Pandora's Ark by Rick Jones Read Free Book Online Page B

yet
capable of transmitting data from foreign sources that went undetected and
unseen. Other military applications were nanobots that acted as poisons or a
force field. More measures taken into consideration by the Kremlin were the use
of nanoweaponry such as mind erasers, whereas nanobots would settle in an
insurgent’s brain as micro fields, then fire off as small brain bursts that
would wipe away sections of memory, and then reprogram it with new commands,
new memories, and new ideologies suited for communist rule.
    Additional
applications such as nano-needles and water bullets were scrapped because of
their non-lethal relevance that would ultimately achieve the Russian means to
rule by military dominance, which was to kill from a distance with something
one-billionth of the size of a man. But more importantly, to do so with something
that was highly programmable.
    It was just
another matter of the race game between Russia, the United States, and the United Kingdom. But Russia had Leonid Sakharov, a brilliant physicist who realized that molecular nanoweapons were the
next great superweapons. In order to get funding in a Russian economy that was
slowly being whittled away by the war in Afghanistan, he explained in detail
that the weapons were simple molecules converted by their own atoms, and then
those atoms would insert themselves into atomic systems which would transform
molecules into tiny computers that raced through space like submicroscopic
viruses capable of finding the enemy, and then destroy them. After lobbying
effortlessly for the sake, safety and cause of Mother Russia, he got the
funding.
    However, his research did not
come without tribulation.
    Progress was slow at first—baby
steps, really—a stagger here and a stagger there, the frustration worming its
way into his core until he took to the bottle to take off the edge. And then
gains became strides, strides became leaps, and Sakharov was elated at the
advancement made toward the evolution of the atom.
    He would spend nights on end
with little or no sleep—his only true companions beside his underling
associates were his own colossal ego, and a bottle of the finest vodka rubles
could buy.
    But one night, in one of his
celebratory moods after making a breakthrough, Old Man Sakharov took to lack of
caution and, against the advice of associates, initiated a start-up program after
he was warned about the consequences, since no pre-tests were conducted to
determine the hazardous effect of the nanobots under controlled conditions. But
the old man gestured with a dismissive wave of his hand, his ego and the
influence of liquor now the driving forces behind his decisions, and engaged
the program with the push of a button. 
    As he sat at a monitor behind
a bomb-proof resistant glass wall, he watched his associates as they examined a
monkey that was isolated in a separate room behind another glass wall. At first
there was nothing, the old man becoming flustered, angry, not understanding
what went wrong. And then a waspy hum sounded over the mike as the monkey
became agitated. Within moments the hum grew in intensity, the nanobots replicating
faster than anticipated. And then the monkey began to scream at a pitch that
none of the scientists had ever heard from any animal.
    Quickly, the rhesus’s fur
began to slough off by the handfuls, the monkey waving and swinging its hands
wildly at something unseen. And then its flesh began to disappear as if eaten
away by patches, revealing the muscle and gristle underneath, then bone. The
rhesus raised its head in agony, its eyes dissolving within their orbital
sockets, and then it shuddered one last time before falling. Within moments,
like a time-lapse reel of a movie running in fast forward, the monkey dissolved
into skeletal matter. But it didn’t end there. The bone quickly became
polished, and then cracked, revealing the marrow that soon disappeared. And
then there was nothing, not even the outline of dust. Everything