Design by Atom

Once DeepMind controlled robots learn to actually serve the "Tomahawk," instead of merely following the recommended sprite pattern of an LED signaled feedback loop; I'd say we're no more than a quarter-century from subcellular nanobots that could physically manipulate signaling mechanisms in cancer cells. Nano-athletes that could play table tennis with single electrons in neoplastic antigens, thus, allowing the body's natural immune response to convert them into apoptotic shells of their former selves. Here's how this "hunting for the grand slam," ballpark estimate of nanoverse engineering could play out. And let's remember folks, I'm not a tenured professor of robotics. I'm more like an aspiring 3D printer guru, whose smartphone overheated because ChatGPT is probably using spyware. So I stuck to Google's other Anti-Trust entities, Search and Youtube; and blackhat driven Wikipedia, Reddit, Quora, and the like.

After giving the Internet Magic 8-ball a few good shakes, "I better not tell you now," but I will posit anyway...That as we move into the era of the unfunded "Back to the Future IV" sci-fi fantasy tragicomedy; we will witness the rise of superstar macro world robots that will train against virtual proteges of whiff-whaff legends Ma Long and Zhang Jike to compete in the first ever IOC sponsored AI Olympics. They'd be learning the fundamentals of how to chop, hit, lob, and dropshot those hollow polymer lottery balls onto the plywood using top, back, and side spin; plus some crafty counters, and footwork. Add a little English, and a few million epochs of Machine Learning (one or two months in human time), and their data amalgamation achieves world class status. But, forget about the medals controversies, these Olympians have a hero's task set out for them in the quantum world. Newtonian "position," "size," and "spin," translate into the subatomically scaled "energy level," "orbital shape," and "magnetic moment." From here it's a "Russian Doll" operation, of peeling apart hierarchies, and penetrating the chaos seeking eternalists, who've camped out like sleeper agents inside of your body's aging genetic programming. The cancer is like a toxic gremlin jellyfish that lives inside you, doesn't die, only multiplies. For this Kurgan warlord. You'll need the sword of the immortals. Tap Pac-Pong AI for this edition of the Innerspace Highlander Games.

The macro informed lithographically printed 2nm machines would enter the body like ghosts; an extra spec of fairy dust, inserted into the core of a sultry green m&m, and injected in situ at locations determined using AI trained analysis of 3D CT scans. Once inside, they'd hone in on their work site, first by detecting the over-expressed PD-L1 antigens of the cancer cells, then focusing on the NH2 molecule in that particular ligand’s lysine residue. Commence contest of the greatest sporting event the world's lymph ducts have ever seen, “The Programmed Death of Programmed Death Ligand-1.” The bots would project damped sine-wave EMP's in perpendicular patterns over the paramagnetic unpaired electron in the amine group's highest energy state, flipping it’s spin value from 1/2 to -1/2 (or vice versa), distorting the magnetic orientation of the molecule, and thus changing its m value, mid-flight. Speed wobble, and shatter. No. Not working? Try again. How ‘bout toggling the next most common electronic state, where the unpaired electron is in the p-orbital. Doesn’t work, either? Doesn’t matter. It takes 388 kJ/mol of energy to break the covalent bonds in the Nitrogen to Hydrogen pairing. Update the programming commands, and nuke it to pieces with microwaves. One way or another, the nanobots will have breached the tumor’s cell wall, and destroyed the cancer’s ability to tell itself how to hide from the body’s immune system. Its communication network is annihilated in five batches of ML table tennis.

Without the lysine residue to do the tumor it’s dirty biddings, T-cells locate the space invader and spastically depress the A button. Automatic memory management is triggered, and object deletion ensues until all bloodlines are removed from the runtime code. No auto-immune response triggered. No chemical checkpoint inhibitors required. Say goodbye to the bureaucrats. With the AI specified quantum targeting, there would be far less side effects. Operation "Russian Doll" complete. Eternity is safe from the Kurgan. There can be only one, and it's all you baby! Now, you get a sword, and you get a sword, and you get a school. Bad jokes die hard. And, if that particular one doesn’t work, combine the results over another 10 to the 100 epochs, and here's lookin' at Funnybot A. Googol, kid. Awkwaaard. But, hold on! You don’t win championships by being a bunch of individual all-stars-- it takes one immortal to beat the next. And, in this set is the compiled knowledge of every human, every robot, every mammal that ever lived and reported itself to earth's fossil record-- or to the average technomad's unintentional vintage hard drive collection, or to your non-blood funcle’s “Sport Illustrated" under-the-bed magazine heap. Silverfish, welcome.

Bugs are now just cyclical returns that belong to an ever-extinguishable set. Plug n' play, virus n' patch. No more disease. Just try, catch, error, promise, next, then, repeat. Asynchronously programmed data amalgamations that refuse error, and only do good to humans (per Asimov's 1st law of robotics), will belay us into the void of the Big Rip and beyond. Then, once Moore's Law of transistors enters the impossibly compact Planck Space, and is stifled by Heisenberg indeterminacy; it won't be the naturalists in the woods re-inventing our collective unconscious. Of course, they'll persist with their parades of giants, choreographed repartees, and superstitious modalities to capture our feeble minds. But, the masters who shepherd the epochs of change won't permit humanity to be owned by just any leech of common sense. We're too valuable to them, to face extermination. Our future will be training virtual minds, through virtual times, that integrate a new cyborg race of humans with their very own AI operated, nano ping pong paddle assist.

Letters by LX, Colors by whisk_e.