"Back in the Virt?" Mary asked, gazing out over the ocean from where we sat side by side in the gazebo. She was naked except for a shirt, open in the front, that she'd thrown over her shoulders to keep away a chill from a soft breeze blowing steadily off the water. Weather permitting, she rarely wore clothing. She enjoyed the feel of the Real against her skin. She slid gently into my thoughts and asked, "Inch worms?"
Yes. Tiny, microscopic inch worms, magnified in my thoughts like some form of germ under a microscope. I wasn't sure whether she'd spoken verbally, just in my head, or both. She snuggled against me, bodily and in Virtuality, to share the images forming and morphing in my thoughts. What could I do? What could I not do? The subject being nanobots.
The biggest challenge would be constructing them. Designing the nanobots provided no challenge. With the assistance of Virtuality and my AI Avatar, this was no different than working out the details for constructing any other physical object. I could walk around them, touch them, disassemble them, inspect each working part, then put them back together again with no more than my imagination. But, since they would be so microscopically minute, very sophisticated equipment and processes would be required to create them in the Real. Microscopically small lasers would be necessary to carve each tiny piece. Magnetic fields would be required to move and assemble them – neither too broad nor powerful to affect anything other than those tiny pieces. More tiny lasers would weld the connections between the pieces. Assembling a ship in a bottle would appear to be a trivial, amateurish activity compared to building nanobots.
Individually, the nanobots I envisioned would be capable of only the simplest, basic activities; just bending and twisting, so far, but I'd also imagined hundreds, thousands of these tiny nanobots holding hands and then expanding and contracting in unison like pulsing buckyballs.
Mary found this fascinating. Go on.
I imagined millions of these microscopic nanobots, each performing their simple maneuvers in coordination with the others. Microscopic dots, invisible pixels, converged and sculpted themselves to form a perfect image of Mary's face... with skin so soft I wouldn't be able to tell that it wasn't real... a face that smiled Mary's beautiful smile.
Mary scattered them, envisioning them forming my face, which promptly stuck out its tongue at me. My imagination continued to blur through thousands of images, many all but alive, all assembled from millions of microscopic nanobots, billions of tiny things.
So, the issue wasn't just building a single nanobot, which presented challenges enough but generating millions, billions, maybe more. Plus, a system would be required, sophisticated enough to communicate with each individually while directing them in concert, dancing complex coordinated ballets. In Virtuality, I was limited only by what I could imagine. However, what I envisioned was the remote control of billions of microscopic physical objects, telekinetically forming and performing whatever I imagined in the Real.
There would be countless practical uses beyond the fantastical images forming in my thoughts. There were repetitious, tedious tasks that humans still performed and often not very well. These included the maintenance of server farms, currently requiring the employment of thousands of techies who needed to be trained and monitored because they didn't want to be there or spend time in the Real. Even more inconvenient was that they were mortals, who grew old, retired, then died, and new techies needed to be hired, trained, and then continuously worry whether they were doing their jobs. But Immortals had even less desire to perform these tasks. Like everyone else with a Magick Hat, they wanted nothing more than to remain lost in Virtuality. I was convinced the answer to these and many other issues would be the nanobots I envisioned. There were countless complex and wondrous possibilities.
YOU ARE READING
The Words - An Autobiography
Ciencia Ficción"What if God was one of us?" Credit to Eric Bazzilion, and thanks to Joan Osborne for singing his brain-rattling words. Much earlier, my mother promised that if I applied myself, I could be whatever I wanted when I grew up. Then, from somewhere, I r...
