Into the Light

by David Weber

  “It sure looked like it. And you did say that there’s no brainwave activity,” Howell pointed out. “Isn’t that the definition of ‘brain-dead’?”

  “Well, yes.” Lewis nodded. “But let me show you something else, Sir.” She raised a tablet into Howell’s field of view. “We’ve set up an interface with Doctor Roeder’s lab computer.”

  “Why?” Howell sounded just a bit more impatient.

  “To show you this, Sir.” She tapped the tablet. “Go ahead,” she said.

  “What?” Howell asked.

  “Not you, Mister President,” she said. “I meant—”

  “She means me, Sir.” The voice was male, a bit deeper than Karahalios’, although the speaker was nowhere to be seen, and Howell frowned.

  “And you are?”

  “Mister President, I’m Brent Roeder. This isn’t the way I imagined meeting you, but it’s what I’ve got right now.”

  For an instant, Howell looked confused. Then his lips tightened.

  “A recording?” he asked. “What kind of joke is this?”

  “No—” Lewis began, but the other voice cut him off.

  “No, Sir. I’m really here. This is me. Well, I suppose I’m not really there, since I’m still in the lab—”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” Howell demanded in exasperation. “I’m down to ten minutes till that next meeting, and I’m not finished here. So could you please get to the point or talk to me about this later?”

  “I’m sorry, Mister President,” Roeder said. “But this really is important. It seems that now I’m in the computer, not just connected to it.”

  Howell’s eyes went wide, and he looked back at Lewis and Karahalios.

  “You mean—?”

  “Yes, Mister President,” Karahalios said, and for once the arrogant, detail-obsessed scientist sounded almost awed. “We may not have AI, but we do appear to have computer intelligence.”

  Howell sat back, eyes narrowed, and stared at them for a few moments.

  “Friday,” he said.

  “Yes, Mister President?” his phone replied.

  “Cancel my appointments for the rest of the day. No, wait. Not the appointment with General Landers. When he gets here, send him straight to the conference room. Tell Angelo to reschedule the others.”

  “Cancel all appointments for the rest of today, except for General Landers, who is to be sent directly to the conference room when he arrives from Citadel,” the phone said. “Inform Mister Christopherson that you wish him to reschedule all of the canceled appointments.”

  “Correct.”

  “Very well, Mister President.”

  Howell laid the phone back down on the conference table, tipped back in his chair, and gazed intently at the hologram.

  “Fabienne, I think you can assume that you and Doctor Karahalios and—especially—Doctor Roeder have my undivided attention.”

  . XIV .

  PROMETHEUS PLATFORM,

  GANYMEDE ORBIT,

  AND BASTION PLATFORM,

  L5 LAGRANGE POINT

  “All system monitors report go, Doctor,” Vivian Osterbeck announced.

  “Good!” Chester Gannon replied with a vigorous nod.

  He sat in a comfortable chair at the center of an only moderately large control room at the heart of the Prometheus Platform in Ganymede orbit. Prior to the Shongair invasion, that control room would have been enormous, filled with dozens—or even scores—of highly trained, highly skilled scientists and technicians. They would have monitored their vast array of displays, funneling reports to team managers, and through the team managers to the project managers, and there probably would have been several of those project managers, all making their own decisions in their assigned spheres but reporting to the one person who bore ultimate responsibility for the entire project.

  Today, there were exactly twelve people present, without a single physical display in sight.

  Of course, each of those twelve people commanded an information flow which was incomparably broader and deeper than any of them could have processed in real-time under those long-ago, primitive conditions. An entire bevy of AIs—and, yes, Gannon was a scientist, he knew they weren’t really self-aware, but, dammit, they were AIs—reported to the visual displays and keyboards projected onto the corneal implants each of them had received. And each of those AIs controlled a host of subsystems which, in turn, ran and monitored every cubic centimeter of the multi-million-ton platform.

  Then there was the thirteenth person.

  “You concur, Brent?” Gannon asked him.

  “Yes,” a voice replied in his earbud.

  Brent Roeder was, in many ways, the ultimate backup for the entire program. It had taken a couple of years for him to really get a handle on his radically changed environment, and it was evident to the psychiatrists and psychologists working with him that that changed environment was also changing him. All of them—and Roeder—were committed to understanding how it was changing him, but the process was obviously a slow one. As he himself put it, “I’m just not as interested in things as I used to be,” and that was growing gradually worse. Clearly, it worried him, yet he’d never allowed it to affect his work, nor, so far as Gannon knew, had he ever complained. The closest he’d ever come to it in Gannon’s presence was the day he’d remarked “I kinda wish I’d at least written down what I was doing. At least that way, someone else could’ve learned from my mistakes. But whatever else happens, so far it’s been a hell of a ride!”

  In the meantime, he’d recorded a complete copy of himself in a computer core identical to the one he inhabited. As a test, he’d “awakened” his alter ego and confirmed that it was just as self-aware—just as much him—as he was. And after talking it over, Roeder II had been the one to suggest that he should be powered back down to serve as the backup for Roeder I in case whatever was changing him proved fatal in the end. That said a great deal about his mental toughness, in Gannon’s opinion. It was yet another reason he’d come to both like and admire the impetuous young man who’d become something so very different.

  And Roeder’s changed circumstances made him extremely useful on projects like this one. It wasn’t really his field, but all of the working files and research data were literally an extension of his own personality and mind. Interestingly, he didn’t seem to be able to “think” any faster than he had as a corporeal human being, but if his data retrieval speed wasn’t actually instantaneous, it was damned close. It took him just as long as it ever had to combine information and concepts after they’d been retrieved, but “just” the difference in retrieval time meant he came up with answers to even complex questions very, very, very quickly and that he had the ability to monitor a vast array of subsystems. Although he was carried on Project Prometheus’ books as a “backup,” the truth was that the human personnel in Gannon’s control room were his backup more than he was theirs. They all understood the theory and the science better than he did, but his reaction time if something went wrong would be astronomically faster than theirs, and all of them knew it.

  “All right, then!” Gannon clapped his hands together and smiled as the rest of his people turned and looked at him. “If all of you say we’re ready, and if Brent agrees, then we’re damned well ready! So I’d say we’re go for the Alpha test.”

  “Yes, Sir,” Osterbeck agreed. “Seems a pity we have to do it by remote, though.”

  It would have been unfair to call Vivian’s tone “wheedling,” Gannon thought … but not very, and he understood. That wasn’t the same thing as saying he sympathized, however, although a teeny-tiny part of him did.

  “It may be a pity, but it’s also the way it is,” he said firmly. “Secretary Lewis was very clear about that.”

  “I know, but—”

  “And I know what you’re going to say,” Gannon interrupted with a smile which took most of the sting from his words. “And, I repeat, it’s the way it is. Right?”

  “Of course, Sir.
”

  Osterbeck matched his smile with one of her own that was perhaps a bit more tart than his had been, and he nodded to her.

  As the head of Prometheus—and despite his own opinion of his shortcomings as a team leader, he’d been the inevitable choice—he was delighted with the progress they’d made so far, and he thoroughly understood the rest of his team’s … ego involvement, perhaps, in those accomplishments. For just one example, they’d demonstrated that it was, indeed, possible to create an artificial gravity field which would ultimately make the spin sections built into long-endurance spacecraft and platforms obsolete. Power requirements were still an issue, but he and his team were confident those could be solved using currently mature tech. Other applications and uses had spun off of their basic work as they went along, as well, and other human R&D teams had pounced on them.

  But Prometheus was still after Leviathan. He’d proven elusive, but they were closing in on him now, and he was twins. The possibility of producing an FTL drive faster than was possible with any conventional phase-drive was one prong of that Leviathan, but the other was the possibility of effectively limitless energy. Energy in magnitudes no human physicist would even have dreamed of harnessing as little as four years ago, far less before they’d acquired the Hegemony’s tech base. And since all of modern technology, especially on the macro level, was about using energy, really, when one came down to it, if Prometheus worked—

  “Okay,” he said briskly. “Everybody out of the pool!”

  Several people, including Osterbeck, chuckled, but they also climbed out of their chairs and filed obediently towards the control room hatch. Gannon waited to come last, then followed them out.

  Actually, there wasn’t any reason they had to have a “control room” at all, he reflected. They could just as easily have stayed in their own living quarters and used the platform’s infonet to run everything and communicate with one another in a virtual control room. Eventually, he felt sure, that would become the new norm. The younger generation, growing up with Hegemony-level technology already did it, and he supposed it was a logical extension of remoting in from home. But the old farts like him still wanted that sense of a communal presence in the flesh.

  Idiot, he thought wryly. You’re already in a “virtual” control room sitting there with your implants and your earbuds. Just be grateful they’re willing to put up with a dinosaur like you!

  He chuckled, yet it was true, and he knew it. Just as he knew he was going to break down and get one of the cochlear implants most of his youthful team already had, so he wouldn’t need even earbuds.

  That thought carried him down the passage to the lift shaft. The lift car was ample for just twelve human beings and carried them swiftly to the docking bay. The airlock was open when they got there, and Commander Quyền was waiting to personally greet them as they arrived.

  “Looking good, Doctor Gannon!” she said, raising her right hand.

  “It is, indeed, Thoa,” he agreed, raising his own hand to high-five her.

  Commander Quyền Bảo Thoa was about fifteen years younger than he was, and there were dark places behind those brown eyes of hers, just like there were behind the eyes of most of the people who’d survived the invasion. She was also diminutive, attractive, prone to practical jokes, and one of Project Prometheus’ charter members. Although she herself was a commander in the Planetary Union Navy—and, despite all of the initial good intentions, the Squids of the world had succeeded in reasserting the traditional naval ranks in all their confusing glory—her command wasn’t technically a unit of the Navy. PUS Andromeda belonged to the Department of Technology, and she was the mobile home of Brent Roeder’s computer core. It didn’t really matter to Roeder where his computer “body” was located, and putting him aboard Andromeda made it practical to dispatch him to places like Ganymede, where he could interface with the local computer net without crippling light-speed delays. That wasn’t the only thing Andromeda did for the Department, but in many ways, it was arguably the most important.

  In this case, one of those “other things” was to serve as a safe, remote aerie from which the results of the Alpha Test could be monitored. And however much it might irk Vivian Osterbeck, Chester Gannon was perfectly all right with that. Even assuming the test went perfectly, they were still dealing with an energy density roughly comparable to the heart of a thermonuclear explosion. He was just fine putting a little prophylactic distance between him and his brainchild while they found out how well it worked.

  “Well, come on aboard,” Quyền told him. “I have got to see how well this works after all this time and effort.”

  “So do I,” Gannon said as they entered the lock together. “On the other hand,” he tossed out his traditional caveat and sheet anchor, “a real scientist learns more from experiments that fail than he does from the ones that succeed.”

  Quyền snorted and the lock closed behind them as they swam the boarding tube to Andromeda.

  * * *

  “ALL RIGHT,” GANNON said forty-five minutes later, settling himself into the chair on Andromeda’s bridge and securing the restraints to keep him safely out of the way in the bridge’s microgravity. The ship was two light seconds from the Prometheus Platform, and Jupiter was a huge red marble in one corner of the visual display. But only for a moment. Then “Big Red” disappeared as the display zoomed in on Ganymede and the orbiting platform they’d left behind.

  “Brent, I think the honor is yours,” he continued. “Please initiate the Alpha Test.”

  “Of course, Doctor Gannon!” If Brent Roeder thought he was “losing interest” in the world around him, it certainly didn’t show in his tone today, Gannon thought. “Initiating Alpha Test in thirty seconds.”

  A digital timer appeared one corner of the complex display on Gannon’s corneal implant, and he sat back, arms folded across his chest, watching it.

  “Five … four … three … two … one … initiate!”

  Roeder’s voice counted down the last five seconds, and then the timer vanished as a waterfall display began climbing. Other readouts flickered and changed, as well, but it was the waterfall that really interested him, and he watched as it continued rising for several seconds, then slowed and stopped.

  “Stage One, successful,” Roeder announced. “Initial black hole activation confirmed.”

  Someone smacked a celebratory hand on a console. It wasn’t Gannon. They’d reached this stage twice before, from this same bridge.

  The real reason the platform was so big was to provide sufficient space for the antimatter power plants required to create an artificially produced Gravitationally Completely Collapsed Object. Personally, Gannon agreed with Wheeler that it was a lot easier to say “black hole” rather than “GCCO,” every time they spoke of one. Of course, Wheeler had come up with quite a few other neat bits of terminology—Gannon had always been especially fond of “quantum foam”—and someone of his stature could call things whatever the hell he wanted. But whatever someone wanted to call it, producing today’s version of it had required as much energy as a dreadnought’s phase-drive devoured. According to his team’s calculations, they should be able to reduce that significantly as they continued to refine their understanding and control. For now, though, it was an incredible energy hog.

  But that, of course, was for the initial black hole, wasn’t it?

  “Stage Two, please,” he said.

  “Initiating Stage Two.”

  Nothing changed for a moment. It took Roeder’s commands two seconds to reach the platform, after all. Then the initial waterfall began rising once more and a second appeared beside it.

  “Phase wall successfully breached,” Roeder reported, and this time there was a spatter of applause. So far as any of them knew, this was the first time anyone had penetrated into phase-space without a phase-drive. Of course, there was a downside to that, and the second waterfall began shooting upward as the higher energy state of phase-space started “draining” into w
hat humans and the Hegemony fondly called normal-space.

  “We’re ten percent above projections,” Vivian Osterbeck announced unnecessarily. Gannon had already seen that, and he frowned slightly. Their base calculation had always been a range, not a hard number, and they were still well within that range, but Osterbeck was right. The power density at this stage was significantly higher than their best models had projected. On the other hand, everything else was almost exactly where it was supposed to be.

  “The system’s handling it,” Tony Furman, another of the team’s plethora of PhDs, pointed out. “Still plenty of margin at this point.”

  “Agreed,” Gannon said. “Brent, initiate Stage Three.”

  “Initiating Stage Three,” Roeder confirmed. Again, there was a momentary delay. And then the second waterfall shot upward again and a third appeared beside it.

  “Beta wall breach confirmed,” Roeder said, and the third waterfall soared with explosive speed.

  “Twenty percent above calculations! “Osterbeck exclaimed. “Thirty! Thirty-six!”

  “Losing containment!” Furman shouted. “Estimate failure in ten seconds!”

  “Shutting down,” Roeder said, his “voice” far calmer than either of the others, even before Gannon could give him the order. “Shutdown in—”

  He stopped, and Gannon felt his jaw muscles clench as the bridge visual display flared with sudden, eye-watering brilliance.

  It wasn’t an explosion. It was too intense to call it that. The entire platform simply vanished in a blinding flash that was far larger than the platform itself had ever been. In fact—

  “Oops,” someone whispered from behind him.

  * * *

  “YOU REMEMBER HOW I told you I was going to put Chester Gannon and his merry crew out in Jupiter orbit, don’t you?” Fabienne Lewis asked as she and her husband settled into chairs in the Dvorak dining room aboard Bastion.

  “Excuse me?” Dave Dvorak blinked at her for a moment, then finished setting the bowl of mashed potatoes with red and gold bell peppers on the table. That was scarcely what he’d expected as opening table talk at Sharon Dvorak’s dinner table, and it took him almost fifteen seconds to rummage around his memory for the two-year-old conversation. Then he nodded.