Abyss Deep by Ian Douglas Read Free Book Online Page A

nanotechnology—­though he’d later said he wished he’d never come up with the phrase. Back in those early days, before the first molecular disassemblers had even been brought on-­line, there’d been a widespread concern about nanomachines programmed to take apart raw materials and create more of themselves. Since human beings are as good as sources of raw materials as an ancient landfill, the fear was that nano-­D would keep on eating and eating until the entire planet was converted to so-­called gray goo.
    It couldn’t happen, of course. Run until the raw material is used up is a piss-­poor way to program molecular machines, first off. They also require energy, a lot of it, to break molecular bonds, and are generally fairly limited in range. Nanodisassemblers are designed to reach an end point and quit. They’re also easily shut down by an ultraviolet radiation bath, or by transmission of a seek-­kill signal in their immediate vicinity.
    But Humankind has had a love-­hate relationship with nano since the beginning. Medical nano has effectively tripled our expected life span, ended the tyranny of pain, overturned the death sentences of cancer and heart disease, and even holds out the eventual promise of . . . if not immortality, then the next best thing: lifetimes measured by millennia rather than years. Some ­people with full-­course nananagathics in their systems have been around for well over a century, now, and still look like they’re in their thirties. Not only that, nanotechnology has completely transformed the way we control and interact with our material surroundings, allowing us to grow everything from a sizzling steak to a house, and pull what we need from the background matrix—­furniture, workstations, nanufactories, anything that can be stored in digital AI memory and retrieved by a thoughtclick.
    But the term gray goo remains a bugaboo, a terror phrase for anyone nervous about the ever-­increasing pace of our technology. Washington in particular was afraid of what would happen if terrorists got hold of so-­called black nano, which when released would proceed to chow down on Earth’s ecosphere.
    Ecophagia —­devouring the ecosphere.
    Machines—­even very tiny ones—­only did what humans told them to do.
    But then, humans were always the weak part of the equation, capable of the most incredibly stupid or irresponsible of acts.
    I started scanning the compartment with my N-­prog, looking for the telltale electronic signature of nanobots. The trouble was, there were ’bots everywhere. When my N-­prog detected active nano, it transmitted the data to my in-­head, which painted green pinpoints against my vision, marking objects that otherwise would have been invisibly small. I looked at the station bulkhead in front of me, gray-­painted and consisting entirely of massive pipes running from deck to overhead. The biggest, I knew, were sorting pipes, carrying the component elements of Atun 3840 into storage and assembly bays. The thinner tubes were nano-­D feeders, sending microscopic disassemblers into the depths of the captive asteroid. The pipes were silent at the moment, the mining process shut down. But they showed as solid masses of green, each packed with trillions upon uncountable trillions of live nanobots—­motionless, but still powered and on standby. Most of the Marines around me showed diffuse green masses within the outlines of their bodies—­the medical nano we all carried to improve our combat efficiency, react to wounds, and keep us healthy.
    There was loose nano drifting in the air too. The damned things are so tiny that there’s always leakage, and any environment with active nano running will have escapees. I pointed my N-­prog at several, interrogating them; a lot of the floaters actually were disassemblers—­leftovers from the rounds the tangos had used.