Nova Igniter

by Joseph R. Lallo

  Lex took a long, slow sip of his cider. “That’s not a lot of good news.”

  “Of course not. What were you expecting, to be told the good news is there’s a super easy solution and we’ve just been sitting on our hands hoping that the legendary Lex Alexander would show up so he can spin donuts on the robots’ lawns and defeat them? If there was a solid, obvious way to solve this problem, it would be solved already.”

  “There is the matter of motivation,” Ma said. “We do not know the motivation of the individual or individuals who have seized control of the GenMech cluster, but we know that raw chaos and destruction are not the aim. The unmodified GenMechs, were they to detect areas of high technology, would assemble themselves into a configuration to reach that technology. Not only are we certain this configuration is aware of outside technology and its location, on multiple instances recently they have succeeded in burst transmissions to local communication corridors. We are still not fully aware of the specific means, as a standard communication system should be limited to light-speed transmission.”

  “It’s inventing new technologies…” Lex said.

  “It would seem so. VectorCorp has been able cut off its communications again with careful oversight of the afflicted communication nodes. They believe they were standard data piracy attempts. It is only a matter of time or desire before the cluster develops novel techniques that cannot be so easily defeated. But there has been no sign of additional attempts to do so. And despite the implied potential to produce any number of other technologies, the relatively inert nature of the cluster suggests it is either semibenign or waiting for something.”

  “This is a lot,” Lex said. “It’s a… it’s a whole lot…”

  “We nuked his remaining brain cells. Give him another juice box and some string cheese and send him home while the adults get back to work.”

  “Perhaps it would be helpful if we focused on smaller, more specific problems,” Ma said.

  “Yes. Yes! I’ve got one. Do we have any idea where my future body is?”

  “Oh, the freezer pop?” Karter said.

  “Yes!”

  “No idea. Been a little busy trying to figure out how to avert the apocalypse.”

  “Do you have a plan?” Lex asked. “Even the beginning of one?”

  “I was able to fab up a Nova Igniter and get the associated support tech in place. If we can get it to the surface of the star, we’d be done.”

  “Nova Igniter?” Lex said.

  “Yeah. This might be a little beyond you, but if you pay close attention to the context, you might be able to work out that it is a device that can ignite novas. Drop it in, the star goes nova, everything in the system gets nuked. Since it’s an early nova, it’d be a relatively inefficient explosion. Probably it wouldn’t wipe out more than one or two other neighboring systems before it was just a nuisance. And it’d take like thirty years for that to happen anyway. Plenty of time to clear people out.”

  “Why don’t you just do that then?”

  “Because, aside from some other prerequisites, it actually has to reach the surface of the star for that to happen, and there’s a couple quintillion robots down there who can run blocker. I guess it’s possible they’d just ignore the attack. But it’s equally possible they’d intercept it, which leads to the potential scenario where a superintelligent cluster of robots built to mass manufacture things got their pincers on the business end of an operational weapon that can blow up stars.”

  “Yeah, that’s worse. But at least it can’t get any worse than that, right?”

  “Oh, it can get worse. It might actually already be worse, since the data breach of our systems may have included the designs for the 4D transporter.”

  Lex shakily took another sip of the cider.

  “Perhaps the information Lex has acquired will help introduce new avenues of investigation,” Ma said.

  “What’s he got?” Karter asked.

  “Mitch and I got a couple bazillion spam messages, and some of them had temporal contingency stuff in them.”

  “Spam. Wow. What are we wasting our time defeating the self-replicating menace for? There’s information technology to be dealt with,” Karter said.

  “It led me and Mitch to the Neo-Luddites, and it seems like Commander Purcell might be involved.”

  “Commander Purcell…” Karter muttered, trying to place the name.

  “The Neo-Luddite commander who kidnapped you and attempted to get you to build the CME.”

  “Oh, right. Couldn’t wrap her head around contracts. I thought she was dead.”

  “We never had proof of her death,” Ma said.

  “Ah.”

  “Wait!” Lex said. “You just mentioned the CME. That’s the… what do you call it… the thing that makes the whole star belch electromagnetic waves, right? Why don’t we just use that?”

  “Same reason we didn’t use it before now. It’s too slow, and not perfectly uniform. The things might scatter like roaches with the light switched on, and we’d have triggered the end times rather than preventing them. A supernova is much faster and much more thorough. So long as they don’t know exactly what’s coming, six minutes after it touches the corona, no more star system. But I seriously doubt Purcell had the ability to plan another successful attack on Big Sigma on her own. What else have you got?”

  “She was being helped by someone called EHRIc.”

  “There’s only a couple billion Eric’s in the universe. Shouldn’t be too hard to nail that one down.”

  “Could be even faster. It was spelled weird. E-H-R-I-c. Uppercase, except for the C.”

  “Ugh. Sounds like the sort of thing a basement rat of a hacker would call himself.”

  “Processing… Coal, please present the data Lex acquired in its entirety,” Ma said.

  “Do you have something?” Karter said. “Because this isn’t ringing any bells over here.”

  “Possibly. Analyzing logs. Processing… I have a theory.”

  “Better than what we’ve had for the last couple months. What have you got?”

  “I require some additional processing time. This will need to be determined with a very high degree of certainty before I am willing to present it. And it would potentially be best, for the sake of reduced redundancy, to contact the others so that they can join us for the discussion.”

  “Yeah. That’s fine. It’ll give Mr. Racer-man here a chance to get his brain working again.”

  Chapter 10

  Michella was no stranger to endless travel. As such, she’d developed the specific set of skills that made such a life tolerable. The budget to afford traveling accommodations that included access to a shower helped a great deal, but the smaller things were almost more important. Right now, she was performing the maneuver she liked to think of as “the instant apartment.” A few strategically placed bags around a seat tucked into the corner of a waiting area had a way of persuading people to keep their distance. The more laborious of a setup you have, the more likely someone will just steer clear rather than bother you. It made it a little more likely that someone would try to grab a bag and run off with it, but theft like that on a space station was pretty rare, what with any potential means of escape involving either a spacesuit or a forty-five minute boarding line. Although with Squee lounging on top of her luggage, it would take a fairly brazen sort of thief to try to take anything.

  So far she’d finished composing an updated report to send to Lou. In order to justify all these traveling expenses, she had to issue not only a final report but also intermediate ones to prove she was actually doing research. That there was very little she’d discovered that she could actually report on was entirely beside the point. Anyone who had been to college knew how to pad out an ounce of content with a pound of filler.

  She’d already gotten Lou’s go-ahead to continue digging when her slidepad chirped with an incoming video call.

  “Jon!” she sai
d, answering the call.

  “Michella, what the heck am I supposed to be doing?” Jon said, his expression radiating raw frustration across the video feed.

  “I see you’re in The Upstairs. Great, right on time.”

  “Yeah, I’m here, and I’m with Blake and he seems to think I’m picking up a ship?”

  “That’s right. He’s loaning me one. We need to pay someone a visit who is off the beaten path.”

  “I thought that was the whole reason you had Lex with you.”

  “Me and Lex split up.”

  “I know, but that’s never stopped you from getting favors out of someone.”

  “What are you… No! I mean he’s handling something else somewhere else. All you have to do is bring the ship to me. Uh…” She pulled up the schedule in the holoscreen beside him. “I’ll send you the itinerary so we can meet up.”

  He leaned in and whispered harshly, “Michella, I don’t know how to fly a ship.”

  “I asked Blake to set you up with good autonav.”

  “I don’t know how to use that either.”

  “It’s autonav. What’s to know? It’ll be fine.”

  “I don’t know how to work autonav.”

  “It’s going to be a choice on a menu. It’s like buying tickets for a trip, but instead you’re just picking a destination and hitting ‘go.’”

  “Can’t you just have the ship come to you without me in it? I had things to do this week.”

  “Two heads are better than one, Jon. Just get Blake to fill you in on the settings and it’ll be fine.”

  “I better be getting a bonus for this.”

  “You’ll be getting a bonus and hazard pay.”

  “… See, the hazard pay thing has me second-guessing this again.”

  She hushed her voice. “Jon, this is more than a story. This is important.”

  “Oh,” he said steadily. “It’s one of those.” He ran his fingers through his hair. “Okay, I’ll figure it out.”

  “Great. You won’t regret it.”

  “I already regret it. See you in a couple days.”

  She could already hear Jon muttering a sheepish request for training to Blake as he hung up. Michella pulled open the document she’d started for things she would ask and observe during her trip to Big Sigma. That planet was a wonderland of potential life-changing technology at any time. But not only could a trip there give her insight and resources to help solve whatever problem Lex was facing, it would give Michella a rare chance to meet with Ma “face-to-face” so to speak. Perhaps it was just psychological, but she did her best work when she was up close and personal with an interviewee. She could see no reason why this wouldn’t hold true for an AI as well as a human.

  There was so much to prepare.

  #

  As tended to be the case, when the time came to have an important meeting, food was involved. In what was either the mess hall, the galley, or some other military and/or nautical term Karter felt like enforcing, Lex felt an odd sense of déjà vu. The picnic-style tables were precisely the same as those on Big Sigma, and the scent of simmering beans was familiar as well. It was oddly comforting to be smelling Ma’s recipe for burritos cooking, even if she was too busy with her processing to rise to her typical level of hosting prowess. The usual spread of beans, rice, beans and rice, and beans-and-rice derivatives was augmented by a small section of fruits, vegetables, and other strangely wholesome fare.

  Karter grabbed a tray and browsed the offerings. “Oh! I forgot she installed the fryer. Chimichangas…” he said, loading up the tray.

  Lex stared anxiously at the speaker mounted on the wall. “What’s she doing again?” he asked.

  “Processing.”

  “Processing what?”

  Karter grumbled and slammed down his tray. He glanced aside, his one silver-irised eye darting a bit. “She’s doing a deep analysis of the patterns of transmission on the GenMech cluster and comparing data from the logs and spam you got.”

  “What’s she looking for?”

  “When she figures it out, she’ll tell us.”

  “She said we were waiting for someone else to show up so she can tell us all at once. Who else is coming?”

  Karter threw a beer on his tray and picked it up. “Look, no one invited you, okay? Thanks for the info, but you don’t have to hang around and ask questions. If you wanted to hang out with me, you shouldn’t have ended your beta-testing contract.”

  “I got sick of constantly risking my life for money.”

  “What do you call all that hoversled nonsense?”

  “That’s way safer than testing stuff for you. The last test I did for you was that high-temp isolation suit.”

  “And it worked.”

  “It got up to two hundred degrees before I got clear of the testing chamber. It scalded like fifteen percent of my body.”

  “Yeah, but the testing chamber was two million degrees. I wasn’t risking your life, I was saving it.”

  “That only makes sense if you weren’t the one who put me in the chamber to begin with.”

  Karter waved his hand irritably. “Whatever. You’re just upset because you thought you were invincible, and now you know the next time you go back in time you might not come back.”

  “I don’t think that’s an unreasonable reason to be upset, Karter.”

  “You’re living at the forefront of history. You’re doing things that actually matter. That comes with risks. Put on your big-boy pants and live with them. Look at me! I lost my last natural vertebrae. Synthetic or cybernetic from my left foot on up to my left fingers. At this rate, in a few years I’ll be a brain riding around in a homemade container. But my creations have led the whole species forward by leaps and bounds. And more importantly, they’ve given me the resources to tuck myself away and be left alone to work on the next thing. And the next thing. And the next thing. But when the time came to get my butt off my planet and come out here to clean up whatever mess the universe decided to throw at me, I got out here. And more importantly, I didn’t whine about it like a toddler.”

  “You could just tell him you missed him, hon,” came a voice from the door.

  Lex turned to find a disarmingly calm and pleasant woman currently in the act of illustrating that being middle-aged had no bearing on what sort of things a body was capable of. She was dressed in the sort of comfortable but still official outfit of an off-duty soldier.

  “Silo?” Lex said.

  “Who else were you going to find out here, hon?” she said, grabbing a banana from the non-Karter section of the counter.

  Another figure walked through the door, this one something of a poster boy for the word “swagger.” He had the same fatigues as Silo, and somehow managed to complement them with a beret and waxed mustache while still threading the needle of balancing debonair with smug.

  “Fancy meeting you here, my boy,” he said.

  “Oh, Garotte. You’re here too. Okay. I feel marginally better now, with the two of you involved.”

  Garotte cocked his head to the side and smirked. “I must say, I rather thought you would be more surprised to see me. As I recall, when we last collaborated you witnessed my apparent demise.”

  “Yeah, but since then I went to an alternate future where you were still alive, so I figured you must be out there somewhere.”

  “I see.” He shrugged. “Well, nice to know you’ve been keeping yourself busy.”

  “Why are you two here?”

  “There are precious few people alive today who have encountered the GenMechs and survived. We have a degree of expertise in the area. That and the relative danger of short-range communication means that any observation or message delivery must be done the old-fashioned way, by messenger. Silo and I each have specialized vehicles with the same directional cloak as this station. We’ve each just finished a sweep of the system. No significant divergence,” Garotte said. “One moment. A cup of t
ea is badly needed.” He marched up to the food and began laboriously preparing a cup.

  “You two seem awfully blasé, given the circumstances,” Lex said.

  “We are soldiers. Constant threat of death is something we are trained to tolerate,” Silo said.

  “Dead is dead, whether the rest of the cosmos joins us for the ride or not,” Garotte said. “The stakes can only get so high. Once you’ve decided something is worth putting your neck on the line for, there’s nothing left but to do the job.” He sipped his tea. “At least this one comes with better than average amenities.”

  “What brings you here?” Silo asked, munching her banana.

  “A couple of those big data blasts that ball of robots did filled my inbox with spam saying it was looking for me and I should be delivered or something. So me and Mitch did some digging and figured out Commander Purcell might have been involved. And now I’m here.”

  “Intriguing. You know, tactically it is a questionable decision to go precisely where your enemy asks you to go,” Garotte said.

  “Yeah, you should have sat this one out, puddin’. Remind me when this is over. I’ve got some books I can recommend to help you with your strategic thinking.”

  “When this is all over, I’m really hoping the only strategy I have to worry about is how to bump-shift my way past that frickin’ guy who I know is cheating.”

  “A laudable goal,” Garotte said.

  The PA system crackled.

  “Good morning. I see that you have all assembled. Please partake of soothing food and drink. I have prepared my findings, and we will very shortly need to discuss what, if anything, can be done.”

  Silo took a second banana. Garotte took an apple. Karter filled his tray with red beans and tortilla chips. Lex stuck with his cider.

  “What have you got, Ma?” Karter asked.

  “The key piece of information was the claim that Commander Purcell as working with someone named EHRIc. The unique spelling and capitalization indicated something that I was not entirely certain was possible. In order to properly understand, you will need to know some context. Some time ago, the Neo-Luddites came to the surface of Big Sigma under the auspices of doing business. Rather than conducting themselves professionally, they chose to kidnap Karter and force him to work for them.”