Snowflakes

A Short Story -

It was about eleven o’clock in the morning, mid July, with the sun blocked by thick clouds of smoke from forest fires thousand miles away. Suddenly the heaven’s gates opened and a snow blizzard hit Boulder, Colorado turning a hot and humid summer day into a freezing chaos without any warning. Wind gusts up to 50 mph, slippery road and near zero visibility brought traffic to near halt on State Highway 93. Dianna Coleman was heading south and barely missed a black F-350 truck that was sliding across the lanes. She took the Table Mesa Drive exit and turned towards NCAR Mesa Laboratory.

Dianna was a research scientist at the National Center for Atmosphere Research (NCAR) and she knew that this kind of extreme weather change was another symptom of rapidly worsening climate crisis.

She arrived to the NCAR parking lot on top of the hill and barely saw the pink-sandstone buildings as the blizzard got worse. She drove slowly to the back entrance, opened the door on her Tesla Model Y.

She had just her shorts and T-shirt on and a freezing wind gust hit her with full force; she was shivering from the cold and the snow was twirling around her. She walked 50 feet towards the door and was covered with snow when she finally managed to get inside. She rushed to the laboratory where she saw Jose Hernandez looking out the window. Jose was a research assistant in Dianna’s team.

“Jesus Christ, Dianna, what is going on out there?” asked Jose. “That blizzard came out of nowhere.”

“There must be some explanation. A snow blizzard in the middle of July is very unusual but could happen if atmospheric conditions are right. If our NNCHF model didn’t predict this so how did this storm get formed?” Dianna responded.

“I looked at all measurements and nothing makes any sense,” Jose replied. “The data just doesn’t add up.”

“Quick, we need to get samples of that snow,” Dianna responded. “If the weather forecasting model failed to predict this event we must collect more data to understand why. Please grab the snow sampling containers from the freezer. We must act quickly! Hurry!” she said while grabbing her insulated jacket that she used inside the cold experiments laboratory.

Dianna and Jose rushed outside to collect snow samples. The parking lot had already over two feet of snow and it was accumulating rapidly. They returned with insulated containers full of snow and headed to the cold experiments laboratory that had state-of-the-art equipment to study snowflakes.

Dianna was looking at the samples they had collected using a powerful computerized microscope. On her screen the AI system was analyzing and classifying the snowflake images but Dianna knew immediately that something was wrong.

“Look, Jose. They are all identical — that is impossible,” she said looking at the images and graphs on the screen. “There must be an error somewhere.”

It is common knowledge that every natural snowflake is different. A snowflake, at its core, is just water molecules that bind together into a particular solid configuration. Most of these configurations have some sort of hexagonal symmetry; this is due to the ways that water molecules with their particular bond angles — defined by the physics of an oxygen atom, two hydrogen atoms, and the electromagnetic force — can bind together. A large, complex snow crystals has hundreds of easily discernible features when viewed through a microscope. For every one of those features, there are literally millions of viable locations that a new branch could form at.

“I need to get a low-temperature scanning electron microscopy images to see what is going on here,” Dianna said to Jose. “Can you turn on and prepare the LTSEM please?”

Jose started prepping the LSTEM equipment. This was the most expensive instrument in the cold experiments laboratory and was used to get very detailed images of frozen objects.

Dianna zoomed in and reviewed the snowflake images at very high resolution. She saw multiple identical snowflakes down to molecular level.

“This is impossible. These snowflakes all look the same down to the smallest details,” she said to Jose. “Something is very wrong in here. Let’s prepare samples from another container.”

The snowflakes from all four containers were all identical. The blizzard conditions outside were getting worse.

* * *

Dianna was looking at the electron microscope images when something caught her attention. She saw a fleck of dust connecting two identical snowflakes. Then she saw another one. And another.

“What is that?” she asked from Jose pointing to the black fleck.

“It could be a smoke particle, there is a lot of that in the air from the wildfires in California,” Jose responded. “The shape looks a bit strange, though.”

Dianna zoomed in to see more details. The object came to focus and she gasped.

“This looks artificial to me. See all those arms and that flat base. It looks almost like some sort of assembly line,” she said pointing to various features visible on the screen. “And that snowflake was still being assembled before this sample was frozen to -170C degrees.”

“Well, that would explain why all the snowflakes look identical, almost like they would have been manufactured,” Jose replied. “But why would anybody to go through all that trouble building a nanobot to make snowflakes? You could just wait until winter and get plenty of snow for free.”

“Unless you want to create havoc and set the nanobots free in the middle of July, when nobody is prepared for a snowstorm?” she said. “This could be a terrorist attack and we are the testing ground.”

“Nanobots sound way too high tech for terrorists. And I have never read about nanobots that can actually assemble molecules, other than in biology where they discovered that CRISPR gene editing tool. That object doesn’t look very biological to me, “ Jose said pointing the object on the screen.

“Well, we discovered this nanobot or whatever this thing is. And based on these samples we have quite a lot of them out there, and they keep making more snowflakes until we figure out how to stop them,” Dianna said. “Let’s isolate a few of them and have a closer look how they work.”

* * *

Colorado blizzard in the middle of July was already worldwide news when similar reports started coming from other parts of the world. In Kabul, Afghanistan the city went from 98F heatwave to blizzard conditions without any warning and the city was covered with two feet of snow. In St Croix, US Virgin Islands reported blizzard conditions that had killed dozens of people. In Italy several cities reported sudden snow storms and fatalities.

Several other reports of snow blizzards came from China, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Australia. Meteorologist around the world didn’t have any idea what was going on and what was causing these extraordinary blizzard conditions.

* * *

“Ok, we have isolated three nanobots in this test chamber. Let’s control the atmospheric conditions and see what makes this thing tick,” said Dianna. “I think we should test the humidity level and temperature first. Can you setup a test grid please? I will turn on the sensor array scanner now.”

“Yes, the grid is now ready. We are sampling at 0.1C degree increments, starting from -30C,” Jose replied. The machinery around the test chamber started making noise. Dianna and Jose were looking at the scanner screen.

“Nothing. The nanobots should have the right atmospheric conditions to make snowflakes. We have supersaturation of water vapor in the air and temperature is within the correct range,” Dianna said. “Let’s add some carbon dioxide in 10 ppm increments.”

“Okay, starting from 100 ppm,” Jose replied. “Adding CO2 in 10 ppm increments now.”

“Wow, did you see that? Looks like 430 ppm is the critical threshold,” she said. “All three nanobots started cranking snowflakes at 430 ppm CO2 level.”

“There are actually four of them now, see the bottom graph there,” Jose pointed out.

“What? We did put only 3 of them inside the chamber,” she said. “ Where did the 4th one come from?”

“Look, there are 6 of them now,” Jose said. “They are self replicating.”

“Let’s reduce the CO2 to 400 ppm level,” Dianna said. “It looks like that is the critical ingredient.”

“We are down at 400 ppm level now. No more snowflakes coming out and we have still 6 of them inside the chamber.”

“So we have a nanobot that uses CO2, air and water vapor to self replicate. It works when the CO2 concentration is over 430 ppm, uses energy from the water vapor and produces snowflakes as output. Did I miss anything important?” Dianna asked.

“They self replicate pretty fast, like once every 30 seconds if the conditions are right,” Jose added.

“I think it is time that we should tell our boss about this discovery, what do you think?” Dianna asked smiling.

“I concur,” Jose replied laughing.

* * *

The discovery of self-replicating Coleman-Hernandez nanobot was the biggest scientific discovery of the decade and it was all over the news. Research institutes around the world were busy trying to validate the results and these nanobots were found everywhere, including in Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station in Antarctica.

Pundits were speculating the nanobot as a sign of extraterrestrial intelligence, and some political commentators were talking about a possible new weapon system that had been released by the government through a laboratory accident.

Climate activists were interested in the peculiar behavior related to CO2 concentration. The 430 ppm threshold was very close to atmospheric carbon dioxide level that had been going up due to ever-growing use of fossil fuels by humanity. There were some speculations that this nanobot was part of a secret geo-engineering project by big oil companies to avoid emissions restrictions.

The self replication of this nanobot was not based on DNA unlike in all other living cells and viruses, so some scientists were exploring the possibility that the nanobot was a totally new life form never seen before.

* * *

“This nanobot is programmable, “ said Jose pointing to the screen after the latest experiment. “Look at the electrical field distribution in the stages below the assembly platform. By swapping the polarity in each stage we can change the replication process.”

Dianna was looking at the latest test results. She had been working with Jose several days to learn more about this mysterious object and how it operated.

Unlike in biological cells that use adenosine triphosphate (ATP) as the energy carrying molecule, they discovered that this nanobot used the energy released by converting water vapor to a snowflake. This energy was consumed by a set of chemical reactions that appeared to be controlled by a molecular encoding scheme that controlled the self replication process.

The “assembly platform” had a spike that acted as the seed for the crystal growth. With air temperature at -15C and supersaturation of the water vapor, this spike and surrounding “arms” controlled the morphology of the growing snowflake crystal and extraction of the energy. Below the assembly platform there was a set of concentric stages that were electrically charged and appeared to control the airflow patterns. By adjusting the polarity of these stages the entire self replication process could be controlled as well as the sensitivity to environmental conditions.

“That is incredible. Whoever created this thing must be a genius. It is thousand time more energy efficient than a living cell,” Dianna replied. “ I am starting to think that we are dealing with some kind of universal replicator.”

“Yes, if we could learn the programming language this nanobot could be harnessed to do all kinds of useful work,” Jose responded. “I wonder where this thing originated from.”

* * *

Two researchers reported finding several nanobots from the Genesis Rock in the Lunar Sample Laboratory Facility in Houston. This Moon rock was brought back by Apollo 15 astronauts in 1971 and was estimated to be 4.1 billion years old. Due to the strict containment protocols implemented during the Apollo Program it was deemed not possible that the nanobots were introduced on Earth.

This discovery raised many questions about the origin of these nanobots. How did they end up in Moon? Were they on Earth before life began about 3.7 billion years ago? Are there nanobots in other planets, like in Mars?

Sure enough, a few weeks afterwards NASA confirmed that they had found nanobots on the outer surface of the International Space Station. Few days later a team in Japan confirmed that nanobots had been found from the samples of Ryugu asteroid that Hayabusa-2 mission brought back few years ago.

* * *

“Okay. I am going to push our new program to the nanobot. We are capturing this experiment to video in real time,” Jose said looking into the camera. “This is experiment NB-089645–180, starting now.”

The video stream was showing a test chamber and the lab behind it. A small black fleck in the middle of the chamber started to grow at rapid pace. Snowflakes started dropping down and a whirl of wind blew the snowflakes around in the test chamber. The panel on the left was showing the environmental parameters, one of which was the CO2 level at 180 ppm.

The whirl grew rapidly and suddenly the chamber window cracked open. Then the lights started flickering and a sound of Dianna screaming “Get out, Jose, it is going to blow up!” was heard. Two seconds later the video stream ended.

* * *

Planet Earth was covered by clouds. Ice and snow was spreading across the planet again, like it had many times in the past. Within two weeks all continents were covered by snow and after one month all the oceans were frozen again.

Nanobots sent a message across the subspace channel: “Experiment Snowflake v398623-b completed. Starting a new cycle.”

* * *