Chapter 1: Creating a Body

It was nearly finished. The schedule noted that anyway, as the monitor of an office flickered off, shut down for the night. Out of the room walked several men, a team of engineers. As each said their goodbyes and packed up to return home, there was a strange sense of presence, of consciousness, in the work they left behind. It's rigid humanoid form was eerily alive in the dark, and it seemed emotionless and unhesitant. It was as if when you left the room it could take it's own existence into it's control, and perform mischief and destruction. Purely metal with no fibers, it nonetheless twisted and compressed like soft sheet. Although it was already intimidating enough on the outside, what lied within was far more overwhelming.

Trillions of nanoscopic machines, made out femtoscopic gears and circuits, swarming over each other. Each one only slightly larger than a single cell, they would become a powerful energy, an army at the command of one man to power forward through any opposing force and to bolster him with strength to victory. I speak of a prototype, of a full body powered armor. The original nanosuit.

Truly the work of a genius, in such times of simplicity and sloth, but still incomplete. And there was still no guarantee that it would even perform as designed. But, for now, that was not the primary concern of its builders. Their only worry was what was demanded of them, which in this case was their deadline. Not a few years ago, a small territorial war had broken out between small parts of Asia and the East Coast of North America, as the two continents grew closer together from drift. The two borders converged and there was an argument over what area was controlled by who. After some unfortunate turns of events, violence was turned to in order to solve the problem.

The nanosuit in this war was much like the nuclear missile during the Cold War. It was an item of deterrence, with one small difference: only one faction had the technology. After it was finished and tested, the nanosuit had been licensed to be mass produced and become standard issue to all soldiers. Such changes in skill and limiting factors would surely tip the scales in favor of North America, hoped the government. But now is not the time to explain that. Now is the time to tell the story of it's creator, it's tester, and at the same time, it's sole user.

As noted before, it was created by a team of 7 or 8 men; the exact number is not critical. One of them, it's main designer and also routine programmer, is our protagonist. Calmly standing next to his car, (it was a 1994 BMW, and a bit clunky), Jeffery Barnes lit a cigarette, and held his cupped hand around it to keep it lit. It was turning winter, and the winds were picking up. After so many days on the same project, he felt like a routine had been razored onto his scalp: Get up, go to building, get coffee, work on suit, program suit, piece together suit, go home, pass out. He was growing tired of his job, but was happy he would be able to finish soon, and then get the money from the military licensing.

As he came home, he was still working, even if he didn't need to: his cell phone was out, and he was planning.

"We need to find a quicker way to transport energy to different functions. The copper wiring isn't fast enough for a combat situation."

"What do we have that's faster? Nothing!" said his colleague.

"It's almost a complete failure if it can't convert in less than 5 seconds. We currently calculated it running at 30. It will never stand up."

"But we're already working to death on the armor mode. We can't just switch now, it would leave the scales out of proportion, and there wouldn't be enough power left for speed and strength."

"Then whittle down the armor mode. Just leave it at bulletproof. No ones ever going to need to survive a tank round. After the extra power is dropped, then just balance it out from there."

"This just won't fit in our work schedule."

"Look, Morris, this needs to be finished in 2 weeks. Until then I control this project. You need to adjust the power, and speed up the conversion process. You think you have problems now? Wait'll you see what will happen when we hand in a worthless nanosuit. You ever hand in work that your teacher wasn't satisfied with?"

"Not often. But yeah."

"Take that frustration, and plant it on top of someone who has the authority to put you out of a job."

"Crap."

"I know. I'll have to call you later. I have family matters."

"Bye. I'll see you at 9:00 tomorrow."

Jeffery's "family matters" were primarily non-existent. He lived in a small suburb in Maryland, and didn't often had to worry about other things. His son, Laurence, was about 18 years old and rarely in the house when he came home, and his wife, Andrea, had died nearly 3 years ago after an extended stint in the hospital, due to horrible pneumonia. It gave this feeling of singularity, and he would often just sit down outside and think about his life. Looking around at the calm of the evening, one would have never guessed that there was a war zone all over the Pacific Ocean. Everything just ran business as normal. At the end of the night, there was intense quiet and everything slumbered.

A month later, it was time for base testing. This meant that the suit alone would be put up against different forces and forcibly controlled. It was not yet proven if it was safe enough for human trial. Behind a safe plate of double layer plexiglass, Jeffery and his engineering team were ready to begin. A red light went up, to ensure everyone knew. Leaning back, the team watched as their suit easily stood up against their many tolls. It stood completely motionless, propped up on a metal stand, and remained so while weights were dropped on it, countless rounds of ammunition were fired upon it, and various extreme temperatures were laid out around it.

All the charts seemed to show nominal performance: internal tempurature, damage control from the nanobots AI, resistance, inertia, opposing force, and friction. The graphs went up, and the mathematical information was shown to perfectly run. This did not guarantee anything, however, about more objective aspects. That part of testing would be far more meticulous. The video feeds from outside the suit, at different angles, the vision from inside the visor, and the varying body pieces of it had to be gone over and every possible detail had to be marked. In all the chatter, one could barely make out the individual sentences: "Too much pressure on the legs", "The neck area is not resistant enough", "We can't cover every square inch, maybe if we reconsidered the layout".

It was a mess of remaining factors to cover, and it meant bad news. It meant that there was more configuration to be done, (in this case lots more), and then the deadline might not be met. Jeffery was getting stressed beyond belief, and was worrying himself to the point of a stroke. There was so much to add to the pressure: if he could not finish the suit, the consequences would be dire. He had been planning for a while to be able to use his salary bonus for good intention, and now he was already starting to get low on his funding. He was also thinking about what would happen if the suit was not good enough. If the government was depending on it too much to win the war, then not enough work would be put into other defenses, and his suit would be useless.

There was also the simple fact that he thought there should be more to it, as he only had found how to increase physical performance, but no other uses, such as power charging, radio signaling, tracking, radar, or any form of stealth options. So many problems were going through his mind, he didn't notice his good friend, Andrew Riley, beckoning him to come and look at something.

"JEFF! Listen to me when I'm talking to you! I need your opinion on this."

Barnes quickly snapped back to reality, and walked across the room to him.

"What's the matter?" He asked. "Is there a system malfunction?"

Andrew replied, "No, it's more of a physical shortcoming. Look at this video here. It was taken from inside the nanosuit. I've brightened it up a bit to highlight the fault."

The clip was looking at an upwards angle, to the chest area of the nanosuit. The caption at the top noted that it was taken during the ammunition and explosives test. The sound of ricocheting bullets and grenade combustions could be faintly heard.

"Look. Right there, at the center of the chest. Do you see the bumps?"

"What?" Jeffery replied. "What bumps? There's nothing."

"I'll slow it down for you. 8 times should make it pretty clear."

The clip slowed down immensely, and it was now easy to see that as the bullets impacted, they were pushing in sections of the suit, and then reverting back, like rubber. The stretching only happened for a few fractions of a section, but it was there.

"Well, now you can see. The impact is not being stopped. It's simply being reflected. That means that the user will still feel the impact. That makes our armor mode nearly worthless."

"But there's nothing inside the suit to stop the impact. Maybe if we put a human body in there, the added mass will suppress the damage."

"You wanna be in there and try it? Be my guest. So unless you want to send it in unfinished, with just theories to comfort us, I suggest you fix it. But, I can probably get the rest of the team started on it. You have a higher priority over this piece of metal. You're losing your head over this project, and I can tell you need a break."

"You can really tell?" Jeffery was almost embarrassed by the statement. It would seem unprofessional to his colleagues if he fell apart while working.

"Oh, it's difficult, believe me. There are only small things that give it away. But you have to remember I was sitting next to you the whole time during math in junior college. You always got nervous then."

"Math never was my strong suit. Why do you think I switched to science? That was what I was good at."

"And if people don't believe you, you shove your MiT diploma in their face. I don't need that. What you need is to relax a little bit. Just take a day off tomorrow, and we'll take care of this. In fact, just head out tonight, and get some dinner at a nice place. Bring your son if you want."

"I don't think Laurence will want to come. He's not so concerned with me anymore. He has his own life. I can't say I'm satisfied with everything he does, though."

"No parent can."

By the end of the day, as usual, Jeffery was exhausted as he drove home. He thought about Andrew's last comment to him. It had never occurred to him that he had to like what his son did. He always assumed that a person's primary goal was to make their parents happy, along with themselves, so that their work would be awarded. But instead he began thinking. Maybe it was simple but he had tried to complicate it to give himself more understanding.

As he thought, he also ran his mind over the differences he and Laurence had in their approach to succeeding. Whereas he was compiled and organized, Laurence preferred to fly by the seat of his pants. Once, Jeffery had decided to watch Laurence do an essay, to observe his method, and found that he simply wrote one draft, with no changes, as if he had already written out whole sections of it in his mind. He had simply written it off as failure without any planning, but when the essay came back with the highest grade in his class, he had to rethink his opinions. He convinced himself that it had to be a learned skill, as genetic inheritance was out of the question (Jeffery was a very organized and painstaking student).

He decided to take Andrew's advice, and spend a day by himself. It would probably do him good, and give him time to return to his hobbies. Ironically however, his only hobbies did not appeal to him at the moment, and he found himself without a thing to do. Without stimulation, his thoughts went back to worry, wondering whether his team could work out the problem. Eventually, by about noon, he simply gave up and went in to work. Repeat routine: Get up, go to building, get coffee, work on suit, program suit, piece together suit, go home, pass out.

The daily activities had become so expected and regular. It just wouldn't change. He could not make his suit good enough not matter how hard he worked. It was too complicated to manually switch suit modes, and it would be too unexpected to work with if it changed automatically. His head was swimming with ideas and unable to process them fast enough to make sense. Too much pressure… (As you may already know, stress can make people do amazing things. Only one other thing can cause the same effect. It's called a writer's convenience. This event happens to be both at once)… and then, from the constant routine and repeated method, came a new idea.

It stood out like a work of pure genius, of Da-Vinci-like beauty. And, incredibly enough, he had been performing it day after day, and never thought to use it: programmed routine recognition. The different modes of the nanosuit were only meant to be used for certain purposes. It would greatly speed up the conversion rate and smoothness of use if the actions (or movements associated with the actions, rather) were programmed into the nanomachines AI to begin with. That way, no one would even have to consider changing the nanosuit's current mode, and could rush in and perform the necessary actions. It was so simple, and he had only just thought of it.

Coming in to work the next morning, Jeffery had a new enthusiasm. He finally felt content with how his project would turn out, and was confident in his abilities again. As he strutted into his office, the workers around him clamored with questions, which he answered quickly. He then headed over to his chief programmer, a man by the name of Graham, and presented his idea.

Graham liked the premise in general, and said he could easily program it, given the time, but needed something a bit… out of reach. In order to assign the motions, he would need someone to get inside the nanosuit, and do all of the base testing themselves, while the actions were recorded. While this would create great jumps ahead in progress, it was also very dangerous as it had not yet been confirmed for human testing. Another obstacle. But, feeling so sure, and not willing to give up his last chance at satisfaction, Barnes gave no thought to the consequences, and volunteered near instantly.

"Are you sure?" Graham asked him.

"Let me tell you something. If I can't make this thing work, then I deserve to at least try to. As soon as possible, get me in that thing."

"Look, I support your opinion and everything, but this just won't work right now. There's just too much doubt over human performance right now that I--"

"Doubt cannot be scientifically confirmed. And besides, if anything happens, there's a chance we'll be given more time in order to fix it."

"That's a very good point you have, but it would make no sense. I'll do it, but I'm concerned over the results."

"That's why I need you in here, recording, and not in the suit, testing. I just manage the work."

And like that, he had made a choice. A choice that would most likely change the course of an entire war, and possibly the course of history after that. To take the risk, to take any risk, in fact, was to risk not succeeding, and it was still doubtful whether he would succeed, even if doubt could not be confirmed.

End of Chapter 1