by Paul Anlee
Larry continued, “I’m supposed to call my folks tonight, anyway. Those video calls back to the family usually take up the whole evening, now that I work for such a famous research team.”
Greg noted Larry’s use of the word “for” instead of “with”; they were the team he worked for, not with. A sad but telling shift.
The food arrived, and Darian took a bite of his bacon cheeseburger. “That’s right. Your mother is Svetlana Tsarkova, isn’t she?” he asked between mouthfuls.
Greg was pretty sure Darian knew everything that was publicly available about Larry and a great deal that wasn’t public as well. He interpreted the question as an attempt to put Larry at ease, to get him talking about something more comfortable.
Kathy saw Greg about to add his own comment and sent him a private message–Let’s leave this conversation to the boss. Larry’s acting weird; let’s see if Darian can pull anything out of him.
Greg bit off whatever he was about to say, corking his open mouth with a corner of crispy panini. Okay, let’s see where this goes–he sent.
“Yes, that’s right. Have you worked with her?” Larry replied.
“No, but her work on ultrafast lasers is well known and very well-regarded. By all reports, she’s an excellent scientist. Our research programs never really had much in common before, but maybe we could work her into one of the new experiments,” Darian added encouragingly, and looked over to Greg for backup.
“Yeah, sure. We have a number of ideas on how the RAF could alter molecular bond formation; some of the new proposals we’re working on may have some overlap with her work,” Greg added. “Larry and I could meet next week to discuss which ones he thinks his mom might be interested in testing. If you’d like, that is. It wouldn’t cramp your style to have your mom working with us, would it?”
“Why don’t you send him the proposals now, and he can look them over later today? Then, if it’s okay with you, we could talk to your mom about them Wednesday,” suggested Darian.
Greg accessed his lattice, picked out a few proposals from the database server back on campus, and sent them in an email to Larry. “Done,” he said a few seconds later. “They’ll be in your email when you get home, Larry.”
“That does come in handy sometimes,” Larry had to admit.
Greg shrugged. “You can still take your pill whenever you want to, you know. No pressure at all; just keep in mind, it’s never too late.”
“I’m sorry you feel you can’t accept installing your own lattice,” Darian said aloud, making everyone squirm. There we go; the elephant is out in the open now.
“I do respect your decision, Larry, and I’m glad you’re able to continue working with the team.”
Larry looked away without saying a word.
After that, they couldn’t get much more out of him on any topic, no matter how harmless. They eventually gave up, finishing their lunches in silence. Larry mumbled something about having some shopping to do and left.
Greg didn’t bother inviting him to join the other three back at the lab later on. I give up—he sent to Kathy, a defeated look on his face.
She put a comforting hand over his. There was nothing else anyone could do.
46
It was 4:00 Sunday morning and Darian was restless.
He, Kathy, and Greg had passed an infuriatingly fruitless afternoon troubleshooting the RAF hardware, software, and theory. They pored over every detail, again and again. By the end of their day, tempers were short and nobody could focus.
It didn’t make sense. The RAF should work. Every single component and idea checked out fine. Maybe they were all too close to the problem. Maybe they’d allowed themselves to be distracted by the morning off and lunch afterward. Maybe catching Larry in that clandestine meeting with Lucius Pratt had been more disturbing than any of them had thought.
Frustrated, they quit work at 6:00 p.m., or at least that was when Darian sent Greg and Kathy home. As long as he kept his lattice adequately charged, Darian was practically indefatigable.
It was his biological brain that let him down; despite its minimal role in the work, it eventually grew tired. Synaptic connections could only tolerate the enforced activity of the lattice for so long before they became recalcitrant and stopped responding.
Around midnight, he decided to give it a rest. Tomorrow would be a new start. They’d decided the best way to test the RAF generator was to build a new one from scratch, using completely different components from an alternative source. That would tell them if the defect was in their suppliers or in their design. They were getting desperate enough to start testing even relatively implausible ideas.
Darian had something even more drastic in mind for himself. A couple of weeks earlier he realized his own computational ability was at least as powerful as the laptop supercomputer they were using to control the RAF device. Why not turn myself into an autonomous RAF generator?–he asked himself, and went to work on the viral vectors that would construct an array of resonance-generating antennae immediately beneath the surface of his own skull. He synthesized the new DNA in-house and cultured the resulting viruses himself. If the available hardware wasn’t going to work, he would try a different approach.
Eight days after taking the completed virus for the antenna, the dendies had nearly finished assembling the sub-cranial array. He waited for the ping telling him it was ready.
Darian allowed his lattice to go into a low-energy hibernate mode. His recent modifications usually took advantage of any downtime to expand the lattice domain, pushing into new areas of his natural biological neural net and learning how to assume new functionality. The process tended to produce a mild headache so Darian closed his eyes and rested while it ran its course.
You’d think that the lattice would give me better access to my own subconscious–he pondered as he drifted. Maybe then I could figure out what’s bothering me, besides the obvious. He knew that wasn’t the way the subconscious worked. He’d spent some time a few years earlier reading how consciousness was an emergent phenomenon of a highly complex web of sub-conscious processes. The “society of the mind,” Minsky had called it, decades earlier.
He managed four hours of unsatisfying rest while the agitated remnants of his biological brain obsessively replayed the chance encounter with Larry in the café. Finally accepting that peaceful rest would elude him until he determined the source of his agitation, he got out of bed and went to the study.
He sat at his desk for a few minutes before giving in to the restlessness. He paced the floor, barefoot, in slow, purposeful steps. Sometimes the body knows best what will put the mind at ease.
The noise in his brain monetarily quieted. He reactivated his lattice, and set it consciously on the problem. Why would Larry be meeting with Pratt, if it weren’t just a random occurrence? Why had he seemed so defensive?
A number of hypotheses came to mind, but he could think of nothing besides the welcome luncheon on his first day on campus that linked the two men. Should I hack into their personal emails? Maybe they belong to the same church or some other organization.
Darian didn’t take such invasions of privacy lightly. Public databases, they were no problem, but areas expressly marked “Private” were different. With the professional pressure building against him, an ethical breach would give the university the justification they needed to sanction him or, worse, to fire him. Anyway, if Larry was clever enough to keep his personal communications off the net, there would be nothing to be found.
Nothing he could find on the public nets linked the two men, but his gut told him there had to be some connection he’d missed.
My gut?–he mused. I’m thinking with my gut now? That’s great. Only, I don’t think my lattice has extended into that neural tissue yet.
I could tap into NCSA surveillance records. They have no compunction about who they spy on. If he used the National Coordinated Security system to check up on Pratt and Larry, he’d ha
ve to be extra careful not to be discovered. Never mind the university’s reaction, he didn’t need the dark side of the feds coming down on him right now.
Am I being paranoid? Trying too hard to force a connection that isn’t really there? Only one way to find out.
His lattice leaped into action. While he raked through the personal emails of both men, he simultaneously searched NCSA records, being careful not to leave any record that could be traced back to him.
Pratt and Larry had avoided direct email contact. Or maybe Larry was telling the truth; maybe they don’t know each other that well. There were no oblique references to one another through mutual acquaintances. If they are separated by less than the standard six degrees of separation, it’s only through me.
The NCSA telephone recordings proved more fruitful. That’s interesting–he thought as he read a transcript of a conversation dated the day he was shot. Larry was the subject of a conversation between Dr. Pratt and Reverend Alan LaMontagne, the leader of the YTG Church.
That Pratt and LaMontagne knew each other was mildly surprising. That they would be discussing Larry, was an eye-opener.
In retrospect, it made some sense that Pratt might be a member of the Yeshua’s True Guard Church, but it was odd he would be so secretive about it. His tenured status would protect him from any conceivable recrimination for belonging to a fundamentalist church.
Darian couldn’t imagine any way in which being a member of a religious organization, especially one officially adopted by the government of the New Confederacy, would have hurt the philosopher’s career. Maybe he’s hiding it for personal reasons, something to do with his family or friends.
The Church of Yeshua’s True Guard had too many connections to Darian’s life over the past few months for him to be sanguine about this revelation. Using Larry to spy on him would be unconscionable. I may have said some things they find objectionable but this is starting to feel entirely too personal.
The phone transcripts indicated LaMontagne denied the church’s involvement in the shooting, at least to Pratt, but Darian wasn’t convinced. Even if the shooter wasn’t an official member of the Church, it felt like something that this fundamentalist group might facilitate.
He turned his focus to the public and a few private records of Jeremiah Falton, the man who’d shot him. Collectively, the records pointed to the kind of person who would join and rapidly rise through the ranks of the YTG Church: outspoken, deeply religious, and passionately nationalistic.
He was a resident of Austin, Texas, the heart of the New Confederacy and the headquarters of Yeshua’s True Guards. He had written a number of prominent public commentaries over the years that were timely and favorable to positions held by the Church. He had served in one of the most active wings of the New Confederacy Militia, where publicly professing one’s faith was a requisite of acceptance into the ranks.
Darian found it more than curious that Falton had never joined the Church. Yet the name didn’t appear on any of their membership rosters. Sure, it was possible, but it seemed highly improbable. Maybe he’s listed under another name, or he’s a sleeper.
Darian tried casually to penetrate the private files of the YTG Church, to see if he could find any hidden information about Falton. To his surprise, the sophisticated security around YTG’s system was even tighter than NCSA’s.
Their server was easy enough to locate but none of the conventional back doors would open. All of the files, including filenames and sizes, were heavily encrypted. Even with my lattice, this could take a while to crack, especially if they’ve used a good algorithm.
He moused around the system a while, hoping his activity went undetected. With this level of paranoia, they probably keep a log of all system-level commands. They may even be trawling communications activity, looking for anything suspicious.
He tried a different approach, injecting a monitoring virus at the router level. Routers usually had more conventional security software and could be more easily bypassed. The virus would alert him to activity over the web and, hopefully, allow him to record the required decryption key.
While he waited, he returned his attention to the NCSA recordings, expanding his search to all calls made by Reverend Alan LaMontagne. There was a lot of activity, but it was annoyingly uninformative.
An alarm chimed softly in his head, interrupting his perusal of the NCSA recordings. His internal RAF antennae were finally complete. Excellent! I can finish the search later. Although the machinations of church and state were intriguing, his top priority was to get the RAF generator working.
Darian sat down at one of his dining room chairs. He loaded a standard control program into his lattice and initiated the antenna array in his skull. He ran through a quick series of tests to ensure individual elements of the array were transmitting properly. Everything checked out. He set the array to ACTIVE and fed it the settings from the first series of calculations.
A tentative bluish spherical region flickered into existence over the table a meter in front of him, sputtered for a second or two, then fizzled out and disappeared.
Darian’s heart raced. It works! It actually works! Not perfectly, but that was something! Something real. I mean, unreal. I need to send the team a message! No, they deserve to hear this in person.
His mind raced as fast as his heart. Focus! Focus! He made a conscious effort to slow his breathing.
The test wasn’t perfect. Given the configuration, the equations should have created a stable four-inch microverse. They didn’t. So why was the sphere so small and unstable? Think. Think! What was standing in the way? Of course! The settings weren’t adapted for the presence of real matter. The air in the room would have destabilized the field. I’ll need to move to the vacuum chamber in the lab to get proper results.
He looked at the time. Somehow, 4:30 in the morning didn’t seem too early to start the day, especially not when it was going to be so amazing.
The young professor threw on some clothes and headed out into the crisp pre-dawn air. The lab was only a short walk away. As he reached the edge of campus, he sent out a wake-up call through the lattice net to Greg and Kathy.
Kathy answered the call within seconds. Darian? What is it? What time is it?
It works—he replied, trying to keep the tone of his transmitted voice as level as possible.
It works? What works?–she transmitted. Then she realized. It works? It works! Several kilometers away, in the suite she shared with Greg, she squealed, “Greg, wake up! It works!” and shook her slumbering partner awake.
Kathy kept the channel open so Darian got to watch as Greg blinked sleep from his eyes and Kathy repeated the news. Greg came online instantly.
I’m sorry to wake you up—Darian said. No, actually, I’m not sorry at all. I was going to tell you in person later this morning but I couldn’t wait. We did it! Without waiting for a response, Darian sent a synopsis of everything he’d been doing, the internal antenna array he had been growing in his cranium, the crude test that had generated a sputtering microverse in his dining room a few minutes before—everything.
I’m on my way to the lab right now. I need to use the vacuum chamber and the laser interferometer–he sent. Can you meet me there?
It’ll take us about forty minutes but we’ll get there as fast as we can–Kathy replied. Can you wait 'til we get there before you run it again?
Every extra minute will be torture but, for you guys, sure. Get here as fast as you can, though, okay? It was only then he remembered the fourth member of the team. Hey, can you pick up Larry along the way? I’m sure he’ll want to be there too.
Sure—answered Greg. I’ll call him, and we’ll cruise by his place. I don’t think his bus will be running at this hour, and he’s not going to want to miss this. They took a collective deep breath and recorded the moment in their memories.
The lattice did a terrible job of transmitting emotions, so Darian just sent one of his favorite stock
photos, a projection of the Milky Way with an arrow pointing to the tiny region just in from the outer edge labeled, “You are here.” It was meant to convey how insignificant he felt before the mysteries of the universe.
Kathy laughed. I feel like we own the entire galaxy right now.
I know what you mean. I’ll be at the lab in a few minutes–said Darian. Get here as soon as you can. Then he signed off.
Darian entered the nearly deserted building and practically ran down the corridor to the lab, his mind already playing out the vast number of experiments the group would perform. They’d lost some time, but they’d make up for it quickly. He realized they still didn’t know why the laptop RAF generator hadn’t worked. We’ll figure that out when we make the second one. If that doesn’t solve it, I’ll just get Greg and Kathy to grow the antennae internally like me.
His old confidence and determination returned; it felt good to be moving forward again. He fiddled with his key in the sloppy lab-door lock–Why do we still have this ancient technology? He knew the answer. Everybody did. Budget cuts over the last decade had brought modernization of university infrastructure to a screaming halt. That’s going to change, too–he promised himself.
Darian entered the darkened lab, letting the door close on its own behind him. He only caught a quick glimpse of the three small spheres floating inside the vacuum chamber, one yellow, one red, and one blue. They disappeared so fast he had to replay the last few milliseconds of visual input to be sure they had ever existed.
Then he noticed Larry sitting at the control console, his face lit by the eerie glow from the display, and everything fell into place.
47
Larry stood up and opened his mouth to explain.
“Don’t bother,” said Darian. “I know the RAF generator works. I know the theory is correct. And now, I know you know, and you’ve probably known for some time. What I don’t know, is how you kept this from us.”
