Mad-Sci-Soc

by Arrand Pritchard

  “Upgrades,” sighed Terri artificially, “do not... transfer in his time machine.”

  “Transfer?”

  “Upgrades do not work in his Entangle-Scan!”

  Conrad rose from the table and strode into the garden and stood motionless seemingly to admire the countryside of hedgerows and wooded copses. When he returned the need for the tea party metaphor had disappeared.

  ***

  Tuesday, January 29, 2123.

  Conrad returned to the Imaginarium after about twenty minutes. Karmen and I were on either side of Terri. I had just handed her a fresh cup of tea.

  “I'm fine. I'm fine,” she sniffed, hunched over the table, brushing our attentions away.

  “I owe you an apology, Terri. I'm sorry that I lost my temper. We are all scientists here and we should have been more respectful into your insights,” said Conrad.

  “Scientists? Mad Scientists!” challenged Terri.

  “Yes, I think we’ve proved that,” said Conrad apologetically, rubbing his head.

  “But you still don't believe me, right?” she sighed. Her voice sore from the hours of yelling.

  “As the Great Steve says, you can't connect the dots looking forward, you can only connect them looking backwards. I haven't been connecting the dots in any direction,” he said.

  “Oh?” said Terri, blowing her nose.

  “I have remembered something... This may be hard to retell without mentioning something that I really do not want to talk about. Not to anyone. And especially not to you?”

  “We have just had a three hour screaming match and there was something that wasn't said?” said Terri sarcastically. (FYI: the tea party metaphor disguised the screaming match).

  “Well, yes.”

  Terri sighed. “Let's hear it.”

  Conrad sat down and put his face in hands, “It is about your death.”

  ***

  Friday, December 13, 2117.

  A group of terrorists called the Open Genetics Alliance Group had taken over the Museum of Computer Technology and was threatening to destroy an ancient artifact, a DEC PDP-11 computing device dating from 1977 that was still working, still calculating the decimal component of pi. Pretty irrational, huh? (Pi is an irrational number).

  Terri was anxious about going on her first mission until she heard OGAG's demands, which were: a) Free access to the genealogical data within the Legacy Net. b) The end of DNA profiling and manipulation of the general public genome. c) Freeing all pets from slavery. d) A flight to Iceland.

  “These don't seem that unreasonable,” she said to Conrad.

  “They are making demands with the threat of violence. That is unacceptable,” replied Conrad.

  “Threats of violence against property,” corrected Terri.

  “Threats are threats,” Conrad said to close the matter.

  But Terri sensed something was wrong. Only someone with the sense of identifying the Uncanny Valley Effect would be able to spot the problem... Terri had that intuition. She kept quiet and bit her lip.

  Conrad, Karmen and Terri were kitted out in full superhero-ware, riding Max's auto-auto to the crime scene. Conrad in his yellow latex, Karmen with her winged helmet and Terri with her new blue pastel Cloudera costume and continuously wavy hair; which had to be swept and held around her left shoulder.

  Max was following the action via a camera equipped quad-copter drone (flying behind the A2). He had pulled out from joining the mission in person. He claimed it was due to an ear-ache but Terri suspected it was due to their recent break up. She had confronted Max a few days earlier about The Game he was playing. Playing her.

  “We're here. Activate invisibility cloaking,” said Conrad.

  Conrad and Terri disappeared in a shimmer. But not Karmen.

  “I've a glitch,” she said gesturing to her headset as if she was dancing at a techno rave. She was, in fact, just trying to access the super-suit system Built In Test utilities.

  “Hardware or software?” asked Conrad.

  “Possibly both.”

  “Ok, stay here. Cloudera and I will do this. The mission is to sneak in through a side door, disarm and incapacitate the terrorists,” said Conrad.

  Karmen's headset displayed their departure as she continued to unravel her technical problems using vigorous hand movements.

  Terri changed her comms settings from group setting to a private channel with Conrad, “Two weeks of training and now this?”

  Terri had actually undergone three weeks of intensive training but she had lost count. It started with her learning how to put on her costume and then doing a single press-up (with difficulty), to full weapon training, rappelling and rope climbing. But it was not the training that worried her.

  Conrad replied confidently, “You'll be fine. Just cover my back. I'll take the lead. Make sure you look good for the camera drones.”

  Terri hummed and said, “But I'm going in alone, aren't I? I must be the ultimate bozo to have signed up for this.”

  Conrad turned and looked quizzically at her, but being invisible, could only slow his rate of progress towards the steps of the museum. “Of course, not. I'll be with you,” he said concerned.

  “Ever since I was a child I could spot a surrogate from a real human a mile off. I've only just figured out how your super powers really work, Captain.”

  Before Conrad could reply, Karmen's voice came over their headset, “Why have you stopped?”

  Conrad closed down the group channel to continue the private conversation. “I may not be here in person, but I am here for all intents and purposes. You have 100% of my attention and I'm piloting a super-strength superhero.”

  Conrad's Captain Kittoffery surrogate was the spitting image of Conrad himself. But it was more than a standard remote controlled replicant, it was customised with many additional features developed by Mad-Sci-Soc, to allow Conrad to operate the machine indistinguishable from his real self. The robot machine had advanced high definition sound to mimic his voice, “true-soul” eye optics, “touchy-feely skin with real human imperfections,” the cash-cow product from Max's Quantact company, all built around a state-of-the-art robot chassis uprated to provide super strength and super endurance, as well as matching Conrad's exact dimensions and walking style. The surrogate was a perfect three dimensional match to the original human. Well, almost a perfect match because Terri noticed the difference, behavioural differences so minor and subtle that only a show-champion bloodhound in a fox-trail sniff-off could do better.

  Terri was mad about not being let in on the secret. She was especially prickly considering her recent fall out with Max. She hated being duped.

  “You should have told me,” she said crisply.

  “How could you tell?”

  “Something in the way you move. The high-pitch metal scraping sound when you turn your head.”

  “Scraping sound?”

  “You are so easy to tease, Conrad.”

  “I'm sorry, we should have told you. Do you want to abort the mission?”

  Karmen's voice broke into the conversation again, “Is everything ok?”

  There was a momentary pause before Terri said with mechanical sarcasm, “Yes. Everything is fine.”

  Max came over the radio, “Police data indicates that the original group have been reinforced. There are now nine terrorists inside. I'm arranging additional drone support. They'll be with you shortly.”

  Conrad and Terri moved forward, their grim expressions masked by invisibility.

  ***

  Friday, December 13, 2117. (One minute later)

  Conrad had the Riffdy key allowing them to slip in the staff entrance undetected. And they remained undetected until they reached the public galleries, where the terror-gang-owned drones detected their heat signatures and signalled their controllers.

  “Here comes the pigs,” said a voice in the gallery above the two super heroes.

  “That's an insult to pigs. Here come the worms,” said another.
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  “Yeah. Wormy worms, we can see you!” taunted the first. “What a bunch of ones and zeroes!”

  Conrad whispered over the headset, “They have infra-red goggles. Deploy flare.”

  Both Conrad and Terri activated their inflatable, infrared deely-bopper antenna while also deploying combat micro-drones, no bigger than a housefly, with high temperature flares to blind and confuse the gang's sensors.

  In a scene reminiscent of a miniature Battle of Britain aerial combat, the SHUMSS bee-like drones switched to “aggressor-mode” and engaged in aerial combat with the terrorist's own drones; each side programmed to seek victory in the infowar. Conrad and Terri walked through this battle cloud towards the terrorist's stronghold, with the sound of snap, crackle and pop and the occasional crash of a civilian camera drone caught in the crossfire. The terrorist gang had retreated to the so-called Rebel Room holding working examples of lesser known twentieth century computers: DEC PDP-11, Cray 1 Supercomputer and the soulful Data General MV8000 plus shelves and shelves of static objects.

  It appeared that there were only five terrorists but they were holding four hostages.  The terrorists seemed to be dressed up as pirates from a bad Disney Pirate movie.

  Conrad crept forward and started his usual bluff. “Give up!” Conrad's voice was a loud whisper which carried around the museum; his voice was relayed by the surviving friendly micro-drones to disguise his position. “We have you surrounded.”

  The voice projection made it feel as though Conrad was standing right behind every gang member. It was scary to most criminals but this bunch seemed unfazed by Conrad's standard trickery.

  “Come any closer, Captain Douche-bag. And the hostages will be fried,” said the lead gang member dressed in a black costume with a pirate's hat.

  “What do you want?” came Conrad's eerie reply.

  “We want to see you for a start,” said a shrill voice from a female terrorist complete with eye patch and lacy shoulder pads.

  Captain Kittoffery de-cloaked, appearing before them, crossed armed and legs astride. He clicked his neck one side to the other as if performing a stretching exercise before a boxing match.

  “I can get you the Genealogical Data and a flight to Iceland. That's all I can negotiate. But you have to let the hostages go first,” said Conrad in a stilted but most reasonable manner.

  “That was their demands,” said the big hatted terrorist, pointing to the two men and two women tied up and sitting on a horseshoe bench formed by the 1980s Cray-1 supercomputer. “We have other demands.”

  “Their demands?” asked Conrad.

  “Yes, we are the Supertechs. We decided to gatecrash this little party started by the Open Genetics Alliance Group and spice it up a little.”

  “You gatecrashed?”

  “Yes, I just said that. I thought you guys were supposed to be clever. Where's your accomplices by the way?”

  “The rest of team will remain hidden until we have completed the deal,” said Conrad.

  “As will ours!” said the terrorist leader.

  Terri quickly scanned the room for any other bad guys that were cloaked or hidden but could see none. Another bluff.

  “So what do you want?”

  “Gold,” said the lead guy. “Five bars. You either bring it here or we'll take the metals from these old machines. They have gold in them, right? The choice is yours but you only have ten minutes before we start breaking up the antiques. Any deceit on your part and we'll start slicing up the hostages. Then you have one hour.”

  “What is it? Ten minutes or an hour?”

  “Ten minutes to agree. One hour to get it here.”

  “Big bars or little bars?”

  “Big bars!”

  “Ok.”

  Then Conrad re-cloaked.

  Terri asked over the radio, “Is it safe to talk?”

  “Let's retreat back.”

  Thirty seconds later, behind a display of ancient “personal computers” (which showed different archaeologists' ideas on how such lumbering items were strapped onto businessmen and carried between buildings) Conrad and Terri resumed their discussion.

  “How do we arrange to deliver five gold bars?” asked Terri.

  “We don't. We go back to negotiate and incapacitate the lot of them. We take out the ones with weapons first.”

  “They all have weapons. There's five of them.”

  “This is too dangerous for our usual theatrics. Improbileon and Max have targeting information on all five and will call in a drone strike in exactly eight minutes along with some better mainstream media coverage.”

  It was Max that answered over the headsets, “I have three waves of drones to arrive in eight minutes: sniper drones to take out their cloud of drones, grapple drones to take down the terrorists and some more camera drones. After that, seize any weapons and escort the hostages out. Remember the OGAG members will also need to be restrained.”

  “Right. Thanks, Max. Do we have drone control at the moment?”

  Max replied, “They are down to a few dozen micro-surveillance systems. We’ve hacked into their broadcast systems and are receiving the positions of the terrorists from their systems. We do not yet have control of their drones though.”

  “Ok,” said Conrad.

  “Oh and the museum curator has said,” stated Max, “there's precious little gold in the old computers. But they are extremely valuable. We’ve been urged not to break anything.”

  “Ok. Let's go back and distract them.”

  Conrad returned to the Rebel Room and uncloaked. The gang were prepared for him and he was surrounded by an impressive arsenal carried by the gang members: one taser, one old style shotgun, an auto-reload crossbow, a modern assault rifle and a hand pistol.

  “We...” Conrad saw the scared looks from the hostages and momentarily lost his voice before continuing, “We have arranged... delivery... of twenty five solid gold coins... in forty five minutes.”

  “Not gold bars?”

  “There's none available within the timescale.”

  “How much is that?” asked one of the gang.

  “Lots,” confirmed Conrad.

  “Hmm. It is enough but,” mused the big hatted gang leader, “why don't I quite believe it?”

  “Because we're monitoring the Police channels?” replied the taser-equipped henchmen.

  The woman terrorist gave him a withering look, one that could have stopped a platoon of marines in their tracks. The henchman merely shrugged in response.

  Conrad responded. “We went to the top, not to the Police. They won’t have heard anything yet,” he lied.

  “Caught you out again, Captain Circus-Clown,” snarled the leader. “We've heard plenty on the Police radio. They said... if you don't return in a few minutes then they are flooding the place with Police drones. Something that doesn't worry us?”

  “Oh?”

  “We have contingency plans.”

  “Of course. Yes, if we don't report back then that may be true. I'm sure the Police will do something rash. Let's not give them that excuse, eh? That doesn't suit anybody.”

  “So they are going to give us gold coins?”

  “Yes. Is that acceptable to you?”

  “Frack-waste. You haven't even tried to negotiate. This is a set up,” screeched the lady terrorist.

  Conrad looked up at his head-up display: twenty, nineteen, eighteen, sixteen... “We just need a gesture of good faith from you...” he stuttered.

  “LOL. No way,” guffawed the leader.

  Three... two... one...

  The timing was perfect; pizza box-sized drones rushed towards the five armed terrorists. As soon as the machines had clear views of their targets they fired tranquilliser darts and mesh nets. The lead terrorist fell straight to the ground. Before being brought down by darts, the guy with the shotgun managed to shoot a drone as it raced into the room. That drone was after the pirate with the taser so he was able to trigger his electric weapon towards Conrad. Th
e cables hit Conrad in the back and discharged 50,000 volts but had little effect. Conrad's latex suit was designed to handle such attacks. Conrad had his back turned since he was busy seizing the automatic rifle, the weapon that could do the most damage. He took the rifle and bent the barrel even before the drugged gunslinger had hit the ground.

  Meanwhile, Terri uncloaked, “Excelsior!”

  Cloudera looked dazzling but neither her appearance nor subsequent battle was not captured by any camera drone. She launched a kung-fu spin kick at the woman terrorist. Two drones followed the woman to the floor and sprayed glue-mesh onto her limbs, pinning her to the ground while she yelled.

  The fifth terrorist armed with a crossbow successfully took out the grapple-drone that was targeting him. He then fired multiple crossbow bolts at Terri. Most missed as Terri turned sideways, but one hit her in her upper arm and she cried out in pain. In full berserker mode she ignored the pain and activated her new super power force field to deflect the other on-target crossbow bolts winging her way. Terri counterattacked with her lightning weapon. Even with the crossbow bolt still in her arm she was able to aim and activate her main offensive weapon. Lightning flashed from her wrist and blew the guy back against a display shelf which started a domino effect of crashing shelving units. As each shelf, carrying priceless ancient computer equipment, toppled, something else strange was happening: the drones died. They spun out of control, flew into walls and crashed to the floor.

  Terri looked at her wrist mounted device. Had she done that? No she hadn't. Crawling on the floor the gang leader, without hat, or indeed hair, had located and activated their secret Wunderwaffe; the reason for their confidence against the Police and super vigilante attacks. Their defence was an Electronic Counter Measures device that could wipe out all drone control and communication in a room; attack drones, defence drones, microdrones and cam-drones. If he had used it one nanosecond before the drones entered then the battle would have been completely different.

  There was another crash behind Terri. It was Conrad. Or rather, the Conrad surrogate, that had just fallen to the floor. Just like the drones, the radio connection to the surrogate had been cut and the electronics fried.

  Terri looked over to the hostages. They were bound and gagged still strapped to the Cray computer. Their eyes were wide and alarmed. They were signalling to “look-out-behind-out-you” in eye-speak.