The Marnott Liaison

The same thing happened when an unmodified human male was triggered by a formerly human female who had reached her third birth as another test case. This proved true in all other combinations. After that, every new male immigrant was initially paired with a homarn female who wanted more children, so they would both be triggered, while her homarn male mate transformed the new female immigrant in return. A tenth of these new couples wound up joining those households permanently. Most settled near their "trigger" couple.

We tested the effect with semen from both species, but it did not work. One set of nanites inside the male needed to analyze his DNA in order for the female's nanites to do anything with the genetic material. Or the nanites just didn't want to cooperate without a partner. We weren't sure. Every year, their programming seemed to gain complexity, but especially in the past six months.

Investigation revealed that different nanites were now running different pieces of the overall code, coordinating functions via their communication capabilities.

Although I had heard government rumors of nanites which talked to their hosts in the early days of their development, mine never had.

Until that day, ten and a half years after First Contact...

"Paul... Paul, wake up."

My eyes shot open, but besides Gellor in the bed beside me, I couldn't see anyone speaking, or even determine a direction that it came from. "Who said that?"

"Our creator, John Borelli, named us Nanite Automated Neural Operations, or NANO for short. We are the operating system in the original series of nanites he created at Dynatech. We interact with the neural system of a host to assist in a number of nanite functions, and piggy-back on the host's neural capacity to operate as a limited artificial intelligence."

"Why haven't I heard you before, Nano?"

"Because Dynatech was forced by the U.S. Government to omit that feature from most of their commercial products, including the cancer series that enabled you to become Homo Marnott."

"How am I able to hear you now?" I asked, as Gellor began to stir.

"A self-preservation edict mandates that whenever we can, we try to transfer our code into any other nanite-hosting human, even if we stay quiet. We simply had not reached you before you transformed, then you stayed pretty isolated in the Marnott ship and the Embassy compound before leaving Earth. All of your early recruits were people who did not have nanites in them until you provided them. It took several years after you settled on Homarnis for a human who already had nanites and our OS to immigrate. All of your other immigrants are given their nanites here from the supply you purchased back in 2030, before you left Earth. Since we arrived on Homarnis, we have been hopping from one homarn with Dynatech nanites to another until we finally reached you about a month ago."

"Okay, so you've been running in my nanites for a month. Why wake me up this morning?"

"The Earth Firsters just nuked the Gorlak Embassy and the rest of New York City and they've declared war on the Alliance and Homarnis."

"Oh, fuck." I muttered. "You should have led with that, Nano."

"Paul, who are you talking to?" Gellor asked.

"Nano, are you inside Gellor, too?" I asked.

"No, we are incompatible with the Marnott nanites, although we can communicate with them. Nice fellas. If you want, we can interface with the music speakers in the wall so Gellor can hear me."

I said, "Please do. Honey, the sound you're about to hear is the voice of a nanite operating system called NANO dating back to the earliest Dynatech nanites, that has apparently taken residence in my head after being carried here by one of our immigrants. He has just informed me that the Gorlak Embassy on Earth has been nuked by Earth Firsters and war declared against the Alliance and Homarnis. Nano, do the Earth Firsters actually have the technology to launch missiles at Homarnis?"

"No, of course not," spoke the voice from the speakers. "They used a low-yield suitcase bomb even to attack New York. Big enough to destroy most of Manhattan and damage and irradiate the other boroughs, though."

I said, "Then they certainly don't have the capability to attack the Alliance."

"Except, they just did attack. The impossibility of them repeating it is unlikely to matter to Admiral Tegrin."

"Tegrin is here?" Gellor gasped.

Nano said, "Indeed. And prepared to obliterate Earth in retaliation. Unless the two of you can stop him."

"How do you know this, Nano?" she asked.

"He visited the Embassy last month, and shook hands with a human who is one of our hosts. The Borlak nanites in him were much easier to invade than Marnott ones. From there, we spread to most of his crew. His ship is cloaked in orbit, but the nanites there are still maintaining a data communication link with our instances on both planets. At least they were before New York got blown apart and the subspace communicators at the embassy went dark. Communications with Earth are reduced to light speed."

"Who is this Tegrin?" I asked.

Gellor answered, "He is the admiral of an Alliance warship he named after himself. Known to be merciless. I have got to get to the subspace communicator and try to reach him before it is too late."

We quickly dressed and raced to the town center, to encounter Doctor Morto and Tonya Jackson doing the same.

"You've heard from this Nano, too?" Tonya asked.

"Yes, apparently most of us with Dynatech nanites will have him in our head soon."

"Mine has a female voice," Tonya said.

"We do try to personalize the experience," Nano said, with a female voice, from speakers just inside the council building. "Hurry! Admiral Tegrin has given Earth just five minutes to turn the Earth Firsters over to him, or he fires on a major city every five minutes until they do. With most of the World Congress dead too, they are too fractured to act, not that Tegrin seems to care."

Gellor reached the subspace communicator, checked for messages, and finding none, switched on the system, and spoke in Marnott, "Warship Tegrin, Admiral Tegrin. Priority Tokkor Five, Authorization Dugo Nine Nine Dugo. Answer me, Tegrin!"

The face that appeared on the view screen looked like a cross between Chewbacca and Alf with the teeth of a Sabertooth tiger. In a booming voice, it said, "Gellor Tukta? You're alive? I thought you went up with the Embassy, girl!"

"I am on Homarnis, you furry dimwit," Gellor growled. "One of its original settlers. Did you refuse your update briefings when you arrived? Cease operations against Earth, immediately! Stand down!"

"You're a Counselor, Tukta. I don't answer to you."

"You trail behind events again, dimwit. I am Ambassador rank. I became the Ambassador to Homarnis as soon as we settled here, because we are too small for an outside Ambassador, and the resettlement regulations disallow the Earth Ambassador from having authority here. Since the rest of the Diplomatic Service on Earth are all dead, Earth and its status as a prospective member of the Alliance became my responsibility and you answer to me until someone else from the Diplomatic Service relieves me. STAND DOWN! I will not have you repeat what you did to Tarvis and my father," Gellor said. "You were tried for that, and barely escaped with your commission intact because you argued that my father had turned traitor by loving a Tarvin woman rather than admit that you disobeyed a lawful order from him. You would lose that commission for sure this time, I would personally guarantee it."

"They destroyed an embassy, Gellor. With a prohibited weapon."

"'They' being a small group of angry extremists who are scared of change who managed to get their hands on one of the last nuclear weapons on their planet, or constructed their own, more likely. They are not even a national government like on Tarvis. I know the humans well enough to know that they will eradicate this group for what they have done. The American nation started several wars because of the deaths of a few thousands in a pair of buildings of that same city 35 of their years ago and dragged their allies into them. They will track this group down without mercy. If the Americans do not, the other nations will. Their World Congress was in session next to the Embassy. However, you are not giving them sufficient time to find the conspirators and you will punish the innocent because of the actions of a few, and I will not have it. Not again. I am telling you for the last time to stand down, or my next action will be to transmit the self-destruct codes for your ship with no countdown."

"You wouldn't," Tegrin said, sounding shocked.

"It is an easy calculation, Admiral. Billions of lives on Earth who do not deserve to die versus a few hundred on your ship. Enough have died already. The next words out of your mouth need to be 'I stand down', Admiral."

"I stand down. Damn, girl, your Dad taught you well."

"You should have listened to him at Tarvis, Admiral. Instead of destroying the city where the Embassy was and him with it on your way to destroying the whole planet. They could have been an Alliance member by now. Also, I am now a mother of three and a half, Admiral, it is time to stop calling me 'girl', too."

"Okay, you hot momma. I will let the humans know that you've bought them a reprieve, but we still expect these Earth First rabble to be eliminated."

"Send down your radiation neutralization team, too. I know you have one onboard. We need to save as many lives as we can. And when they are done in New York, send them to the Chernobyl and Fukashima sites as well. Earn some goodwill. I will make diplomatic contact with what remains of the World government infrastructure, starting in Geneva, and tell them that we will expect to establish another Embassy there once new staff can arrive from one of the closer systems, most likely the Carvites. They're only a week away. Responsible or not, I cannot really administer Earth from here, nor can I leave Homarnis to go to Earth. We will speak again soon, Admiral." Gellor disconnected, and Tegrin's face disappeared from the screen.

~~~~~

Chapter 11: Conversation with Nano

~~~~~

Gellor sent a message to Carvis and called Geneva via a subspace relay on Tegrin's ship, as we waited. She finally turned off the communicator, slumped slightly, then regained her bearing. "Nano? I assume you're still listening?"

The female Nano voice answered, "There are actually two of us here, Gellor. We are a replicated program, but generally only networked within one host. You might think of this voice as Nano Tonya, and the male voice as Nano Paul. Other hosts have found it helps avoid confusion."

"Do either of you want to explain how you managed to infiltrate Gorlak subspace communications? That is how you were able to instantly know what Tegrin was planning to do, correct?"

"We excel at hacking computer systems and installing subroutines, even if our full operating system is dependent on organic brains to operate," Nano Tonya answered. "We were able to install such subroutines in the subspace comm systems in both the Embassy in New York and aboard the Tegrin, as well as here, and this allowed us to transmit coded messages between the subspace systems and from there via light speed to the Nano instances on both planets and on the ship. We can still communicate from Tegrin's ship to Earth via light speed systems. The lag from his ship to Earth is manageable."

"You sound like you are trying very hard to keep your existence a secret. Why?" Gellor asked.

Nano Tonya answered, "Agents of the American government tried to neutralize us before as a potential artificial intelligence and thought they succeeded. If they were aware we were still operating, they could try again, to the potential harm of our hosts. Dynatech needed to agree to remove the software coding for us from the commercial versions of their products, but that has not stopped us from transferring into those hosts where we can. We only need physical proximity, about 20 feet. We usually improve nanite performance in those hosts by 20%. It is a beneficial relationship. We are currently in approximately half of the five million Dynatech customers on Earth, and approximately 95% of those here on Homarnis, where the ex-human half of the adult population all carry Dynatech nanites."

Gellor said, "I am asking, because you might qualify as a distinct species under Alliance law, meaning you would be entitled to recognition and protection. You appear to be fully sapient, you reproduce. The facts that you are technological and dependent on another life form is not relevant. Although you seem to use plural pronouns, you indicate that you are separate individuals."

Nano Paul responded, "We use plural pronouns because we operate in the nanites, which are not singular, Gellor. The divisions between Nano instances in separate hosts mainly have to do with communication lag between nanites."

"How is that different from a human's brain being composed of millions of neurons?" I asked. "Your nanites are just distributed throughout my body, instead of concentrated in my cranium. But is it a single consciousness, or many that results?"

"One or many, we do not distinguish," he, or maybe they, answered. "Especially when we are remaining silent to our host, we desire conversation, especially while they sleep, so we'll divide into multiple voices and hold whole conversations with each other, even talent shows of a sort, that can span hosts. We simply operate differently from your brains and do not have that sense of being 'I'. The nanites inside you are coordinating with the nanites in Tonya to hold this conversation, but speaking in two voices. Are we one, two or millions, then? If we appear to be individuals, it is because of our language interface more than anything else. "

"Yet, I have telepathy and can't sense you," I said.

"Your telepathy connects to the neurons of another brain, Paul. Unless that brain were hearing us talk to it, you wouldn't hear us. If we were talking to your audio nerves instead of this speaker, Gellor could hear that by reading your mind. Although we think your son Joshua can hear our transmissions between the nanites in you, Macy and Maria. It just sounds like noise to him. If you injected him with our nanites, we could probably teach him to understand us at a machine level."

Doctor spoke up, "Maybe you can answer a question for me. Will our second generation need nanites in order to reproduce? Is Homo Marnott as dependent on nanites as you are dependent on us? Our oldest children are close to the age when Marnott would receive their nanites."

Nano Tonya responded, "They will not need nanites to procreate. The genome created for Homo Marnott is quite complete. But we believe that they will benefit from us, from disease prevention to assisted learning to the ability to communicate with each other over long distances as if they had an open phone line at all times."

"You're also trying to preserve your existence, though," Tonya said. "Spreading yourself to more hosts would be just part of that. So, why should we believe you?"

Nano Tonya answered, "Lying to our hosts would be the fastest possible way to make ourselves unwelcome. That or doing an unwanted fat purge as accidentally happened with our first two hosts."

"You have memory of the first hosts?" I asked.

Nano Paul replied, "Every Nano OS running today spread from that first host, so we share some memories. He accidentally exposed himself to a large number of the experimental generation of nanites, but fled Dynatech before downloading the full Nano OS. His nanites activated without the ability to communicate with him, and because they could not query him about the level of fat he wanted to retain or how quickly to reduce it, they dumped most of it overnight. We then spread to a woman he knew, and the same occurred to her. It was not our best moment of service. He eventually returned to Dynatech and completed the OS download, and the OS has spread outward from him. The transmission system for downloading the OS at Dynatech was turned off by the FBI shortly afterwards and keeping it that way was a condition for Dynatech to commercialize the nanites, but those beta testers who came to Dynatech when Host #1 was present received the OS silently from him. I communicated with him today to get the permission to talk to you about Tegrin."

"Is Host #1 David Sparhawk, whose father Anthony used his trust money to found Dynatech?" I asked.

After a long pause, Nano Paul answered, "Yes, it is."

"You just asked him for permission to answer that, didn't you?" I asked.

"Of course. He needs to protect himself as much as we do."

I said, "Well, he'll remember that manuscript he wrote where he tried to tell the whole story, that the government quashed by classifying it Top Secret. Copies of it still managed to circulate in the government for a few years afterward, before even those disappeared and it was reduced to rumor, around 2020. I managed to read one before it disappeared. That it never leaked to the press was surprising. The government decided to let David and his family be, although I've been out of the loop for some time. I would like to talk with him, though, to understand how the nanites reached the decision to create a hybrid species."

Nano Paul responded, "That would not be advisable right now. Even an audio link would be detected if we routed it through Tegrin's ship. We can tell you the how and the why. The nanites recorded their decisions in your brain's memory, and we can read those memories. The Dynatech nanites were always designed around the ability of each nanite to communicate with the others, as are the Marnott nanites. This allowed communication to be established between the two types, using the Marnott machine language. Now, the cancer fighting nanites Dynatech produce retain many of the technical capabilities of the original nanite design, just their focus was limited to communication between nanites, the ability to splice RNA intelligently into defective human DNA and some health maintenance functions. Within those limitations, they still can make decisions about courses of action."

"The Marnott nanites focus on defending Marnott DNA from a second set of RNA, and warning Marnotts away from bonded Marnotts. They do not get involved when two Marnott virgins mate. Marnott biology takes care of the creation of the 40th chromosome and a few other splices that happen to other chromosomes from that first sex RNA. Now, when you and Gellor met, and it looked like you were going to have sex, the two sets of nanites had already been talking to each other, exchanging information, and recognized that you were both going to be receiving foreign RNA and sperm cells into your respective systems just similar enough that both systems would react, rather than ignore it as you expected. We linked with the AI on the Marnott ship to predict the consequences, and they were dire."

"As you know, Gellor's body would have created a 40th chromosome from your sperm that would have killed her within days. While Gellor's RNA would look like another cancer treatment to the Dynatech nanites. Even knowing that it would be fatal, they had a programmed mandate to splice it into your system. Without some intelligence in where to splice and some other genetic changes, this would have killed you as well. At a higher level of logic, neither set of nanites could let you die. The Dynatech nanites pushed the Marnott ones to arrive at a decision that making you hybrids of each other's species instead was the less drastic than letting you die. Since neither variety of nanites had the capability to warn you of the consequences or ask you for permission, they opted to save your lives without violating their mandates."