Alexander Lazarevich - The Nanotech Network

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The NanoTech Network

Alexander Lazarevich

Science-Fiction Novel

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

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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

Aroundnoon , as usual, the subway car was full of foreign

tourists. A group of American high-school students, maps of

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Moscowsubway 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

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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 theirJapan , without even

suspecting what other souvenir, besides the nested doll,

they were carrying fromMoscow ...

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.

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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."

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-"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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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TheNanoTechNetwork AlexanderLazarevich Science-FictionNovel Copyright(c)byAlexanderLazarevich,1997,1998. Thistextisherebymadeavailablefornon-commercialuseonly.You maycopy thistext and freely distribute it,providedthat: 1)no moneyis chargedor receivedintheprocess by neither you nor any t...

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