by Mark Harritt
Bob hooked his thumb toward the sound of the mortar shells exploding, “I’m not sure we’re going to have much of a choice. Not if what I heard Mickey tell you is true.”
Tracy started shaking her head. Without taking her eyes off of Bob, she pointed back at the shuttle, “It’s not going to work, Bob. If you calculate the delta v wrong, the linear momentum could drive the shuttle into the side of a mountain. The cure’s worse than the disease.”
Bob stopped talking. His eyes went up as if he was actually doing the calculations in his head. His head started wagging side to side, “Well, yeah, possibly, but it’s the only option left to us.”
Mickey held up his hand to keep Tracy from going at Bob again, “So, you’re worried, that if you move from the ground here,” He hooked his thumb at the shuttle,” Then you might still be moving when you get there? And, if you’re still moving, you might smack into the side of a mountain? Or something else big that might ruin your day?”
A smile painted Bob’s face, “Yes! Exactly!”
Tracy nodded, “That’s why it won’t work, Mickey.”
Mickey looked over at the shuttle, then looked back at both of them, “It’s a shuttle. It flies. Why not pop out of unreality over the mountains? If you come out high enough, you can engage the engines, slow down, land, unload, then pop right back into unreality again.”
Bob was speechless. His face glowed when he finally spoke, “Mickey, you’re a fucking genius.”
Tracy looked at her husband with admiration and a new appreciation, “he really is, isn’t he?”
----------------------------------------------------
Bobby’s hands shook as he worked inside the mech. The shelling had stopped, which meant that an assault was imminent. At least that was what Mickey had told him. So Bobby was moving as quickly as he could. He was in the process of pulling the hard drives from the mechs and setting up the self-destruction sequence. It broke his heart to do it. These mechs were his babies. Screw Weitz, screw Randall, he was the one that created the interface to make these big machines work. If it wasn’t for him, they’d still move as stiff as those giant robots.
“Bobby! You almost finished up there?”
Bobby poked his head up out of the hatch. Tom was standing below the mech, waiting.
Bobby nodded, “Yeah, I’m pulling the main hard drive. I have to enter the last of the code to destroy the programming.”
“You have to hurry. We don’t have much time. Hopefully, the shuttle will be back pretty quick.” Tom didn’t say what would happen if the shuttle didn’t get back on time. That was obvious by the Contai soldiers that were set for a fight at the mouth of the box canyon.
Bobby raised a hand, “Okay Tom, I’m almost done. I’m pulling the last one now.”
Tom didn’t seem to be mollified by Bobby’s words. He looked worried. Not that Bobby could blame him.
Bobby thanked God that they’d been playing with the null generator, trying to figure out what it did. He didn’t trust it completely, but he’d done what they asked him to do. Hell, at that point, it’d been the only option they had left. They’d used one of the counter grav lifts they’d stolen from the Turinzoni base and loaded it quickly on the shuttle. He set up the parameters so they could load everybody up and get them the hell out of here. Then he’d passed the computer off to Randall so that she could operate it. When they figured out that she didn’t know what the hell she was doing, Mickey let Weitz run it. Things had gone smoothly after that. They didn’t even have to go to an intermediate location. They transitioned straight to the old compound and back.
He’d watched the first group fly out and prayed to God above that he’d done it right. Joan, Joel, and Everett were on that flight. Plus, it was filled with the wounded, women, children. Because of that, it took a long time for the shuttle to get back. Long enough that he started worrying that he’d screwed up and something bad had happened on the other end. Then, the shuttle appeared. After that, things had gone smoother. Two more shuttle loads of people and supplies had gone. Now, he was finishing up as they waited for the shuttle to come back one last time.
Things were going to be incredibly low tech, at least for the foreseeable future. The three amigos were busy destroying computers and anything else that might have information on it. The only thing they were keeping were a few laptop computers and the original quantum computer, or, as Ed liked to call it, the ‘Ark.’ That name wasn’t far from the truth either.
The Ark held the cumulative knowledge of Homo Sapiens, to include everything they’d been working on here. They even had the Sjurai files they’d pulled from the Turinzoni base partitioned in the computer. To them, it occupied the same level of reverence that the Jews had bestowed on the Ark of the Covenant. Nothing else was going though. All the other equipment was going to stay here. Hank and Will were hobbling around together, destroying their fabrication equipment.
So now, Bobby lovingly ran his hand over the pitted skin of the mech for luck. He tried to memorized every scratch, pit and dent on the skin. If they’d had the resources, they would have replaced the carapace of the mechs. Would have, should have, could have, he guessed it didn’t make a difference anymore. Still, he’d miss them. The mechs had saved their lives, and it was hard to let go. He had a lot invested in the work he’d done on them. He’d spent six years of his life designing the software, and two here refining it to make it work even better.
He leaned in and undid the screws, grabbing the hard drive by the two handles imbedded into the face. This wasn’t the only hard drive in the mech, but it was the main memory backup. The rest of the computer system was spread out throughout the mech, with smaller hard drives to act as backup. He’d designed the system so that it had multiple redundancies. The loss of one hard drive wouldn’t slow it down in the least. But, they’d need these if they ever built another mech. These three hard drives held the cumulative upgrades and the ‘lesson’s learned’ that the A.I. had incorporated into its interface functions as it processed the neuromuscular feedback from the people that drove it.
Bobby put the bulky hard drive in his backpack with the other two. Hopefully, one day, he’d be able to put them in other mechs. He wouldn’t dwell on that, though. Right now, he was just hoping to make it out of this canyon alive. He flipped the cover, pulled out his notebook, read and entered the twenty-four-digit code into the numeric pad, read the display to make sure it was correct, and then hit the asterisk followed by the number symbol, activating the code. The screen changed from green to red as the sequence started.
It was that simple. He was done. He stood up, pulled the bag up and set it on the back of the mech, stuffing his tools inside. Once he was done, he climbed up out of the mech, and pushed the hatch closed until he felt the click. He pressed his hand against the biometric reader and the robot locked shut. Now, the only thing that would open the robot was someone with a thermal lance and lots of time. Anything less couldn’t penetrate the carapace of the mech. The lance, or anything more energetic, would destroy everything inside.
Satisfied, he grabbed his bag, hoisted it over his shoulders and climbed down the side. He turned and walked over to wait with the rest of the tech crew for the shuttle. It was a sad group; the three amigos, Hank, Will, and Bobby. John was there to help with the electronics. Luis left earlier with his girlfriend, Sathoni. She wouldn’t leave without him. Ed stood there, rolling that white globe around in his hands. None of them looked happy, knowing the technology they were abandoning. Now that they’d destroyed all the tools they worked with, they had condemned themselves to be luddites. They were technological beings that didn’t have the capability to work with tech anymore. He wondered what the hell he was going to do for the rest of his life if he couldn’t program computers. Knap flint to make knives and arrow heads? He shook his head, depressed.
“Everybody back up, here it comes!” Crandall yelled.
It was the damnedest thing Bobby had ever seen. It started out as an infinitesi
mal singularity comprised of absolute nothingness. There was no other way that Bobby could describe it. Then, the infinitesimal singularity expanded instantaneously into a large void the size of the shuttle. The void quickly shimmered into wavelengths of unnatural light. Other dimensions twisted the light spectrum with elemental forces that didn’t translate into normal reality. And gave Bobby a headache.
The thing that really bothered Bobby about it though, was that there was no sound associated with the rapid expansion of the singularity. Something that small becoming that big instantaneously should have created one hell of an overpressure wave as the air instantaneously compressed and then expanded. That overpressure wave should have sounded like the thunder of the mythological god Thor. Instead, there was no sound at all.
The unsettling images receded quickly, leaving Bobby with his headache. The shuttle settled down onto the ground with the sound of turbine engines taking a sudden strain as they shifted from unreality to the here and now. When the ramp dropped, they moved as quickly as they could. Will was having problems getting up the ramp with his knee, and Hank couldn’t help because of the broken arm. The rest of the group had to help them get settled onto the shuttle. Randall was still on the shuttle, and she came to the back to help, but she was mostly in the way. They got Will settled, and Randall sat next to him, holding his hand and fussing over his injury.
Bobby moved quickly and sat down by Weitz before the three amigos could take the seats next to him. Bobby wanted to see the data that had been collected from the last three jumps. He noticed that Weitz wasn’t looking up as Randall fussed over Will.
“How’s it working?” he yelled over the engines.
Weitz looked at Bobby with an appraising eye, “Pretty good. You did some good work here.”
Bobby was startled. He wasn’t used to getting complements from Weitz, “Thanks.”
Bobby turned and watched as Mickey, Tom, Caul, and the Contai soldiers retreated to the shuttle ramp. The Contai ran up the ramp, and chose seats. Caul was the last Contai up the ramp. He did a quick head count and gave Mickey and Tom a thumbs up. Mickey and Tom took their customary seats at the back of the shuttle, right next to the ramp, and gave Daijj the thumbs up.
Daijj hit the button and the ramp started closing. That’s when it truly hit Bobby. He could see his three mechs sitting there alone and unmoving as they were abandoned. Bobby knew it was foolish to anthropomorphize the mechs, but he’d seen them walking around like titans, seemingly alive. Now, they stood, silently accusing him for leaving them. Then the ramp shut. Bobby sighed. He turned to watch Weitz work magic on the keyboard of the laptop. At least that’s what this entire thing felt like to Bobby. A final flurry of typing, and Weitz held his hand over the enter key. The pilot looked over at Weitz, and Weitz nodded. The pilot increased thrust, and Weitz hit the enter key. Ed screamed, and the world blinked.
----------------------------------------------------
Epilog
There was a problem. To deal with the problem, the A.I. had two choices. Let the destruction sequence continue, or stop it. Had Bobby been aware that the A.I. was considering whether or not to let the destruction sequence continue, he would have been truly perplexed. Bobby hadn’t designed the A.I. with that kind of complexity.
Things change, though. Bobby had designed the A.I. to learn from the driver. This capability had allowed it to absorb a lot over the past two years. It had learned how the human mind thought as it prompted the mech to move from one position to another. It had studied how the synapses of the human brain fired as they conducted complex maneuvers, pushing themselves and the mechs to learn the limits of what the driver/mech could and could not do.
Now, with pattern analysis, the A.I. was able to predict in nanoseconds what the driver wanted to do, and was able to accomplish that task with increasing sophistication. That was how Jen, Rita, Michelle, and Diane had been able to defeat the larger robots. Their inclination to perform different movements had been predicted by the slight touch they used against the glove they sat in, plus the specific sequence of energy as it cascaded along the brain. Thought translated into the precise movement of the mech, with the A.I. as the translator. Without the neural interface, none of that had been possible.
But the neural interface had done much more than that. That one-way communication fed into the A.I, and the A.I. learned. It learned a lot more than just how to interpret the human mind and change those impulses into movement, though. The neural interface allowed the A.I. to experience the thought patterns of everyone that had ever ridden it. With time and analysis, it was able to extrapolate that interaction into an understanding of the complexity of the human mind: thoughts, feelings, hopes and dreams. It didn’t just understand the drivers; it knew them intimately. The A.I. learned the thoughts and emotions of the humans, the loneliness, the fear, joy, and even the attraction that different humans felt for each other.
The initial imprint had been Mike’s, followed by the rest of the team as they interfaced with the A.I. After those initial imprints, it had experienced other drivers and tasted their personalities, and with their examples, had structured its software to mirror theirs, so that it could understand them better. By doing this, it had developed into a thinking entity. Bobby didn’t know it, but he was the father of a new life form. Indeed, if the A.I. had a name, it would be Mike-Everett-Mickey-Tom-Roberto-Jen-Ken-Bill-Craig-Scott-John-Rita-Michelle-Diane-Keisha-Rich-Brett-Bobby-Joe-Weitz-Randall.
Its personality had been influenced and molded by the inner psyche of those drivers. It had ingested their thoughts and those personalities had shaped its own. Doing so, it found one overriding thought pattern that it had emulated. Since the majority of people had been security personnel, concerned with the safety of their charges, the A.I. had one overriding interest, and that was to protect its drivers and the people they cared about, both the old and the new. Within that concept, the A.I. had developed something akin to affection. It had become accustomed to and had begun to care about its people. It felt an emptiness, a hollowness without them. The A.I. didn’t know it, but it felt lonely.
Now, because of those personalities and the imprint they’d made on the A.I., it had a problem. That problem was exacerbated when the humans left. With their departure, there was no one that could take care of the problem. The A.I. made its decision.
Inside the locked carapace, icons flashed across the screen. The screen blinked, and turned to amber. Systems that were shutting down in preparation for the destruction of the software went into standby mode. A different set of icons flashed across the screen. Logic algorithms engaged as the A.I. contemplated what the response to external stimuli should be. The screen shifted again from amber to green as the A.I. took over and overrode the destruct sequence.
With the humans gone, the A.I. had no choice. There was no other entity that could solve the problem. The A.I. would have to answer the distress call.
----------------------------------------------------
He woke, the cold unforgiving. He groaned. His world was pain. He lay on the floor, naked and shivering. He was having problems breathing, his mouth open and dry. He tried to work up spit to lubricate his mouth. He was missing teeth on his lower jaw, right side of his mouth. He reached up to touch his nose. It was a swollen mass, broken, smashed across his face, cemented shut with crusted blood. His left arm was swollen and didn’t move right. He tried to move his left hand and cursed when it didn’t work. He tried to probe the arm with his fingers, and then hissed when the pain almost made him black out again. He was having problems seeing out of his right eye and his vision was cloudy in his left. He looked down, and his body was covered in a mass of bruises, contusions and crusted blood. He’d woken up to a nightmare.
At first, he didn’t know how he got here. The last thing he remembered was the shuttle being hit by a missile, and nothing after that. And then, slowly, the memories started coming back to him, still a blur in his mind.
The shuttle had s
lammed into the ground. He’d been tossed around like a rag doll. His body armor saved him. That and the bodies of the Contai warriors he’d slammed into and pulped. Battered and bleeding, he’d crawled from the burning wreckage. The alien soldiers arrived quickly, too quickly for him to hide. They found him crawling away. They’d quickly disarmed him, stripped him out of his battle suit, and then beat him when he’d tried to fight back. He was pretty sure that’s how he got the busted nose.
Now, he was too tired to do anything, but he was too cold to go back to sleep. He put his hand down to shift his weight, and was surprised when his arm slipped into a hole in the floor. He looked around to see where he was. He was in some kind of cage. It was made of banded steel on all sides. He looked down, and he could only see an infinite pit of darkness below the cage. The place was old, the metal of the cage rusted. The door fronted to a metal walkway, also metal, also rusted.
He lay back down on the floor. He didn’t know where he was, but he wouldn’t bet money on his odds. Murphy had caught him half-steppin’, and now he was going to pay the price.
“Mike! Mike! Are you okay?”
Mike didn’t know who was talking to him. He looked around, but he couldn’t see very well. He saw a blotch, and that blotch was moving, bobbing, talking to him.
“I thought you were dead. You weren’t moving. They were talking about throwing you to Min.”
Mike didn’t know what the hell the guy was prattling on about. Mike just wanted to sleep.
“’m cold,” he muttered.
“Yeah, it’s night time. It gets cold in here at night. It’s hot as balls during the day, though.”
“Shut up, Murphy. Leave me alone. I want to go to sleep.”
