by J. J. Lorden
After activation and a short diagnostic, the unseen nanites started assembling the wall of Grak within the cylinder. As they did, it emerged from the bottom and pushed the silver tube up. The vertical wall was done in ten minutes.
At full height, the machine stopped, neatly bent ninety degrees, and began the horizontal portion, trailing the two black hoses straight down like a pair of boneless legs.
When Austin asked his father how the tube stayed up there and knew where to go, Bendik’s response, “It’s in the nanites.”–didn’t actually explain much.
Twenty minutes later the atrium had a transparent ceiling, all of the rough concrete edges merged seamlessly with the Grak.
The silver tube descended on thin lines of graphene that were withdrawn into the overhead Grak. The machine and hoses were stored away in short order. Then, with his crew gathered behind, Clint looked to Bendik with his chin high and brow lowered, expression asking ‘We done?’
“Yes, thank you Clint,” replied Bendik with a wave.
With a–“Yes sir!”–Clint turned on his heel, calling, “Roll the fack out!” And with purpose, they did.
When the trucks were gone, Bendik winked at his son then looked to his head of security. “All right my friend, let’s light it up.”
“Yes, sir,” Olli replied, then knelt, unzipped his smoky, black-banded duffle, and pulled out sets of hearing protection; both ear plugs and well-worn black earmuffs. For himself, Olli pulled out a square case, from which he retrieved, and then donned, something that was closer to a sleek helmet.
When handing Austin his, the security man favored him with a slightly wild look that screamed, things are about to get crazy. At the time, Austin hadn’t known Olli that well yet, but, combined with the earplugs, the look was all he needed to know what was coming next.
His intuition was confirmed when Oliver Ward began pulling sequentially more lethal weapons from his van and firing them into the glass.
Bullets from a .45-caliber handgun dimpled the surface with black, fingernail-sized dots that vanished in seconds.
Next, lying prone behind a rifle nearly as long as Austin was tall, Olli unleased .50-caliber rounds in rapid fire.
On first impact, a steering-wheel-sized bloom of opaque black appeared. With each subsequent round, the circle seemed to pulse, shrinking slightly in the space between shots as the reactive material began healing.
After that another bipod mounted gun emerged in two pieces. Assembled, it topped Olli’s head by a couple feet, although he moved the weapon as if it was lighter than it looked.
This portable cannon was all smooth curves and looked almost sensual. Even more memorable than its aesthetic was the triple barrel design. Olli set the weapon down on its legs then activated pneumatic anchors in the legs, sending puffs of dirt from beneath both.
Austin was curiously wondering about the elegant design as Olli settled in behind it, laying prone again. Then Olli pulled the trigger.
Austin had been expecting the gun to be powerful. However, when a three-foot lance of flame erupted from the barrel, and his chest reverberated with a chainsaw like ripping noise, he stumbled back into Pete.
He was so stunned, he forgot to look at the Grak to see the impact. By the time he remembered, the wall was clear and unmarred.
When Olli pulled out a shoulder fired rocket, a yard-long hollow tube that Austin recognized from video games as being designed to level buildings, he began questioning his father’s sanity.
The test was not slowed by Austin’s silent misgivings. Though they did move to stand behind Bendik’s car.
The rocket exploded in a double-decker-bus sized fireball, leaving behind a thick cloud of smoke that obscured the wall. By the time it dissipated, there was nothing to see, the Grak was good as new.
Finally, after a hushed word from Bendik, Olli opened the simple black case again. He pulled out goggles with black lenses and no head strap, that snapped into place on his helmet.
Moments later his van suspension compressed, dropping the frame to rest over the tires while thick hydraulic legs extended from the corners to level and anchor it.
When they were set, two more extended from the front bumper angled outward and down. They had feet like snow shovels that dug into the ground.
Then the rear door slowly dropped open, revealing a hard-mounted electromagnetic cannon.
Austin knew the weapon well; it was a favorite. So, he knew the Texier version.
Commonly known as a rail gun, the magnetic and electro-inductive forces harnessed by an EM cannon produced so much power that original military designs literally tore themselves apart.
By fortifying the barrel and acceleration rails with an integrated, self-repairing, non-corrosive graphene weave, Texier labs had solved the weapon’s self-destruction problem. And boosted its muzzle velocity from Mach 7 to more than Mach 20.
Each projectile, about the size of a hotdog, traveling at more than four and a quarter miles per second, carried the kinetic load of a standard surface to air missile. In practical terms, each shot hit like a meteorite.
After an all-clear check, Olli energized the weapon and opened fire.
The van rocked back with a crack like that of a lightning strike, and a wave of concussive force buffeted Austin, Bendik, and Pete.
Of the three men, only Austin flinched. His father and Pete stood unflappably, just a couple of high-tech monks at prayer.
The first projectile shook the wall, sending out a circular ripple that vanished in a split second when the entire crystalline barrier flashed to midnight black.
That one round penetrated.
The following shots did not. Instead, they were intercepted by thick, yard-long arms of Grak that reached out like smooth, living tendrils for each one.
Unlike the previous bullets, the rail gun projectiles seemed to be consumed by the black tentacles. None of them being visibly ejected from the inky dark material. When Olli powered the gun down, Austin checked.
Walking up to the Grak, Austin pulled off his hearing protection and caught the soft pattering of things landing in the ubiquitous pine needle bed of the forest floor.
Turning to look, he discovered it was dead wood and unopened pinecones knocked free by the rail gun shockwaves. The sound lived poignantly in his memory of that day. It was a visceral reminder of the weapon’s astounding power.
He found remnants of conventional bullets thick in the dirt before the Grak. But as he’d suspected, there were none of the large rail gun slugs.
The wall still being black, Austin poked his head through the door opening, and found the first round had indeed penetrated.
Standing just inside the Grak, he could see clear to the back of the building through car-sized holes in the intervening concrete walls.
Stepping through the rubble and retracing the projectile’s path he eventually discovered it on the slab at the base of the rear wall.
The high-density round was mashed into the shape of a mushroom with a flattened top, an effect of smashing through concrete, not its designed shape. Despite its size, the mangled slug weighed as much as a gallon of milk.
He’d known the rail slugs were made of a high-density alloy, but the physical experience of having something so small weigh his arm down grounded that knowledge in reality.
He still had that round, and occasionally found himself pondering it, remembering that day and wondering why the lab needed such extreme protection.
After Bendik and Pete were done reviewing data from the test, Austin and his father had scooted into town for lunch and a lesson on massively adaptive materials.
That day he learned about molecular sublimation.
Austin had intuitively known that Grak was packed full of nanites, but he’d not known they could move freely within the apparently solid material.
He’d learned they did this by existing in a state of massively parallel entanglement with the surrounding crystalline material. Which was a fancy way of saying that t
heir movements could be tied to any number of molecules of Grak and those particles would mirror the movement of the nanites.
Or, if needed, they could be made to move in a perpendicular or opposite direction to the nanite by polarizing or inverting the entanglement.
In scientific terms this was the sublimation, essentially the capacity to transfer energy and movement to another molecule without a physical bond.
Knowing that quantum entanglement was a fragile phenomenon, Austin had questioned his father about how the link was maintained.
Bendik’s cryptic response, “It turns out that we weren’t approaching entanglement the right way. What we had thought was a forced and delicate link is actually a natural and preferred state–when you know where to look.”–didn’t improve Austin’s understanding.
He had noted that his father very specifically said where to look, not how. He’d puzzled over that and asked for more, but Bendik was unwilling to expand.
Moving on, Bendik explained the afternoon’s test parameters were that of a worst-case scenario, called a “dead site”. A dead site being a state wherein Grak’s far-reaching sensory web had been defeated.
When this web was active, Grak could detect and proactively intercept even a barrage of rail gun slugs without a single round penetrating.
When Austin asked about why they did the dead site test, Bendik just said it was a necessary test, adding that it was a highly unlikely condition. One that could only occur if the very air around the building was filled with hostile nanites.
It was a chilling thought. But given Texier Quantum’s iron grip on the nanitics sector, Austin was inclined to believe it was nothing but worst-case planning.
Even so, the possibility of the air being hostile stuck with him.
In addition to being packed full of nanites, Grak also held a large amount of unaligned carbon. In its stored orientation, the carbon was invisible. Only when responding to a kinetic force did the nanites align the carbon, creating graphene and turning the Grak pitch black.
Each atomic sheet of perfect graphene could resist about 2200 pounds of force before failure, and there were sufficient nanites and suspended graphene in the Grak to form tens of thousands of layers.
In addition, the graphene sheets turned Grak into a near perfect conductor. This conductance capacity meant, with a large enough heat sink and if sufficiently grounded, the wall could disperse a mind-boggling amount of energy at the speed of electrons.
As it turned out, Austin’s curious black dots were exactly this part of the mechanism. A web that stretched throughout the entire structure and with long fingers that extended into the surrounding soil. Providing a place to dispense any energy Grak absorbed.
In the end, Austin left the meeting in awe and firmly grasping two separate but equally impactful things.
First, the Grak wall at the lab could probably withstand the force of a tungsten telephone pole dropped from space. Which was a real weapon, colloquially known as a ‘God Rod’, incorporated into the US Guardian III defense satellites.
And second, Belkin was preparing for something much, much larger than he knew.
In the days since, Austin had frequently wondered if the test had simply been for his benefit; a way for Bendik to let him in on the magnitude of his plans without divulging anything directly.
The memory receded and Austin came back to the present as the three of them piled into a waiting mag-lift. “To my lab, Alice.”
8
The Data
Texier Quantum Labs Research Facility and Q-Core Node Host
Sub-level 37, Q-Core Terminal and Workstation
May 13, 2064—World Seed plus 6 days, 23 hours, 27 minutes
When they spilled out at sublevel 37, Austin went directly to the quantum-node work terminal and canceled the absentee protocol. He then shifted the Kuora time compression to tier 0 and pulled up the total elapsed in-game time.
4108 years, 4 months, 3 days, 1 hour, 40 minutes, 48 seconds.
His gut began to twist. “Wait… No, this can’t be right. It’s short more than 3000 years.” As he spoke, Austin’s world narrowed. He was only peripherally aware of his friends crowding in behind.
He looked back at the compression log entry from just before he’d reset it.
Date: 05May2064 Time: 23:11
Event: Compression tier change—start: tier 17 end: tier 0
That was right.
He pulled up a bar graph of the system resource load for the past seven days, setting each bar to represent one hour of server time.
With the compression, one hour of server time should represent about 45 years in game. Any change to a lower tier time compression would reduce the system resource load and the representative bar in the graph would be significantly shorter.
The graph populated and he expanded it to spread across all three crystalline displays–Austin heard someone gasp, it could have been him, but he wasn’t sure.
“What the hell.” Matty whispered over his right shoulder.
Racheal leaned over his left and breathily exhaled. “Ohhhh, shit.”
The graph should have shown a spike during initial creation, followed by a pull back and then a steady ramp up, and in general terms, it did. For this reason, the shorter bars did exactly as expected. They stood out.
In specific, the image reminded him of a section of castle wall built on an upslope. Since the height of the wall remained constant, no matter where you stood at its base the wall was always the same distance above your head. And this held true for the arrow slots too, looking straight up they were always the same distance above your head.
However, standing at the base of the hill and looking up. The wall clearly moved higher as did the arrow crenulations.
The slope of his graph had three distinct arrow slots in its slow steady climb.
They weren’t the same width, though. From first to last, the gaps spanned 17, 22, and 36 hours respectively.
The depth of the slots also got successively shallower, meaning that in each interval the compression was at a higher tier than the last.
He checked the start time of the first change, it was at 22 minutes in.
“22 minutes? That’s insanely close to when I left the lab. When did I message you guys last night– no, I mean, last week?” I was out for a week, he realized again. Why the hell was I out for a week?
Matty flipped his palm up, his iCore came on, and he fingered through the displayed projections. “You sent it at 11:04 that night, bud.”
Austin checked the system time for when Elle had dropped the seed. Exactly 10:44 pm. He’d spent most of the time between in the simulation with her before logging out.
The start of the first compression shift, and what it implied, suddenly made him feel dizzy.
He spoke through that haze. “The first compression change happened 2 minutes after I sent the text.”
How long did it take him to walk to the maglift? Then to leave the building? Did he stay in the lab for even a minute more after he sent the message? What was his workstation logout time? He pulled it up, 11:03.
Jesus H... One minute? He was probably still in the building when this had happened.
Austin was reeling. His head felt like it was floating and his fingers on the console seemed foreign–like someone else’s.
I wonder if this is what emotional trauma feels like, he mused in that detached place, then moved right past the absent thought and looked at the time compression readouts.
It began at tier 17 compression, as he’d set it. At 22 minutes, it had been changed to tier 4, which equated to 48 days in-game per Earth day. The second anomaly increased the compression to tier 5, a 96 times compression. The final, which was the longest at 35 hours 28 minutes, was at tier 6, or a compression ratio of 192.
“These are the system resource logs?” Matty asked.
Looking blankly back at his friend, Austin blinked a couple times before he replied, “Ahh, yeah. Active quantum core processe
s, and flash crystalline memory usage.”
“Humm… and that spike there close to the beginning, when was that?”
Austin touched the screen at that point. “Right… look at that little usage spike. Good eye, man. That was… 17 hours 55 minutes after launch.”
Matty’s brow furrowed. “Wasn’t that about the same time we were assaulted by the pizza pans?”
Austin pondered for only a moment before he saw the truth of it. “Whattt…” He exhaled slowly and then confirmed the timing. It was exactly correlated to the incident at MP2.
“I’ll be damned,” he whispered to himself. The realization had an odd grounding effect, somehow connecting him back to reality. Spinning his seat around, Austin calmly laced his fingers in his lap and nodded. “Yes. Yes, it was. It was at exactly that time.”
Silence.
Racheal scowled, her left cheek tilting toward the data on the monitor. Matty’s mouth worked noiselessly to form some kind of response.
After several long seconds, Racheal spoke, “So that either means… we were part of one of the most spectacular coincidences ever observed in the history of humanity. Orrr, Kuora somehow interacted with the real world.”
“Yep, that’s about the size of it,” Austin said, strangely calm. “And I found one other thing.”
“What? Another thing? What other thing?” Matty managed, finally finding his voice.
“During that period, which lasted a bit more than a minute, the program synchronized itself with Earth time, then resumed accelerated time afterward. That’s a backend modification equivalent to compression tier negative 1. It definitely should not have been able to do that.”
They discussed the unexplained and disturbing anomalies for several long minutes more. Austin spent more time searching through the system for any clues or information that would help clarify–ultimately finding nothing definitive.
The time compression function and its associated log file were run by a subroutine separate from, and inaccessible to, Elle. Still, he queried the QI, and although aware of the tier shifts, she attributed them to established simulation permissions.
