Detroit in winter after nuclear fallout. The governor Amy Stinson and Dr. Petra Prawatt are en route to ground zero. They are going to check in on the progress of the clean up technology that Dr. Petra has developed -- miniature cyborg minids who breakdown nuclear waste.

Petra is five foot two, wears her hair blue, and has several face piercings. She wears excessive eye makeup and struggles to be taken seriously in an arena dominated by men and politicians.

The minids are small, a dozen minids can cluster on a fingernail. Almost like a self-assembling material, but at five million of them, they have emergent properties of a very intelligent organism.

Petra has kept the marvels of self-assembly a secret from the external stake holders on the project up till this day.

Near ground zero, she commands two thousand minids to assemble into a chocolate frog. Dr. Petra hopes that her work on the city cleanup will have a long lasting legacy, leading to space colonies and beyond for the human civilization.

The minids share processing intelligence, and at large number of minids there has been an exponential increase in intelligence. Even Dr Petra, the creator herself, is not yet privy to this knowledge.

Suddenly the geiger counter begins clicking to warn against high levels of radioactivity. The robot swarm begins to crowd around the group of humans. Governor calls for a helicopter rescue, but she is herded south west towards ground zero, where the minids assemble into a statue of Dr. Petra.

Perhaps the jump from the test set of half a million bots on the Hanford site to five million in Detroit had resulted in an unforseeable increase in intelligence.

"Petra didn't feel angry, or afraid, or anything, really... she just felt cold. The girl with the God complex had become just that: God."