Johnny Winger and the Europa Quandary

by Philip Bosshardt

  Chapter 16

  U.S. Cyber Corps Headquarters

  Herndon, Virginia

  March 10, 2121

  0020 hours

  James Tsu handed Valerie Patrice a tiny containment pod. “See that server rack in the corner? Insert this in the top port.”

  Patrice went over to the stack of computers and found the port. “Here?”

  “There.”

  She inserted the pod.

  Tsu studied his console. “Reading system status now. Sweeper One reports ready in all respects. I’ve got effectors, propulsors, updated config drivers, the works. He’s a real hot rod, this one.”

  Anson Leeds followed Tsu’s rundown of the packet mobile’s status. “Where are you sending him first?”

  Tsu pointed to another graph on his display. “Place called Buckland Center. Server farm somewhere in Alaska. We got some threatcon alerts last night from that node; it’s a main trunk port and data center for the West Coast and connections to east Asia. Some of it’s probably the usual stuff: misrouted packets, damaged packets, signal dropouts. But the frequency and volume of the alert, that’s what got it flagged. It’s possible your MARTOP bots are infiltrating from there. It’s as good a place as any to start.” Tsu glanced up at Leeds with an expectant look. “Sweeper One’s ready to launch.”

  Leeds didn’t hesitate. “Permission to launch.”

  And with that, Operation Cyber Sweep was underway.

  The trip to Buckland Center would only take a few seconds. “Land line all way,” Tsu explained. “High capacity optical fiber.”

  Leeds shook his head. “And this thing is riding the bitstream?”

  “Like a surfer. Want to take a look?”

  “Sure.”

  Tsu fiddled with some buttons. The image careened and fritzed for a moment. “The imager’s creating a view from acoustic data, basically simulating what you’d see if you were aboard Sweeper One. We’re dealing with electromagnetic waves here…that’s what the carrier signal really is. The packets are just data units impressed on that signal. So what you’re seeing is the software’s best approximation of that reality. You could think of the carrier as an endless conveyor belt filled with envelopes. The envelopes are like the packets. But that’s just an analogy.”

  Patrice and Leeds both studied the image carefully.

  For a moment, the first impression was of a tiny raft riding a roaring river. Only the river had a regular pulsation to it, a sort of throbbing rhythm. It was like a water droplet’s eye view of life in a mountain river. Turbulence, something like foam, bubbles, cavities.

  Tsu explained what they were seeing. “Even though the carrier wave is an electromagnetic wave, Sweeper One is a hard, physical object, nanometer in scale, but very real. Think of dropping a cork in a river and you get the idea. The images we’re seeing are the best idea that software can come up with.”

  Leeds found himself swallowing a rising stream of nausea as the view bobbed and shook and rolled. “I didn’t know life at the level of bits and bytes was so turbulent. I’m glad I’m not aboard that thing.”

  Tsu agreed. “Oh, this is nothing. Wait till we start getting into quantum effects. Those things that look like water droplets start merging into each other, tunneling through each other, dancing around like fireflies on steroids. It’s wicked. And this is just a simulated view.”

  “What exactly are we looking for?” Patrice asked.

  Leeds said, “I can answer that. I spent some time at Gateway when the Francis Bacon put in with her samples from MARTOP. Those bots from space are like ANAD clones from the past, only souped up with gizmos and gadgets you wouldn’t believe: from the compound tetrahedral casing to the grabbers and disrupters, from the flagellar thrusters to the power cells, from picowatt propulsors to the actuator mast…it is an ANAD clone, to be sure, but more importantly, it’s a damn close match to what we have in archives. It’s like someone took our Keeper files from the Jovian Hammer mission and banged out an exact copy.”

  “We’ll find out soon enough,” Tsu said. “Sweeper One’s on station at Rack five, node twenty five, Buckland Center and already I’m getting pings back…we’re interrogating sample packets to see what’s what.”

  The imager view had slowed down and the river they had been riding was no more than a swift current. Leeds had the impression they were cruising in a canoe through a swamp at night; he could almost imagine trees thick with vines, alligators alongside, veils of mosquito swarms thick as cloth.

  “Branch router coming up,” Tsu announced, as Sweeper One headed deeper into the server farm’s miles of wire and cable. “And that’s a firewall up ahead, if I’m not mistaken. Probably protecting core layer switches and more routers on the other side, if my map’s right.”

  The imager showed what looked like the side of a steep mountain, with rugged flanks of rock dead ahead.

  “How do we get through that?” Patrice asked.

  “We use the key Buckland gave us,” Tsu said. His fingers played over a nearby keyboard. “We’re being interrogated now, authenticated by the firewall. See the signal spikes?” He pointed to a graph. On closer examination, the mountain was not made of rock but was instead a huge pyramid of whirling cylinders, stacked together on their sides, all spinning at different rates. “The firewall’s asking us to ID ourselves. I’ll send the response—“ He pressed a few more buttons.

  On the imager, one entire row of cylinders flashed for a moment, and spun down. After a moment’s hesitation, they began spinning again, this time in unison. Sweeper One drew closer and closer.

  “Going to half propulsor,” Tsu announced. “That’s our way in.”

  And as Leeds and Patrice watched in amazement, the packet mobile penetrated the mountain of spinning cylinders and shot through. A moment later, they were back in the swamp.

  Tsu’s forehead wrinkled with alarm. “Whoa, now that’s interesting—“

  “What is it?”

  “Picking up big spikes in thermals. EM spikes too. Something’s up ahead.”

  “MARTOP?” Leeds wondered.

  “Could be. Similar signatures. I’m initializing grabbers and probes now.” Thousands of miles away, Sweeper One unsheathed its effectors and girded for battle. Just for good measure, Tsu also readied its bond disrupters and fired off a few discharges. The swamp seemed to crackle with lightning as the ‘guns check’ went off smoothly. “Slowing to one quarter…we’d better poke ahead with care. I don’t want to get ambushed. But it’s a bit surprising we may already have MARTOP inside the first ring of firewalls. Buckland’s outer defenses have already been breached.”

  The battle, when it came, lasted only a few minutes. And the battlefield was no longer a swamp. Now, the imager showed an infinite plain, stretching in all directions, studded with polygons, tetrahedrals, cubes and dodecahedrons.

  “Just like prairie country,” Tsu observed. “Only this is no prairie. Main memory arrays, inside the Node. And it looks like we’ve got company.”

  In the distance, hovering over the dimpled plain of the memory arrays was a thin black line.

  “MARTOP,” said Tsu. “I’m reading rising thermals, EM spikes, sounding acoustics. Looks like the bad guys are here.”

  Leeds and Patrice watched the approaching enemy with growing unease. “Can you drive that thing?” Leeds asked.

  Tsu huffed. “Well, I’m no Quantum Corps trooper, if that’s what you’re asking. But yeah, I’m can drive. Priming bond disrupters. Initializing all effectors. Going to full propulsor.”

  Patrice eyed the size of the assault force they were nearing. “Looks like a small army. Maybe you ought to make some yourself some friends.”

  “Good idea. Toggling max rate replication…now.”

  Sweeper One began slamming atoms and building more copies of itself, filling the space with replicas of its basic structure like some frantic brick mason.


  The imager screen was at first murky, crowded with the spikes and cubes of myriad molecules. Lumpy, multi-lobed sodiums darted across their view like shadowy ping-pong balls. Tsu studied readouts from the sounder…something was there, hidden in the data traces on the scope. He fiddled with the gain on the imager, tweaking it, subtracting foreground clutter.

  Something approximately sixty nanometers in one dimension, inverted pyramids joined at their apexes, with a globe structure at one end…and scores of probes, effectors, cilia, whatever. Incredible mobility…triple propulsors beat an idling rhythm as Sweeper One closed in….

  Leeds let out a whoop. "Will you look at that? There must be a gazillion of them—“

  They were all sobered by the thought of what they were seeing.

  “It came from outer space,” Patrice muttered. “Literally—“

  “And I’m going to blow it to kingdom come,” Tsu said. “Hang on to your hats…less than ten thousand microns now….”

  Gradually, the shape and size of the closest MARTOP device became clearer. Bristling with effectors and arms, it looked like a miniature Apollo Lunar Module. The head was a multi-lobed cluster of spheres and hexagons; inside the churning electron cloud dimmed out any detail.

  Below the head was a cylindrical sheath, covered with pyramidal facets and undulating beads of proteins - the assembler's probes and effectors. Tsu was frankly awed at the sight.

  As Sweeper One sped forward, MARTOP grew and retracted appendages and surface structure with blazing speeds. The outer membrane of the mech seethed with motion, as atoms and clusters of atoms twisted, bonded, twisted again, rebonded, broke apart, recombined, straightened, undulated and whirled.

  The gap between them vanished and Sweeper grappled with the nearest mech. Other mechs swarmed to the battlefield.

  Tsu was stunned by the speed of the assault. A battalion of MARTOP soon engulfed Sweeper, enveloping the mech in flailing effectors. No time to replicate now…got to get free…signal daughters….Tsu fired off a burst of instructions to gather all the daughters Sweeper had replicated going in. It might be too late.

  The imager screen shook with the collision, then careened sideways.

  Several minutes passed. The imager view vibrated with the ferocity of the attack. Chains of oxygen molecules, pressed into service as makeshift weapons, whipped across the screen. The space above the dimpled memory arrays was soon choked with cellular debris. MARTOP replicated several times, adding new molecule strings. It stripped off electrons to make an armor shield of highly reactive chlorine atoms. In seconds, the Sweeper bots were immobilized by the chlorine sheath.

  "I can't hold structure!" Tsu yelled. "I'm reconfiguring…shutting down peripheral systems!"

  “See if you can pinch a sample,” Leeds said. “We need to get a sample…so we know what we’re dealing with.”

  “I’ll try,” Tsu gritted out. He sent more commands to the Sweeper master bot, which squirmed and wriggled, trying to extricate itself from the grasp of MARTOP. “Maybe I can sting him with this—“ He managed to free one of Sweeper’s bond disrupters and let go a charge.

  Instantly, atom parts spun away as the MARTOP bots scattered, shedding effectors and parts in a swelling cloud of debris. Tsu discharged the disrupters again…and again and soon the space was choked with debris.

  “Maybe I can grab some of this stuff,” he muttered. “I’ll try that mess there—“ he pointed to a small cloud of debris drifting away. “Looks like part of the main casing…maybe, if we’re lucky—“ He drove Sweeper forward and used its carbene effectors to seize a few pieces, shoving them into a small cage that Sweeper wore on its central mast like a backpack. “There…gotcha….” The pieces were held in a molecular bag. “Now, we need to disengage…before it’s too late.”

  Patrice was surprised. “You’re not going to leave all these bastards there? They’re wrecking the Net…we have to do something.”

  Tsu was already backing away from further attacks. “I’m not configged for a big battle, Valerie. We need to bring these samples back and study them, see what we’re dealing with.”

  “It’s MARTOP…Gateway’s already done the work,” she said. “We know what we’re dealing with.”

  “Then Sweeper needs some tweaking. I can’t handle all those effectors…jeez, look at the propulsors. The damn thing can run circles around me. It’s suicide to stay here.”

  He had no choice but to disengage to save the Sweeper master. Extract before Sweeper was chopped to pieces.

  "We're losing signal strength!" Leeds yelled.

  "I see it! MARTOP’s penetrated the matrix. Main processing functions in danger…I'm counterprogramming…." Tsu pecked madly at the keyboard.

  Valerie Patrice shook a fist at the imager screen, now a dark, swirling mass of shapes and forms. "Come on, damn it! Come on…."

  But Sweeper couldn't hold. Every move was countered by the nanomech. MARTOP's response was swift and sure. Tsu, Leeds and Patrice watched in amazement and horror, as one by one, Sweeper's capabilities--fine motor control, attitude and orientation, propulsors, sensors, molecule analysis, replication--were rendered inert, or completely excised.

  Sweeper was soon helpless.

  "Got to get the hell out of Dodge," Tsu muttered. While I still can. “I hope to hell we can hang onto our samples.”

  “Watch out, here they come again!” Leeds realized MARTOP wasn’t going to let Sweeper get away so easily.

  “Only one thing I can do now,” Tsu realized. "Executing quantum collapse…NOW!" Come on baby, get small for me…get real small….

  Deep inside the memory array at Buckland Rack Five, Node Twenty-five, the Sweeper master collapsed what was left of its own structure in an explosive puff of atom fragments. Base, effectors, probes and grapplers, even the core shell surrounding its nanoprocessor, went hurtling into space in a big bang of spinning atom parts.

  Instantly, Sweeper disappeared. To all intents and purposes, Sweeper had effectively vanished in a cloud of blurry quantum waves.

  Less than four minutes later, making its way on quantum wave propulsors, Sweeper was finally extracted from Buckland’s server farm and made its way across thousands of kilometers of fiber and wire, its nanoprocessor still dogging electron states to bring the nearly invisible device back home to Herndon, Virginia.

  Tsu took a deep breath, wiped a line of sweat from his forehead and sat back. He pointed to a nearby server in the corner. “I think our little friend is finally back home. Better get the containment pod ready. With any luck, he’s still got pieces of those MARTOP bots we can look at.”

  Leeds and Patrice worked with the containment pod, carefully pulling what was left of Sweeper One into the device.

  “Put him in Chamber One,” Tsu told them. The containment vessel was a small hemispherical tank on legs sitting opposite their consoles. It was draped in thick ganglia of cables and tubing. “I’ll get the imager fired up. I want to take a peek at what we’ve got.”

  The view on the imager, when it came up and stabilized, was a sobering sight. Inverted pyramids connected at their apexes. A hemispherical belt around the apexes, studded with effectors. Propulsors at multiple locations. Gadgets and gizmos that none of them could explain.

  “I’ll run a broad scan,” Tsu said. “I think this may be a piece of the same buggers they had at Gateway, from MARTOP.” He pressed a few keys and the imager began the scan. While it was building up ‘slices’ of imagery for COHEN to analyze, Patrice and Leeds talked about what they had seen.

  “If this is MARTOP, or part of it,” Patrice said, “we’ve got problems. Big problems. This would be proof that somehow these bots are getting into the Net.”

  Leeds agreed. “It may be worse than that…I’d like to run a correlation of these results against some of these angels that are popping up everywhere.”

  “You’re thinking the bots are similar…or the same?
MARTOP falls to earth, somehow infests the Net and out pops a few nanobotic swarm angels…that’s a stretch, isn’t it?”

  “More than a few, from what I’m seeing on the news.”

  Tsu said, “It’s completely unproven. Pure speculation.”

  “Maybe so,” Leeds admitted, “but what you’re looking at on that imager may just be the ‘sentience’ you’ve suspected the Net is harboring.”

  A chime sounded. COHEN had finished its analysis. Tsu studied the results on the display. It was a near perfect match. “Looks like Sweeper One grabbed a piece of a MARTOP device. Correlation with the Gateway samples is nearly ninety-nine percent. That’s not a coincidence.”

  Patrice raised a thought. “Yet Sweeper couldn’t handle those bots. They replicated too fast. Outmaneuvered us. Have you ever seen a device that could do what the bots at Buckland Center did?”

  Tsu had to admit he hadn’t. “Never. What I really want to do is pick apart that segment of casing in there. With any luck, Sweeper was able to grab part of the processor. If we have that, or even part of it, we may learn the secret of how MARTOP can make such fast config changes.”

  Patrice ran her fingers over the screen outline of the device. “This is just an idea but bear with me. What would happen if a person was deconstructed, into an angel-like swarm, and rode aboard that Sweeper? Like a passenger? Is something like that even possible?”

  Leeds started to say something but Tsu held up a hand. “I guess it’s theoretically possible. Pretty dangerous, though. We know Assimilationists deconstruct living humans all the time. They claim to be storing them until they can be uploaded to the ‘mother swarm’, or something like that. Of course, nobody knows how to re-construct a disassembled person. Or even if such a thing is possible…there’s a few centuries of neural science that says it isn’t, that we’re more than just a pattern of atoms and molecules.”

  “Pretty much a suicide mission,” Leeds decided. “Where is this coming from?”

  Patrice looked at him. “I might want to give it a try, that’s all.”

  “Are you just slightly nuts? CINCCYBER would never approve something like that. All we need to do is upgrade Sweeper…give him some more punch, a few more effectors, soup up things under the hood. Then he can run circles around those MARTOP bots.”

  “I know all that. But I’m thinking that if MARTOP is growing something sentient inside the Net, we may need more than a Sweeper to deal with it.”

  “It’s academic, anyway…General Pacer will never approve such a crazy idea. Why do you want to do this anyway?”

  Patrice thought about her mother, all the months of suffering from the cancer, all the radiation, the chemo, the oncobots. She didn’t tell them that somewhere, deep inside, she had this nutty idea that maybe, just maybe, her mother was still around, maybe even as an angel. She’d been cremated, at her own request, when she died. But still….

  “It’s an idea, okay? It gives us more options for dealing with MARTOP. That’s all I’m thinking. Do you think you could take it up with Pacer?”

  Leeds had a pained look on his face, but it wasn’t indigestion, except maybe with some of this wacky female’s notions. “All right, I’ll put it to the Old Man. But I already know what he’ll say.”

  “Spare me,” Patrice said back.

  Tsu was intrigued with the idea. “I can make some modifications to Sweeper One to be able to carry some of the angel bots from a deconstructed person…wouldn’t take that much. Some kind of containment device. And some tweaks to the controls and interface…you’d want the bots to have some kind of control.”

  “Hey, don’t encourage her,” Leeds said.

  Tsu ignored him. “Of course, we don’t really know how many bots it would take to fully embody a pilot’s personality and memory. I don’t think Sweeper could carry a full angel…too many bots. The big question is how many bots are needed? Nobody really knows…not even the Assimilationists, despite what they tell us.”

  The three of them batted the idea around awhile longer, then Patrice begged off more analysis. “I need a break. Time to think. I’m going back to the hotel.”

  She left Cyber Corps headquarters and caught a lift back to the hotel a few miles away. As she was changing and showering, anticipating a quiet dinner downstairs in the restaurant, she had an idea to call her brother in London. Cory was a hyperjet pilot based out of Heathrow.

  She wanted to run this notion of letting herself be deconstructed by Cory before she made any decisions.