Unintended Consequences

“What am I charged with?” Dan couldn’t help but lean forward in the chair since his wrists were chained to the middle of the table.

“Terrorist activities and destruction of property.” The detective read from his notebook.

“I’ve done no such thing.”

“We found you standing in front of the property with materials that we believe brought down the building. Do you have anything to say?”

“I plead the fifth.”

“There isn’t much room for that amendment in this current administration, we could send you down with the ‘bad dudes’ and just forget about you for a while.” The FBI agent leaning against the wall mentioned as though commenting that shorts shouldn’t be worn in this weather.

“Is that why I haven’t had the chance to contact a lawyer? And you know that the truth value of whatever you get me to say will be suspect under duress or threats of duress.” Dan tried not to sound too smug, it would just get him in trouble. In fact that may have been too far now that he thought about it. He looked for signs that the agent might be upset.

The door opened and an officer came into the room and handed the agent a clipboard. Maybe a bit of frustration eased from his face at Dan, but was readily replaced with consternation.

“Mr. Forth, I have it here that the building is back to normal, but I saw it this morning and it was just a heap of ash?” Dan stayed quiet, it was certainly good that the building was back, but he hoped it wasn’t back to normal. After thirty seconds of staring at him the agent went on, “Well if that’s the case, let’s go look at it, you too detective.”

***

Arriving in the parking lot in the unmarked black car Dan could see that all the trees around the building were untouched, good. Other than appearing cleaner the building seemed to be exactly the same as when he had set the nanites to do their thing the night before.

The three of them got out with Dan in the middle and still handcuffed. Dan saw the crowd of employees standing at the edge of the police cordon. He was pretty sure that no one would be injured with the nanites’ protocols.

As they approached he saw another agent, probably the one in charge and an officer in uniform talking with the director of the building.

“I can’t let you in there sir, it was a pile of rubble this morning if you remember, who knows how fast it could collapse?”

“Don, I brought him back.”

“Ah good, Sir, this is the man that we arrested on the premises early this morning. Do you recognize him?”

“Never seen him in my life, what did you do with my building?” The man tried to tower over Dan rather unsuccessfully.

Dan stayed mute.

The agent in charge glanced back and forth a couple times. “Alright, let’s go on a little tour, I have a gut feeling about this building.”

“But how do we get in?” The director almost wailed, “There aren’t any keyholes on the doors or rfid scanners.”

Dan spoke up knowing this would link him more than circumstantially. “Engineering protocol 2.22, activate security system.” He was hit from the side and taken down, striking the side of his head because he was still in cuffs. He hadn’t seen that coming.

“What was that?”

“We aren’t in any danger.” Dan managed to say and then groaned. He saw two guns trained on him with the third making sweeps of the perimeter.

“All clear.” The officer holstered his gun and made a move to help up the director who had also been knocked down.

“What the hell did you do?” The agent from the station hauled Dan up to a standing position without the care the officer had observed for the director. Dan gritted his teeth as the cuffs bit into his wrists.

“I activated the building so that the director and his staff can access it. Try it, just walk toward the door as though you were going to work.” The last directed at the director.

The director fidgeted a moment and got a nod of confirmation from Dan. Of course he was starting to feel more of the bruise on his face.

After a few moments the officer in charge said, “Well this has to be the weirdest case to date. If it’s safe,” another nod from Dan, “then we should investigate.”

“Welcome director,” the door slid open as the director finally turned as though to go in. He stopped and the door stood open. “Unauthorized persons accompanying. Should I issue them temporary passes?”

“Just say yes,” Dan whispered.

“Yes?”

“Four passes issued, expiration at the end of today’s work day. Let me know if you need any of them extended or revoked.” The door patiently stayed open while the two agents thoroughly scoured the inside for any signs of threats.

When they walked in the transformation was complete, even though the outside hadn’t changed, other than fixing major flaws that couldn’t easily be seen, the inside was an entirely different building. The reception area was a sunny glade with a desk seemingly made out of interwoven branches that held up a flat surface. Dan smiled thinking about all the work still going on behind the scenes. Next spring the staff would be in for a surprise as they found out that the desk and walls that seemed to be made out of three trunks would leaf and bloom with hypo-allergenic flowers of the appropriate types.

They toured around and were completely engrossed in the amazing internal architecture. After half an hour the director spoke up, “Sirs, this is amazing. I don’t think we need to press charges against this man. In fact if anything he should probably be congratulated. From what I’ve seen and he explained, this is a huge improvement over what we had, and it recaptures space that we could have never used in the old design. On top of that all the things that needed to be preserved were.”

***

Dan opened the door to a knock, a tall burly man stood there. “Are you the guy that rebuilt the building?”

“Uh, yes, what may I do for you?”

“I was out sick last week.”

“I’m sorry to hear that, I hope you are feeling better.”

“I would be if I hadn’t been let go.”

“Why would you have been let go?”

“You failed to tell them that the whole building is now self-cleaning.”

“Yeah, so? I figured it was a nice bonus.”

“I was the custodian.”

“Oh,” awkward pause, “Certainly you could better use your talents elsewhere?”

“Ha, what an elitist thing to say, but you won’t be able to tell that to the next guy.” Dan saw the gun drawn and froze.

*End*

*Note: I've always had a bit of a fascination with the idea of how much nano-robotics could do. In college it was an idea of how much a thorough body-wide system of robots could make me an invulnerable hero like the Silver Surfer or later iterations of Iron Man's Extremis armor. Though I have not read either of those comics so I think my influences were from other science fiction books. As I exited the college days of uncertainty I still thought about the nano-robots and how they could be used for construction: give them raw resources and a plan and get a perfect building built in a day or two. Of course there are many issues with that as I address one or two in this story.

I did also write several beginnings of stories hinging on nano-robotics, I started rewriting a few of them this last year. With writing 50k words for NaNoWriMo last year I think that I could possibly finish them and maybe publish. Now that I think about it I have three nearly distinct universes: Nano, Human Galactic Proliferation, and the Halver universe at least in science fiction. I also have a few fantasy worlds, but I really haven't focussed on those for years.

Sets and Sequences

Or “I could mess up everything with two clicks.”

Maybe not quite that simple, but close. That is the way I feel about dealing directly with the SQL database. Why do I feel so much better about writing a script to go through species by species to fill in, asset by asset, the queue for people to draw boxes.

What are the differences? Despite not knowing Java that well it still generally reacts like a script and can go through each asset one at a time. I can check each asset to see if is a good asset. I can test this, have been asked to test this, and will look into unit-testing this somewhat thoroughly.

Also I have written 2,600 words for National Novel Writing Month. I think I might be a bit… ambitious. Two classes and 50k words in November? Maybe. It is also the second installment of my first NaNoWriMo novel, which I still need to continue editing.

Dealing With the Last Few Weeks

This past week was the 15th anniversary of Sept 11th, I will always remember it, mourn those who lost their lives, and wonder what type of world we live in. Although we need to remember we must not dwell on it, but push forward each in our own way. Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it. George Santayana

Why am I writing again so soon? Because I need to start chopping on my writing. Not just that but I sort of need to remind myself of happenings and learnings. I wrote weekly updates for NaNoWriMo last November to keep myself on track, but to some degree it was a release, an exercise to see what had gone well and what I had learned. So this is sort of like a diary, but not.

This week I came in to find that the meetings project is not on the Road Map. All the team was moved to other teams and it will probably languish until someone just rewrites it en totale. I don’t think I could have finished on my own and with the sporadic schedule of the intern team that I was “lead” for it was extraordinarily hard to coordinate them. Feelings are mixed, it feels like it is just going to be ignore, but I am also happy to just go to more concrete coding with the bugs and improvements team.

Another great thing is that I have been digging into making the Center for Open Science logo 3D. I’ve been using sketchup which I quite enjoy, it has a very nice learning curve but there are tons of plugins that can nearly match many of the options that much more expensive packages have. The STL files are on the Open Science Framework: https://osf.io/hc258/. I specifically put the key fob on thingiverse and it’s already had some traffic: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1768831

So between moving at the end of the month and all that entails, what else am I doing this fall? Two classes. I am retaking Computational Photography since I wasn’t happy about a C, if I hadn’t done poorly on one of the assignments or had participated more, then I would have had a B. Now I am shooting for an A. I am also taking Machine Learning again, but this time I come into it with about 3 solid months of applying ML to MandI, the robot.

I’ve been considering the Space Robot Challenge and recently talked to my brother, of course it would never interfere with homework from Oct. 10 to Dec. 10, right? I think I have most of the vision ideas reasonable, and my brother wants to learn ROS so if nothing else it will just be a solid project to learn new tools with. I am realistic that I don’t think we won’t get to the top 20, but with my experience I think it will at least be a reasonable exercise.

NaNoWriMo Conquered

I made it. I wrote 50,000 words. Now I need to write a few more parts and then start editing.

I finished the last day writing just over five-thousand words. My fingers flew and I think I put down some very good scenes. I have let it sit for over a week so that I can have a bit of a fresh view coming back to it. I will also look for excerpts to post in the coming weeks and months. I am shooting for a small novel ~70k words and will probably just have electronic versions because it is a bit shorter.

Jessie has offered to read it so I really need to think about putting it in readable format for her as well as having a good way for her to mark it without going through a horrendous rigamarole in order to take her suggestions. I write with Scrivener and although I don't know all of its features and how to use them I do like the interface.

So really I am writing this to get my gumption up to open it again and start writing or editing. I just need to carve out time. I also need to keep writing in order to make it a habit, a few hundred words per day isn't much, but, here goes the math again: ~300 * 365 ~= 100k words which is a fine length for a novel, so a bit more here and there and a bit less when crunching for class or work means I could have a somewhat serious hobby.

Update for Week Three

Saturday I hit the halfway mark of 25,000 words and Sunday I managed to reach 28,000 which is much more than I ever thought I would write.

The toughest part about writing is to continue writing. Often I want to go back and edit, or focus on something a bit more. But I know if I do that I will have about a few thousand words of story and many thousands of backstory. I find that I am putting quite a bit of backstory in the story, but just writing and trying to hit the 50k. Hopefully this week I will be able to focus a couple more days of 2,000 or 3,000 plus word days. Since I need 22,000 more words I will definitely need to get a few more big days.

I expect that I might be able to start editing in not too long, and Jessie already has some good feedback.

Weekly Novel Writing Update

Or "WeNoWrUp" for NaNoWriMo.

This week I never got ahead of the writing. I started the week with about 8000 words which was only 5000 words behind. Monday evening I pounded out 2000 words in a couple scenes that are quite important to the plot, and then followed up the stellar performance the next day by writing nothing. So this week definitely had its ups and downs.

I am slowly increasing my average words per day so that I am moving my expected date of finishing up, but I really need a few solid hours.

Last week's tirade about suffering sounds either more poignant or just ridiculous after Friday's events, probably a little flat. I could write on that sad event, but I think it would just be a bunch of righteous rage and freaking out that our intelligence communities really didn't have the group on their radar. The whole thing makes me sick.

Back to writing, normally scheduled events were not so nice to my writing schedule. Work was pretty solid including a meetup of beCraft on Thursday that talked about the Go language and a specific use case. Am I getting old that I just enjoy Python and don't really want to learn yet another language? I still find Go interesting, it has some built-ins that make it pretty good for, well, okay, aren't I writing about novels?

Back to writing, again. With a trip to see our Hawaii friend before she goes back this week, Saturday just disappeared. Not in a bad way except for writing-wise. So now I am looking at nearly a 10,000 word deficit. My best day has been around 2,000 words, so I really need a few 3,000 word days to make it a bit easier on the days that I can't sit down and write that many. And now this post is getting pretty long itself.

Let me know your thoughts about Friday, if you need a place to vent, or about languages if you understand the programming world. I am writing this early so that I might have a chance after church to put in many solid hours of novel writing. I remember back in the day when a few pages for a paper was back-breaking, now though I am pushing for a novel, crazy.

Writing Update and Other Things

I have ten things to write about that aren't part of NaNoWriMo, of course. My story isn't quite on the rocks word-wise, but I just wrote a post and have a few other things that are on my mind thanks to work and church.

Suffering is Not for the Faint of Heart - Talking about suffering, let's hope all your tribulations are small and solvable.

I also would like to write about how faith can come with writing. A small sticking point that somehow reason can't be applied to faith. Or maybe, it can't lead to faith. It is a very interesting question that I am somewhat invested in.

So I hope my unwritten words this week read my post on suffering, because they are suffering from me not writing them. Currently I have 6,987 very rough draft words. At the end of today I am supposed to be done with 13,333 words. A difference of nearly seven thousand words. Which if you read my post means that I still need to write nearly four hours today. Oof.

You can follow my progress at the NaNoWriMo site. Any encouragement welcome.

Anyway, I need to change my writing situation physically for a while. More words will come, hopefully a story with them.

Beginning of November Updates

Ran a 5k yesterday. It was a trail run, which was fun, but I am certainly not in the shape I was when I discontinued running a few years ago. Despite the varied terrain I managed a time of 32:42. Which is about the time of my first ever 5k. Definitely room for improvement. I know there has to be a Turkey Trot or something similar around here near the end of this month, so I hope to improve incrementally.

Also updated my Links page so that it actually has consistent formatting. For some reason Blogger's formatting is not very healthy. You may have noticed that my blog has changed formats quite a bit, but that is all in an attempt to keep it legible. Maybe I will have to switch back to the Magazine or other formats.

Also carved a pumpkin and gave out very little candy.

Edit:
After getting home and giving the Subaru a cursory brake inspection to see if the pads needed replaced, I realized that today is the first day of Novel Writing! I almost forgot. I will start, right after this:

Here is a pumpkin picture.

This is my pumpkin. It was interesting to work with a 45 lb white pumpkin.

Thanks to Jessie for taking pictures! I didn't put her pumpkin up, but she did a really good job with the patterns she chose.