Busy weekend,somewhat smoothed draft, followed by quick fixes 1 & 2...
12
Mars, Endurance Base, the south tunnel (armored up for hazardous conditions)-
In a curiously lightened mood, John strode through Roger's roughly-machined tunnel, stopping from time to time to collect rock samples and make a few positional notes. He was no geologist, but he'd been trained to spot certain crystal combinations and color bands. Back home, he'd have called such dense, light-veined stone gneiss or schist. Here…? 'Anomalous, layered grey rock of uncertain origin, probably metamorphic'. Catchy.
Mostly, though, he considered his artificial intelligence. (Dammit… it was possible). His father might have ordered a no-competition watchdog program slipped into Braman, but John was certain he could handle a mere computer, and equally sure that he was on to something important. Matter of time and further thought, was all.
He made his way along the shadowed passage, illuminating rock and dust motes with the wavering beam of his helmet lamp, not paying as much attention to his surroundings as usual. Too busy.
The basics were these: a super-cooled lake of sodium atoms, all locked into the same quantum state. In orbit, preferably, where ultra-low temperatures were less of a problem to maintain. Lasers and radio frequency pulses would adjust the atoms' spin states and electron levels, providing a set of multi-path logic gates far richer in scope than simple 'on' and 'off' switches. A powerful magnetic imager would then serve as a reading device, yielding landslides of output. As for programming, there lay the true artistry, the tricks and nuances of which kept him up well past Pete's announced bedtimes.
Back in his sleeping compartment, on a narrow shelf beside the leather diary Virgil had given him, rested John's laptop. It was black, sleek, and hand constructed; 675 GB hard drive, 20 GB of RAM. The keys were featureless and scrambled, and the screen output shifted randomly from one language to another. Better yet, the computer's wireless interface and input slots were tied to his ID chip. Only John could access the thing, which recognized no one but him, and was backed up nowhere else. Stored in secure memory (on a file labeled: 0xFAB) was a program. The program; the one that would bring to life an intelligent quantum entity… once he'd coded in all the bits Braman had tried to block.
'Should work…' he decided, half-consciously listening to the faint, thrumming pulse of Roger's drill. The trick lay in degrees of freedom, in treating the data paths, not as a line of digits, or even a flat matrix, but as a 4-D field. He could even see it.
In his head, John could adjust figures and spin states, watch coded data flash back and forth across tightly linked times and dimensions. In his mind, it… she was beautiful.
His armored boot struck a small rock, which skittered off across the tunnel floor. (Was that olivine? Best to take a sample. Back at JPL, the astro-geology types were frantic for a closer look at the stuff.) John bent for the little stone, and stood a moment turning it over in his gloved hands, watching pale crystals sparkle in the glow of his helmet lamp.
Yeah… Someone back home would be writing his doctoral thesis on this little guy….
With a nudge to the right inside of his helmet, John triggered the digital camera, imaging rock and collection site, both. Then, he dictated a few notes, bagged the sample and tucked it away in a belt compartment.
The drill had cut off, he noticed, plunging the south tunnel into strange, ringing silence. He began walking again, unconsciously picking up the pace. His heads-up display showed green for Thorpe, but indicator lights and sensors could be fooled, and Endurance lay over a mile and a half behind them. No help from that quarter.
Thinking of help, his thoughts shifted again, this time to his conflict with the Red Path. Terrorists and assassins, they had struck at WorldGov and his family several times, now. The matter clamored for attention, but John was so far from ground zero as to be all but crippled. Knowing this, he'd contacted a few people, Lady Penelope among them, and set up a quick and dirty contingency plan. Other than that, all he could do was wait, catching the knives as they were thrown.
Speaking of which, his conversation with Penny had been rushed and confusing. She'd made four previous attempts to contact him, but John wasn't ready to discuss his reasons for not replying. She absolutely wasn't the same as Linda.
For one thing, Penelope was a freelance operative, not a physician. John had many times provided her with IT support on extracurricular missions, and she'd returned the favor when International Rescue ventured to Europe. Also… they'd been together a lot, physically. Penelope enjoyed danger, and the possibility of discovery. She liked yachts, limousines and cleared-off desks in other people's offices. The riskier, the better.
John still wasn't entirely sure what Linda wanted from their association, but doubted that a swift encounter in a Pyongyang guard hut (with an army truck full of explosives idling in neutral not fifteen feet away) would be her first choice. Maybe not even her second.
Possibly, John mused, coming within view of the drill's running lights, what Doctor Bennett wanted was security. Just possibly, she wanted him to stay with her and Junior, officially. And… maybe… he wanted the same thing.
Something to be filed away for later processing, though. He'd spotted Thorpe, standing at the end of the tunnel beside his softly grumbling drill. Roger was facing the chewed-up stone wall, holding a data board. Seemed all right, but, again…
"You okay?" he asked, when the Marine turned around. Seen through the curving surface of his helmet glass, Roger's expression was deeply puzzled.
"Got everything in hand, AO… just working something out. Come take a look at this, would you?
John walked over, glancing down at the electronic databoard Thorpe held out for him. He read a few lines of odd telemetry, and then looked up again, frowning at the stone wall. According to the drill's acoustic probes, a very large chamber lay just ahead of them, but ground-penetrating radar indicated nothing at all.
"Weird."
Inside his helmet, Roger nodded.
"Yeah. I've informed the skipper, and he's on his way down. Says we don't make move one, till he gets here. Orders. I mean, a cavern's one thing, but a perfectly round, scanner shielded room… here? That's gonna lift a few eyebrows, back home."
John hardly noticed Thorpe's comments.
"Artificial," he reasoned, trying to see past the drill's blade-studded cutting face, "it has to be. Wonder what's inside?"
Curiosity and failure to yield had always stood high among his greatest flaws.
XXXXX
The Otherverse,on a slowly burning planet-
Alerted, something was launched from the sprawling organo-mechanical scab that covered Rome. Beneath an orange sky, raked by broiling winds, the Eternal City now hosted another sort of life: an intelligence altogether alien, and inimical. Initially invading as a stream of information, it had immediately set about altering the Earth; atmosphere, soil and all. Absorbing most of the brief war's released energy, it had taken physical form, becoming an enormous, insatiable mechanism. Its probing arms sifted the rubble of cities and warcraft, converting nearly everything it encountered to fuel and bio-mass. Certain organisms were conserved, however, to be used as 'scaffolding'. Through these primitive life forms would emerge the beings which had first designed the intelligence, renewing an extremely ancient cycle.
Meanwhile, the mechanism grew. It devoured and it drilled, pushing sharp metal pseudopods deep into the hard-baked ground in search of power enough to rebuild a civilization. Unimpeded, without deviation or error, everything proceeded correctly.
Until, that is, something caught the attention of a lunar outpost; something that should already have been digitized and absorbed. The intelligence re-focused a small number of units, considering the orbital platform and its organic contents. Arcing thoughts flashed among nodes located in twenty-eight contiguous dimensions. The unexplained persistence of a native structure was not allowable, triggering a programmed response: investigate, and destroy.
A blister-like surface portal opened in the portion of the mechanism that had grown to encompass Gibraltar, disgorging a small probe. Had anyone been alive who recalled such things, they'd have said that the probe resembled a stubby grey bird, with an outline that shifted, sparked, bubbled and re-formed.
It rested for the briefest instant on a glowing launch pad, absorbing instructions and data. Then, swift and cold as malice, the probe launched, headed for Thunderbird 7.