And that's when the robots attacked, Chapter 29

Chapter 29

Benji, Nitya, Kristina and Naoki ran into the nanotech lab's control
room to find Aaron still sitting at the control console, squinting
bleary-eyed at the screen.

"We just got your message," Kristina said.

"Is everything alright?" Nitya added.

"Where's Mary-Anne? Is she okay?" Naoki asked.

"Well," Aaron said, looking into the lab, "that's kind of
complicated."

The lab was...perfectly normal, apparently. The table with the oddly
naughty material samples had been knocked over, but otherwise
nothing seemed out of place. Even the main algae vat in the centre of
the room looked perfectly fine...

"You see, it's like this," Aaron began.

"I'm in the vat," Mary-Anne's voice came over the speakers.

"Okay, maybe it's not that complicated," Aaron admitted.

"In...the vat?" Nitya said, looking through the window into the lab.

"What, are you swimming in there or something?" Benji asked.

"Not exactly," Mary-Anne said.

"There was a lab accident," Aaron said.

"Lab catastrophe, more like it," Mary-Anne replied.

"And," Aaron continued, "we had a main vat containment breach."

"The little guys broke out," Mary-Anne translated.

"Okay, wait," Kristina said, looking back and forth between Aaron and
the computer speakers. "This is like a bad tennis match. Mary-Anne,
can't you come out of the vat and tell us this? And how are you on
speakers in there anyway?"

"I can't," Mary-Anne said.

"Can't what?"

"I can't come out of the vat."

"The little guys disassembled her," Aaron explained.

Needless to say there was a pause at that point.

"Disassembled her," Naoki said slowly.

"Into her component cells," Aaron elaborated.

"DISASSEMBLED HER?" Naoki shouted.

"Relax, Naoki," Mary-Anne said quickly. "It's okay, I'm fine."

Another pause.

"WHAT?" Naoki said.

"Yeah," Benji said, "I'm not a biologist, but doesn't that make no
fucking sense at all?"

"It's like this," Aaron said, "the algae's cells programming had a
bug..."

"Obviously," Nitya said.

"Not like that," Aaron said. "Their deconstruction protocol had a
bug. When the algae found something that looked like a cell, the
deconstruction protocol ceded control over to the assimilation
protocol...the program we use to get the modified algae cells to make
more modified algae cells."

"They assimilated my cells," Mary-Anne said. "All of my cells now have
the same modifications that we gave to the algae."

"Can we skip the pause and just go straight to the part where someone
says 'what'?" Kristina asked.

"So...you're a cyborg now?" Naoki asked, trying to get his head around
it.

"Strictly speaking," Mary-Anne said, "I'm approximately five times ten
to the thirteenth little cyborgs."

"I'm going to sit down now," Naoki said. He sat on the floor.

"Let me see if I've got this straight," Nitya said. "The vat broke."

"Yep," Aaron said.

"Your little Borg got out and...assimilated Mary-Anne."

"Yep."

"Separating her into her component cells in the process."

"As far as we can tell."

"And the vat just, what, reassembled itself?" Nitya said, waving at
the perfectly whole vat in the lab.

"HA!" Mary-Anne said. "I just wish the vat had reassembled itself. I
had to teach these little buggers to reassemble the damn thing
themselves, practically from the component atoms. And in a way that
left all the algae inside the vat, so that Professor Egger doesn't
realize we had an accident."

"You just know he'd use it an excuse to shut down the project," Aaron
added.

"What, just because one of the researchers was accidentally
disassembled?" Kristina asked sarcastically. (The sarcasm, it should
be pointed out, went right over Aaron and Mary-Anne's head. Well,
Aaron's head and Mary-Anne's vat. Whatever. The point is, they were
tired.)

"So," Nitya continued, "Mary-Anne, despite being a bunch of cells, is
communicating with the algae in the vat?"

"It's the only reason she's still alive," Aaron said.

"For God's sake, how?"

"We're still working on that," Aaron said, "but we can guess. The
assimilation protocal normally just adds new cells one by one to the
wireless network as it assimilates them, but it's also program to
detect if the new cells are already part of the network. In case the
algae gets separated into two volumes and then recombined, for
example. I think the assimilation protocol recognized that Mary-Anne's
nerve cells were already part of a network and tried to connect to
it."

"They would have recognized that it wasn't the right kind of network
pretty quickly though," Benji said.

"Mary-Anne was able to reprogram the networking protocols on the fly
to keep them from overwriting the preexisting network, i.e. her, and
allow it to integrate with the new network."

"I had to talk really quickly," Mary-Anne said.

"And I've spent the last hour and a half debugging the new protocols
to make sure they're stable."

"God damn, that's amazing," Kristina said.

"Aaron's been a life-saver," Mary-Anne said. "I'd be goo if it weren't
for him."

"You are goo," Kristina pointed out.

"Well, I'm goo with a future then. Aaron's managed to give me control
over the rest of the network, and all of my cells are intact and in
the vat, being kept alive by their implants. All I have to do is put
myself back together."

"You can do that?" Naoki asked.

"Hey, it'll take more than plant cells to take me down, even cyborb plant
cells!"

"It's a little more complicated than reassembling the vat," Aaron
said, "but the principle is the same. With Mary-Anne connected to the
network directly, we've finally got the geometry and reassembly code
working. She just has to put everything together in the right order."

"I'm the world's biggest jigsaw puzzle," Mary-Anne said.

"Professor Egger'll give you top marks for sure when he hears about
this," Kristina said.

"NO!" Aaron and Mary-Anne shouted at the same time.

"We can't let him know this has happened," Aaron said. "He'll either
shut down the project immediately or take control of the project and
start doing his own experiments."

Benji nodded. "Probably the latter. You've made the project
interesting."

"Either way I'm screwed," Mary-Anne said. "My best bet is to get out
of this damn vat before he finds out what happened."

"How long do you think it will take to put you back together?" Naoki
asked.

"We're hoping before the end of the Christmas break," Aaron
said. "Mary-Anne's going to start the reconstruction process as soon
as we're convinced things are stable in there, and I'm
going to cut my holiday short and come back as soon as I can to
monitor things."

"Not exactly a romantic holiday together, Naoki. Sorry about this,"
Mary-Anne said.

"It's alright, Mary-Anne. I'll keep you company," Naoki said.

"Thanks, sweetie."

"I can help out too, until Aaron gets back," Benji said.

"One good bit of news," Aaron said, "is that you won't get bored in
here. I'm giving you your Christmas present early, Benji. We're going
to get a new Playstation and set it up here in the lab. I think I can
even rig up an adapter for a controller to let Mary-Anne play."

"Whoa, Aaron," Benji said. "that's generous of you, but I don't need a
gift that fancy. How can you afford that?"

"Oh, I'm not paying for it," Aaron said. "Justin Bragg is."

"Who's Justin Bragg?"

"Nobody," Aaron said with surprising viciousness. "Nobody at all."

"Not any more he isn't," Mary-Anne agreed vehemently.

"That reminds me," Aaron said. "Does anyone want a moon laser?
Justin's treat."