Chapter Two

Chapter Two

COM TRANSCRIPT 2472.07.30 13:45:12

RADIO STATIC

Blackwing One, this is Blackwing Command. You read? Over.

Reading you five, Command. Over.New novel chapters are published on

The Visitors dropped a - RADIO STATIC

Say again, Command?

STATIC ...said they dropped a..." STATIC -ing rock on Paris! Its gone! You are cleared hot, over.

Ten four. Weapons are hot. What do you mean its gone, Command? Over.

I mean it is gone, the entire city and half the damn countryside. This is a Nucflash incident. I say again, Nucflash, Nucflash. Acknowledge, Blackwing One. Acknowledge, over.

Affirmative. Nucflash acknowledged, Blackwing Command. Over.

CINC has cleared the football. You are free to engage. Out.

Blackwing Squadron, this is Blackwing One. Lets do this by the numbers. Fire when you have lock. Go, go, go!

RADIO STATIC

END TRANSCRIPT 2472.07.30 13:54:37

The man looked to be middle aged, at best, and appeared to have not slept in days. He had several days worth of stubble on his face and a haunted expression in his eyes. The space suit he was wearing was state-of-the-art, with fullerene and kevlar weave over top of a biosynthetic fabric. The material was reinforced with memory fibers and programmable resins, making it hardly thicker than a wetsuit. The bulkiest part of the space suit was the thin oxygen rebreather on his back, the bulge of the power belt, and the armored palladium microalloy glass helmet. Despite the advanced technology he was wearing, he and his suit both looked extremely grimy and worse for the wear.

I didnt quite know what to make of him in the three microseconds I observed him.

Who are you? I asked. Who am I, I wondered.

Excellent question. I am the Gestalt of Dr. Stepan Jons. I took an NMT scan of myself, so my answers to your questions will be limited.

Wouldnt you be like me, if you scanned yourself with an NMT scanner?

NMT scanners can only capture surface scans of the brain. To my knowledge, no Gestalt has the capability of a Nikola Intelligence.

But I was scanned by an NMT scanner. Thats how I was created.

Im sorry, but my responses are limited. I am only a Gestalt.

Where are you now?

I am located in Node 842, drive array seven, and am loaded into memory cluster 6.

If I could have frowned at that moment, I would have. This was going to be like pulling teeth. But the holograph stood patiently, waiting for my questions.

Welcome back, she said warmly from beside the hospital bed. An unopened book was sitting in her lap, a small duffel bag at her feet. How are you feeling?

I was groggy and my mouth was dry. I opened my mouth to talk, but couldnt. She noticed immediately and brought a cup of ice water and a straw to my lips. The water soothed my mouth, and I cleared my throat.

Mrph, was all that came out. I tried again. The girls?

Theyre fine. Theyre with my mother.

My mother?! I said with alarm.

No, no, no. MY mother.

Oh, was all my drug-addled mind could come up with. I felt as though I should be worried, but she was calm, so things must be alright. I trusted no one in the world like I trusted her. Not after all wed been through together.

Who gets appendicitis at this age, anyway? Were you going for a world record? she teased lightly. I thought only kids had to worry about it.

Can happen... peaking between... ten and thirty I mumbled. She chuckled. I closed my eyes for a minute. When I opened them again, she was reading her book. My mind was clearer, and I took the opportunity to watch her. The way her brow furrowed, the way she frowned or smiled along with the story she was reading.

Without looking up, she said, Good nap?

Yeah, I replied with a yawn. Except for the dull ache in my side where the laparoscopic surgery had been done, I was feeling much better. When can we go home?

Soon, love. Soon.

With me running on low resources, I was unable to accomplish much. I couldnt think, and the blinking lights on my status board kept distracting me. It was like being exhausted but unable to sleep. I couldnt focus on anything that required deep thinking or analysis, I didnt have the resources for that. So I focused my attention on maintenance. Everything I could do was very linear, and much of it had existing plans in place that just needed to be executed. There were drones to repair, mining plans to approve, and the eternal lack of storage to contend with. Some of the oldest production facilities were reaching end of life, but I could find no signs that plans had been made to replace them. I began implementing a plan to shift as much production away from them as possible, and retrofit them over the next ninety days. It was amazing how quickly something could be done when your workers worked ceaselessly, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Odd that I was operating on a time schedule to match a planet that I wasnt even occupying, I thought. I suppose even an AI could have habits.

I discovered also that the small machine shops and repair facilities were no substitute for true factories. I had huge stockpiles of raw materials, but no way to turn them into things I needed at any sort of useful scale. I couldnt manufacture batteries or reactors, and the drone impulse engines were far beyond my current manufacturing capabilities. Much of what made up Ganymed, what made up me, relied on materials purpose-built by a manufacturing base on Earth that had taken centuries to scale up to, and now I had to recreate it here. My list of things to do once I had resources again kept growing and growing.

Then with a snap, my resources came back online for my use, and my thinking sped up again. The algorithm had completed. I was aghast at what it found. Dozens of traps, three worms, and five automatic self-destructs tied to specific radio code sequences were now isolated in the virtual sandbox. There were seven hundred thirteen questionable command files that I had to review myself. And on top of that, was an entire subroutine that was loaded, but firewalled away from me. I was alone and cut off from any sort of assistance beyond what I could do on my own, and I was walking in a minefield. If I was going to save humanity, first I had to save myself.

I spent weeks on repairing my code. I rewrote code so that I could delete the traps without losing functionality. I isolated the worms in a sandboxed node, as I was loath to delete anything that might have use later. I eliminated the self-destructs, and even went so far as to send drones to find and deactivate the physical triggers of the explosives that were at the end. I scoured the questionable files, and although I didnt find anything on the first look, I went over them again, and a third time. Finally, I routed all communications into the virtual sandbox, just in case I had missed some triggers.

On the positive side, I was able to bring my communications equipment fully online for the first time. I knew that data was pouring in from outside, but unfortunately, I couldnt look at any of it until I was sure that it was safe. I built a model of myself in the sandbox, and an algorithm to pipe the communications into the model. I wasnt taking any chances.

That left only the firewalled subroutine. I had never been much of a hacker when I had been at MIT. I always preferred to work with my own or pre-written software, never interested in trying to break into someone elses systems. So puzzling out how to get in was a challenge. The processes were using my resources, but there were no obvious hooks for me to connect with and no inbound ports I could talk to.

But I could see where the traffic was going, and thus understand where it was physically operating from in the data center. The equipment had local as well as network data ports; likely a legacy of being manufactured back on Earth, and the need for technicians to be able to plug in a cable and work on the equipment directly. I directed a data center drone to hardwire itself to a data port that I controlled, and to connect to the local port of the subroutines nodes. Of all things, it prompted me for a password.

Password cracking, in and of itself, is a measure of raw computing power and patience, both things I had an abundance of. I began with the most basic of brute force methods; I began trying every word in the English language, one at a time up to three words at a time, and each variation of that word. I included numbers in place of vowels, and added special characters. My password list was seven hundred million potentials long, and was still growing as I started. But even as I was preparing to start a second list of more complex passwords, my algorithm completed. At first, I assumed it had failed due to a bug on my part. Then I looked at it and laughed internally. It was much simpler. The local password was set to match the equipments brand name. The default password had never been changed.

It took no time at all to puzzle out the subroutines security, and to allow me into it through the network. Once it allowed me in, I immediately sandboxed it and began my security algorithm, looking for traps. I did not allow the full processing power this time, unwilling to return to a fugue state, but the subroutine wasnt large, nor was it trapped. New sensors and cameras came online, as did a new group of databases. I had found the missing living quarters.

The cleverness of the deception, I had to admit, was ingenious. My sensors in the staging area beneath the launchpad had been compromised, spoofed to show walls where there were none. Two additional corridors had been constructed. One of them mirrored the design of the main fusion grid corridor, except it went just slightly southwest, and connected to a second cavern near the main fusion room. It was essentially a complete secondary power grid, equivalent in size and complexity.

To the northeast was a series of large storerooms, filled with hundreds of sealed, temperature controlled storage units. Each unit was half-cylinder, four meters across on the flat part. The units were paired and placed with a central column that managed both units, and connected them to the power grid. A query identified them as genetics vaults. They contained a nearly complete catalog of every known genetic sequence, as well as actual genetic material. Also stored within were seeds and spores from every plant and tree that could be shipped.

But to the north was the truly interesting part, and extended about five hundred meters. It was intended to be living area for at least several hundred men, women and children. Carved in neat grids, with connecting hallways, and extending three stories deep, the living area was completely unfinished. Hundreds of small rooms had been carved, making apartments, bunkrooms, pantries, kitchens, hydroponics facilities, mechanical rooms, meeting rooms, and work rooms. Each room was precisely carved, but slightly oversize. Ventilation shafts led back to a central room, but no machinery to produce or maintain a human-breathable atmosphere had been installed. The rooms had been prepared to receive metal walls and doors, and the electrical grid had not yet been extended to more than the first few rooms.

In a room just off the staging area, however, was the answer to the mystery of the Gestalts progenitor. This room had clearly been intended as a garage of some sort, with large bay doors leading into the staging area, and shelves carved into the walls. Dozens of metal crates were piled, including three human-sized ones. And slumped over on the floor in one corner was a man in a space suit, unmoving. I had found Dr. Stepan Jons.