The Infinity Program

by Richard H Hardy

General Rockaway looked down at his notes for a moment, as though searching for a particular item. He gave a brief smile to the senior advisor.

  “I don’t believe your questions to be quite as pointless as Dr. Brookings seems to feel. At this point, speculation is all we have. Certain experts have analyzed the available material and while their opinions are not unanimous, they seem to point in a single direction: the nanotechnology, which was used in the theft, is most likely of extraterrestrial origin. It is clearly far beyond the capabilities of any present-day nation or corporation. Our experts speculate that this crèche might have played some role in the evolutionary development of modern man. More importantly, they feel that this technology, whatever its source, is an active threat. Just the materials they have already appropriated give them the resources to establish a large-scale industrial base. To what purpose is anyone’s guess.”

  “How can we fight an unseen enemy?” asked the senior advisor.

  “We can’t,” said General Rockaway. “But we can be ready for their next move and when they make it, we’ll hit them with everything we have. We now have operatives stationed throughout the region of West Virginia. We’re fairly certain that whatever it is has retreated below the level at which the crèche was found. We now have over a hundred operatives in the region and we’ve also installed a number of extremely sophisticated sensor devices designed to pinpoint any subterranean industrial activity. If anything out of the ordinary occurs, we’ll be mobilized and ready to move. When we find our target, we have clearance to detonate an underground nuclear device as close to it as we can get.”

  The general looked up abruptly from his notes and scrutinized the audience. “Are there any questions, gentlemen?”

  There were, of course, a million of them, but the audience was too stunned to ask even one. General Rockaway seized the opportunity to bang a gavel on the table and shout, “This meeting is adjourned!” He turned sharply and walked toward one of the back exits. As though waking from a nightmare, the audience rose from their seats, looking at one another in stunned silence. When they left the hall, the only noise was the sound of their feet.

  Chapter Six

  Jon Graeme pulled into the parking lot of HTPS Industries at 6:30 Monday morning. He expected to be the first one there and was surprised to see Harry’s 1949 Studebaker already in the parking lot.

  After taking an elevator to the second floor, Jon headed to the break room for a cup of coffee. Then he strolled over to Harry’s office and rapped gently.

  “Come on in!” Harry called out with enthusiasm.

  When Jon entered, Harry didn’t even look up. He was staring intently at his monitor. Jon glanced at the screen, but the meaning of the code completely eluded him. He recognized the language as C++, but somehow the extended ASCII set had been incorporated into it. Jon could recognize the hexadecimal and octal codes of the ASCII set, but he could tell they weren’t being used the usual way—to represent the various numbers and letters on a computer keyboard. He couldn’t even begin to guess what Harry was doing.

  “What the hell is that?” Jon asked.

  Harry looked up at him. The pale, washed out blankness marring his face on Sunday was completely gone. He looked to be in the full flush of health, with the exception of his eyes, which burned with feverish intensity.

  “This is the HSOS,” he said with a chuckle. “The Harry Sale Operating System. It all came to me last night at about two in the morning; the whole thing, full blown!”

  “Just what I need,” Jon said with no enthusiasm, “another damned operating system to learn.”

  Harry turned away from the screen and looked up at Jon with fierce enthusiasm.

  “It all came to me in an instant last night. It was so obvious that I wonder now why I never thought of it before. The germ of the idea was a new way of using bit-wise operators to control the quantum mechanical effects within the Josephson junctions. But when I thought it through, I realized I had a totally new approach—an operating system that would eliminate all the problems in multi-threaded architecture. It would eliminate contention and latency and load balancing and starvation.”

  Jon had heard all these terms before, but his mind raced to catch up with Harry’s. The engineers he worked with were always talking about such problems. Contention was the big one, the major drawback of a super computer like Big Moe. With so many parallel processors, delays were unavoidable. Too many different processors were trying to access the same, shared resource. There was also something they called latency—the inevitable delay created between a system request and the communication travel time to fulfill that request. Load balancing was simply optimizing the distribution of the work. That was a huge issue when thousands of separate processors were each trying to accomplish their unique function. With poor load balancing, starvation—the progressive wastage of system resources—inevitably followed. If Harry had found a solution to all of these problems, that would fundamentally change computers as the world knew them.

  Jon stared at his friend in amazement. It was as though their weekend in West Virginia had never happened.

  “Well,” said Jon, “maybe I’d better leave you alone with your new operating system.”

  Harry did not even turn away from the screen. His hands flew over the keyboard and more of the strange-looking code appeared on his screen. Jon shook his head. It might have been hieroglyphs, for all he understood it. He stepped back and shut the door quietly behind him.

  At the end of the day, he stopped back at Harry’s office and found his friend exactly as he had left him in the morning. This time Harry didn’t even nod. He was entirely wrapped up in the screen before him.

  “Don’t work too late,” said Jon. “See you tomorrow.”

  At Harry’s inarticulate grunt, Jon walked away.

  The next morning, when Jon Graeme pulled into the company parking lot, the first thing he noticed was Harry’s 1949 Studebaker. Dew covered the windows, betraying the fact that the car had been parked all night long. Harry had never left the building. He had worked on for twenty-four hours straight.

  Jon knocked on Harry’s office door and didn’t wait for a response before walking in. He was half expecting Harry to be asleep at his desk but saw immediately that he wasn’t. There was a king-size cup of coffee sitting in front of him and his fingers were still flying over the keyboard.

  “Don’t say anything,” Harry muttered under his breath without so much as a glance upward. Jon waited for a pause, but Harry seemed to have forgotten that he was even there. After a full three minutes, Jon retreated from the office.

  At the end of the day he stopped by again. A young woman stood at the entrance. She was the senior technical writer in the Advanced Programming Division—quite a feat for a woman under thirty. Jon had met her a few times and always felt uneasy around her. Not because of her status, but because of her beauty. Her name was Lettie Olsen. She had honey-blonde hair, dark eyes, and an incredible figure. Most of the male staff had hit on her at one time or other, but she was oblivious to them all. Harry Sale was the only man at HTPS Industries who interested her. It seemed incredible to Jon that a woman like Lettie Olsen would show romantic interest in a guy like Harry. Most women would find Harry about as passionate as a wire brush.

  He couldn’t help but speculate as to why a woman like Lettie would be attracted to a man like Harry. Perhaps by fixing her attention on Harry, Lettie avoided the possibility of a real relationship. He wondered if someone in her past had hurt her badly.

  “Damn it, Harry!” he heard her say. “This is totally unhealthy. You can’t just live on coffee and candy bars. And you’re going to go blind staring at that damned screen for thirty-six hours straight!”

  Harry’s face was flushed and he had a vague, uncertain look, as if he didn’t know what to say next. When he tried to respond to Lettie, he would mumble and stutter, unable to get his words out properly. His features relaxed when he saw Jon’s familiar face.

  “Come on in
, Jon!” he said with false heartiness.

  Lettie threw open her arms in disgust. “You bull-headed male!” she said as she stalked out of the office, slamming the door behind her.

  “Whew, that was close!” Harry said.

  “Close?” said Jon in amazement. “Every single guy in the place and some that aren't even single would give their eye teeth if she stopped by and showed some interest in them.”

  He shrugged. “She makes me nervous. I never know what to say to her.” His eyes danced between Jon and the computer screen.

  Jon noticed the wastebasket on the floor, which was full to the brim with soda cans, candy wrappers, and empty chip bags. “You know, Harry, she’s absolutely right. You need to get out of here and get yourself a decent meal and some sleep.”

  “Well, maybe some food, but I don’t need any sleep. I feel great!”

  “Harry, you’re just running on nervous energy. When the steam burns out you’re going to fall to pieces.”

  Harry ran a hand through his tangled mop. “Okay, okay, okay! I don’t need to hear it from you, too. I’ve already had a lecture from Lettie.”

  He turned his unshaven face back to the computer screen. “Just got a few things to finish up and then I’m out of here.”

  Once again, Harry’s fingers began to move over the keyboard, and Jon realized that neither Lettie nor he had gotten through to Harry. Whatever he was working on, Harry would be staying with it until he was done.

  The next morning it was the same story: Harry’s Studebaker was still there, its windows and windshields damp from the morning dew. This is not humanly possible, Jon said to himself.

  When he entered Harry’s office , the crazed look on Harry’s face astounded him. Obscure lines of code blocked out between curly braces jumped on the screen even as Jon watched. If anything, Harry was working even faster than on Monday. There was stubble on his chin and a feverish gleam in his eyes. For once, he acknowledged Jon’s presence by turning away from the screen and slumping back in his chair.

  “Man, this is incredible! Working out some of the details took a little longer than I first thought, but once I load this on Big Moe, that baby will be humming at a quadrillion flops. That’s a thousand times faster than what she’s doing now. We’ll be able to work on the big problems!”

  Jon had never seen his friend in such a state of excitement. How was it possible that he had been working for over sixty hours straight and still showed no signs of slowing down? Jon didn’t want to throw cold water on his friend’s plans, but he felt that Harry needed a wake-up call to the realities of the corporate culture of HTPS Industries.

  “Harry,” he said, as if reasoning with a child, “it would take months of testing before you even tried your OS on Little Moe. You know how they are around here.”

  An enigmatic smile formed briefly on Harry’s face. “If I’m lucky, I’ll be done today or tomorrow. I’ve got the spine of it all in place. I just have to resolve some of these goddamned details!”

  “Don’t you think you would work better if you went home and got yourself a good night’s sleep?”

  “Hell, I never felt better in my life!”

  Jon noticed a large, empty Styrofoam container pushed to the back of Harry’s desk.

  “Where’s that from?” Jon asked as he pointed toward the cup.

  “Lettie dropped it off last night at about 8:00 p.m., along with a take-out steak dinner from Miller’s Tavern.”

  “You know, Harry, I just don’t understand you. You’ve got this beautiful lady interested in you and you won’t so much as ask her out to the movies.”

  Harry had turned back to the computer monitor. “Damn! I can’t believe I left out a semicolon at the end of that statement.”

  Jon didn’t say anything more. He had been dismissed, so he stood up and started to walk away.

  “I’ll stop back at the end of the day,” he said. Harry made no response. The only sound was the clicking of his keyboard.

  When Jon returned to his office, he found that his boss, Matt O’Reilly, had left a couple of additional assignments for him. The requests were lying on the seat of his chair. He was irritated when he saw that they were not requests for documentation, but for low level programming issues. This sort of thing had been happening too much lately. Instead of letting him focus on technical writing, they were using him to handle rinky-dink stuff that other programmers couldn’t be bothered with. One request was for a UNIX script to reformat an EDI 864 Text document so that it would be printer friendly. The other was for a more elaborate script to search out recent code changes in a source code library. Jon groaned. He did not want to do this stuff. How the hell was he supposed to develop his skills as a technical writer when they kept farming out this kind of crap to him?

  Jon leaned back in his chair, shut his eyes, and for a moment tried to imagine he was back on Tartan’s Crag. He could almost see the trail in front of him, and smell the phantom scent of the pines. What he wouldn’t give to be back in the mountains right now! Oh well, he thought. At least I have the memory. Two minutes later he was in the midst of another hectic workday.

  At the end of the day, as soon as he swung open the door to the Advanced Programming Division, Jon heard George Ludwig screaming at the top of his lungs.

  “You arrogant son of a bitch. You’re even a bigger prima donna than your father was!”

  There was a delay then and Jon assumed that Harry was making some kind of response. Indeed he was, for when he approached Harry’s office he saw George Ludwig standing just outside, almost apoplectic with rage. His face was twisted and his lips were curled back in a grimace, exposing two rows of small, sharp, crooked teeth.

  “The PIM programming should have been completed on Monday and you know it! I’m going to the division head with this one, Harry. You’re dragging down two years of work. I’ll have you shit-canned from HTPS for this!”

  Again, Harry made some sort of reply, not raising his voice enough for Jon to hear. But Jon could see the effect it had on George Ludwig. It was as though he had been touched by a live electric wire. His whole body convulsed and his eyes popped open from a narrow squint to something wild and bug-eyed.

  Harry stood and approached the threshold of the office , pointing toward the floor.

  “Just imagine,” said Harry in a soft, very reasonable voice, “that there is a dotted line running from the right side of the threshold to the left. Don’t ever cross it again.”

  With that, Harry shut the door in George’s face.

  For a moment or two, George Ludwig sputtered in disbelief. Saliva flew from his mouth but not a word came out. He spun about and stalked away, and Jon could see that the back of his neck was beat red. While Jon had never liked the man, he hoped that he was not about to have a coronary.

  Jon knocked lightly on Harry’s door and called out, “It’s me, Harry, can I see you a minute?”

  When Jon walked in, Harry turned toward him. His three-day beard was starting to thicken so that it was more than just stubble, and his face was calm and dispassionate. It was impossible to tell that he had just had an angry encounter with George Ludwig.

  “Hey, buddy,” he said. “I don’t mean to be impolite to you of all people, but I have had so many interruptions today. Can we talk some other time?”

  “Sure thing,” Jon said and immediately walked away. This was getting out of hand but he wasn’t sure what else to do.

  Jon turned to go back to his own section of the building and literally bumped into Lettie Olsen.

  “Oh, excuse me,” he said.

  Lettie smiled. “No problem. I was hoping I would catch you here. I was wondering if you might be going down to Miller’s after work.”

  Jon had been planning on going straight home, but without so much as a pause, he answered her.

  “Yeah, I’m going down there,” he said, trying to keep the excitement out of his voice.

  Lettie smiled again, setting off an earthquake of nervous tension in
Jon’s stomach. “I was wondering if we could discuss a couple of things down there, just for a couple of minutes.”

  “Sure thing,” said Jon.

  “I’ll meet you there, then. I’ve just got a few odds and ends to wrap up before I leave.”

  When she turned and walked away from him, Jon could not keep his eyes off her retreating figure.

  Jon waited at a small table in the back of Miller’s Tavern. He was seated with his back to the wall so that he could see everyone who entered. It was now past six thirty and there was still no sign of Lettie, so Jon sat nursing his beer and trying hard to quell the intense feeling of excitement overtaking his limbs. She had made no small impression on him in his few encounters with her at HTPS Industries.

  While most men could not get past her physical attributes, he was more fascinated by her character. She seemed to be a study in contradictions. Even though she wasn’t yet thirty years old, she was the senior technical writer in the Advanced Programming Division. It was a demanding and stressful job. Every day she had to work with incredible scheduling issues and was always up against unrealistic deadlines. On top of that, her staff was populated with difficult personalities, Harry being just one of them. Yet somehow she kept her cool and usually seemed quiet and reserved. But she wasn’t shy about mixing it up and being just as aggressive as any of the alpha-type males that populated HTPS Industries.

  While she also seemed folksy and down-to-earth, there was another side, which was regal, aristocratic and aloof. Jon was intrigued by her and more than a little bit intimidated. What mystified him the most was her interest in Harry. Was it some kind of mother hen instinct? Was she just feigning her interest as a ruse to keep other men away from her? Jon had no idea what the answer was. The only thing he knew for sure was that if she were interested in him, he wouldn’t be indifferent like Harry.

  Lettie finally arrived at a quarter to seven. Without even ordering a drink, she made a beeline to Jon’s table, took a seat, and without preamble plunged into the reason for the meeting.