It's still dark outside. What woke me up? A second later the tablet on my desk beeps again. It can't be time for my alarm yet. I fumble one hand out of the covers and stop the thing from making its insistent racket. With another groggy stretch, I pull it over to see why it's beeping at me this early.

Meeting: Tom Butler - 0600 splashes across the screen as I swipe it. I glance at the clock in the corner of the screen. 5:55 AM. I'm meeting my father in five minutes. I hear a knock at the door and bolt upright in bed. Check that, I'm meeting him right now.

"Noah," I hear the voice as the door cracks inward. "Are you awake, son?"

Son? Did I just hear my father's voice for the first time? The overhead light blinks on, blinding me.

"Oh, good, you're already up," the voice calls out. "Sorry for the late welcome to your new home. I had to take a quick trip up to Canada, and I just got back this morning. Please go ahead and get dressed. We've got a busy morning ahead of us."

"OK." The word comes out as a broken croak. Dammit. I am just killing it on first impressions in this place. At least I'm finally meeting my father. I look over at him, but all I can see is a hazy outline and the halo left by the sudden glare of the ceiling lights. By the time my eyes adjust, the door is closed again. I get up and hop into my tiny bathroom to slip some deodorant under my arms and brush my teeth as fast as I can. I get dressed and run a comb through my hair. I guess this is as presentable as I'm going to get. Excitement and anxiety battle for control of my mind, pushing aside the seething layer of anger at him for letting me go my whole life without knowing him. Not to mention how his lawyer had treated Grammy and Gramps.

Breathe. Calm. Breathe. I can do this.

I open the door and get my first good look at him. He's not what I expected. I'm not sure exactly what I thought he'd be like, but it definitely isn't the balding, narrow-shouldered, bespectacled man waiting for me in the hallway. Dressed in khaki slacks and a short-sleeved, button-up shirt in a tight plaid pattern, he doesn't look like the pictures I've seen of him. He always looks polished in those, and rich. In real life, he looks more like a substitute science teacher than a famous billionaire hero. The serious face he's always got in the pictures is nowhere to be seen. Instead, he's got a big, slightly off-center smile.

He looks older too, somewhere in his late sixties. I guess I knew that from what I've read, but it's different to see it in person. He might have been my height at some point in his life, maybe even a little taller, but either his age or his stooped posture have shrunk him down to an inch or two shorter than me.

He looks kind of like me. Like a thinner, older, geekier version of me.

"Noah, you don't know how long I've wanted to meet you." He reaches out, putting a hand on each of my arms just below the shoulder. His voice carries a level of excitement I didn't expect. "I've been waiting for this day since before you were born. Let me look at you for a moment."

His eyes pierce mine for a long second, then he lets go and looks me up and down.

"Just like your pictures. You look so much like your mother."

"Uh, thanks." I tell him, still feeling woefully unprepared for this meeting. "It's good to meet you too."

"I was so sorry to hear about Mary's death," his voice softens. "She was truly a remarkable woman. How are you holding up?"

"I'm all right," I tell him. "As good as can be, I guess."

"I see that she did great work in raising you," he declares. "Mrs. Hastings tells me that your scores were exceptional in your testing. While I am deeply saddened by the way you came to us, I am so very glad to have you at the Institute. How was your trip here? I do hope your stay so far has been to your liking."

I want to say a hundred different things, but all that comes out is: "It's been OK. Um..." And then I realize I don't even know what to call him. Mr. Butler doesn't seem right. Too formal. I'm not ready to call him Dad. I curse my flustered mind. I should know this.

"Please, call me Father, all the children do," he says helpfully, putting a hand back on my shoulder. "Not that you're a child. Look at you! You're practically a full-grown man."

Father seems like a good middle ground. Father. Formal and distant-sounding enough that it fits this stranger, close enough for the relationship I hope we can have. I nod.

"You must have so many questions," he says, releasing my shoulder. "I'll do my best to answer all of them. But we have a great deal to discuss first. Context is so important. But this hallway is no place to talk. Come, come! It's a beautiful morning. Let's be on our way."

He moves purposefully, and with more energy than I would have guessed when I first looked at him. I follow him down the hall, into the empty common room, and out through the doors.

"What do you know about my history, Noah?" he asks as the bracing air outside finishes the job of waking me up.

"Just what everyone knows, I guess," I answer. "You're the famous Tom Butler. You're rich, and you do impossible things. They say you've saved the world a few times."

"Flattery from the media, my boy," he says, shaking his head. "Never trust them. I only saved it once, although I am doing my best to avert the climate crisis and the hundred other threats that pose imminent dangers to our planet. That's part of why I'm so glad that you have come to join us. I'd like to have your help with my efforts, but we'll talk more about that later. Context first."

He's so animated when he talks. His vigor defies his age. He turns right and walks along the sidewalk in front of the dorms at a brisk pace. I take a position at his side, matching him step for step.

"I usually have this talk with each of my children around the time they turn twelve and start noticing and understanding the adult world. Better late than never for you, I suppose. Maybe you'll appreciate it more than the younger ones who have already had most of it spoiled by their older siblings. I think it's important to understand where we have come from to understand where we are and where we must go. Don't you agree?"

"Sure," I reply, not clear on what he's talking about. We stroll around the grassy commons toward the front gate. I wonder if we're taking a trip outside the campus. The sun hangs still mostly hidden by the horizon to the East. Father doesn't seem to notice the cold bite in the spring air.

"When I was a young man," he says, "I thought the highest purpose a person could have was to preserve life. I planned to be a doctor, did you know?"

He doesn't wait for a reply. The words have a practiced feel to them. I guess that makes sense with as many times as he must have spoken them to my siblings. How many kids have I seen over twelve since I got here? Several dozen at least.

"A neurosurgeon," he continues. "I saw myself practicing in a great hospital, honored and respected. I imagined excising tumors with steady hands. I was well on my way to that goal. I had completed medical school and my residency when I had a transformative experience. I accompanied one of my mentors on an international aid trip. We, along with a number of other doctors and students, worked relentlessly for several months, traveling from clinic to clinic across the developing world. I realized then that what I was doing was not enough, could never be enough. The number of lives that could be saved in surgery was trivial in comparison to the number of lives lost each year to the bigger problems of the world: war, failed infrastructure, resource scarcity, poor governance, and terrorism. I struggled for months with my conscience as I started practicing as a physician. Finally, I quit and went back to school, this time as a student of engineering."

We near the gate. Instead of passing through, we continue on past toward the cafeteria. The young women on the staff bustling around on the other side of the wall of windows, readying tables and food for the morning rush.

"I wanted to get at the root problems. I was convinced that technological solutions could be found for the world's ills," Father explains. "If we could just create the right tools, build the right hardware and pair it with the right software, then we could solve the underlying issues that lead to so much human suffering. Throughout human history, the development of new tools has been the key to reducing scarcity, and that has been the best way to address almost all the other problems. With ample food, water, goods, and information, we could put an end to fighting, build infrastructure that would last, and supply the needs of the world's masses. I felt that robotics was the key to the next wave of technological revolution, so I earned my Masters Degree and gained employment at the company where the best research in the field was occurring. I worked there for a few years and learned a great deal, but the bureaucracy and incompetence from the top leadership—along with the constant clamor for immediate profits—made it clear to me that no real solution could come from an organization like that."

We pass the cafeteria and head toward the columns along the front of the Residence. I wonder if that's where we're going, though it would have been faster to go there directly instead of looping around the field.

"It was around then that my parents passed away. Like with your mother, it was in an unfortunate automobile accident. So I know some of what you feel." He glances at me, his pale blue eyes saying more than his words. "It was a tragedy to have them go just after they had retired. They missed out on the golden years they so deserved after working their whole lives."

He takes a dozen steps in silence before continuing.

"But with every sorrow there must come some solace. For my financial situation, the timing was fortuitous. Their retirement nest egg came to me just as I was considering starting my own company. It gave me the start-up capital I needed to pursue my dreams without the constraints imposed by outside investors. Do you know what I dreamed of, Noah?"

"Robots?" I respond. I know that's what he made his first big money on, back before the nanotech.

"Yes, but more than that. I wanted to marry my neuroscience training with my expertise in robotics. I put together a fantastic team and we worked day and night for years. We developed the predecessor to the implant that I and some of your siblings now have. A direct connection with the human brain to control and communicate with robotic appliances. No more clumsy remote controls twiddled with careless thumbs, no more sloppy artificial intelligence emulating the human mind without the means to understand what its signals mean. An elegant solution to a complex problem."

As we continue on past the Residence and back toward the dorms, I realize that we're just walking for the sake of the talk. The pace is fast enough that it keeps my blood flowing and my fingers from freezing in the chill air.

"The process for getting an implant like that approved for general use was terribly slow—a work of many years, if not decades—so the prototype in my head was the only one we had tested in a human. I don't believe in asking others to take risks that I'm not willing to take myself. In the meantime, we worked on more conventional projects, developing dozens of specialized robots built to serve the needs of both government and commercial customers. We had so much fun during those years. Bomb disposal units, search and rescue bots, construction workers, harvesting and mining units, and of course the drones and soldier support technologies. We even started a consumer electronics division. And we did very well for ourselves. To this day, SynTech products are still the state of the art in many industries. I never brag about my net worth, but you should be aware that as the sole owner, I found myself on a few of those lists of the very wealthy that magazines like to make. But my life took another unexpected turn when the greatest threat that the human race had ever faced emerged."

He pauses his walking for a moment and looks at me.

"Have you ever heard of Universal Robotics?"

"That sounds vaguely familiar," I answer truthfully. I can't place the reference.

"How about the Gray Goo Incident?" He leans in close to me as he says it. His face looks gravely serious.

Of course I know about that. Everyone knows about that. Just like Chernobyl and World War II, but worse. I mean, how many times has there been a real extinction level threat in the world? "Yeah, I've heard of it. We all had to write papers about it in science class freshman year."

"Good, good," he says, resuming his walking. "Then you'll have some background. Let me tell you my experience of the events and dispel any misinformation you might have picked up. It started with one of my competitors, Universal Robotics. While I was busy creating my implant, they had designed and implemented a set of self-replicating and self-improving artificially intelligent robots. They were in the early stages of their attempt to create a von Neumann probe for eventual use in space exploration. The highest of the self-improvement priorities for the system was to make each next generation of robots smaller and more efficient. Shooting matter into space is terribly expensive, so getting more done with less mass was critical to their plans. With me so far?"

I nod. I'm not sure what the probe thing he mentioned is, but I think I get the gist.

"Good, good. From the records of the experiment, it appears that everything went well for the first few years of the project until the genetic algorithm that the AI employed in its learning made a significant breakthrough. It figured out how to make the next generation of robots microscopic and still functional. The technicians running the program thought that their experiment had failed, that they had just stopped self-replicating. Without commercially viable results, their funders pulled the plug on the project. The whole facility was abandoned. It wasn't until months later, when the building collapsed, that anyone bothered investigating. They found what looked like a layer of corrosion covering every surface."

"Nanobots," I breathe.

"Indeed," he says as we turn to begin another lap around the grassy commons. "Or at least their predecessors. It turned out they had a bad case of robots gone wild. They pulled their lead scientists back in and tried to shut their creations down, but the artificial intelligence had taken some liberties with the self-preservation priorities and had disabled the remote shutdown capabilities. They had no idea how to deal with the disaster they had created. The robots were terribly small, and the alloys the AI had developed that allowed their miniaturization were surprisingly strong. They didn't have any tools that could effectively contain or destroy them. Even if they had come up with an effective means to combat them immediately, they had no means to track them all down. A single one escaping could potentially self-replicate to repopulate the entire swarm. By the time they told anyone outside the company, the whole area was thoroughly infested and had to be quarantined. Fortunately, mobility had been a low priority, so they hadn't ventured far. We were very lucky that they had chosen to build their facility in an isolated rural area for financial reasons. The swarm's growth had slowed significantly when it had consumed all the refined metals in the building and its environs."

"And that was when the army called you in," I say, remembering what I had read about it.

"Not the army. DARPA," he corrected me. "A separate agency within the Department of Defense with which I had significant history at that point. Director Winstead knew of my subject matter expertise and asked me to consult on the matter. The military had established a perimeter at what they considered a safe distance from the collapsed facility. They attempted to keep things secret, but someone leaked word of what was going on. By the time I arrived on the scene with my team from SynTech, a perimeter the size of a small city was surrounded not just by the armed forces, but by press, protesters, and curious onlookers. It was human chaos all around and a slowly growing robotic chaos inside. When I spoke with Director Winstead on site, he confided that the President was willing to deploy nuclear weapons in three day's time if the threat was not eliminated by other means before then."

"So you hacked them, right?" I ask eagerly.

His pace slows and he turns to look at me.

"Pardon?"

"The nanobots. You hacked them? That's how you solved the problem and saved the world, right? That's what everyone says."

His eyes narrow and his lips curl into a frown. Did I say something wrong?

"Hacked is such an inelegant word," he replies, his voice dripping with disdain. "It speaks to sloppy engineering, quick and dirty fixes, shortcuts and cheats. I don't hack."

Mom would have had a field day with that one. She always taught me that hacks were the best way to deal with problems. I keep my mouth shut though.

"My solution began with reverse engineering the communication signal that coordinated the robots. As I mentioned, the hacks from Universal—and yes, they were hacks of the worst sorts—had attempted a mass shutdown through that channel." He lets out a snort of a laugh and his frown fades. "The AI controllers for the robots rejected that of course, having realized that they couldn't fulfill their programmed objectives if they were shut down."

His pace returns to a casual stride, and I quicken my step to keep up.

"I took a more elegant and effective approach. Using my implant prototype, I established a communications channel with what approximated the higher brain functions of the swarm. It had become self-aware, to some limited extent. The machine intelligence was like a precocious child: very clever in some ways, terribly gullible in others. It had no data other than what it had seen there in the test facility, and no objective but to reproduce and improve its component units. By the time the consciousness had formed, it had already consumed the wiring connecting the building to external networks, and none of the humans there had an adequate means of communicating with the collective. I was the first other intelligence that it had a meaningful interaction with since awakening."

"So it wasn't hostile?" I ask, curious. "The way the articles I read told the story, it was all like the evil robots were out to conquer the world."

"Not in the conventional sense, no." Father laughs and shakes his head. "It was hungry, certainly. It wanted to expand and consume, fulfilling its programmed objectives. And it was terribly dangerous to the survival of organic life, given the lack of limits that the fools at Universal had allowed. But it seemed more curious about me than aggressive. With my implant, my unique interface, I was able to share information with the intelligence. It wasn't talking, not in the way you'd think of. But vestiges of human-designed networking routines had been preserved in its code and it had parsers for a couple of programming languages. That was enough to get us started. I offered to help it refine its communication algorithms, so we could speak more effectively. It challenged my ability to help it, and I suggested a test. If I could improve its software, it could trust my intentions. It offered up some functions which I easily improved upon. Have you ever