‘Engebbe and the Beginnings of ANAD’

In this post, I want to describe the historical beginnings of the Autonomous Nanoscale Assembler/Disassembler (ANAD). 

In the late 2040s, the U.S. Army and a new UN organization called Quantum Corps came separately to Dr. Irwin Frost, director of the Autonomous Systems Lab at Northgate University with a proposal: build us a nanoscale robotic device that could operate autonomously in a variety of environments, always at the scale of atoms and molecules, and that could both assemble and disassemble matter at high speed.  The need for such a device was becoming more and more apparent as threats were developing around the world in this medium.

The Army and Quantum Corps now regarded the world of atoms and molecules as a new medium in which to fight and win wars, and they had a tight timetable, as molecular assemblers and matter compilers were a growing problem everywhere, all of them unlicensed and unregulated.  Dr. Frost found himself under the gun to get a workable ANAD unit up and running.  This led him to make a fateful decision.

From a dig site at a place called Engebbe, Kenya, archaeologist Dr. Rudolf Volk had recently made an extraordinary discovery.  Nestled in among fossilized Homo Erectus bones were also fossilized remains of a micro robot from several billion years ago.  As well, dormant specimens of an ancient virus were uncovered.  The virus was removed and genetically sequenced.  The results were published and Dr. Frost found in this ancient viral genome sequence the answers to some programming problems he had been having with ANAD.  It seemed that Nature had solved the very same problems billions of years ago. 

Frost took this genome sequencing and applied selected parts to ANAD’s program, solving his problem, enabling him to meet his deadline and make ANAD ready for launch and service with the newly stood-up U.N. Quantum Corps.  But what he didn’t know was that he had inadvertently copied into ANAD’s core programs some unknown aspects of the viral genome that would manifest themselves only later, aspects that would threaten all of Mankind and make all assemblers worldwide suspect.  For at the very heart of ANAD’s program lay a ticking time bomb.  And no one realized it, until it was almost too late.

ANAD was originally conceived as a weapon of war, an intelligent autonomous, nanoscale device that would enable Quantum Corps troopers to deal with similar devices springing up everywhere.  The principal adversary in the mid 21^st century was the criminal cartel Red Hammer, a bastardized offshoot of rogue Chinese army leaders and secretive tong societies in Hong Kong and Macau.  Red Hammer was a vast and growing criminal enterprise and their discovery and employment of matter fabs and ANAD-style nanobots rapidly became the number one public health and national security concern of nearly every nation on Earth.

It was Red Hammer who first demonstrated one of the most dangerous aspects of ANAD technology: the ability of the bot to replicate copies of itself at high speed, to build large formations of these copies, to control these formations, and to swarm against targets of interest, assault them like murderous bees and disassemble the targets into atom fluff….into their constituent atoms and molecules.  High-speed replication, close coordination of all elements, autonomous operation and configurations optimized for a variety of uses made Red Hammer ANAD systems especially dangerous.

And when Red Hammer demonstrated during the Serengeti plague outbreak of the 2050s that these systems had the ability to enter a human body and take up positions anywhere, especially in the brain and to manipulate nerve impulses, stoke dopamine and serotonin flow and in general control pain and pleasure impulses in the affected persons, Quantum Corps knew they had to act and act fast.  The ability to generate addiction on demand and to manipulate it to any desired degree made Serengeti a global menace and ANAD an essential weapon in this ongoing fight.

Serengeti made ANAD a necessity. 

The growth of molecular assembler technology and its rapid spread into all corners of society and the world went hand in hand with the growth of ANAD into a powerful weapon of war and law enforcement.  In fact, by the mid 2st century, the divide between fighting wars and enforcing the law had blurred to near invisibility.  ANAD’s ability to replicate, swarm, assume a near infinity of configurations and disassemble matter at high speed made it and Quantum Corps a front-line organization in the battle against exploding fabs and malicious hackers and fab lords worldwide.

In an earlier post to Quantum Corps Times, the general state of the world in the last decades of the 21^st century was described this way:

Life in the late 21^st century AD is generally a time of great technological progress, conflict and promise.  The growth and spread of ANAD-style nanotechnology has had profound effects on every aspect of life in the last fifty years.

ANAD systems and poorly regulated fabs based on ANAD technology are widespread, around the world, in every city and village and on every farm or commune.  Fabs (fabricators) based on ANAD can create almost anything inorganic that human beings can imagine.  Cars, furniture, clothing, sex toys, homes, electronic devices, guns, etc can all be fabricated from atom-scale feedstock.  All you need is the fab, the core with its software drivers and the requisite feedstock.  Organic structures, especially living systems (strictly forbidden in most places) are still difficult, expensive and generally not worth the effort.  Otherwise, the sky’s the limit.

More importantly, robotic nanoscale systems based on the original ANAD design (from the 2050s and Northgate University, Dr. Irwin Frost) are widely recognized to be a parallel sentience and life form, both a companion and competitor to Man on this planet, even though the devices were created by Man.  The swarming nature of ANAD bots and the complexity of their swarm formations have given rise to the belief and understanding that ANAD swarms are worthy of being called a new life form. 

Moreover, the spread of ANAD technology has been so explosive, and the swarms so compelling in their sophistication and behavior that the term angels has now entered popular use as a way of describing such swarms, with all that implies.  Angels (now a generic term for ANAD swarms) are originally defined as messengers from God, spiritual beings and protectors and guides for humans in their relationship with God.  Angels as ANAD-style swarm entities are companions, love mates, partners, and all other things, even pseudo-religious beings to many people on Earth today.  Some people have even developed swarm analogs of themselves, so that when they die, the swarm version remains behind…a strange form of immortality.

A growing symbiotic (some would say parasitic) relationship has developed between Man and ANAD.  Because of the growth and spread of independent swarms, quasi-official recognition of their status has been granted formally by the UN and by most other political entities.  In other words, ANAD swarms have rights, now defined by law.  Not only do they have rights, ANAD swarms have independent lifestyles and can reside (if they choose) in protected sanctuaries, which are almost like nation-states.  In the story ‘Johnny Winger and the Golden Horde’, ANAD swarms (angels) will even be given political representation in the UN.

Humans have a conflicted relationship with ANAD swarms.  On the one hand, humans are deeply dependent on ANAD technology and the fabs which are spreading so quickly.  Human economies and lives depend on fabs now.  Many economies and societies would fail if ANAD systems vanished or were banned.  Yet many people are uneasy with this growing dependence and the rapid growth in sophistication and complexity, and now official status, of ANAD swarms.  Man has not had a serious competitor on this planet for millions of years.  Now he does.  And this competitor is of his own creation.  There is growing concern with where this relationship is going. 

Will Man and ANAD remain partners, with ANAD a more or less junior partner?  Will Man and ANAD fight each other?  What will be the outcome?  Will Man and ANAD merge into a new life form, symbiotically blended? 

These questions plague human beings profoundly in the last years of the 21st century. 

The next post to Quantum Corps Times will come on October 1, 2016.  This post will deal with a development already alluded to in this post…the discovery of micro-robotic remains at an archaeological dig site in Kenya and all that this discovery implies. 

See you then.

Phil B.