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The Diary Entries of Doctor Arthur Frobenius
Approximate date: June, 2034
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It is a strange feeling, being a patient. Before all of this, I had never been ill. Before…
After the injection Teresa gave me, I cannot think of the present, only the past. I should have died two years ago, but fate has sentenced me to spend my time thinking about the nightmare that has happened while watching my friends and loved ones die. I am forced to spend the rest of my days in a fruitless attempt to rescue crazy people and, finally, die on a dirty mattress in a hastily-organized hospital.
Twenty one years ago, two classmates and I had conjured up a fantastic idea. We were going to create a neural nanobot system that could improve the efficiency of the human brain through an organic "distributed computing" method. This distributed computing would be arranged inside the brain instead of a computer. Put simply, the person implanted with this nano-equipment could think of several things at once both awake and in their dreams.
After a decade of hard work and excellent public relations on behalf of our business partners, we released our new nanobot drugs, implants, and enzymes. They sold over the counter like aspirin. Billions of people have since become dependent on these new stimulants. We were hailed by most as great benefactors to the world. Others became out enemies, but in one way or another all of humanity benefited from our creation.
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Had we given true thought to the consequences? Of course, we thought. We loved to talk about it over a few drinks upon the successful conclusion of one of our tests. During those chats, we realized that humanity was becoming more technologically vulnerable. It began before our intervention, with the building of the first aqueducts. Even earlier, when man first learned how to use fire, one of the members of the primitive tribe had to stay up and maintain the bonfire all night. Should the fire die out, so too would the tribe. If the aqueducts of later man were destroyed, the city would have died of thirst. In our time, destruction of the computer network would leave the country and even continent paralyzed. If an electromagnetic emission went awry it could kill all of mankind.
I now realize we hadn't thought of the consequences. The people responsible for the disaster retained their body and mind - myself, Ernie, and a few of our colleagues. We were working on the new smart enzymes. To guard against unforeseen problems, we carried out the tests in a secured room…or so we thought. Later, someone could accuse us of anticipating the calamity but there is no one to accuse us now.
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I met my first “mankurt” on the first floor of our research complex. He had been an unskilled technician, a man without a name and without a homeland. Broken nanobots had damaged his cerebral cortex when he had emerged from the building at the time of the incident. The effect was like a poisonous dementia. His mental development had plunged to the level of a three year old child and he had lost all memory. His ability to speak had somewhat survived, but I was unable to understand a word he said. He was drooling saliva and tried to grab me by my coat and drag me somewhere. It was then that I saw the dead bodies, and paid no more attention to him.
Ten years earlier, my colleague Ernie had mentioned to me that one could use a certain frequency of radiation to boil a brain full of our nanobots. "Have you found this frequency?" I asked him. He replied, "I am trying, so that I can find a way to neutralize it."
On June 6th, 2032, I first saw what a boiled human brain looks like. A man named Lan from the administrative department fell from a window and his skull split open on the asphalt. Had someone found the dreaded radiation frequency?
Outside of the building, the robotic lawnmower sliced pointless circles in the lawn, its knives spinning and shearing the blades of grass. At one point it stumbled upon the edge of a paralyzed body, spraying a fountain of blood. I rushed to the man, believing he was still alive, but it was too late. The knives had sunk deep and severed his carotid artery. His mangled face was covered with blood. I never found out what his name was.
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This all appeared to us as a nightmare with no explanation. We had seen no traces of destruction as in a natural disaster. We had heard no gunshots as in a terrorist attack. Perhaps it was a mass poisoning or biological attack? Ernie seemed to agree, and he told everyone to flee to the bio-protective overalls. At the time it seemed the smart thing to do.
All electronics were out of order. Ernie unsuccessfully tried to contact the rescue service. Radio and television were silent. Barbara, her small child still at home with the babysitter, rushed out to the parking lot. When her car wouldn't start she fell to the ground, pounding it in hysterical agony. I ran to aid her as I told Ernie to hand out protective coveralls for everybody.
Of course, we did not then appreciate the magnitude of the disaster. We attributed the failure of our phones to local problems. We thought we could reach the highway and find some sort of transportation. We felt we could surely make a call at the farm three kilometers away.
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Much later, I was able to recover the data from the security cameras. They covered the area in front of our building and the access road. In the footage, a car slowly rolled up and stopped when it ran into the stairs. The driver's face was twisted in pain. He shouted but the camera recorded only silence. After a few seconds, his head fell lifeless down to the steering wheel.
Other recordings of the sky made on the other side of the Earth revealed a weak light trail similar to the Northern Lights. Here it had been a sunny, normal day and it was hard to imagine that anything strange had happened. It was like a bird flying which suddenly drops out of the sky. Did it feel something or did it change direction on purpose? We would never know.
Only the five of us were now out of the building. . Barbara and Fischer went on to search for transportation and communication. Myself, Ernie, and Genevieve went to help the survivors. On this particular weekend, only a tenth of the morning staff had arrived for work. We found two more people in the same mental condition as the drooling technician. They had fallen and suffered bad head injuries. Genevieve found morphine in the infirmary and gave one of them an injection. Ernie and I were not able to hold the second person, so he escaped to the forest nearby. Within three hours we had ruined our reputations. We found fifteen dead bodies, four people in a deep coma, and three people with severe brain damage. We stayed with the survivors, attempting to keep them alive until Barbara and Fischer returned.
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Fischer later returned alone at sunset. We were prepared for the worst but not ready for his news. All along the road lay the wreckage of cars with dead people inside. They had made it to the farm, where they found three dead people and one who had lost his mind. He had tried to attack Barbara and Ernie was able to use a shovel to stop him. Nobody had a working phone.
In one of the cars, a baby lay dead. Seeing this pushed Barbara over the edge and sent her running towards the city. Fischer had decided to come back and tell us what he saw.
We didn't know what to do with all of the bodies. We couldn’t leave them in the building, but the refrigeration units were not working so we decided to carry them to the street.
At some point all human feeling left us. Even a butcher in a slaughterhouse would have felt more empathy than us as we dealt with our dead colleagues. Throughout the night we moved the bodies out of the building.
Fischer had found some gasoline and a great funeral fire broke out agains the backdrop of the pearl-colored dawn sky. We went back down to the underground laboratory - the place that has saved us once and still seemed the safest place for us – and dropped to the floor, exhausted and spent.
And here I am, two years later, laying half-dead in bed. I know that I will never get up again. I did everything that I could. I hope I am redeemed from my guilt. One question lingers in my mind. I have never learned the names of those who lit the fuse. What were the names of those partners in this crime who ignited the nanobots laid by our work? Were they punished? Or are they alive somewhere, rubbing their hands together and free of the punishment they deserve? Will anyone deliver the justice that they deserve?
I pray to the Lord not to save me, but to find a person who can deliver that justice.
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Русский
English