays is spent on buying Mercedes-Benz cars for the newly rich New Russians. The salaries in the research institutions are delayed for months, but still these people don't quit their jobs - many of the scientists consider it beneath their dignity to hawk matches in the streets. This is a whole multimillion army of hungry, angry and highly skilled specialists. One could expect anything from them." - "Like selling nuclear secrets to Iraq" - said President. - "Or stealing cyborg-bacteria from a secret military lab and spreading them all over the world" - added CIA Director. - "What kind of threat could these cyborg-bacteria pose to us?" - asked the President. - "I was just getting to the section of the report that analyzes potential threats to our security. Once, in the past, we did a feasibility study on the use of nanotechnological systems for intelligence and sabotage purposes. First, a few words about sabotage. Theoretically speaking, the cyborg-bacteria that already live inside everyone of us, can kill any one of us at any moment they might choose. And they could do it in thousands of ways." - "Can they manufacture poisons?" - asked the President. - "Sure they can, but that's not the best way - poisons are easily detectable during post-mortem. The perfect way would be to induce a heart or asthma attack - in that case everything would have appeared as death from natural causes. To succeed in this, the cyborg-bacteria should be capable of finding those nervous fibers in the body that control the heart beat or the diaphragm muscles, hooking up to these fibers and feeding into these fibers electrical pulses of very low voltage, which cannot do any harm by themselves, but these would be control pulses that commanding the heart or the lungs to stop working. And the "on-board computer" of each of those bacteria we have to deal with now, appears to be powerful enough to accomplish such a task. Some of our experts even think it to be too powerful for such a task. They suspect that cyborg-bacteria are designed not for sabotage, but for intelligence-gathering activities. A tremendous traffic of data is being continuously exchanged between these bacteria, but we still don't know what kind of data this is. We can only make guesses. For example, we could assume that the cyborg-bacteria that live (this is only an example) inside you, Mister President, have tapped into the nerve fiber that goes from your ear to your brain. All the sounds that you hear are converted by your ear into a sequence of nerve pulses that are further sent into the brain. The bacteria that have tapped into your nerve fiber in the same way as an eavesdropping device might tap into a phone line, intercept these pulses, convert them into infrared radiation that is transmitted to another group of bacteria located a few dozen feet from you, those other bacteria pass it on to yet another group, and so on. Almost immediately, the information about what is being spoken in this room arrives in Moscow." - "The chief of my security service has assured my that the walls of this special conference room won't let any radiation out." - said the President. - "The total data storage capacity of all the cyborg- bacteria that currently live in your body is such that they could easily store several hours of conversation and transmit it as soon as you leave this room. Or I leave this room. Or any of those present here. We have very good reasons to believe that by this very moment the cyborg- bacteria already inhabit every human being on Earth." - "And as soon as these pulses arrive in Moscow they will be decoded on a computer and the sound will be restored?" - "That wouldn't be the most efficient method. There is a much simpler way to do this. Since these bacteria already live inside everyone on Earth anyway, we could safely assume that they also live inside those who might be eavesdropping on us in Moscow. We could also assume that one of the cyborg-bacteria has hooked up to his auditory nerve in the same way as it did to yours, the only difference being that your bacteria is recording electrical pulses coming from your ear, while his bacteria is reproducing these pulses, inducing them in his auditory nerve. From the standpoint of his brain these pulses are indistinguishable from the ones coming from his own ear. Thus, however quiet it might be in his room, he will distinctly hear every word we are saying now in this room. But as I have already mentioned, all of these are just conjectures. For all we know, the purpose of the cyborg- bacteria may not be limited to eavesdropping. There is still one more possibility, which at first glance might seem absolutely wild. But if we keep in mind how far ahead of us are the developers of this system, we should admit that there is nothing that is totally impossible. This other possibility I'm referring to is the possibility of gaining total control over other peoples' bodies, gaining control not only of the nerve fibers that go to the heart, lungs or brain, but of all the nerve fibers in the body and turning a human being into a remotely controlled puppet. Just as in the case of eavesdropping through cyborg- bacteria, where your ear becomes, in a way, the ear of that other man, the eavesdropper, one could also make your arms, legs, throat, the whole of your body into the arms, legs and throat of that other man. Let's imagine that his brain sends a command to move his arm. These commands are issued into the nerve fiber that goes from his brain to his arm. Half way to the arm these nerve pulses are intercepted by a cyborg-bacteria, and are eventually transmitted to a cyborg- bacteria that lives on your nerve fibers going from your brain to your arm and are fed into these fibers. For all that your arm knows, these pulses might have come from your own brain, and so your arm obeys the command. Add to this the possibility that cyborg-bacteria may suppress the signals that come from your own brain, and what we have here is that the control over your body is completely transferred to somebody else. You may well imagine what vistas of new opportunities may open up for espionage or sabotage, if a spy takes control over the President's body." Everybody in the room fell silent and looked at the President. After a short pause, the President said: - "Or over the body of the CIA Director." - "Under the circumstances, nobody can be above suspicion." - replied the CIA Director. - "Do you seriously believe that all you've just described is really possible?" - "It's our experts who allow for such a possibility, and I see no reason why I should not trust them. Cyborg-bacteria in themselves are so fantastic, that we can safely assume their purpose to be absolutely fantastic as well. As I have already mentioned, we are most likely dealing here with terrorists from among disgruntled former Soviet scientists. If this is indeed the case, then, within the nearest future, they are going to put cyborg-bacteria to work, making them do something that will be supposed to scare the whole world. Don't ask me what they are going to do, I don't know. In view of the awesome capabilities of the cyborg- bacteria, they might do absolutely anything. And after that demonstration of their power, they'll make their demands known to us. And if the public gets scared enough, we may have to accept their terms." - "What kind of terms that might be?" - asked the President. - "All depends on what kind of people we are dealing with here. If they are just ordinary extortionists, they will demand money for themselves personally. That would be the least painful option for us, since here we are talking about no more that tens of millions of dollars. However, I'm inclined to expect from the Soviet scientists something more idealistic and unselfish, like a demand to change our current policy towards Russia. And that may cost us hundreds of billions of dollars." One of the President's aides, who had been silent up to that moment, suddenly asked to speak. President's aid: "Mister President! I have already tried many times in the past to draw your attention to the fact that our current policy towards Russia is potentially very dangerous for the United States, and today we once again had an opportunity to see this for ourselves. But I want once again to draw your attention to the fact that such policy is not only dangerous, it is also amoral. We have always publicly proclaimed that our objective is to create a technologically advanced society, where the advancements of Science will eliminate poverty and disease, and give equal access to education to everyone. But at the same time, in Russia, we support a political regime which destroys the intellectual potential of its own country. Millions of scientists, who could have greatly benefited the whole of mankind , are loosing their jobs and skills. Today, in the era of global communications, when people of Earth are interlinked via satellite TV and Internet, the policy of double standards quickly becomes evident to the people and undermines their trust in the government. The time is coming when we no longer will be able to afford to form our policies on the basis of transitory political expediencies at the expense of moral principles." - "What is your concrete proposal?" - asked the President - "Is it to let Russia build up its intellectual potential? And what if tomorrow the power in Russia will be seized by fascists, and the Russian scientists will develop for them a weapon that'll make the atom and hydrogen bombs look like baby toys in comparison?" - "But it is our policies that are pushing Russia towards fascism! Having lost their intellectual and industrial potential, the Russians feel humiliated, and it is the national humiliation that paves the way to fascism." President: "We have been through this many times before, so let's please not start this again. The current regime in Russia! There is just nothing to replace it with. You know as well as I do, that we had to choose the lesser of the evils. So let's get back down to our today's problem. What can we do under the circumstances?" CIA Director: "Not very much. First, we should continue the study of cyborg-bacteria, so as to understand what they are really capable of and be prepared to face it. The most important thing to do is to try and decipher the data they are transmitting. If our guess that all these bacteria are joined into a global network is true, we've got to try to "crack the password" and break into the network. We might even be able to try to seize control over the network. If we succeed in this, we will be able to turn this dreadful weapon against its creators. For these purpose we are now putting together a team of programmers and hackers. Secondly. We've got to put pressure on our Russian counterparts. To demand from them all the information on classified projects conducted in the USSR in the field of nanotechnology. To demand from them the names of scientists involved in these projects. In short, it's high time for us to start looking into this case in earnest. For this purpose we intend to send to Moscow our liaison officer with special powers. I want to ask you Mr. President, to contact Moscow on the hot line and demand from the Russians that they grant him such special powers." President: "What do you mean by special powers?" CIA Director: "Free access to any classified archive, permission to conduct investigation on the Russian soil and so on. Ideally, they should allow him to do whatever he asks and be very cooperative in giving him any assistance he might ask." The President: "This may not be easy - lately the Russians have started playing independent, but I'll do my best. We still have the means to bring pressure to bear. Anything else?" CIA Director: "For the moment, that seems to be all that we can do. In conclusion I would like to once again stress the need to keep it all secret from the public. Under the circumstances, the general panic is the last thing we want." 1.5. The autograph July 6, 1997. Nanotechnology lab at MIT, Mass, USA. Computer monitor displaying in real time the image from electronic microscope. Two researchers looking at the screen. The first one: "And now let's try having a high resolution scan of the back wall of this bacteria's 'on- board computer'." The second one: "It's a waste of time. Low-res images have clearly shown that there is absolutely nothing there - just a blank wall." The first one ( holding a picture to the light): "Are you sure? And what is this dot here? A photographic artifact? I still want to see this spot under high magnification. " The second one: "Are you satisfied now? Still no features." The first one: "Stop! Did you see that? Move back a little. Here it is! Increase magnification!" The second one (looking at the screen): "Wow! Does anybody here read Russian?" The first one: "I don't think that will be necessary. There seems to be an English translation here as well." Each character was composed of just several dozens of atoms, carefully arranged on a smooth wall surface. But there could be no mistaking - those were indeed characters. The writing on the wall read: "Made in the USSR by Alexei Levshov and a team of his comrades." Part Two: "Something wonderful is going to happen..." 2.1. Gloomy morning. July 6, 1997, Moscow, 7 A.M. Alexei Levshov went out onto the landing closing behind him the door to his apartment and started locking it up. The rundown-looking door was made of wood and badly needed a new coat of paint. There was only one lock in it. Almost immediately Levshov heard behind his back a series of loud clicks as the many locks in the new armored metal door on the opposite side of the landing started to unlock. - "That's strange" - thought Alexei. It was only on rare occasions that his neighbor got up so early. His neighbor who lived behind the armored door was known to everybody in neighborhood from his earliest childhood as "Mityai". Actually his name was Dmitrii, but it is amazing how many diminutives there are in the Russian language for any name, each diminutive expressing a certain distinct attitude towards the person. If Dimitrii had been a well-behaved boy, everybody would have called him "Dima" or "Mitiya", but "Mityai" suggested someone unruly, and unruly he was. As a kid he was considered a local imbecile. When he was 13 he landed up in a labor camp for juvenile delinquents for stabbing somebody with a knife, not to death, though. He served his term of several years and came back. Then came the new policy, the Prestroika. Mityai became one of the so- called "New Russians" - that is, the newly rich, and started buying for himself expensive foreign-made cars, one after another. Nobody knew exactly what was the nature of his business, but there were some dark rumors whispered around the neighborhood that Mityai had become a hit man, a "killer" - one of the many words that Russian language has borrowed from English during the Perestroika years. The armored door opened. Mityai appeared in the doorway. He wore dark glasses and black leather costume adorned with multiple gold chains. He cast a disparaging glance at Levshov's old suit that was coming apart at the seams and said: "You are wearing rags, old man. Our Science has gone completely to seed!" Mityai never passed up a chance to pick on Levshov, who had gotten used to it long ago and did not pay any attention. This time, as always, he left Mityai to lock up all his locks and went downstairs. Mityay caught up with him in the yard. Twirling the keys of his new Mercedes-Benz car around his finger, he clapped Levshov on the shoulder and said: "Listen, Science, I'll give you a hundred bucks, buy yourself some decent trousers, 'cause you look disgusting." Levshov froze in his tracks. He felt a wave of anger rising inside himself, while Mityai continued in the same impertinent tone: "Let's take you, Science, as an example. You studied all your life, and all you've got for it is living like a homeless dog. And as for me, they threw me out of school when I was in the eighth grade for bad behavior and all that, but I now live as a Man. And you know why? It's because in the past the Communists were perverting the economy, but now the Free Market has come and shown everybody's true worth. And it turned out that I'm a valuable member of society, 'cause I'm in demand. But there is no demand for you, and so it turns out that your science is shit and you are a piece of shit yourself. Take the bill." Mityai shoved a one hundred dollar bill into Levshov's fist and started walking towards his Mercedes car. Levshov felt a wave of hatred and anger flooding his soul like water that burst a dam. For a fraction of a second, through the mist of choking frenzy, he had in his mind's eye a fleeting vision of all the power of NanoTech coming down upon Mityai, exploding this impudently smirking nonentity into a myriad of tiny fragments, smearing his remains all over the wall, splattering them on the blacktop. Stop this! Being the NanoTech Network System Administrator means not only to be in possession of powers beyond imagination, it also means bearing an unimaginable responsibility. The First Commandment of the Nanotech Network System Administrator reads: "Thou shalt not make decisions in wrath". "NANOTECH" - mentally said Levshov. And although he pronounced this command only in his mind, without any audible sound, the cyborg-bacteria that were permanently hooked up to the nerve fibers going from Levshov's brain to the muscles of his throat, easily picked up those weakest action currents that are always generated when we want to say something, even when we say it inaudibly, to ourselves. The cyborg-bacteria took only one thousandth of a second to decipher the action current patterns in the nerve fibers and to understand that what they had received was the system activation command. One more thousandth of a second later, the cyborg-bacteria that were permanently hooked up to the nerve fibers going from Levshov's ear to his brain sent into these fibers a sequence of pulses, which, upon arrival to his brain, were perceived by it as a sequence of sounds, namely as words enunciated by a pleasant, "radio announcer's" voice: "SYSTEM READY". The further commands- and-messages exchange between Alexei Levshov and the NanoTech System was as follows: AL:>SUBROUTINE "I AM CALM" NT:>PARAMETERS? AL:>BRING DOWN: BLOOD PRESSURE, RESPIRATION RATE, BRAIN ACTIVITY; STEP "MEDIUM"; DO UNTIL "ENOUGH". NT:>OK Millions of cyborg-bacteria residing in Alexei's body immediately got down to work. In a second he felt an icy calmness come over him. AL:>ENOUGH NT:>OK "So," - said Alexei to himself - "Firstly, disclosing the existence of the NanoTech network now would mean bringing the whole effort to ruin. Secondly, Mityai is an imbecile and a ruffian, but it is not his fault. He was made an imbecile by his parents, who conceived him when they were drunk. He was made a ruffian by the existing political regime. In the future, NanoTech might be able to correct both, and that means that potentially he is a human being, and therefore, he should be treated as a human being, and not as a bug to be smeared all over the wall." In the meanwhile, Mityai who was absolutely unaware of the terrible fate that he had just escaped so narrowly, sat into his Mercedes and stuck his head out of the window: "Goodbye, Science. A client waits for me." He took a hand gun out of the glove compartment, released a safety catch, and tossed it back. Suddenly, a new idea struck him, and he once again poked his head out of the window and said: - " And you know, Science, what's funny? I have no orders for finishing off your kind, I mean, scientists. I have orders for businessmen, for politicians, even for journalists. But no orders for scientists. You are not even worth killing. That's how the things stand. Supply and demand. The invisible hand of the market. Adam Smith. That's what I call real science!" He bared his teeth, showing a gold tooth, in what was probably meant to be a smile, stepped on the gas, made a complete circuit around the yard, at full speed ran the car into a puddle splashing water all over Levshov, and roaring with insane laughter rode into the street and was gone. Levshov looked at the one hundred dollar bill in his hand, put it into his pocket, calmly shook the water droplets off, and headed for the bus stop. One hundred dollars almost amounted to his two months' salary at the research institute. But even this pittance have not been paid him for the last four months. 2.2 The nightmare continues One hour later, Institute for Molecular Biology Studies, Moscow. If a researcher on the staff of the Institute for Molecular Biology Studies had fallen into a lethargic sleep ten years ago, to be awaken only today to come and visit his institute, such visit would have left him in a state of complete shock. His first thought would have been that while he was asleep, some terrible and irredeemable calamity had happened. What once had been a proud edifice of shining glass and polished marble, erected back in the days when science was proclaimed to be a "productive force of society", was now reduced to a state of decay and desolation, covered with layers of dirt, with many of the glasses broken and replaced with plywood. Inside, he would have seen deserted corridors - the staff was reduced to one tenth of what it had used to be and the people who were left were mostly those approaching their retirement age. True, he would have also seen some young people, who surely did not look like intellectuals and were carrying some boxes to and from lab rooms. Upon entering one of such rooms (if only he had been allowed to), he would have been shocked to see the valuable scientific instruments piled up into a heap in a corner, while the room itself had been converted into a warehouse for a commercial company dealing in ladies' boots, or wallpaper, or some such stuff. In the Institute's scientific library he would not have been able to find even one scientific book published within the last five years. He would be astounded to see that librarians had been allowed to turn the library into a store selling all kinds of things that had absolutely nothing to do with books. True, among these sundry things he would indeed have been able to find some newly published books, but not scientific, but rather antiscientific in character: books on astrology, chiromancy, occultism, black magic and witchcraft, and so on, which would have led him to the conclusion that civilization is dead, and the mankind has been thrown back into the Dark Ages. People can get used to the most horrible changes, especially if these changes don't happen overnight, but are spread over several years. And people got used to them and resigned themselves to them. Alexei Levshov also got used to them. But never resigned. That day, when he got to his work, he stopped for a second before a notice-board in the corridor. The most recently posted notice began with the words: "In view of the fact that the employees of our research institute have not been paid their salaries for the last four months, the collective members of the research staff have petitioned the city authorities that they should not impose fines for arrears of rent and electricity bills...". Alexei skipped reading the rest, and stepped into the room where his lab was based. One glance at the faces of his staff was enough to tell him that something was wrong. - "I have made up my mind" - said a researcher, young woman with her face turned to stone - "I have nothing to feed my kids with. I have made up my mind." Everybody in the lab knew the story of this single mother. One old and loathsome "New Russian" had been propositioning her for a long time, offering lots of money. Alexei came up to her desk, bent to her and said in a low voice: "I can't explain to you everything now, I have no right to, but I want you to know that this nightmare" - he made a sweeping gesture - "will soon be over. I implore you to refrain from making any rash decisions. You are talented, you must continue your research. You've got to stick it out for one more month. Take this for now." - he took the crumpled one hundred dollar bill from his pocket - "I don't have the right to tell you anything, but trust me, very soon, maybe even sooner than one month, something must happen ... something tremendous, something wonderful, something that is going to change everything ..." 2.3 Arrest The same day, July 6, 1997, 6 PM, Moscow. They came up to him in the street when he was walking back from work, two from behind, one in front, all of them in civilian clothes. The one in front promptly produced a red KGB ID card, momentarily showed it to Levshov, and rattled off: "Alexei Petrovich Levshov, I presume? You'll have to come with us in this car.". Sooner than Alexei could reply, he found himself sitting on the back seat of a black "Volga" car, caught between the two men in civilian clothes who had come up from behind. The one who showed his ID took the right front seat and the car sped off. - "Here we are! It has started!" - thought Alexei - "So they have finally found my 'autograph'. Now the things will start moving!" 2.4 Interrogation. The same day, half an hour later. At first the Colonel was very polite and smiling. - "Alexei Petrovich!" - said he, addressing Levshov with patronymic, which is the polite form of address in Russia - "I think I don't need to explain to you the reason why we have invited you here. But just in case you might presume to deny everything, I would like to show you this picture right away." The Colonel passed to Levshov a picture where one could distinctly see the inscription: "Made in the USSR by Alexei Levshov and a team of his comrades". - "A good picture." - said Alexei - "A good microscope. We never had one like this. And I guess you still don't have one like this. I would say it were Americans who took the picture." The Colonel didn't respond. - "So, it were Americans. " - said Alexei - "That means that my babies are already over there, in America. That's good. And the inscription did come off well. You know, it's the first time that I actually see it. I did issue the command to make the inscription, but I wasn't completely sure that the characters will come out well, or that the command will actually reach as far as America. That means that the system is fully operational. That's good. You, Colonel, can't even imagine how pleased I am with this photograph." - "So, you are not going to deny anything, are you?" - Colonel's voice betrayed his slight disappointment - "In that case, I have only two questions: why did you do it, and who are the members of this 'team of comrades' ?" - "I'm not going to give you any names. The team of comrades, who prefer to remain anonymous, have authorized me to conduct negotiations with the authorities. This picture," - Alexei put the picture to the Colonel's very nose - "this picture is my business card. It means that there is a power behind me, a great power, maybe even greater than you could possibly imagine. And that's why it's me who is going to make demands, and you better meet them." - "Alexei Petrovich, I'm afraid that you are not fully aware of your current situation. Let me first read to you some excerpts from our file on you. Now then, Levshov, Alexei Petrovich, born 1946; in 1969 graduated with honors from the prestigious PhysTech Institute, Moscow, and went to work at a secret unnamed research institute, known only as the post office box number such-and-such; in 1976 became the head of the nanotechnology lab that was founded at the time at that research institute.. But all this is not very interesting ... Here we are. This is sort of curious: in spring 1983 you wrote a letter to Yurii Andropov, soon after he had become the Secretary General of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Our man on the General Secretary's staff managed to make a copy of this letter. A very curious letter, and it reads as follows: "Dear Yurii Vladimirovich, I took the liberty to address you because I would like to draw your attention to a very important issue, so important that the fate of the whole of mankind may eventually hinge on it. In one of your recent speeches you exhorted the Soviet people to return to the roots of our ideology, to return to Marx. One of the fundamental ideas of Marxism is the idea that new socioeconomic formations come into being as a reaction of society to the emergence of new productive forces. From this standpoint, Communism as an economic formation cannot at present exist in our country in principle, because we are still using the same productive forces as the capitalist countries, and the economic formation that currently exists in the USSR can only be characterized as a form of state-monopoly capitalism. A social formation is a superstructure over a foundation consisting of productive forces. The breakthrough to Communism can only happen as a consequence of emergence of a radically new technology, the very logic of which shall make the social superstructure adapt itself to this new foundation. And such a technology may emerge very soon. However, if improperly used, it may not only fail to free mankind from capitalism, but even might assist in perpetuating it, and the great historic chance will be lost forever. My field of work is nanotechnology. It is not just one more technology. Potentially, it is a complete revolution in the methods of production, that is even greater than the Great Industrial Revolution of the 18th century, which, in its time, caused the demise of feudalism and ascendancy of capitalism. If we take the right steps, the emergence of nanotechnology should cause a similar natural extinction of capitalism. However, at present, all the research and development activities in the field of nanotechnology in our country are geared exclusively to military needs, and are not aimed at the above mentioned objective. We need to redirect the efforts of at least one of our nanotechnological labs from military to peaceful applications. I request that you grant me an audience so that I could explain to you my ideas and proposals on the subject." The Colonel stopped reading, gave Levshov a disapproving look and said: "One can clearly see from this letter that even as far back as 1983 you were reluctant to work on strengthening the defensive potential of our Motherland." - "Is this the only thing that you can see from this letter?" - asked Levshov, mildly amused. The Colonel ignored the remark and went on leafing through the thick folder containing Levshov's file: "... So, the all-powerful General Secretary Andropov makes some inquiries, and soon afterwards grants an audience to Levshov, a chief of research in an obscure lab, virtually unknown to anybody. He has a conversation with him that lasts an hour and a half, instead of the scheduled ten minutes. The content of their discussion is unknown to us. But we know that soon after that the nanotechnology lab headed by A.P.Levshov is taken from under the control of the Ministry of Defense Industry, and moved to the Institute for Molecular Biology Studies which belongs to the USSR Academy of Sciences. However, the work in that lab still continues in strictest secrecy, even stricter than under the military. Our organization gets a directive from the "very top" to obtain for that laboratory some advanced Japanese equipment banned from export to the socialist countries... Well, all this, once again, is not very interesting, so we'll skip it... And now, we have reached the crux of the matter. In November 1991, when the country was in the state of complete disarray and chaos, our organization decided to assume the responsibility for the protection of the important state secret, which the work conducted in the A.P.Levshov's lab clearly was, and to move that lab from an Academy of Sciences institute to one of our secret research facilities. Some of the lab staff, including Levshov, refused to transfer to our organization and stayed at the Institute for Molecular Biology Studies. During the relocation to our secret facility some of the lab materials were lost. In particular, a test tube containing an experimental hybrid of a bacteria with a nanomechanism was found missing, which, in the opinion of some of our experts, set back the lab's work by at least fifteen years. Even back then there was some suspicion that it was A.P.Levshov who stole the materials, but at the time his guilt was not proven. The same experts are of the opinion that by the end of 1991 the work on the hybrid of bacteria with a nanomechanism had progressed to a phase where the further work would not require the use of complex and expensive laboratory equipment. Some of them even go as far as to say that that the only thing needed for the further work on the bacteria hybrid was the bacteria itself, since it already had in itself all the tools required for any further modifications or upgrades, and that means that all the further development effort could be conducted at home... That's how the things stand, Mr. Levshov" - the Colonel looked up from the folder and once again glanced at Levshov - "This photograph is an irrefutable evidence that it was you who, back in 1991, stole the test tube with the hybrid, which was government property, and by so doing have inflicted a considerable damage to the defense potential and state security of our country. Moreover, by the mere fact of letting the hybrid loose, you have given all our potential military adversaries the knowledge about the current status of nanotechnology research in our country, which can only be interpreted as an act of espionage. All of this is sufficient to put you away for a very long time. That's why I don't recommend you to be impertinent and make demands. It is me who is going to make demands here." Levshov replied with an inscrutable smile: "Oh, Colonel, you can't even realize how ridiculous all your threats seem to me. If you had only known what is going to happen within the next week. We are standing on the threshold of a new world, a world where everything will be different, where, in particular, the mankind will not be divided into nations and nationalities. The individuality of a person will become more important than his or her belonging to any particular ethnic or social group. With the disappearance of nations, their respective nationalisms will also disappear, and such notions as national defense, or espionage, or national security will just stop to make any sense, and will start looking like atavisms inherited from the Stone Age..." - "Don't you even try to push me all this bullshit, Levshov!" - barked the Colonel - "What I want from you is a clear and intelligible answer to the questions that I asked: who else works with you and why have you done this?" - "Done what?" - asked Levshov. - "This, for example." - the Colonel poked with his finger at the picture with the "autograph". - "Oh, this! This was done in order to draw the attention of the authorities, to make them lend an ear to our demands. By the way, Colonel, you still have not heard our demands, and I think that you should have had. If you had had, you would have asked a very different kind of questions." - "So what are your demands?" - said the Colonel grudgingly. - "Inform your superiors that I need a series of my TV appearances arranged, half an hour, prime time, each day for a week." - "Do you realize how much this would cost? On what grounds do you presume to have it?" - "On the simple grounds that I have something to say to the mankind, in stark contrast to the ones who use this time on the air now. I have a message of utmost importance." - "Why do you need a whole week?" - asked Colonel - "Usually, terrorists take no more than five minutes to make all their threats and demands." - "Now we have really come to the crux of the matter. You believe that I'm a terrorist. But actually, nothing could be farther from the truth. You are just too much used to the idea that nanotechnological research and development were pursued with military applications in mind. You just cannot imagine the peaceful applications of nanotechnology. You have absolutely no idea of what I and my comrades have done in this field over the last five years, while working at home. What we have done can improve the lives of billions of people on this planet. But we've got to have a way of letting people know about the possibilities they now have. Of course, we could do this using the built-in capabilities of the NanoTech System itself, but we are concerned that if people suddenly hear a voice in their heads, a voice coming from nowhere, or see moving pictures materializing from the thin air right before their eyes, some of them might get panicky. We don't want anybody going crazy with fear and jumping out of the window, or anything like that. Television is something which is familiar to people, that's why we want to start a series of lectures on the uses of NanoTech on TV, and only after that we'll gradually switch to the purely NanoTech means of communication. As a matter of fact, we could have built our own TV transmitter - we have the capability - but we don't want to be pirates on the air. We decided to go through official channels. It might be hard for you to believe, but me and my comrades are actually law- abiding citizens. " The Colonel was silent for half a minute, digesting what he had just heard, and finally said: "From what you have just told me, I understood only two things. First: you consider me a complete idiot who is supposed to believe all that bullshit you gave me. Second: you have finally admitted that you have stolen the test tube with the hybrid. And as for your law-abidance, when I went to the public procurator's office this morning and showed him this file on you and this photograph, he signed a warrant to search your apartment without asking any further questions. The search is being conducted right now as we sit here, and I expect to have news from there any moment now. I think we are going to have lots of new subjects for our conversation pretty soon." This time Levshov's smile was even more inscrutable than before. He said: "Well, let them search. I wonder what they'll be able to find there. And more importantly, whether they'll be able to understand what they are going to find there..." 2.5 The Search. At the same time at Levshov's apartment. One of the two witnesses summoned to the search was Levshov's next-door neighbor, that is, Mityai. While they were opening the door, the investigator once again went in his mind over the list of objects that criminals usually adapt to serve as hiding places for all kinds of incriminating things. But nevertheless, he was absolutely unprepared for what he saw as soon as the door was opened. Entering into the apartment he stopped, completely at a loss. His carefully laid-out plan for the search had collapsed in a wink. - "Oh, my!" - muttered Mityai pensively, looking around - "Our science has completely gone down the drain!" There was absolutely nothing in the apartment. That is, not a single thing. Bare floors. Bare walls without wallpaper. In the hallway, there were no coats or slickers hung up on pegs. Actually, there were no pegs, not even a nail to hang things on (if there had been anything to hang up, but there was not a thing). They went to the kitchen. In the kitchen, not only there wasn't a counter, there was not even a fridge. Only a gas range and a sink. The range was covered with a thick layer of dust, attesting to the fact that it had not been touched by a human hand for many months. - "Poor devil!" - exclaimed the second witness, a warm- hearted old lady who lived one story up - "I wonder what he ate. He lived exclusively on cold food, I guess. After his wife left him for a New Russian four years ago, he completely went to seed." As for the sink, its hole was plugged, and it was filled with water to the brim. But only with water. There was nothing else in the sink. No sign of any dishes. In the bathroom, there was also not a thing, not even a mirror. Not even things for shaving, although Mityai immediately affirmed that Levshov went to work every morning smoothly shaven. In the bathroom, there were only a bath and a sink. Both were plugged and brimming with water. The biggest surprise was waiting for them in the living (?) room. There was also no furniture and no things in that room, except that more than half of the room was occupied by something very similar to a huge aquarium tank, but there were no fish in it. There was nothing in it but water. The walls of the tank were made of some strange sort of glass, very transparent, and infused with a mysterious luster. The last ray of the setting sun came through the window, fell on the tank, reflected from its walls, re-reflected, and the room was suddenly lit up with a piercingly brilliant iridescent glow. "It shines like diamond!" - exclaimed Mityai. He came up to the tank, and before the investigator could stop him, he pressed a small diamond, which was mounted into a gold ring that Mityai always wore, against the glass, and ran it across the tank wall. The result left him absolutely dumbfounded. He could not even say anything - the words stuck in his throat. The diamond has not left even a tiniest scratch on the tank wall. A six by nine feet tank, five feet tall, standing in the room of an impoverished scientist, was, to all appearances, cut out of a single diamond crystal... 2.6 The first demonstration of the NanoTech system capabilities. The Colonel replaced the receiver and remained sitting deep in thought. - "Well, have they found anything?" - inquired Levshov. - "Levshov, why have you sold all the furniture and all the things from your apartment? Were you preparing to flee from the country?" - "First of all, I have not sold them, I gave them away for free. But not because I wanted to flee, but because I no longer needed them. Being a System Administrator of the NanoTech Network, I can enjoy all the benefits of nanotechnology even now." - "How did you come into possession of a water tank made of diamond?" - "I've grown it. Glass can break, you know, but diamond is much stronger and from that standpoint is more practical. You see, I just needed some vessel for all that water." - "I see. You have grown it." - said the Colonel in a flat voice. - "You know, Colonel, I really think I've got to give you a small demonstration, otherwise you just won't believe a word of what I say. A demo is worth more that thousands of words... Do you have a sink somewhere around here?" - "A sink?" - "Yes, a water basin with running water. A bathtub would be even better, but I don't expect you to have one here." ... Behind the door at the back of the Colonel's desk, there was a private rest room with a sink. - "Well, just as I expected, you don't have a plug for this sink." - said Levshov - "But we'll fix this in no time." He turned on the tap, cupped his hands and filled them with water. Turning to the Colonel, he said: "At the moment, I hold in my hands, together with the water, several million cyborg-bacteria. They are currently inactive. Now I am going to give them a command to speed up their reproduction. You won't hear this command - I'll enunciate it inaudibly, in my mind. Inside me, just as inside you and all the other people on Earth, there now live the same cyborg-bacteria, and these particular bacteria inside your body provide an interface between the nervous system of your body and the NanoTech System, that is, all the other cyborg-bacteria that live throughout the globe. This interface has two layers: a physical and a logical. Physical interface is implemented by the bacteria attached to the nerve fibers in your body, who tap into the action currents in these fibers and convert them into infrared signals used for data exchange between cyborg-bacteria. Or sometimes they do the reverse, converting infrared signals into action currents and feeding them into nerve fibers. As for the logical layer of the interface, it can be implemented by both the bacteria that reside inside you and all the bacteria of the NanoTech Network operating as a single global distributed computer - it all depends on the complexity of the task. At the logical layer, the commands of a NanoTech System user that are given in a high-level, almost natural, language, are converted into the NanoTech System executable machine codes. And now, watch closely." AL:> NANOTECH NT:> SYSTEM READY AL:> OBJECT: IN THE WATER IN MY HAND NT:> OBJECT FOUND AND LOCKED ONTO, OBJECT BOUNDARIES SET BY DEFAULT AL:> MULTIPLY OBJECT ELEMENTS; RATE: MAX; DO UNTIL "ENOUGH" NT:> OK The Colonel suddenly saw the water in the Levshov's hands start to turn opaque and opalescent. In a couple of seconds it definitely started to look like milk, in a couple of seconds more it reached the consistency of sour cream. AL:> ENOUGH NT:> OK Levshov turned to the Colonel once again: "What I am holding in my hands now is just an amorphous mass of cyborg- bacteria, that have no mechanical links with each other. To impart a structure and rigidity to such mass, we need to establish mechanical links between the bacteria. For this purpose I'm going to use the manipulator arms located on the outer surfaces of each of the bacteria. Figuratively speaking, I'll ask them to join their "hands". Watch!" AL:> LINKS BETWEEN ELEMENTS: PLASTIC; PLIABILITY:4 NT:> OK "What I have done now was to activate the so-called "plastic links". This means that the bacteria don't hold each other's "hands" very firmly - if a certain external force limit is exceeded, these links will break up, only to be immediately re-established. Simply speaking, the mechanical properties of this mass are similar to those of modeling clay. You can probe it with your finger. Go ahead, Colonel, don't be afraid!" The Colonel poked his finger at the mass resting in Levshov's hand, and the finger left a deep imprint. - "Now" - said Levshov - "I'm going to model a plug out of this "clay". I'll do this modeling manually, although I could have used for this purpose the resources of NanoTech, such as the capability of the bacteria to move themselves around, and the NanoTech built-in CAD/CAM - Computer Aided Design and Manufacturing System with graphic interface fed into the user's optic nerve, with the IRV - Ideal Result Visualization controlled by the user, and the automatic fitting of the real object to the ideal one. But in this particular case, doing it by hand would be much simpler, although it may not be so spectacular. But this is not NanoTech Demo yet, these are still preparations - I just need a plug for the sink. Now we've got something which looks like a plug. I am putting this plug on the bottom of the sink, and now I see that the plug turned out to be a little bigger than needed and its shape is rather irregular. That is why I issue to NanoTech a command to shrink the object." AL:> SHRINKAGE; RATE:3; DO UNTIL "ENOUGH" NT:> OK To his amazement, the Colonel saw that the plug began to shrink rapidly and finally droped into the sink hole. AL:> ENOUGH NT:> OK - "You see, Colonel, the plug is now in the sink hole, but it won't stop the water yet, because its irregular shape doesn't fully conform to the circular shape of the hole, and there are gaps between them. That's why I'm going to do two things now: I'll switch from the plastic link mode to elastic link mode, that is, I'll change its mechanical properties from "clay" to "rubber", and then I'll issue a command to expand." AL:> LINKS BETWEEN ELEMENTS: ELASTIC; ELASTICITY: 5 NT:> OK AL:> EXPANSION; RATE:3; DO UNTIL "ENOUGH" NT:> OK The plug began to grow, gradually filling the gaps, until they were completely closed. AL:> ENOUGH NT:> OK - "Well, Colonel, now we have a plug. Of course one could have worked on it a little bit more to give it a more presentable appearance, but for our purposes it'll do as it is. So, let's proceed with the Demo proper." - Levshov turned on the tap and the sink began filling with water - "While we wait for the water to fill the sink, I would like to briefly explain what you are going to see. Back in 1993, when we began our first experiments in manufacturing things using NanoTech, VCRs were still considered a luxury in Russia, and that was one of the reasons we decided to take VCR as an example. One of our comrades has nobly sacrificed for science his own video recorder. By that time, we had already developed a program for copying any object atom by atom. Physically, the copying process went as follows: the object to be copied was submerged into a tank with water containing cyborg-bacteria, and these bacteria gradually disassembled, one might even say dissolved, the object atom by atom. That was a fairly slow process which took, in the case of the VCR, about three months. But since, as a result of this process, the cyborg- bacteria recorded into their database the information about where each atom had been located, this process was reversible, that is, a command could be issued for the cyborg-bacteria to start placing proper atoms at their appropriate places, and if the water in the tank had the atoms of the necessary elements dissolved in it in the required quantities, that meant that after some time (longer than three months, because now the bacteria also had to fish for the required atoms and to transport them to the required positions) the object once again would come into existence out of the seeming nothingness. Moreover, this process, besides being reversible, was also reproducible - by using the information from their database, the cyborg-bacteria could reproduce any number of identical copies of the initial object as long as they had a sufficient supply of the necessary atoms dissolved in the water. By the way, from that one initial VCR we finally obtained three absolutely identical (down to every scratch) VCRs, and all three were working normally. One must note though, that the whole process took more than a year. In other words, we have created what science-fiction writers call a "replicator", but there was no practical use for it, because it worked excruciatingly slow. So we began to look for ways to speed up the process. The first way was to refrain from the atom-by-atom assembly in those cases where it is not really needed. For example, the VCR body - do we really need to assemble it atom by atom, when we could just issue a command for the cyborg- bacteria to link up, the same way I have just linked them up into this plug right before your very eyes, specifying the required mechanical properties of the link. The surface color and reflectivity can also be varied by arranging the bacteria into different configurations, so that light waves of one wavelength cancel each other, while the waves of another length reinforce each other, giving the object a certain color, making it light or dark. Another way was to stop using atoms of any chemical element other than carbon. By changing the atomic lattice of carbon, one can simulate the physical properties of virtually any substance. By 1995 we have managed to write for the NanoTech system a program that converts the data bases obtained in a "replicator" into the databases for things to be assembled out of cyborg- bacteria and atoms of carbon. And that is what I want to demonstrate to you now - our VCR of 1995. And the sink is already full of water - just in time!." Levshov turned off the tap. "Now, Colonel, watch very closely." AL:> OBJECT: WHAT_I_AM_LOOKING_AT Levshov stared fixedly at the water for a couple of seconds - he had to allow some time for the cyborg-bacteria to measure the contraction of his eye muscles, to recalculate these contraction values into the coordinates of the point in space at which his stare was fixed, and to contact the bacteria located at that point using an infrared link. NT:> OBJECT FOUND AND LOCKED ONTO, OBJECT BOUNDARIES SET BY DEFAULT AL:> PROGRAM VCR_1995 NT:> PROGRAM FOUND. PROCEED WITH EXECUTION? AL:> YES NT:> OK Initially, just as it had been the first time in the Levshov's hands, the water started to cloud. However, when in a few seconds time it approached the consistency of milk, the upper layer of the water suddenly began to clear, while at the bottom of the sink the density of the whitish substance started to grow even faster, and it gradually began to assume a definite shape. It was several more seconds before the Colonel realized that on the bottom of the sink, under a layer of slightly cloudy water there lay... The Colonel could have sworn that it was a printed circuit board, were it not absolutely white and colorless! In the first second he thought that there were no components on that "circuit board", but soon he did notice a few small parts, although a second before he was absolutely sure that there were none. Then he finally saw white rectangles, that looked more like ghosts of integrated circuits rather then the real things, to materialize on the board out of coagulations of turbid water that were running over the circuit board like ribbons of mist over a morning land. For a brief moment the water in the sink became completely transparent, and the Colonel could clearly see on the bottom a perfectly real circuit board with lots of components, only unnaturally white, looking as if it were made of alabaster. But the circuit board stayed in this ghostly state for only a fleeting moment. What happened next was as if somebody turned on a switch - the circuit board suddenly took on color - green substrate, golden conductors, black cases of integrated circuits. Now the circuit board was indistinguishable from a real one. - "Well, we did it for purely aesthetic reasons." - Levshov commented on this sudden transfiguration - "It does not really affect the operation of the circuit." The Colonel did not respond. He stood staring at the sink with his mouth agape with wonder, while the work in the sink proceeded at an astonishing pace. Over the circuit board, the mechanical part of the VCR started to grow up. It grew up like flowers grow in the films shot by the one-frame-per- hour process, where weeks flash by in mere seconds. One second - and it sprouted levers and springs, couple of seconds more - and a video head cylinder burgeoned like a huge flower-bud. Couple of more seconds - and it all became enwrapped into a transparent filmy case, which grew more solid and opaque with every passing second, until it completely obliterated the view of the components inside it. One more instant - and the case suddenly turned from white to black with golden trimming. Levshov took the VCR out of water and put it on the table. The VCR was steaming. - "We'll have to wait a few more seconds to let it dry up, and then you can check its operation - I saw a TV set in your office." - said Levshov - "By the way, did you time it? All of this should have taken three minutes and 20 seconds." - "That fast?" - asked the Colonel. He stepped forward and touched the VCR. It was still warm to touch, although it had already stopped steaming. - "That slow." - answered Levshov - "Too slow for our purposes." - "What purposes?" - "I'll explain it later. And now, let's go and see whether it works." 2.7 All the things in the world. On returning to the office, Levshov hooked up the newly made VCR to the TV set. - "Why doesn't it have a power cord?" - asked the Colonel. - "We have introduced some changes into its design. It is now powered from a built-in power source. Have you ever heard about cold nuclear fusion?" - "That's one of the questions I was supposed to ask you: how did you do it? Physicists throughout the world has been puzzling over the cold fusion problem for years." - "We don't know it ourselves. I guess one might say we did it empirically. The first versions of cyborg-bacteria operated on organic power sources, the way ordinary bacteria do. One of our comrades was experimenting with what he called "nanotechnogonics" - in simple terms, it was artificial selection of cyborg-bacteria. He artificially increased the rate of mutations in some of the bacteria, and was placing them in various strange environments to see which way the evolution would take in those environments. In particular, he was trying to make one of the strains adapt to low levels of lighting, and he was putting them in darker and darker rooms. Most of those bacteria just died out, but there was one strain that turned out to be capable of living in complete darkness. Thanks to cold fusion, as we found later. Subsequently, we built this function into standard cyborg-bacteria, but we still don't know how and why it works - I think we should let physicists figure it all out." - "But isn't the work with mutants hazardous?" - "Very much so. We had one accident... Very gruesome... I just don't want to recall it. But those bacteria which we have released now are perfectly safe. We have disabled their mutations, but if by any chance a mutant were to come into existence, it would be immediately destroyed but its normal fellow bacteria before it had time to do any real damage. Modifications in the design of cyborg-bacteria of this kind can only occur on purpose, by commands received from the NanoTech Network... However, let's get back to the VCR. Please insert a cassette and press "play" button." The VCR worked perfectly. - "Had I not seen this with my very eyes" - said the Colonel - "I would have never believed that a VCR can be sent over a water supply line. " - "Water supply has nothing to do with this. I only needed water as an environment which makes it easier for the cyborg-bacteria to move around. In principle, we could have used the cyborg-bacteria who live inside you or me, and take the hydrogen for nuclear fusion from water vapors that are always present in the atmosphere, but in that case the whole process would have taken much more time. And as for "sending", I hope you realize that this particular VRC was not sent from anywhere. It just exists in the NanoTech Network as a purely informational entity, as a data set and a program, which can always be "executed", and it can be executed any number of times, and each time the result of executing this immaterial program will be a material VCR. One could say that the NanoTech Network is the place of potential existence of an innumerable number of VCRs, as well as lots of other things." - "What things?" - "In principle, all kinds of things. You just place an already existing thing into a replicator, dissolve it there, obtaining an atom-by-atom database, convert this initial atom-by-atom database into a database for manufacturing that thing out of cyborg-bacteria and carbon atoms, and store this final database in the NanoTech Network memory, which is virtually infinite, since it grows along with the multiplication of cybor-bacteria. And please note that the whole process does not involve any resources beyond those of the NanoTech System itself, since the system already includes a program for creating a replicator, and the data processing and storage are performed by cyborg-bacteria. After the information about any particular thing is entered into the system, any NanoTech System user can access the program for bringing a copy of that particular thing into material existence, execute the program and use the resulting thing." - "What other people are NanoTech System users, besides you?" - "There are not very many active users at the moment, but as soon as I issue the command to activate the system to its full potential, each human being living on Earth will be able to use NanoTech. I believe that by now the cyborg- bacteria have already infiltrated the bodies of all the people on our planet. These bacteria are so designed that as soon as they find themselves inside a living organism, they automatically determine whether this organism is an animal or a human being, and if human, they establish a data interface between this person's nervous system and the NanoTech Network, and automatically assign to this person a NanoTech Network User's ID number." - "And how are you planning to collect payments for the use of this network? And, especially, who is going to benefit from these payments? I hope you have not forgotten that these bacteria were stolen, and they are actually Government's property?" - asked the Colonel. - "There'll be no payments. I mean, no payments in money." - "But you've been working on these bacteria for a long time, and probably expected to somehow benefit from your efforts?" - "But I'll benefit. And you'll benefit. And the whole of the society shall benefit. Imagine that somebody invents something new - and somebody will always be inventing something, a thinking human being just cannot stop inventing - and thanks to NanoTech this person's invention will immediately become accessible to all people on Earth. Including me. And this will recompense my efforts." - "I think I'm missing something." - said the Colonel - "Well, suppose NanoTech will give you things for free. All kinds of things. Can it create clothes?" - "Easily." - "And an automobile?" - "No sweat." - "And a house?" - "As easy as anything else." - "OK, I can see that you won't have to pay electricity bills...' - the Colonel nodded towards the VCR running without a power cord. - "Neither shall I have to pay for gasoline." - added Levshov - "The automobile will draw its power from cold fusion." - "Let's assume that it is indeed so." - conceded the Colonel - "But you will still need something to eat! That means that you still need money! For food, if not for anything else!" Levshov gave one more of his inscrutable smiles: "And how do you know that one really needs to eat? Have you recently tried not to eat?" - "What do you mean by that?" - asked the Colonel suspiciously. The world he knew and understood started to develop a flaw in its structure. A feeling started to well up from the depth of his soul, a feeling as if he were being dragged to the brink of an abyss he dared not to look into. - "The fact is that cyborg-bacteria are so designed that whenever they find themselves inside a human body, they automatically start to monitor the levels of nutrients in the blood, and as soon as these become dangerously low, bacteria automatically activate the genes that produce these nutrients, and immediately discharge the produced nutrients into the bloodstream." For a few seconds the Colonel sat stunned and silent. Finally, he said in very low voice: "So, you mean that ... Do you want to say that no one needs to eat anything anymore?" - "Actualy, I would not recommend this. We still don't know the long-term effects of such fasting on the digestive tract. But there might be some difficult situations where such direct replenishment of nutrients in the bloodstream could actually mean the difference between life and death. Try to look up the latest statistics on the third-world countries. I'm sure that over the last month or so they have not reported a single death caused by starvation." - "So, one still needs to buy food for oneself?" - asked the Colonel, his spirits revived. - "As a matter of fact, one needs not. The nucleus of each cyborg-bacteria cell contains a library of genes each of which can be selectively activated by a command from the NanoTech Network. Instead of that mass of white material that you just saw during the demo, I could easily produce a piece of meat or yolk. The standard gene library includes the most popular staple foods, but if you would like to eat something special and are willing to wait a little, the cyborg-bacteria have the capability to assemble new genes from individual nucleotides using "blueprints" - that is, the information obtained from the NanoTech Network databases. By the way, Colonel, it's high time to have a supper. How about some caviar? If you allow me to use your sink once again..." - "That's it! The sink! The waterworks!" - the Colonel once again regained his spirits, which had begun to flag for a moment - "I should have remembered about it all along! You'll still have to pay for water supply! That clinches it! You'll never be able to do without money! Money is a material manifestation of the relationships that cement society, and you cannot live in a society and be free from it!" - "Oh, Colonel, what a muddle of ideas you have in your head! Capitalism jumbled together with communism... As for the waterworks, let me explain it to you once again. Massive amounts of water are only used to facilitate the movement of cyborg-bacteria, but, in principle, they are not absolutely necessary for manufacturing things using the NanoTech Network. Water is needed for sustaining the life of the human being though, but there is always a sufficient amount of water vapor in the air. Even now, in the memory of the Nanotech Network are stored a number of simple devices that allow to condense a glass of water out of the air in a matter of a few minutes. And don't forget about clouds that are almost always present in the sky. They consist of minute water droplets, that also contain cyborg-bacteria. You only need to give them a command to merge, and the cloud will produce rain." - "You want to say that you can even control weather?" - "To a certain extent, yes. At least, I can always pour a glass of water out of a cloud." - "OK, let's assume that you can always get yourself some water for free. But your house - even if we assume that it will be completely built by NanoTech and won't cost you a penny - it will still be standing on land, and a plot of land costs money, and that means that you still won't be able to build it, if you don't have any money!" - "Tell me Colonel, have you ever camped out? Ever put up a tent in a forest?" - "Suppose I did." - "You didn't pay any money for the land you put up your tent on, did you?" - "But I put up the tent for one night only, while a house will stand there permanently!" - "Who said that a house must stand in one place permanently?" - "What on earth do you mean by that?" - asked the Colonel. The feeling that he had been dragged to the very brink of an abyss and was being forced to look down there, at another, frighteningly alien world, that feeling became almost unbearable. - "Our team of comrades have formulated for ourselves three rules of 'good' design practices that are most consistent with the NanoTech System capabilities. The first, and the most important rule is that things must be what we call 'living'." The Colonel opened his mouth to ask something, but Levshov had anticipated his question: "Let me explain what I mean. Take for example that very first VCR that we produced, the one that we assembled in the replicator. That one was an absolutely 'dead' thing. 'Dead' not in the sense that it didn't work - it actually worked perfectly - but it didn't hold a single living cyborg-bacteria, and that meant that it could not rebuild itself, couldn't change its own design, couldn't repair itself and so forth. It was a very ordinary thing, one of those things that we usually find all around us, the only difference being that it had not been built with machine tools at a factory, but rather had been assembled by cyborg-bacteria in a replicator. That was the only difference, and the difference lay not in the thing itself, but in its earlier history, which was absolutely immaterial from the standpoint of its consumer qualities. Now, let's have a look at the VCR which I have just produced before your very eyes, the 1995 model. This one is already what we call a 'semi-live' product. It already incorporates quite a lot of living cyborg-bacteria. They provide power to this thing, they can even re-grow the video heads, if they get worn-out. However, this product also contains a lot of 'dead' parts, that, built by the cyborg- bacteria though they were, don't contain cyborg-bacteria themselves. And this means that this thing will never be able to instantaneously disappear, to decompose itself into individual cyborg-bacteria that could once again disperse." - "Why would they need to do this?" - asked the Colonel, baffled. - "Don't you see it? As things stand now, you'll finish watching your video cassette, switch off the VCR, and it'll just be left standing in the corner gathering dust and occupying space to absolutely no purpose, until you once again decide to watch something. How much more convenient it would have been if, for the time between the two viewing sessions, it had just disappeared, with the cyborg-bacteria that had been its building blocks re-assembling into some other thing, the one that you need at that specific moment in time. They could have become a part of a plate, a spoon, a toothbrush, a razor, a coat, a shoe, a chair for you to sit on, anything that you actually need at the current moment in time. And they would have left that thing as soon as the need for that thing is no longer felt, and they would have gone into a new thing, the one you are going to need at the next moment in time. Look at this empty chair near me. Why does it have to stand here, while nobody is sitting on it? And nevertheless it does stand here and occupies space. In a perfect world, it should have only appeared here if a third person came into this room. And this applies to the majority of things around us - we only use them one percent of the time, at best. But they occupy space in our houses the whole one hundred percent of the time. Dead things demand that their owner dust them, maintain them in proper condition, and always take them with him every time he moves house. Oh, those moves! There seems to be nothing so terrible as moving house, and this terror can chain a man to one and only place of living forever. Dead things turn their owners into their slaves! And now imagine a house built in the true spirit of NanoTech. At any given moment in time, only a few things exist in it physically. Actually, only those things that you need at that particular moment. And at the same time, there exist in it an infinite number of things - all the things in the world that have been entered into the NanoTech Network database are potentially present in that house, since any of them at any moment can be brought out of non-existence and be given a material form. And the NanoTech-type house itself , if you live in it alone, contains only one room, since you cannot simultaneously be in more than one room. And at the same time, potentially, it contains an infinite number of rooms, since that one and only room can indefinitely change its appearance and size, filling itself with all kinds of things, effectively transforming itself into a different room, into an infinite number of rooms. And as soon as you leave your house, it disappears or transforms, for example, into your car, or into a house for another man who was passing by and decided that it would be a good idea to live in that place for a day. And if you, during your outing suddenly have a wish to find yourself back at home, your house will immediately reappear in front of you wherever you are." - "Immediately? I find that hard to believe." - said the Colonel - "It took you almost four minutes to grow only one VCR." - "Let me repeat it once again - this VCR is a semi-live thing. It grows so slowly only because in this case we force NanoTech into reproducing a thing which was designed to be manufactured using an absolutely different method of production, that is, the serial industrial machine production method characteristic of capitalism. In this case we abuse NanoTech by making it operate in a manner which is completely inconsistent with its character. I have done this demonstration on purpose, so as to show you that in principle NanoTech can even cope with such difficult task as an almost perfect reproduction of things characteristic of a historically antecedent method of production. It is worth noting here that machine production cannot always cope with the task of reproducing, by its own means, things that are characteristic of an antecedent era - the era of master craftsmen working manually, the era of feudalism. And now I'm going to give you a demonstration of a video system designed in the true style of NanoTech. Please note the difference in the time required for its manufacture. This time I won't need much material, so I'll just use the bacteria that live inside my body." Levshov put his hands on the table, palms up, and suddenly the palms started to cover with a sort of perspiration, to glisten with little beads that began to quickly grow and turn whitish. The beads began to roll off onto the table, and in a second they merged into a single thin white sheet. Half a second later the sheet suddenly changed its color to deep black. - "So it's ready now. Two and a half seconds." - said Levshov. - "What's ready?" - asked the Colonel. - "The video system is ready. Please, order the movie you want to watch." Only then the Colonel noticed that the sheet lying on the table was no longer black, but was glowing as if it were a computer screen, and on that screen a list of movie titles was slowly scrolling. - "We don't have a very wide selection yet." - apologized Levshov - "as of now, only a few hundreds of movies have been stored in the NanoTech Network memory, but we believe that as soon as the Network becomes accessible to the general public, the users will transfer to it everything that is now available on video cassettes... Don't be shy, Colonel, choose a film title and touch it with your finger!" The Colonel warily poked at the title of his favorite movie, the list of titles immediately cleared off the screen, and instead the Colonel saw the familiar movie characters, in full color and motion. - "I just can't understand where the sound is coming from." - said the Colonel after a few seconds of viewing. - "The film soundtrack is fed directly to your auditory nerve, by-passing the phase of its transformation into sound waves, which makes for the high quality of the sound, because there are no intermediaries, no loudspeakers which usually introduce sound distortion. Generally speaking, the picture could also be fed directly to the optic nerve, and this would be more consistent with the Third Principle of good design in the style of the NanoTech. The Third Principle says: always use only direct interface between the human nerve system and the NanoTech Network, without any intermediaries like human body's sense organs or muscles. In practical terms this means that if, for example, we design a automobile for the NanoTech, it should not have a dashboard - all the necessary information about the status of the car systems should be fed into the driver's optic nerve, to be superimposed on his actual field of vision. Also, such a car should not have a steering wheel or pedals - mental commands from the driver should be routed directly to the car's final controls, without any mechanical intermediaries. All this allows to radically simplify the design, and consequently, to considerably reduce the time needed to "grow" a car. - "You said it was the Third Principle. And what is the Second one?" - asked the Colonel. - "The Second Principle of good NanoTech-style design says: for a power source of the device you are designing always use the internal power of the cyborg-bacteria, and the power should always be generated at the same location where it is to be consumed. This allows to eliminate all the contraptions for transferring power within the device. For example, our semi-live VCR complies with the Second Principle only in part: the power is indeed generated inside it by cyborg-bacteria, but after that it has to be transferred to 'non-live' components, such as electrical motors, integrated circuits, and so on. That's why it has so many extra wires, levers and shafts serving the only purpose of transferring electrical and mechanical energy from one location to another. From the standpoint of the Second Principle, a much better design is the video system that you can now see on the table." - Levshov nodded towards the glowing sheet, where the scenes from the Colonel's favorite movie still continued to unfold. - "Each luminous dot on this surface is a cyborg-bacteria that itself generates the power for its own glow. That means that the power is consumed at the same spot where it is generated. This is only possible in a completely 'live' product." - "So, if I understand you correctly," - said the Colonel musingly - "an automobile built in compliance with the NanoTech principles doesn't have any transmission, and the function of the engine is performed by the wheels themselves?" - "You got the idea absolutely right. And to completely visualize a NanoTech-style car, please remember that it always has just as many seats as it has passengers and its trunk is never larger than the luggage it carries. And if you take into account the fact that it just doesn't make any sense to transport things that can always be grown at your destination, it means that usually such car doesn't have any trunk at all." - "And all of this, all this things, cars, houses, all this will immediately become available to every human being on Earth as soon as you give a command to activate the system?" - asked the Colonel in a slightly trembling voice. - "In principle, yes, although it will take some time for the people to learn to use the system. But it's not very difficult, anyway. We have recently developed a graphic user interface, where the signals are fed directly to the user's optic nerve which results in the user seeing an illusory, or a "virtual", to use the current buzzword, space, or rather a "virtual store" filled with all kinds of things, where he can walk around and choose whatever he or she needs. After that it's just a matter of the user reaching for the chosen thing and grabbing it in virtual space. The thing will immediately materialize..." - "That's not what I was asking about." - interrupted the Colonel, impatience showing in his voice. He felt that the abyss had already opened up under his feet, and he was falling, falling, falling... - "It's money. The money in your virtual shop - is it also virtual or is it real, after all?" - "You know Colonel, I just can't imagine what other explanations do you need. I've been speaking about this for an hour now, and you still don't seem to understand that there'll be no money at all. Think for yourself: who and for what purpose may need any money at all, when any one can get out of NanoTech any thing he or she may need, absolutely for free? Money will take its rightful place in museums as an evidence of a past-and-gone era in the history of mankind." In despair, the Colonel squeezed his head between his hands and fell silent. The world around him was coming down. The Colonel had spent all his life to make a career for himself, to reach the position which allowed him, back in the days of the total chaos of late 1991, to grab hold of a certain amount of the Party's money, to transfer it abroad and stash it away in a Swiss bank account. This money was supposed to provide for a comfortable existence in his old age and a secure future for his heirs. All the terror he had to go through to do that, all the nerves and energy spent! And, as it turns out, everything was in vain?! The monstrous unfairness of this all was searing the Colonel's soul. His brain was in hectic search for a rebuttal. - "There can be no market without money, and the market is the only force that can fine-tune the required amount of production!" - spluttered the Colonel and immediately realized the stupidity of his remark. - "Why would you need to additionally fine-tune the production when everybody produces exactly what he needs, at the exact moment when he needs it, and in the exact quantities he needs?" - Levshov seemed surprised - "The market forces are only needed to adjust the amount of production at that phase in the development of productive forces where things have to be produced before they are actually needed." - "Without money there'll be no incentive for increasing the efficiency of labor!" - persisted the Colonel. - "Whose labor?" - asked Levshov, surprised - "The labor of cyborg-bacteria? Since it's them who'll be doing all the work." - "What I mean is creative work. There'll still have to be somebody who'll be inventing new things for NanoTech, otherwise the progress will stop. Does it make any sense for an inventor to work, if his invention won't in the end give him any advantage over the rest of the people?" - "You know, Colonel, I think you are seriously mistaken about the motives behind creative work of an inventor. The desire to create is a need deeply rooted in every human being. This need exists not only because in satisfying it one may gain some advantages for oneself, but also because of the very fact that a human being has a brain which needs a workout from time to time, just as muscles do. Just as you'll never be able to sit in an unchanging posture for hours - you'll finally need to stretch your legs - your mind also needs stretching from time to time. The brain wants to work just because it exists, however, under the existing method of production, only a chosen few can afford the luxury of brain-streching, while most of the other people have to earn their living by doing purely mechanical mind- numbing jobs. Under capitalism only a few lucky ones can afford to do some creative work, but even they are forced to sell their creative products in order to be able to buy their freedom from mechanical work. In contrast to this, NanoTech opens up the possibility of doing creative work to every person on Earth, and also allows any person to immediately use the creative products of any other person. I think that as a result of this we are going to see a creative progress like we could never