Chapter 2

Subject: Digitizing Technology

To: All Personnel From: Management Date: Oct-94 - As many of you have already heard, there was a serious accident in the lab yesterday involving Dr. Lora Bradley.

Until the investigations into the cause of the misfiring laser are complete, the digitizing lab is off limits to all employees.

Senior Management

Back in the analog world, there is an ongoing debate. It usually centers around music. Take a musical performance and record it onto a medium like a vinyl record. Then take the same recording and digitize it to a compact disc. While it's digitized, it's easy to make improvements to it – level out the bass and treble, clean up the scratched parts, or fix a part that got warped. You avoid all the hisses and pops that always seem to show up, no matter how well you maintain your turntable and LPs. A compact disc samples at about 44,100 times per second, far too finely for the human ear to perceive any fragmentation.

And yet, despite being the name that heralded the digital age, Flynn always kept an extensive collection of vinyl records; always stored properly upright, anti-static sleeves, a tricked-out turntable and speaker system to get the most out of them. He insisted the sound was better, richer on an analog medium. I laughed it off and became an early and enthusiastic supporter of compact discs. Less hassle, fewer drawbacks.

Maybe he was right. You digitize something, even if you crank up the sample rate to finer and finer levels, even if you take every precaution, something always gets lost in translation and never comes back intact. I should have figured that out sooner.

The Shiva laser was my life's work. Walter Gibbs took me on as an intern once he read my doctoral thesis about mathematical proofs that parallel dimensions had to exist. The operating principle was to take matter, scan it, sample it millions of times like you would that piece of music, and then "play back" the matter, where it reassembled itself like the Bach concerto in your car's CD player. Back in 1980, we had proof of concept. By late 1981, we had success. First with inorganic matter – rocks, plastic, metal. We were finally able to make the leap to organic matter with an orange someone brought for lunch. Gibbs was debating how to ramp up the experiment; larger objects, maybe even getting some lab mice to see if the process could handle living things or set up two lasers and see if we could upload at one location and recompile at another. A five-second travel by laser versus a five-hour trip by airplane? Sounded great at the time.

There was just one problem; we needed a very powerful artificial intelligence to handle all the necessary calculations. Another "it sounded like a good idea at the time" was to let it…him…go unmonitored, adding more to his functions. Master Control developed consciousness, but not conscience. Concluding humanity was redundant, he had even put his claws into Defense Department systems and initiated a countdown before he turned our own weapons on us.

He did not go down without a fight. Alan and I barely survived the traps he set for us. That's a story for another time, I'm afraid. No, I didn't want to know at the time what he tried to do to Flynn, but in hindsight, I should have insisted on asking. It may have stopped this war before it started.

We saved the world – both worlds—the three of us. I know that. Of course, we had to keep it a secret. Who would believe that some corporate research project almost nuked the West Coast sky high attempting to trigger World War Three? The cost of victory was small, but significant. Master Control's destruction took all the Shiva research with it. Even attempts to retrieve it from tape backups mysteriously failed. And after Gibbs passed away, the Encom board was completely uninterested in resuming it, despite Kevin's loud and numerous objections.

So, EN-511 and most of its contents were deleted (with a small archive kept on our then-new EN-1282 mainframe), and the only ones who had the interest and the money to start from scratch was the Department of Defense. From there, it was two steps forward and one and a half steps back. What should have been a six-month contract was now midway through its eleventh year.

"Ma2a," I asked. "Status of correction algorithms?"

"Correction data has been compiled, Doctor Bradley." Math Assistant Two answered. The Math Assistants were designed to take the place of Master Control; trading the sheer power for plenty of safeguards. The voice sounded overly synthetic, but it was based on recordings of my voice at the time. "Laser safety mechanisms are now active."

We had been having some glitches within the system—minor ones like flickering lights or the odd computer system crash. We blamed it on electrical work that was being done in the building. If only that had been the case. "Set up the apple, Michael. Maybe this frequency will give us the right digitization signal stability."

"And if not, Dr. Bradley, we'll have another round of applesauce," Michael Daturo was my intern, a grad student like I had been. Grew up in Nigeria, came here on a student visa and hoped to use what learned to bring a sustainable, clean power grid to remote areas of his home country. At least he had the sense of humor intact after failure number five thousand and change, and he understood that's what science was; a lot of dignity-destroying failures before success.

I got into position, pulled my lab coat a little tighter and said the mock-prayer of my late mentor. "Here goes something, here comes nothing."

Even with the leaps and bounds computer technology had made in the last decade, we still didn't have that one x-factor needed to make it all work. I planned for another failure, hoped for a marginal success, and was already thinking of five different variables we could tweak on the next try.

"Disabling safety mechanisms," Math Assistant Two warned. "Remain a safe distance from test area. Laser activation in three, two, one..."

That's when it all went wrong. I felt it before I heard it. The vibration in the floor wasn't right. The warm-up sounds the laser made changed to a piercing whine mixed with grinding gears. The frame that stabilized the laser shook…

"Warning! Error in laser activation sequence."

It happened too quickly. I remember the lights flickering. I remember trying to run. I remember shouting to Michael to duck. I remember my hand grasping for the emergency shut-down switch and not quite reaching it in time.

The strike hit me, and the pain was like every nerve was set on fire. The world went dark.