Déjà Doomed

by Edward M. Lerner

  And a Truman anecdote helps me how?

  Marcus said, “You’re forever online with the specialists. You must be hearing something from them. Speculations, if not firm conclusions.”

  “Those conversations are why I can say anything about the alien electronics. Naked-eye observation tells me—and them—nothing. They opened up a few of the starfish bots we had sent, photographed the insides, then took them apart for study. Unlike some random spare part we provided from a storeroom here, at least they could make educated guesses what an entire bot once did. Everything but those … lobotosized?”

  “Lobotomized,” Marcus offered. Her English, if on the formal side, was damn near impeccable. His Russian stopped after vodka, blini, and stroganoff. Most often, after just vodka.

  “Yes, thank you. Everything but those lobotomized starfish remains boxed up in cold storage, for preservation, while they try to learn something from those first sample components.”

  “The operative word being, I take it, try. Help me understand the problem. Counterfeit electronics is big business, like knockoff designer clothes and handbags.”

  “Yes, reverse-engineering of chips is routine. But counterfeiters care about a chip only once there is demand for it. Suppose they wish to counterfeit a popular Intel microprocessor. Some Intel website already offers potential customers that chip’s full functional description. From the very start, the counterfeiter knows what instructions the microprocessor performs, the behavior of every input and output terminal, the exact voltages the chip requires, and much more. If the counterfeiter can steal the chip’s design file, or bribe an Intel engineer for those details, they begin knowing even more. And none of that, my friend, applies to alien integrated circuits.”

  “Umm,” Marcus said. “I stand corrected.” And discouraged. “So what is the approach?”

  “I lack the tools and the experience even to attempt the process, but I do know the theory. A 3-D image is derived from X-rays scattered off a chip. In principle, it is like doing a CAT scan. The chip image is input to software design tools, first to recognize the low-level components in each circuit layer, and then to map the connections in and between circuit layers. And do you know what, Marcus?”

  It wasn’t difficult to guess. “That doesn’t work with the alien chips.”

  “Not usefully. Transistors and such on the alien chips are much smaller than we build. The standard hardware for imaging chips does not use X-rays of sufficiently short wavelength to capture details of the alien chips. Lab hardware is being upgraded, but the related software also needs reworking before it can handle the much increased quantity of detail.”

  “Ugh,” Marcus said. “But some progress has been made. I mean, how else would you know anything at all about the chips?”

  “Back at Base Putin, they have gone, how do you say, old way? No, old school. To how chips were reverse-engineered before 3-D X-ray imaging. With great care, you etch microscopically thin layers from the chip. Normally, you would know which chemicals are appropriate to use. Determining which chemicals are safe and effective to use on the alien chips added a whole new complication. After you identify suitable chemicals, and begin etching, you photograph every newly exposed surface. Again, you use software design tools to identify the low-level components, such as transistors, on each layer, and the connections in and between layers. And do you know what?”

  “Let me guess. Old school isn’t faring well, either.”

  “Indeed. And the challenges extend beyond not knowing the aliens’ manufacturing processes. Not every component on these chips is a transistor, or anything else familiar. To understand the whole, engineers need to characterize those unfamiliar components. Also, there is a capacity problem. Every alien chip so far examined integrates many billion, some more than one hundred billion, components, wired into a convoluted three-dimensional structure.”

  “And when the specialists sort out all that? Then we’ll understand the chips?”

  “Perhaps. Complex chips, and these merit that qualifier, are often controlled by embedded software. You cannot understand how such a chip operates without first reading out the content of its memory and interpreting the stored program.”

  “You are a bundle of sunshine,” he said. “Any more good cheer?”

  “Sorry, but yes. Where our, that is, human, electronics most often combines transistors and such into digital circuits, it appears the aliens favored neural nets. I will spare you the details, but that architecture makes it hard to interpret what is in the memory. No, I must share one detail. Neural nets, if that is what these are, intermix processing and memory elements.”

  “Neural nets. That’s interconnected simulated neurons, right?” And with that comment, assuming it was even correct, Marcus had exhausted his knowledge of yet another technology. The curse of the generalist. “And in this case, I suppose, a simulation of alien neurons.”

  “The functioning of which the biologists do not yet understand.”

  And with only the desiccated mummy of Goliath to study, they might never. Marcus sighed. “What do we know?”

  “Alien chips are very much more energy-efficient than the best human-made chips. Alien motors are, too. Both discoveries have the engineers quite excited. And there has been much progress analyzing the tiny, dark tiles that cover the starfish bots. The tiles are photovoltaic cells, as I suspected from the start. That technology looks much like ours, except somewhat more efficient and optimized for light of longer wavelengths. Oh, and the optical sensors use longer wavelengths, too, but at a surprisingly low resolution.”

  “Longer wavelengths.” Marcus glanced up at the too-orange, alien light panel. “So, an orange sun?”

  “Ask your wife. I do not do astronomy. The exciting discovery here is that the alien photovoltaic technology is efficient well into infrared wavelengths. It exploits thermal radiation.”

  “Getting back to the matter at hand”—and he pointed—“what can you tell me about this alien maybe-computer?”

  “That it is broken?” Ekatrina levered aside a cluster of cable bundles with a telescoping plastic rod. With her other hand, she aimed a flashlight. After another long pause, she said, “Hmm. See that?”

  Marcus saw a dozen-plus substrates: some planar like old-fashioned rigid circuit boards, others curved or folded in the manner of datasheets, all a putrescent sort of ocher. Both sides supported, on almost every substrate, scores of black, plastic-like blocks ranging from stick-of-gum size to deck-of-cards size. Among those (presumed) integrated circuits, metallic traceries peeked out. Cable bundles snaked everything, making connections with what appeared to be standardized adaptors. A cable bundle went through grommet-ringed holes in both side panels into the adjacent cabinets. However enigmatic the individual chips, to him the whole just looked like electronics.

  He asked, “What am I overlooking this time?”

  She probed deeper into the cabinet with her insulated tool (not that a fuel cell was still hooked up, but something inside might have accumulated a charge during their failed experiments), tapping on one of the rigid circuit boards. “Ripples and bubbles on several of these components. Discolorations.”

  He squinted. “Scorching? Overheating?”

  “So I expect. Take pictures, please.”

  With his everyday datasheet, Marcus shot pictures at several magnifications, concluding with tight close-ups around the tip of the plastic probe. “Done. What do you think it means?”

  “Anywhere else, I would say there had been a power surge and some chips fried. Or that circuit boards got jolted together, and something shorted out, to the same effect.”

  “And what would you say here?”

  She grinned. “Same thing. The rock that took out this base must have packed a wallop.”

  “You can fix this, right? Like you did the airlock?”

  “Not at all like that. There, all I
had to do was provide power. This”—she tapped with her insulated probe—“is a lot of circuitry. And if I may remind you, we do not know what it is for. Airlocks, I understand.”

  “We might not need to understand,” he said. “Your hands are smaller than mine. Can you pull out the damaged board?”

  She shook her head. “I should not risk snagging my suit.”

  “Right you are. If you’ll allow me, then?”

  She stepped back.

  After grounding the cabinet, just to play safe, he disconnected and removed the suspect board. Viewed up close, it was mottled and heat-warped. One corner showed a line of gray symbols like squashed spiders. A part number?

  “I’ll be right back,” he said. Two presumed storage rooms had stocked bunches of alien gear, including individual circuit boards. Only a small fraction of any of it had been shipped (and that, it would appear, to little useful purpose) to Base Putin. He would not need to read Squiggle to compare symbol sequences. Sure enough—after stubbing a toe where another onetime tidy starfish-bot pile had subsided to ooze across the floor—he found two matching boards. He detoured on his return to collect cold-water bulbs.

  Back in the control room, with his earlier photos for reference, he installed the replacement part.

  “Why swap out only the one part?” Ekatrina asked. “Yes, I can see that one was damaged. But the same power surge, or short, or whatever, likely damaged other parts. Just less obviously.”

  “Could be,” Marcus agreed. “Still, suppose this console is a computer. Then it has, or at least once had, programs and data. Intermixed, you suggested. Possibly, spare boards came with software preloaded. Possibly not. Either way, they won’t come loaded with operational data. The fewer parts we replace, the more data we’re likely to recover.”

  And more than anything, Marcus wanted to see any image files they might recover from the time of the aliens’ disaster.

  She took a long swig from her water bulb. “Good point.”

  He finished by reconnecting a fuel cell and DC/DC converter. “Care to throw the switch?”

  “Thank you, but no. This was your idea.” She stepped back up onto her crate.

  Starting low, Marcus ramped up the voltage. At six volts, the power switch glowed yellow, like the open option of the alien airlock controls, but nothing else happened. “That was disappointing.”

  “It was not a complete failure. You did not need this.” She nudged their fire extinguisher with a boot tip.

  A smoke test passed was a modest enough accomplishment. Gradually, he stepped up the voltage. Six and a half. Seven. Seven and a half ….

  “Stop!” Ekatrina yelled.

  Colored hexagons, most bearing squashed-spider markings, bounced around the console shelf. Marcus tapped and swiped on that surface. His efforts accomplished nothing, as far as he could tell. With an additional half volt the flashing stabilized, and the colored hexagons settled down into what might be a virtual keyboard. Taps and swipes still had no evident effect.

  “Higher voltage, do you think?”

  She shrugged.

  He supplied another half volt—and squashed-spider symbols spewed onto the vertical panel. Two columns of … self-test status? … then three, then four, then five. The display blanked before starting a new column: a growing collection of tiny, blinking, squares ….

  “It’s booting,” Marcus said.

  Bounding from her perch to the doorway, Ekatrina called out, “Guys! Get up here!”

  By the time Brad and Yevgeny rushed into the control room, the console screen, apart from a handful of blinking squares, had frozen.

  Thereafter, no matter how often they cycled the console off and on again, no matter how and where they tapped and swiped, the boot process—if that was the proper description—never proceeded any further. Nor, when they repaired and powered up another workstation in the arc, did it. Nor did the third, or the ones after that.

  After two days without further progress, trying to make the alien system respond became a background hobby.

  Chapter 21

  Another day. Another dollar. Not yet two cents’ worth of contribution.

  Among the random snippets of thought flitting through Valerie’s mind, staring for hours at a stretch at the barren landscape near the alien base, was the salary she continued to draw while on “disability.” If there were a way to have that money come from the spooks, and not NASA, that would be one thing. Her department did not enjoy the budgetary largesse the spooks clearly did. And how had her efforts here made any difference?

  Maybe Tyler had read her into the program to keep her quiet.

  Along the eastern limb of Nearside, the day was young. Long shadows obscured much of the bot’s view—not that the impediment much mattered, the real action all taking place underground. Had anything changed since her previous shift? Not worth mentioning. The neat stack of relocated alien beds (if that’s what the objects were) had grown a bit. Even knowing better, they looked like ore boxes awaiting pickup. Another pile of detritus had begun to accumulate beneath one more gray tarp; in a satellite view, every such heap looked like mine tailings. Here and there, a few new boot-print trails meandered. Atop two spindly towers, their construction completed days earlier, antenna dishes pointed up at Earth.

  If she were to drive the bot forward (a few feet would suffice, just to get past the low, jagged rim of an inconveniently situated ridge) she would gain an unencumbered view of the lava-tube entrance and vicinity. She didn’t, and not for lack of power. Having gone a lunar day without moving, the bot’s batteries had made it through the long, cold lunar night with charge to spare. Backscatter from the sunlit plain behind the bot had begun adding trickles of fresh charge through solar panels that still faced due west. No, feasibility had nothing to do with her remaining stuck behind an obstacle. By satellite, any new tread marks in the regolith would be obvious. If she were merely to pan the camera a little, or zoom out, she could observe more. Those tweaks were banned, too, lest the on-site Russians notice the change.

  Valerie sipped on a smoothie, puzzling over what the newest disguised heap might hold. (Well, the most recent pile she could see. There were more outside her camera’s line of sight, within a nearby shallow crater.) Chunks of rock and mooncrete dislodged from ancient walls and ceiling? Long-dead alien robots? Bagged dust from a hydroponics corridor, the hypothesized remains of alien flora? Marcus might answer if asked, but trying to work it out helped keep her mind focused. If she could read anything—correctly or not—into the draping of the tarp, theoretical observers might, too.

  TV droned from the next room, in counterpoint to the soft sloshing of the washing machine. The scent of cinnamon wafted her way from the pie she had baking. Valerie permitted herself a soft “Huzzah” when two figures emerged from the lava tube. She no longer needed a cheat sheet to name the players. The dark blue pressure suit: Brad Morton. Tawny brown: Yevgeny Rudin. A few seconds later, a third figure emerged. Pumpkin orange: Nikolay Bautin. She waited in vain for an emerald-green figure. “I am Marcus, the Great and Terrible,” she recited. The lame crack about his personalized color never failed to make her smile.

  Facing one another, the three men caucused about … something.

  “What are you up to?” she asked.

  Something might even then be siphoning up their comm chatter, but Tyler had given her neither orbital parameters for lunar spysats nor access to their real-time radio feed. She shrugged. Anything these guys radioed while aboveground they intended to be overheard. When they had something private to share, they jacked together with fiber-optic cable far too thin to be seen from orbit—and in most cases, even from the comparatively nearby prospector bot.

  A few minutes later, Brad loped off to the north. As he walked away, Yevgeny and Nikolay exchanged a few hurried hand signals. (“That’s new,” she muttered.) Yevgeny dashed after Brad as Nikolay he
aded east.

  Did the hand signals signify distrust between teams? To Tyler’s ill-disguised annoyance, Marcus maintained they were long past such skepticism. Swapping helmet-cam vids worked, Marcus kept insisting. He did not rub salt in a wound by bringing up how both teams had conspired to hoodwink their superiors while they pressurized the alien base. He did not need to.

  But maybe Tyler was right.

  Valerie stood, stretched, and brought her empty glass to the kitchen. Her oven timer showed thirty-two minutes, but the pie already smelled wonderful. The dessert was for Helen from next door, in appreciation for her concern and frequent stopping by. That did not keep Valerie from hoping her solicitous neighbor would insist on leaving behind a slice or three.

  With a refilled glass of ice water in hand, Valerie detoured into the living room. Projected above the round end table was a favorite holo of Marcus, Simon, and herself. Three Technicolor figures—none messier than she. Simon was grinning from ear to ear, blue eyes unmistakably twinkling no matter his insectile, paint-spattered visor.

  On his twelfth birthday, they had treated Simon and his closest friends to an afternoon of paintball. She (and Marcus, or so he had claimed) had had no intention of participating, but the boys talked him into taking part—not a hard sell—and then he had egged her into it. He had even shown her several hand signals, of which she had retained none. (How had Marcus known them? He had never been in the military. “TV and movies, hon. How do you not know them?”)

  Well, maybe she had retained two hand signals, for wait here and enemy—for all the good either warning had done her. Call it negative reinforcement. Of course the boys—from both putative teams—ganged up on the parents.

  “Not fair,” Marcus had mock groused. “You’re all such pipsqueak targets.”

  Lost in her memories, she had to agree. The tallest among his gaggle of friends, Simon had been a good half head shorter than her. No longer. Scarcely a year later, sending him off with her parents, she and her son had stood eye to eye. Before he returned home at the end of the summer, she expected he’d be the taller one.