Now we are all sons of bitches - Kenneth Bainbridge, after testing the first nuclear bomb -- Anon Guest
[AN: I've been made aware of the Shiva quote, but that happened after the detonation in war as far as I recall]
Destruction. Devastation. Brutal elimination of the enemy, their buildings, their society. That has always been the ultimate goal of war. Winning, however, has gone further than razing the enemy castle and salting the ground so that they can no longer prosper. It has escalated beyond melting the ground of the capital and rendering a significant area around it deadly to anyone who dared set foot on it.
Behold. A tiny vial containing a cubic centimetre of an apparently still beige substance. The vial is thin glass and can be concealed inside a pocket or a hand or... just about anywhere. It is worse than deadly, long term. It is the worst weapon ever made. The general looking at it is singularly unimpressed.
"The hell is that?" said General Balana. "You said you had a new WMD. This is a toy." He picked it up and made to pitch it into the disposal, but the egghead in the white coat gently removed it from his hands.
"Best not to do that, sir. Breaking the vial will deploy the weapon and this form of friendly fire is not what we want. This is the deadliest weapon ever made, and it's not currently programmed for a target."
"How in all that's holy can a little bitty ampule of Gramma's caramel sauce be a deadly weapon?" said General Balana.
"It's actually nanites in a sustaining solution. Enough to keep them maintained indefinitely in a cyclical cascade of chemical reactions," the egghead stopped when the general's eyes glazed over, and dumbed it down a bit. "There's little tiny robots in here that are made to make a grey goo situation happen to an area they're told to destroy... and they haven't been told what to destroy yet."
"I don't see any tiny robots in there. How much of this multi billion project is horse pucky?"
The lead scientist re-evaluated the words they had to use for the general. Some people really needed the learn-to-read levels of lies-to-children in order to understand anything. Obviously, this general was one of those people.
"The tiny robots are very tiny," said the scientist. "Like... grains of sand in a picture of a beach. You don't see them because they're too small to pick out."
"I knew that, I'm not stupid," said the general. "So what do they do?"
Finally. The point. The scientist remembered to keep it simple. "They eat things to make copies of themselves," she began. "They also scoop up useful stuff for the good guys. When they know where they're supposed to be, they stay inside and eat everything there. When they run out of stuff in the area... that's when they stop."
"So it eliminates the enemy and leaves the infrastructure?" The general picked up the vial again, peering at the viscous liquid within.
"Uh. No. It eliminates everything and leaves resources ready for exploitation." Those were supposedly words that a general could understand, since the orders frequently contained them as objectives.
"What? All of it? Even their weapons?"
"Yes, sir. Even the weapons."
"Even their buildings?"
"Yes, sir. Even the buildings."
"Even all the art?"
"Especially all the art. And the gold and the jewels and the money and the holdings, and the things in the museums and every brick and all of the mortar and all the roads and anything you could think of," sighed the scientist, heading off half an hour's worth of questioning.
"Well if we can't get the good stuff, then what's the point?" General Balana tossed the vial at the disposal bin, too quick for the scientist to stop him.
"No! It doesn't have a stop function!"
Nothing happened. At least on the macro level. "See?" said General Balana. "Useless."
"Sir, you have just killed this entire nation. We have four months. Five at the outset."
"Horse pucky. There's no way that caramel sauce can cancel the school holidays."
The scientist let him leave, sending urgent emails to their teams in an attempt to reprogram the nanobots after they'd been released. A situation that none of them had foreseen. They had six months to save everything they held dear about their nation.
Step one - evacuate the initial contamination site. This included beaming out all the source code into other secure areas so that Weapons Development could become Weapon Disarmament as soon as possible. This was done in the same day.
Diverting the funds to disarming the beige menace would take longer, and they didn't have that time. They worked off hours. They worked every hour they had. They worked tirelessly. The kill switch failed. The process of target elimination could only go so fast. Turning the nanomachines off of carbon, off of calcium. Off of each minutia responsible for keeping the human body working. Bit by painful bit.
Unfortunately for the nation, General Balana was on the funding advisory board, and shut down all nanite research and development programs, stating that they only made caramel sauce that didn't work.
He would melt less than three months later as the invisible machines devoured his bones first. Too late to act, by far.
There is nothing left of the nation but the infrastructure. Overgrown by weeds that the nanites would not eat. The people are gone, and no people can go there. The active programming prioritised the important, isolated by their habit of sitting in one place for extended daylight hours. Then they worked their way down and down until nothing organic or edible was left.
Death by Bureaucracy is the slowest and therefore the most terrible.
[Image (c) Can Stock Photo / Myvector]
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