In my last post, I put out a little background detail on my recurring main character Johnny Winger.  Winger shows up in all my stories of Tales of the Quantum Corps and also will be the main player in Nanotroopers.  The last post ended with Johnny Winger learning that his mother had just died in a car crash.  The time was August 2, 2047….

The period 2047 to 2051 was a four-year period of hell and challenge for Johnny Winger.  Jamison Winger was also severely injured in the crash, but managed to survive and recover.  However, he was devastated at the death of his wife and responded to the overwhelming grief by spending all his time, after being released from the hospital, in his barn-cum-workshop on the North Bar Pass Ranch, working and tinkering on inventions that had no future, as a way of dealing with his grief.

For most of this period, until his father got clinical assistance for grief and depression (neuroplant and patch treatments), Johnny and his brother Brad and his sister Joanna had to run the ranch/farm business.  Johnny put off any thoughts of going to higher school and did one hell of a lot of growing up during this time.

The most difficult time came in 2048, when severe drought and low beef/produce prices caused the Winger kids to have to sell off part of their ranch land to a resort developer.

The developer proceeded to develop a faux “dude” ranch-western culture showplace called Highhorn, catering to rich city people from all over the western U.S.  Johnny hated himself for agreeing to this decision forever afterward.  Just seeing the stylized Highhorn signs and billboards and para-sailers wafting on mountain breezes over the ranch’s perimeter fence made him sick.

Not long after Jamison Winger got the ‘patch’ treatment for grief and depression, Johnny learned from hospital techs at the Sisters of Mercy Hospital in Colorado Springs that the nanoscale medbots they had used on his Dad to assist in his recovery, were also used by an international organization called Quantum Corps.  In fact, one of the techs even let Johnny have a go at operating the medbots inside an artificial body.  He found that he had a sort of knack for working with devices at the scale of atoms and molecules. 

The first nanoscale robots were just becoming known to the public, at this time in 2048 to 2050.  Studying up on this strange UN agency, Johnny learned that Quantum Corps wanted candidates to apply for a 5-year term of service, get schooled in nano theory and techniques, and assist the Corps in developing, building and perfecting such bots as weapons.  Threats from outside the U.S, other nations and even criminal groups such as the cartel Red Hammer were beginning to employ such nanoscale bots in the service of their own enterprises.  The threat to public safety was growing and Quantum Corps needed applicants to fight this new menace.

Johnny Winger was intrigued.

In November, 2048, he applied to Quantum Corps. 

His father was back at the ranch, better and able to work, with Johnny’s brother and sister.  Johnny got his Dad’s blessing to apply, but Brad and Joanna were skeptical.  Johnny was invited to Table Top Mountain, in Idaho (the main U.S. base for Quantum Corps) for initial interviews and screening.  This was June 2049 and Johnny was now through with school and Net Tutor.

 

At Table Top, Winger saw firsthand what Quantum Corps did.  He was given some tryouts in simulators and continued to show unusual aptitude for operating bots in nanospace environments. 

 

Winger met other applicants including Oscar M’Bela, Nathan Caden (a Red Hammer agent) and Deeno D’Nunzio at the Table Top recruit station.  They were also applying.  He learned why they were applying.  They became friends and learned a lot about each other.  They were also highly competitive with each other.

 

Unknown to the others, Nathan Caden used some liberty time to meet his Red Hammer handler at the Custer Inn, in Haleyville, Idaho. The handler gave him some malware to ‘infect’ the training ANAD system the applicants were using.  But Caden didn’t know he was under suspicion.  Base Security had placed a TinyEye  spybot on him before he left Table Top.

 

Before they could be accepted, Winger and the others learned they would have to pass the Atomgrabbers’ Qualifying Test.  Part physical, part mental, it tested their abilities to perform functions and combat roles in the nanoscale environment.  Caden did a surreptitious insertion of the Red Hammer malware into the ANAD containment tank, after studying all the security and containment arrangements.

 

The day of the AQT came and it was a bitch.  Winger continued to do well in tests of dexterity and skill at the nanospace orientation and nanobot maneuvering tests.  But something happened: one of the early training ANAD (Autonomous Nanoscale Assembler/Disasssembler) bots suffered a malfunction (due to Caden’s malware), and the defensive systems didn’t seem to work.  (Caden had fiddled with the defensive systems to disable them and had released ANAD from Containment).

 

ANAD now escaped containment and started replicating out of control, consuming everything in sight. At Table Top, this was called a Big Bang.  Quantum Corps regular troopers tried HERF’ing (High Frequency Radio Frequency) the growing swarm but it seemed in danger of escaping Table Top.  Panic set in across the base.  Winger asked to try locating and ‘driving’ the master bot that controleds all ANAD replicants at the base. Base Security and the base C/O General Kincaid told him to try it.

 

Using a portable interface control unit from inside the Mission Prep bunker, Winger is able to locate, contact and take command of the ANAD master, driving it back to into containment.  Table Top is saved.  Moreover, Base Security has now moved in to take Nathan Caden into custody; he is MOB’ed (Mobility Obstruction Barrier) right after the Big Bang started.  Caden is immediately suspected of creating the threat to the base and is arrested.  Memory-tracing is ordered.

 

Major Jurgen Kraft, commanding officer of the newly formed 1^st Nanospace Battalion, tracks down Winger.  He presents a civilian Order of Merit award from the base commander Kincaid, even though Winger was just an applicant. Then he tells Winger he’s a natural at atomgrabbing and asks: does he still want to join the Corps?  Winger said he does.  Kraft said, “Good.  We need someone like you.  Sign here and welcome to Quantum Corps.  Get a good night’s sleep. Your first day of nog school is tomorrow.” 

 

Johnny Winger was now an atomgrabber.

 

This is just a little background on how Johnny Winger became a Quantum Corps trooper, or as they say in the Corps, an atomgrabber.  For more on this, see my upcoming series Nanotroopers, debuting on www.Smashwords.com in January 2016.  The first upload is scheduled for January 18.

The next post to The Word Shed will be on December 14.  In this post, I’ll attempt to answer a question that every writer has to deal with, a sort of logistics question: “How many pages should I try to complete every day?”

See you next week.

Phil B