Defusing Armageddon


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."