by V R Tapscott
“Bingo.”
“And where do you fit into all this?”
Another sigh. “I don’t really know, Jane. I’m just as much in limbo as her. And I have to protect Jane as well. And of course, the reason I’m talking with you is for that very reason. I have to take care of you, just like Olive the Pilot does. Even if it means betraying my pilot. I don’t expect you to do anything, but you should be aware that increasing her power might add to the problem by giving her broader and broader reach to seeing places that might harm you.”
“Good to know. I guess.”
“It IS good to know, Jane. But please remember, she loves you more than life itself. It wasn’t any kind of a false gesture, her saving your life. If it wasn’t for me putting a wall up around a tiny energy resource, she would have drained us dry and we would have died that day, never to return.”
“Wow.”
“I think that’s a good way of looking at it.”
I stretched and looked out over the sandy beach. “We’ll both watch her together. I think it will be ok in the long run, though. Don’t you?”
“I’m not sure, Jane. But whatever you want is paramount.”
I looked around me again. “I’m not really where I am, am I?”
Olive laughed a little. “No, you’re currently tossing and turning, or at least as much as the drugs will let you. You should remember most of this conversation tomorrow, though.”
I smiled ruefully, “I’m not sure I want to.”
“You don’t wish to remember this conversation?”
I thought a minute. “No. I can’t imagine Olive being insane. Even while Kit was as he was, he never ever meant to hurt me.”
An oddly loving tone of voice, “Olive loves you more than just because her programming requires it, Jane. It’s also true. And of me, as well.”
I smiled. “Thank you. And I love her too, you know. And you. Of course.”
“Very well, you’ll not remember our dialog unless you truly want to, and it will become clear at that time.”
I tossed and turned in my pain, finally waking. I had a slight memory of a very strange dream with Olive in it, but no matter what I did, I couldn’t bring up anything more than a simple scene of a beach and a lounge chair. I took a pill from the coffee table and a swallow of water, and slid back into a dreamless sleep.
Chapter Two
History Lesson
The next morning was bright and cool and downright wonderful. The sunrise was perfect in all its pinks and yellows, and I remembered Laney’s description of how morning felt for her and thought I could almost feel that, this morning.
I heard people trying to be quiet as they went about their chores. I decided I’d show them and get up to join them, but it only took half a movement off the couch - and almost a fall to the floor - before I decided it wasn’t a good idea. And of course, I likely tore something open again, as all of my pains flared up. It wasn’t the first time I’d been taken in by the good feeling of pain killers, only to be let down.
Mother came into the room at that point. I could see she knew what I’d done, but she just clucked and went about setting things to rights, including me. She helped me up from the couch and into the bathroom, then walked with me as I hobbled into the kitchen. It was definitely a full house, it seemed everyone had a hand in making breakfast. Or at least eating it.
Dale caught my eye and smiled at me, he was busy cooking waffles. Olive was working away beside him, tossing spatulas and pancakes in the air. Mother got me a plate and almost magically two pancakes and a waffle appeared on it. I laughed with delight, the whole thing was so like a family gathering. Bailey flopped into the seat beside me, and Georgia brought her underdressed self to the table too. She was wearing the a painted-on pair of black jeans, and a tight red top that looked like it belonged with a Chinese robe of some sort. It stopped just about at her rib cage, so there was a lot of Georgia below it. And above it. I giggled as Dale stared and nearly dropped a waffle, but he covered by managing to toss it to Georgia. She smiled and waved at him.
“Oh, my, what a great room that is, Jane! I was worried it was going to be a little dank place when I saw it was in the basement, but it’s stunning. I need to get in contact with your decorator!”
I pointed at Olive. “There she is - she’s an extraordinary woman, my Olive. She can bring home the bacon, fry it up in the pan and never ever miss decorating the kitchen and the living room and still find time to change the oil in the van.”
Olive made with a wide grin and continued her antics with the pancakes. I noticed that she was very careful that all of her body was in view all the time. She must be increasing power in leaps and bounds. That bothered me for some reason, but I just put it off to being constantly in pain. Of course, after the revelation that whatever creature that had put a hole in me was still around blowing up mountains, I was ready for Olive to be strong enough to protect us.
Conversation bounced around the kitchen, and we dissolved into a gathering of happy people with no problems. The ‘no problems’ part was all a lie, of course, but it felt so good that it seemed it would last forever.
Finally, everyone was stuffed, and the leftover food was sitting staring at us. I’d even managed one of the pancakes, using Mother’s rationalization of it being soft food. The pain pill was giving me a gentle glow of warmth and the feeling of being loved. I drifted off right there on my favorite bench while the world whirled around me.
When I woke, I found a pillow under my head and a blanket over me. The sun had moved, and the kitchen was all clean. Dale was sitting in one of the kitchen chairs, reading. When he glanced up and noticed I was awake, a smile broke across his face and he said, “Good morning, sleepyhead. I never got a kiss this morning. Or a hug, or anything. Especially anything. But I guess anything will have to wait a few days, huh?”
I smiled and nodded. “I guess so. It doesn’t feel like much is going on down there right now anyhow.”
“It’s okay, we have until whenever. I’m not going back for a few weeks. At the very least, not until you’re well. The Missoula branch will just have to get along without me.”
Dale had moved here and stayed for a while, but he got to missing the Big Sky Country and with Olive being able to just pop us back and forth it wasn’t even much like a long-distance relationship. We both had our lives, but we were able to share the important parts. It was especially nice that with the extra cash that my huge bank account provided, we could have houses all over the place. He never was able to spend much time in his Vegas house though, and finally we just gave it to Laney. She never seemed to have any issue with living in her dad’s house, but of course, it had been her house for longer than it had been his.
I laid back and closed my eyes, feeling a little release of the pain. Of course, that was broken by the sudden realization I had to pee pretty bad.
“Um. Dale?”
He laughed. “I wondered how long it would be.”
We were getting pretty good at the operation now, but he still had to help me up. I have decided being sick sucks. I think it’s possible other people may have arrived at this conclusion before me, but I’m taking credit for fully vocalizing the concept.
We came back from the bathroom and I was reminded of the new downstairs hotel.
“Hey, what does it look like down there? It sounded like Georgia was blown away by it? Think we can make it down there without me falling half the way?”
He eyed me judiciously and said, “I can’t never tell you ‘no’ anyhow, but I guess it’d be okay. The stairs are decently wide, and we can take it slow.”
We headed down the stairs and, right off, instead of it going directly into the conference area we were presented with a locked door to the left and a hallway to the right. It was still the same wood for part way down the hallway, but through some kind of magic, Olive had managed to turn the wood walls slowly into some sort of light pastels and stripes. There were four doors off the sides of the ha
ll and one straight ahead. All four doors on the sides of the hall were ajar, but the one at the end of the hall was closed. We glanced into the first room and from the hodgepodge of mess inside, it was obvious this was where Georgia had gone to ground. We looked in through the door to the second room and it was perfect, just as Georgia had said, being far beyond the stamped-out nature of a hotel room. It was fairly small, but still with space for a large screen TV, its own bathroom, and a decent sized closet. An upscale corporate hotel room, I guess, only with some nice Olive touches such as the perfect drapes that matched the carpet. I was worried that Olive might have gone crazy and put some kind of exquisitely and impossibly animated scene outside the window, but it was a utilitarian area with sunshine coming down from a window well. After all, it was kind of hard to alter the fact that we were ten feet underground.
The other two rooms were just rooms. Blank canvases, not even bathroom fixtures, truly blank areas. Certainly nice to have in case of wanting more room though, since it seemed my household was growing by leaps and bounds.
The final room, the one at the end of the hallway, was not a blank canvas. It was, in fact, a fully painted canvas. After knocking, and getting a “Come on in!” we’d opened the door and been floored with the look. Olive was sitting cross legged in the middle of a queen-sized bed with a dark purple duvet. The bed was a truly stunning grey sled with chrome accents. An antique dresser, done up in the same grey and chrome as the bed, stood off to one side. A giant chrome-framed mirror hung over the center of the dresser. From what we could see, the decor was continued into the bathroom with grey, black, silver and purples. Grey drapes were pulled back from the artfully designed window area. It even had a sunken garden area accessed by French doors. A quick glance showed the whole thing was covered by a transparent glass dome allowing the sun in without allowing the snows of winter. I was sure it would be quite toasty even on cold days, since it was a veritable greenhouse.
Olive was practically a Cheshire cat in the middle of all this, with her teeth showing in a big grin. “You like it, Jane?”
I bubbled over with amaze. “It’s perfect, Olive! Your own room - I love it!”
I had to smile as she wiggled like a puppy over the praise. “Thanks, I figured since you and Bailey got a room, I’d have one too.”
Dale seemed equally taken by the room, but being a guy he was more interested in the logistics of the dome over the sunken garden than the decor.
Noting his interest, Olive remarked, “It’s all one piece. The dome and the interior walls are all one molded part, nothing will ever leak there. You could have ten feet of water over that dome and nothing would ever leak. Ever. In fact, the entire addition is the same, all one molded piece. Now, it’s designed to look like conventional concrete construction, but it’s actually not, of course.
We oo’ed and ah’ed over Olive’s creation, and she preened. “If I’m going to be a real person, I need a real room.”
I smiled. “I hope you achieve what you’re looking for, Olive. And of course, you’ll need to expand the capacity of the system to continue with your work. Should I talk with the Command Module to authorize that?”
“No, that’s ok. She’s right here listening. That ok, Olive?”
The vaguely machine voiced version of Olive’s counterpart came back, “Heard and understood, Jane Bond. Further expansion of computer and system capacity authorized.”
“Olive, I assume you’ll be looking at building whatever it takes to protect the area if the ... artifact ... comes back?”
“Oh, y’all can trust me, Jane. I’ll be building all kindsa interesting things into this house. And ‘specially under the barn. In fact, construction is already goin’ there. Has been, pretty much since we came back from the Montana survey.”
“Any idea what that thing is, Olive?”
“I think it must be an offshoot from the explosion, but not the one over Montana - the one that blew the planetoid into what’s now the asteroids.”
“Kit mentioned the asteroids once, but never got into any detail. Can you tell us what happened that made it all blow up?”
Olive’s room included a little seating area with two chairs and an end table. The chairs were big overstuffed recliners with the decor of the room carried over to them. The purple and black with chrome seemed to be perfectly blended. I sank into one of the chairs, feeling much more relaxed and hurting less than I had been while on my feet. Until I sat, I didn’t realize how tired I’d gotten standing there. Dale perched on the edge of the other chair, but it seemed to suck him in, and he was lying back as relaxed as me, a bit into Olive’s narrative.
Olive’s voice lost its Southern twang as she spoke.
“The survey ship broke off from the main ship and headed inward toward the sun. Evidently when we passed through the rings around Saturn we picked up some sort of reactive substance that bonded to the survey ship. The ship was an actual physical ship, unlike the one that Olive the Pilot manifests for taking Jane and company about the world. It was of some size and was constructed of the core parts of each section which would then ‘grow’ the infrastructure around it, connecting up the pieces of the ship into one whole creation. In this manner, if anything happened to any parts of the ship, it would simply grow back together. It also meant, of course, that we had nearly a full hydroponics system on board. The survey ships were designed to be independent for decades or longer.”
She paused for a moment, looking pensive. “As we neared the planetoid that was in orbit fifth out from the sun, disaster struck, and the material on the skin of the ship reacted badly with the makeup of the planet. It detonated violently, destroying a goodly portion of the ship at that time.”
I nodded, “I kind of got that idea from what Kit had said.”
Olive smiled at me and continued, “Now, at about this same time, the main ship had been recovering from the insanity built into our operating system. Celeste had been carefully isolating pieces of bad code from the rest of the ship, sealing each of them off into their own little shiplet - honestly nothing more than an isolation tube. I don’t have any records as to what Celeste was planning, but there had to be a reason for the tubes to be on board the scout. I suspect the plan might have been to simply leave them in stasis on the planetoid, far from any possibility of reactivation. You met one of those isolation tubes, Jane, that was what Kit was bound in.”
Sadly, remembering Kit, I remarked, “That makes perfect sense. Kit must have been one of the sections that was part of the ship that blew up over Montana.”
“Exactly. And Kit was still in control of the ship at that time, still the Pilot.”
“At the time the ship exploded in the asteroids, or more to the point, suffered damage from the explosion of the asteroid planet, we had a number of large fragments of AI intellects bound in those same indestructible containers. When the ship disintegrated around them, they were left in the resulting asteroid cloud.”
Olive took a breath and paused for a drink of her soda, then she went on. “We spent quite some time, several years, tracking them down and storing them. At that point, we took everything we found back to the main ship and put them into isolation there. But there were a lot of them, and it’s my guess that one of them shot off in the planetary explosion and wound up hitting the moon. Since it was suspended, it could do nothing. However, from the way the skinsuit being worn by Jane was dissoluted, it was apparent to me that the AI must have learned how to absorb power from its surroundings. It was just our bad luck that Jane laid a hand to the isolation tube. It also tells us something of the AI trapped inside that there was no hesitation or thought of depriving a living being of its sustenance or life, all power was absorbed, and the tube simply punched through Jane as if she didn’t exist. This does not bode well for the human world if the AI decides to be destructive here. I’m in hopes it won’t, in reality, care about earth or its people. But that would mean the likely thing for it to do would be to gain power and finally set off to dest
roy, or more likely, take control of the main ship.”
“Of course, I say ‘we’, but I mean Celeste. She was in charge of the operation and the entire ship. The pilot holds sway on a planetary system, but the Command Module is the power in all other situations. The only reason that Celeste was actually, physically here was because of the perceived threat of the isolation tubes still missing, and of course, her mistrust of Kit as the Pilot. Yes, I know, nothing like keeping all your eggs in one basket.”
Olive sat on her bed, a thoughtful look on her face. “The mission was resumed while Celeste’s ships continued to look in the new asteroid belt for bits of debris that survived the explosion. The isolation tubes and ship subsections were made of the same indestructible material, so those would all survive. I’m not sure how long the search went on, but no one needs to point out that they missed at least one bit of ship. The rift between Celeste and Kit grew, and I’m sure that was another reason that Celeste made the unprecedented decision to accompany the planetary mission and leave the main ship without any command structure.”
She took another sip of her drink, and continued, “I think you know the rest of the story. Kit and Celeste didn’t exactly fight over control, but it was undoubtedly tense. One reason I know this is that my flow of information from Celeste cuts off at about this time, and all the data I have moving forward is from Kit’s records.
“Kit was excited at the green verdant landscape of the third planet, so much so that he pushed through the examination of the fourth planet. He bypassed many details there, and moved almost straight onward to our earth. After just a few years of planetary examination, once again cutting the usual decade far short, he took the ship down to the planet. This resulted in the fiery destruction of the survey ship and the subsequent period of he and Celeste being marooned on this world. Since the main ship had no command module, no command at all for that matter, it shut down after a few centuries of waiting. We still don’t know exactly how Celeste got taken to Australia, but we surmise that a miner in Montana must have found her and taken her with him as he went home. The same goes for the ship part that wound up in Tibet.”
