Story:Netrixia's Plague

This is the story of the Nano Fmall, a rising star in House Gosnoth.

Chapter 1
Fmall of House Gosnoth was frustrated. This was the third time that his robo-plague had failed, falling apart before it got past the Hackbot stage. He sat in his small, round, cluttered room, staring at the large device that took up half the left wall, humming and whirring as if taunting him to try again. Fmall got up out of the chair next to his desk, and walked over to a window that took up most of the other wall space in the room. He looked down at the planet revolving below him, a world aglow with the fires and lights of industry. The world was Netrixia, the fifth factory planet of the Nanosan empire. Fmall lived in space-station Beta, one of the three such stations that orbited Netrixia. The planet was also plagued, which was the reason for Fmall’s frustration.

He was broken from his brooding by a much younger voice, that of his little brother Dahhas. Dahhas was only 16 years old, and had a flair for the theatric. When asked what he wanted for his Beginning Day augmentation, he gave his parents a set of plans for a ‘chrono cape,’ a holographic projector that made a long cloak depicting all the different time zones of the Nanosan empire. The ‘cape’ was now implanted in his back, and often fluttered behind him as he ran, making him look like a small demi-god of time.

“Hey Fmall, how’s it going?” he asked.

“Quiet Dahhas, I’m thinking, replied Fmall, “don’t bother me right now.”

“Just because you’re eight years older than me doesn’t mean you can just blow me off. I want to know how your plague is going, otherwise I might have to take it upon myself to fix Netrixia’s problem.”

Fmall turned to his brother, “Many minds greater than yours have been trying to fix the ‘Problem’ as you call it. What makes you think you can do any better?”

Dahhas’ face patterns shifted to a darker hue, forming what passed for a Nano frown.

“And how do you have a claim to one of the greater minds of House Gosnoth? If you can’t even put a robo-plague together, I don’t think you have much to boast about. Truly, even I, a sixteen-year-old, yet to Become, can create a basic plague.”

Now it was Fmall’s turn to frown; he remembered that plague quite well. It had been turned on him, as something of a practical joke that got a bit out of proportion. The robots created by it infiltrated the door control systems in Fmall’s family’s section of the station, and made it so that Fmall couldn’t go through any of them. It had become a major problem when the plague’s tagger system malfunctioned, locking the entire family away from the rest of the colony.

“Yes, said Fmall, “but you made a small, generic plague. I am trying to incorporate a new set of technology into mine, and to make it grow all the way to subclass three. Otherwise it won’t be powerful enough to challenge the Lighfliers in battle, let alone destroy them. And I am very very close to creating such a plague. Thus, I do have a claim on being one of the better minds of the House, if not one of the great ones.”

“What technology are you trying to add?” asked Dahhas.

“House Glonog’s photon destruction fields; the Lightfliers main set of ranged weaponry are lasers. The fields would completely negate that channel of attack. But the fields take copious amounts of energy to activate, and I can’t make a plague that capability.