The sun peeks over the top of the dorm building, striking me full in the face. I squint against it and Father leads me over to the wide steps between the pillars in front of the Residence. We sit down on the cold stone. From the shade of the pillars, we watch my siblings trickle from the dorms to the cafeteria.

“Once I had convinced the military that no threat remained,” Father explains, “I played a pivotal role establishing the international agreements that would prevent future fools from risking the earth the same way. They even named the treaty after me. I redirected the significant resources of my company to the study and safe use of the nanobots I had preserved. We excised the potential for them to become self-aware, leaving only a simple and fixed controller in each nanobot. We took the hardware designs that the swarm intelligence and I had sketched out, and refined them to their perfect implementation. I purchased the now nearly-worthless remnants of Universal Robotics and made sure we owned the patents on everything. All the secrets of working nanotechnology are safe with us for a little while longer still. Some competitors are always trying to emerge, including some efforts by former employees of mine, but it’s an uphill struggle for them to do any of the fundamental research within the constraints of the treaty.”

He glances at me. I nod and he continues.

“We contained the parts of the genetic algorithm that had produced the wonderful advances in materials science and energy storage in a server farm at a new data center built specifically for that purpose. It’s still running to this day. Every few months the techs there sneaker-net out some design improvements that we incorporate into the latest version of the bots. Today, my cloud can self-replicate using over two hundred different compounds, and the energy density of the batteries has increased more than thirty-fold from the original prototypes!”

I nod in appreciation. The tech is truly revolutionary. Even if I wasn’t already something of a tech-head anyway, I don’t think I could help catching some of his excitement over it.

“The controls though!” he exclaims. “That was the tricky part. You could do some very rough work with the nanobots using traditional control schemes or fixed programs. That turned out to be quite useful in manufacturing or maintenance tasks, where the actions required of each bot are simple and repetitive. But there was no way to bring them anywhere near their full potential without, as the swarm and I had agreed, coordinating their efforts through the awesome capabilities of a human mind.”

He rises from the step and leans his back against the pillar. “It took some time and practice, and a whole team of engineers working behind the scenes, but we finally got it working. My implant, and the training I had done with it, allowed me to be the first to so control them. We called it my cloud, as the word ‘swarm’ had a less pleasant connotation. I became a three-dimensional printer at a massive scale, a one-man army, and a healer of diseases for which there are no cures. I began applying the immense power I had gained to solving the world’s problems. You may have seen some of my early work on your way into the campus, or even some of the installations I’ve done back in your home state. Those massive fields of solar panels in the desert were created from nothing but the sand and rocks around them.”

“Yeah. I remember seeing those on my trip here.”

“Of course, the potential uses and abuses were both mind-boggling,” he continues, taking his seat again and leaning in toward me conspiratorially. “Imagine, Noah, a person capable of killing with a glance, without leaving any evidence or even a clear cause of death. Imagine the ability to create whatever you desired from the raw materials around you or decompose anything back to those base compounds. Imagine the destruction, the instability, the suffering that someone like that could cause if their intentions were not pure. In my travels as a medical resident, I had seen for myself the results of abused power and the suffering it had caused. I couldn’t bear the thought of my technology being used that way.”

I nod, considering the possibilities.

“Do you know why you’re here, Noah?” Father asks suddenly as he locks eyes with me. His gaze is so intense, it unnerves me, breaking through the calm veneer I’ve been putting up. The anger and anxiety I’d forgotten during his story resurge.

“Yeah, I know why I’m here. I’m here because a giant in a suit told my grandparents that they’d be arrested if I didn’t come,” I reply, surprising myself with the sudden fierceness in my own voice. World-saving genius or not, my father had caused my grandparents real pain.

“No, not that,” he says, clearly flustered by my answer. I think I just threw him off his script. “Wait, did he really do that?” I nod. He sits silent for a moment. “I am so sorry. Mr. Smith does take his duties very seriously as my head of legal. I’ll have a word with him. That was certainly not the way I intended your pickup to proceed.”

“Well, you could have come and picked me up yourself if you wanted to make a better impression,” I tell him flatly.

He looks down, then nods in acknowledgement.

“Again, all I can do is apologize. I had planned to do just that, but when the leader of a major nation needs emergency medical attention, and you are literally the only one on Earth who is able to provide it, you have a certain level of obligation to attend. I promise that I will do what I can to make it up to you.”

He seems sincere. I feel the sudden burst of anger subsiding.

“How about letting me call my grandparents on a regular basis?” I ask. “I know you have rules about outside contact, but they’re my family.”

“Certainly,” he agrees immediately. “I’ll tell Mrs. Hastings that I allow it and she can coordinate scheduling a regular call. Is there anything else you need?”

I think about it for a moment. What I need is Mom back, but even his wealth and power can’t do that. I want to ask him about him and Mom, find out the whole story and why she never wanted me to know about him, but I don’t feel like I can handle working out that much more emotional baggage this morning. I shake my head instead.

“Good, good,” he says, his smile slowly returning. “Do let me know if there is anything you find yourself in need of. But back to my question. In the much broader sense, why are we here?”

“Is this a religious question?” I ask. “Grammy and Gramps took me to church once in a while, but I don’t think I went enough to have any good answers to questions like that.”

“No, no, nothing like that,” he shakes his head with a look of disdain. “God is for people too simple to think for themselves. What I’m talking about is the purpose of this Institute.”

“Then I don’t know,” I answer sincerely. “I don’t know why you live off in the middle of nowhere in a walled compound with a hundred children and no mothers.”

He looks at me for a moment, then guffaws with laughter. 

“Oh, my boy, this must seem so strange to you. I suppose I’ve gotten so used to it, and we’ve never had someone like you that didn’t grow up here return to us. I didn’t even think of how different it would be for you. What an apt way of describing what we have here without the benefit of its context and purpose.”

“Uh, thanks?” I say, not sure what to make of his reply.

“What we are doing here, Noah, is nothing less than saving the world,” he says, lifting his arms into the air in a grandiose gesture. His words are back to that practiced feel.  “When I studied to become a doctor, my highest ideal was to preserve life. When I changed my career to robotics, I aspired to an even higher goal: to end all human suffering. But when I encountered that swarm, made contact with that truly alien way of thinking, I realized that there must be a higher purpose than to simply perpetuate and preserve humanity. The childlike artificial mind of the swarm recognized the importance of improvement, both of the individual members of its collective and of the whole of it. It was a lesson I took to heart. I could heal, protect, and preserve the lives of individuals, but something must be done to elevate the whole of humanity.”

He turns to give me another one of his intense looks.

“I know that I’m famous, the press who covered my capture of the swarm ensured that. But I am not particularly charismatic,” he continues, his gaze turning downward. “My social skills have never been as strong as my technical skills, and I am not able to trust easily. I recognize this weakness in myself. If I had different attributes, I may have tried to recruit others to my vision, but that’s not the sort of man that I am. I don’t pretend to be able to judge the characters of others well enough to know whether they can be trusted with this awesome power. So, rather than try to find men and women worthy of wielding a cloud, I decided to create them. Children raised and trained from birth to prepare for the awesome responsibility of using a cloud like mine. Individuals dedicated to executing my vision for the betterment of the world.”

He turns and kneels on the step in front of me, then leans in and places a hand on each of my shoulders. His intense eyes lock onto mine. I feel like he’s peering right into my soul.

“You, Noah, are a special case. Your mother took you with her instead of leaving you with me, as I had wanted. It was a hard lesson for me, and one that I swiftly remediated for my subsequent children. I continued to hold out hopes for you, though. I supplied your mother with ample funds, and she has sent me regular reports on your development throughout your whole life. Even though you don’t know me well, I feel that I know you. The kind of power a cloud provides can only be held by those I trust completely.” The look in his eyes intensifies. “Noah, can I trust you? Can you be trusted with the sort of abilities that I have? Would you use them to preserve life, end suffering, and elevate humanity?”

I don’t hesitate for an instant.

“Yes,” I reply, looking him right in the eyes. 

He keeps his unrelenting, unblinking gaze on me for several more seconds, and I don’t let my returning stare waver. Finally, he releases my shoulders and smiles.

“We’ll see,” he says with a nod. “Your mother certainly thought you were more than worthy, and she was an excellent judge of character. I hope that I see the same attributes in you that she saw. If I do, I will allow you to join in our grand experiment.”

My mind swirls. Those same powers that my siblings have, that he has, those would be mine too. I could make such a difference. Ending poverty, pollution, war? This is so much better than what I could have ever done as a hacktivist. This is exactly the kind of thing Mom would have gotten involved in. She was always supporting good causes. So why didn’t Mom want this for me?

Part of me can’t help wondering whether he’s lying or not about Mom reporting on me. Mom never said a word about any of this. Has he really been in contact with her my whole life? Why didn’t she say anything?

Mom, where are you when I need you?