Orthogonal Procedures

by Adam Rothstein

  The next question Eliza asked was met with dead silence. "Is Gene Thompson to be trusted?" The rectangle blinked, awaiting their response.

  Thompson stood up, startled, looking around the room. "Can she see me?"

  "No," Hopper explained. "The program doesn't have a concept of its location. It knows its address in the ARPNET, but it has no idea that it inhabits a room, or that there might be people in that room. But I had to describe the entire narrative of events up until this point. We gave it all the information we have, so it knows about all of us."

  Leaning to Willamette, she said, "Write that Assistant Secretary Hopper says yes."

  Eliza's next question appeared quickly. "Where is a databased copy of the Liber Loagaeth?"

  Parsons jerked backward, knocking over a stack of manuals on a nearby table. "That's an Enochian magic text from the 16th century!" he exclaimed.

  "Why would Eliza want that? How could Eliza even know that?" Mackey asked.

  "Isn't it obvious?" Parsons spoke rapidly, full of excitement. "The underlying occult! She's found it, a link coming through the information somehow. She's divined it, pulled it out of the data! The algorithm is nothing short of oracular!"

  Ross looked at him skeptically, and then asked Willamette, "Can you ask why that text is important?"

  Willamette did so, and the glowing rectangle took a moment to consider.

  "It is referenced in Helmsted, Winton Xavier. ‘Glossolalia and Ancient Script,' Library of Congress Classification BV158.H1937."

  Mackey rubbed his eyes behind his glasses. "Like many things, I don't know if that makes what is happening more reasonable, or more strange."

  Parsons looked slightly disappointed with the answer, but that didn't prevent him from having a response. "There should be a copy on the ASTB Interstellar Rocket Research document repository, under Enochian."

  Hopper looked at him quizzically, and gestured to Willamette, who fed the information to Eliza.

  The rectangle blinked steadily for five seconds. Ten seconds. Thirty seconds. Then the response appeared.

  "The answer to your query is: Project Sanguine Research Site, Republic, Michigan."

  They looked at the screen, waiting for more, but there was none.

  "Well, I would call that a fairly specific answer," Ross offered.

  "I've heard of Project Sanguine," Mackey spoke slowly, trying to recall. "It's an experiment with myriameter radio waves—extremely low frequency. So low that they can penetrate the ocean waves."

  "To communicate with submarines at sea," Hopper finished, and Mackey nodded.

  "So is that it then?" Thompson asked. "They want to disrupt communications with submarines?"

  "Commerce was running the program," Mackey continued. "It was a Geodetic Service project, because it required knowledge of the earth's crust to place it. Underneath the Upper Peninsula of Michigan is the Laurentian Shield, a large expanse of Precambrian rock. The rock is very old—dating back to the early history of earth. But the reason they chose that site is that the rock has very low conductivity, allowing the radio waves to propagate further under the ground."

  "Could they be using the myriameter waves to communicate with their satellites without us interfering?" Parsons asked.

  Ross shook her head. "Extremely low frequency waves have very little throughput—only a few characters a second. Satellite telemetry and sensor data requires far more bandwidth. And even if you wanted to broadcast myriameter waves to space, you couldn't. Much of the signal at such low frequencies would bounce off charged particles in the ionosphere and come back to earth. That's good if you want to communicate with submarines, but bad for satellites."

  "So what does this have to do with anything?" Parsons asked. "Not that I don't love a good red herring, but isn't it possible Eliza has given us an answer that is, as Emily phrased it, spurious?"

  "There's not really any way to know quickly, given the question," Willamette said. "We asked for what would be most likely, not a proven logical theory. To unravel Eliza's reasoning would require analyzing thousands and thousands of code executions."

  The Assistant Secretary straightened. "In that case, I say that we continue to play this hunch. We are going to raid the Project Sanguine site. Eliza has come through for us in the past, and it's at least a concrete lead."

  Parsons shouldered his satchel of explosives. "Well then, what's the fastest transit to Michigan? Back to the Valkyrie?"

  Hopper smiled. "It would be even faster if we travel without moving. The NATSB happens to have another tool that may be of help, in a lower laboratory."

  She turned to Willamette. "Thanks for your help, Emily, I'll be in touch."

  The Assistant Secretary picked up a phone and began dialing, motioning to the others that she would meet them in the corridor.

  Camera pans across an unnaturally blue lake, grey, cloud-colored concrete in the form of pedestrian viaducts and P-car tracks, centering on a large Administration Deco apartment block.

  This is Greenbelt, Maryland, one of the first model towns of the former Postal Administration's Resettlement Section in the late 1930s. This stylish apartment block is steeped in history, recalling the days in which the Postal Administration was planning the rebuilding of America in harmony with its accelerating technological advances. The Resettlement Section had ceased to exist after 1958, but the legacy of well-planned neighborhoods like Greenbelt inspired the rest of the country. Transferred from governmental management to private ownership in the early 1960s, the managers of Greenbelt maintain the classic Administration Deco style and layout, because that is what brings the tenants: well-paid bureaucrats who commute daily into Washington DC.

  Camera shows a modern, high-speed elevator in period Greenbelt style, with inlaid wood paneling in dark swoops accented by polished brass curves, that opens onto a clean garage filled with neatly parked P-cars. Camera switches to views of a large aquatic center, strangely absent of people, but with attractive smoked-glass brick and aqua-tiled stairs augmenting the concrete exterior.

  Today, most modern neighborhoods do not have ample park space around a lake, or such community facilities as the residents of Greenbelt. Buildings are far taller and built closer together, leaving only room for track access and pedestrian walks, making areas with dense enough stands of trees to be considered ‘park' untenable. As older, early 20th century neighborhoods were slowly demolished in the post-War decade so the P-car tracks could be centralized on loops around new apartment towers, at least a nod was made towards the idea of green space when possible. Not actual park space, but tree lines between the tracks and pedestrian viaducts and similar other landscaping nodded to the idea. For those who make their home in Greenbelt, actually living in an area that was the inspiration for these design elements is indeed quite a luxury.

  Scene fades into a shot of small, filthy shacks, crammed together under the concrete footings of a massive arterial overpass. A few poor children kick a ball around in the mud.

  But here, not two miles from Greenbelt, we see the dark legacy of the Postal Administration's policies. Tucked underneath the express arterial that delivers the bureaucrats to their office buildings, we find the dilapidated housing known as Roosevilles, bitingly named after the Postmaster that started the wave of re-urbanization some three decades ago. Moved out of their former homes to make way for new highrises, these people build shelter from whatever they can find, stealing electricity from the tracks above in dangerous cable patches that have been known to electrocute people and start fires. When the Infrastructure Bureau finds these settlements, they are supposed to move the residents into a Housing Act development. But as our America: Tonight! reporters have uncovered, there are far too many Roosevilles for the limited Housing Act spaces available. What will happen to these people? Are they a sign that the era of Administrationism was too good to last? Can private development solve the housi
ng crisis?

  Find out with America: Tonight! as we show you the stories that the governmental news channels can't and won't cover—8pm Eastern Postal Time, 7pm Central.

  Chapter 9

  Multiple Contacts

  Following Hopper, they boarded an elevator. They descended further down, into the rock below the surface of Virginia.

  "Is this really the best idea?" Ross was asking Hopper. "We have no idea of the basis on which Eliza pointed out the Michigan site. We have no idea what is at the site, or what we're looking for."

  "That's a reason to go," Parsons suggested. "We go in and then we see. The only way to know is to go."

  "But what if there's nothing there?" Ross protested. "Then we've tipped them off, maybe triggered a Federal incident, and all for nothing, because a computer said so."

  "Not a computer, a computerized engineer substantiated by parallel learning algorithms," Hopper corrected. "And the alternative move, at this time, is to let Roy Johnson of ARPB declare open war in low earth orbit. Johnson is a good man, and a good Secretary. But he's working on instinct right now. He wants to shoot first and ask questions later. Eliza, on the other hand, is trying to make our bullets do the asking. Eliza was designed for just these sorts of situations—when we don't know what questions to ask, Eliza figures it out."

  Departing the elevator onto an unnamed and unnumbered subterranean level, they proceeded down a white hallway, floored in ceramic tile. At the end of the short passage, Hopper unsealed another security door and led them into a white lab room.

  The lab was nearly empty except for ten long tanks, like antiseptic white coffins made of molded thermoplastic, lifted up from the floor on narrow, stainless steel legs. From the underside of each tank glowed blue neon light, wavering off of small rectangular pools of water. Thick white electrical conduits like tendon flesh led from each of the white tanks upwards, into the ceiling of the lab. White spherical pressure vessels were suspended there, like clusters of organelles, or antiseptic, space-age fruit. The setup gave the room the feeling of a health club designed by someone who had just been to the 1964 World's Fair in DC.

  On a small table in the center of the room was a ball, larger than two feet in diameter. Upon closer inspection, Mackey saw that it was actually an icosahedron, a polygon of twenty equal-sized triangles, each slightly rounded outward. The triangular panels were white, made from a composite material. In the center of each triangle shone a small black lens.

  "This," Parsons swept his arm at the tanks, "is clearly not any sort of aircraft. What sort of transportation is this? Pneumatic tube travel?"

  "Our bodies will not be leaving this room," Hopper announced. "Only our minds will travel."

  She placed her hand on the icosahedron. "This is a remote unit. They are already prepositioned in various locations across the country. The ones we will use are at the Coast Guard base in Sault Ste. Marie on Lake Superior. I activated the Guard's 261st Hovercraft Division to provide the transportation to the site and to conduct the raid. They'll load the remote units on semi-autonomous hovercraft, so we can go along with them."

  Thompson reached out and touched the spherical object. "What does it do?"

  The remote unit jumped at his touch, and Thompson quickly withdrew his hand as if it had tried to bite him. The curved triangular sections flapped in and out in turn, using each triangular edge as a hinge to extend the opposite point. Connected to the remote's body at the triangle's center point, by using a servo-actuated piston, each triangular side of the remote had a free range of motion, like flapping scales that opened in all directions.

  As these fins flapped, the remote emitted a constant whirring hiss punctuated by chattering, as internal compressors balanced pneumatic pressure and the relays switched the actuators on and off. After all the sides ran through the same startup diagnostic range of motion, each in turn popped outward and retracted forcefully, beginning at the top, continuing in sequence around the shape until the bottom side fired, launching the remote upward a foot in the air before catching itself deftly on the piston-cushioned triangle. The device had to weigh at least fifty pounds, judging from its construction, and yet it bounced itself on its scales as lightly as a personable beach ball.

  "The remotes can move by adjusting their scutes, as you see. The lenses in each scute capture video imagery and create a composite, full-axis spherical view. The remote transmits that imagery to the local repeater, which then relays to satellite. That comes here to us, in the tanks. We wear special television helmets, so we can see what happens in real time. We control the remote using neural stimuli nets attached to the helmets and the tank suits. Our control commands are transmitted back through the satellites, to the repeater, to the remotes."

  "Well," said Mackey, "of all that I've seen over the last two days, I suppose this is not quite the most outrageous."

  "Not at all, Fred," Parsons assured him. "This is just a bit of astral projection, with the help of satellites."

  "When you describe it like that, it definitely sounds outrageous," concluded Thompson.

  "We'll need to change. Gentlemen, you'll find the equipment in the room there," Hopper indicated a door to one side of the lab, "and Ross and I will suit up in the other room. Try to be quick, the acclimation to the tank takes a few minutes and we don't have much time before the Coast Guard force departs base."

  In the small prep room, Parsons, Mackey, and Thompson found white suits made from thick neoprene, and large spherical helmets of thick, dark, nearly opaque glass, riven through with thin white grid lines, like latitude and longitude on a globe.

  Mackey tried to look through the helmet. "Like a blind astronaut, lost in outer space," he mused.

  "Psychonauts, traveling in inner space." Parsons winked. "The road is inside you."

  A useful pictogram on the wall depicted the act of dressing in the suits using step-by-step images of stick figures. Interpreting the images, they deciphered the best means of entry, sealing up the suit, and attaching all the leads between the suit and the helmets. Holding the helmets under their arms, with just enough slack in the wires to do so, they trooped back into the main lab, where Hopper and Ross were also dressed and preparing the tanks.

  "These must be saline suspension tanks," Parsons guessed. "Enough salt in the water and you float, allowing a bit of freedom of movement on all sides."

  "That's right," Hopper said as she typed commands into a console to bring the system online. "The suspension aids in the ability to put one's mind into the remote, to see what it sees, to feel what it feels. After a few minutes, you'll forget you have a body at all. You'll be entirely in the scene, as depicted to you via the satellite connection." She showed them the inside of the tanks, where they would connect the suit leads to the tank wall using waterproof connectors. "Leave your glasses off, Mackey," she said, removing her own. "The helmet will focus itself to your eyes."

  "What is the purpose of this system?" Thompson asked. "I mean, why build it? Is this intended to be a new form of entertainment?"

  "The National Automated Transport Safety Bureau developed it in concert with the Mass Transit Bureau to allow remote inspections of tracks, signals, and bridge structures," Hopper responded. "But now they are testing it for more widespread consumer use."

  "A tank in every home? I don't really see the appeal."

  "Think of it," Ross suggested. "Right now, the P-car system is designed for human bodies. But what if all it had to transport was a tiny ball? Getting humans and their life support systems into space is the majority of the weight in most spacecraft assemblies. If all we had to do was shoot that ball into orbit, costs would plummet."

  "Except then we'd spend half our lives in tanks, rather than sitting in cars," Mackey said, morosely. Then, that idea having given him another thought, "What happens to us if the remote unit is killed? I mean, if it falls down a hole, sinks into the sea, or burns up during re-
entry, or whatever?"

  "It's disorienting for a moment." Hopper shrugged. "But the computer will patch you into another remote, if there's one available." She handed out a small capsule to each of them. "Take this."

  Parsons popped it into his mouth and swallowed. "What is it? Tastes like amines."

  "It helps with motion sickness. The whole experience can be a bit intense the first time."

  With a look at the clock, Hopper ushered them into the tanks, climbing in by way of short sets of steps drawn up to the tank.

  "When you are plugged in, put on your helmet and lie back," she commanded. "We should hear each other through the audio channel."

  Mackey put on his helmet, shutting out the bright fluorescent lights of the lab. He lay back, feeling as if he were slipping downstream. The capsule he had swallowed made him feel slightly dizzy. He realized that they hadn't eaten anything yet today. Perhaps it had been the amphetamine effect of the pill they had taken during the short, supersonic REM goggle sleep which had kept him from noticing until now.

  He heard the Assistant Secretary's voice from behind his head. "Everyone online?" The team chimed in, one at a time. The voices sounded fuzzy and distant, like a telephone call. "The synchronizing program is spinning up. We'll check in again once we're through."

  The white grid inside the opaque helmet glass glowed incandescently bright before dimming to a dull luminescence. A test pattern of two interlocked counter-rotating spirals appeared and steadied on the inside of the dome that hemmed in his awareness. Then the logo of the NATSB flashed up—a blue eagle with triangular, inverted delta wings, spread wide with track-like bands encircling it. It faded, and was replaced by a circle, drawn in a thin green line on utter blackness, expanding outward until it was at the limits of his peripheral vision. Fine reticle hashes appeared along the outside of the circle. Mackey counted; there were twelve of them.