He awoke the next morning feeling stiff and achy from sleeping on the wooden chair, which he promptly dissolved as he tried to stretch. A rippling warmth and vibration spread through his back and shoulders, and down his arms and legs, and the pain and aching gradually eased and vanished as he groaned in pleasure. He queried the nanites and received a confirmatory impulse, but their picture based communication was as ill-suited to explaining what they had done as it was to explaining the details of multiversal dynamics. In much the same vein, it was obvious that they were manipulating his hunger, but whether they were feeding him by adding food particles to his stomach to be digested, or satiating all his cells directly in the manner of an IV drip, their communication had left unclear. Well, at least, it had been unclear to him. Doubtless from their own perspective the matter had been made perfectly obvious.
He turned his attention to his dreams, for this time, he had remembered them, or at least, the last dregs of the dream just before he had awakened. It had been about an anime he had enjoyed, Bubblegum Crisis, a rather fanciful name for a darker futuristic science fiction anime about a team of four women who used hardsuits similar to an Iron Man style armor to combat nanotechnology based robots called boomers. The particular element that stuck in his memory was the way that boomers would swell out of their unassuming human forms, substantially increasing in size, and sometimes extending massive tentacles whose mass surely could not have fit in the space available to them.
Something akin to that might well be feasible for him, as after all, his nanites apparently had a near-infinite supply of resources for building more of themselves. Could he, then, employ coherent swarms of nanites as extensions of himself? A quick check of his probability power confirmed that it was substantially probable that he could achieve something along these lines with his nanites, so he dove into trying it.
The first step was to see if he could form a visible scale object from the nanites and control it more directly than by simply telling it to do this or that. If he had tentacles or something similar, he would prefer to be able to control them fluidly, as if they were an extension of himself. He started as simply as possible, just trying to get a sufficient accumulation of nanites in one spot to form a visible sphere, without depleting his utility cloud.
To do that, he needed to be able to see his utility cloud, or at least have an idea of where and how many there were. Having them mark each cloud element in his field of view with a glowing blue dot seemed to simply form a solid blue dome around him. Toning that down to every hundredth, and then thousandth, and then ten-thousandth finally reached a point where he could visually assess the field without it obscuring his vision too completely.
He focused on a particular spot, and encouraged the nanites there to double and redouble and simultaneously aggregate, until a small gleaming sphere had formed. Confirming that his utility cloud was not noticeably reduced, he let the glow lapse. Somewhat to his surprise, the aggregation of the innumerable nanite points did not form a pretty silver sphere, as he had half expected, but something that seemed more like a sphere of water or glass, bending the light that passed through it, and having an obvious surface, but still basically transparent. Almost as soon as he thought it, the sphere turned perfectly silvery, then thin depressions formed on it, following odd intersecting but also jogging paths, where they formed short pairs of opposite right angles, causing it to look like a piece of high technology carefully fitting together.
After checking with the nanites to confirm that this was an actual appearance change that anyone looking at it would see and not merely an illusion directly introduced to his visual cortex, he played for several minutes, challenging the sphere to take on different appearances. Forming a crystalline ball of spikes in a translucent purple with a glow emanating from within was perhaps the most visually impressive look, along with a dark metal where the lines from the first sphere were glowing in bright colors, like something straight out of Tron, but the sphere proved itself capable of looking like a variety of different metals, of emulating rivets, connection ports, screw threads, wooden and stone textures, and even taking on the appearance of a simple ball of yarn.
Returning it with a simple thought to the high-tech silvery appearance, Thomas began to practice controlling its movements. At the same time, the nanites themselves began to practice trying to give him a mental feel for the sphere and its location. Sliding it back and forth as if on a fixed axis came first, followed by trying to get it to follow visualized paths in space, and then as the nanites began to succeed in giving him a feeling for the ball, guiding it with thought directly, as if he was holding it in his hand.
A short time later he had it reshaped into a rounded cylinder split in the middle, bouncing around like a Yo-Yo with a virtual string showing only to his eyes, extending from his finger. Later still, it had grown substantially, and was in the shape of a boomerang, whipping through the air, as he worked on guiding it without affecting its spin simultaneously.
The clouds having begun to darken, he took his play up above them, allowing the utility cloud to simply maintain his position above the cloud layer, after they and his probability power had both assured him that even a series of direct lightning strikes posed no danger. Apparently every single nanite was effectively connected to ground from the perspective of electricity, meaning that not only would it not get past his cloud, but even if somehow it did, it would never travel through his flesh, and therefore would cause no damage.
Having followed him into the sky, the boomerang began to thin and lengthen, the number of nanites composing it doubling and redoubling as it stretched out into a long whip-like shape. He grasped one end of it, and practiced whipping it back and forth as the nanites adjusted their pattern of connections at his suggestion, until it finally moved with the free flowing motion of a proper lariat. He did not know the trick to cracking a whip, and could certainly not do it every time, but after nearly a dozen tries, he got a good crack out of it.
A target formed several meters away, a vertical cylindrical column like a bollard. He practiced trying to hit it and wrap around it with the whip, then he moved further away, and tried to get the whip to lengthen to make the strike and then shorten back up afterward. This took a number of tries, as the nanites played with different arrangements of the threads they had formed internally when trying to mimic a whip's motion, before obtaining a satisfying result.
The end of the whip twirled about his hand, meeting and melding with itself, so that it was more like a bracer at the end, extending out in a long cord or tendril. Now finally he was at the point of trying to treat them as tentacles, as extensions of his own body. Instead of holding the end and whipping the rest out at the bollard, he tried to reach out with the tentacle as a whole and wrap around it. It took some time to get the feel for moving the whole, and at first, while he could sort of feel where the tentacle was, he could not feel its contact with the bollard and so continually failed to properly grapple it.
As soon as he became aware of the deficiency though, the nanites in his brain went to work trying to resolve it, and shortly thereafter, he began to feel sensations beyond mere position through the tentacle. It was fairly obvious that improving the plasticity of the brain, and training it in new sensations was one of the tasks the nanites actually knew about, and they proved quite skillful at it. Barely a quarter of an hour later, he was reaching out and crushing bollards with a constricting wrap of his dynamically extending tentacle, feeling the pressure, feeling the tentacle sliding against itself, the texture of the surface of the cylinder, the way it crumpled, the temperature of the air, the movement of wind, the warmth of the sun upon it, he could feel it all.
A pair of arm extending tentacles with an optional fully articulated hand on the end went on to his abilities HUD, to allow him to activate and deactivate them quickly. He could form such things manually, as he had done now, but once he had settled on a design, this served as a way to have the nanites remember the patterns he preferred and restore them quickly.
The clouds below him had grown into a storm, and he had been forced to rise above their reaching grasp several times. Now, desiring to test another form of comic-book motion playing with tentacles reminded him of, he flew swiftly in the direction opposite the clouds' path, until he was beyond the storm, and returned to land. His tentacle shifted towards his back, thickening swiftly, then dividing, thickening, and dividing again, until he had four substantial tentacles coming out of his back, in the style of Doc Ock.
Pressing into the ground, the lower pair of tentacles pushed him up into the air, as he swayed drunkenly back and forth, trying to integrate them into his sense of balance. Slowly, he steadied, then tried to lift one tentacle to move it forward, before promptly dropping it back down. The internals of the tentacles twisted and shifted, the fibrous pattern so suitable for behaving like a whip doing little to help with providing proper support. He tried again, then again a few minutes later, noticing already a substantial improvement.
His first successful step came a short time later, and soon he was striding across the prehistoric fields, as he practiced reaching out and removing leaves from trees with his upper tentacles. A visual reminder from his nanites had him creating a length of string to practice making cat's cradles with his hands while manipulating his tentacles, to try and expand beyond manipulating only four extremities at once.
The Doc Ock backpack tentacles went on his HUD beside the arm tentacles, then he activated both. At first he was nearly constantly realizing that one set of limbs had gone quiescent, and concentrating on moving them, only to realize a different set was now motionless. As time passed, things began to get a little more fluid, however. From the speed of the improvement, he knew that the nanites were obviously actively working on his brain.
The transition between the arm tentacles and the backpack had been slow, restoring the tentacles had likewise been slow, so when he grew weary of practicing and turned them off, and they nearly instantly vanished, he was startled. Experimentally, he turned the arm tentacles back on, and they reappeared on his arms in the blink of an eye. Confused, he tried to query the nanites about what the source of the difference was, and got a deeply confusing series of images and visions back. He tried to make sense of them, and finally got a sense of approval from the nanites when he pictured half the nanites being pulled within the other half's connected universe, and the process repeating in like steps of half the number at a time.
A full-body shiver ran over him once he understood what was going on. It was a Matryoshka doll of universes, and apparently there was no prohibition here against putting a bag of holding into a portable hole. Or perhaps they were able to drop their connection to their universe and pick it back up? Frightening as it was to realize that they seemed to have been doing the sort of things that in most of the science fiction he had read that touched on it would have lead to tearing great holes in spacetime, especially within his own body, it also gave him hope that they would likewise not interfere with him passing through such a connection, something that had been a fear he had been holding ever since he realized that each nanite was connected to its own universe or dimension or whatever it was.
The two tentacle styles he had, well, not invented or created so much as cribbed from comics, were versatile and useful, but he did still want to see if he could do a more Genom boomer style tentacle. He tried to remember how they looked and operated. Sort of muscles on muscles on muscles? He imagined a hollow core and a single muscle on one side, able to contract and cause the core to bend towards it, then another muscle next to and a little below the first, torquing the core in a slightly different direction a little layer, then progressing his wrapping all the way around and down the length.
Forming muscles, unlike a whip, was easy for the nanites, having his own muscles as a pattern to work from. Rather than trying to support such a large tentacle from himself, he imagined it being anchored into the ground nearby to give it a firm basis for leverage. Barely had he pictured it, than the expanding rope of muscled banded steel erupted from the ground, racing forward at remarkable speed, extending forward from the tip at the same time that it was being wholly pushed forward by expansion at the base. He lashed it around a tree and crushed it effortlessly to pulp.
The sheer strength afforded by the mass of mechanical muscles was intense. He formed a solid core at the very tip, and sharp bladed edges, and it thrust readily through the tree's trunk where it had not been pulped, not seeming to be slowed at all by the dense fibrous tissue. It made him a bit nervous about getting it near anything that shouldn't be destroyed, so he had the nanites festoon the area with a variety of positive and negative targets, and spent some time practicing with the massively powerful tentacle, trying to strike the positive targets without brushing the negative ones.
The immense speed with which the tip could move when the muscles near the base flexed made things quite challenging, as it was an undifferentiated blur much of the time. To be sure, he could move it very slowly and carefully, and hit only the positive ones that way, but the point was to be able to actually make use of that strength and speed without turning any innocents nearby into a pile of organic mush.
It was a fair while before the discordant tone of hitting a negative target began to lessen, and then eventually cease sounding except for the occasional misstep.
Once he was satisfied, and retracted the tentacle, leaving a gash in the ground where it had burst forth, he noticed that evening was quickly approaching. He had not eaten breakfast nor lunch, nor was he now hungry, but the time did put him in mind of the meal he had consumed the day before. If it had been so easy for the nanomachines to replicate muscle tissue, far easier than creating a workable replacement for rope or braided leather, could he create a nano-replica of a dinosaur? Not using his nanomachines to simply make an organic duplicate, he knew from duplicating the cooked beast from the previous morning that he could do that quite simply, but to make one out of pure nanomachines, duplicating it on a functional basis?
He lifted off the ground and began drifting along, hunting for a critter to try it on. The noise and vibrations of his practicing had emptied his immediate surroundings, but he could hear the sonorous calls of what he had heard termed the duck-billed dinosaurs previously. Tro-something, he thought, perhaps, though to him they were just noisy. He was not really interested in them directly, as they were quite large and noisy, rather cow-like though there was not really anything he would consider grass for them to be chewing on.
Lurking near them though, observing them, were a band of raptors, larger than the turkey sized ones near the beach. He was not sure they were really hunting, exactly. More like lounging, but watchful for opportunities, they were feathered and a few had a deep blue wattle hanging beneath their jaws. He formed a sphere of nanites and sent it zipping through the air towards them, only to have it stop part way.
He was able to draw it back, but not send it further out. What was most perplexing about it was that he was fairly sure he had sent the tentacles out much further than the sphere was willing to go. After a bit of puzzling, he finally realized that he was having a communications issue. The sphere was not leaving the extent of his utility cloud. All of his tentacular work had been a long string of nanites all still linked to the cloud.
He briefly considered trying to extend an invisibly thin tentacle to the sphere, but discarded it as ridiculous. There had to be some way to get remote communications going. After poking and prodding at the idea for a short time, he hit upon a key question. Could his nanites support more than one three-dimensional protrusion into another realm? Yes, they could, and that instantly gave him the solution.
One nanite in the sphere needed to have an extrusion into the universe of one of the nanites remaining with him, and the communication lines could be as long as he liked in this world, while being in actual terms of distance of signal only a few nanometers. The sphere whipped back out again, this time not hindered at all by reaching the edge of the utility cloud, and zipped over to where the raptors were, dissolving into invisibly fine particles as it settled on to one of the wattle-less beasts.
Going for a non-destructive scan instead of simply taking the beast apart at a molecular level took a bit to get across, but the basic point that he only needed the large scale muscular, bone, tendon, and skin structure was eventually communicated to the nanites, and they replicated in swift doublings throughout the animal, then as swiftly retracted. Another sphere of nanites appeared near him, and swiftly swelled and expanded, billowing out in rushes as they duplicated the animal, bone here, muscle group there, until a silvery dinosaur stood next to him. A moment later it shimmered, feathers burst forth, and the color settled to a perfect duplicate of the original animal, aside from its unnatural stillness.
Controlling it, on the other hand, turned out to be a tricky proposition. He could manipulate it as a sort of mannequin, adjusting the position of one limb at a time, even moving the head around and operating the jaws, though it felt more like he was moving his arm and opening and closing his hand, as though it were a hand puppet. At no point, even while being moved, did it look alive.
Thomas spent the next hour or so explaining the basic concept of motion capture and replay to the nanites, and the robotics concept of compliance. It was made more difficult by the fact that all the memories he had regarding motion capture were of videos he had seen, which were of course two dimensional. The nanites captured three dimensional video as a matter of course, and had no experience in regenerating three dimensional models from two dimensional video. His own imaginings were more effective, but were also more fragmentary and incoherent. Eventually they seemed to get the idea, and he moved back to watch the living raptors for a time. When the nanites indicated they were ready, he returned to the raptor statue. As soon as he was close enough for his utility cloud to touch it, it seemed to come to life. The little repetitive shifting of balance, the breathing, the flicking of the tail, the movements of the eye and head as it seemed to track his movements, all projected a definite feeling of life. He reached out with his own hand and pressed against the side of the raptor's head, and it turned easily under light pressure. He pushed at the shoulder, and it took a natural seeming step to the side. Stepping back, he reached for it mentally, and shifted the bulk of the body forward, and it obligingly stepped forward. Slipping his mental hand into the head, he turned it from side to side, made it yawn widely, then snap its jaws shut. Attempting to move the head around beyond where it could reach had the nanite construct moving its body in a natural way to enable the attempted motion.
Satisfied with the results, Thomas considered how lifelike it was, and had it reshape into a copy of himself. Here there turned out to be no need for an extended period of observations. The nanites had plenty of records of his motions, and even before the colors had settled his doppelganger was breathing and shifting about in a lifeline fashion. There was something subtly unsettling about it that he could not quite put his finger on, and he returned it to the raptor form.
Seeing it looking so like himself had brought up a different idea, even if he felt more comfortable experimenting on a raptor to test it. It took barely a thought for him to swap his vision for that of the raptor, probably, he assumed, because the nanites were already used to overriding his visual cortex to show him visions. Trying to move while looking out through its eyes have him an intense and unpleasant sense of dizziness and nausea, however. To overcome it, he had to switch his vision back, sit his body down, and have the nanites switch all his sensory inputs over. Even that took several tries to get right, as overriding the sensation of his breathing and the involuntary sense of his heart beating left him panicked and claustrophobic.
Once he got it dialed in though, it actually felt as though he had become a raptor. It could run like the wind, turn on a dime with the help of the long tail acting like a rudder, and leap an impressive distance. He considered trying to infiltrate the little raptor - what? Flock? Pride? But he decided against it. Emulating the smell of an animal had not been part of his instructions, and he had no doubt that he smelled nothing like the other raptors.
Seeing his body lying on the ground, basically defenceless aside from the automatic defenses provided by the utility cloud also warned against attempting to go too far. He supposed he could try to set his body up on this form's back, jockey-style, but while he had considered trying to ride dinosaurs when he had seen the triceratops, having his own body hanging around on his back lurching about as he moved like a sack of potatoes sounded like a miserable time.
What about a larger animal form though? He had to replicate the musculature of the animal, but its body cavity was essentially empty, there were no lungs behind the apparent breathing, nor a heart pumping, nor a digestive system. Perhaps if the animal was sufficiently larger than he, he could effectively ride along inside it, protected there. It would like a dinosaur mecha.
He abandoned the raptor body, restoring his senses, and vanished it, then went hunting for a larger dinosaur. He hunted down and scanned a triceratops, then a massive sauropod, and finally found one of the larger tyrannosaur types feeding on a carcass and scanned it as well. Moving away, he materialized a tyrannosaur form, which took only a little longer than the raptor, since most of the needed nanites already existed, just folded within themselves like nesting dolls. There were a few more doublings needed to get the full size, but then he was able to step up to the beast and it sort of melted and flowed over him, drawing him up into itself until he was wearing it, and seeing through it, a gigantic T-rex costume better than any ever built before. Well, except for being feathered, and lacking a roar. The duplication of the auditory mechanisms of the real animal had supported the sounds it made, less varied than birds but not dissimilar, if much deeper in tone, bleeps as he thought of them rather than chirps, but it was hard for him to work it. It had a larynx just as he did, but it was not shaped the same and did not have the muscles to move and manipulate it. Apparently the sound was produced by a different organ, and he could not quite find the controls for it, leaving him able to sort of hiss and moan with the air the nanites forced out of his trachea in imitation of lungs, but roaring or even bleeping were out of his reach.
He had thought the raptors could run, but they were nothing to the speed of running on four meter long legs. He had some doubts whether the living beasts jumped, since similarly sized animals in his time did not do much of that, but with his more solid structure, he gave it a try, and found that at speed, he could leap a prodigious height and distance, but landing when you were used to using your arms to correct your balance in a body where those arms were nearly vestigial in nature left one massive trench. His body was undamaged, both the false one and his real one, the momentum canceling powers of the nanites preventing his body from experiencing the full impact of the acceleration, especially since they had his body fully cradled inside, not just sitting in an open area as he had first pictured.
He made sure the three bodies were recorded in his HUD options and let it vanish, returning his senses to his body and dropping to the ground, landing lightly and easily as the utility cloud absorbed the impact for him.
Night had fully fallen and he considered finding somewhere to sleep, but realized that he was actually not feeling at all tired. A quick test with the nanites confirmed that they could effectively increase the area of his pupils so as to give him full color vision at night, as if it were full day. He did not like the idea of losing track of day and night, though, so he had them tone it down a little, as if it were twilight.
Having determined that alternate universes could be used as a communications medium for his nanites, he brought up the query interface, and began attempting once more to interrogate them about it, this time focusing on what existing functions the universal spaces were intended to provide. After all, while he could understand that it might be difficult to fit sufficient complexity in a small nanomachine to actually accomplish complete programmable self-replication, and multiple other ancillary jobs besides, surely a universe per nanite was immense overkill. It must have some additional purpose beyond the obvious ones he had already thought of or triggered.
As before, many of the images he was shown were from his perspective incoherent or simply incomprehensible, but one of them the nanites did a particularly good job of getting across. They recognized he valued the senzu beans he had, that were currently stored in a pocket in a fabric that was, by their standards, ephemeral. The image of him holding the pile of senzu beans in his hand and their vanishing, followed by a single bean reappearing, was repeated in the mix several times.
Unwilling to risk his beans on his understanding of the often confusing and multi-layered images - part of the confusion of three dimensional imagery versus two dimensional was simply that functionally speaking, the nanites always had multiple perspectives on something, but for him, seeing more than one perspective at a time was almost always too confusing to understand what he was being shown - he picked up a stick and pictured it simply vanishing, at which point, it promptly vanished. There was no flash of light or special effects, it was simply there and then gone, quite unlike the fading out effect of the nanites disassembling something.
He held out his hand and imagined the stick in it, and it reappeared. As far as he could tell, it was the same stick. "Subspace storage pocket? Or at least, a reasonable fascimile." He tried to query the nanites, sending them images of him touching a tree and it vanishing and then reappearing, and the same with a small dinosaur. They corrected him, the tree vanishing and reappearing mostly sans leaves, wilting, and crushed, the dinosaur vanishing and reappearing only to collapse to the ground, not even struggling. Well, that put paid to any ideas of testing that as a transportation method for himself, to be sure. Was it a lack of oxygen? Inhospitable environment? Maybe there was a difference in the passage of time? He wondered if it was the transportation that was harming them, or the storage facility, but attempts to clarify it were not terribly helpful. He could not work out the right images to send to get them to show him what it looked like where the objects were stored. Checking with his probability power confirmed that his understanding that if he stored a raptor, it would be dead when retrieved, so he had at least interpreted that visual correctly.
While it would have been easy to simply set it aside with the intention to only store inanimate objects, this was too important to ignore. He was planning on understanding and expanding the universe-linking powers of the nanites to get off this world, so if it was somehow merely traveling through their link that was killing things, he needed to know that before he made the attempt himself.
Trying to explain what he wanted to the nanites would be problematic, if indeed he could manage it at all, but the inter-universal communications method he had come across for handling remotes had the genesis of a solution. This was easier to get across to the nanites, and after only a few minutes of back and forth, his nanitic doppelganger formed in the largest available enclosed open space in one of the other universe extensions of one of his nanites. A moment later, as far as he could tell, he was in utter darkness.
Lights began to appear, flicking into long arcing lines across a ceiling of ridiculous complexity. It was not designed to give room for men to get into spaces to repair them, or to construct them in the first place. There were no panels to cover and conceal the complexity, as there would normally never be eyes to see it. Even as he watched, sheets of metal formed, sealing away the complexity above him, and beneath his feet. The room itself was not large enough to store one of the larger dinosaurs, but the smaller raptors would fit without trouble.
The nanite he was within migrated to the utility cloud, and began drawing in air from the atmosphere where his living body still was, and filling the space. The very first bit of air rushing in was instantly visible, as the intense humidity he was familiar with for the last several days, when the gas it was in expanded into what was formerly near vacuum conditions, appeared as a spreading fog. Theoretically, lower pressure air could hold more water than higher pressure at the same temperature, but of course, the rapid expansion of the air had simultaneously dropped the temperature drastically. As the air pressure began to equalize, the fog stopped appearing, and what had already condensed settled and clung to the ground.
Satisfied that with the space now lit and air-filled, it ought to be survivable, he returned his focus to his body, and rose into the air. A test with his probability power indicated that storing and retrieving a raptor would not kill it, but he had to be sure. He found the shoreline of the inland sea again, and swept along it, until he located another small group of the turkey sized raptors. A sphere of nanites shot around, zipping down and evaporating into a cloud of particles when it reached the raptor, and it vanished.
He flipped his focus back to his doppelganger back in the other universe, and looked around. The raptor was chirping curiously, scratching at the metal floor, but seemed fine. He flipped his view back again, and returned the raptor to confirm that there was not any particular danger from a second transfer. Unwilling to leave it at that, he flipped the animal back and forth a dozen times more before accepting that he had found and corrected the cause of the death the utility cloud had warned against.
Tempted though he was to immediately start trying to find a world to travel to, he reminded himself that he had five years here where there was basically nothing that could kill him. As soon as he started traveling, he upped the odds substantially that he would meet something that could ignore his nanites. The bastard that gave him his powers would probably think nothing simply causing all his nanites to vanish, or to be in some other universe without him, or stop working, or the like.
He also had some philosophical issues to work out, and he took to the sky again, flying above the cloud layer so that he could look at the unending sea of stars while he pondered. The implications of infinite universes existing, to the extent that anything that could exist did exist, probably millions of times over, was both promising and frightening. It promised great things, worlds of peace and high ideals, worlds of unspoiled beauty, realms of beauty and light - but equally is promised worlds of war and death, worlds crushed under conquering tyrants or endless plagues, worlds where humanity was enslaved, or destroyed, worlds where humanity never existed, or where humanity was the conquering tyrant enslaving everyone else. It threatened, deeply, the ability of a man to truly care, to be a good man.
What was the point in fighting a dictator if there must be unending worlds where he was already defeated? What was the harm if a million worlds fell to Hitler, or Genghis Khan established a ten thousand year reign of rape and conquest, if there were a million more where they were never born? Or what was the point in fighting to save another world when it was only one of millions equally devastated?
How easy might it become to look at human suffering, and simply move on to another world where the suffering was less?
For that matter, what of the inhabitants of this world? Was he condemning humanity if he stopped the meteor or comet or whatever was coming? Or would humanity even have developed here? He might be able to answer that with his power over probability, but should he? Who knew if left alone the dinosaurs might have evolved an even greater civilization - though perhaps it was already ethnocentric just to think that it would somehow be better so? If no civilization ever developed, what if that was better for the world as a whole?
He had taken only a single Introduction to Philosophy course in college, and he was certainly not prepared to argue his thoughts one way or another. One thing he was fairly certain of, was that he had better not allow his power to dictate his actions. If he killed a child because his power told him the child would commit horrendous actions when grown, he would have abdicated his responsibility as a person and might as well be replaced by a machine following the power's dictates. Above all, he desired to remain a good man, a good person.
"Absolute power corrupts absolutely." He could not recall who had said it, nor would he have known who Lord Acton was if he had remembered, but he recalled the sentiment, and thought it had more than a kernel of truth to it. Already he had killed a dinosaur without need, only to satisfy his curiosity. He did not even need to eat anymore, so he did not have the excuse of survival needs.
Frustrated at his inability to think his way through the problem without tying himself in mental knots, Thomas abandoned the attempt and sought to sleep instead. His dreams were warped and disturbing, his sleep light and troubled, but he remembered little of it on waking some five hours later when the sun rose high enough to shine on him where he was sleeping above the clouds.
When he awoke, he found that his thoughts the previous day about various human dictators had reminded him of their various uniforms. When he got travel working, he would want to fit in smoothly wherever he went, so perhaps it would be worthwhile to work on various sets of clothing. He suspected that the nanites would be able to basically fabricate clothing in situ.
He was about to carefully empty his pockets out and have the nanites destructively scan his clothing, when he froze. If he did that, if he completely emptied his pockets, then he would know, without a doubt, that nothing had been left in them, and it would at the very least become much harder to chance something like the peanut into existence. Instead, he switched his mind to his doppelganger.
The fact that it was dressed was confirmation he had previously not considered that the nanites could of course produce clothing. Taking this as another opportunity to show the nanites the value in two-dimensional images by showing them clothing with embroidery, he tried to get them to make several polo shirts, examining the results and making adjustments. After confirming they could create a workable shirt, he moved on to getting the nanites to swap his clothing while it was worn. He could not really move much further on designing clothing until he had more samples to work from.
Storing and restoring the clothing did not work well, since it turned out, now that he could watch it, that the items stored simply fell to the floor of the storage area. When transported to his hand this was fine, but trying to transport rumpled flat clothing into place on his person was a losing proposition from the start. Having them build the clothing in place from nanites, rather than creating clothing from the actual original substances worked far better, so in the end, he abandoned the idea of storing outfits to be swapped into place. He could store store changes of clothing, but could only employ them if he was somewhere he could dress and undress. In any other case, he would have to use nanitic clothing, which could intelligently form itself in place on the fly.
Satisfied that he had a handle on it, he returned his view to himself, then formed a second doppelganger of himself, set up with the same remote connections that allowed his spheres to exit his utility cloud. In this case though, he wanted some redundancy, and so he set up twenty such communications paths, then moved away, and hamster-balled himself again, sealing himself away from external influences while his mentality was elsewhere, then switched his view into the duplicate.
Trying out the new clothing thing, he had the nanites replace the duplicates of his existing clothing with more tightly fitted shorts and undergarments so that he would have nothing getting in the way atmospherically. This body should have no issue with experiencing extreme acceleration, or lack of oxygen or food, or physical damage. In this body, he could experience space. If anything would give him the perspective to get past his philosophical issues, this would be it.
Glancing over at his hamster-balled living body, he lifted into the air. Adjusting his upward momentum, he shattered the sound barrier only a few hundred feet above the ground, and reached ten thousand kph on his odometer a few moments later. He was not sure what escape velocity was, but then, he did not actually want to get out of Earth's gravity well, at least not at this point, just get into space actual. That was what, something like a hundred miles up?
Knowing that he could negate the pull of gravity meant that he did not need to build up horizontal velocity so as to get into an orbit, he just kept pushing straight up, 20,000 kph... 30,000 kph... when his altimeter hit a hundred miles up he stopped cold. It barely seemed like any time had passed at all, as he looked down at the Earth. He was up high enough that he could see the curvature of the Earth. Looking down at the planet, he tried to see the probable path of the impactor, but saw nothing. Flipping back to his physical body, he saw the glowing line in the sky marking the path, and realized that when his view was with the nanites, it was because they were overriding his senses, which meant he could not use any of the visual aspects of his power while he was controlling a remote body.
He flipped back to the remote and turned to look up into the sky, staring at the unobstructed view of the stars, then slowly spun so that the Earth came slowly into view. As he gazed at the land far below, he realized that the answer was actually simple. Now that he knew what was coming for the animals below, he could not just abandon them to their fate. Had he been able to leave before learning it, it would have been fine, even though he knew what eventually happened to them in his world. There was no inherent reason why that would happen to them in every world.
Now that he knew, though, if he left without doing anything, he would feel responsible, whether he was right to do so or not, for all the death that would follow. If he tried his best and failed, he might still feel some guilt, but not as much as leaving them callously to their fate.
Having decided that settled some of his worries, and gave him a goal for the next while - figure out how to change the outcome. He knew that the simplest course was simply to get some remote of his to the impactors, since with contact, he could simply have his nanites exchange their momentum, altering the course of the asteroid or comet or whatever. To actually locate them before they hit, though, would require he either figure out a way to get these remotes to be able to see using his power, or get into outerspace himself. Or he could wait until they were in orbit on their way down, and hope he could get to them fast enough to reverse them. He briefly considered trying to expand his nanite network around the entire planet, but he knew the planet plowed through billions of tons of space debris continually. Putting the nanites in place densely enough to catch the impactor would have a material impact either on the space debris if the nanites blocked it to prevent damage, or on the nanite swarm as they continually destroyed it.
He did not want to take any action that could potentially cause the utility cloud to reject him as a user, and setting it up for continual destruction seemed likely to do that if anything could.
Of course, there might be a way that he could parlay his power into something workable with his remote bodies even so. The first step was to convince the nanites to give him something akin to a picture-in-picture view of what his actual body was seeing. That might be tricky, since technically, what he was seeing right now literally was what his actual body was seeing. They would need to tap into and process the signals coming in the optic nerves somewhere prior to the point they were overriding them.
He worked at it for a while with no success, then switched to trying to get them to take a snapshot of what his body was seeing. He had managed to convince them of the value of two dimensional imagery by this point, but the pictures they took were still of he was seeing right now, in space. Flipping back to his actual body, he focused on the path of the impactor, then tried to get them to take a photo of what he was seeing. To his surprise, the glowing line of probability was not on their picture, and when he complained, he got only incomprehension.
He flipped back to the space version of himself, and decided to try a different course. Sometimes he saw probable paths, sometimes he just got a sense of the likelihood of something, a feeling for what the odds were of it happening. If he could tweak his questions to be that sort, where it did not use the visual system the nanites were hijacking, it might just work out for him. Looking straight ahead, he applied a small forward impetus, then tried to consider the likelihood that he would encounter the asteroid along this path. Of course the chance was nil, unsurprising for a random selection, but the fact that he got the sense it was nil told him this would work.
Now, instead of looking for the likelihood that he would encounter the impactor, he tried to find the likelihood that he would pass within five astronomical units (five times the distance between the Earth and the Sun) of the impactor, just to verify whether it was a comet or not. An asteroid impactor would probably be a near-Earth object. and therefore somewhere around the Earth's orbit, which logically would be within one to three AU, depending on whether it was on the same or the opposite side of the Sun from the Earth or not. A cometary impactor five years out could be much further out. Certainty.
"So it was an asteroid that took out the dinos," he thought. "That settles that old argument, for this universe, at least."
He narrowed the distance he was checking for until the probability dropped suddenly from a certainty to nil, then altered his trajectory slightly until it returned to a certainty. Boosting his speed, he cycled his checking back and forth, widening it whenever he lost the track of the object, narrowing it to tighten his course as he ramped up the speed.
Eventually he gave up that night, dropping his speed drastically and flipping back to his body to sleep. When he woke in the morning and returned to the space doppelganger and looked around, he was a little surprised that he could not find the Earth or Moon in sight anywhere. The Sun was clearly visible, and the automatic safeties in the visual override meant he could actually look at it and see it as a dully gleaming disk with visible sunspots, instead of a retina searing ball of painful light. No other recognizable objects were in sight, so before he tried to focus in on the asteroid again, he took a minute to narrow down the Earth the same way, confirming its direction. Even knowing basically where it was in the sky, he could not differentiate the points of light to say this one or that was the Earth.
Did that mean that he was further from Earth than any human had ever been, at least on his world? As soon as he thought it, he realized it was not true in a meaningful way. While his thought was right, as least in that he recalled pictures of the Earth from the Moon showing the Earth clearly still visible as a giant orb in the sky, and that was the furthest that humans had been from the Earth, it was likewise true that he was actually still on Earth, and what was in space was a robot probe. Humanity had sent robot probes out beyond the outer planets when he left, the Voyager probes as he recalled were approaching the outer edge of the Solar System.
That did bring up a momentary thought that perhaps this shape was not ideal for space travel, before rejecting the concern as ridiculous. He was setting his velocity directly, and there was no atmosphere for him to be insufficiently aerodynamic in. Besides, what were his other options? It was not like he had scanned a spacecraft, and even if he had, having a larger cross section would not gain him any additional abilities, it would just expose him to more micrometeoroid impacts, and a dinosaur form would certainly not add any benefit.
Refocusing, he narrowed down the direction to the asteroid. He ended up wasting a bit of time when getting within a certain range caused his power to behave erratically, which he eventually determined was because there were multiple asteroids, something he had already known but had disregarded.
It took him most of that day to locate the largest object, helped greatly several hours in when the nanites finally were able to detect an object at the target they extrapolated him to be aiming for. They could not detect the signals he was getting from his power, but they had apparently been able to process all of his movements, and use them to deduce an intercept curve. Once they had it, they were able to give him a course heading and speed.
The asteroid was massive, peculiarly shaped, and quite dark. Without the nanites highlighting its angular contours, he doubted he would have been able to find it even with his probability power, at least not without several more days of trying to narrow it down. Much longer in one dimension than the others, it vaguely resembled a bullet, but dimpled in deeply on one side, and not flattened on the back. The nanites detected and highlighted another massive asteroid a short distance away, only a little smaller than the one he was at, and doubtless another of the impactors. His power indicated there were several more too far from the grouping to be seen with the naked eye.
Almost, he merely did what he had come to do, to simply change their momentum so that they would not impact, but thought better of it at the last minute. It would work, it was within his nanites' ability to do, he had no doubt of that, but what of Murphy? If he simply redirected them, how could he be certain he was not just setting them up to hit around the time that civilisation developed? Better, he thought, to remove them from the field completely, and now that he was here, he thought he saw how to do it.
He drifted slowly closer, until he touched down on the surface, sinking slightly into the crumbly surface. His nanites were telling him this was carbon heavy, and so possibly a life-seeding asteroid, had it not hit where life already existed, but also heavy with iron and other metals. Remembering something from his readings, he asked about iridium, and they confirmed it was present in levels substantially higher than were present on the surface of the Earth. He thought he had recalled something about there being an Iridium-rich layer of clay or sediment that had first brought up the dinosaur-killing asteroid hypothesis, and here was a bit of confirmation.
The asteroid vanished utterly and instantly, and he grinned. He had directed the nanites to connect a nanite to a resource universe large enough to contain all the asteroids, and store the asteroid in it, and it had worked. "No more dinosaur killer," he thought, boosting his velocity a bit to line up with and land on the smaller of the two big ones. It too vanished, following the first. One after another, he tracked down the smaller pieces and vanished them all, storing them away. "And someday," he said aloud, though he heard no sound, "I'll need One, at Sufficient Velocity, and now I have it."