Symborg: Could a Robot Become a Celebrity?

In this post, I look at a character called Symborg.  Symborg enters the Tales of the Quantum Corps about midway in the overall story cycle. 

Symborg is a robotic celebrity, a swarm-entity that I have given the name angel. In Tales of the Quantum Corps, angels are para-human swarm entities that achieve a new level of realism. In the case of Symborg, because of its lifelike nature and artificial personality modules, the entity eventually becomes a sort of robotic Messiah. 

This Symbiotic Organism, or Symborg, is endowed with charismatic genius and becomes the leader of a spiritual movement called Assimilationism.

Symborg takes the world by storm in the spring of 2110, a combination of Buddha, Jesus, Gandhi and Hitler.  And he makes Assimilationism a political and ultimately a military force to be reckoned with.

As a charismatic spiritual and political leader, Symborg has great influence, even though his followers are well aware that he is nothing but a lifelike swarm of nanoscale robotic elements.  Physically, his main configuration is a handsome middle-aged man of average height but muscular build, but he can assume many other configurations and forms, as needs dictate.  Symborg prefers to maintain a consistent ‘brand’ and ‘image, so he does not often present himself in public in anything other than his human-like state. 

His creators have endowed and programmed Symborg with the most effective personality elements of Hitler, Buddha, Jesus, Gandhi, Lincoln and a variety of historical figures, kings and emperors, celebrities and scoundrels.  Symborg can assume whatever personality characteristics are appropriate for the moment.  Each is nothing more than a module he can activate or shut off at any time.   Yet each is developed, tested and fine-tuned for maximum effect and charisma and the modules can be modified on the fly, by his creators and downloaded to Symborg over secure, encrypted quantum communication channels that Humans cannot initially detect or intercept.  This is a point of potential weakness and Quantum Corps will attempt to exploit this link by detecting, intercepting and scrambling these communications.

Symborg comes to public notice from a small African (Kenyan) village on the borderlands of east Africa.  The village is Kipwezi.  He is a man visually of darker skin, but not deeply black.  One of Symborg’s physical capabilities is the ability to manipulate his skin appearance to appear subtly lighter or darker, depending on the needs of the audience.  This is a simple matter of manipulating the melanocyte composition of the skin cells at the molecular level, something easy for Symborg to do.  He can literally be all things to all people, as any good politician would want.

Symborg comes to notice as an advocate of Assimilationism, the idea that man and his ANAD creations are destined to merge into some kind of blended symbiotic organism, part human and part machine. 

Symborg is a messianic character, literally a robotic messiah.  He is programmed with the healing and teaching abilities of Jesus, the oratorical skills of a Lincoln, a Roosevelt or a Hitler, the enlightened state of a Buddha, the ruthlessness or a Stalin or Mao, the leadership ability of Patton or Nelson or Mohammed, and the sheer intellectual genius of an Einstein.  He is or can be all things to all people.  But most of all, he is a persuasive advocate for assimilationism and for deconstruction of single-config entities such as Humans into nanobotic swarm elements and their absorption into the mother swarm.  This absorption is portrayed by Symborg as something akin to Heaven, nirvana, paradise or just a desirable end-state configuration symbiotically united with the great mother swarm of the Central Entity.  Symborg publically uses the phrases Central Entity and mother swarm interchangeably with various audiences according to his analysis of their emotional and spiritual needs.

In fact, Symborg has the programmed ability to do glutamate trace matching on large numbers of people at the same time…a covert insertion of a few nanobots to sniff out glutamate and dopamine trails in the brains of his followers and the ability to remotely manipulate these trails so as to produce desired emotional states of wonder, enlightenment, happiness, ecstasy, or terror, as the situation dictates.  Symborg is like a conductor, orchestrating the ventral tegmentum areas of the brains of his followers to achieve ecstasy or enlightenment or abject terror as his needs dictate.  One of the rituals Symborg encourages in his followers is to allow small-scale nanobots to be inserted into them…this is considered good form for those who seek Assimilation. See The Serengeti Factor, Prologue.  These inserted bots, like angels, allow Symborg to precisely control how his audiences respond to his messages. 

Symborg will gather around him a small coterie of followers and worshippers.  This cabal will be a mixture of actual Humans and swarm–angels.  They are known publically as the Sons of Assimilation. 

Does Symborg have any weaknesses that Quantum Corps can exploit?  Do they even want to stop Symborg?  Perhaps Symborg is an evolutionary development that shouldn’t be stopped…there are some who say this is the Next Step, the next Great Leap and it should be encouraged and nurtured not stopped.  This is Quantum Corps’ dilemma.  Symborg is to some an enemy of everything Human yet many Humans worship him.

That will make defeating Symborg very difficult.

The rapture that Symborg portrays as the end state of Assimilation is an early 22^nd century variant of Singularity thinking, from the late 20^th and early 21^st century. 

It seems as if Symborg can only be defeated using techniques and tactics that are known to be useful against swarm systems generally.  Any ANAD-derived nanobotic device or swarm of devices is vulnerable to HERF, mag pulses and similar weapons.  However, unless the core or the master assembler is destroyed, it will re-generate and replicate again.  And that is something that hasn’t proven possible in forty years of Quantum Corps efforts.

In my next post, for May 2016, we’ll look at more developments that flesh out the backstory of Tales of the Quantum Corps.

See you in May.

Phil B.