Flashover

By Abdullah Ali

Darren Swenson is a normal teenager, and an excellent coder. He's curious, he's intelligent, and he's madly in love with science and technology. What will happen when he invents the first molecular machines? Will he use them for personal gain, or to uplift humanity to new heights and usher the dawn of a new era?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Abdullah Ali
• Release date: Sep 23, 2014
• ISBN: 9781310929762

Abdullah Ali

My name is Abdullah Ali, and I am an Egyptian author. I enjoy writing science-fiction in addition to other genres. I write in English as well as Arabic.I am passionate about hard science-fiction and sometimes I delve into details, as my writings would attest.

Book preview

Flashover

Abdullah Ali

Copyright © 2014 by Abdullah Ali.

All rights reserved.

This is a work of fiction. All the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

This e-book is for your personal use only. You may not print or post this e-book, or make this e-book publicly available in any way. You may not copy, reproduce, or upload this e-book, other than to read it on one of your personal devices.

Table of Contents

Prologue

1 Sparks

2 Embers

3 Flames

4 Flare

5 Blaze

6 Flashover

Epilogue

Prologue

I find it funny how I used to wonder what an Artificial Intelligence would feel like.

Would it soar through cyberspace in unparalleled freedom? Or would it feel like a bird forever trapped in a metal cage?

I would have never guessed that one day I’d find out the answer for myself.

We all take our steps through life, and from the time we learn how to walk, we keep going. Yet all that walking could only lead to a single inevitable destination: a grave.

At least that’s true for you.

I still remember taking my first step.

1 Sparks

When I was little, my mother used to tell me that the universe was made in sparks. Would that mean that at the beginning, someone had clacked two cosmic stones together?

***

I was flitting through the code on my screen. This damn bug was driving me insane.

Stack corruption. I whispered the most dreaded words a programmer could ever hear.

A stack corruption was a special kind of bug. Somewhere along the line, the program had overwritten a small piece of memory, a tiny piece, but it was located on the stack, and that changed everything.

I clicked through the corrupt stack trace in my debugger, trying to find the culprit. No use.

The stack was the map with which a program could tell where it had been and what it had been doing. There was no telling how badly a program would misbehave after overwriting part of the stack, and you know what the worst part is? That kind of bug gets the debugger itself confused.

I sighed and shut down my debugger, it would have to wait.

I checked my email. Nothing yet.

I should have received the message by now. I was starting to get worried. Did it lose power? Was the process interrupted somehow? What’s with the delay?

I checked the estimated completion time on my phone again and realised it was two minutes past the original estimate. I had to go check it myself.

I got up, turned off the computer, and left the library.

***

My name is Darren Swenson, and I’m seventeen years old.

The year is 2022, and last week, I finished writing the first Structural Molecular Compiler.

The SMC was a piece of computer software. A suite of compiler programs. Only it didn’t compile code into computer programs. It compiled code into complex molecular machines, simply known as nanobots. It compiled from a new programming language I’d invented specifically for this purpose.

The language was called C@ – pronounced ‘cat’ – and it was weird. It certainly looked like C++, but had its own idioms and special keywords for automata.

It was hard work, and the compiler was very slow. It had to account for millions of atoms interacting simultaneously within a molecule, and produce something meaningful out of the code it was fed. It would take days to compile anything of moderate complexity.

At the moment, I was having it compile my second invention, it was a mere 12,382 lines of C@ code, but when passed through the compiler, it produced a peculiar piece of nano-machinery: the Structural Molecular Assembler. I won’t get into its function right now, but if you’ve studied biology, the best analogue for it is a Ribosome on crack.

But the compiler was taking too long. I checked my message queue again. Nothing.

I entered the basement.

***

Designing those things wasn’t easy. It took me two years and a lot of unrelenting work. I had to study so many things in so many fields, I think it’d be fair if I’d turned into a raving lunatic in the process.

What made it ironic was that I was somewhat of a failure at school. History, geography, languages, crafts, and art weren’t on my list of interesting subjects. Well, maybe geography and crafts were mildly interesting.

As I walked into the basement, I could smell something in the air. Something was wrong.

I turned on the lights and went to my terminal, I woke it up from standby and signed in.

Oh shit! Shit! Shit! Shit!

My compile farm had crashed.

I’d made it using old computers. Instead of using a single computer for my work, I figured a long time ago that it was much more efficient to network many cheaper computers into a cluster. Well, in terms of cost versus performance that is. But my father had told me not to worry about the power consumption. Son, you let me worry about that. You do your thing. he had said, but I’d still contributed through my freelance work online.

Well, now that it had crashed, I was having second thoughts. All of that for nothing!

I ran a diagnostics routine and found 3 unresponsive nodes. I spent two hours figuring out what went wrong.

Overheating. God damn heat. I needed better air conditioning. Yeah, right. Fat chance of that.

I disconnected the nodes and started the process all over again. I lowered the processing priority. It would take longer, but it would mean less heat.

There we go again, two weeks down the drain.

It’s not like I could use the schematic yet anyway, I still had a stack corruption bug to overcome.

***

Hey Kat. I greeted Katherine as I walked through the living room on my way to the kitchen.

Hey. she said without looking back from the TV.

What are you watching? I asked.

Just one of my stupid soap operas. she said nonchalantly.

Is it any good?

Not particularly.

All right, good talk.

Yeah.

I stepped into the kitchen and fixed myself something to eat, then went upstairs into my room.

It was time to fix this bug, once and for all. I delved in with all I had.

***

It took me a month to fix all bugs and finish my tool. A whole damn month.

Thankfully, it was over. The compiler was finished processing the schematic for the assembler as well.

The problem with the schematics that my compiler generated was that, to build them, you’d need an assembler.

Since the schematic for the assembler was generated by the compiler, you’d need an assembler to assemble one. A chicken-egg situation.

When confronted with this problem, I decided to cheat. Why not have something that already builds molecular machinery do my work for me?

That’s why I wrote the RNA converter, and now I had a working converter and