The room is filled with angry Four Star Army Generals, DARPA personnel and a few members from the board of directors.

As soon as you open the door, all eyes fall on you, and the room becomes deathly silent. You take a nervous gulp.

"Dr. Zolaas." you flinch internally as soon as you hear that voice. It was General Jonathan Anderson, a sixty-year-old man with grey hair and piercing blue eyes who had kept himself in shape. "How nice of you to join us!" His voice was dripping with sarcasm.

"I'm really sorry for being late. Let's just get right into it shall we?"

"Yes. Yes, we should."

All of the people in the room take their seats at the conference table. You stand at the very end near a large screen TV and start with your presentation on the progress that you have made on swarm-intelligence. After some time, Anderson interrupts you.

"So let me get this clear. You still haven't been able to design a suit of armor. After all the time that we gave you?"

"It's not about the suit of armor. We could build one right this instant, it would hardly take 20 minutes. No, the real problem is making it change its shape on-the-fly. The suit of armor would be super strong, but it won't be adaptable at all. It won't be able to self-repair or make new weapons."

"And why is that, Dr. Zolaas?"

"Well, as an analogy, these nanobots are like the cells of our body, each designed to perform a very specific function. These nanobots co-ordinate with one another, just like the cells of our body, to do a huge range of tasks. But the cells of our body are prone to error. Some can become cancerous, some of them could become hyper-vigilant thereby making our body prone to auto-immune diseases. We don't want that to happen with nanobots. Each and every nanobot must be perfect every single time to prevent any variance in performance. That requires us to design a sort of a nanobot immune system to check the health of each swarm, perform self-diagnosis, prevent any errors in replication, and to destroy any nanobot that is not functioning according to specification. Designing this immune system and designing new nanobots that perform very specific functions has proven to be an extremely difficult task."

"Hmmm...how long would it take for your team to design this immune system and just the repair function?" Katie Rosenblatt, one of the investors and a member of the board asks you this question.

"Conservatively speaking, with all the testing and safety precautions required, I'd say about 10 years or so."

"10 years! Unacceptable! Russia and China are already moving their super-suits into production. Even India has made **** advances in nanobot technology! At this rate, America will be left behind in the dust!" Anderson is fuming at this point.

"Sir, respectfully, none of these countries have developed a nanobot immune system. It's the most critical component if you want to build a super-suit. And I can say for sure that without this immune system their suits are much more **** to failure and cyber attacks. For fuck's sake, they don't even have replication technology!"

"I agree. But the people around the world will not see it that way. They'll only see the fact that America failed to take the lead in developing advanced weapons technology. It would be political suicide." says another General.

"We can't let that happen Dr. Zolaas." Anderson says "We have to fast-track the development to under a year if we want to regain lost ground. To that effect, you'll be asked to share all of the advancements that you've made so far with DARPA and co-operate with them to develop a viable super-suit within a year. I know you guys have been working at maximum capacity for a while now, that's why I think it'd be best if you shared the workload."

".....What if I refuse?"

"We'll pull out our contract with your company and give it to your closest competitor," Anderson says matter of factly.

"What? Aedron Systems? They are crap! They can't do half the things that we can do! And their safety records are abominable!"

"Well, you leave us **** son. These are your two options."

You let out a sigh. You knew it would come to this someday. The US Government simply didn't care about safety. They cared about their image. With a heavy heart, you agree to it.

"Also we'd like you to recuse yourself from this project and focus on other important matters," Rosenblatt says dryly.

"WHAT! WHY?"

"You have been working non-stop on every aspect of this company ever since it's inception. It's time you took a break and let others handle your work. Take a break, go on vacation maybe."

"I don't need a vacation. I'm doing just fine."

"No, you're not. You've been cranky all the time and you've been drinking **** at work. None of those look good on the CEO of this company. We need to rebuild investor confidence after the stunt you just pulled last week." You wince at that statement. She was referring to the incident where you were drunkenly screaming expletives during the annual investors meet and greet. That was a bad day.

You realize that maybe it wouldn't hurt if you took a vacation. It had been far too long since you had met your family.

"Vacation sounds...nice," you say. Everybody in the room is immediately relieved by those words. You have been having a negative influence on this company for some time now.

"Well, that concludes everything," says Anderson. "Please co-operate with DARPA here and give them what they want." he gestures to the personnel.

Everybody gets up to take their leave. DARPA personnel stay behind for further instructions. You guide them towards Mike who then begins the process of sharing all the necessary information.

You're all alone in the conference room now, thinking to yourself. This isn't what you wanted to do with these nanobots. Your vision of the future was filled with the wondrous things these nanobots could do. They could revolutionize medicine, construction, nuclear technology, clothing industry, heck, they could revolutionize the entire society. It's a shame they were classified as WMDs since the moment of their inception. There was a danger that they could be used to build nuclear weapons by non-state actors and hostile elements if they were left uncontrolled and unsupervised. Nonetheless, you had a lot of hope for their use in civilian space. It would require a tremendous amount of research and lots and lots of capital to make them safe for civilian use and prevent their misuse.