SL Huang - Up and Coming - Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

When we first cut him open to plug him in, Teeny convulsed . He twitched with the first slice, and the more we cut, the more the external nano-scales surged, changing his exterior to look like a tan desert rock and then a small pile of bricks and then a fifty-pound tuna. His on-the-ground camo looked pretty good up close.

We went through the manual to figure out what we’d done, and couldn’t find anything to help us. Betty said that maybe because it was wetware instead of hardware we need to treat it more like it was alive—a ‘he’ instead of an ‘it’—and maybe he’s in pain when we cut. We all thought she’d gone bananas, but the next day she’d rustled up an IV with some dihydromorphine from home. She’d been taking care of her husband and had plenty extra. She stabbed it into one of Teeny’s ion channels (no small feat, since he was still spasming so bad) and opened the drip. And sure enough, the convulsions quieted down.

Well, we thought that with behavior like this, we should probably tell people about it before we start the usual course of testing. So we sent holos to the research team and to General Pitticks. The research team was excited, but said that wetware was so unpredictable that they didn’t have more guidance to give us, but please keep noting down what happened and proceed. Pitticks, on the other hand, quickly replied with “Don’t care as long as it does its missions right. Stop fucking around with scientific theory and fast-track this.” Tells you a lot about him, doesn’t it. People called him General Pitiless behind his back.

We programmed the sims with increasingly-complex scenarios and watched little Teeny march right through them as long as we managed the painkiller drip. He never failed a mission, but the wetware really did have its quirks. The first time we saw something was up was when we coded in the nursery school mission. In our sim, the religious extremist group (we based it loosely on those nutjobs that were rolling around DC at the time—you know the ones) had a terror cell hidden under the basement of a nursery school. We had their weapons shipments staged in boxes of formula and diapers, and we coded up explosives to be hidden in the storehouses full of holos for the kids and replacement parts for the nannybots.

Teeny caught us all by surprise that day. We expected a pretty standard MO: get in, watch the schedules to find a time when the kids were out and the nutjobs were in, and blammo. We’d coded it up to make sure that wouldn’t happen for a few days in the sim. But before we knew it, Teeny’d set himself up to look like a box of bot parts, then found the standard control net that let you repair the nannybots and injected it with a virus. We’d just written the bots with basic off-the-shelf programming, but what do you know, they all got up and ushered the kids outside in broad daylight. Even brought them down the road to an ice cream shop. (Well, a shell of an ice cream shop. We’d only programmed the outside.) And when the kids were all safely out of blast radius, only then did the blammo happen. Blew the compound to virtual smithereens, and from a location that minimized additional damage from the blown explosives in the warehouse. We didn’t know it could do that.

Linda was working from home that day with the flu and had patched into the sim from bed. She’d lost her voice, so had turned off her comm and instead was typing in. And when she typed “Good job Teeny!” we were even more surprised to see an answer.

Up in the left-hand corner of the VR view, right where no interface elements should be, we saw the words, “Thank you. But the bomb did not explode.”

They were written in white, in an old-fashioned font we’d certainly never put into the sim. And Teeny wasn’t supposed to be able to talk. Nothing in the manual said anything about that.

We were all a bit spooked, but at the same time excited to actually talk to a test subject. So I typed back in the normal part of the UI, “Your sensors did just what they were supposed to. We just took out the explosive material for testing.”

“Testing?”

“Yes. This is a simulation, to see what you’ll do in the real world.”

“The simulation is not real. I see. Did I do good?”

I wrote, “You did so much good!” After thinking about it for a moment, I added in some imaginary evils that this nutjob group was planning. Teeny—the real Teeny, not the digital one in the sim—gave a little bzzt at that. His nano-scales fluttered.

Pitticks had said to fast-track as long as it did its job, but we contacted the research team anyway. Taking initiative to bug the program, talking to us, bzzt ing…this all seemed like more than just a wetware quirk. But they responded with the same thing—they didn’t really know what the wetware would do. The only other wetware bots in circulation were the fake pets for rich people, and those each came with their own unprogrammable “personality”. Most of the pets were small and cute and devoted, but every so often one would come off the line with a mean glint in its eye and a tendency to bite. They’d checked, and there was no bug in the programming or a flaw in the wetware itself. That was just it—wetware was unpredictable.

Teeny gave that same bzzt and nano-scale flutter after we complimented his performance in his next mission, taking out a fake dictator we made up, and again after blowing up an enemy sub as it was surfacing to put out its own missile. Neither bzzt seemed to do any damage, so we eventually figured it was like he was purring with satisfaction at a job well done. If the wetware pets can do it, why not a precision guided missile?

Teeny asked “Will this do good?” after each VR mission. He was really growing on us, and we started taking turns writing up what messes he would be preventing. Not just that the death of that dictator was a good thing, but we’d also type in a story about a little girl who would now be able to go to school safely, and grow up to be a great doctor and halt a plague in its tracks. Or how carefully blowing up a chemical munitions plant (yes, carefully ) meant that the tree frogs in the enemy’s target bomb zone would get to live on and keep the malaria-bearing mosquitoes in check. He’d make the little bzzt sound each time.

The more mission sims we sent him on, the more questions he started to ask. “Will this do good?” was followed by “What would do more good?” And Linda, who’d been a philosophy major before she got her head on straight and switched to testing, talked to him about Aquinas and Aristotle and Camus and Kant and goodness knows who else before we told her to stop filling his ROM with such nonsense.

But philosophy twaddle or no, our boy was clever. He kept getting more creative in his solutions. I think my favorite test was the mission to take out the number two in an anarcho-green extremist group. Once he got to their compound, instead of finding the milito-hippie, he plugged himself into their Net. We had to code it up as he went along, and he hunted down the number one through old-school message boards and crypto’d messages. He waited until both the number one and two were in range, then got the both of them with one beautiful explosion.

“This will do more good, yes?” he’d asked when the VR reset, his old-fashioned white text hovering at the left of my vision. I’d nodded, almost too proud to speak, and exhausted from the race of building the Nets before he got into them.

“Even more good,” I’d said, and that night me and the gals went out for beers to cheer our genius boy.

The next morning when we got back to the test lab, Teeny had left us a message. “The number three will keep the group going. It is not ended. I must go back.”