9 SENTIENT NANOBOTS

9 SENTIENT NANOBOTS Lunar day 217 T minus 37 minutes to Capsule Drop "I know what happened to Nina!" Roddy cried suddenly. We were with Kira in the gymnasium, taking measurements of the room for Chang. Violet, Inez, and Kamoze were there too, although they were only playing with all the exercise equipment. My parents had broken the news to them all that Nina was actually missing, not playing hide-and-seek, but none of them seemed too bothered by this. They hadn't put together how dire Nina's situation was— and no one felt any good would come of explaining it.

I fired the laser from a measuring device along the exterior wall between the emergency backup air lock and the corner. "What happened?" "She wasn't human," Roddy said proudly. I turned to him, startled, wondering if he also suspected she might be an alien. "She's not?" "No," Roddy declared. "She was an amalgamation of sentient nanobots." "You're an amalgamation of sentient nanobots," Violet repeated, and then all the little kids laughed. "Ha, ha," Roddy sneered at them, then turned his attention back to Kira and me. "I'm serious. This is completely plausible." I checked the measurement the laser had given me—thirty feet—and compared it against the measurement in the digital copy of the blueprints on a tablet computer. The numbers matched. So far, every measurement I'd taken had matched the blueprints perfectly. Roddy launched into an explanation, even though Kira and I hadn't asked for one. "You know what nanobots are, right? Incredibly small robots. Well, there's a top secret project at NASA to develop nanos that can work in sync together. If you had enough of them, they could take any shape they

wanted to, then form a hive mind and behave as a single unit." Kira stared at Roddy. "You think Nina was a robot?" I would have expected her to immediately dismiss this theory as idiocy; instead she sounded surprisingly intrigued. "No," Roddy told her. "I think she was a billion robots. A nanotechnology prototype. NASA sent her up here to test her out. Then she must have malfunctioned or something and all the nanobots scattered, which is why we can't find any trace of her now." "Where'd the nanobots go, then?" I asked. "They could be anywhere," Roddy replied. "They're so small, you wouldn't be able to see a thousand of them if they were right in front of your nose. They could even be in your nose and you wouldn't know." "Eeeew!" Violet shrieked. "Snot robots!" To my astonishment, Kira actually seemed impressed by Roddy's idea. "Wow," she gasped. "That's amazing." Roddy seemed equally surprised that Kira had given him a compliment. He flashed her a wolfish grin. "Of course it is."

Kira said, "I know in the past I've accused you of having some really stupid theories, but this one is different." "Really?" Roddy asked. "Yes," Kira said. "This one is incredibly stupid. It's like a hundred times dumber than any of the others. I didn't even think that was possible." Roddy's face fell as he realized Kira had only been leading him on. "It's not that stupid." "It is," Kira told him. "Remember your stupid theory that aliens created spray cheese? This nanobot theory leaves that one in the dust." Roddy sat on a rowing machine, making a point of not working anymore. Not that he'd been working much to begin with. He'd mostly been lurking near Kira and trying to impress her. "Fine," he said. "If you're so smart, why don't you tell me what happened to Nina?" "Someone bumped her off," Kira said, without even thinking about it. Roddy laughed obnoxiously. "Right. And you think my robot theory is stupid?" "No one has ever built a cloud of sentient nanobots," Kira told him. "That's sci-fi silliness. But people kill each other all the time. In fact, it's even

happened here at MBA already. So why couldn't it happen again?" I glanced at Violet and the other little kids, worried about them overhearing this conversation. They seemed to have lost interest in us, though. Instead they were busy trying to jump rope with the elastic tension bands. I started to argue that Kira's theory was wrong, as I knew Nina was still alive. But then I caught myself. In the first place, I couldn't explain how I knew Nina was still alive without mentioning Zan. And second, just because Nina was alive didn't mean someone hadn't at least tried to murder her. After all, Zan had said Nina was in desperate shape with extremely weak vital signs. That could have been the result of an attempted murder. Roddy was shaking his head, determined to argue against Kira's theory himself. "There's only twenty- four people here. The chance of there being two murders in this small a population is infinitesimal." "Maybe not," Kira countered. "This is a really cramped place and we're all stuck with everyone else, whether we like them or not. Everyone's getting on each other's nerves all the time here." "That's not true," Roddy said.

"Oh, no?" Kira asked. "You and your brother can't go five minutes without fighting each other." "That's different," Roddy sneered. "All brothers fight." "Well, you're probably fighting ten times more here than you would back on earth," Kira told him. "Because you can't get away from each other. And that's the case with everyone else here too. There's arguments all the time." "There are not!" Roddy argued. "You're arguing with me right now," Kira pointed out. "I am not!" "Are you even listening to yourself?" Kira asked. Roddy clammed up, trying to figure out how to argue his point without arguing. Before he could try, I said, "Kira's right. There's been a lot of tension up here lately." I'd noticed it well before Kira had pointed it out. Even though everyone at MBA had been selected in part because they got along well with other people, we hadn't all been getting along as well as NASA had assured us we would. It seemed that everyone was always annoyed at someone else, if not two or three other people. Myself included.