MIND FIELDS by Brad Aiken

brain and used to control the thoughts and actions of their host.  He knew better than to propose this idea to Senator Cole; a man like Cole would never have the vision to take such a bold step in the name of God and Country.  Instead, he enlisted an NSA operative by the name of James O’Grady, who he knew would appreciate the advantages of mind-controlling nanobots.  With the support of the NSA, Stetson could insure the security that would be needed to covertly bring his ideas to fruition. 
    All the security in the world would be useless, of course, without the capability to develop the mind-controlling nanobots.  It was imperative to find a scientist who not only had the skills to develop the nanobots, but who also could be persuaded that Stetson’s ideas were the right ones.  This would not be an easy task; scientists are, by nature, an altruistic group.  Stetson searched long and hard for the right man to do the research needed to accomplish his goal.  He needed someone equally ambitious as he was brilliant, someone with the wealth to sponsor the research without making the government’s support obvious, and someone who could be trusted, or at least intimidated, into absolute secrecy.  By the spring of 2042, he had made his choice.  JT Anderson was already one of the wealthiest men in the country.  His brilliance was incontrovertible, and his willingness to stretch the boundaries of integrity were well known; no one really believed that he had just happened to make the critical breakthroughs in nanotechnology immediately after leaving Hopkins.  Even though the courts exonerated him, no one really believed that he hadn’t stolen the work that rightfully belonged to Hopkins.  They just gave him credit for being a particularly brilliant thief. 
      Anderson was the perfect choice, and when Russell Stetson approached him with the idea of using his expertise in nanotechnology for a very patriotic and even more lucrative cause, he was not hard to persuade.  He proved to be very adroit at his task, and within a few years, had developed a synthetic bionic implant the size of a pea that could be surgically inserted into the human brain and could be used to introduce thoughts and actions into its host.  It was constructed of thousands of nanobots, which together made up a small machine capable of generating electrical impulses that could be read by the surrounding neurons.  By meticulously studying brain wave patterns, he was able to develop a digital language with which he could program his bionic implant.  The digital signal would then be converted into electrical impulses that the brain would interpret as original thought.  When implanted in the right frontal lobe, the device was capable of making its host perform whatever action the bionic implant was programmed to suggest.
      The first obvious flaw in the work was that cutting the someone’s head open to insert the bionic implant was not the ideal way to covertly gain control of the subject.  Cutting a person’s head open would definitely arouse suspicion.  Anderson had toyed with the idea of injecting nanobots programmed to assemble themselves into the bionic implant once inside the body, but he had no idea how to insure that it would assemble itself at the proper location in the right frontal lobe.
      The second obvious flaw was that his inorganic nanobots would create a foreign body in the host, one that could cause seizure-inducing irritation, and would be detectable by standard X-ray techniques.  Again, this was not ideal for a covert operation.
      Anderson had struggled with these issues until he heard Dr. Sandra Fletcher speak at the Hopkins Symposium introducing organic nanobots.  The organic bots would solve the problem of host rejection and detection, and the programming skills of someone like her or Paul Hingston would give him a fighting chance of getting injectable bots to migrate to the right frontal lobe where they could be