Free Directive 51 by John Barnes Page B

colleagues, folded his arms, and asked, “And you didn’t have crypto resources to find out about this sooner?”
    Arnie looked as embarrassed as Heather felt. She said, “The only thing we could get was assistance from the Amateur Crypto Section at NSA.”
    Susan Adler from NSA nodded. “It’s as much our neglect as yours. OFTA asked for more help all the time, and Dr. Plekhanov several times told us that you needed it badly.”
    Edwards, a tall, thin, bald man with a crooked nose, who tended to look like Popeye on a bad day, said, “Well, that’s probably enough recrimination right there. Just another case of you can’t watch everything. But . . . thousands of people doing minor sabotage?”
    Arnie nodded. “Maybe not minor. The tech analysts from Dr. Browder’s office gave us a preliminary opinion that what we’re looking at is at least weaponized nanoreplicators, which the Daybreakers call nanospawn , and a mix of genetically modified organisms they call biotes . Coordinated release not just across the country but around the world.”
    “We’ve had to run on borrowed resources,” Heather said. “I’ve had a request in for two full years for a cryptologist, longer than that for more science and engineering staff—”
    Edwards made a sour face. “I said this is no time for recriminations. Now, when they weaponize a nanoreplicator, what do they make it do? I thought in the most sophisticated labs they’ve got, right now, they’re barely making nanotech do anything.”
    Jim Browder rubbed his porcine jowls, shoving so much flesh up toward his ears it looked as if he were about to peel his face off like a bag. “ Non -replicating nanotech works just fine in industry, everywhere, these days, and has since the late twenty-teens. Replicating nanotech is a stunt that hobbyists do. It’s not hard to make nanos that make copies of themselves, and it’s not hard to make nanos that do something useful, but so far it’s hard to get them to do both because for any useful, creative purpose, they’d have to communicate and work with each other, and that’s very hard. But if all you want a nanobot to do is make nitric acid whenever it senses that it’s near an electric circuit—that’s what our weapons guys were looking at. They thought it was too unreliable, it would attack our own gear, and you’d never get rid of it once you released it. But if all electric machines are the enemy, forever, I guess that’s an advantage.”
    “Why nitric acid?”
    “Just an example,” Browder said. “Because you could theoretically synthesize it from air and wouldn’t have to have any other material available. But depending on what they intend to attack, and what they can expect to find near it, there’s at least a hundred other possibilities: fluorine gas, or hydroxide or peroxide ions, or a bimetallic strip that works like a battery. For sabotage, you only need nanoreplicators to reproduce in clusters around something valuable, and excrete a substance that attacks it. Achieving that is down at the college sophomore lab level these days.”
    Hannah Bledsoe, from DHS, tall, handsome, dignified, with a deep red dress and pearls that seemed as much a part of her as her soft curly gray hair, looked up from her laptop. “And what are the biotes? Disease organisms?”
    Browder grunted. “Sort of, but not against people as much as against artificial materials. The Daybreakers’ genetic-modification stuff that we’ve decrypted so far is all devoted to modifying ordinary decay bacteria, molds, funguses, any bug that eats dead stuff, to make engineered enzymes to break down long chains of carbon.”
    Edwards said, “Pretend that some of us skipped chemistry class.”
    “A lot of artificial materials—most plastics, for example—and the common fuels like gasoline and kerosene—have molecules that are built around a long, branching string of carbon atoms, with various other atoms attached on the side. The reason they