"And these planets would be ones where individuals infected by this phage are denied access to your YIT, I suspect?" Anson said.
"Yes, that is correct," Prawmitoos said.
"Is there a cure for this picophage? Why can't the nanomachines eat it?" Tabitha asked.
"Tab, my guess is that this picophage is just that, a picometer phage. That would be three orders of magnitude smaller than the nanomachines and would be undetectable by them," Anson replied.
"You are quite correct." The royal Gray furrowed its head and wrinkled the coloration there. It didn't seem happy that we understood their plight.
"Then there is no cure for this picophage?" 'Becca asked.
"No cure that we have been able to discover. This is why we have drones live in your solar system and conduct experiments on your species. They are trying to develop a cure for this technological disease. Unfortunately, they have yet to discover one. They are motivated, as they are exposed to the phage and cannot return unless they find a cure. We have sent our best scientist drones."
"Yes, I bet you did. All the way to the Russian front, mein Fuehrer!" Tabitha said.
"Wait a minute." I thought about their actions seeming a bit megalomaniacal and not with any good intent, or at least none that I could perceive. "You could care less about us, isn't that right? You are experimenting on us to find a cure for yourselves. That is why you stay hidden away so. You are afraid of these Lumpeyins, aren't you? And what happens if we become aware or a threat?" I knew the answer. The bastards would wipe us out.
The Teytoonis didn't answer immediately. In fact they seemed to all have facial twitches. They were conferring over their headbands. I almost decided to grab one of them and connect to his circuit, but I thought better of it.
"Okay, so why can't you help Tatiana?"
"There is no escape from the collapsing quantum singularity that she has been placed in. Her use of the warp field to delay her fate was clever, but it will not save her in the end and is only delaying the inevitable. Even if we could save her, we would not. She is infected after all," Prawmitoos said.
Mike, access this damned YIT and get as much info as you can on everything. If you detect them pinging you, get out.
I understand, Steven.
Finally, Tabitha forced them to answer the big question. "You never answered. Are you afraid of these Lumpeyins and are we inconsequential to you?"
"Yes," is all Prawmitoos said.
"And when we get too dangerous to be used as lab rats what then?" Tabitha asked.
"I believe the answer is obvious," Feyibi replied.
"You plan to destroy humanity?!" Anson asked.
"I'm sorry, but it is your fate," Prawmitoos said.
"Bullshit!" I said. I didn't like these bastards from the first day I met them and I liked them even less at this point.
Steven?
Yes, Mike? I was getting used to being part of multiple conversations at once. Having a wife and a sentient computer always talking in your head will force you to develop this skill.
There is way too much data on the YIT for me to download even small fractions of it. Do you have any suggestions? Mike said in my mind.
Uh, Mike, have Michelle make a copy of yourself back in the supply room on the Phoenix, but tell her to not add any SuperAgent code. Use that cube as a data repository. In fact, have her make as many cubes as she can and fill them up with as much as you can find that might be pertinent to the survival of the human race. Understand?
Yes, Steven.
"Wait a minute," Jim interjected. "If this Opolawn creature can control the picophage on individual levels, then that must mean there is some sort of control mechanism somewhere."
"Yes, so?" Feyibi asked.
"Well, why don't we go and get the damned thing and turn it off? Then what happens to the picophage?"
"We have seen this before. The picophage drives its victims rapidly insane. Destroying the control mechanism is not an option for humanity since so many of you are infected—more than two-thirds of your species are tainted. The wars that would be created on your planet would devastate your culture. On the other hand, it would be a good option for us."
"Well, what if we found the thing and just locked it away in a place and let nobody send instructions to this picophage? Would it just lie around dormant? How does the virus spread?" Tabitha asked, not quite sure if the word virus actually fit.
"The phage spread is controlled through the control mechanism and Opolawn chooses his victims carefully," Yiaepetoes explained.
"This Opolawn must be one bored dude to sit around for millennia just tinkering with four billion people's lives," 'Becca said.
"The mind of the Lumpeyins is amazing and such tasks are minute to them," Prawmitoos assured us. I wasn't sure if he had meant the mind of a Lumpeyin or the mind of the Lumpeyins. Were they individuals or were they a collective mind?
"Well, that is the answer. We will go and take the control mechanism from the Lumpeyins and then we will control our own fate. We will let the virus remain dormant until it is gone from attrition of the infected individuals. Once all infected people have died of old age, a few generations from now, then we will destroy the controller," Tabitha said.
"Great plan, Tabitha. But if we return from Lumpeyin space with this control device or whatever the hell it is, you bastards will let Tatiana out of her prison and you will spare Earth from annihilation." I told them, I didn't ask.
"We will spare Earth. But as I have said before, there is no escape from the diminishing quantum singularity within which she is trapped. We are sorry."
"You're full of shit!" I said.
CHAPTER 23
We spent the next three days discussing strategies and possible scenarios to approach Lumpeya City in the mountain continent of the alien planet. There didn't seem to be a simple way to do it. For one thing, the damned place was more than thirty thousand light years away. The trip in a Gray ship would take as much as ten days. The next big hurdle was the fact that Opolawn would see us coming for those ten days. So, somehow we had to devise a ruse to fly under the flag of truce. Prawmitoos suggested that we could approach under the treaty by which the galaxy had been separated. It seemed like the only way to approach Lumpeyinis or whatever the hell they called it.
We also needed intelligence on how the picophage worked, what the controller looked like, and where it would be. Mike found a lot of this information on the YIT. The aliens didn't compartmentalize their information since none of the drones would look for anything that they weren't instructed to look for. I quickly understood why I was able to hack Mike so easily. God, these aliens were powerful, but stupid. I stored that information away in my mind and began to subprocess it for possible future applications.
The information that we couldn't find on the YIT wasn't there because it didn't exist, according to Feyibi. The Titan told us as much information as it had gathered through personal encounters and then had the others discuss the concept with us as well. We understood the general configuration of the device. It could gather massive amounts of information via the YIT and subprocess that information at various stages during the data manipulation process before it reached the main processor. There an artificial intelligence of some sort would sort the data throughout the multiprocessor bus of the device and reroute commands back out over the YIT. In other words, it was another damned SuperAgent. Mike, Anson, Jim, and I discussed the possibilities of overpowering the SuperAgent or just pinging the controller across the Infrastructure to find it.
We realized that the picophage must have some sort of signature that could be detected and that the Teytoonis knew this. The credit card device knew that Tatiana was infected. How? We searched back through the YIT and found it. The individual picophage device was much larger in macrospace. In fact, each tiny device was about six centimeters across; again the Dr. Who's phone booth phenomena came into play. The devices apparently used a Van den Broeck–modified Alcubierre-type warp bubb
le that was a picometer wide on the outside but was six centimeters wide on the inside. So how was it detected? Easy; the tiny location within the picometer bubble contained more energy density than normal space from an outside-the-bubble reference frame. Following Einstein's equations that spacetime curvature is proportional to energy density, the spacetime around these pico devices should be slightly curved inward. And the Teytoonis had been able to detect this extremely small change in spacetime curvature. Anson commented to the fact that all of these little warp drives floating around on Earth could have been one of the reasons that during his original warp experiment program he never could find a closed solution to the Einstein equations that matched the experimental data. Mike thought he was correct.
At any rate, we figured out a way to rig together one of these credit card things with the sensors on the Phoenix and then have Mike ping Earth through the Infrastructure. When he did he received an echo that had the address of the picophage cloud. There were more than 1030 returns in a superposition wave and we nearly dismissed them as noise until we looked at the signal's frequency spectrum. The information was spread out on a hopping spectrum from radio-type pings way on up to pings that the Teytoonis used, but they were there and we found them. The Teytoonis were amazed at our scientific and engineering capability because they had never gotten this far in tracking the things before. Before long Tabitha warned us to start keeping most of our tricks secret. We hoped that something here would end up being a weapon that we could use to hold both the Grays—the Teytoonis—and the Lumpeyins at bay.
After we were confident that we understood exactly the signal that the picophage returned upon pinging, we started looking for signals that were being sent to the picophage devices.
"You know," Tabitha commented, "what we have done here is good SIGINT work even if it was with alien technology."
"Well I would agree partially, Tabitha," Anson said. "But it is a little more, really. I would say it was MASINT since we weren't just detecting the SIGnals INTelligence, but we also had to do some Measurement first And then do some SIGnals INTelligence."
Whatever Anson or Tabitha wanted to call it, we were putting some well-learned human traits to good use.
Finally, after day twenty-two we had it. Anson called us into the makeshift lab in the Phoenix where he and Sara had detected a signal from an exact location within Lumpeya City the Grays had pinpointed. That had to be the device's location and we now knew exactly where it was. These facts really amazed and frightened the Grays. They had apparently been trying to find this thing for more than six thousand years with no luck. 'Becca pointed out to them that their slave scientists probably weren't really motivated in the right way to help them. Then she told them about flies, honey, and vinegar. It was completely lost on Feyibi and Atalas and Yiaepetoes, but Prawmitoos seemed to ponder the story. Perhaps it didn't fall completely on deaf ears.
Occasionally, Tatiana and I would talk for limited, small amounts of time. I missed her terribly. The wait between conversations wasn't as bad for her since she had taken to putting herself in suspended animation in order to conserve her strength and life expectancy. Oxygen wasn't a problem since the nanomachines could convert the carbon dioxide that she breathed out right back into diatomic oxygen very easily and practically instantaneously. The warp armor belts only had minimal air supplies since we expected to use them in a breathable atmosphere. All that was normally needed to replenish the air would be a quick lights-off lights-on maneuver. We had planned for them to be used as emergency spacesuits but that was for limited periods of time and the air supply limitation was counted in minutes, not days.
Food and water were Tatiana's biggest problems. We calculated that the nanomachines could reutilize her clothes and weapons; her urine, feces, and sweat; and the food and water that were in her stomach, and any excess body fat and muscle over and over (at the body's typical ten percent efficiency) for about a year before there was nothing left of her but vital organs. If she had to she would use her hair first, then her breasts, then her fingers and toes and her earlobes and ears, her eyeballs, then her hands and feet, then her arms and legs, until there was nothing left. So we only allowed ourselves a minute a day for quality time together. It was hard thinking about what she was going through and that she was trapped there this way, but she was intent on staying alive no matter what it took. She had a year before she had to start in on her hair. That had to be enough time. The total gruesome calculated time that she could stay in there and still be fixed when she got out was pushing a hundred years, about twice that if we stopped talking until we got her out. But Tatiana told me that if she had to stay there that long without talking to me, she would end it now. We didn't have that conversation again.
Fortunately, with our rapid download capabilities I could fill Tatiana in on a full day in a matter of microseconds, and then spend the rest of the minute telling her how much I loved her.
Tatiana told me a few days after I had downloaded her the specs for the picophage detection system that she was working on an idea for getting out. She knew she was wasting energy that she might need sometime in the future, but she said she was only allowing herself an extra minute a day for this—which would cut her year into six months. She told me several times that she didn't have a need for legs and arms in that damned bubble. I cried all that night and had that image stuck in my head. It was Jim and 'Becca who came around and pulled me through the depression. I also had Mike keep tabs on it for me. He assured me that I was perfectly normal and that he was sad, too.
Ten more days passed and we were prepared for our journey. We planned to take the Phoenix to Lumpeya City. The Teytoonise drones had fixed the quantum fluctuation drive and so it would be able to make the trip a third of the way across the galaxy in just ten or so days. Tabitha asked Prawmitoos if he would give Annie, Sara, and Al a ride back to the edge of the quarantine zone and drop them off there in the Einstein. He had a science drone ship do this. He told us that he planned to come along to Lumpeya City with us. We argued with him about it for some time, but the Gray finally put his foot down and said that this would be the only way he would allow the Einstein to return to Earth space. Anson stepped in and told him that he had a deal
Finally, we were on our way to meet the Lumpeyins—or at least Opolawn. Once we were aboard the Phoenix and on our way at a million times the speed of light, Prawmitoos took me aside when nobody else was around and he touched my forehead.
You hear me, human?
Yes, alien. What do you want?
This is something that you might need. He palmed two small medallions made of a flintlike stone to me. One was a grayish color and the other black.
What are these and why are you giving them to me?
You have the Servant and understand its mechanisms quite clearly. I think you could use this best. It is FUER. Your people have yet to develop this technology, but I give it to you now with hopes that you will understand its potential applications. It is what you might mistakenly call elementary particles.
When he thought it and spoke it the word sounded like a drawn out "fuyer" and sounded almost exactly like the way that Anson says the word "fire" in his slow Southern redneck drawl. He downloaded the instructions to me and I realized that it was a serious weapon, one which worked similarly to a nuclear bomb. If you forced the two rocks together hard enough, like striking two flint stones, you would create sparks. If you really slammed them together it would release tremendous amounts of energy, many hundreds or possibly thousands of times greater energy than a nuclear device. FUER was a Latin acronym for fugitivus unus elementum retineo. Fugitivus translates to something like a fugitive or runaway slave. Unus means one and only one. Elementum is the first principle or basic constituent. Retineo means constrained or confined. Put it all together and you get something like fugitive one and only one basic constituent confined. It rang a bell with me and I was sure it would with Anson, Jim, or Tatiana. The best I could gather was that the rocks were
crystallized arrays of quarks.
Single quarks didn't exist as far as I knew until that moment. Quarks are the basic constituent of matter and always come in twos or threes—never one and only one. The gluon force required to keep the damned things together gets larger the harder you try pulling them apart. In other words, quarks are attached in such a way that they can't be pulled apart because it would take a near infinite force to do it. I say infinite just because humans have never figured out how much energy it would take. Oh, there are theories, but nobody has ever figured out how to do it. Obviously, Prawmitoos had figured out how to free some quarks, capture the free ones, and confine them in some type of matrix. He was giving me a couple of chunks of the stuff.
Human, you must keep this inside your warp field or Opolawn will be able to detect it. Do you understand?
Yes. Thanks, I think. But why are you doing this?
When we get to Lumpeya City I cannot help you. We are under treaty with the Lumpeyins and will not make war with them unless they are infringing upon that treaty. They are not violating the treaty as you are not protected by us. Use this gift of FUER wisely.
Mike, did you get all that?
Yes, Steven. Curious, isn't it?
Let's remember to download it to Tatiana later.
Okay, Steven.
Mike?
Yes, Steven?
You are a good friend.
Thanks, Steven.
* * *
Tatiana had the brilliant idea of attaching the two FUER pieces to a small warp armor belt. If we modified the warp bubble to rapidly collapse like the Gray's confinement bubble, it would force the two pieces of quarkium nuggets together and implement the quark fusion bomb effect. The warp device would be destroyed, thus releasing the mammoth explosion. We talked this over with Mike and were able to build such a device into a box much smaller than a wristwatch. I then had Mike attach the FUER medallions on either side of the thing and place a low-level warp bubble on and around the FUER at all times. This small warp bubble was about the size of a golf ball and I had Mike place a hard shell around the warp field. Then I picked up the little ball with the miniature warp bubble inside it and put the thing in my pocket. I hoped I wouldn't have to use it, but all it would take to activate it would be a mental order from me to Mike and I would use it if I needed to.
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