REPLICATION
Nemo's survival was slightly less precarious than it might have appeared. It was true that an airstrike timed an hour or so earlier would have blown Fort Tortuga out of the water. But it was also true that immediately after settling on a design for the FlyBot13, Nemo copied the design to other parts of his network. And he had been lining up production sites around the globe for the better part of the day.
Nagoya, Japan
When Hiroki Nada got a text message on his phone on the evening of the 28th (some 12 hours before Birth), he knew from the number that it communicated some "emergency" dragging him out of bed and on the hour-long commute back to the factory.
The Toyota facility he managed was on a rare break from production scheduled over the holidays for retooling of the machines on the factory floor. Only a minimal, expert staff was required for the retooling work. That particular facility was the most sophisticated and automated car manufacturing operation on the planet. But apparently they needed help with something -- maybe reviewing a specification or (hopefully please not) a tricky and delaying technical problem.
As he arrived outside the factory, he noticed that the text message hadn't even been completed. It was one word: Come.
He unlocked the door and wound his way through lines of machinery toward the section of the line where the team of three was working.
He arrived at a macabre and incredible scene: one of his men was trapped under a press. But not just trapped under a press. Pressed under a press. The entire top half of his body had been pressed.
Hiroki felt faint. His head spun. What happened to the safety on the press? This couldn't have occurred by accident. There were multiple levels of safety. Each would have to be overridden individually; it was virtually impossible mechanically. A word materialized in his head: murder?
It was dead quiet on the floor. He staggered around the press. Where were the other two?
The corner revealed another mystery. The other two men were there: but they were welded together, to a piece of test sheet metal.
He sat on the floor, like a baby. That was all of them. He dully worked through the possibilities. It was as if two freak accidents had occurred simultaneously... or someone else was in the factory.
He swatted at his neck, and then winced in pain. He looked at his hand. There was a bug on his palm. Only it wasn't a bug. It was made of metal.
San Francisco
On the morning of the 28th (about 12 hours before Birth), a roboticist by the name of Chris Johannenssen was at home with his fiancee, enjoying a few new Christmas presents: robots and toys. Taking a break from his new gadgetry, he looked on his laptop and discovered something funny. His webcam had moved. He had a webcam set up in his laboratory -- to play with, and occasionally to show off his robotics to the world. But that morning, the webcam showed a different shot of the laboratory than usual. Someone moved the webcam, he thought.
Chris walked out to his car. Probably he himself had moved the webcam; he was absent-minded; nevertheless, he couldn't resist driving in to the laboratory to check. He had a slightly paranoid sense about his latest project that came from being greatly excited about it. He was working on underwater echolocation. Using previous models of robots that were able to swim underwater, like eels, Chris was attempting to develop a robot that could identify other shapes in the water over great distances by using clicking noises, like a dolphin.
Boston
It was almost time for lunch on December the 28th (about 12 hours before Birth), though Eric Rock, the designer of the HogDog robot -- which had the size of a horse and the agility of a dog -- was not particularly aware of the time. He was padding around his apartment in his pajamas. Vacation mode. So he was surprised to check his computer and see that he had gotten a chat from Julie:
Julie: Eric, are you there?
Eric: You betcha. What's up.
Julie: I came into the office... No one is here... Wondering if you wanted to come by.
He was confused for a minute. There was no reason for her to be in the lab. There was no reason for her to invite him to the lab. Then Eric, who had always been madly attracted to Julie, had a thought: he might be receiving the best Christmas present he could ever have asked for. Yes, he replied, he'd be at the lab in twenty minutes.
Nagoya, Japan
0 hrs 10 min After Birth
Out of hundreds of attempts, Nemo succeeded in establishing only a few centers of production for robot technology. But they were enough.
The cargo bay opened at Hiroki Nada's factory and a horde of flybots poured out, like bats exiting a cave. They were in search of building materials. All the hard work was done, now that the worldwide count of flybots numbered in the tens of millions. A flybot could duplicate itself in about twenty minutes, given a little hunk of metal and some sunlight. In two hours, a million flybots would be 64 million flybots.
Nagoya, which had already stirred itself for breakfast and work, broke into panic over the mysterious darkening of the sky over the city. Ten minutes later, the public transit system was closed due to "deterioration" (i.e., consumption) of its tracks and cars. Twenty minutes later, a state of national emergency was declared in Japan.