Starkindler (MechaVerse Series Book 1)

by Jeremy Cunkle

  Kurtis stopped in mid-conversation with the Captain of the Integris, turning to look at Mikkhael, who returned the glance. They both grinned. Their airship had been in and out of Marseilles so many times they had become familiar with most of the comptrollers even if they had never personally met. Subtle, ritualized jokes were one of the few ways either party had to replace the tedium in an otherwise uneventful day.

  Mikkhael keyed the mike again. “Thanks comptroller, but we will not be staying longer than necessary to grab what’s ours and run. I guess those clean linens will just have to stay clean for now, over.”

  The comptroller was ready for the expected reply and this time there was no delay. “Well, if we cannot persuade you otherwise then I repeat, permission granted to carry on. Godspeed, over.”

  Mikkhael silently thanked the comptroller while he changed the dial on his microphone to the frequency of the cargo ship they were towing, briefly updating the Captain, thanking her for her business. Plenty of times the airship crew had run into comptrollers who wanted to show off their self-importance by holding up the unique airship, denying permission to enter their airspace for no reason at all, or out of simple incompetence. Mikkhael switched frequencies and keyed the mike for a third time, “Kiryl, we are twenty minutes outside of Marseilles, would you prepare to release the tow cable?”

  As a reply, the mic key rapidly pressed twice. Kiryl often used this method of response, saving his words for something more important. For his task, Kiryl had to descend to the belly of the SkySail into a one-person blister cockpit encased in glass framed in aluminum mesh. The blister’s internal housing was set up much like a crane. A series of levers caused the winch to unwind some slack. The line between the airship and the cargo ship would droop while Mikkhael simultaneously reduced the forward speed of the SkySail. Next, the electronic current being sent down the line externally providing power for the ship under tow was cut, causing the electro-magnets connecting the line to the ship to decouple. Then the winch back wound back up, drawing the tow cable back into the ship, ready to be redeployed for their next client. In case a tow cable frayed or broke, a replica backup system was housed on the other side of the main engines.

  The switch between clients proceeded apace, taking a few hours. As soon as the process completed, the airship headed back out to sea, Nautilus in tow. Kurtis and Kiryl finished their shift, then left to get some sleep. They woke up Alyona to relieve them, and within thirty minutes she assumed her duty station on the command deck with Mikkhael. Alyona assumed piloting functions while Mikkhael filled in operating the communication and navigation equipment. Anytime Kurtis became overloaded or went off duty, Mikkhael was the first choice to take over his functions. They proceeded like this for the rest of their shift, allowing the computer to guide everything, occasionally giving input but mainly just standing nearby in case of an emergency. The relaxed and casual atmosphere onboard the SkySail was dutifully maintained by all five crew members. They spoke casually while monitoring the equipment, the hardest part of the next two weeks behind them.

  When Alyona and Mikkhael’s shift ended, they retreated to the main living area to grab some food and relax. Now that the action had died down of switching out clients and they were back out to sea, their responsibilities relaxed, only requiring them to monitor the ships onboard computers and functions remotely from data slates everyone carried, relying on the SkySail’s auto-pilot for mundane tasks. Reporting for duty within the command and control center simply lent a necessary credence to the importance of maintaining official routines, lest the small crew became too casual, thereby inviting disaster upon themselves. The sound of kitchen instruments in use mixed with the smell of bacon frying as the scents of a meal in progress wafted through the air vents. Alyona took her turn preparing the group meal. Mikkhael lounged on one of the couches within the common area when Kurtis walked in, stretching to his full height as he exaggerated an extended yawn. Rested and alert, Kurtis headed for the kitchen to grab a quick snack before returning to his shift while Vera and Kyril slept. The staggered schedule ensured that someone was always alert and ready to respond should an emergency develop.

  “Morning, Kurt, that computer you have been working on; are you actually going to ever finish it?” asked Mikkhael.

  “It’s almost done,” Kurtis replied, as he worked through a mouthful of biscuit he snatched from the kitchen when Alyona turned her back. “I should be able to acquire the last parts when we arrive in Copenhagen. I already have most of what I need; I just need to integrate all of the parts into the servers. I am working on it, but everything has to be perfect and it’s not like there is any kind of manual I can use. Besides, it’s not just a computer. It will have its own artificial intelligence, individual personality, the works, although I haven’t decided what to name her yet; maybe Aurora?” Kurtis just shrugged and stared vacantly at his half-eaten biscuit, temporarily lost in thought.

  Mikkhael let him have a moment. Alyona, who had overheard the conversation, asked from the kitchen, “What do you mean its own intelligence?”

  Kurtis considered the question and his reply before speaking around another mouthful of biscuit he had just eaten, much to the pair’s mutual disgust. “You have to understand there is a fundamental difference between this computer which is based off quantum mechanics, and a standard binary computer.” He was about to leave the matter at that when Alyona gave him an encouraging nod to continue. “Take for instance the act of adding two plus two. Your standard computer will have to add two plus zero, then two plus one, and finally two plus two in order to get the right answer. And that computer will have to do that exact process in that order unless the information is already stored as a solved problem. That computer can perform that particular process incredibly fast, but when you have a really difficult problem, the process can take the computer quite some time to reach the answer because the computer only functions in a linear fashion. A computer capable of using quantum mechanics can try many different answers at once, and that same computer can process all of those answers almost instantaneously. So for your addition of two plus two, the quantum computer can try all possible answers at once limited only by its processing capability. That makes the quantum computer substantially more powerful, especially during processes that require machine learning, or large amounts of directed logic, such as hacking or cryptography.”

  Vera had just entered the room for the last bit of Kurtis’ explanation. She pulled up a seat at the table to join in on the conversation. She waited for a pause then asked, “Not to sound lost or anything, but if you have all that processing power, what is the point? I mean, we already have more capability than we need for big projects. So what do you plan on doing with your shiny new toy? I know you have been adding to our current capabilities at every opportunity, so you obviously have a goal in mind.”

  When Kurtis only shrugged for a reply, Vera keyed her mic and said, “Kiryl, would you join us in the common room please?”

  For a reply, there was the sound of the mic keying twice. The small group spent the next few minutes waiting in awkward, tension-filled silence no one wanted to break. Kiryl quickly arrived, walking over to the sink to clean his permanently grease-covered hands off, completely oblivious to the tension in the room. He looked over his shoulder as he was cleaning his hands, “You rang?”

  Mikkhael said, “Kurtis is nearing completion of his computer, and he has some things to tell the group about.”

  Kurtis took his time answering. “I should start at the beginning. Two years ago, I became frustrated at how little I knew about what my parents did for their secretive government jobs that occupied most of their time, the same as all of yours. I designed the system we use on the ship now with a custom code designed to hack into our parents’ old home network.” He looked around at his friends for a long moment, meeting each of their eyes. “What I found stunned me. Everything was chopped into small bits, data wise, and each piece of data was encoded with a unique code. In
order to read a simple file, someone would need to break thousands of combinations. After a little progress at first, I hit a dry spell for about a whole year. Then I set up a virus infecting tens of thousands of computers, enslaving their unused processing capability in order to brute-force the rest of the combinations.”

  Kurtis took a deep breath to continue explaining, but Vera held up a hand, stopping him there. “Whoa. You set a virus to infect tens of thousands of computers?” Her disbelief was mirrored in the shocked expressions on everyone else’s. “How the hell did you not get caught?”

  Kurtis grinned, the devilish grin of a child who has outsmarted an adult. “Environmentalists tend to see what they want to when it’s dangled in front of them the same as everyone else, so I set up a program for them to download that made them think they were mapping the individual trees in the South American rainforest to watch for illegal logging. Instead, I sent a very slow-panning view from a satellite watching South America and enslaved their processing power.”

  Kurtis had been holding this secret in for so long that everything was gushing out. He ignored his friends, unable to meet their eyes any longer as they continued gaping in total surprise. “About ten months ago, I made a breakthrough. There was a pattern that began to emerge in the encryption based on a story my parents use to tell me about a famous mathematician. Once I inserted that pattern into the combinations, the numbers gave me almost half of the digits for each encrypted file in a revolving pattern. That significantly reduced the time to break further combinations. I began piecing the files together six months ago, and that’s when I realized that each file contained a very tiny set of instructions on how to build a quantum computer. The more progress I made, the faster I could break more combinations as my algorithm learned from earlier solutions.

  “So the quantum computer I have spent the last year or so building is actually from my parents, and not only that, I feel like they specifically meant for me to find it. The data was encrypted in such a way that would have been easy for me, but nearly impossible for the types of resources that the government would use. And the data on their network was set up in a way that a scan of the files would have given no indication of the plans.”

  Alyona stared at Kurtis as if he had the chance of becoming the devil incarnate. Her tone was hushed. “Why? What are you after that would cause all of this, Kurtis?”

  Once more he looked at all of them one by one, his eyes pleading for understanding, but finding nothing definitive in their returned gazes. Inhaling deeply, he dropped yet another bombshell. “I want to use the quantum computer to examine the rest of our parents’ work files before they died. They all had terminals at our houses that would remotely let them access the secure network on the base. Because the base network is independent from the rest of the internet, I can’t use the bot-net I created with the hacking program to help me break in and brute-force the encryption. The network has to be accessed specifically from one of our parent’s remote terminals, because all of the other terminals were destroyed or shut down after the incident five years ago.” He winced involuntarily even to mention it. “We all know how the government immediately shut down the base and never looked back after what happened. Our parents’ work has been sitting abandoned since that day, so all of the information is still there and accessible. One of my computer’s specialties will be code breaking; I’ve been specifically designing a sub-routine for it.”

  His story was the last thing the small group had been expecting. Alyona continued to press now that all of his walls were down. “But what specifically are you looking for? That stuff was just about their work.”

  Expecting the question, Kurtis was ready with an immediate reply, “It was only with the decryption of the files left in my parents’ home that I was able to begin building the quantum computer in the first place. If they had stuff like that on their home networks, and we know for a fact that’s not what they were working on, then I want to try to get some idea of what it was that they were working on.”

  Breathless and scared, Kurtis started to clam up, but all of them knew there was more to tell, and Alyona continued to press him for answers. “And, what else?” she asked quietly, leaning in towards him encouragingly.

  He looked plaintively; but too much had already been said for him to stop now. With an extended groan he replied, “I feel lost without them. Maybe this would be some way to reconnect with them. None of us ever really had the opportunity to know our parents well; they were always working. Well, I want to know what was so important that it kept my parents from me so often. I know I should let them go, but I just can’t, not yet. I’m not ready to do that and this is a way I feel like I can get to know them better.” At this point Kurtis was simply devastated. His courage born of desperation had been used up over the last twenty minutes, and in its place was the weird nagging feeling he had just admitted to a murder and his friends were about to turn him in.

  Kiryl immediately jumped in before Kurtis was interrogated further by the rest of the group. “I’ve been thinking about things myself, and I know a little about what my parents were doing, but not enough. Each of us had those small glances that we paid no attention to growing up, but they never talked to us about their work, always changing the subject whenever it was brought up. Once enough time passed after their deaths, I too wanted to get an idea of what my parents were working on after finding a cypher of my own. I was able to use it to come to a remarkable conclusion.”

  Without needing to, Kiryl stopped speaking long enough to make eye contact with each of his friends, ensuring that he had everyone’s attention and permission to continue speaking. It was completely unnecessary as they were hanging on his every word. “I came to the conclusion that our parents were working on building advanced sky suits, tricking the government into supporting their research by using the technologies they developed in other applications. I don’t know what the other applications were for the suits they were designing, but I don’t think it mattered. They went to great pains to design these suits without anyone outside their small circle having any idea what they were constructing.”

  Vera was the first to respond, “That makes sense if you stop and think about it. Sky suits in and of themselves are not outlawed, but they’re heavily regulated and monitored after the wave of Islamic suicide bombers a few years ago. We don’t know our parents’ motive, but those factors alone would certainly explain their secrecy, especially when we know they hated how oppressive the government is. My question then, is who, or what were they designing the suits for?”

  When she finished, the oppressive silence returned as the small group re-examined everything that had been said; comparing it against what little of their murdered parents they could remember without triggering the painful memories of their deaths that still haunted the five survivors. Several minutes passed as they thought aloud, relating their own stories that they had kept hidden until Kurtis broken the unspoken taboo of speaking about the dead.

  After a few more moments of hearing everyone out, Vera again turned to Kurtis. When he looked at her after feeling her eyes on him she asked, “What exactly will you do with your computer?”

  Now that he was back in the spotlight, Kurtis began to blush and sweat all over again. “Since the network is closed-circuited, we have to physically access it. Finding one of the remote access tablet would be awesome, but doubtful, so I was planning to use Aurora to hack the military network and send a seemingly legitimate order authorizing the reopening of the Alice Springs base. Aurora would then send a request for the government to hire us, under fake names of course, and we would finish what our parents were working on. Combining resources from both of our existing super-computers along with the new quantum computer, Aurora would be powerful enough to completely mask us from any inquiring eyes at the government level, making sure that nothing we do is traceable. The easiest way to get caught with a project like this is to ask the government for funding, but each of us has tens of billions fr
om the settlement just sitting around that we could use to fund ourselves with. And the best part is that everything would be funded and completely legitimate from any outsider’s view barring a government audit, something that will never occur because of the bases history.”

  “Did anyone ever tell you that you dream big my friend?” Kiryl laughed. “You can count on me. This sounds exciting. And, I could do some maintenance on the outside of the SkySail without us needing to dock or land and rent those expensive lifts. I know that my parent’s home network had some models on it; maybe you could take a look at making one functional with this new computer. “

  Vera and Alyona both offered their support as well, Vera because she would enjoy the challenges of designing a suit her parents had worked on, Alyona because she helped Kiryl with the airship’s exterior maintenance and could see the suits’ use. Civilian sky suits were practically a variable thrust rocket strapped to a skeleton frame, and notoriously difficult to fly. The reward, however, was the closest any human would ever come to true flight. If their parents had dedicated their life work to designing suits, then maybe they had worked out many of the common kinks.

  Kurtis added, “When I get Aurora up and running, we could use her to design the frame and functionality of the suits easily enough, but we could also use the simulator here on the SkySail. If we could link the two systems so that the simulator would be able to provide results based on changes to the components of the suits, then we could test them in almost real time without having to do a physical series of builds and tests. With all of the parts already on hand, we could probably have them built within a matter of weeks.”

  As the rest of the group began to express their growing interest in the project, planning out loud how they were going to use the suits the group would build, Mikkhael who had stayed silent so far surprised them all. “And we could weaponize them.” The softly spoken comment sent them all back into silence Not backing down now that he had spoken aloud a long-repressed desire thereby officially admitting it existed, Mikkhael looked at each of their faces, the set of his eyes speaking to his resolve over the matter. “I want to go to Mars. I want to join the Rebellion. And, I want to kill the bastards who were responsible for murdering my friends and family that were sent there and are now doing the same thing to other families on Mars. If we can weaponize a sky suit and make something far more advanced than what’s already out there, I could actually do some good for once.” He unconsciously slammed his fist down on the table, causing his friends to jump at his uncharacteristic vehemence.