“Well then,” Burgton said. “Take the next few days to settle in. Gina will look after your needs and then we’ll get to the real work of fixing your eyes, Shima.
“Varya, I’m sure you and Kazim are eager to explore, but please don’t go off alone. I know you’re both capable hunters,” he said. All Shan were, even Kazim was, though his peers would laugh to hear that. “But the wildlife is different to what you’re used to. If you give us a little time to get settled back in, I promise to send you with Gina and some of her people to explore as much as you want. Understood?”
Varya flicked his ears in assent. “More than fair, General. Kazim and I will spend the time in study. If we might be given access to maps and information on this planet’s ecosystem?”
“See to that would you?” Burgton said and Gina nodded. “Anything else?”
Sharn stepped forward. “Chailen and I would very much like to be involved with Shima’s treatment. Anything we can learn about the process would be a great benefit to my people.”
Burgton nodded. “I’ll make certain medical allows you access. I believe a lot of our medical knowledge would belong to your caste of scientists and engineers rather than your healer caste, Sharn. The Alliance uses nanotech a great deal, and my vipers were created using it. I’m not sure how much will make sense to you.”
Sharn flicked his ears in agreement. “Nanotech has been discussed within the castes since knowledge of it became known. I believe its manufacture and many of its uses will be in the province of science and engineering, but medical applications and the programming required for that will be healer caste.”
That made perfect sense to him. Burgton nodded and said, “A lot of data on nanotech is openly available in the Alliance. Gina will get you set up on our Infonet so you can access it. You’ll understand that certain military uses are restricted. You won’t have the access required for those.”
Sharn flicked his ears. “There are plenty of things at home restricted to caste and rank. No need to explain.”
“Good. I’ll leave you in Gina’s capable hands then,” Burgton said and headed for his office. He really needed to get started on his backlog of work.
General Burgton’s office, Petruso Base
It took a week of meetings for Burgton to feel on top of things within the regiment, and able to turn his attention outward to Snakeholme and future projects. Rather than send Colonel Stanbridge to Alliance HQ and another round of recruit testing, he finally decided to send his exec, Colonel Flowers. Dan Flowers had done a fine job when he recruited the men and women who later became 1st Battalion. He was the perfect choice to recruit more people to repair his creation.
As before, Lieutenant Hymas and Sergeant Rutledge joined Flowers’ team, but Stone stayed behind this time. Stone was the closest thing the regiment had to an Intel officer despite his rank of Master Sergeant and they had been away a long time. He needed Stone to tap his contacts and get up to date intelligence on what was happening within the Alliance. Flowers took a solid team with him; he wouldn’t miss Stone too much.
His plan to reconstruct the regiment was progressing and the President was still solidly behind him on that. The Shan were safe for now, and the Alliance was on a war footing at last. The only thing better would be news that the Merkiaari had all surrendered in a fit of madness. The Council might even be scared enough to contemplate offensive ops, a recon in force to evaluate the Merki. Might. It would be a ballsy but sensible move, not something the Council was renowned for. Frankly, he doubted they would authorise it, but he’d been wrong before. Whatever the future might bring, his own world was improving. The regiment would be strong again. That was all that mattered at this moment in time. All his other plans relied upon that.
A knock sounded upon his door.
“Come!” Burgton said looking up from the latest report he had been reading.
His new adjutant, PFC Raphael Robshaw, stepped inside and closed the door behind him.
With more units now online, Burgton had decided it was permissible for him to tap one of them to help him in the office here. Normally Dan Flowers, his exec, would be here and performing that task, but with him on the way to Alliance HQ, Burgton had decided to start rotating units through various admin positions to help take the load off his officer’s shoulders. It would also give the new units experience in something other than combat. That was how the regiment should be run and how it had been run before the Council betrayed him and prevented him recruiting back to full strength. Hopefully, the new people would learn something, and give him a bigger pool of competent people to draw upon at need. Stone’s idea of a proper Intel Section was much on his mind. They had never had intel weenies of their own, but they needed something like them among other things. It was probably time to reorganise and promote his oldest veterans into full time staff positions rather than using his current ad-hoc method of using whomever was handy at the time. He didn’t think Stone would like it much, but they all had to make sacrifices. He had been a master sergeant for most of his career and preferred it, but it was time he moved up.
“Sir?” PFC Robshaw said.
Burgton shook off his preoccupation. “Sorry, Raph, I was day dreaming. You need something?”
“Mrs Brenchley is here to see you. She doesn’t have an appointment.”
Burgton waved that off. “For future reference, she has an open invitation. Make a note, Raph, that all my department heads have access to me at any hour, but Liz has priority. She is working on a few special projects.”
“Understood, sir,” Robshaw said and left the room to invite her in.
Liz Brenchley, Snakeholme’s head of industry, stepped inside a moment later and closed the door.
Burgton rounded his desk to greet her. “Liz, this is a surprise.”
Liz nodded and shook his hand before taking a seat. Burgton sat behind his desk and clasped his hands upon it. She was looking well, he thought, especially as she had been in her current position for over sixty years. It was a stressful job he’d given her, but she had taken over from her predecessor without complaint and he had never regretted that. Tasked with building a self-sufficient and robust industrial infrastructure for an entire planet, she had come through despite the handicap of having to use only local resources to maintain security.
Liz was as much responsible for Snakeholme’s success as the regiment was. She was over a hundred now, well into her middle years, but she still looked good. No sign she planned to quit any time soon, and he was glad. He didn’t know who would or could replace her. Her deputy could handle the day to day, but no one else had her vision.
Liz sat quietly before him, her brown eyes hard and locked upon his. She wore a light grey business suit, her jacket unbuttoned to reveal a white shirt open at the neck revealing a man’s gold wedding band strung on a thin gold chain. Her husband had died in a shuttle accident more than twenty years ago, and she had carried that ring with her ever since. She had never remarried.
“To what do I owe this pleasure,” Burgton said, starting to feel just a touch uneasy. Liz was unusually quiet. “You didn’t call ahead.”
“I had to do this in person, George. I wouldn’t feel right otherwise.”
“Ah?”
She nodded and took a breath, her eyes looking bleak. “I’ve failed,” she said bitterly and Burgton stiffened. “I promised you I could do it, I really believed I could, but... I can’t. It didn’t bloody work!”
Burgton winced at the volume as well as the bitterness. “Oracle?”
“It’s dead. Project Oracle is a failure, complete and utter.”
“Surely not complete. The facility—”
Liz chopped the air with a hand to silence him, and Burgton felt the first flickers of anger at her attitude. He wasn’t one of her subordinates! He held his temper, reasoning that she wasn’t used to setbacks like this.
“... amounts to just another hole under the mountain. You don’t need me to build yet another empty bunker! You
gave me a task to perform, and I’ve failed you damn it!”
“That’s enough,” he said keeping his voice calm and cold. “You haven’t failed until I say you have.”
“But!”
“Quiet,” he said softly.
Liz closed her mouth and swallowed whatever she was about to say.
“Projects like this are a gamble; we both knew the odds when we started. The facility is complete?”
“Yes, but it doesn’t work!”
“So you said. Explain to me what the problem is, and we’ll decide what to do about it.”
Liz clenched a fist. “There’s nothing to decide. I’ve hit the wall, the same wall the original researchers failed to breach.”
The wall she was referring to was metaphorical, but a severe impediment to their success. Liz had told him that centuries of advancement in computer technology coupled with nanotechnology and twenty-twenty hindsight, would allow her to succeed in something that had ended in failure almost five centuries ago. Back then, the creation of the first true A.I had been a goal of scientists who spent entire lifetimes trying to realise it. Failure upon failure had led them to believe the task impossible, and they called that point of failure, the wall. It was the point where the hardware of the time reached its limits; theories remained unproven not because they were wrong, but because the technology was lacking. Then, out of the blue came success. The breakthrough that remained unexplained to this day.
Liz had researched and studied everything she could get her hands on regarding the A.Is and their destruction during the Hacker Rebellion. She was the only expert Burgton had. She knew everything there was to know about the subject, from the first tentative experiments on Earth, to the breakthrough that saw the very first A.I created. The problem was that every attempt to duplicate the breakthrough had failed. It was known as the greatest anomaly in the history of science—an experiment that succeeded but could not be reproduced in the laboratory.
Project Oracle was Liz’s effort to reproduce the anomaly here on Snakeholme using cutting edge tech and centuries of learned discussion and theorising to bolster her own theories.
Looked at from Burgton’s layman’s standpoint, it should have been easy to create his very own A.I. After all, what had been built once could be built again right?
Wrong.
A.I hardware could be built and had been many times over the centuries. Liz had succeeded in that despite the ban. It was the mind that should inhabit the hardware that failed. The software simply failed to wake into full cognitive awareness.
“Have you any other ideas?” Burgton said. “The software was exact?”
Liz sighed and nodded. “Down to the very last byte of data, I swear it’s identical to the historical record. It should have worked as it did back then.”
Burgton smiled. “You realise that you’re parroting the thousands of scientists through history who studied the breakthrough?”
“Of course I do, George. It doesn’t make it easier.”
“No, I suppose not. Shame we can’t ask the A.Is themselves.”
“Hmmm,” Liz frowned in thought. “I bet they know the answer. Something happened back then you know. Something unplanned, something unnoticed and random. Something undocumented. An error entered at a keyboard by a programmer maybe, or a random power surge scrambled something, queered the matrix at a key point... something!” Liz sighed. “Something so random that we can’t duplicate it.”
“Talk to me about A.I reproduction,” Burgton said.
Liz grimaced. “Reproduction, right.” She sighed and leaned back in her chair, interlaced her fingers over her still flat stomach, and prepared to lecture. “Artificial intelligence, according to the literature, cannot be reproduced by man... I have to say that I still believe what has been done can be done again, but every variable would have to be examined and that would take centuries even with the cooperation of multiple A.Is. So, for our purposes let’s say the literature is correct.
“Before the Hacker Rebellion destroyed ninety-nine percent of them, A.Is had control of their own reproduction. We just facilitated it by supplying the new minds with the matrix and other things needed for them to survive. I’ve read about requests for a new A.I being denied. A planet’s government would make the request of a particular A.I and offer it certain things, but for one reason or another, the A.I refused them. It caused all sorts of controversy at the time. You know the sorts of things. Master and slave debates, with questions about which of us was the master.” Liz grimaced. “Human rights applied to artificial minds has never sat well with me, but I can see that something was needed to protect them. Whatever, A.I reproduction was entirely out of our hands. The A.I networks decided if, when, and how. Not us.”
Burgton nodded. “Now explain the mechanics of it.”
“But you know all this. We talked about it before starting Oracle.”
“Refresh my memory.”
Liz frowned. “One or more artificial minds would... donate or spawn a copy of itself to the new matrix and kick-start the new mind. At first, they were like exact copies, but separation soon caused them to diverge and develop their own personalities. Experimentation with multiple donors created some surprising results, and became the norm quickly thereafter. The A.Is preferred that method. They were uncomfortable with clones of themselves on the same net with them even when the clones slowly diverged and developed their own personalities. I guess it would be weird; like living with your brother in the same house with only one bedroom. Anyway, Humans were relegated to supplying the tech and completely shut out of the actual reproduction process.”
Burgton nodded. “If I could get you in direct contact with an A.I—”
“You can’t!” Liz said sounding more and more frustrated.
“I said if I could,” Burgton said. “If I could find a way to do it, would you be able to clone it?”
Liz shook her head. “If you could get me in with the new matrix and all its hardware, which you can’t because the core is as big as this room, and that’s only part of what’s needed, I would have to persuade the mind to transfer a copy of itself into the new matrix. If it agreed to do that, which it won’t because the ban on new A.Is can only be rescinded by the Council, then and only then would you have your cloned A.I.” She sighed glumly. “Face it George, we have no chance. The only A.Is left are in bunkers on Earth, Alizon, and Steiner. Those bunkers are so deep that not even a Merkiaari kinetic strike would harm them.”
Burgton sat in silence for a full minute going over scenarios in his head. They were familiar and ultimately useless. The reason Oracle had been conceived at all, was the futility of trying to reach one of the old A.Is, or of trying to persuade the Council to lift the ban on new ones.
Frustration boiled in him, but he kept it off his face and out of his voice. He stood and rounded his desk. “Well, thank you for coming to explain in person. I’ll think of something.”
Liz gaped up at him then stood. “Think of something... right.” She headed to the door. “I’ll pull my people out and close down the site.”
“Just seal it up. Don’t strip the equipment yet. I might have another use for it.”
Liz just shook her head. “Why not?” she muttered. “No point wasting man hours to recover scrap anyway. What’s another three trillion credits in the grand scheme?”
Burgton closed the door, not watching the dispirited woman leave. Three trillion didn’t mean a thing to him. He had always found ways to get what the regiment needed before now. It was what the money was for that mattered. He needed Oracle. Needed it badly.
He went back to his desk and leaned upon it, glaring at the neatly piled compads containing 2nd battalion’s unit evaluations. He snarled and in a sudden fit of rage swept them off the desk, his arm a black blur. The office door opened at his back, and Robshaw looked in. Probably heard the crash.
“Get out!” Burgton snarled.
The door clicked shut.
* * *
; 9 ~ Centrum
Oracle facility, The Mountain, Snakeholme
Burgton guided the shuttle into the hangar bay in the mountain and landed. The facility had never had another name. Snakeholme had mountains aplenty, but whenever anyone spoke of The Mountain, it was the underground base built below this one that they meant. It was a vast complex riddled with defensive installations and the tunnels needed to supply so many missile silos from the magazines, but it was the facility built deep below that was the main attraction. The regiment’s archive was here, and had been the first installation built, but it had been extended and upgraded constantly since then. Burgton had come to visit the latest addition.
He rarely came here in person. His neural interface allowed him to access the archive anywhere on the planet, and the command centre was manned by civilians these days. InSec also used it to monitor the feed from Uriel, and the system’s space traffic, but most of the facilities were on power down and would not be activated for anything short of a Merki incursion into the system. Should that unhappy occasion occur, the mountain would become a fortress, ready to perform its primary task of protecting the planet.
The Mountain, unlike the Shan keeps, was never designed to be a shelter for the civilian population. It was large enough for that purpose with room to spare of course, and at need Petruso City’s population could evacuate to it, but that wasn’t what he had built it for. It was his fortress, his arsenal and armoury. It contained enough weapons and supplies to allow the regiment to fight for years if necessary. It even had a duplicate of the tech centre, its equipment still sealed and never used so that unit repairs and even construction of new vipers could be undertaken in extreme circumstances. Where Merki were concerned, he couldn’t be prepared or paranoid enough. Other cities on Snakeholme had bomb shelters and emergency procedures but nothing on this scale.
Merkiaari Wars Series: Books 1-3 Page 92
