Johnny Winger and the Europa Quandary

by Philip Bosshardt

  Chapter 20

  Aboard Sweeper One

  October 25, 2121

  1150 hours

  Valerie Patrice wasn’t sure where she was, only that she was dizzy and disoriented. She had a vague memory of riding the Mighty Cobra roller coaster at Daytona Beach as a child. It made her sick. She threw up when they stopped. Threw up all over herself and her Mom and Dad.

  How embarrassing.

  But this wasn’t quite like that, not exactly. It was more like riding the surf at Daytona. She often did that all day long, until she was sunburned to a deep red and her chest was chafed from the float and her eyes and ears stung with salt water.

  Now she was…what, exactly? A collection of atoms. A swarm of molecules. An angel, deconstructed, now she remembered, at that Assimilationist Church in Springfield, Virginia. And James Tsu had put in her a packet sweeper and sent her off flying around the Net just like that awful roller coaster years ago.

  That good-looking associate pastor at the Springfield church—what was his name? Billings or something like that—had been the last face she had seen.

  “It’s just like going to sleep,” he told her, as he secured the containment chamber door. “You nod off and that’s it. You wake up a whole new person.”

  Sure, a whole new person, with no body and only the barest inkling of how to get around in this new world of deconstructed swarms.

  Now she was an angel, cruising the WorldNet in a packet ship called Sweeper One, conducting recon missions for Operation Cyber Sweep. It was all too much, overwhelming really, despite what Billings had said. She wasn’t sure which part of the experience was the strangest: being an angel or riding packets inside the Net.

  One moment, she was thrilled at what she could do now. Things she never imagined anybody could ever do. The next moment, she despaired, thinking she had died and this was some version of Heaven. Pastor Billings had smiled as he shut the chamber door, assuring her that “the best is yet to come.”

  But she was still conscious. She was still Valerie Patrice, in some form or another. And she still had a mission.

  Focus on the mission. Focus. Focus….

  So she was traveling around the Net at near-light speed, through cables, wirelessly into and out of routers, hubs, switches, servers and nodes too numerous to count. Somehow, Tsu and Anson Leeds could communicate with her. Messages came and went. She looked around and realized she was still in some kind of containment vessel. It was cramped. She didn’t see any controls. But the messages came and she heard them and she responded.

  Tsu was saying something even now--”…some kind of rogue packets in your vicinity…I’m diverting you to that node…can you see anything, Val? Can you describe what you see?...”

  Patrice tried looking around. Now, she realized that the containment vessel that was Sweeper One had some sort of translucent, at times even transparent skin. When she squinted, when she focused, she could see outside. It made her even dizzier. But she gritted her teeth…or what she thought was her teeth, for the memory of how to do that was still there, and tried to describe what she was seeing.

  It’s like riding a train, she decided. That was the best analogy. A train of fuzzy cotton balls. In fact, she realized there were trains of cotton balls everywhere, paralleling Sweeper One, and some at crazy angles too.

  This is insane, she told herself.

  Some of the cotton balls came alongside and began to stick. Soon, a great quilt had built up along the outside. That’s when she realized someone was talking. It was James Tsu.

  “Val…Val…can you hear me? Val…come in.”

  Patrice looked around. There were no buttons to push. No controls of any type that she could see. How you respond?

  She just started forming words in her mind. “I hear you, James. I don’t know how, but I hear you.”

  That did the trick. Somehow the cotton balls carried signals to and from the packet cruiser.

  “Good. I’m sending you a link…it’s some news files from Solnet…you should view them.”

  “Yeah? How do I do that? There aren’t any controls inside this thing.”

  For awhile, Tsu said nothing. Nobody had any ideas how to make comms work when you were inside the signal wave. “You’ll just have to figure it out, Val. I’ll keep sending the link.”

  Thanks. She watched the streams of cotton balls. The ones that clung to the outside of Sweeper One had to be Tsu’s link. But how to activate it?

  Then she hit on an idea. Patrice found she had all kinds of effectors. No longer limited to two arms and hands, she could manipulate atoms and molecules in a variety of ways. She was puzzled by this for awhile, but soon enough, found a way to cycle open a port on the side of the sweeper and crank some of the clinging cotton balls inside. Immediately, she saw and heard snatches of some kind of news vid…”—orting that some rogue software…stretches of the Net…shutting down critical systems…”

  As she cranked in more and more cotton balls, the compartment became crowded but the imagery and sound became clearer. Patrice was stunned at what she saw.

  All over the Net, the news was the same. Rogue software, viruses, Trojans, worms, berserkers, zero-day exploits nobody had ever heard of…the Net seemed to be slammed with them. Everything was affected: water treatment and supply systems, fuel and gas transport, communications, finance-bank-credit transactions, air traffic control, even killsats in orbit, which had fired uncommanded bursts on unsuspecting ground targets. Cyber Corps was swamped, unable to keep up with all the infiltrations.

  James Tsu had appended his own file to the link. Patrice watched as Tsu’s disembodied head materialized inside Sweeper One, like a ghostly wraith from a bad nightmare.

  “The reason Solnet and WorldNet can’t keep up is that there’s a steady infiltration of bots from space, from that MARTOP source, or so UNIFORCE keeps telling us. Until that’s shut off, the Net will be overwhelmed. Look, Val, we’ve got a bigger problem here. Contact me with this link—“ Tsu’s head looked down. At that very moment, a small cylinder appeared in the sidewall of the sweeper. Instinctively, Patrice reached out an effector and contacted the cylinder. Instantly, James Tsu’s head appeared right next to her, so suddenly, it startled her. Tsu nodded.

  “I see you managed to work the link. Welcome to the Net. How does it feel…being a disembodied swarm riding a signal wave at near-light speed?”

  Patrice shrugged, at least she tried to. She didn’t have any shoulders. But some kind of embedded memory said she had shrugged. “It’s hard to put into words. I feel like I’m riding a roller coaster in a sleet storm of cotton balls. Is this what it’s like to be part of a signal?”

  Tsu smiled. “I don’t know. You’re the one on the scene. You tell me. Look, there’s a serious problem at the Kings Gorge Dam in Colorado. Something’s infected the controls for the Discharge Control System…the threat center’s getting steady feedback of valve and pump malfunctions. It’s serious. If the Bugs take command of the discharge controls, they could open all the sluice gates, flood hundreds of miles of valley downstream. Millions could be affected…in Colorado, Utah, New Mexico. I’m diverting you there…it should only take a few seconds. Leeds wants you to scope it out, send back a report. Don’t try anything yet. You’re not configured for offensive actions yet. Just report.”

  “Don’t worry…I can’t even control my own effectors yet. How do you drive this thing anyway? I don’t see anything to control it.”

  Tsu’s face was already fading. “You don’t. It’s just a containment device. Leave the driving to us.” Then his face and head were gone. She was alone.

  And Sweeper One careened left, diving headlong into a maelstrom of cotton balls.

  She knew she had arrived somewhere…Node 2133493, KG Discharge Control Primary Gate Circuit A…when the cotton balls began to thin out. Sweeper One shuddered and rattled a little bit and she fo
und herself rocking back and forth, like a train clacking along some tracks. Suddenly, Sweeper One jerked right, onto a new course and the last of the cotton balls parted.

  She caught a quick view of some kind of enclosure flitting by. The sweeper darted into a tunnel, then emerged again and she saw more clearly, as the ship orbited something like a small lagoon, that the enclosure was like a fence encompassing the small lagoon. Inside the fence, bobbing on the lagoon surface, more cotton balls, but these balls looked dirty, torn, misshapen and bedraggled. One end of the fence was open and a multi-lobed nanobotic device seemed to be herding more and more balls inside, sorting, stopping, checking each one as it approached.

  Right away, Patrice understood that the nanobot doing the herding didn’t belong there. James Tsu had talked of enemy bots. She realized she was looking at one, in fact, there were several, forming a gauntlet along the approaches to the fence opening. The bots were shepherding more and more cotton balls inside. It was like some kind of round-up.

  And inside the enclosure, the balls were undergoing some kind of metamorphosis. They came into the enclosure looking like all the other balls. But once inside, they changed color and shape and began looking decidedly beaten down.

  Valerie Patrice hunted around the sweeper cabin for the comm link. The cylinder was still there, still turning slowly in its socket. She reached out with an effector and felt a connection. Tsu’s head returned, turning slowly in the air.

  “Good. You’ve got the hang of it. See anything.”

  Patrice reported what she was seeing.

  Tsu frowned. “That’s bad, Val. That’s what we were afraid of. Those bots you see are the enemy. Don’t do anything. Don’t try anything yet. I think what you’re seeing is the discharge control system software being changed. The bots are trying to take command of the pumps and valves. We’re working on a fix right now.”

  “Something needs to be done now,” Patrice told him. “I can’t just stand by and let them take control of the dam.”

  “You’re not configured for offensive action, Val…don’t do anything stupid.”

  But even as James Tsu’s head was streaming warnings and cautions, Valerie Patrice wasn’t listening. Instead, she was learning fast how to use her effectors and propulsors. Maybe this is how I learned to walk, she surmised. Step here, put a foot there, shift and stride, fall down and bang my head on the coffee table. Scream bloody murder and get up and try again.

  Bit by bit, little by little, she was able to get some of the basics down: okay…that’s extend, that’s retract, that’s manipulate, now rotate. Got the effectors. Now propulsors…how the hell do you turn these damn things on?

  She decided to do a little exploring inside her cocoon, see just what this packet cruiser was like.

  Patrice found that she could just squeeze into another compartment. This one had some kind of airlock. Maybe a way out of the packet cruiser. She worked her effectors and by trial and error, found a way to open the airlock. She collapsed herself down and squeezed through. Then, cycling the outer hatch, she shoved herself outside.

  Steaks of cotton balls raced by, multiple streams going in all directions. Jeez, it’s like standing next to a freeway. She reconnoitered the outside of her little ship for a moment, finding it a squat cylinder with hemispherical end caps at each end. Some kind of jets puttered front and aft and the aft jets were surrounded by flagellar propulsors as well. Sweeper One was well equipped for maneuvering in this strange new medium.

  She dodged several streams of cotton balls and soon spied what looked like a mountain range in the distance, behind and above the small lagoon, where sorting and selecting was still going on. Atop the crest of the mountain, she saw what looked like the crenellated stone walls of a great citadel, perched on the very top. But it wasn’t the citadel that caught her attention. It was the swarm of bots attacking the citadel that she noticed…hundreds, maybe thousands of them, breaching the walls, clambering all over the parapets and towers of the great fortress.

  She tried the link back to Cyber Corps, and found she could talk to Tsu, even outside Sweeper One.

  She described the scene.

  Tsu’s voice was concerned. She could tell in the strain of his voice. “That citadel you’re describing is Cyber Fence, Val. It’s something we built. The Kings Gorge discharge controls are inside. We installed that to keep the Bugs out. What you’re describing is a full-scale assault on the Fence. The Bugs are trying to get inside, and take over the dam operating controls.”

  “I’ve got to do something, James. I can’t just stand here and watch.”

  “Val, you don’t have the configurations to make an attack. Don’t even think about it. Just get in as close as you can and describe what you see….Val…Val, do you copy?”

  But Patrice had already gotten underway, figuring out how to operate her own propulsors as she jetted toward the steep escarpment of the mountain.

  It’s like learning how to swim and walk at the same time, she told herself. I don’t know what half of these gadgets do…but , here goes….

  She closed the distance to the slopes in a few minutes, and straight away found herself in a scrap with a small squadron of Bugs. They were nanobotic devices, of that she was sure. So am I, she snorted. I wonder what I look like to them.

  Before she could react, she was already in the grasp of two bots, whose effectors lanced out and pinioned her against the flanks of the mountain before she could maneuver away.

  Oh, yeah…let’s see what this thing does…she found all she had to do was think of a config and the right effector was enabled and powered up. Slammed sideways, she reacted with a few snaps from her own grabbers and managed to pinch off a few molecules of the attacking bots, atoms went spinning off in a puff of fragments as she scooted out from under them.

  Take that, you snotty little worms.

  Now Patrice whirled and slashed with the same grabbers, a feint immediately parried by the bots, which butted her amidships and sent her spinning back down the slope. She managed to right herself and jetted back up into the melee.

  It was like combat underwater in the swimming pool, like when she had tussled with her brothers as a kid, pulling hair, kicking, slapping, all in slow motion. The trouble was the slightest touch could set her spinning. Clearly there were forces here at this level she had never heard of. She’d have to be more careful.

  Patrice waded into another knot of Bugs and went to pinching and grabbing and slashing. She found she could use her propulsors to make kamikaze swooping attacks on a tangent to the mob, diving in for a slash, then pulling out just in time. That tactic worked pretty well.

  Then, just by chance, she found how to operate her bond disrupters.

  Using the same kamikaze dives, she found she could scatter knots of Bugs with liberal use of the disrupters. Each dive produced the same result: a big zap! and then atom fragments and pieces of effectors cartwheeling off in all directions.

  This was starting to be fun.

  Tsu’s voice muttered in the background but she paid little attention. “Val…you don’t have the right configs to attack…be sure to keep a safe distance…recon and intelligence, that’s all we need….”

  Patrice slashed and burned her way up the slope, encountering thicker and thicker knots of Bugs. It’s just me against millions. She knew there was a way to replicate additional copies of her own structure, but where was that control? Maybe that’s what James was talking about. Did she even have the right config to replicate?

  But before she could consider the implications of that, she spied a different sort of Bug, higher up the slope, bigger, with more effectors, standing off from the others, directing breaching operations. Already, some of the Bugs had penetrated partway into the citadel walls. Others were clambering toward the parapets at the top, while disrupter fire from towers rained down on them. It could have been an illustration from a textbook on medieval hi
story.

  But it was very real.

  The larger Bug seemed to be in charge. Patrice worked her way against the flow of bots, grabbing, pinching, slashing, where she had to, until she found herself at the same level as the large Bug.

  It had multiple heads, globular and pyramidal, with a forest of effectors around its equator and it was spitting out copies of itself like some kind of whirling assembly plant…casings, effectors, grapples and propulsors…a queen bee of a bot growing drones and workers left and right.

  Valerie Patrice had never been one to turn down a challenge. Her brothers often dared her to try things and she learned at an early age not to back down. She could outrun and outfight half the boys she had grown up with. Part of surviving in a family of boys was standing up to them, talking trash with them, roughing and wrestling with them. That’s how you got respect. Above all else, Valerie Patrice wanted respect.

  So she was moving toward the master bot before she even realized what she was doing, Tsu’s voice muttering and warning her in the background…you don’t have the configs to do this…your propulsors aren’t up to spec…you’re going to get hurt…little girls don’t fight little boys…

  She waded right in, slashing and burning, and caught the master bot by complete surprise.

  The first thing she noticed, after she collected herself from the recoil, was how fast the bastard was. In the blink of eye, the bot flung her away and zapped her with its disrupters for good measure. It went back to slamming atoms, trying to replicate as fast as it could.

  Okay, mister, if that’s the way you want it.

  Patrice backed off and played with her effectors for a few moments, trying to figure out what did what. Okay, that’s like a hand. That one’s like a knife. That zaps things. That one over there twists things. When she felt she had a little better mastery of the gizmos, she charged right back in.

  Patrice remembered grappling and wrestling with her brothers as a child. It was all about leverage. The best position was on top but there wasn’t any gravity here, just weird forces that had names she couldn’t pronounce…van der Waals something or other. Tsu had described it to her.

  By instinct, she closed on the master bot and went for the mid-section, an area that seemed to have fewer effectors. Using a clutch and grab combo, she managed to grapple something and hung on as the bot thrashed about. Disrupter fire zapped the air and she returned fire. Moments later, they had company as the bot master’s friends came zooming up. Patrice felt herself pulled and punched in a hundred different directions. She zapped and pinched and twisted and slammed but it wasn’t doing any good.

  She lost a couple of effectors—that should have hurt but then you could just grow more when you had the right config. Then she lost her hold and went spinning off in the distance.

  Now the bot master was surrounded by a protective squad of daughter bots, replicants, Tsu had called them.

  How did he do that? She wondered. I should have the same ability. But Tsu had warned her against attacking. She didn’t have the right configs.

  Above them, the Bugs were busily assaulting the walls of the fortress. Patrice could see it was only a matter of time before they got in, inside the Kings Gorge Dam Discharge Control System. If they got in, havoc would follow and millions would be affected. Lives could be lost.

  Patrice knew now she couldn’t do this herself. Wrestling her brothers, she knew that sometimes you won and sometimes you lost. But Tsu and Leeds needed to get reinforcements here as fast as possible.

  “I’m pulling out,” she announced, to no one in particular. She was startled when Tsu’s voice erupted in her ears.

  “About time…we’ve got more Sweepers on the way. Just stand down, Val. Get back to your Sweeper. I’m bringing you home.”

  Patrice figured discretion was in order. “Better make it fast. That fortress is about to be overrun by Bugs…there must be a gazillion of them.”

  “Probably two gazillion,” Tsu came back. “Sweepers Two and Three on the way. They should be on site in a few moments. Can you stay there and give us some battle damage assessment?”

  “Roger that,” Patrice said. She jetted on her own propulsors back toward Sweeper One. It was like trying to cross a ten-lane freeway; streams of cotton balls zipped by in a blur. She dodged and ducked and juked until she had made it across the signal flow and drifted up to Sweeper One’s airlock. She cycled the lock and was inside the lockout chamber moments later.

  Patrice wriggled through from the lockout bay into containment. When she was secure, she was about to inform Tsu to get the little ship going when she noticed a few stray cotton balls packed into one corner of the bay.

  What the hell? She kicked at the balls and they quivered a little but didn’t move off.

  Must have slid past me when I cycled the lock. She knew the balls were nothing more than packets of data and the thought came to her that they might be of some intelligence value. After a few more desultory kicks, she left them alone. They clumped and quivered in the lower level of the containment bay and didn’t otherwise respond. She soon forgot about them.

  “Prepare for launch,” James Tsu told her. “I’m bringing you back to Herndon. It should take about ten seconds…you’ve got several nodes to traverse and a few filters and buffers at the end. Maybe a little bumpy. How’d you like life as an angel?”

  Valerie Patrice was busy securing herself in containment, making sure all her parts were well fastened down to the scaffolding that served as an acceleration mount.

  “It was wicked. Everything I am, or was, now in this little bot…it’s still hard to believe. And I still haven’t mastered the replication business.”

  “Don’t sweat it…it’ll come. You’ve still got a lot of learning to do. Plus we’ve got more configs to add when you get back. Ready to come home?”

  “More than ready.”

  “Here goes….”

  And the trip was over in a few eye blinks. Out of Kings Gorge to junctions at Amarillo and Memphis and a router at the National Comp Lab in Pittsburgh. Sweeper One was soon home in the Watch Command Center’s own server rack, Node 22887, Disk C. Valerie Patrice hardly had time to take a breath, if an angelized cloud of nanobots could be said to breathe.

  Seconds later, she made her way out of the packet cruiser and rode on faint currents drawing her into a small containment chamber on the Watch Center’s second floor. After being cooped up inside Sweeper One, the chamber seemed like Buckingham Palace.

  Now Valerie Patrice could stretch out. Soon enough, she found her home scaffolding and gratefully attached herself to it. Home sweet home, such as it is. It had been a dizzying, jarring transition.

  Tsu and Leeds opened a comm link. “Val,” Leeds was saying, “good job. That’s a difficult trip you made. How about loading up config C1 and making yourself presentable?”

  Patrice knew that C1 was a full angel configuration, a human simulation. It would take some time to slam atoms and build out the structure. “If you say so. Have I got enough feedstock in here?”

  “On the way—“ Tsu announced.

  An hour later, something that looked like the original Valerie Patrice waited impatiently for Leeds to cycle the containment center lockout and open the hatch. The door swung open and Patrice stepped out, a bit unsteadily, into bright lights and what seemed like half a dozen faces peering down at her.

  Tsu gave her a chair and something to drink. It tasted surprisingly good.

  “How do you feel? he asked.

  “Like I’ve been on the losing end of a gunfight,” she told them.

  “Remember those little packets you picked up inside Sweeper One, the ones that came back with you?”

  Patrice asked for more drink…it was some kind of fruit juice cocktail with protein filler and nucleic acid extract, helpful for rebuilding structure. “Sort of. What was it?”

  “An image file,” Tsu told her
. “Strange format but we were able to decrypt it and wash it through some filters. A portrait actually.” He held it up and Patrice studied the image.

  The picture was of a man, high forehead, black hair slicked back, huge, bushy moustache and stern unforgiving eyes. He wore a dark suit with a starched white collar and some kind of badge insignia on the left breast pocket.

  Patrice blinked. “Who’s that?”

  Tsu admitted,” We weren’t sure at first, so we did a little digging. Turns out it’s a photo of a famous American sheriff from the late nineteenth century.”

  “A sheriff?”

  “Val, it’s a picture of Wyatt Earp.”