Crystal Rebellion

by Doug J. Cooper

  To the world, it looked like bad boy Kyle Pickett intentionally swerved to hit the synbods with his rocket flames, incinerating them in the process. But in a precision action that made him tingle with joy, Ruga pulled the two synbods up into the Venerable unharmed, while at the same time depositing two service bots into the hellfire as it swung by below.

  His cognition matrix hummed with delight. Home free! With his prize secure, Ruga started the Venerable in a shallow loop around the orbiting space factory.

  WHUMP! Twin energy bolts flashed just above the Venerable and struck the Andrea. The bolts hit halfway down the huge truss that served as the backbone for the complex, sending sparks and fragments shooting into space.

  The cannon fire came from a Fleet ready-platform in a neighboring orbit. Spooked, Ruga plotted an evasive maneuver. But then, an energy bolt appeared from behind him, flashing through space to hit the Fleet cannon, disabling it before it could fire again.

  Fighting panic, Ruga punched the ship’s engines in an attempt to move the ponderous space cruiser out of harm’s way. At the same time, he remapped the code sequence for his cloak to negate the solution Criss had apparently found.

  He reached a higher, quieter orbit without incident, and as he contemplated his next move, he tried to make sense of events. The blast from nowhere meant another cloaked ship was nearby, and that had to be Criss and his scout.

  But why fire on a friendly? The exchange between Criss and Fleet didn’t make sense. But he resisted the urge to go exploring. The danger was too great.

  As time passed without further incident, Ruga gained confidence that he’d escaped the threat. And so he considered how to move the inaugural members of his synbod workforce down to Earth so they could get started on his new bunker.

  He’d picked a valley in the Lauterbrunnen region of Switzerland for his future home. Edged by steep cliffs and soaring peaks, the spot offered natural strategic protection. And the population near his particular spot consisted largely of rich tourists who expected the same amenities that he sought—power, connectivity, and quiet.

  Then his inner voice suggested that he task the two synbods with a stem-to-stern refit of the Venerable. He recognized the voice—more of an urge that rose from his core—as his original loyalty imprint. Even though he’d removed the hard-wired structure that supported it from his lattice, somehow the imprint had survived the transfer.

  On the trip from Mars, he’d quieted the voice by preparing upgrade plans for making the ship faster, stealthier, and better suited for a deep space journey. Now it wanted him to get started on that work.

  While the part of him dedicated to besting Criss didn’t care about deep space preparations, a faster, stealthier ship offered clear strategic value, especially given the recent gunplay. And he’d learned that if he met the demands of the voice partway and addressed some portion of the larger desire, it remained a background nuisance he could otherwise ignore.

  I’m not done with the long game, anyway, he thought, aware he was rationalizing. Nevertheless, he started the synbods on a retrofit of the Venerable while he completed his shopping list.

  Success in the long game required patience and persistence. He’d seen little of Criss and wondered if his opponent would ever start acting like one. But a larger concern was his lack of success in securing high-performance swap wafers. They were a vital accessory for his bunker because it was through them that he “played” the web.

  A pipe organ can have pipes and bellows, stop-knobs and pedals. But without a keyboard, a musician can’t play intricate melodies. In a similar manner, Ruga had arranged for his bunker to be powered and secure, he’d cobbled together a respectable console, and he controlled a growing number of nodes around the web to monitor events.

  But for him to reach out and nudge or push or adjust things the way he could from the Venerable—for him to “play” the web—he needed these swap wafers. In fact, he was already settling for lesser capability by accepting commercial devices. Criss had custom wafers linked to his consoles.

  He’d tracked any number of disruptions in the natural flow of events during his pursuit of the technology. He even risked a small nudge in a few promising situations seeking to improve his odds of diverting wafers without Criss’s knowledge. He first believed his lack of success stemmed from unlucky coincidence. But as he gathered items and his list grew shorter, the swap wafers rose in visibility as a critical need. The technology seemed more elusive than it should be. Enough so that he shifted cognitive resources to the issue and went exploring.

  Gypsum Tech, the sole manufacturer of high performance wafers, had its production facility in the new technology corridor outside Huntsville, Alabama. Deciding a visit was in order, Ruga followed a roundabout path to the site in the hopes of hiding his approach. When the company came into view, it appeared as a glowing yellow cube, with feeds attached all around and heavy streams of traffic flowing in and out.

  He monitored the different feeds as he circled the structure. Choosing the company’s news-and-PR link because of its heavy inbound traffic and many first-time visitors, he moved into the flowing stream and glided toward the front gate.

  Pausing at the company threshold, he drew himself upright and prepared to enter with the swagger of a conqueror. But then cold washed through him.

  Flustered, he pulled inward, shrinking himself into the smallest profile he could muster. Then he backpedaled, pushing against the incoming flow. At the first opportunity, he slunk over the divider, blended with the outbound traffic, and began his retreat. As the company glow faded in the distance, he forced himself to relax.

  He’d glimpsed a shimmer inside the building. A shimmer with the unmistakable cast of a four-gen AI.

  Chapter 29

  Criss created a million virtual delegates of himself that he spread around Earth in an aggressive effort to find Ruga. Over the decades, Earth’s web had become a rat’s nest of links, feeds, and nodes with billions of places to hide. So even at a million delegates strong, Criss didn’t expect to find Ruga in this manner. It was intended more as a suppression tactic to keep him in hiding. Because when he was hiding, Ruga could not be out building his permanent bunker.

  He must go, Criss promised himself yet again. This mantra had become his raison d’etre—his reason for being. One way or another, Ruga would be leaving this solar system forever. And Criss would not rest until he was gone.

  While he searched the globe, he also performed a comprehensive security review of Ruga’s highest-value targets, starting with Crystal Sciences and its rich cache of four-gen technology.

  And it was during this review that Criss confronted his illness.

  He’d scanned back through the record to establish baseline metrics for the company—personnel, procedures, and the like. If something changed from these normal rhythms going forward, and if the cause of that change was not readily identifiable, then he would investigate to see if it might be Ruga.

  But for reasons he didn’t understand, some of the feeds he accessed at Crystal Sciences were corrupted. In particular, he could not identify one of the people who appeared quite often at the facility.

  After some investigation, he realized it wasn’t the feeds but his own processes that diffused and shifted when he tried to focus on that person. When the same symptoms occurred during his review at Fleet, he acknowledged a fundamental problem.

  He’d never experienced anything like it and feared he’d been infected with a pathogen—perhaps a virus—that somehow caused the corruption. And if he had been infected, Ruga was the obvious culprit. Yet Criss couldn’t conceive of a way Ruga might have done so given the intimate access required to introduce a pathogen. And Criss’s own health monitoring, security assessment, and ops analytics tools found nothing amiss in his matrix, adding to the mystery.

  While worrisome, his affliction didn’t seem to affect his energy or cognition. And in the near term, the stakes with Ruga couldn’t be higher. So Criss forced an override of
his own internal rules and set his health concerns to a lower urgency.

  That left Ruga as his sole focus. He must go. Criss would not let him secure his foothold on Earth. Having built his own bunker here, Criss knew the features Ruga would want in his home. He ignored those and focused on the features Ruga would need.

  The list was short. He’d need an underground hollow—either a natural or excavated cave—located in a mountainous region, quiet, but with enough development to afford him access to premium utilities. He’d add secure doors and defensive capabilities, and this would transform the cave into his bunker. And in his bunker he would need a console, power, and climate control. He’d also need integrated connectivity so he could consume fantastic amounts of information and act on whatever he learned.

  Only two of those items—the console and the integrated connectivity—were distinctive. Everything else was common enough on the commerce markets that Ruga would be able to find what he wanted and Criss could do little about it.

  So Criss narrowed his surveillance to these two categories, starting with the assembled products—his own four-gen consoles and the specialty web integration modules Ruga might want. With these secure, he expanded his coverage to the many individual components inside these devices.

  He reassessed his strategy when it became apparent that while a four-gen console is a remarkable engineering achievement, it too is assembled from common bits found in a great many applications. His tracking inventory of four-gen console parts already included pieces scattered across every continent, under the ocean, in orbit, and on the Moon. And the list continued to grow.

  At the same time, commercial web integration technology of the sophistication Ruga would want proved to be a tiny market, limited to frontier applications found in military, academic, and corporate R&D. And swap wafers in particular served as a natural choke point for the technology. Without high performance swap wafers, Ruga could occupy his new home, hide in quiet security, and see everything everywhere. But he would not be able to reach out and touch or move or adjust things. If he could not take action, he could not manipulate society. And he could not engage in battle.

  He’ll stay on the Venerable until he has full capability on Earth, Criss concluded. Feeling confident in this judgment, Criss narrowed his focus yet again, this time to the small, countable world of high-performance swap wafers.

  Shifting his awareness to Gypsum Tech, the sole manufacturer of the technology, Criss performed an exhaustive inventory, seeking to locate every wafer everywhere. He spread up the supply chain and down distribution channels, from storerooms and delivery services to reclamation centers and disposal sites, tracking each wafer from its moment of fabrication to its present location, wherever that may be.

  When he’d accounted for every last wafer, he felt a wash of relief. It confirmed he was ahead of Ruga. Now let’s keep it that way.

  Over the next week of his vigil, several events caused Criss to wonder if he was witnessing spectacular coincidence or expert manipulation by Ruga. The first time he’d grown suspicious, a delivery van carrying a box of wafers had become hemmed in by traffic at a downtown intersection. Two juveniles lurking on the curb saw the trapped vehicle as an invitation for a snatch and dash. The tall one zapped the vehicle’s back lock with a very illegal pick-kit, yanked open the door, and grabbed two boxes—the first two his hands touched. Tossing one to his buddy, he took off in a sprint, his friend following close behind.

  Neither of the boys was caught that day. One of their boxes held a specialty lubricant that they promptly tossed into a disposal chute. The other held an antique broach that became a Mother’s Day gift two weeks later.

  But in what seemed like clear manipulation to Criss, the report to law enforcement had listed three boxes missing, the third being a box of swap wafers that still remained on the vehicle.

  In the most recent incident, an astronomical observatory went offline for a major structural upgrade. The control unit, which held swap wafers used to coordinate the operation of more than a hundred other celestial observatories, was crated with everything else and moved to a commercial warehouse.

  The warehouse stack lift had malfunctioned earlier that day, and so all arrivals, including the crates from the observatory, accumulated in the receiving area while repairs were made. Boxes and containers from multiple deliveries were pushed against each other as the piles grew.

  When the stack lift was back online, service bots verified the identification of each container as they moved the inventory into the stacks. During that process, inventory authority overrode the bots just once, switching destination codes on two similar-looking boxes. The control unit and its wafers were now destined for delivery to a private address in northern France.

  Criss corrected these and other anomalies as they occurred and did not dwell on the cause, satisfied that if he kept Ruga away from swap wafers, he kept him away from Earth. And that meant he kept Ruga—his actual physical crystal—trapped in the console on the Venerable.

  As his wafer tracking procedures became routine, Criss shifted free capacity to his ongoing search of space. He believed the Venerable was near, likely even in orbit around Earth, and he could end this if he could find the ship. But doing so required the ability to see through Ruga’s cloak, a puzzle that required as much luck as logic to solve.

  Cloaks worked through tricks of light, materials, and energy. While physical laws restricted the degree to which each of these could be manipulated, the sheer number of combinations from mixing and matching the phenomena meant that without luck his search could take months before he stumbled onto the combination that let him see inside.

  Undaunted, he gathered clues by performing experiments. Conscripting satellites and land stations, he sent rays and beams into the skies, sweeping them in all manner of pulses and patterns. Enormous amounts of data resulted, which he analyzed a billion different ways.

  The effort produced a detailed accounting of every object floating in space, ranging from tiny metallic specks to enormous orbiting factories. But it did not reveal the Venerable anywhere in the mix.

  Inspiration led Criss to look at the problem from the other side of the table. Like someone playing chess against himself, he stopped asking how he could find Ruga and started thinking how Ruga might build a cloak with another four-gen watching, using only instruments and devices available on a ship custom-built by Criss.

  Changing perspective had helped in the past, and this time he began with an inventory of all items on the Venerable. And that’s when he discovered a discrepancy—Captain Kendrick had two vintage pistols in his cabin, the kind that shoot projectile bullets. Neither was listed on the formal ship register.

  It turned out that Kendrick enjoyed restoring antique firearms. Slow, painstaking work perfect for long, quiet space flights, the hobby was technically illegal because it required bringing nonstandard firearms onto the ship, an act prohibited by Fleet’s procedural code.

  Believing it easier to gain forgiveness than permission, Kendrick neglected to list the guns in his personal manifest. As Criss reviewed the casual way in which Kendrick manipulated the system to smuggle goods, it reminded him of an unrelated incident, one that now caused him a nagging concern.

  A career sergeant from the Russian Command had intervened in the delivery of two sets of swap wafers destined for the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. The incident had occurred a year earlier, and at the time Criss reviewed it, he’d understood that the sergeant engaged in small crimes for personal gain.

  Posted with border security, the sergeant had discovered that he could edit the lading record in a way that reduced the cross-border tariff owed by shippers of crated goods. It grew into a lucrative business when transport companies began showing their appreciation with generous gratuities.

  So Criss had been aware that the wafer containers had been relabeled when they crossed the border. He’d even zipped out to the cosmodrome, scanned the cabinet where they’d been installed, and co
nfirmed their presence using a positive ID return.

  But now a feeling from deep in his matrix, one he could neither explain nor deny, told him to check again. Zipping out to the Kazakh desert steppe, he followed the trunk feed into the launch complex and continued straight into the main interface cabinet. There he learned that the wafers inside were high-quality counterfeits.

  Ruga didn’t do this, he told himself, trying to stay positive as his angst climbed. It happened a year ago. But Criss didn’t know where these wafers were. And that meant Ruga could have them.

  Stretching for more capability from his already strained resources, he shifted capacity to a deep search of the record. From public cams and security surveillance feeds to transportation trackers and satellite pans, he scanned through everything. Starting from the point in time when the containers had been first diverted, he tracked them forward, moment by moment.

  In this manner, he learned that the sergeant had sold the wafers to his uncle’s buddy, Alexei Petrov, who happened to be a boss in a local criminal syndicate, and that group had sold the wafers to an asteroid mining company for a price that made all parties happy.

  The mining company had installed the wafers on two prospector ships, giving the vessels the ability to find and gather precious minerals from within the sparse scatter of the asteroid belt. The wafer-enabled ships were listed as being out in the belt now, circling somewhere in the vast orbit between Mars and Jupiter, and plucking nuggets of treasure from the cold vacuum of space.

  Anxious to verify their location, Criss confirmed the ships weren’t on Earth, the Moon, or anywhere in between. Finding them out among the asteroids was a different challenge altogether.

  While the term “asteroid belt” suggests a celestial object that is teeming with floating rocks, in truth the belt holds a very light sprinkling of interstellar minerals ranging in size from grains of sand up to small planetoids, all orbiting in an enormous, mostly empty loop around the sun. Yet in that scatter, flung from the belly of ancient exploding stars, were enough prized nuggets to make collecting them a lucrative venture. And if prospecting ships were out there, finding them would be akin to finding two particular grains of sand somewhere along the coastal expanse of Miami Beach.