Cryptikon Far Freedom Part 2

by Warren Merkey

may be able to help you," Zakiya said.

  She got to her feet. Koji tried to raise Alex from the deck and finally succeeded.

  "Help me?" Koji asked her. "How?"

  "I now have a key that may unlock your auxiliary memory."

  "And Setek?"

  "I think we can soon find out. Take care of Alex, will you? Bring him along. I'll help you as soon as I can."

  "How did he find his memories?" Aylis asked as they walked back from the morgue.

  "I found Sammy," she said.

  "You mean Shorty?"

  "Perhaps both. I can't explain it yet. He's inside me. He's safe."

  Aylis could only stare at her with grave concern. Zakiya was sure she sounded mentally impaired, or at best mystical. She had seen the dark pool of sparkling matter spool itself into silk-fine thread as she tried to capture it in her hands. The thread entered her body through her hands and began to talk to her. She didn't have time to ponder this miracle of sentience, but she guessed it was an intellect composed of microscopic machines. She tried to explain.

  "Sammy found the path to Alex's auxiliary memory and completed the circuit," she said, coming to the end of her explanation. "I'm calling it Sammy, but that may not be accurate. It may be both an independent entity and a copy of Sammy's memory."

  They returned to Iggy and Wingren, who waited for them in the hospital foyer. Koji sat down with Alex, who was still lost in memories. Zakiya explained what had happened in the morgue.

  Jon, Jamie, and Direk arrived in the hospital by transmat. They appeared agitated.

  "It's here?" Zakiya asked.

  "Something is here!" Jon replied. "We've lost control of the ship!"

  In the middle of the hospital foyer a small golden object bloomed into existence and floated in the air near them.

  "That's it!" Iggy declared.

  "But it's so small!" Wingren said. "I thought it was huge!"

  As if in response to her words, the double spheroid began to grow. They backed away from it as it magically expanded to fill half of the foyer without disturbing anything. It grew farther, until much of it passed through walls and chairs and ceiling, yet did not appear to cause damage. It seemed utterly real and completely impossible at the same time. Its two spheres were joined by a thick shaft that flowed between them with seamless curves. Their eyes couldn't focus on any detail of its golden surface, only the line of its bright silhouette and the reflections of objects in its perfect surface. It could not be determined if it destroyed any of the objects it swallowed or merged with, until Direk pulled a partly-enveloped chair away from the golden object. The chair remained intact and was easy to move but Direk could not return the chair to its partly-enveloped position in the alien intruder.

  Zakiya moved to the middle of the shaft connecting the spheres and waited. She was tempted to touch the perfect liquid-like surface of the alien artifact. "Who are you?" she asked.

  There was no reaction.

  "Speak to us," she said.

  Zakiya put out her hand to touch the golden smoothness. Her hand, her wrist, and her forearm each shrank in size when they came near the surface. She snatched her hand away, frightened. She noticed the effect seemed to vary as she moved her hand sideways near the surface. One place greatly reduced her hand. At that place a depression started to form.

  A portal opened as the golden surface dimpled into a passageway. A tiny human figure staggered toward the opening, the base of which extruded to form a golden ramp whose width expanded as it extended to the hospital floor. The little man stood at the top of the ramp and blinked as though unaccustomed to bright light. Each blink squeezed out tears from his eyes. He swayed slightly as he looked at Zakiya and the others with an expression of disbelief. Perspiration coated his face and dampened his simple clothing. His hair was long and wild. When he wiped the sweat from his brow he left smears of red. His hands were covered with a dried red substance.

  The man started to take a step backward, to retreat.

  "Wait!" Zakiya called to the miniature figure. She reached for him and saw her hand and arm taper in size again to match scale with the man. Aylis grabbed Zakiya protectively from behind. Zakiya felt nothing unusual in her arm even though the view was extremely disturbing. Her fingers contacted the doll-like reality of the man and reflexively clutched at his clothing. The little man reacted by stumbling and taking a few steps down the ramp. With each step he grew larger as the ramp became wider, and with each of his steps Zakiya felt impelled to pull him forward. He tried to resist but seemed to have no strength for it. In a few seconds he stood unsteadily on the hospital floor, grown to normal size, and he owned an indisputable reality of being. The ramp retracted like molten gold being sucked back into its container. The alien ship shrank to a point of golden light and disappeared.

  "That's impossible!" Aylis declared in a shaky voice.

  Zakiya held the stranger by his cloth shirt with her trembling hand while her mind tried to accommodate what she had experienced. Then she took a closer look at the man. She feared for his health! He appeared dangerously thin and weak. The man stood wavering and stared at her with eyes that haunted her.

  She knew who he was!

  "Let us help you," she said in Twenglish.

  2-39 Parting Gift

  Day after day we studied the simulation on the computer: sequences of events so brief they might only exist as ideas in this universe, and shapes so strange they could not be traced by electrons striking phosphor. Day after day the Advisory Committee refused to permit a vacuum test of the Big Circuits. I kept the vacuum in the apertures hard, in ever fainter hope of doing the tests.

  The delay in the testing of the Big Circuits was ultimately caused by the first experiment the Air Force let me perform at an abandoned facility in the desert. That test had reached legendary status among those with the need to know. The facility - a dilapidated building dating to the late 1930s - no longer existed. Colonel Duncan and three other people were still alive because I had insisted we position ourselves five miles away on the other side of a ridge. They thought I was being overly cautious. They had thoroughly inspected the concentrator component and the jury-rigged current-pulse device two of my colleagues at Princeton had helped me build. Except for the stick of dynamite, there was nothing to suggest that even standing a hundred meters away wouldn't be safe. The flash beyond the ridge was a great surprise to Duncan and the others, and even to me. I never expected such a large explosion, and although I was elated as the ground shook, I was upset I didn't have the equipment to measure what happened. Later, seismograph recordings did suggest an impressive force, and the blast crater proved it. That test was followed by two more with similar results.

  Many more concentrator components were fabricated with increasingly larger dimensions. Their potential for becoming cheap non-nuclear armaments kept the secret development funds pouring in and eventually moved the project to a deep mine in West Virginia where the test explosions would be less noticeable. There were not that many test explosions, as the "yield" did not increase quickly enough with the increases in size. The component was then greatly enlarged and it went west to the desert to be tested. This component melted and seemed like a failure, which it was - for a weapon. However, measurements suggested that the output energy was greater than the input and some mass had disappeared. This made my theory inadequate to explain why greater size did not produce greater explosions. It seemed the universe had a secret size scale for the kind of event I was testing. This was a geometry problem that Milly jumped into with fierce fascination, coming up with suggestions that were more imaginative than I could imagine.

  The circuits of the second range of sizes were designed to study the mass and energy losses and gains of the larger concentrator components. We melted half a dozen concentrators of various sizes. Milly invented a new kind of geometry using data from the tests. Her new geometry suggested a third range of sizes with yet a different but unknown test outcome. My quantum circuit theory became wedded t
o Milly's geometry, where size changed fundamental relationships for almost everything. I suggested Milly call her new math quantum geometry. She never did like the word quantum. She did like the idea of a probability geometry. She did not like what probabilities her geometry hinted at for the larger circuits to come.

  The Second Range circuit, had it been refined, could have generated electricity from its excess heat production, becoming a kind of fusion power plant. The disappearing mass, however, was a theoretical problem and a practical problem. The Second Range circuit was never going to be exploited. As much as our fellow scientists and engineers did not understand my theory and as little as they liked Milly's predictive geometry that required - for instance - that triangles have an imaginary total of less than 180 degrees, it made them shudder to wonder what our Third Range circuit would do.

  I had my own imaginary probability for what a very large Third Range Circuit could do. Something was happening at the position where all the electric lines of force plunged into maximum density. A larger "aperture" for the concentration of field lines - quantum circuits - might change the nature of that piece of real estate. Milly's "probability geometry" had sent me back to quantum physics and relativity to recharge my imagination with the probability and uncertainty of stuff we can never see. What are we, if we