"I must admit I had expected something different. "Nanotechnology is technology acting on the molecular scale, tiny devices able to move atoms precisely. It promises thorough, inexpensive control of the structure of matter - all matter, be it concrete, petroleum or the human body. Nanodevices can do the same things as biological enzymes do, such as spit apart or connect chemical bonds, react to their environment and follow programmed orders, but in a designed, industrial way. Nanoassemblers can build objects molecule by molecule, disassemblers can pick them apart to determine their structure. Nanocomputers can cram tremendous computing power into invisible specks. The potential is immense."A golden cornucopia perhaps? Or some big machine with blinking lights and dials?"
"Yeah. The stuff you showed me was pretty amazing - diamonds, tools, that gun. This looks more like an aquarium. It... "
"...it looks rather haphazard. Yes. But most of the wires and tubing is for providing feedstock, cooling or signals to the pumps. The real hi-tech is that thin, nearly translucent layer at the bottom. Thats the assembler sheet. That one cost me nearly a year's pay, I have to keep it well protected in gel when not in use and clean it with expensive solutions all the time. It mustn't tear. But it is worth it. This contraption is the greatest weapon since the atomic bomb or the printing press."
Current nanotechnology is still fairly limited; it can do a lot, but not everything. The nanodevices are fairly sensitive, and cannot survive well without a controlled environment such as a vacuum chamber or a nutrient solution. They are good at building regular structures such as diamond crystals and polymers, but complex structures are much harder. Most nanodevices are quite dumb, much simpler than gnatbots, and programming them to do what one wants is a nightmare. Still, even these limited capabilities are enough to revolutionize world economics, politics and the human condition - if they are allowed to.
Free-running nanodevices with internal computers and power are called nanites. At present they are fragile and cannot survive in the outside world more than a few hours; ultraviolet radiation, oxygen, free radicals and bacteria quickly destroy them. If somebody can come up with a stable nanite the effects would be tremendous.
Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology
Originally all nanofacture was done using nanolabs, making it extremely slow and expensive. But after the assembler breakthrough and the first MCs, it has become much easier to build objects. Today the nanolabs are used to test out new nanomachines in a safe and controllable way before attempting to incorporate them in larger designs. MCs are too crude to act as good nanolabs or nanite factories; they are generally more useful for making macroscopic objects.
Needless to say nanolabs are rare, hard to get and very sought after. They are every nanohacker's dream to own, but most have to settle for simulations or MCs.
The MCs are in many ways the Concordat's best weapon. With a MC, "transports" of many goods can be done through the net. It can produce boundless resources, and completely circumvents the current economic system in favor of the information economics of the Concordat. In addition, when aligned people get their MCs, they also become able to sell their nanofactured surplus, making the Concordat underground networks grow even faster.
The whole process takes a few minutes (longer if very complex chemical structures such as DNA strands or viruses are to be made).
Vanilla MC Mark I: The most common MC Mark I design, sold by the N Conspiracy, Cautious and Conservative and NRG1 on the Market. It looks like an opaque test tube in protective teflon casing with a standard computer port. It has a volume of 50 ml and is known to be very robust.
MC Neat: A MC Mark I hidden inside what looks like an ordinary pen (it can even be used as a pen, but the ink doesn't last very long), with minimal electronics (interfaces with an ordinary computer through infrared signals). It can be used by opening the end and connecting a feedstock supply. The volume is just 10 ml. Produced by NRG1.
MC Mark II cannot build all shapes (due to gravity) and has trouble with soft materials, but it could build a block of diamond, a pistol or a complex nanocomputer cluster. The process takes one to several hours, depending on the object being made and how large it is.
Vanilla MC Mark II: The Concordat workhorse, exists in several versions by the various nanotech groups. Most variants looks like an aquarium or tank with feedstock bottles, computer connections and special cleaning devices. The "Care and Handling" manual is very thick. N Conspiracy: clunky but inefficient, NRG 1: fairly small but fast, Cautious and Conservative: several sizes, from "holiday" (1 liter) to "family size" (one cubic meter).
NRG1 Stephenson Microwave: The casing looks exactly like a microwave oven, and it can even be opened to reveal what looks like an ordinary microwave interior (suspiciously clean). Actually the assembler plate is hidden beneath the floor, the oven contains a hidden feedstock pump and the microwave controls can be moved aside to reveal the MC control panel. It does not work as a microwave oven.
Standard feedstock solution: this is a feedstock containing water, long-chained alcohols, sulphur, nitrogen and tin compounds. This is the feedstock used for most mechanosynthetic work, when the output is diamondoid or other nanosystems. Price: 0.1 IOU/liter
Biofeedstock: a solution somewhat similar to the standard feedstock but with elements in the right ratios for building objects with a biological composition. Price: 0.1 IOU/liter
Special feedstocks: there are specialist feedstocks containing metal salts for building metal objects and other compositions suitable for specialized kinds of work. Price: 0.2 IOU/liter
The converter is short-lived; depending on its environment, certain pollutants that block its devices and how much it is used it may produce between one to ten liters of feedstock solution before becoming unusable. It can produce around one milliliter per second, ca 3.6 liters in a hour.
NanoNemo has developed a macroconverter, a large device that becomes over ten meters wide when fully unfolded. Currently it is only known to be used by the Ghosts, and it requires external power to run.
Sometimes the owner of a nanodesign wants others to nanofacture it once or a limited number of times, but not give the recipe away. One solution is "meterwared" recipes. The manufacturers run a recipe program on their MCs that sets up a connection to the server of the designer. There essential parts of the design are downloaded when needed and combined with the local program in a way that (through some neat cryptographic tricks) makes it impossible to copy or falsify them; the MC produces the design and the designer debits the manufacturer. This is used especially for some valuable recipes like the "Midas recipe" and nanofacturing large sums of playmoney. Meterware isn't that common (normal recipes are easier to use and maintain), takes much longer to compile (since the MC must remain in touch with the server), but gives the designer a certain measure of control over the copying.
There is great paranoia about the spread of recipes; it would be very easy to smuggle a "backdoor" into the design to create bugged, booby-trapped or dangerous stuff, so the authentification of recipes is always carefully checked and often their contents validated by independent nanotechnologists. Using anything not carefully validated can be extremely dangerous.
Some typical recipes that can be bought on the Market or found in Alexandria are:
A good example was two recipes for a diamondoid dagger and a gun that appeared on the net in October 2015. It turned out after a while that they were of WETF origin, and in contact with a certain chemical "pheromone" would disintegrate into spontaneously igniting diamond dust. Most likely they were intended to give WETF an edge in conflicts with the Concordat.
Theoretically this could be used to duplicate anything by linking it with a MC, but in practice disassemblers are extremely tricky to use: molecules tend to slip away, the disassembly changes the material, data management is hard, the data is easily erroneously interpreted and the sheet can easily break down. Among nanohackers disassemblers are sometimes called Murphy Machines. Still, disassemblers are a great way to get approximate structures that can be reverse engineered into better recipes.
NanoDream Disassembler: Looks like a MC, but scans the interior at around 10 millimeters per hour. Internal nanocomputers can buffer around a liter of comparatively simple structure (like plastic) or a few cubic centimeters complex material (wood). Tends to break down easily when dealing with chemically resistant materials.
I would bet that if you asked some agencies funding us what their most hoped for outcome would be, they'd want proof that quantum computing is impossible.The creation of computing nanosystems is one of the greatest promises of nanotechnology, the holy grail of many nanohackers and chip manufacturers. At present the main problems are both creating useful, reliable computing units and coordinating them - nobody knows the true potential of networks of several billion computers.
John Preskill
The two most common kinds of nanocomputers are quantum blocks and rod clusters. The quantum blocks are diamond blocks with quantum dot cellular automata, usually made using Mark II MCs, which act as general purpose quantum computers (most are designed to be plugged into normal computers). At present the blocks are mainly used by Brinists, Cryptoanarchists and likely certain FOG agencies to break codes, and sometimes by nanohackers to model new molecules. The rod clusters are networks of mechanical computers (looking like black or opalescent crystals) with interfaces to normal computers, able to do massively parallel computing, such as running neural networks, simulation software and genetic algorithms (and the virtuals: wow!). Practically every cell in the Concordat wants one.
Nanocomputers are very rare and hard to get; they are the cutting edge. Especially quantum blocks are kept under strict wraps. Quantum computers are a technological bomb waiting to go off. The current quantum computers are unreliable, exceedingly rare and hard to use, but that will change. They are able to crack several of the major cryptosystems. If the existence of quantum computers became publicly known, the result would be a crisis of confidence in digital trade that would be much deeper than the 2002 crisis: far too many systems rely on advanced cryptography that could be compromised through quantum computers. Neither the Concordat or NSA, SGDN, PLA, BND and the other intelligence agencies want that to happen. At the same time the potential is too great; the race is on in secret, with everybody trying to make sure the others don't get the technology and that nobody discovers that it already exists. And WETF is going to do its outmost to unleash it.
The simplest form of nanoweapon is nanofactured ordinary weapons. With a MC it is trivial to build a knife or a gun. They can even be improved slightly by better materials, but they remain knives and guns. Of course, anybody who has encountered the Tessin Fractal Special may disagree.
The next level is radical improvements on old systems. Nanoexplosives are an example: by building explosives from the bottom up it is possible to create truly powerful explosives that no sniffers (yet) recognize. D4 from N Conspiracy is the only nanoexplosive whose recipe is sold on the Market. It looks like an ordinary plastic explosive, but is close to the theoretical limits of what a chemical explosive can do. However, making explosives is usually extremely energy intensive, and most MCs fail at that unless given specialized feedstocks.
Trillicon Arms is an endless source for more or less bizarre designs for nanotech improved weapons, ranging from diamondoid bullets to knives with active edges. Few have been used in practice; they aren't worth the trouble, and nobody would like the police or public to find them. But that doesn't deter the intrepid designers, who regularly announce yet another bizarre weapon on SubNet.
The cutting edge is nanite weapons. Since nanites currently do not survive well in the environment or the body they are limited, but the potential is awesome, especially if they can be made to replicate.
White dust has so far only been used a few times by WETF, mainly for blackmail ("It is in you; if you don't cooperate, we will send the trigger signal"), but it is a nasty premonition of what nanoweapons could do. NRG1 has offered a major reward to anybody who can give them a sample so that they can develop a countermeasure, while WETF is developing an even more deadly version.
[ Each milligram of white dust does one level of damage when attacking internally, over the span of around one hour. Each level of the victim's Endurance reduces the damage by one; if a person with Fair Endurance is injected with 5 milligrams of dust he will just take one level of damage (experienced as a severe allergic reaction).
White dust isn't as effective on the skin, it takes several minutes to get through and overall behaves like a corrosive. For the first ten minutes it only produces a single level of damage, and then it will do only half damage. Washing with water lessens the effect, but to really get rid of it Goozer is needed.]
[ Diamond blood increases Endurance with one step, beside the effects on breathing. ]
http://www.southwestern.cc.or.us/wr122rs/local/nano1.html
There exists a prototype immune system, another of the projects from the Atoll and Cautious & Conservative collaboration. It can bind to certain kinds of nanites and immobilize them, but it also causes a serious allergic reaction when it activates. The cells are currently testing it.
If a feral technology superceded the police arsenal and made the cops obsolete, who would enforce the law?Interpol is the international coordination agency for nanotechnological crime. So far it has not built up much organization to handle this but there is talk of creating a technological crime branch to handle all forms of international crime involving advanced technology. Currently nanotechnological, digital and genetic crimes are handled by a subdivision of the General Crime branch.
Linda Nagata, The Bohr Maker
The situation in the US is rather confused; a lot of agencies have not yet managed to build a working system to deal with nanotech. The FBI, FDA, DEA and BATF are openly fighting about who is responsible for handling nanotech crimes. FBI of course claims it is the logical agency. BATF officials regard nanotech as a form of weapon, DEA as a drug (partially based on the fact that Mark I MCs can be used for drug production) and the FDA because they regard nanotech as dangerous medical devices (or medical drugs, depending on the interpretation of the rules). To make things worse, the CIA, Department of Defense, Department of State Bureau of Intelligence and Research and Department of Energy are quarreling in the NIC ( National Intelligence Council) about who should be doing what, and generally getting involved in the affairs of the law enforcement agencies. The Secret Service recently got into the mess due to the appearance of nano-forged currency (likely due to a WETF plot to make them go after Underground Reserve). In the background the NSA, US Army Special Weapons Research Division and the Critical Infrastructure Assurance Office are working on their own, and doubtless several other agencies are involved in nanocrime tracking and possibly illegal research.
In PRC nanotech crimes are to be dealt with by the Ministry of State Security (MSS) as "crimes endangering state security". However, the PLA Second Department (the military intelligence) is also pursuing nanotech crime, both in the PRC and abroad. To make the situation trickier, both the PLA Institute for Strategic Technology and the MSS Tenth Bureau (Scientific and Technological Information) are rumored to be gathering nanotech information and perhaps capability, in direct competition to each other and the overall system.
In Europe nanotech crimes are bundled together with biotech crimes and handled by the Europol fifth directorate. National law enforcement and security agencies are supposed to notify Europol when they have any suspicion of nanotech involvement, and the fifth directorate will send their "advisors".
In general, most ordinary policemen haven't got the faintest clue about what nanotech is, how it works or how it looks. Some have been briefed, but most wouldn't recognize a nanolab or a matter compiler unless explicitly presented to it. However, sometimes they have some experience with underground laboratories (usually drug labs or more rarely biohacking) and can guess when there is something unusual going on. Usually they call in assistance or expertise from higher agencies, and it is then things get truly dangerous.
Nanotech is a hot potato in the intelligence community. The objectives are conflicting, on one hand the various agencies are to stop nanotech development, on the other hand it is of national interest to get one's hand on better nanotech, on the third hand the other blocks mustn't know about this, and so on. The result is a complex web of red tape, secret agendas and double-crossing that slows down the agencies despite their other abilities.
The Concordat is doing its best to profit from the confusion, but realizes the need to be very, very careful. Members are instructed to avoid revealing nanotech capabilities to others as much as possible, and make sure the enemy doesn't learn anything new about nanotech by picking up pieces left behind. Nanotech weapons are bad PR, and tends to get the wrong kind of people interested.
