Rear Window
Rear Window
Nose pressed against the transparency of the observation window, feeling the condensation making my nose damp, I watched the receding, wispy ball that we had called home with some sense of loss but more of determination.
Don’t get me wrong, I am not against change, in fact I welcome it! But this change was forced on us, we are the rightful owners of this world we left behind. Once beautiful and teeming with variety, it now holds the image of oneness. Where once there were plains, valleys, forests, deserts, arctic zones and bustling townships, now everything looks the same, feels the same, smells the same.
This isn’t my opinion, isn’t the view of one individual in the system. It’s there, you can see it’s. It’s not like in the books anymore, or the holos, or impregnated in everybody’s minds since pre-school. Now the image doesn’t match the stored image we all have of home at all. Gone is the variety of colour, of peaks and valleys, smatterings of colours from the artist we knew called nature. Now the predominant colour is a sort of reddish brown, specked with the flares of other craft like ours attempting to boost into orbit. If they aren’t too late. If they aren’t carrying the ‘infection’ with them.
It wasn’t our fault personally, we didn’t come up with the idea, the theory, the practicals in the laboratories. We didn’t submit our results, however tainted by idealism they were. We didn’t have a say in the affirmation to continue the work. We didn’t even understand the potential benefits of the science involved. But when the experiment broke out of control, continued spreading, contacting all matter, consuming and changing the molecules through the security of the laboratories, we still had no say for it was too late.
An idea as basic as the original conundrum presented to the manhattan project scientists. How do you create a self sustaining reaction, that would in actual fact create an excess of results. Here, the group now known to the public in the media as The Doom Group, had tried to create nanobots that would create more of themselves when needed, then inactivate when their job is done, passing out of the body and simple becoming a part of our landfills. But they didn’t switch off, they didn’t stop replicating, they didn’t finish their work.
It is generally thought the nanobots passed out of the test humans into our waste disposal system, they passed along and got through the filtration systems in our sewerage plants. Let loose into the world they were so small that travelling great distances was unthought of. But they simply passed back through our water system, unnoticed, colourless, odourless, straight into peoples drinking water. There the nanobots found hosts, hosts they were not programmed for. At this point a change in basic programming was forced in the nanobots, a reaction to foreign environments. Since the nanobots ‘talked’ to each other, by touching and exchanging information, all the variety of different environments must have confused the basic programming the nanobots contained, or maybe they got together to share processing power. Quite how they decided they had to act on their own, is anyones guess.
Of course, the scientists worked feverously in their labs, no longer pristine quarantine zones, safe from affecting the world. With these facts in mind the red tape dissolved, allowing the scientists some respite from their previous controls. But this didn’t make them cheerful, didn’t make them glad to be getting on with their work with no restraints, no ceiling to their creativity. They attempted communication with the nanobots, but the nanobots simple processors wouldn’t allow for communication as they were originally designed within limited size constraints, to only go after one type of cell, one type of disease/virus. So the scientists introduced other matter to the nanobots in an attempt to maybe shift the nanobots priorities, to actively seek out and destroy the material they were introduced to. The nanobots ‘tasted’ the material and added it to their collective knowledge, carried on as they were before, but also went after the new material, seeking it out actively.
They had been introduced to nuclear material, processed nuclear material. When power stations that had been shutdown and made safe, suddenly developed leaks, their concrete walls developing pores where the nanobots went through them, Chernobyl became a living nightmare for people all round the world. The nanobots spread the radiation to their fellow workers, which spread further stage by stage. Killing the nanobots along the way,after a short period of time, it was thought they would all kill themselves like a moth to flame, but the radiation dosage became less and less the further out from the nuclear sources the nanobots travelled.
I feel priviledged to have been chosen to leave earth, to escape the destruction and loss of our home. Put into a high, slow orbit where we have the best chance of avoiding strikes by manmade clutter in orbit. We’re going into cold sleep now, our solar panels will provide more than enough power to keep the hibernation units working. We have to be here in the future, we have to be found if another race comes upon our world. We just hope they revive us before attempting a landing, so we can warn them off, they mustn’t be affected by the nanobots to return to their home and destroy themselves like we did.
