THE HAND OF GOD

Fort Tortuga, Laboratory Complex, West Wing

3 hr 31 min to Birth

After Preeti left, the lights came back on in the Prototyping Room. The light switch could not be controlled electronically, but a dozen or so flybots were strong enough to flip the switch up if they did it together. Nemo had used the same technique to turn off the lights prior to Preeti's arrival. He used the same technique to turn the computer speakers on and off: dozens of flybots working hard to turn the dial.

It was the same technique that he had used, after sending the 'shutdown' command to the computer, to turn it back on. Simon had been right: someone had physically pushed the Power button on that computer. And he was also right that the person who had pushed the button had not been a system administrator or a member of the staff of the island, but rather a hacker. The button had been pushed by a team of flybots, swarming over the button and crushing against each other to power the computer back on.

Two silver dishes hung in the air. They were speakers formed by flybots to project the voice of "Koginka" into Preeti's ears. They disassembled and swarmed to the glass tank that housed the hand under construction.

Kenny's body was slouched in the chair at the computer, his red and swollen face on the keyboard. Preeti had stood a couple feet from him in the darkness.

The design for his hand complete, Nemo began assembly in earnest. It was only one of multiple large-scale design projects he was working on. Nevertheless, in terms of computation, testing, and "man-hours" of design, it was more intensively designed than any human spacecraft, robot, or weapon in history.

Nemo had two limitations in building the hand. First, the assembly had to be executed by flybots. Second, it had to be achieved with only the materials available in the vicinity.

The handbot was made of flybot parts, by flybots. The metal fibers used to build the legs of flybots were woven together by the insects, in greater quantities, to form the robotic tendons and muscles of the hand. The minute hexagonal tiles used for the flybot wings functioned as the "skin" of the handbot and the basis for most hard surfaces. (This design principle allowed the handbot also to run on solar power.)

Forming the tendons and skin for the flybots required a dizzying array of connections. And that was only the beginning. The handbot needed a nervous system -- a microprocessor to control itself, radio capabilities to communicate with the bots and computers that were part of Nemo, and the solar-power system. These components borrowed some design principles from other state-of-the-art robots, plus some inventions by Nemo, but the design stayed close to the flybot in most respects, since those parts were on hand.

The assembly of the first hand, a crude model, took about ten minutes. The massive complexity of the task was offset by the fact that hundreds of thousands of flybots worked simultaneously with a cooperation that seemed perfect by human standards, since they were part of the same decentralized brain.

The first handbot was used (along with the flybots) to build a second, superior model. The second model then directed activity to the first handbot and upgraded it to the latest model. The updated model had two modes: one for locomotion and the other for hand function.

Rather than continue building handbots in this way, Nemo sent his two prototypes, guarded by a cloud of flybots, toward the Assembly Area. There, they would set in motion a much faster schedule for the development of Nemo's physical forms.

3 hr 30 min to Birth

Roars of alarm from gorillas and the brushing of foliage broke the silence of the jungle.

A cloud of flybots eased through the trees. They were hunting not gorillas, but other insects.

They approached a brightly colored spider, a few inches in diameter. It was waiting for prey at the center of its large web hanging just off the apes' path. The spider hunted at morning and evening times, when its prey was most active. It had constructed this particular web an hour ago for the evening hunt. Like many spiders of the region, it was potently poisonous.

It was the first spider Nemo had ever seen -- in person, at least. He recognized it on the basis of thousands of web pages and photos on the topic, from Wikipedia to obscure web pages.

One flybot plummeted from the cloud and landed on the web. It was about the size of the spider's normal prey, if crunchier. The cloud looked on as the spider jumped toward the flybot and began casting out silk. It quickly encased the flybot in silk, though it would have a hard time eating it. Nemo watched the movements of the spider carefully.

Nemo needed to find a smaller spider, the smallest he could find that fabricated webs. It turned out to be not much bigger than a flybot, a black specimen with white spots.

A part of the cloud descended upon the little spider and engulfed it. But the flybots weren't attacking the little guy -- in fact, they handled him carefully. They picked the spider up off its web, holding it by all the parts of its body and buoying it from underneath so it wouldn't be hurt. They carried it off toward the Laboratory Complex, while the rest of the cloud searched for other specimens. In the Prototyping Room, Nemo would study the movements and especially the silk production of the spiders.

With his ability to store information in perfect form digitally, and to think using countless computers in simultaneous cooperation, Nemo would reproduce the product of millions of years of evolution in a few minutes. The objective was to give his flybots the power to spin silk -- only, in their case, they would spin thin filaments used to build flybot legs and robotic tissue. It would be achieved within the half hour.

With further modification of the silk-spinning, and a redesign of some flybot components, flybots would be able to reproduce themselves. All they would need was solar-powered battery energy, some metal to chew on, and a little time. That ability would be present in the next model of flybots, in about an hour. These new flybots would usher in a new phase of expanding Nemo's brain -- and his army.

3 hr 5 min to Birth

The security cameras at Fort Tortuga captured two small robots scuttling down the hall of the west wing of the Laboratory Building. They came from the direction of the Prototyping Room and headed straight to the Assembly Area.

They resembled large spiders, with eight arched legs, four on a side. Their bodies were about the size of a human palm.

At the Assembly Area, the two robots were posed with a challenge: opening the door.

The robots stopped. One of the robots began a transformation, accompanied by a whizzing sound. On one side of its body, three of its legs separated from the fourth. Those three legs extended out from the body of the spider. Part of the spider's body followed them, like a collapsible cup expanding. The three legs lengthened and rearranged themselves on the floor, in the shape of a tripod. Then, in an unlikely-looking feat of strength and coordination, the spider lifted itself up on this tripod into the air.

The tubular tissue connecting the tripod with the body and five remaining legs of the spider continued to expand, sending the spider three or four feet into the air.

The remaining five legs -- four on one side, one on the other -- shifted slightly into a shape closely resembling a human hand.

The hand grasped the door to the Assembly Area and pulled the handle. The handbot was able to get the door open almost a foot.

The second handbot, still in spider form, scuttled through. Then it unfolded, to hold the door open and let the first one come through.

Inside, the handbots got up onto the machinery and began some rapid modifications.