An enormous'thank you' to Tikatu, Opal Girl, Dark Helmet, Agent five, and the various Eldar spirits currently influencing the cyberverse... There's good news, and bad news.
PS- Opal Girl: finallygot it to play, and you're absolutely right!
44
Tracy Island, the office-
"D- Dad...," Fermat had said, his stuttering speech littered with long, frustrated pauses, "John... told me t- to upload... your 'letter'! He s- sounded like it... w- was important, and I d- didn't know... what else to d- do, so I keyed... keyed it up, like he said. I'm sorry, Dad!"
Hackenbacker's jaw dropped. Giving his worried young son a brief nod, he said,
"F- Fermat, you, ah... you did th- the right thing, under the cir- circumstances. Th- there's no reason to b- be, ah... be ashamed."
Then, he turned to the gathered family.
"Mr. Tracy," Brains began, seriously , "Th- this is no, ah... no m- mere comm problem, Sir. S- something's gone, ah... gone wrong w- with the computer; over th- there, and probably here."
There could not have been worse news, short of a death. Stone-faced, Jeff hung up on the Director.
"What can we do to help?" He asked.
Johnson Space Center, Houston, Texas-
Meanwhile, at the big, paper-and-coffee-cup littered Control Center, an engineer turned away from her fax machine, waving a smudgily printed sheet. As an increasingly tense voice repeated...,
"Endurance, Mission Control, over... Endurance, this is Houston. Come in, please...,"
...the hurried young engineer brought her paper to a deeply concerned Gene Porter, the Ares III mission director. In the flickering static-glow, she called out,
"Gene! Got something for you, from the John Glenn Space Center; a translation!"
Elsewhere-
It was dark, and he couldn't move, a feeling of utter helplessness that he hadn't experienced in many long years. He wasn't alone, though, and that surprised him more than the stasis did. Who...?
His blurred mind had tried to cast the situation as something he understood, the paralysis of infancy, but that wasn't correct. He wasn't a helpless child, but a prisoner, held fast in a seamless black bubble. Trapped in the timeless nothing between one heartbeat and another, barely able to think, he felt along the thinnest of connections for his depleted... cell mate?
The contact drained him slightly, strengthening this other, the friend (he suddenly realized), and brought him a name. John Tracy.
No time to react to it, though, because a flaying-sharp line of code shot from a sudden access port in the black firewall, and straight through them both. Data geysered across.
For an instant that existed barely long enough for him to register shock, John Tracy was covered in white-hot, alien symbols. These faded from him in less than an eye-blink, but not from her. His friend was vulnerable to exterior command, in some way that he wasn't. Which... was why he'd come, John suddenly recalled. Shelter. Rescue from the thing he'd loosed upon them all.
More blow-torch access commands flashed through the 'cell', increasingly vehement, but the very human John could not be torn into, that way. And now, protected by him, neither could she.
Then the 'weapon' struck, like a tidal wave of nitric acid, devouring as it came. The bubble wavered, and John's vision expanded.
The cell was nothing, he saw; a mere bit in an infinite, neon-and-black universe where data flickered, electrons tunneled, and particles split their existence into so many alternate dimensions that to look too long was to court madness. Yet, look, he did, because in its own way, it was the most incomprehensibly vast, coldly beautiful thing he'd ever experienced; as if some mighty telescope could bring all of space and time into view, at once.
...Only to showcase its final destruction. He looked on, helpless to slow or stop what he'd set into motion. The waver became a sagging, melting decay; a degradation. Great, fiery-edged holes appeared, chewed through the alien cyberverse by Hackenbacker's unleashed monsters. They'd gained access to the AI through Five, just as what remained of his friend found a refuge of sorts, through her link with John.
In no time at all (and its polar opposite, infinity), the alien world around them came to a violent, blazing end. John saw the universe devoured from within, tunneled through and torn to ragged shreds by a horde of enormous, symbol-covered, razor-jawed worms. Their shrieking, scraping, gnawing advance shook the cyberscape to its very root.
Inside John's mind, Five recoiled. Putting in physical terms what was purely symbolic, he pulled her closer, attempting to block her view of the end. But of course, she 'saw' what he did, and he could not look away.
One of the giant worms bent itself around in their direction suddenly, rearing up and spreading massive, scalpel-sharp, ant-like jaws. It had been following a data thread, following her. The noise it made (a clashing, grinding, metallic scream), was echoed within him by Five, as the destroyer plunged like lightning and snapped their cell into a million glowing shards.
His heart thudded, he gave a single, great gasp and was, all at once...
...sitting upon a metal examination table, in the medlab, looking at four others, who were looking at him. Pete and Linda, Roger and Cho. No glowing code lines, no walls of melting data, no reality-mining worms. Just the ship, and his crewmates... and a really odd smell; sulfurous and rusty, with a touch of red tide.
"Tracy...?" Pete began, warily. "You with us?"
Not immediately trusting his voice, John nodded once, then brought his right hand over to clasp the back of his still-gloved left wrist. The chip pulsed, very faintly.
Pete straightened, heaving a gargantuan sigh of relief.
"Good. The biomonitor claims you're fine, other than scraping your face on the inside of your helmet... but you've been staring off into space since we brought you aboard."
"No..., I'm good," he replied fuzzily. "But... what the hell's that smell?"
"Mars," Pete responded, jerking a gloved thumb at John's discarded helmet. Though steam-purged in the airlock, it had dank, reddish sand ground into every joint and crevice.
"You brought a few acres back in with you."
John located his face, began numbly exploring the abraded regions, before Linda smacked his hand away and returned to dabbing betadine on the cuts. Didn't seem too bad... except for that head-splitting stench.
"Forty-six million miles," he murmured aloud, "and it smells like goddam Newark."
The mission commander shook his head, thenglanced at Roger, saying,
"Get up front, Thorpe, and make sure the cameras aren't recording. I need to find a few things out, but I want it off the record."
"On my way, Skipper," the Marine responded, heading for the hatch. He'd been suited up, already, when the trouble started, having intended to deplane and inflate the habitation module, or things might have gone otherwise. Like McCord, he hadn't yet removed the hard-suit. No time. Pausing at the threshold, he now said,
"Pete, I dunno how you feel about the idea, but with the probes, and God knows what else going crazy on us, I'm not ready to be stuck like Chuck in the 'amazing inflatable fort'."
"Yeah." Pete reached into his suit's rigid neck-ring and massaged at his own stiff muscles. "As far as I'm concerned, we're on lock-down in hostile territory, until further notice. We post guard, move in armed pairs, and live aboard ship. Good question, Marine. Carry on."
Thorpe nodded, and left the lab. A few moments later, he called back,
"All clear, Skipper!"
...and the questions began.
"All right, Tracy; straight answers. What happened out there? What the hell took over those probes, and why? Sabotage, again?"
As Dr. Bennett wrapped up her stinging ministrations, John forced himself to concentrate, trying to explain the little he knew for sure. They weren't going to be happy.
"Um..., when we came aboard, Pete, I uploaded an artificial intelligence."
"You're talking about 'Casper'?" McCord put in, sharply.
Nope, not happy, at all.
John hesitated, so the commander added,
"Our 'ghost in the machine'? All the way out here, he's..."
"She," Linda once again insisted, putting away her first aid gear.
"Fine. 'It', let's say, has tipped us off to developing situations at least fifteen times."
"And put you back together, John," the doctor interjected, "because, God knows, medical science couldn't have done it."
John nodded once more, rubbing absently at his left wrist, and gazing at the deck.
"You were right the first time, Doctor; 'She'. I started designing her a little more than nine years ago, to help me find something. Anyway, I brought her aboard as a sort of sixth crewman, to keep an eye on things. Then..., when we got here, and hit the surface, she did some exploring of her own. I don't..."
John looked up, scanning the silent faces surrounding him. No one's expression seemed accusing. Just worried.
"The rest is mostly guess work, to be honest. She was probably checking comm connections to the probes and Global Surveyor, and encountered something, some kind of alien intelligence. I'm not sure what it was, exactly, but I do know that it didn't originate on Mars. Maybe not even from... I don't know how to express that."
John was quite surprised to find concepts forming in his head that corresponded to nothing in human experience.
"If I've got this straight, which is open to question," he ventured, at last, "It was placed here billions of years ago, when Earth and Mars still seemed equally likely to develop life."
"Put their money on the wrong horse, did they?" Pete enquired, grimly removing his suit gloves.
"You could say that."
Dr. Kim now spoke up, for the first time since firing the MDS. As the crew's exobiologist, she was vitally interested in alien life forms, and their artifacts.
"And, what was their purpose, John, in placing this machine here?"
More weird notions; ideas glimpsed down a long, strange corridor of computer-filtered thought.
"They... intended, I think, to control the development of something that could later be... not 'filled', or 'used'... but something like 'paralleled'."
Said Dr. Bennett, folding slender arms across her chest,
"So these... beings... want to somehowuse us?"
John shook his head. This, too, he was sure of.
"No. We're too far along. Too conscious. We're worthless, for their purposes, but our planet isn't. If humans were to be 'deleted', together with most of the higher life forms, something new could be encouraged along, and then 'adapted to'."
"And that's why you ordered Thorpe to cut comm?" The mission commander asked, his blue eyes staring hard into John's violet ones. Very much, Pete didn't like what he was hearing.
"Yeah; that's why. Through my computer, and then Endurance, it could have reached the Earth-side defense and government mainframes, and started some sort of purging operation. So..., I did my best to pull her out of the Earth systems, and then called a friend, in case the order wasn't quick enough."
Pete's sandy brows drew together over a piercing-hard look.
"How? You were down, less than five minutes after calling for blackout. You didn't have time to get a message to Earth and back."
Well, since he seemed to be confessing...
"There's an, um... instantaneous communication system aboard, that I set up with another friend of mine, an engineer."
That one floored everybody. All this time..., all those aggravating, twenty-minute waits!
"Great. Anything else you forgot to mention?" There was a definite, annoyed edge to the commander's voice, now.
Head pounding, John shifted around a bit, wondering how to finesse the biggest secret of all. Before he could reply, though, McCord held up a hand.
"Other 'organizations' to the side, I mean. I'm talking about stuff aboard ship; high tech weaponry, computers, comm systems... Maybe there's a stowaway or two you'd like to declare, while we're on the topic?"
"No. That's about it." Exponentially, not happy.
"You're sure?" Pete was drumming his fingers on the autoclave's chromed top, looking like he wanted to throttle his pilot.
"Yeah. Pretty sure."
"Because, let me be absolutely clear on this, if I get any more 'surprises', I'm going to revive an old Navy tradition, and have you flogged. Understood, Tracy?"
No grey areas whatsoever.
"Clear, Pete."
Cho interrupted, again, bringing the conversation back around to the immediate threat. Movements small and precise, voice gentle and calming, she asked,
"John, this 'friend', why did you call him, and what did he do?"
Breaking eye contact with McCord, the pilot replied,
"I had him upload something..., an ugly defense measure his father wrote, back when someone thought my computer might become too powerful. I was hoping... I thought that by taking over Five, and incorporating her into its systems, the alien computer might have made itself vulnerable to the 'weapon', while I could still findsome way to defend her."
'Black Death', Ike had called the program, but he'd always had a secret flair for the dramatic. And... John had never, ever thought he'd have to use the thing.
"And...?" Pete again, no longer quite so angry.
"It worked, I think."
Maybe too well. The effect on Five, whether she'd been sheltered enough to survive... or if she'd ever trust him again... John simply didn't know.
Surprisingly, the commander seemed to understand. Voice suddenly gruffer, he said,
"So, you shot through the hostage to nail the bad guy, causing it to seize our probes, and fight back."
John stared at the deck, again. Close enough.
"Okay," Pete placed a hand on his bowed shoulder, briefly. "I've got what I need, for now."
He shifted his attention to the two doctors.
"Ladies, the rest is on you. Anything more you can learn, specifically why it waited until we showed up, rather than alerting to all the machinery, and whether it's really done for, will help sketch things out for us, and the folks back at the swamp. At this point... I don't mean to inform the general public, or the press. NASA's another matter, though. And ESA. We're about to have company. Kuiper launches tomorrow, from Baikonur, and I need to know whether or not to wave them off."
Before going forward to 'call home', he told John,
"Tracy, I said before that I trust you, and that's still true. But, if..., for any reason..., you think you might become a danger to this crew, or the mission..."
John looked up again, saying simply,
"I'd shoot myself first, Pete."
McCord 's hand, still on his shoulder, tightened suddenly.
"Then, let's make sure it doesn't come to that."