ANAD, Humans and Angels

The following post offers some technical and cultural insights into the backstory of the para-human swarm (ANAD-type) entities that I call angels.  Angels appear in many stories that make up the Tales of the Quantum Corps and the Nanotroopers series.  But these angels don’t have a divine or heavenly origin….

1.     An angel  is a swarm configuration that resembles human beings to some degree

2.     Configuration drivers and maintenance are the keys to how good the simulation is

3.     People use or want angels for a variety of purposes: lovers, slaves, children, housekeepers, pets, sports or entertainment celebrities, spouses…

4.     Of course, in the late 21^st and early 22^nd centuries, people use all kinds of nanobotic interventions to enhance their bodies and their minds.  The latest is to swallow a capsule containing a small swarm of bots that will then assemble into a larger swarm inside your brain and make adjustments to certain axonal and dendritic connections to boost processing efficiency…sort of a tune-up of your synapses. 

5.     What would life be like as an angel, a deconstructed nanobotic swarm entity?  Nobody knows for sure, but here are some thoughts…

6.      You are not constrained to a single configuration.  You can assume multiple configurations, basically any form or shape for which you have a config template. 

7.      Your natural form is an amorphous cloud, a swarm of ANAD-style nanobots. 

8.      You can replicate and assume the form of any human being (or any other structure for which you have a template) with an evolving level of simulation accuracy.  By 2120, this accuracy has approached nearly 100%.  Depending on the structure, this could take anywhere from a few seconds to many minutes. 

9.      The real brains or control center of any swarm angel is the master bot, often referred to as the master.  Replicated bots comprising a swarm angel are usually referred to as daughters or replicants.  The entire formation can be collectively referred to as a swarm, an angel or more crudely, Bugs. 

10.   The master bot maintains the quantum processor which is the real heart, soul and brain of an angel.  The bot is comprised of a primary shell (body or hull), with assorted effectors, propulsors, etc which the master bot uses to manipulate its environment, navigate, replicate, and perform other essential functions.  The processor houses the configuration library and config manager.  An angel bot can only do what it is programmed to do and allowed to do by its config manager. 

11.   What does it feel like to be an angel?  Nobody knows for sure.  But many have speculated.  Various reports indicate that angels describe ‘feelings’ of a kind of warmth, as a closeness, affection, even a form of love, a family, or a sense of belonging, a cocooning, in a way or at a level which they never experienced as humans (single-config entities, sometimes known as Normals).  Feelings are experienced differently as an angel, because feelings must be programmed in and allotted processor capacity to exist for an angel. 

12.   Angels have been created or fabbed by human beings using ANAD technology and used as lovers and companions, sex slaves, surrogate children, butlers and valets, and just about anything else human ingenuity and depravity can think of.  They are a reflection of our wishes, dreams and nightmares.  All it takes is a matter compiler (molecular assembler) and the right config drivers. 

13.  Angels are programmed nanoscale robotic entities.  It is misleading to speak of what motivates them.  They are ‘motivated’ by what their programming requires them to do.  The central quantum processor of the master bot executes programmed actions through its config driver.  Many of these action modules can be quite complex, involving detailed behaviors and abilities. 

14.  As swarm entities, angels are necessarily a form of distributed intelligence.  The master maintains angel memory and runs the config drivers.  Because of its replication ability, an angel can ‘be’ in multiple locations at once.  Symborg (the robotic Messiah detailed in Johnny Winger and the Great Rift Zone) is like this.  Even though the master is physically located in a single space, through quantum couplers, angel swarms replicated from the same master can be in multiple locations and can assume multiple configs.  For example: a master could reside in London, and yet create and run angels in New York and Tokyo and Farside on the Moon, at the same time, as long as comms were good.  They are true multi-config, multi-state entities. 

15.  In some ways, an angel could be thought of as analogous to a computer node in a network, or a cloud.  Does a network or a computational cloud have an intelligence or sentience beyond that of its individual components?  And just like an individual PC, a master bot has channels for input, output (effectors), a processor and memory, as well as navigation, sensing and locomotion. However, a PC doesn’t have the ability to grab atoms and replicate itself or other physical objects.  An ANAD-style master nanobotic assembler does.  It’s a combination of computer and virus.  It has the processing speed and ability of a computer and the replicability and survivability and evolvability of a virus.  An intelligent, programmable virus expanded to swarm scale and macro dimensions…that’s what an angel is. 

16.  Although they can be designed to simulate lifelike functions, angels don’t need to eat, sleep, execrete or do anything biological like that.  They need power to operate (usually an onboard power cell that generates power from radioactive decay of an isotope) and feedstock to replicate or assemble matter.  They don’t need sex either, since replication is a matter of grabbing and arranging atoms.  But they can be designed to simulate sex.

 

These are just a few thoughts on angels.  Wikipedia defines angels this way:

 

An angel is a primarily spiritual being found in various religions and mythologies. In Abrahamic religions and Zoroastrianism, angels are often depicted as benevolent celestial beings who act as intermediaries between God or Heaven and Earth, or as guardian spirits or a guiding influence.^[1][2] Other roles of angels include protecting and guiding human beings, and carrying out divine tasks.^[3] The term "angel" has also been applied to various notions of spirits or figures found in many other religious traditions.

 

As a storyteller, I use ANAD and angels (lifelike ANAD swarms) as a means to reflecting on what it means to be human, especially as seen through the “eyes” of an entity that is not human. 

 

In my next post, coming on March 28, I’ll return to my science fiction novel The Farpool and provide an update on how it’s coming, possibly even a short excerpt.  There will also be some new data on ebook downloads and how they’re going. 

 

See you March 28.

 

Phil B.