The Puzzler's War

by Eyal Kless

  “I name him Cain.”

  Jameson furrowed his brow. “That’s a very biblical name and, if my memory is correct, quite ominous.”

  Mannes nodded. “Exactly. Not a perfect fit for what we are about to do, but close enough.”

  He turned and walked towards his daughter without waiting for a response.

  Chapter 77

  Twinkle Eyes

  “You copied your own daughter’s brain patterns?” Peach looked genuinely shocked. Through the entirety of our travel and battles, she had kept a cool and controlled façade. But as Mannes was telling his story, the emotional wall she had erected around herself was crumbling down. “Do you realise how dangerous that was? Messing with her brain like that could have led to severe damage. You did that to your own daughter?”

  Mannes nodded solemnly. “That and more, much more. I made Daichi copy her entire brain pattern and DNA sequence onto a flashdrive, then work on a program which would make it easier to restore the patterns into a clone body.”

  “You are insane. Absolutely insane,” Peach spat.

  “Look around you, Colonel Major.” Mannes also seemed to be losing his cool for the first time since I saw him. “Look at this world below us, all the death and destruction. I was trying to stop all of it.”

  “By endangering your child?”

  “By doing what was absolutely necessary. Daichi was a genius. He promised me the program would be safe, and he was right.”

  “I don’t care about all of this rust,” Vincha intervened. “My daughter is inside this”—she waved her gun in the air—“Cain, whatever. Tell me how you’re going to bring her back or I’ll shoot you in the kneecaps.” She placed the barrel of her gun above Mannes’s left knee.

  “I did more than just copy part of my daughter’s brain to create Cain,” Mannes said softly. “I copied all of her.” He looked meaningfully at Peach. “I was hoping to succeed, but what if we failed?”

  “You backed up your daughter,” Peach mumbled.

  “Yes. I inserted Cain with more of Deborah’s brain patterns than needed and and hid the rest of the files somewhere safe. I know what you are going to say—” Mannes held up his hand as Peach opened her mouth. “But Daichi designed a program just for that. Actually, it was his idea in the first place. The program assimilates the scattered brain waves back into the original line. The files I have hidden survived the Catastrophe. Now that Cain is extracted to this Space Hub, I can bring my Deborah back to this world.”

  Mannes’s eyes still glistened as he looked up at Vincha. “And I’ll do the same for Emilija. That was why I preserved her body. I can’t promise that she will be exactly the same person, but she will still be your daughter.”

  “Are you saying you ran around for a hundred years with the program this Daichi gave you?” Peach found her voice again. “Seems unlikely.”

  Mannes shook his head. “No, I did not trust myself with it. I hid a Deborah in the place I was hoping no one could find.”

  Chapter 78

  Mannes

  Mannes closed the lead over the plug, then turned and grasped the handles of the vehicle everyone nicknamed the “Space Bike.” With a flick of his thumb Mannes gently propelled himself up the chute, although from his position right then, “up” was not completely correct in the Earth sense of the word. The chute was tiny, and not for the first time, he fought a growing feeling of claustrophobia. He stopped in front of plug GR2-6701L, made sure the Space Bike was secured, and opened the Comm channel with a flick at the upper part of his visor.

  “Time to report, team.” He tried to sound jolly, like a bored technician trying to fill up his time.

  “Graham here, seventy percent done.” A familiar female voice was the first to answer, and Mannes was not surprised. Graham knew her work and was ambitious in the best sense of the word. He wished he could have brought her to the team, his team, but her wife was a high-ranking security force officer, and the risk was too high.

  “Seventy percent? You’re lying, Graham. Savoy here, about halfway through.”

  “Nadik here, forty-five percent. Boss, why did you design those chutes so narrow? I mean, we passed the claustrophobia test and all but this is pretty creepy, even for me.”

  “If you were awake during the lecture on the Hub’s external pipelines you wouldn’t have asked that question.” The answer came from someone else.

  Despite feeling nervous, Mannes smiled inside his visor. “Salama, progress report please.”

  “Only a third of the way, I’m afraid. Found a problem at DR4-3980K that took some time. Sending you the specs . . .”

  The plug Salama mentioned appeared on Mannes’s visor; he tapped it away. “Anything I should know about?”

  “No, Boss. It was very minor fix and only took time because I dropped the micro tool.” Salama sounded embarrassed but added, “I handled it, and it will be in my report, of course, unless you want me to send it to you right now.”

  “No need. Keep on going. You know the punishment for being last.”

  “Oooh.” Savoy reacted exactly like Mannes expected him to. “Salama is going to buy us drinks all night.”

  “Don’t count your drink chips before you’re sitting at the table,” Salama answered crisply, “or you’ll be buying me the most expensive cocktail pills on the Hub.”

  “Okay, that’s enough. Keep working,” Mannes cut in with just enough authority to stop their banter. “Report in an hour. Mannes out.”

  He cut the Comm and took a long breath to steady his nerves. Of course, the whole competition thing was meant for him to finish last and buy drinks for his crew. By the time they landed back on Earth they would be nursing headaches, bar stories, or, in the case of Salama and Savoy, most likely a new love affair or an embarrassing one-night stand. He was hoping they would not be asking themselves why it was the third time in four months they were shipped up on an emergency maintenance assignment that turned out to be nothing dramatic.

  Mannes opened the cover of the new plug, attached the cable into his left arm, and watched as numbers and code lines flashed on the left side of his transparent helmet. He let the program run its course and opened the external pocket of his suit and spread his fingers wide. The small, flat pad came out of the pocket and attached itself to his hand; he turned it and stuck the pad above the plug cover. With a double tap the pad powered up and Mannes entered the ten-digit code. He took his time, making sure there was no mistake that would cause the data inside to self-destruct and make this whole journey null and void.

  The pad flashed and a photo of Deborah appeared. Mannes smiled at her image, then flicked through the family photo album. Anyone exploring the pad would have concluded Mannes was just a sentimental man who liked to carry images of his loved ones in his pocket.

  He stopped at an image of himself and his team. Deborah had climbed the desk of his office and taken the photo with her thumb camera. All in all, it was a good representation of them all. Daichi wasn’t looking at the lens, of course; his face was lowered to the floor and he was in the process of wiping away a large visible coffee stain from his lab coat. Andriana stood to the side, with her wry, knowing smile. Jameson mirrored her with his chest sticking out and his potbelly held in tightly. Mannes stood behind them, hands folded, cool and composed. “The mighty four,” Daichi called them.

  Mannes touched the screen again and transferred the image into raw data. He flicked through the code until he found the stain. Daichi’s sixteen-line code was hidden there, and Mannes nodded to himself inside the helmet. Daichi was a fucking genius; the code was cleverly hidden. Even if you were a trained programmer looking for it, there was a chance you’d miss it. Now all Mannes had to do was manually copy that code in less than thirty minutes while floating upside down in space. It had to be done flawlessly, since there would be no chance for corrections.

  Mannes grimaced as he tapped his left arm and stopped the maintenance program. He was going to be the last one at the bar whether he
planned this or not.

  He scanned the lines projected into his visor by moving his right arm across his left. It did not take him long to find the right place to insert Daichi’s code lines, just as Professor Vitor instructed.

  “Blood pressure rising,” his suit suddenly informed him. “Body heat rising.”

  Mannes felt a cool wave inside of the suit and cursed inwardly. As far as he knew, no one checked the space suit’s bodily function reports unless there was an accident or a real medical emergency, but he should get it together. Really . . .

  Mannes forced himself to breathe slowly until he felt his body relax. He had done this before and everything worked out smoothly. Concentrate on each code symbol, he told himself, and went to work, carefully inserting the code Daichi had cooked up.

  It was genius work, Mannes had to admit it to himself as he hovered inside the chute, carefully tapping in each sequence. Simple, logical, thin, the code dug an invisible tunnel through Adam’s gigantic structure and placed virtual supporting beams. Like the constructions prisoners dug out from ancient jails. He finished typing the code in, checked it again and then checked his watch. Thirty-seven minutes, seven minutes over his slowest practice but still within the margins.

  One last thing to do. Off the record.

  Mannes fished out Daichi’s rectangular flashdrive, making sure it was attached to his engineer’s finger before placing it on the magnetic plate at the back of the plug. He then closed and locked the plug cover.

  There. Done. Daichi’s code was successfully inserted and Deborah was in the safest place he could think of.

  Mannes punched the data insertion key and ordered the cable to unplug itself. As he caught something moving in the corner of his eye, he instinctively turned too fast and felt his neck and shoulder muscles tighten painfully, but it was only the emergency toolbox that slid out. Feeling like a fool, Mannes pushed the box back into the slot, but it slid out again. This time he pulled and the box slid open, attached to a short cable which stopped it from floating away. Mannes tapped open the box and peered inside. The normal array of multitools was arranged neatly in their slots but there was also a rectangular, black, sponge-like material that did not belong there. Mannes identified it immediately as an External Engineer Viewer, or EEV. It was an old, obsolete model, the sort you used by attaching it to the external part of the space suit’s helmet. It floated out of the box and Mannes grasped it with his hand, then brought it to his helmet’s transparent visor. As soon the sponge touched the helmet’s surface it stretched and expanded until it covered a quarter of the helmet’s front surface. It took several more seconds for it to charge enough to create an image, but as soon as it did, Professor Vitor’s face appeared on it.

  “Doctor Holtz.” He smiled.

  “Professor . . .” Mannes was momentarily lost for words.

  “Don’t worry, this channel is secure, and I only need to chat with you for a short time.”

  Someone had put the EEV in the emergency toolbox. For the first time Mannes had proof of what he suspected for a while now: that there were other teams out there, just like Mannes, working for Professor Vitor. It was an uncomfortable thought.

  “The tunnel is complete,” Professor Vitor said, “although I will be happier if we could expand it a little, for faster passage. Tell me, what is the status regarding our project?”

  “On schedule, and we are taking all the precautions necessary,” Mannes answered carefully. “But we will need several more tests and a detailed functionality survey before we even go to the simulation stage, which we still haven’t found a safe ground for.”

  “Well, you may need to do it quicker.”

  Mannes shook his head. “That would be risking detection. I already work my staff dangerously long hours. Jennifer’s husband mentioned this to me in passing at the last office party, and Jameson complained his girlfriend left him because he—”

  “We don’t have time for this,” Professor Vitor interrupted, “you need to speed up the process. You know of the accelerator project to planet CSX5?”

  “Yes, it’s being built around Mars, but it will take years before—”

  “The accelerator built in Mars’s orbit was never meant to be completed. Adam has been successfully derailing this project while secretly building a second accelerator hidden within the rings of Saturn. And that accelerator is now complete.”

  Mannes felt his jaw drop. “What? When? How?”

  “Last month was the final successful test. If the international community doesn’t know by now, they’ll discover it as soon as it’s powered up and moved away from the ring. If you’re going to ask how it was done without the public use of the Space Hub, well, it’s simple. The Moon Hotel.”

  Mannes felt confused. “What about the Moon Hotel?”

  Professor Vitor chuckled. “Man, do you really think Tarakan would build and maintain a luxury resort on the moon, of all places, just to give a few privileged Tarakan citizens a bit of zero G fun? The Moon Hotel doubles as a secret science and military base. Oh, it still functions as a hotel and those Tarkanians who are lucky enough to win the rigged lottery get to enjoy a week in weightless bliss and post their thumb photos for all to see, but more than half of the guests and two-thirds of the personnel are military, engineers, and scientists secretly working on the project on the dark side of the moon.”

  “Launches could be timed to make it impossible to fully monitor from Earth,” Mannes said. “Okay, that makes perfect sense, but why the secrecy?”

  “Really, Dr. Holtz.” Professor Vitor smiled. “Do I need to spell it out for you? It took twenty-four years for the first probe to reach planet CSX5. The accelerator makes it possible to reach the planet in less than ten, which is under the threshold for deep cryo-stasis. This means that it’s—”

  “—possible for humans to reach the planet,” Mannes said. “That is . . . amazing.”

  “True,” Professor Vitor agreed. “That is not just a moral win, this has huge implications and is also a major violation of the 2231 Paris Treaties.”

  Mannes looked at his clock. Fifty-two minutes had passed.

  “The Paris Treaties, which were signed before Adam took control of foreign policy, clearly state that any venture to a life-sustaining planet will be done as a joint, international operation. This is especially crucial for the CSX5 project because—”

  “—the first probe found by Tarakan had originated from there.”

  “Yes. The first and only finding of extraterrestrial intelligence which Tarakan found when it was just a mining company came from CSX5. The salvaged technology from a small, destroyed probe was enough to make Tarakan excel in every scientific field known to mankind and made it into an empire, no less. We would not have been even close to where we are today without it. Now imagine what we could find there, I mean really find there, and how it would affect the balance of power here. Imagine if one power managed to colonize the planet before the others.”

  Fifity-five minutes, in five minutes he would have to contact everyone.

  “Even with the accelerator built, it would take years to build a colony ship, and that can’t be done in secret. This would surely trigger a war—”

  “True, unless you already have a colony ship ready.”

  “Impossible.” Mannes forgot for a moment he was floating in space and gestured with his hands. “No one could build a spaceship in secret.”

  “It is not a secret—the colony ship is in plain sight.” Professor Vitor smiled sadly. “Four septimum engines instead of only two that are needed for adjusting to Earth’s spin. And how can you explain the fully functioning cloning lab and hundreds of cryo beds? There is enough space in the Hub to hold a few hundred physical bodies in cryo-stasis and up to ten thousand minds hosted within Adam. Face it, Dr. Holtz, the Space Hub is the colony ship.”

  “That’s impossible. The Space Hub cannot detach itself from the elevator.”

  “Yes, it can, you simply didn’t know about it—a
nd the same goes for all Tarkanians. It even took me two years of careful digging to realise the Hub is capable of detaching itself from the space elevator.”

  “But . . .” Mannes tried to work the horrid physics of such an action in his mind. “If the Space Hub detached itself from the elevator the whole thing would—”

  “It is not just the imminent destruction of humanity’s greatest achievement”—Professor Vitor’s tone of voice remained cold, as though he were lecturing—“the elevator shaft would be unable to adjust itself to Earth’s spin. Even I can’t predict fully what would happen, but worst-case scenario, three hundred miles of shaft would gain momentum and then snap back to Earth with the force of hundreds of nuclear weapons. Even areas not in the path of destruction would be affected by such a disaster. Tsunamis and thick dust clouds would block the sun for months—and those would be the mild side effects. No one would survive, no one.”

  Chapter 79

  Twinkle Eyes

  Peach finally lost it when Mannes was describing to us what happened on the day of the Catastrophe.

  “It was your fault!” she shouted. “You destroyed the world, killed billions of people, wiped out the entire human civilisation by planting an uncontrolled, untested, accelerated growth Sentient Program into Adam!”

  “We all have to face our consciences, Special Agent,” Mannes answered calmly. “I read your file when we extracted you. Care to estimate how many people died by your actions? I would say the collateral damage was in the millions, perhaps even billions, when you connect all the dots.” For some reason, Mannes was looking at me as he talked.

  “I was a pawn, you goddamn piece of shit. This, this whole war was because of you.” She moved forward, and I saw the flash of murder in her eyes.

  Vincha was the fastest to react. Gun raised, she stood in Peach’s way. “Not before I say so,” Vincha said. “He does not die before I get my daughter back.”