CHAPTER 11
Autonomous Systems Laboratory
Northgate University, Pennsylvania, USA
August 18, 2110
1430 hours UT
Dr. Ryne Falkland peered at the monitor, watching as Johnny Winger shifted and situated himself to be more comfortable inside the Configuration Scanner.
“All comfy in there?” he asked.
Winger was dressed in a light gown, covered in wires and pads. “This is how I want to spend my vacation, Doc. All wired up and crammed in a tunnel. Hope you’re not planning on disassembling this creaky old body. Let’s get going.”
“Very well.” Falkland pressed a few keys and the medbot whirred up to Winger’s bed, a syringe extended and its effectors brought the needle into contact with an IV stent. “Here goes….” He pressed one button. The medbot responded by loading the IV tube with anesthetic. In seconds, Falkland could see Winger’s eyes flutter shut. EEG and EKG showed him deeply under in less than a minute. Now the fun begins, he told himself. Five hours of it.
In an adjoining room, Dana Tallant was still groggy from her own time in the Config Scanner that morning. So far, the scans had gone as well as Falkland could have expected. After a few hours inside, he hoped to have a full atom scan of each one, gathering enough bond and geometry data to impose a new configuration on the Rene-angel they had brought from Paris. With enough scan data and a little luck, the new configuration would so closely resemble the original Rene Winger that both parents couldn’t tell the difference.
Falkland studied the readouts on Winger closely. The subject needed to be well under and moving into Stage III sleep, completely immobilized, for some four to five hours, in order for the scan to be good. If all went well, the new Config Scanner would detect and build a detailed image of its subject’s atomic configuration, including atomic species, bond energies and bond geometry. This massive database, once populated, was the core of the config driver and engine, the device which would later grab atoms from feedstock to re-construct the original pattern.
That was the plan.
Falkland had tweaked and adjusted this scanner and config engine over the last few years to a point where he could now routinely disassemble small animals and more or less reconstruct them into a nearly exact likeness of the original. Not that there weren’t occasional hiccups, as had happened with Jiggs and Simon. But that’s how Science advanced, in fits and starts, three steps forward and two steps back.
To do this with organic matter or living creatures was in fact a stunning achievement, if not yet fully appreciated, due to UNIFORCE security restrictions. Never before, in the fifty year history of nanobotic technology, had anyone been able to do this. Of course, since his earlier subjects had been animals, nobody knew if they really were like the originals…the principle of Continuity of Consciousness had clearly been violated and the reconstructed animals might have been just extremely realistic simulations, angels like Rene Winger herself and not the real thing. General Winger himself had pointed that out in the last briefing Falkland had given at UNIFORCE Headquarters.
That’s why a human subject was needed. That’s why this was really still an experiment.
Falkland was sure this technique, using an imposed memory field on raw atomic matter, would give him a good pattern on the original Rene Winger. He’d recommended that Johnny Winger and Dana Tallant, Rene’s parents, let themselves be scanned. Then with some tweaks and adjustments to the database that he accumulated, he was sure he could get pretty close to the original Rene pattern…blending genomic data from the two scans with the pattern data and sort of averaging out the data should, he theorized, provide a good foundation pattern to reconstruct Rene.
Of course, what was missing was any config variations that had occurred in Rene’s short fifteen year life…data based on her experiences as a functioning human angel swarm for the last fifteen years. Falkland felt this gap could be interpolated.
More importantly, Winger and Tallant were okay with the idea.
For the next four hours and forty two minutes, Falkland’s config scanner did its job, methodically scanning and recording the position of every atom and molecule that composed the atomgrabber. Absolute immobility was critical. After Winger was fully under, the medbot secured the officer tightly in his bed and closely monitored the snoring form for any sign of out- of-tolerance motions, intervening quickly whenever Winger tried to move or shift or fidget in the bed.
It was a tense, nerve-wracking time and Falkland was relieved when the chime sounded gently, signaling the end of the scan. He checked the database and found it populated with exabyte after exabyte of scan data. Routine integrity checks determined that the data was clean, within tolerances and fully useable.
It was time to wake the General up. And bring Rene out of containment.
Recovery took several hours for Johnny Winger and Dana Tallant. They both lay on separate beds in the recovery room, down the hall from Falkland’s lab. Winger watched as Dana’s eyes fluttered open.
“You look like hell, Wings,” she said weakly.
“Hey, I love you too. How do you feel?”
They were both groggy and disoriented from anesthesia. “Like I went nano and stayed that way for a few weeks…you know, ‘over the waterfall’, again and again and again.”
“Me too.” Winger sat up experimentally. Nothing hurt. But the room spun like a carousel. “Falkland said the scans went well. He’s got lots of data.”
Tallant took a deep breath, tried sitting up, groaned and lay back down. “Did we do the right thing, Wings? Has this trick got even a prayer’s chance of working?”
“It’s worth a shot. What do we lose if it doesn’t? We’re right back where we were in Paris. I’d like a normal family…I guess that can’t happen as long as we’re in the Corps. But this gives us a chance. That’s all I want…a chance to get Rene back.”
“But it won’t be Rene, honey. We both know that.”
“Now, don’t go getting all philosophical on me, babe. The finest minds around here can’t agree on that. I think if Falkland’s right, we won’t know the difference. Rene’ll be Rene in all the important ways and we can have a family again…we can stop living inside a MOBnet and get on with our lives.”
Tallant seemed unconvinced and was about to say something when Falkland came in, knocking on the door as he did.
“Both scans went extremely well,” he reported. A medbot accompanied Falkland into the recovery room and busied itself checking monitors, IV attachments, medicine quantities and the bedding. It clucked like a disapproving maid at the covers lying askew on Winger’s bed and proceeded to straighten them out. “The data look clean and well behaved. All I have now is two weeks of analysis and reformatting and I can load the pattern buffer. I’ll have a new, sort of composite memory field, and I’ll be ready to impose that on your daughter’s structure.”
Winger sat up and accepted a cup of something from the bot. It tasted brassy but went down smooth. “I’d like to see her.”
Falkland studied the medbot’s report screen, sucking at his lower lip as he went over their vitals. “In another hour or so. You both need more recovery time…and more fluids. I’ll have Betty here bring in a tray for both of you.”
The bot followed Falkland out like a loyal pet and the door was shut. Winger finished off the liquid and decided he needed to lie down again. On her bed, Dana was already snoring.
They had brought Rene over from Paris in a small pod, well secured with MOB capability and electron beam charges, in case anything went wrong. Falkland looked over the pod, then fastened it to some scaffolding inside the containment chamber. He exited the chamber and dogged the hatch shut. Then he ran a sweep, just to make sure all security systems were armed and ready.
Winger and Tallant studied the board. With the practiced eyes of veteran atomgrabbers, they knew what containment meant…and where it could fail. But this was Rene in
side…supposed to be Rene, not just some nameless swarm. Despite the fact that his daughter was little more than a cloud of bots configured to resemble a human who had long since been disassembled, Winger found he was anxious to see her. Whether it was love or concern for her safety or just plain curiosity at the sheer novelty of seeing a loved one re-assembled out of thin air, conjured like a magician’s trick, he couldn’t say. And he decided he didn’t want to explore that line of thinking any further.
Falkland did a quick scan of his board. “I think we’re ready. Here goes—“ he pressed a single red button, unsealing the pod inside the chamber.
For a few moments, nothing changed. Then a faint mist-like smoke began to appear, issuing in a steady stream from the side of the pod. The mist sparkled like dust motes in strong sunlight. Winger knew the master assembler had been released and was executing its basic instruction set, replicating structure, slamming atoms like some mad brickmason, building Rene atom by atom, molecule by molecule. One wag had called it like being conceived and born again, but at hyperspeed.
Rene gradually took shape before their eyes. First her head gained form, then her shoulders, with the reddish-blond curls of a pony-tail assembling right in front of them. Winger had always loved that pony-tail. That was one thing about daughters who were angel swarms. They didn’t age. They stayed adorable little girls forever, if you wanted it that way.
Winger shivered in spite of the cuddly little creature taking shape before his eyes. Somehow this wasn’t right. It had never been right. And I’m not sure a hotshot whizbang new memory field will ever make it right.
The entire process took about five minutes. Winger looked through the porthole. To all outward appearances, the thing inside was Rene. It had the pony-tail. It had the blue eyes. The crooked grin and the mole beside the lips. Dimples. Pert little nose. An exact replica.
But still a replica.
Winger found that Falkland had rigged up a system to communicate with her. “How do you feel, honey?”
“Daddy…Daddy…I want out. Can’t I get out?”
Even her voice tugged at his heartstrings. It had the same timber. The same huskiness. He told himself that she wasn’t real. Couldn’t be real. Yet Falkland had assured them he could make her more real than ever.
“Honey, you’ve got to stay in there awhile longer. Dr. Falkland here—“ he stopped, unable to finish.
Tallant jumped in. “Rene, sweetie…you’ve been sick. Dr. Falkland’s here to make you better. There’s a procedure you have to—“
The Rene-thing twisted on its seat, rubbed at its eyes. Every motion seemed real. No edge effects. No blurring and smearing or translucence of the hands. Solid tracking everywhere…Rene seemed more real than ever. Maybe it was hope. Maybe wishful thinking.
Rene got up from the seat and came over to the porthole. She pressed a hand against the cover. Faint sparkles could be seen in her palm, almost as if you could look through it if you tried hard enough. Like stars in a nighttime sky, seen through your fingers. No veins, no palm lines, no blemishes. Just little sparkles.
“She looks so real,” Tallant said. “I could just reach through and touch her.”
“Have you changed her config, Doc? Or is it something in the containment chamber?”
“This containment system has filters. That may be what you’re seeing…some filtering of the config as it executes. I haven’t run the pattern buffer at all.”
“How long is this going to take?” Winger asked. He wanted to reach through the porthole too and hold his daughter. That’s not Rene in there, he told himself. That’s not Rene.
Falkland gave that some thought. “The database is full. There’s a lot of data to massage. I’ve got to put all that data through some filtering of its own. Then I have some transformations and conversions to perform, to setup up things in the right format for the pattern buffer…the memory field. It’ll be a week or two. Then I load the pattern buffer with the revised configuration and see what happens.” Falkland gave them a brave smile. “I’m sure we can make your daughter almost as good as new.”
“Almost,” Tallant said back. She looked over at her husband. Their hands found each other, interlocking fingers. She felt a hard squeeze.
“We have to try, Dana. We have to give it a try.”
It was the uncertainty of it all that bothered Dana most. Not knowing. No way to be sure. Was it even worth the effort?
“I suppose you’re right. But that’s not Rene in there. That’s not my daughter.”
Falkland wasn’t sure which would be harder: getting the new configuration right or getting the parents to accept the new configuration. The memory field needed a human test…of that, he was sure. It couldn’t be proven to UNIFORCE standards without the data from a human test. There was no chance of defeating the Assimilationists if he couldn’t prove he could re-assemble a deconstructed human being.
Jiggs and Simon were a hell of a lot easier to deal with than this.
Aboard the Michelangelo (UNS-212)
Trans-Jovian Trajectory J-24
Post-Boost + 25 days
2245 hours (U.T.)
Dietrick Vogel finished off his beer in the ship’s galley and belched. He stared out the porthole nearby, not that there was anything to see hundreds of millions of miles from nowhere. Black space. The Great Beyond. He might as well have been inside the closet of his bunk compartment on B Deck, for all there was to look at. He glared back at Roy Favors, who was nibbling up scraps of his sandwich and eyeing the clock on the bulkhead. They were both due at their duty stations in less than ten minutes.
“I’m telling you, Roy, that Commander Liu’s different, somehow. I can’t put my finger on it, but she’s just plain weird. You spend time on A Deck…you telling me you ain’t seen
that?”
“She’s an officer…what do you expect? They’re all different…like a different species.”
Vogel eyed the clock, decided he’d better get down to B deck, where his shift as a Systems Tech 1 was set to start in less than ten minutes. “I dunno…this whole mission’s messed up. Destination all hush-hush…crew cobbled together from every vacuumhead who can lift a wrench…headed out to places nobody in his right mind would go…off the friggin’map, if you ask me. I feel like Columbus’s crew in 1492, sailing right off the edge of the world.”
Favors just stared morosely into his drink. “Nobody made you sign up…we’re all volunteers here. Why’d you come aboard?”
“Money, same as you. Cripes, I got debts…got that big wagon back on Earth. Plus a neat little sailer for the ocean…somebody’s got to pay for all that crap. And my oldest…Rico…you know he’s headed off to college. All that Ed-Net stuff and nobody can afford those stimplants anymore. So he’s got to get his fat butt into class and on-line.”
Vogel left for B Deck and Favors just sat there wondering. Big Mike was only three weeks out of Phobos Station, on a speed run to deep space, and already the gripes and the whining had started. Maybe Dietrick was right. The whole mission was cursed. You didn’t have to prowl Big Mike’s gangways, corridors and decks for long to get a strong whiff of foreboding, a sense of unease among the crew. Some said the whole thing was a hunt for ghosts, cobbled together at the last minute, doomed to fail. Commander Liu didn’t make matters any better.
Captain Hawley’s exec was a known hardass, even allowing for the great legs, the high cheekbones and exotic eyes. She was a looker but like Vogel said, she was serious bad news and she didn’t belong on an old cycler heading off to the Great Beyond. She was greener than fresh puke and meaner than a snake. He couldn’t quite put his finger on it, but most of the crew had taken an instant dislike to her. Crews were like that. They could sniff out phonies and ass-kissers in no time and Victoria Liu gave everybody the creeps.
Favors had to admit he was one of them. There was an aloofness, a kind of regal di
stance to the way she comported herself, like she didn’t belong and she knew it but she wasn’t going to lower her guard to acknowledge the obvious. Frontier Corps officers were strange beings from another dimension…everybody already knew that.
Victoria Liu was the strangest being he’d ever seen in twenty four years with the Corps.
One deck forward of Michelangelo’s wardroom, Commander Victoria Liu and Captain Cory Hawley were up in the command center on A deck, methodically going over mission orders. Command was empty except for the two officers. A phasing burn was coming up in a few minutes, a burn which would put Michelangelo on a gravity-assist course toward Jupiter. Once the burn was made, Big Mike was committed to deep space. She wouldn’t be able to turn about and come home for months once her trajectory was shifted. The physics of orbital mechanics would make sure of that.
Hawley wasn’t too sure he liked Frontier Corps cramming a new and untested officer down his throat as exec, even though he knew perfectly well that she came with the highest ratings and fitness reports.
He’d spent the last night before shove-off at the Mariner Bar, at Phobos Station, knocking back a few cold ones with other officers. The question of using angels, para-human nanobotic swarm entities, as serving line officers surfaced some strong opinions. Hawley was one of them.
“Look, guys, I’m an old cycler captain. I’m used to spinning around the Sun in a nice easy stable orbit…not too much excitement, nothing to see, nothing to do. I’m for anything that makes my life easier. The Corps started integrating swarm para-human ‘crewmen’ into our normal rotations about fifteen years ago. Call it efficiency. Cost savings. Latest technology upgrade. Politics. Call it whatever you want. Just don’t give me something that makes my life harder. Cycler captains like routine. We don’t like surprises. And so far—“ Hawley shrugged, worked his beer for a moment, “—it’s worked like a charm. Commander Element B—that’s the name the Corps gave us…his real designation is something like Config CXT-209987—has been a most able crewman and engineering officer. Does everything I ask. Doesn’t get the rest of the crew riled up…anymore. We had some issues in the beginning…I’m sure you know the scuttlebutt. You know…dinosaurs, troglodytes who can’t accept change. Everybody has those types. But Element B’s worked out pretty well.”
The bar discussion had gone on for awhile and Hawley remembered there never had been a consensus on whether the angels made good officers or not. Pretty much true for Frontier Corps as well, he thought. Angels had been serving as crewmen for a decade, although none had ever captained a ship, even a bus like this old cycler ship, which most considered pretty boring duty. He’d never had any reason to doubt Element B’s fitness, but all the same…you couldn’t help but wonder.
“Commander, all systems ready for the phasing burn?”
Victoria Liu scanned a tablet from her right-hand seat, double-checked something from the main console and nodded in the affirmative.
“Yes, sir, Captain. All departments report ready. Plasma engines on line, voltages steady, reactors at full mil power. Central mast rigidizing complete. Tanks at flight pressure. The ship is ready for the phasing burn, sir.”
“Very well, Commander. Give me the count.”
Liu checked the ship’s clock. “Five minutes on the mark, sir. Maneuver Two is enabled and ISAAC flags no anomalies or contingencies at this time. Waiting to proceed.”
Hawley checked the board himself. The whole thing was fully automated but Frontier Corps captains like to feel the wind on their faces, so he checked anyway. ISAAC was the ship’s master computer and ISAAC was never wrong.
“Proceed.”
Liu punched a few buttons and ISAAC counted down the last few minutes to the burn.
It was a gentle acceleration, less than five meters per second, but the result of the burn would be to put Big Mike on a Jupiter approach trajectory which would use the giant planet’s gravity as a slingshot to deeper space. The entire burn lasted less than a minute and when the ship’s engines cut off, Michelangelo was on course, right in the center of the corridor, essentially zero rates in all axes, for Jupiter flyby six weeks from now.
“Well done, Commander. I’m heading aft to grab a bite. You have the bridge.” He hoisted himself out of his seat and turned toward the hatch to the central gangway.
“Thank you, sir. It is always a pleasure to see all systems perform so well. Scanning no anomalies at this time, sir. Systems functioning at ninety-seven point six percent design capacity.”
Something in the way she said it caught Hawley’s attention. He sat back down. “You say that a lot, Commander. All ship systems functioning at capacity. How do you figure that?”
Liu turned slightly in her seat. She was attractive in an exotic way, with her high cheek bones and oval eyes, partially hidden behind dataspecs. The specs glowed and winked red and green as she accessed data from ISAAC and studied parameters from ship systems.
“It’s an algorithm, Captain. You are aware of this, I’m sure. All ship systems report status regularly to ISAAC, which formats the data and reports to me. I have a real time picture of how well all systems are performing. A good executive officer always has this data at their command, for decisions by the captain.”
Quoted right out of the Frontier Corps manual of command, Hawley knew. Verbatim. “Do you ever sleep, Liu? I mean, we all have duty shifts. I know Command is never really off duty, but you must take some downtime eventually.”
Liu smiled faintly and Hawley thought he detected just the slightest flaw in her expression…very subtle, but it was like her lips weren’t attached to her face just right. What the hell was that? Then he remembered something from her personnel file…Victoria Liu was enhanced, loaded with bots to rev up her respiration, her mind, her muscles, everything. She could swap files with ISAAC like kids swapped lies on the playground.
Probably some kind of weird closet Assimilationist, he decided.
“Sir, as you know, I…” she seemed at a loss for words. “…I require less rest than most of the crew. Maintenance periods are a part of my routine. I don’t rest the same way you do, sir. Or the rest of the crew.”
Hawley sniffed. “So I noticed. And that neuro-boost you went through several years ago…what does that tell you about our crew? How are they performing, five weeks into the mission?”
Liu gave that some thought. Hawley saw her specs winking on and off furiously. No doubt checking with ISAAC, dredging up all kinds of files.
“The crew is performing at a composite rate of greater than ninety-five percent efficiency, according to the percentage of tasks completed on time. Department ratings range from ninety-one percent to ninety nine percent in Engineering. The median value is—“
Hawley held up a hand. “Okay, okay, I give up. You’ve got all the data. But I’m hearing talk, scuttlebutt really, about this mission. Some of the crew are uneasy. Some of the crew think the mission is cobbled together, that it’s not well thought out, that it’s all politics to show people back home we’re doing something. What does your data say about that, Commander?”
Liu seemed to be checking some kind of reading on her specs. Her eyes narrowed. “I have no such data, Captain. As executive officer, you know I have the highest enthusiasm for our mission. Operation Sentinel is an important mission, critical to determining what phenomenon is currently approaching our solar system. Any concerns and discontents among the crew have not been reflected in the departmental ratings or performance data.”
Hawley figured he ought to be glad for that. “Liu, you sound like a marketing brochure. Give me the residuals for the burn and let’s go over the rest of the mission time line. We’ve got Jupiter Encounter in less than six weeks. I want daily drills in every department. On a mission like this, we’ve got to do everything we can to stay sharp.”
“Captain, the next waypoint is J-6, less than five days away. May I rec
ommend—“ But Victoria Liu never finished her sentence.
A shrill alarm sounded on the command deck. Both officers scrambled to take stock of the situation.
Liu checked her board. “It’s Triton Odyssey, sir. Signal’s dropped out. We’ve lost comm with the probe…checking carrier status, all systems….”
Hawley saw that Liu was correct. “We need to backtrack, see what Odyssey was doing before this happened. Did she hit something?”
“Unknown, sir, but I’m checking.” Liu’s fingers played over the keyboard, calling up one display after another. She tapped a spot on her cheek, upping the data rate from ISAAC. Raw systems feed poured in and her embedded algorithms massaged the data, looking for patterns. In seconds, she had an answer. “Sir, it seems that Odyssey was tracking some kind of diffuse mass in space, less than a hundred thousand kilometers distant, something beyond Pluto’s orbit. Analyzing now—“ She let the algorithms play with the feed from Odyssey for a few minutes.
“A diffuse mass,” Hawley wondered. A bot swarm, perhaps? Drifting dust particles? Some dead comet passing by, shedding debris, on its way sunward? From this distance, from the data Odyssey had returned over the last few weeks, there were few answers.
Hawley checked flight parameters for the probe. The maneuver files showed recent engine activity. Whatever Odyssey had detected, she had made a few maneuvers and changed course toward the object. That much was clear. Over the last few weeks, she had been steadily closing in on the source for a closer inspection.
Then the signal had stopped.
Johnny Winger and the Great Rift Zone Page 34
