One day soon Rahma wanted to take Artie up on the offer after all, and go for a flight in the pouch of the strange creature.
Gilda.
She soared high above the trees and vanished from view.
37
There seems no limit to the number of psychotics who find their way into leadership positions around the world. I am a most notable exception.
—Chairman Rahma Popal, classroom remarks
PROBLEMS WITHOUT END.
For years there had been a variety of them on the resurrected vanishing tunnel project, with one problem leading to another, and apparent solutions leading the researchers into entirely new and more complex difficulties. The quest for the holy grail of vanishing tunnels was like working to find the solution to a complex puzzle box, only to discover more puzzles inside, and when they were solved, still more inside them.
It was driving Director Ondex crazy. He needed this technology so that the Army of the Environment could gain control over military operations on the ground. He didn’t want to activate the satellite-based Janus Machine, which was a doomsday device, too powerful to ever actually be used, except as a bargaining chip. In contrast, vanishing tunnel technology had practical advantages, and he needed to get it developed. Ondex wanted the GSA (and, by association, his SciOs) to use subterranean military forces to oppose and defeat Dylan Bane’s forces in the Americas.
To protect the GSA government in the event of attack, Chairman Rahma and the rest of the GSA leadership had access to subterranean bunkers at a number of locations, including beneath Ondex’s own home in the Berkeley hills. As an added precaution he had built even more bunkers to accommodate his valuable SciO employees, and in the current state of heightened tensions he had ordered some personnel to sleep in those bunkers every night, and to make every attempt to remain near them during daylight hours, for quick escape. Whoever was developing the vanishing tunnel technology—Bane, presumably—might have already perfected it, and could strike in a big way at any time and place, without warning.
When the SciOs began a new research program after the apparent suicides of all vanishing tunnel team members, they’d developed small, functioning prototypes, but had not been able to scale them up to practical sizes.
Then, two years ago, they had finally been able to construct medium-size prototypes, and they had worked … but with limitations. The prototypes (unmanned and remote-controlled) drilled and closed underground tunnels that were around three meters in diameter, and through those openings small machines could travel up to one hundred seventy kilometers, leaving no trace of their passage—but at around that range the tunneling prototypes always shut down and were crushed by earth and rock.
His scientific teams were making progress on the research project, but it was going too slowly. Even details that might have been easy were not really that at all. As but one example, conveying liquefied dirt and rocks from the Splitter array at the front of the voleer to the rear was not a simple variation on old tunnel-boring technology, in which mud and other debris was moved out of the way. Instead, this was a problem of precise timing, of coordinating the speed of splitting atoms at the front of the machine and conveying them to the rear, where they were immediately earth- and rockformed behind the craft. To accomplish that, and to keep the machine tunneling forward at high speed, the designers damped down the front Splitter Cannons to reduce their efficiency, so that they matched the reformative speeds at the rear. This was controlled by a sophisticated computer system that enabled the two ends to communicate with each other, enabling them to coordinate important details.
So far his team of researchers had solved more than eleven hundred serious problems and tens of thousands of smaller ones, with an unknown number of each remaining. It had been a monumental struggle to get the prototypes up to three meters in diameter, and now the scientists had reached another plateau, because they could not make the diameter any larger, or extend the range.
Because of the impracticality of earlier small tunneling machines, the researchers had not performed extensive range testing for them. The current range problem was a surprising development, and a troubling one. Conceivably, a three-meter-diameter tunneling system could work for military applications, although highly modified war machines would need to be developed to fit inside the transporters as cargo, and it would be easier to use robotic soldiers (that could be compressed and packed tightly) instead of human fighters. But the problem of range was now the biggest one facing them; one hundred seventy kilometers was of little value. Theoretically, the machines should go farther, but they would not. At a certain point the machinery not only stopped, but it did so in a very bad way.
In recent months, manned test pilots had been risking their lives, cramming themselves inside the three-meter tunneling machines, taking readings, making adjustments, and dying horribly when things went wrong and the machines were crushed.…
From his Berkeley hills mansion, Ondex watched a wall screen with a live video feed of yet another test run involving yet another death-defying pilot—trying to push the experimental envelope and make the breakthrough discovery that would take the development team to the next level. It was late afternoon, and his vanishing tunnel research team had been working around the clock, day after day, week after week. He checked on them regularly.
This time the scientists were hoping for success with a tiny, incremental increase in boring size, so they had constructed a machine with a hull that was only a few millimeters larger than the previous prototypes. The hull and interior had thousands of built-in sensors, collecting a wide range of data and transmitting it to the researchers—information on cutting angles, hull speed, transfer ratios of splitting and earthforming, and more. There were many variables.
The new machine started to drill with its Splitter array, and then began to move, slowly at first, and then faster. Director Ondex felt his pulse quicken when the underground range reached one hundred kilometers, then one hundred ten—the craft was slowing down, but still going forward, slightly faster than earlier tests. Speed seemed to be related to range, and they’d been working on variations, combinations, on keeping the sensitive machinery going.
A webwork of illumination played around the machine where it was splitting earth and rock at the front, bright purple threads of light that sparkled and stretched to the limits of the freshly dug hole. The light beams gave the illusion of shoring up the tunnel—a tunnel that was only a little larger than the machine itself, and moved with it.
Ondex felt a surge of hope. Maybe it would be different this time.
But it wasn’t. The slightly bigger machine stopped abruptly at one hundred fifty-two kilometers and the tunnel collapsed on top of it, crushing the pilot and splattering blood on the screen, before it went dark.
The Director stared in horror and dismay, then looked away and cursed. They would have to dig the machine out, inspect it carefully, and try to figure out what went wrong. Again.
* * *
THAT EVENING, ONDEX could not sleep, no matter how many pills he took. His mind kept churning, filled with the endless problems that seemed to have no solution. His broken hand throbbed inside the cast.
Then a coded sat-call came in. He sat on the edge of the bed, waiting while the decryption programs ran their course. Presently he heard Soledad Oliveira on the other end of the line. She was one of his top researchers on the vanishing tunnel program.
“Sorry about the late-night call,” she said, sounding breathless. “We’ve just made a major breakthrough. It turns out we were closer to a solution than we realized. We’ve been poring over the data from the tunnel collapse this afternoon. That pilot didn’t die in vain. Just before the end, he saw something on the heads-up display in front of him, a seemingly minor piece of data that we didn’t recognize for what it was at first. But it turned out to be the key.”
She rattled off a stream of technical details that Ondex had trouble understanding. But the bottom line was that they could b
uild large, long-range machines now, capable of transporting armies and military equipment. The engineers were certain of it. The solution was remarkably simple, and right in front of their faces all the time—but in the midst of so many details, it had been overlooked by both human and AI researchers.
Finally he asked, “What was the pilot’s name?”
“Just a moment. Oh, here it is. Patrick Dennehy. An Irishman, one of our best test pilots.”
“The best, Soledad. He was the very best! Now that we have the solution, I want every new tunneling machine to bear a plaque with that brave man’s name on it.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Marshal all of our resources and focus everything on a massive construction program. I want the machines built fast, I want them built right, and I want full secrecy on the operation to protect the technology, and to contribute to our element of surprise.”
“I’m on it, Mr. Director.”
After that, Ondex still could not fall asleep. But this time it was for a different reason.
38
We humans spend our lives in fragile containers,
wreaking devastation and ruination all around.
—Chairman Rahma Popal, Introduction to The Little Green Book
DYLAN BANE WAS one of those leaders who didn’t require much sleep. Throughout history there had been a number of them, a small percentage of industrialists, military leaders, politicians, and other leading citizens. For them, as for Bane, there wasn’t enough time in the day to accomplish everything of importance. No matter how much they achieved, no matter their fame or wealth or power, they wanted more, craved more.
Sometimes Bane compared himself to one of them, the military genius and emperor Napoleon Bonaparte. Reportedly the great man required a scant fifteen minutes of sleep a night. Bane didn’t even need that much. Twelve minutes at most, and he was ready to go again. For him it was a matter of intensity of time, of quality of time. He slept as he lived, putting tremendous focus into every moment. But now he had a special problem, requiring not only time but enormous resources.
It was more than a week after the natural disaster that forced him to abort the San Diego operation and every other target for now—instead devoting all of his resources to the massive underground recovery operation that was under way beneath the central highlands of Mexico. It had been going on for three days.
His hands gripped a railing as he stood on a high platform watching the ongoing extraction and rescue work, and listened to the hum and clank of machinery and the shouts of rescuers as they removed people and called for medics. It was all makeshift and hastily dug, making space for a temporary medical center inside a new underground cavern just west of the destroyed base.
He sighed. After so much work, designing and constructing voleers to transport war machines and soldiers, his squadrons hadn’t even gotten off their starting blocks. Before they could launch, two earthquakes had struck—the first one disabling electronic systems for most of the voleers, and the second inundating the entire Michoacán base. Luckily, he’d gotten one squadron out before the cave-in, so this provided him with machines to dig back into the disaster site.
Part of the work involved reburying hopelessly crushed voleers and piling the dead in mass graves. Not all of the voleers had been destroyed. His crews had removed seven of them relatively intact (along with survivors), and already four of those machines were back in operation, digging new tunnels in an attempt to rescue other stranded ships and crews. There were fourteen thousand survivors so far, half of them injured, and more than nine thousand dead.…
As work progressed, Bane had officers tallying up the remaining military assets and personnel and moving them to a new subterranean base beneath the frozen tundra of the North Canadian territory, where earthquakes were far less prevalent. Leaving a skeleton crew back in Michoacán to mop up operations there, he was getting close to understanding the extent of his military losses. Of the original forty-five voleers, he had seventeen still in operation, and of the original seventy-two thousand human soldiers and other personnel, there were just shy of twenty-eight thousand still alive and able to resume work, along with eleven hundred robotic fighters. Some soldiers were injured and eager to return to duty, while others recovered in their hospital beds, and perhaps a hundred more were likely to die from their wounds.
Most of his fighters were ideologically bonded to his cause to destroy the GSA, so Bane was heartened by their attitude and the way they were getting on their feet rapidly and resuming their duties. But his reconstituted assets were not nearly enough for what he had in mind. He put out feelers to his secret, powerful allies, telling them he needed additional funds to rebuild the fleet and bring in more fighters and war matériel.
39
Life is a dance of opposites,
of alternately warring and making up,
then beginning the cycle all over again.
—Anonymous
FOR TWO WEEKS, Joss continued to lead his Janus Machine crew on various jobsites outside the Sonora Reservation for Humans, while performing his own specialty of greenforming with the Seed Cannon. He was intent on establishing a new personal routine and doing his part for the environment, but at each site he found an increasing number of unwanted observers, more than a thousand now, according to the old mechanic who did a rough count, Sabe McCarthy.
Each day the intruders shouted questions and demands. He didn’t like the carnival sideshow atmosphere, felt like a freak with his unusual appearance and the bizarre abilities they wanted to see. But he ignored all of the people and instructed his crew to do the same—except to remind the observers they were just doing their job, and that did not include dealing with the public or even with SciO, Greenpol, or various other government workers who happened to get passes and were not there on official duty.
For anyone who could prove they were there on official government duty, Joss took them aside and provided them with any information they needed, usually about splitting and greenforming conditions that the crew was encountering at various sites. For any other questions that happened to arise about his physical transformations and powers, Joss deferred to the bi-weekly sessions he had decided to grant to Dr. Mora and his SciO research team, and to whatever they wanted to report. In a laboratory environment they had been testing his ability to split matter, to generate greenforming seeds at will, and to shield himself with a protective net of black light.
Today there were two J-Mac jobs, and they’d already completed the first, an assignment to repair the faulty work of another crew that had failed to properly clean up and seed the site of a Corporate agribusiness farm that had been using toxic chemicals on its crops.
Now Joss’s crew was on its way to a site that had been overlooked previously, a hidden ravine where old motor vehicles and other junk had been dumped and were rusting away. For a change, Joss and Kupi rode in the forward cab with the tall driver, Bim Hendrix, as the truck bumped across the desert. In the side mirrors Joss saw clouds of dust billowing behind them.
That morning he had heard about Andruw Twitty; reportedly he had died of a heart attack at the Chairman’s game reserve, but that sounded suspicious, because Andruw had been young and healthy, having passed stringent police physicals that were required every year to remain on the force. As for the reason that Twitty was at the game reserve, Joss agreed with Kupi’s assessment that he had probably gone there to say bad things about the two of them, lies and distortions. Even so, Joss tried to stop thinking ill of the dead man, preferring to remember good things about him.
In the back of his awareness, Joss heard Bim Hendrix telling stories, and Kupi laughing. The driver was a wellspring of humorous anecdotes.
“Okay, that’s enough from me,” Hendrix finally said. He’d been talking for the better part of an hour. “Now let’s hear someone else’s best funny stuff. Hey, Joss, how about you?”
“Anything we had to say would pale in comparison with your stories,” Joss said. “Right
, Kupi?” He nudged her in the side.
“Oh no,” she said, “I’m just full of anarchist jokes. You wanna hear some? Did you hear the one about the Black Shirt, the Corporate president, and the eco-criminal, all deciding at the last minute that they wanted to get into heaven, no matter all the bad things they’d done in their lifetimes?”
Hendrix groaned, said he had heard the long and convoluted story before, a variation on what used to be called “shaggy dog stories” in the pre-revolution days. “Not again,” he said. “Please, not again.”
The three of them chuckled and then fell silent. Intermittently, Joss glanced over at the navigation holo that danced in the air beside the driver. Leaning to his left, Joss studied it and then saw the ravine ahead of the rig, just coming into view.
“Almost there,” Joss said.
The driver slowed the long truck and steered it onto a wide expanse of rock. Near the edge of the ravine, he stopped and got out, looking for the best place to set up. This was one of his other duties.
“Remember I said we were like Shiva, the Hindu god, when we operate the Janus Machine?” Kupi said.
“Uh-huh.” Joss watched Hendrix as he walked along the rim of the ravine. From the truck, Joss saw dented, rusted vehicles and appliances heaped down there.
“I’ve been thinking about it,” Kupi said. “With your raw ability to split and greenform, that gives you both Shiva powers, too—destroying and creating.”
The Little Green Book of Chairman Rahma Page 27
