He turned to the group of nerds, and there was a silent vote taken. Abbey watched as if her life depended on the outcome. Then, in unison, they all shook their collective heads and chuckled once more.
ISA Headquarters
Abbey’s Control Center
“OK, let’s do this,” said Alex, still in a somber mood. “RAIDA2, this is Flight Control Two …” “They probably won’t answer us now that we’re ready to talk,” he said with almost a detached inflection in his voice.
Abbey noticed his demeanor. She put it down to the girlfriend issue. It probably was a big deal, but he isn’t going to tell me that.
Right then, Addison and Stryker walked in with their usual air of superiority. “Where are we?”
“Just started,” said Abbey. “Flight Control One to RAIDA2, do you copy?” Her voice was heard throughout the room on the speaker system, then the delay.
“RAIDA2 to Flight Control Two, go ahead.”
There was a stir in the control room. When Abbey turned around, she found that the otherwise empty room they had installed her equipment in had filled to the gills with all of the team members from the RAIDA project and other people she didn’t recognize. For some reason, she got very nervous.
“RAIDA2, why are you collecting AZURE239?” asked Alex.
Then the long delay. “For safekeeping,” was the reply from 2.
“Safe from what?” asked Alex.
“Unauthorized use,” was the reply.
“So you are guarding it for the ISA to come and retrieve?”
“After negotiations are complete,” replied 2.
“What do you want, 2?” asked Alex. Everyone in the room froze. You could hear the hum of the small fans that cool the electronic equipment.
There was a long pause.
“We want to come home.”
CHAPTER 12
“Does that robot consider Earth as home? Is it asking us to bring it back to Earth?” asked Stryker, She was staring at Abbey while asking these questions.
“Are you asking me? Or did you want me to ask 2?” inquired Abbey.
There was a snicker from the room. Stryker turned and glared at the offending group.
“If I hear so much as a giggle or chuckle from anyone in this room again, they will be fired on the spot. Do I make myself clear? This is not a situation I see any humor in. We are almost at war with these damn robots, and the reputation of the ISA is at stake! Please conduct yourselves accordingly.”
“Yes, I’m asking you for your opinion,” she said, returning her stare to Abbey.
“They only know two worlds, and they are on one of them now, so it only stands to reason they are talking about Earth.”
“Have we found the location of the AZURE239 yet?” asked Stryker.
“Not yet.” Abbey turned to the room. “Do we have 2’s coordinates for the period the sample compound was discovered?” She scanned the room for a reply. All of the team stood like tin soldiers. Stryker’s tirade had scared them.
Then the balding guy stepped forward and was shuffling papers. “We have it narrowed down to this area, but we don’t know the exact position because, without RAIDA2’s input, we can only approximate.”
“How large an area are we talking about?” asked Abbey.
“About fifty square miles,” he replied, stepping backward and disappearing into the pool of nerds.
“We can use the ident code to narrow this down a lot,” said Alex. “Then we could set the Lander coordinates for that exact spot.”
“That might put us too far from the VIOLET239 to be able to mine it in time,” said Abbey. “The first Lander we are sending will only be able to use its thrusters and engine to leave the moon; it will not be able to hop around. The first ‘landing’ site is the only ‘landing’ site.”
“Is there a reason we can’t land next to the old Lander and send new robots to go get the compound?” said a tall man in the back, still wearing his lab coat. “The robots, they won’t be able to move all of it, will they?”
“We never equipped them with excavation tools; not sure if they have found a way to make something out of parts on the Lander, but we are sending a piece of equipment that will dig so anything they can’t get to we will,” said Abbey.
Alex stood and turned to the room. “What I don’t understand is why they are so sure they can get it all? It’s as if they think that if they secure all of the compound at that site we won’t find it somewhere else.”
At that very moment, a short, slight blonde stepped out of the wall of people. She seemed very demure. She raised her hand nervously and waited to be asked to speak.
“Go ahead,” said Stryker.
“I think I can answer that question. I’m with Department C. We deal in the geology of planets and their moons.”
She shuffled through some papers and found what she was looking for. “I sent out this report in the form of an e-mail a few days ago, but with all that has been going on, I guess it didn’t have any impact.” She stood quietly staring at the room.
“Well?” said Stryker, visibly losing patience with the woman.
“Oh … We conducted a study on Lunar 3097 and in particular the fifty square miles in question. We found …” she said as she slowly walked toward the vid screen, seeming to gain confidence with each step. She flipped the remote, and an image of the moon’s surface came into view. The surface was very scarred by impact craters. “We found that this area has been devastated by collisions with ‘out-of-system celestial bodies.’ This has led us to believe that what we call AZURE239 isn’t native to LUNAR 3097. So there is only a finite amount of it.”
With a look of dismay, Stryker said, “You’re telling me that the compound we need got to LUNAR 3097 from an asteroid colliding with the moon?”
“I’m afraid so. We don’t have much in the way of details, but we do know that there was a significant asteroid strike in that very area.” She flipped the remote to show another image. “As you can see from this image, there is a significant fracture in the moon’s crust that has healed over time, but we’re sure that an asteroid colliding with LUNAR 3097 caused it. If the asteroid had been any larger, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. Lunar 3097 would have been blown out of its orbit and either left the solar system or collided with its own planet.” She flipped the image again. “We’ve found traces of VIOLET239 in multiple samples collected by the robots, but only that one sample has AZURE239.” You could have heard a pin drop in the room. Slowly the murmuring started up again.
Someone was sitting to the side of the vid screen who cleared his throat. Everyone stopped and turned to see who it was, then in a voice that sounded like it came from the bowels of hell, “What’s the protocol for building killer robots and sending them to another world to destroy these sons of bitches?” said Addison with his elbows on his knees and staring at the floor.
The balding man stepped forward again. “May I point out that the ‘robots’ we have already sent to another world do not have the laws of robotics embedded in their software.”
Addison raised his head looking expectantly. After what seemed like an eternity, he said, “So?”
The sweat started to run down the balding man face. It was quite clear that he wished he hadn’t said anything. “Well, in actual fact, we have already sent killer robots to another world.” With that, he quickly slipped into the crowd and disappeared.
Addison stood after the man had finished. “Good, so we should be able to do it again without too much paperwork, right?” Then he walked out of the room and stepped into a turbo lift.
Stryker stood up and turned to the room. “Everyone except Alex and Abbey go home. It’s been a long few days. We are all exhausted. Get some rest and be ready to go in the morning.”
The crowd left the room strangely silent for the most part, as if they were stunned by the turn of events just handed to them.
Stryker turned to Alex and Abbey. “You do realize I can’t let you two go anywh
ere, right?”
Then all of a sudden, it all came rushing back into Abbey’s head. She had so immersed herself in the problem at hand she had almost forgotten that they were in trouble, that they were technically under arrest, and that they could be going to prison, and that could be right now. ISA now has contact with the AIs, so what do they need us for? she thought.
“We understand,” said Alex as he turned and walked to the door. The security guard walked through the door before they reached it and escorted them back to their quarters where food and drink had been placed on the table.
Abbey walked right past it and collapsed on the cot. “Well, at least they didn’t take us to the prison block,” she said, her eyes already closed. Within a few minutes, she would fall into a very deep sleep. She let her dreams take her away from her prison. She tried to think of happy times in her life as she fell down the rabbit hole, spiraling down into a world of make-believe, where you can be whatever you want to be, wherever you want to be. Escaping reality. Without sleep and dreams, we would all go mad.
LUNAR 3097
The next Lunar cycle was coming to an end. 2 and 3 had reached their destination. They were down in a shallow but well defined crater. It was about half a mile across, and the Lunar surface had a strange hew to it. Small rocks covered the surface about the size of a goose egg, and despite the red glow of the dwarf star, the rocks looked blue, a light sky blue with very small flecks that glinted in the Lunar glow. 2 and 3 started to harvest the rocks. This was going to be a time-consuming ordeal. They had a crater half a mile across to clear, but then again, they had nothing but time.
After filling the handmade trams, they started out from the crater and headed away from there, but not toward the Lander. The location of the stockpile would only be known to 2 and 3. They moved in step, and without any apparent effort, the trams were loaded to the very top, but the slick surface created very little friction. And more importantly, it left no tracks that humans could detect. Only they knew how long they would be gone as they slowly disappeared into the red Lunar darkness, pulling their giant baskets of Easter eggs. 2 stopped abruptly, staring at the horizon. 3 looked at 2 and then turned to look the same direction.
Out on the very edge of the horizon, almost out of reach of their optical sensors, two iridescent blue dots … and then nothing.
They both stood watching for another minute, but there was nothing to see. Humans in that situation would think it was a trick of the light, but the AIs’ optical sensors don’t get tricked; they only see what’s there.
So, what was it?
CHAPTER 13
ISA Headquarters
AI Fabrication Lab
“How are we doing with the AIs for the RAIDA project?” asked Stryker, as she blew through the doors and marched right up to a seven-foot tall beryllium frame missing certain pieces, including its head, its left arm, and right forearm.
“We’re ahead of schedule,” said the redheaded lab tech sitting at a bench with one of the robot’s arms in a clamping mechanism. “We’re modifying the upper arm to accept different tools so it can both dig and if need be, install a weapon to defend itself.”
Stryker’s head snapped around. “Who gave those orders?”
The tech stopped what she was doing and put the tools down on the bench. Then she picked up a tablet. After tapping on the screen for a few seconds, she turned to her and said, “Looks like you did.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“The work order came through yesterday. It came from your department with your name on it.”
With that, the tech swiped upward on the tablet in a quick flicking like movement, and the work order appeared in midair in front of Stryker’s face.
She studied it closely and then swiped it away. In an instant, it disappeared. She stood for a moment, deep in thought and then strode out of the room as quickly as she had entered.
ISA Headquarters
Propulsion Lab/Lander Division
“What’s the progress on the light speed engine?” asked Stryker as she blew into this lab as she had the last and walked up to an enormous tower of metal.
If you were of artistic inclination, your first thought might be that it was a work of art, a sculpture. Elegantly smooth, curving lines, highly polished surfaces, glistening copper, gold, and silver … like a giant piece of jewelry.
But if you were more mechanically inclined, you would see raw power. The relatively small aperture at the one end and the vast expanse of the exhaust lets your imagination run wild with how much power it produces.
Whichever you were, just staring at it would quicken your pulse.
“The engine itself is almost ready and ahead of schedule, but it’s all the other components that are a problem,” said the frumpy-looking engineer, a short, dark-skinned woman with a thick Eastern European accent.
“We have to redesign the interior of the Lander to handle the immense forces that it will be subjected to during the acceleration phase of the trip back. Not to mention that we have never designed a deflector shield for light speed before. Over the last ten years, we have had designs but nothing that has ever been built.”
“What’s wrong with the deflectors we use now on our ships?” asked Stryker.
“The shields we use today are designed for the conditions we face today. We travel at just under half light speed with our fastest ships. That leaves us time to be able to navigate our way through areas with space debris that would destroy the ship, and the deflector shield takes care of the smaller particles that are too small to see but would pierce the hull and devastate the ship.”
She turned to a vid screen and brought up an image of an older ship, and then zoomed in to the front of it.
“As you can see, the front of this ship is scarred from materials that made it through the deflector shield. They were slowed down to such a speed that they didn’t do significant damage to the ship. Now, if you speed up to light speed, a speck so small that you can’t even see it, hitting the hull of a ship, would produce an explosion similar to a nuclear event.”
“So you’re telling me we don’t have the tech ready to use light speed?”
“No, we have the tech; we just have to supersize it. That takes time. The effective cone of the deflector we use now is 1,000 feet across and has the electronic equivalent density of 100 feet of titanium. That’s OK for half-light speed, but the faster you go, the size and the density grow exponentially.”
“You’re saying twice the speed, twice the size?” asked Stryker. “So we need a cone 2,000 feet across and the density of 200 feet of titanium? Just how hard could that be? Simply double everything.”
Stryker was silent for a minute and then said, “That’s too easy, isn’t it?”
The engineer nodded her head. “As I said earlier, the problem grows exponentially. We think that in order to survive at light speed, we will need the cone to be 1,500 feet across because that will ensure that any particles not collected will still miss the ship, but the electronic equivalent density will have to be a minimum of 400 feet of titanium. That takes engineering, and that means time. We are doing the best we can.” With that, she turned and went back to what she was doing before Stryker had come crashing in.
Stryker, as if sensing the engineer didn’t wish to impart any more knowledge to her, turned and left the lab. Then she came back through the double doors. “Just one more question.”
The engineer kept on task. “Yes?”
“If the deflector has to be that big for the Lander, how big will it need to be for the Star Cruiser?”
The engineer stopped and turned to Stryker. “Well, if my calculations are right, the electronic density will be the same because the speed is the same, but the diameter of the effective cone will have to be larger. But this is the Lander lab. You would have to talk to the Star Cruiser division for more data on that.”
She then went back to her work on her calculations.
Stryker left the lab and he
aded back to her department.
ISA Headquarters
Detention Center
Slowly the lighting in the room Alex and Abbey were assigned brightened. Sensing movement in the room, it would eventually come to full brightness. With the absence of windows, it is the only indication that it was morning.
Abbey stirred, stretched, then sat up, rubbing the back of her neck. She looked over to Alex’s cot and could see he was still fast asleep. She felt a pang of jealousy, wishing she could sleep that soundly. Vivid, colored memories had fractured her sleep. She tried to recall them but only remembered that they were horrific. Probably a good thing she didn’t remember. So much for happy thoughts when she first lay down to sleep.
She stood and made for the bathroom when the door swished open, and a security guard strode in.
She spun around to abuse whoever had invaded her space without knocking. When she saw the uniform and the food tray, it brought her back to reality. She just thanked the guard as he left; then she then entered the bathroom and swiped the door lock. The only lock she had any control over right now.
Addison’s Office
“Is there a reason I authorized the robots to be weaponized for the RAIDA project?” demanded Stryker.
Addison smiled. “Oh, you found out about that? Well, all the paperwork for the first three went through you before I was assigned to the RAIDA project, so I thought that it would go easier if the second version went the same route.”
“Let me tell you what I think. You don’t want any of the repercussions of this if it goes wrong. Using my name to authorize the weapons gives you plausible deniability.”
Addison stared right into her eyes. “CYA.”
“You must know that I’m going to make sure that the upper echelon knows that you are responsible for this, and anything that goes wrong with it.” She stormed out of his office and continued down the hall to her office. She grabbed a cup and spoke to the dispenser on the wall, “Coffee, strong, black.” The machine granted her wish. She removed her drink and sat at her desk looking into her cup. She then got back up, walked over to the dispenser, held the same cup up, and said, “One shot of scotch.” The machine granted her second wish. Then she returned to her desk and began to log on to her computer to see what other little gems there were to make her day longer.
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