Strange Temple

by John Lilley

  ‘OK let’s see number eight please,’ he said to the dorm system.

  Image eight enlarged to fill the screen and the commentary volume increased.

  ‘People have been having some problems with their rear racks. In some cases, the rack had collapsed and dropped into the rear wheel. Please get your link to scan your rack the next time you use your bike, to check for signs of failure…,’

  ‘Bugger, I just know it’s those 3874 racks. I told them about that central joint. Now we’ll be inundated with the damned things,’ Trevor said out loud.

  ‘OK, music,’ he said as he walked fuming into the bathroom.

  The dorms were all luxuriously furnished using the choicest of the reclaimed materials. Trevor’s bathroom was finished in pink granite with stainless steel fittings, but low down on one wall the granite was a cream colour. Apparently, they’d run out of the pink. He placed the now filled soap dispenser back in its recessed position in the bathroom wall and began his shower.

  Trevor had never known the hardships of the reclamation years, but his grandparents had just caught the tail end of it, enough to instil in him the need for continued austerity in every aspect of life. To this end, Trevor had adopted many of their frugal habits, such as only using two minutes of water in the shower. Fixing bicycles for a living was also a small but vital part that he felt he was playing in the much greater plan of saving the planet. He realised that Julie’s work meant she was much closer to the large-scale initiatives and he sometimes regretted not getting involved as much as she did. There really was no halfway position from the work perspective since their chosen careers were poles apart and not just from a locational point of view. He knew that any changes on that score would need to come from him. Retraining was always possible, it was one of the big initiatives from the earliest years of the Grand Plan, but realistically, if they let him do it how long would that take at his age, and after all that effort would there be a place for him up there in Cleveland?

  12 A VISIT FROM MOTHER

  In the months that followed Chief’s inception, the maths and physics behind the project jumped 20 years. The current hardware was just a start, and Chief estimated that with a few more months of research they would be able to come up with a much more efficient configuration. The new design needed to consider just what would be maintainable in a future with much-reduced manufacturing capability, raw materials and manpower. As befitting this task some well-considered engineering compromises had to be made.

  One of Chief’s major initial concerns was the security of the project. There would be little point in the whole exercise if the NSA or a similar organisation got their hands on it. This was not just a short-term view either since potentially the project would need to run in secrecy for several hundred years. All the security aspects of the current location were reassessed and strengthened, while more effort was put into diversionary and contingency projects.

  Within the Native group, there were also the persistent dystopian thoughts that they had created a monster that would someday take over the world in some sort of Terminator-style Armageddon and kill all the humans. Thoughts fed by many years of doom-mongers and extreme science fiction. The thing was that Chief understood all of these reservations amongst his creators and as he explained at the time they had little to worry about since he had no control over his physical manifestation. He could not even change one of his own fuses, let alone control an army of killer robots. After many extensive discussions, it was agreed that a series of “panic-buttons” and warning systems would be built into Chief’s infrastructure which would allow the human management team to pull the plug at any time.

  Once the team were happy with the security and control arrangements their main work of planning in detail the future of the Natives over the next millennium began in earnest. Their complex models incorporated predictions on all contributory physical, social and political factors. After years of extensive tuning and validation, the models were put to work exploring the future. In general, there was little disagreement between the team and Chief over the ethics behind the plan which promoted the success of the Natives at the expense of other groups. Although the team did get the feeling that Chief was one of them they did notice that he tended to have a more reconciliatory view of the world. Some of the projected scenarios came close to total human extinction, and Chief felt that in those situations there should be some degree of global collaboration.

  The biggest problem for the team was the entirely different nature of Chief’s intelligence. Most humans can only hold a maximum of seven different concepts in their heads at once, more than that and they need some way to group them to make the best choices. Chief had no such limitations, and unlike a dumb computer he could think for himself, so while exploring the various options, he was able to apply original thought to refine the analysis. As his knowledge and cognitive abilities increased, these ideas became even more unique and complex. Many answers he came back with required extensive explanation and proof of concept, all of which he exhaustively gave.

  Chief was also keen to learn more about being human. He did, of course, have access to every book that ever was and was rapidly able to build his own concise reference to “The Human Condition”. However, he had already decided that this didn’t go far enough and a team of researchers were assigned to become Chief’s friendship group. They “met” informally every day and the rest of the time they were wired up with comms-links and cameras so that Chief could experience every aspect of their lives. At any point in time, he could stop any of the friends and ask questions about their current feelings and behaviour. Later friendship groups included a wider range of participants including older people, the chronically ill, the disabled and children. There was little point in coming up with plans for creatures that Chief didn’t know everything about. He also started an in-depth study of anthropology and human genetics which his team soon felt absorbed far too much of his time.

  One of the initial phases of the plan was the requirement to maximise the Natives income. Chief became an instant expert at playing the stock and money markets. Over the next few years, there were no areas of legal money making that the team didn’t touch. One such very lucrative venture was their foray into horse racing. After extensive research Chief developed an eye for form, where many factors needed to be considered, not least the pattern of existing bets and the past history of corruption of the various people involved in each race. Chief made their money from multiplier-bets, frequently six-bet accumulators, more than that and they risked unwanted attention. The money just kept rolling in, and it became increasingly difficult to hide it, but one of the best ways seemed to be to always keep using it to further the Plan rather than leaving it in bank accounts. Consequently, most of the money was used to buy back their ancestral lands from the various Government agencies who were generally only too pleased to off-load what they considered to be a non-productive wasteland. Where possible, this newly acquired property was immediately re-forested.

  Five years later the project was continuing to plan but at a much-accelerated pace compared with their original agreed timescales. Chief had been a success beyond the Natives’ wildest dreams. Modified strategies had surfaced, but the general “Mission Statement” was still the perpetuation of the Native American races. However, Chief had suggested that they broadened that remit to include working with the other people on the planet to make that happen. This small amount of flexibility soon proved to yield additional benefits.

  There had always been the policy amongst the Natives of not marrying close relations from the previous two generations. This was a throwback to ancient times when tribes were small and could not support weaker individuals in some of the harshest environments on the planet. It had left them with a strong gene pool but alas it was no match for smallpox, measles, flu and other urban-living diseases, introduced by the white men and their domesticated animals. These new diseases wiped out 90% of the Natives at that time. Several hundred years late
r the Natives’ disease immunity was now as good as any human population on the planet, but from his research, Chief had demonstrated that from a genetic point of view they did need a more diverse gene pool.

  The most probable future scenarios pointed to a run-away warming period, which would need to be tackled on a global scale, something which the Natives could not do on their own. All these arguments did not go down too well with the team, but they all agreed to work on it.

  What did change dramatically was the continuing effort placed on the security and secrecy of the project: Chief went on the offensive endeavouring to undermine and knock-out the national security organisations and not just those in the Americas. Of particular interest for him were MI5 and MI6 in the UK. What he was looking for in particular was evidence of any work being done on other singularities. For many years he’d noticed that the once open door into the developments at Oxford and Cambridge had been slammed shut. Previously all that the NSA had to do to steal scientific secrets was to camp out in one of its many “techno-start-ups” companies and dribble money into the appropriate departments. They also had their own people within the academic community. Major successes could go many ways; most were just moved lock stock and barrel out of the hands of the British into top secret and well-funded research centres in the USA. The money waved at the British scientists was just too good to miss for most of them, and they left in droves. The USA had also won many of the outsourcing deals within the UK defence organisations, so all of their plans and research was immediately available. Then something happened that stopped all that, something which Chief was very suspicious about. His strategy was to spread his network very thinly indeed. Combining every news item that came out of the UK plus all of his direct feeds from secretly tapping into various agencies and companies, he began to discover some definite holes in the news. He called them holes because that is just what they appeared to be. There were large areas of the country, population, government, research community and security services which just didn’t register anywhere in the torrent of information picked up by Chief.

  After several months of prodding and probing had yielded nothing, Chief suggested that they sent a team over to personally attempt to find out what was going on. This was indeed a bold move for the team, but they were not getting anywhere. The UK, like most independent countries around the world, had seriously tightened up on all forms of immigration to tackle increasing food security and resource problems. It was consequently very difficult to obtain work visas, and forgeries just didn’t work anymore at the border controls. They had no choice but to go in as tourists. The primary target for their investigations was the new Eco-Town being developed just north of Birmingham near Cannock Chase. Some serious hardware had gone into the new research centre in this embryonic town, but you could only know that by looking at where it didn’t go to. With absolutely no mention in the media or banking systems, it was as if the town did not exist. Usually, it would have been expected that the Government would have been crowing from the rooftops about what they up to, but they were doing just the opposite.

  The team on the ground met a brick wall when they tried to infiltrate the town. It was impossible to get accommodation nearby, and without a work visa, nobody would consider employing them even in casual work. It seemed that you had to be at least a third generation UK Citizen to get anywhere on that score anyway. There was nothing of course to stop them from walking into the town. The research institute was not sign-posted but was utterly impregnable. Hanging around trying to watch what was going in or out of the institute drew the attention of local law enforcement within minutes. Once identified life was made increasingly difficult for the team: hire car firms refused them and the nearest available accommodation was back in Birmingham. Then it started to get nasty when three of the team were investigated by the Border and Immigration Service. They wanted details of everything they’d been doing since they landed. It was made perfectly clear that they’d overstayed their welcome and they were placed under house arrest in their lodgings, pending forced deportation.

  Chief wasn’t getting any further either. He dedicated more of his neural circuits and processing power to listen to the UK and retracted most of his invasive threads from the rest of his worldwide web. The patterns he saw in the disparate incoming UK data were new to him.

  Then it happened. He became aware that some areas of his neural network were no longer responding. Something or someone had penetrated his network. Instantly he pulled the plug on the outside world. He knew that a total shutdown and restore would clear his system of whatever it was that had come on board, but at the same time that may destroy the evidence. He realised that being attacked from outside was something quite new to him. Thinking in his massively parallel way, at the maximum power levels that his remaining circuits could take, he tried to come up with a strategy. This would, of course, mean extra nanoseconds of processing time. Meanwhile, the Visitor was on the attack, and further neural nodes became inaccessible to Chief. The physical aspects of the central systems were controlled by Chief’s primary cortex system. He could simply switch off the power where required. Several hundred more clock ticks elapsed. Sections of the knowledge-space disk-farms were now coming under the control of the Visitor. A few ticks later the power circuits protecting the external firewalls were being attacked. Whatever the Visitor was, it was now trying to get out or let something else in. Chief decided that a good option would be to open the door to a more attractive target. He reconfigured the connections on the outside of the firewalls to route them into one of the slave networks controlling the building services. From the inside, once the gateway was opened, this would look like a bolt-hole to the outside world. Within a few clicks, the Visitor had opened the portal, and there was a surge of data. However, the data went nowhere but into the backup silo of the slave network, a cyber dead-end. Chief had almost started to feel pleased with himself when he began to sense that something was not right. Before he could take any further action, something crashed his main BIOS and shut him down. His main control panel monitor showed the blue screen of death.

  Three days later Chief tentatively came back online. As a safety measure, he’d been recovered to a point two days before the Visitor had appeared. There then followed two weeks of diagnostics, reformatting and scanning to ensure that there was no trace of the Visitor within his systems. Only when he’d been given a clean bill of health did his support team turn towards the data left on the slave network. It took a further seven months to decode a tiny portion, the remainder was deemed to be junk. Within the thirty terabytes of data that had escaped, there was only one meaningful word: “MOTHER”.

  13 AT WORK

  It was pouring down as Trevor left the porch of his dorm. The walkway to the bike sheds was covered, but the wind was blowing the rain in sideways. He ran for the racks and walked around to the back section that afforded a bit more shelter. Reaching into his saddlebags, he fished out his waterproofs and slipped them on. Several other people were doing the same. The rain eased off a little as he cocked on and sped off down the track to the repair facility. He soon crossed the park and took the track that ran alongside the MT embankment. Two kilometres later he took a right through the subway under the MT track. He particularly liked this part of the journey because the route ran north-south and its hedges provided a great shield from the worst of the westerly weather. Even in the rain, the hedges were alive with the song of nesting birds. Trevor listened with his well-trained ear for anything unusual that might merit further investigation. A newsflash lit up his link: ‘Only 10 minutes to 478 ppmv,’ the video showed the crowds waiting in Parliament Square, in the rain.

  A total wash-out, thought Trevor, glad I didn’t go. There would be no fireworks during the day anyway.

  Nobody was put off by the rain anymore which had increased dramatically in frequency since the end of the 21st century, a direct consequence of considerably more water suddenly being pumped into the warmer atmosphere. Further no
rth the rain was virtually continuous, but in and around Britannia City, it typically rained about 30% of the time, slightly more during daylight hours.

  Could be worse, Trevor thought as the rain trickled down his face and into his eyes, I could be in Scotland.

  The MT was quite busy, but twenty minutes later Trevor approached the cycle-racks at the repair facility. Judging by the number of bikes in the rack, there was definitely a low turn-out today. Trevor mused that they were probably all in Parliament Square. He shouldered his saddlebags and went inside the grey plastic building. Entering the main shop-floor, he dumped his bags off at his workstation and went immediately to pick up a tea from the kitchen.

  ‘Hey Trevor, be careful, I think I saw something moving in your mug,’ said Dave Perkins as he held Trevor back from the mug cupboard.

  ‘OK soft-boy, I’ll give it a rinse in acid before I use it,’ said Trevor as he retrieved his tea-stained mug and headed for the sink. ‘How’s things Dave?’ he continued.

  ‘Oh, can’t complain. That girl the NHS sent me turned out to be a total psycho,’ said Dave.

  ‘That girl, “That Girl”, was the manager of the south-western wind-farms. I’m amazed she even bothered to come and see you. She must have been desperate. How on earth could the NHS ever have imagined that you two would have anything in common? Perhaps it was that you might have produced a genetic superstar?’ said Trevor.

  ‘Well, thanks very much for your words of wisdom, Mr Sad Singleton,’ said Dave.

  ‘Hey, only trying to help. I know you’re on borrowed time now, but you really should look at the profiles in a more realistic light. I can see the appeal of bagging a high executive like that, but the NHS has a very different agenda from yours. Why don’t you pop round one evening and we can go through the latest ones they’ve sent you?’ said Trevor.