A Chilling Dystopia

I’m currently reading Nano’s End by Stan Hope, a sci-fi dystopian novel. It has one chilling, perfectly-dystopian chapter that I needed to share for reasons that will become clear. The novel portrays a world flooded with nanotech bots that affect the brain’s functioning. They’re very popular but have been banned because of bad side effects.

The police capture someone who sells these robots and are looking for information about the engineers and programmers who manufacture them. In a bid to reduce her sentence, the suspect gives a phony address. The government of the novel often gives police permission to conduct a military raid on people’s homes without knocking or identifying themselves — since some nanobots have been programmed to listen out for signs of police and self-destruct. Even though all they have is the uncorroborated testimony (of someone who has every reason to give them anything to get them off her back), they still obtain the license to perform this raid. The government hates these nanobots which have been causing a lot of social unrest.

Unfortunately for a 92 year old woman, she happens to live at the address that the informant mentioned. Purely coincidentally of course. She had certainly never manufactured any nanotech bots before. Nor could she: she switched to astrophysics in college after a semester of electrical engineering — which wasn’t her thing. The closest thing she had to a nanobot device was a device common in her neighbourhood, one that sealed her fate. It was a personal protection bracelet: if ever she was attacked she just had to press a button and it would calculate the aggressors’ trajectories and start to fire particle beams at them.

The police burst in without identifying themselves. The woman, thinking that some bandits have just broken into her house, presses the button on her safety bracelet. This sets off some particle beams. Encountering this resistance, the police unload 39 rounds into her from their own particle beam devices, 5 or 6 of which hit and kill her.

They find no nanobots on her so they leave some of their own nanobots (which they carry in their police vehicles for such purposes) there to justify the raid. Fortunately, the detectives investigating her death figure out what happened and charges are laid. As a result of this fiasco, that police department is expanded from 8 employees to 30. To better protect the citizens from the nanobots.

Now, why am I telling this chapter and what does it say as a warning sign for us today? (It’s probably too obvious, in which case I apologise. If you know the answer, please withhold until tomorrow when I post the explanation.)