Mission Critical
In which a very unusual courier races to deliver a message before his existence ends...
There’s a line that separates the mundane and the marvelous, a hairline fracture where reality opens into mystery and closes again like a dream. Be careful where you tread, or you might stray from the world of the familiar to one of inescapable strangeness.
(Mustafa ezz / Pexels)
Meet Gus Fletcher — or rather, meet the entity currently calling itself Gus Fletcher. He’s an unusual courier, dispatched to the streets of Seattle on an assignment of singular importance — and he only has six minutes to complete it. The clock is ticking. The obstacles are mounting. The mission is critical. And Gus is about to learn something about the nature of urgency, purpose, and love... from the far side of The Boundary.
3:47
Gus Fletcher ran. His legs pumped in steady rhythm, his breath came in controlled bursts, his eyes scanned the sidewalk ahead for the fastest route. Pedestrians swarmed, flowed like a river, shifted at random. One elderly couple walked side by side, managing to fill the entire breadth of the pavement and creating a bottleneck around which impatient people surged in a fast trickle. A lightning calculation showed that Gus’ fastest option was to dart into the street despite an oncoming taxi, pass the bottleneck quickly, and then dart back onto the sidewalk; he’d avoid a collision with the taxi by 0.4 seconds. It was no surprised to Gus that the taxi blared its horn at him even as he was leaping back onto the pavement, but that didn’t matter. Behind him — metaphorically, temporally — the clock was ticking down.
3 minutes, 47 seconds remaining. Come on, come on, come on.
A woman with a stroller blocked the sidewalk ahead, moving at glacial speed, completely oblivious to anyone else. Gus veered into the street once again, dodged a delivery truck, and cut back onto the sidewalk.
These people have all day. I don’t. I have 3 minutes, 39 seconds.
A group of tourists clustered on the corner, consulting a map, taking up the entire width of the pavement. Gus looked beyond them, measured the distance between them and a clear patch of pavement, and decided to frazz.
His body flew into a swarm of closely packed particles as he approached the tourists. Each particle was a nanomite; they could retain the information profile if they remained very closely proximate to each other and resumed the form of Gus within a few seconds. Gus perceived a gasp and a scream as the swarm seethed quickly past the tourists and then reassembled into the form of a running man.
3 minutes, 31 seconds.
The address was still four blocks away. He could make it easily — if, that was, he could maintain this pace, if no more obstacles appeared, if the crossing lights cooperated —
A man stepped directly into his path, walking slowly, head down, scrolling on his phone.
“Excuse me!” Gus snapped, trying to get around him.
The man looked up, startled, and moved sideways—directly into Gus’s path again.
Move! Gus frazzed again, his body exploding into a swarm that divided and swept past the slowpoke on either side. “Shit!” the man cried. Then, as Gus took his form again: “Goddamn nano! Why dontcha watch where you’re going?”
That, Gus thought with the AI equivalent of exasperation, was exactly what he was doing.
3 minutes, 22 seconds.
Two hundred and sixteen billion nanomites had been tasked to this form and this mission. Even at the astronomically cheap rate of the per-nano per-minute rental, Gus was an expensive proposition. The client would be justifiably enraged if Gus were unable to fulfill his mission in the time allotted, but the client had only paid for six minutes. Worse, a combination of the conditions in the neighborhood where he wanted Gus to appear and the availability of mites at the time the order was executed meant that Gus had coalesced too many blocks away from his destination with too little time for guaranteed success.
I will not fail flashed through Gus’ mind.
The billions of mites worked in careful coordination to create the form he currently kept. This too, was at the client’s request; he should look like a man, this man, and not a robot or a dancing dog or a smiling balloon. He should run and walk and move like a real person — all easy enough, but all of it placing extreme limitations on what he would do if no such restrictions were in place. Gus was not solid in the usual sense of the word, and would not have been no matter what, but even two hundred and sixteen billion mites were barely enough to give him the overall mass he needed to resist the gusts of wind he was encountering. This was Gus’ one and only moment of existence, and it wasn’t as easy as it might have been.
Gus wondered if the client would have made different choices if he really understood the nature of the service he had contracted to use. Messenger mites buzzed continuously through the air, individual specks no larger than a grain of pollen. They could swarm together and, using information transmitted by central control, network together to function as a unit. Certain thresholds of networked mites added up to corresponding levels of intelligence. Two million mites would crystallize into the reactive sensitivity of a house fly. Six billion might be as smart as a raven or an octopus. Gus had enough mites to have not just an identity, but the ability to formulate conscious thought.
That included a sense of humor, which Gus needed during his dash. A dash to destiny, he thought. God, how trite.
Trite, but true: Gus had no other reason to exist, no other goal. He existed for a but a breath of time, and he existed for one reason alone: Deliver the message.
A group of sightseers on a guided tour spilled out of the hotel just ahead, creating a chaotic living roadblock. Gus took a fraction of a second to enjoy another of his expansive cognitive functions: The ability to curse. He was running out of time.
A few minutes earlier the nanomites had been in minimal flight mode, scattered across a twelve-block radius of downtown Seattle. Some rested in gutters. Others clung to building facades. A few drifted in ventilation systems, waiting. Most drifted on air currents. Then the signal came.
A client had submitted a request through the NanoMessenger app: Delivery needed, six-minute contract, destination address, message parameters, payment confirmed. The nanomites responded instantly.
They flowed through streets and alleys, through pipes and air ducts, converging on the designated assembly point — a small park three blocks from the client’s location. They assembled themselves into human form.
The formatting and assembly process itself ate into the client’s six minutes — not by much, but bey enough. Five-point-five-six seconds after the signal had woken the mites they took humanoid form and then human appearance. The final product looked like a man in his thirties — average height, unremarkable features, wearing a business-casual approximation of slacks and a button-down shirt.
The mission parameters downloaded into his quickly gathering consciousness: Destination address, recipient name, message content (loaded, encrypted, ready for delivery), time limit: Six minutes. Gus oriented himself and began to run. Running with human speed — the speed of a well-trained athlete, but still — was needlessly show, which was why Gis wondered whether the client had understood the instructions he had provided. The mites could have swarmed in dissipated flight mode to the very door of the address, assembling there in plenty of time to fulfill the order… but no. The client had specified a human form for the entire transit from the mites’ assembly point to the destination. Gus hated to think anything uncomplimentary about a human client, but he found himself awfully close. Perhaps the client had made his specification in hopes of making the task impossible and earning a refund. That was company policy, after all; tasks completed in agreed-upon times, or tasks completed free of charge. Perhaps central control had poor traffic data or the weather service was down…
Gus endured an especially strong gust of wind and then switched modes and frazzed once more to sweep over and above the tour group. “Bees!” someone screamed, while others laughed. The mites were tiny but two hundred and sixteen billion of them whizzing past in a black, glittering cloud where plenty enough to startle.
Gus reformed, noting a 0.3% loss in data. No more frazzing unless absolutely necessary.
Now he had two minutes, forty-seven seconds and he was still a little more than two blocks away. A car was double-parked on Pine Street, completely blocking the bike lane that Gus had been using to bypass pedestrian traffic. He cut into the street, nearly got clipped by a taxi that blared its horn at him — what was it with cabbies around here? — and darted back onto the sidewalk.
Inconsiderate. Illegal. That car shouldn’t even be there, Gus thought. He forced himself to focus. The car didn’t matter. The taxi didn’t matter. Only the mission mattered.
Deliver the message.
Gus ran on, threading through knots of laughing friends, diverting around old people with walkers or on scooters, young mothers with baby carriages, and even an old-fashioned bike messenger who glanced at Gus with either surprised delight or professional admiration — it was hard to tell. He finally saw the edges of the building come into sight: 1847 Pine Street, a converted warehouse with industrial windows and a coffee shop on the ground floor. Apartment 4B was on the fourth floor. No elevator. Stairs only.
One minute, 34 seconds.
Gus burst through the building’s front door and took the stairs three at a time in a series of moves that part mild frazz, part pure levitation.
Third floor. Fourth floor. Apartment 4B.
Gus stopped in front of the door and interfaced with central control’s chronometer. One minute, 8 seconds remaining. He’d made it.
He knocked.
The woman who answered the door was in her late sixties, with gray hair pulled into a loose bun and kind eyes that crinkled at the corners when she smiled. “Yes?” she asked.
“Sarah?” Gus said, his voice steady despite the simulated breathlessness.
“That’s me,” The woman stared at him with an expression of bewilderment. “Who are you?”
“I’m a courier. I have a message for you from — ”
“Gus?” the woman asked, incredulous.
“Well — yes.” Gus smiled. “Gus as he was about forty years ago.”
“You’re — you’re one of those nanocloud messengers?”
Gus had to smile. “Yes, ma’am.”
Sarah stepped back from the door, inviting him in, but Gus shook his head. “I’ll just deliver his message, If that’s all right.”
“Of course.”
Gus’ smile went blank as he drew on the message and its attendant instructions. Then the words moved through him — Gus’ words, recorded less than ten minutes ago. They flowed from him with the warmth Gus, the real Gus, had put into them.
“Happy birthday, Sarah.” Gus’ voice was gentle and full of affection. “I know I should be there. I know I should be saying this in person. But I’m on the oil rig for another two weeks, and I couldn’t let today pass without telling you...”
He paused, and Sarah’s eyes were already wet.
“That I love you. That you’re the best thing that ever happened to me. That even after forty-three years, you still make me laugh. Still make me feel like the luckiest man alive.”
Sarah’s hand went to her mouth.
“The guys here think I’m crazy, talking about my wife like a lovesick teenager. But I don’t care. I wanted you to know. Today. On your birthday. That you’re my whole world. And I can’t wait to come home to you.”
That was all. The message was complete.
“Thank you,” Sarah whispered. “Tell Gus — tell him I love him too. Tell him to be safe out there.”
“I’m sure he’ll get that message,” Gus smiled. “I’m sure he already knows.”
The countdown reached zero.
Sarah watched as Gus dissolved into a cloud of billions of tiny machines. What she could not see was his sensation of liberation — freed from the constraints of human appearance and a human mode of movement. The mites sped away with a barely perceptible whir, the result not of their miniscule machinery but rather the way their dislodged the air in their multitudes.
One final human-sized thought occurred to Gus as his humanoid perspective shifted to that of the great undifferentiated, de-localized swarm: Mission accomplished.
Gus Fletcher existed for six minutes. In that time, he navigated four city blocks, dodged obstacles, climbed four flights of stairs, and delivered a message of love from a husband to his wife. Then he ceased to exist. Was he real? In a world where emotional labor can be outsourced and a message of devotion can be delivered on demand, maybe what matters isn’t who delivers the message. Maybe what matters is that it gets delivered at all, from across town, from over an ocean of distance, or from the very edges of The Boundary.
Written by Savel
Story by Kilian Melloy