By A.J. Hazard
Debugging a malfunctioning, runaway nanobot swarm’s a bitch. Back in the day when everyone was afraid of the grey goo apocalypse, the code for these swarms was tighter than the stuff that controlled how the superpowers launched their nuclear missiles. But now? With Cassandra Nano Fabricators running at under $50,000 on eBay, every mom and pop shop with a team of horseshit Angolan coders on retainer thinks they can go into the clean-up business. This grand cock-up was just itching to happen.
Luckily the UN called in the Big Dog here.
Two robots the size of mosquito sperm unleashed on a benzene spill in the Azores. Only eat the benzene, how fucking hard is that? Once it’s gone, stop replicating and shutdown. This ain’t rocket science. Four hours later, the spill is history but the bots are still chowing down and multiplying faster than rabbits on Spanish Fly.
Nukes or EMPs might have worked early on when the cloud was more blob-shaped. But nanos seek out organic molecules, so there are now tendrils of the bastards reaching 75 miles under the surface. There’s old petroleum extraction code firing in there; you can see it happen in the debugger.
The main problem here is there’s no way to attach to the swarm as a whole. And since each bot only holds a fraction of the program controlling it, finding the correct entry point is difficult. There are tools to automate it, but they take time.
Plus these EU idiots keep blowing off their EMP cannons and royally fucking up my wireless connection into the thing. It won’t work, you jerks! And you’re only making them mad! Seriously, it’s all just ones and zeroes, but it really looks like the sons-of-bitches get pissed off every time a chunk of them dies.
Why is there no global halt for these bugs? Break, continue, step — how hard is that? And what outsourced moron wrote this piece of shit debugger, anyway? Or the underlying OS for that matter? I mean, geez, a good old kill -9 would have had you back at the beach an hour ago, pounding back the brews and regaling the senoritas with tales of saving the effin’ world.
Then the ground rumbles. The widget showing maximum swarm depth says some tendrils have started to penetrate the asthenosphere. They’re in survival mode now, ingesting base elements to keep up their replication. There’s not much time left. Gotta concentrate, see the whole picture. Ignore that the fate of mankind depends on you plowing through dead method calls and 500-line algorithms that any toddler could have written in 10.
And then it’s right there. The one bad variable preventing shutdown of this nightmare comes into scope. Is it really that simple? It can’t be. Screw it, you only live once.
set variable node->_gspeed = -1
- signal lost -
