Johnny Winger and the Great Rift Zone by Philip Bosshardt
CHAPTER 23
UNIFORCE Headquarters, Paris
February 1, 2111
1230 hours (U.T.)
CINCQUANT listened gravely as Lofton and Stavrolets went over their findings in detail. All of them were in Winger’s seventy-third-floor office at the Quartier-General, watching screen after screen of data on their pads. Dana Tallant wasn’t watching the briefing at all. It was all she could do just to keep from screaming.
“There’s no question about it, sir,” Lofton was saying, “your…er, daughter has become a Class-A intel source for us. We’re learning all kinds of things we didn’t know before.”
Winger gave that some thought. “Have any of you ever lived with an angel? Ever worked with an angel?”
Lofton shook his head. Stavrolets did likewise. General Evgeni Orlov (CINCSPACE) spoke for all of them.
“Winger, I know what you’re going to say, so there’s no need to say it. We all know living with angels is a challenge…hell, I guess that’s an understatement. It’s also beside the point and irrelevant to this briefing. Rene Winger is the best intelligence source we’ve got. How or why, I don’t know…I can’t pretend to understand the theory behind this. All I know is that whatever she provides get corroborated. It’s good intel and it gives us something to act on.”
“Not only that,” Lofton added, “but now it looks like she’s able to pick up data streaming to and from Config Zero and the swarms causing all these quakes. Boundary Patrol now has at least some idea of how and where the swarms are deployed. Now we can intercept and engage before they cause so much damage.”
“There’s one thing you’re all forgetting,” Dana Tallant spoke up. “Rene is part of our family. She’s not an instrument of strategic policy. She’s a teen-ager who’s been through a hell of lot.”
All of them regarded Dana with an understanding look. Sure, Dana…we get it. Mothers are expected to say things like that. We understand…we sympathize. But no one actually said that.
Orlov wouldn’t be dissuaded. “She’s also the best source we have on what the Bugs are up to, how they operate, how they deploy, what their capabilities are. Maybe even what they’re plans are. My men need that. I’ve got a crew nine billion miles from here fighting Bugs off left and right…I need every advantage I can get. Sorry, Major Tallant, but that’s the truth.”
Winger saw what Orlov’s words had done to Dana. He wanted to hug her close. He wanted to punch CINCSPACE in the face. He did neither.
“Maybe we just have to accept some things. Rene was lost to Config Zero a long time ago. That’s not Rene down there in containment. With all due respects for what Dr. Falkland has done for my family, this is an angel. It’s a simulation of Rene, granted a very good one. We’ve got to give her up—“ he stopped, seeing the how could you? look on Dana’s face. That hurt like a knife. Then she turned and wouldn’t even look at him anymore.
“Forty years ago, my Dad was infected with the Serengeti virus. I knew what it was. We all did. And, yeah, I’m an atomgrabber so I wanted to do all kinds of inserts and go inside my Dad and slug it out with the bots. But I didn’t. You know why? I didn’t want Dad to become a battleground. I had to give him up. It was the only thing I could do. It was the humane thing to do.”
Tallant glared back coldly at her husband. “You just said Rene’s not even human. How can doing something humane even matter if Rene’s not human?”
Winger swallowed hard. God, he hated hashing this crap out in front of fellow officers, even though the arguments were in the air, all over, everywhere. This was what Symborg himself was saying. Wasn’t that ironic? Now I sound just like Symborg.
“Maybe being human is what we make of it. Being human is whatever we call human. Maybe we’ve reached the point with our technology when humans don’t have to have a body like you and me, to be human. Maybe it’s a state of mind, or an attitude, a group of values and ethics, a collection of traits and memories. We can give the master bot that runs the Rene angel those memories and values. We can load a config that makes a swarm of bots look and act, even feel, like Rene. And we’ve gotten so good at this, we’ve had to institute the normality test to tell humans and angels apart. But it’s still not really Rene. We have to let her go…UNIFORCE needs what she has and we can’t keep her from providing it…too many lives are at stake.”
Lofton added a point.” Sir, with the failure of the Berlin mission, it may well be that Rene’s channeling more than just Config Zero. She may be inadvertently detecting and transmitting what we say and do inside UNIFORCE. Stav, you just mentioned this idea to me this morning.”
Stavrolets nodded. “Indeed I did. In some way I don’t understand yet, she may have become a kind of router or a hub for quantum comms and signals to and from Config Zero. Sort of like a miniature Keeper, only we’ve been maintaining her in a config that looks like your daughter. Maybe even a portal between Config Zero here and the Old Ones, whoever and whatever they may be.”
Winger wanted to kick everybody out of the office and just hug Dana tightly. “She was our daughter…once. Now she’s so much more than that.”
Orlov agreed. “She may be the very thing that saves us from going the way of the dinosaurs. If we’re smart enough to understand what she’s telling us.”
“I want to see her,” Dana decided.
So they went down to the fiftieth level of the Quartier-General and entered the Containment center.
The chamber was surrounded by consoles manned by technicians and analysts. On the monitors, Dana Tallant could see Rene reclining inside the chamber on some kind of bed. Her face was peaceful and she seemed asleep. But something was wrong with the config driver. Her face was blurred. Her hands and lower legs were smeared out, as if something were interfering with the config driver’s ability to maintain structure.
Tallant put a hand to her mouth. “What have you done to her?”
Stavrolets tried to explain. “The R9 probe has that effect. Her config driver tries to resist, and it diverts some part of the swarm structure to countering what R9 is trying to do. That’s what is causing her to lose structure at her extremities. Not to worry. Her core functions are intact.”
Tallant wanted to say something, but Winger squeezed her hand…hard. Not now. Not here.
Lofton indicated the nearest console. Reams of data and patterns came and went on the monitors, in confusing bursts of feedback from the R9 swarms infiltrating Rene. “We’re getting a lot of data now, since we learned how to read what R9 is sending back. Plus, we’ve tuned the Quantum State Grabber better…we can snatch quantum state information right out of the ether, as it were. Now we can read most of it.”
Winger kept squeezing Tallant’s hand hard. It was all Dana could do to keep from screaming Let my baby go! Instead, squirming against Winger’s grasp, she tried coughing and clearing her throat, biting her tongue. Winger squeezed even harder.
“What are you finding?” Winger asked.
Lofton had been an analyst with Q2 for several years. He scratched his forehead, searching for the right words. “Mostly imagery…it’s like we’ve had to learn a whole new language here. The data comes in encoded as entanglement wave patterns. We grab it, or process what R9 sends back to corroborate, and then try to make some sense of it. Mostly it seems like sensor readings…pressures, temperatures, spectral curves, EM flux, that sort of thing.”
“Over time,” Stavrolets jumped in, “we’ve been able to build a picture of what all the readings mean…a consistent picture. You have to remember that what we seem to be getting is a swarm view of things. But we’ve been able to correlate most of this with real life phenomena we can detect or observe through other means. For instance, lately we’ve been pulling in readings and indications that the Devil’s Eye anomaly is returning to the vicinity of Sedna…stellar patterns and solar particle flux readings are consistent with that.”
“
Returning…does Hawley know that? Have you advised Michelangelo?”
CINCSPACE answered that. “We’ve sent advisory messages last night…the problem is Big Mike’s so far away, it takes thirteen hours to get a message to them…one way. We’ve not heard anything back. It was just a warning anyway…be alert.”
“Bit by bit,” Lofton went on, “we’re building a consistent tactical picture of what Config Zero’s up to. We’ve found some patterns that seem to indicate when swarms are engaging along tectonic plate boundaries…chewing up rock to start tremors…we’ve sent numerous warnings to Boundary Patrol from that. It’s a slow process…two steps forward, three steps back. Like learning a new language, as I said. I’m sure we’ve misinterpreted things, misunderstood what your daughter’s quantum state changes are telling us. But bit by bit, we’re putting it together.”
Tallant couldn’t hold back any longer. “Meanwhile, my daughter lies there, like a lab rat, hooked up to all your gear…a playground for experiments and all your probes and toys.”
“Major, believe me, we understand what all this—“
Winger cut in. “What she’s saying is that it’s hard to take…seeing Rene like that. I know she’s an angel. But still she is…or I guess, was, our daughter.”
Dana’s eyes blazed. “She’s still our daughter! I don’t care about any of this…hell, I know the intel is important. But she’s just a teen-ager. Can’t she live like a normal teen-ager? Go to school. Have friends. Flirt and go to parties. Cut up and laugh…I mean, look at her. Just look at her!”
Orlov was growing annoyed with all the outbursts. “Major, you’re a trooper. You know the mission always come first. For Christ’s sake, I do look at her. You know what I see? I see a critical intelligence resource. I see information that can help us defeat this damned menace. Better yet, I see something that my troops can use to stay alive, and get back home. That’s worth a hell of a lot to me.”
There was a tense silence for a moment. Orlov glared at Dana Tallant. Stavrolets coughed and spoke up. “There is something else we’re seeing here…something we’re not sure quite what to make of.”
“What’s that?” Winger asked, glad to fill the silence with something.
Stavrolets ran a hand through thinning hair. “We decrypted some imagery that doesn’t seem to correlate well with anything. Here, I’ll show you—“ his fingers massaged a keypad and the displays shifted to something new. “After decryption, we ran check routines, washed it through processing several times and this was the best match the system could come up with. Watch—“
The imagery jittered and shifted, then settled down on the display. Some kind of desert scene settled into view…sand dunes could be seen, dust devils, with a mountain range on the horizon. In a few seconds, the scene shifted and now they were looking from a higher altitude, perhaps at the same scene. In fact, the point of view had shifted to an orbital view, a view from deep space. A world materialized before their eyes…a dun, ocher-colored world, bleak and brown, desiccated and crackled like a billiard ball left in an oven.
“Mars?” Winger suggested. “Before the Big Smack, maybe?”
“That’s what we thought,” Stavrolets said. “At first. But look more closely…look at these seams and lines…they’re continent outlines.”
Winger peered intently at the display. “My God…is that--?”
“Yep. We think it’s Earth. But it’s not a picture from today…or any time in the last few billion years, either.”
Lofton had seen the imagery earlier. “Ancient Earth, maybe?”
“Or a future Earth,” Stavrolets said. “And there’s more…I’ll summarize what this imagery seems to show. If you follow all the imagery and set different orientation grids to the scenes, it correlates well with other places in our solar system. We think this is Earth. But the hell of it is…every other world scene we’ve seen looks like this too. If we’re processing these quantum states right, Rene’s showing us a view of our solar system millions of years from now.”
Winger shook his head. “There’s another possibility. What we’re seeing may not be millions of years from now. It may be a lot nearer than that. These images may be what Earth will look like if Config Zero completes the Prime Key.”
Lofton wasn’t buying it. “That’s a bit of a stretch, isn’t it, General?”
Stavrolets was skeptical as well. “Sir, the raw data can be interpreted many ways. This imagery is just one of many interpretations the Quantum State Grabber can make. The imagery fits the raw data pretty well, but it’s not perfect.”
Winger was sure he was right. “You yourself said we have to look at these images from a swarm point of view, didn’t you? Old Doc Frost once said that if the Old Ones were real, they might have looked on the Earth as a giant incubator. Or a giant Petri dish, where what they had planted could be nurtured and grown. A vessel for new life. Only weeds started sprouting in this incubator. What do you do when you get weeds in your garden?”
Lofton shrugged. “Pull ‘em out. Spray ‘em.”
“Exactly. And to Config Zero, we’re the weeds.”
Orlov wasn’t convinced. “That’s preposterous, Winger. You’re seeing things that aren’t there. What we’re facing is a classic contest of wills with a very capable adversary. Config Zero’s a cloud of bugs, a horde of nanobotic entities with a lot of smarts. Same with whatever Hawley’s run into, out there beyond Pluto. Get what I’m saying…they’re bots. Very capable bots, but still they’re machines. They act as they’re programmed. All we have to do is get in and bollix up the programming. Now, with the girl here…or what’s tricked out to look like a girl…we’ve got intel on how the bots think. How they deploy. What they’re capable of. This stuff-“ he indicated the desert world on the display “—is probably deception. You know: disinformation. Something to throw us off the track.”
Winger knew he had no answer for Orlov’s conclusions. Even worse, he knew CINCSPACE might even be right.
“Doc Frost used to lecture me about some of his original thinking when he designed the first ANAD. Deep inside every ANAD unit, from day one, there’s a small module that he called the Imperative of Life. Sort of a survival instinct, if you will. One of his theories about the Old Ones was that, if they were truly nanobotic swarms like ANAD, they might have the same imperative.” Winger tapped on his wristpad and found what he was looking for. “He described it like this—“ A small, grainy 3-D hologram emerged from his wristpad and danced on the console in front of them. It was Doc Frost, from years ago, gesticulating in front of a classroom, “…it’s from a lecture he gave me once…I recorded it.”
“…you see, the truth is that the Imperative of Life is really very simple. Life absorbs chaos from the Universe. It adds structure. It builds stuff. Life is anti-entropic. I programmed this explicitly into ANAD, from the very beginning…”
Orlov smirked. “So what are you saying, Winger? That the Old Ones are real? That they’re not just a collective nightmare…or mass hallucination? We’ve all heard those theories before.”
“I’m saying there’s some kind of connection between what Doc Frost programmed into ANAD and what’s happening today. I don’t know about all these quantum states you’re decrypting and how real these images are. For all I know, they could be some artifact of processing and nothing more.”
“A distinct possibility,” Stavrolets admitted. “Entanglement waves are damnably hard to pin down, as you well know.”
“And I’m not sure what Hawley’s run into out there beyond Pluto…some kind of mass formation of bots. How they got there, I have no idea. But I know Config Zero is very real…I’ve been to Kipwezi…I’ve see it. I’ve been to Europa and been inside the Keeper. That was no hallucination. Maybe another quantum state, another reality, a sixth dimension, who can say? I can’t discount those possibilities.”
Tallant was intrigued.
“So what are you saying, Wings?”
“I’m saying let’s follow Occam’s Razor. The simplest explanation is probably the best. Major Lofton, you and your techs are grabbing quantum states from Rene’s processor…you think she’s some kind of router, a go-between Config Zero and …something out there. We’re trying to figure out what the hell Config Zero’s going to do next. Maybe this new imagery is telling us that. I think Doc Frost was telling us that, in that little snippet I showed you. Prime Key…Imperative of Life…whatever you want to call it…that’s what is driving Config Zero. If we’re the weeds in the garden of Eden for these bugs, then we know what’s coming. If Config Zero’s programming is to clean out the Petri dish and start over…which is what I think…then it’s up to us to defend the Petri dish. Keep the incubator from being turned off.”
“Winger, you may or not be right, but we can’t afford to ignore what this girl’s telling us. It may be disinformation. It may be processing errors in the Quantum State Grabber. I say grab as much as we can…milk the girl for everything we can get…and try to find patterns. Patterns will give us actionable intelligence. If I can give Hawley and his crew even a little heads-up, even a little advantage over whatever they’re facing, I’m damned well going to do it. I’m sorry, Winger, if that thing in there still resembles your daughter. There’s your disinformation. It’s just a disguise, has been all along. She’s no more your daughter than I am.”
Winger looked over at Dana Tallant. She had a look of resignation. Her lips were a tight line. Winger knew she was having trouble letting go of Rene, of the idea of Rene, of the pattern or configuration she had always known as Rene. It was painful.
But it was necessary. Every scrap of intel they could get from her would help.
Winger knew now with a conviction that was hard to put into words that the only pattern that mattered was the memory of the little girl they had lost years ago to Config Zero. The pattern in the containment chamber wasn’t Rene.
The real one was in their minds.
UNIFORCE Headquarters, Paris
February 1, 2111
1230 hours (U.T.)
CINCQUANT listened gravely as Lofton and Stavrolets went over their findings in detail. All of them were in Winger’s seventy-third-floor office at the Quartier-General, watching screen after screen of data on their pads. Dana Tallant wasn’t watching the briefing at all. It was all she could do just to keep from screaming.
“There’s no question about it, sir,” Lofton was saying, “your…er, daughter has become a Class-A intel source for us. We’re learning all kinds of things we didn’t know before.”
Winger gave that some thought. “Have any of you ever lived with an angel? Ever worked with an angel?”
Lofton shook his head. Stavrolets did likewise. General Evgeni Orlov (CINCSPACE) spoke for all of them.
“Winger, I know what you’re going to say, so there’s no need to say it. We all know living with angels is a challenge…hell, I guess that’s an understatement. It’s also beside the point and irrelevant to this briefing. Rene Winger is the best intelligence source we’ve got. How or why, I don’t know…I can’t pretend to understand the theory behind this. All I know is that whatever she provides get corroborated. It’s good intel and it gives us something to act on.”
“Not only that,” Lofton added, “but now it looks like she’s able to pick up data streaming to and from Config Zero and the swarms causing all these quakes. Boundary Patrol now has at least some idea of how and where the swarms are deployed. Now we can intercept and engage before they cause so much damage.”
“There’s one thing you’re all forgetting,” Dana Tallant spoke up. “Rene is part of our family. She’s not an instrument of strategic policy. She’s a teen-ager who’s been through a hell of lot.”
All of them regarded Dana with an understanding look. Sure, Dana…we get it. Mothers are expected to say things like that. We understand…we sympathize. But no one actually said that.
Orlov wouldn’t be dissuaded. “She’s also the best source we have on what the Bugs are up to, how they operate, how they deploy, what their capabilities are. Maybe even what they’re plans are. My men need that. I’ve got a crew nine billion miles from here fighting Bugs off left and right…I need every advantage I can get. Sorry, Major Tallant, but that’s the truth.”
Winger saw what Orlov’s words had done to Dana. He wanted to hug her close. He wanted to punch CINCSPACE in the face. He did neither.
“Maybe we just have to accept some things. Rene was lost to Config Zero a long time ago. That’s not Rene down there in containment. With all due respects for what Dr. Falkland has done for my family, this is an angel. It’s a simulation of Rene, granted a very good one. We’ve got to give her up—“ he stopped, seeing the how could you? look on Dana’s face. That hurt like a knife. Then she turned and wouldn’t even look at him anymore.
“Forty years ago, my Dad was infected with the Serengeti virus. I knew what it was. We all did. And, yeah, I’m an atomgrabber so I wanted to do all kinds of inserts and go inside my Dad and slug it out with the bots. But I didn’t. You know why? I didn’t want Dad to become a battleground. I had to give him up. It was the only thing I could do. It was the humane thing to do.”
Tallant glared back coldly at her husband. “You just said Rene’s not even human. How can doing something humane even matter if Rene’s not human?”
Winger swallowed hard. God, he hated hashing this crap out in front of fellow officers, even though the arguments were in the air, all over, everywhere. This was what Symborg himself was saying. Wasn’t that ironic? Now I sound just like Symborg.
“Maybe being human is what we make of it. Being human is whatever we call human. Maybe we’ve reached the point with our technology when humans don’t have to have a body like you and me, to be human. Maybe it’s a state of mind, or an attitude, a group of values and ethics, a collection of traits and memories. We can give the master bot that runs the Rene angel those memories and values. We can load a config that makes a swarm of bots look and act, even feel, like Rene. And we’ve gotten so good at this, we’ve had to institute the normality test to tell humans and angels apart. But it’s still not really Rene. We have to let her go…UNIFORCE needs what she has and we can’t keep her from providing it…too many lives are at stake.”
Lofton added a point.” Sir, with the failure of the Berlin mission, it may well be that Rene’s channeling more than just Config Zero. She may be inadvertently detecting and transmitting what we say and do inside UNIFORCE. Stav, you just mentioned this idea to me this morning.”
Stavrolets nodded. “Indeed I did. In some way I don’t understand yet, she may have become a kind of router or a hub for quantum comms and signals to and from Config Zero. Sort of like a miniature Keeper, only we’ve been maintaining her in a config that looks like your daughter. Maybe even a portal between Config Zero here and the Old Ones, whoever and whatever they may be.”
Winger wanted to kick everybody out of the office and just hug Dana tightly. “She was our daughter…once. Now she’s so much more than that.”
Orlov agreed. “She may be the very thing that saves us from going the way of the dinosaurs. If we’re smart enough to understand what she’s telling us.”
“I want to see her,” Dana decided.
So they went down to the fiftieth level of the Quartier-General and entered the Containment center.
The chamber was surrounded by consoles manned by technicians and analysts. On the monitors, Dana Tallant could see Rene reclining inside the chamber on some kind of bed. Her face was peaceful and she seemed asleep. But something was wrong with the config driver. Her face was blurred. Her hands and lower legs were smeared out, as if something were interfering with the config driver’s ability to maintain structure.
Tallant put a hand to her mouth. “What have you done to her?”
Stavrolets tried to explain. “The R9 probe has that effect. Her config driver tries to resist, and it diverts some part of the swarm structure to countering what R9 is trying to do. That’s what is causing her to lose structure at her extremities. Not to worry. Her core functions are intact.”
Tallant wanted to say something, but Winger squeezed her hand…hard. Not now. Not here.
Lofton indicated the nearest console. Reams of data and patterns came and went on the monitors, in confusing bursts of feedback from the R9 swarms infiltrating Rene. “We’re getting a lot of data now, since we learned how to read what R9 is sending back. Plus, we’ve tuned the Quantum State Grabber better…we can snatch quantum state information right out of the ether, as it were. Now we can read most of it.”
Winger kept squeezing Tallant’s hand hard. It was all Dana could do to keep from screaming Let my baby go! Instead, squirming against Winger’s grasp, she tried coughing and clearing her throat, biting her tongue. Winger squeezed even harder.
“What are you finding?” Winger asked.
Lofton had been an analyst with Q2 for several years. He scratched his forehead, searching for the right words. “Mostly imagery…it’s like we’ve had to learn a whole new language here. The data comes in encoded as entanglement wave patterns. We grab it, or process what R9 sends back to corroborate, and then try to make some sense of it. Mostly it seems like sensor readings…pressures, temperatures, spectral curves, EM flux, that sort of thing.”
“Over time,” Stavrolets jumped in, “we’ve been able to build a picture of what all the readings mean…a consistent picture. You have to remember that what we seem to be getting is a swarm view of things. But we’ve been able to correlate most of this with real life phenomena we can detect or observe through other means. For instance, lately we’ve been pulling in readings and indications that the Devil’s Eye anomaly is returning to the vicinity of Sedna…stellar patterns and solar particle flux readings are consistent with that.”
“
CINCSPACE answered that. “We’ve sent advisory messages last night…the problem is Big Mike’s so far away, it takes thirteen hours to get a message to them…one way. We’ve not heard anything back. It was just a warning anyway…be alert.”
“Bit by bit,” Lofton went on, “we’re building a consistent tactical picture of what Config Zero’s up to. We’ve found some patterns that seem to indicate when swarms are engaging along tectonic plate boundaries…chewing up rock to start tremors…we’ve sent numerous warnings to Boundary Patrol from that. It’s a slow process…two steps forward, three steps back. Like learning a new language, as I said. I’m sure we’ve misinterpreted things, misunderstood what your daughter’s quantum state changes are telling us. But bit by bit, we’re putting it together.”
Tallant couldn’t hold back any longer. “Meanwhile, my daughter lies there, like a lab rat, hooked up to all your gear…a playground for experiments and all your probes and toys.”
“Major, believe me, we understand what all this—“
Winger cut in. “What she’s saying is that it’s hard to take…seeing Rene like that. I know she’s an angel. But still she is…or I guess, was, our daughter.”
Dana’s eyes blazed. “She’s still our daughter! I don’t care about any of this…hell, I know the intel is important. But she’s just a teen-ager. Can’t she live like a normal teen-ager? Go to school. Have friends. Flirt and go to parties. Cut up and laugh…I mean, look at her. Just look at her!”
Orlov was growing annoyed with all the outbursts. “Major, you’re a trooper. You know the mission always come first. For Christ’s sake, I do look at her. You know what I see? I see a critical intelligence resource. I see information that can help us defeat this damned menace. Better yet, I see something that my troops can use to stay alive, and get back home. That’s worth a hell of a lot to me.”
There was a tense silence for a moment. Orlov glared at Dana Tallant. Stavrolets coughed and spoke up. “There is something else we’re seeing here…something we’re not sure quite what to make of.”
“What’s that?” Winger asked, glad to fill the silence with something.
Stavrolets ran a hand through thinning hair. “We decrypted some imagery that doesn’t seem to correlate well with anything. Here, I’ll show you—“ his fingers massaged a keypad and the displays shifted to something new. “After decryption, we ran check routines, washed it through processing several times and this was the best match the system could come up with. Watch—“
The imagery jittered and shifted, then settled down on the display. Some kind of desert scene settled into view…sand dunes could be seen, dust devils, with a mountain range on the horizon. In a few seconds, the scene shifted and now they were looking from a higher altitude, perhaps at the same scene. In fact, the point of view had shifted to an orbital view, a view from deep space. A world materialized before their eyes…a dun, ocher-colored world, bleak and brown, desiccated and crackled like a billiard ball left in an oven.
“Mars?” Winger suggested. “Before the Big Smack, maybe?”
“That’s what we thought,” Stavrolets said. “At first. But look more closely…look at these seams and lines…they’re continent outlines.”
Winger peered intently at the display. “My God…is that--?”
“Yep. We think it’s Earth. But it’s not a picture from today…or any time in the last few billion years, either.”
Lofton had seen the imagery earlier. “Ancient Earth, maybe?”
“Or a future Earth,” Stavrolets said. “And there’s more…I’ll summarize what this imagery seems to show. If you follow all the imagery and set different orientation grids to the scenes, it correlates well with other places in our solar system. We think this is Earth. But the hell of it is…every other world scene we’ve seen looks like this too. If we’re processing these quantum states right, Rene’s showing us a view of our solar system millions of years from now.”
Winger shook his head. “There’s another possibility. What we’re seeing may not be millions of years from now. It may be a lot nearer than that. These images may be what Earth will look like if Config Zero completes the Prime Key.”
Lofton wasn’t buying it. “That’s a bit of a stretch, isn’t it, General?”
Stavrolets was skeptical as well. “Sir, the raw data can be interpreted many ways. This imagery is just one of many interpretations the Quantum State Grabber can make. The imagery fits the raw data pretty well, but it’s not perfect.”
Winger was sure he was right. “You yourself said we have to look at these images from a swarm point of view, didn’t you? Old Doc Frost once said that if the Old Ones were real, they might have looked on the Earth as a giant incubator. Or a giant Petri dish, where what they had planted could be nurtured and grown. A vessel for new life. Only weeds started sprouting in this incubator. What do you do when you get weeds in your garden?”
Lofton shrugged. “Pull ‘em out. Spray ‘em.”
“Exactly. And to Config Zero, we’re the weeds.”
Orlov wasn’t convinced. “That’s preposterous, Winger. You’re seeing things that aren’t there. What we’re facing is a classic contest of wills with a very capable adversary. Config Zero’s a cloud of bugs, a horde of nanobotic entities with a lot of smarts. Same with whatever Hawley’s run into, out there beyond Pluto. Get what I’m saying…they’re bots. Very capable bots, but still they’re machines. They act as they’re programmed. All we have to do is get in and bollix up the programming. Now, with the girl here…or what’s tricked out to look like a girl…we’ve got intel on how the bots think. How they deploy. What they’re capable of. This stuff-“ he indicated the desert world on the display “—is probably deception. You know: disinformation. Something to throw us off the track.”
Winger knew he had no answer for Orlov’s conclusions. Even worse, he knew CINCSPACE might even be right.
“Doc Frost used to lecture me about some of his original thinking when he designed the first ANAD. Deep inside every ANAD unit, from day one, there’s a small module that he called the Imperative of Life. Sort of a survival instinct, if you will. One of his theories about the Old Ones was that, if they were truly nanobotic swarms like ANAD, they might have the same imperative.” Winger tapped on his wristpad and found what he was looking for. “He described it like this—“ A small, grainy 3-D hologram emerged from his wristpad and danced on the console in front of them. It was Doc Frost, from years ago, gesticulating in front of a classroom, “…it’s from a lecture he gave me once…I recorded it.”
“…you see, the truth is that the Imperative of Life is really very simple. Life absorbs chaos from the Universe. It adds structure. It builds stuff. Life is anti-entropic. I programmed this explicitly into ANAD, from the very beginning…”
Orlov smirked. “So what are you saying, Winger? That the Old Ones are real? That they’re not just a collective nightmare…or mass hallucination? We’ve all heard those theories before.”
“I’m saying there’s some kind of connection between what Doc Frost programmed into ANAD and what’s happening today. I don’t know about all these quantum states you’re decrypting and how real these images are. For all I know, they could be some artifact of processing and nothing more.”
“A distinct possibility,” Stavrolets admitted. “Entanglement waves are damnably hard to pin down, as you well know.”
“And I’m not sure what Hawley’s run into out there beyond Pluto…some kind of mass formation of bots. How they got there, I have no idea. But I know Config Zero is very real…I’ve been to Kipwezi…I’ve see it. I’ve been to Europa and been inside the Keeper. That was no hallucination. Maybe another quantum state, another reality, a sixth dimension, who can say? I can’t discount those possibilities.”
Tallant was intrigued.
“I’m saying let’s follow Occam’s Razor. The simplest explanation is probably the best. Major Lofton, you and your techs are grabbing quantum states from Rene’s processor…you think she’s some kind of router, a go-between Config Zero and …something out there. We’re trying to figure out what the hell Config Zero’s going to do next. Maybe this new imagery is telling us that. I think Doc Frost was telling us that, in that little snippet I showed you. Prime Key…Imperative of Life…whatever you want to call it…that’s what is driving Config Zero. If we’re the weeds in the garden of Eden for these bugs, then we know what’s coming. If Config Zero’s programming is to clean out the Petri dish and start over…which is what I think…then it’s up to us to defend the Petri dish. Keep the incubator from being turned off.”
“Winger, you may or not be right, but we can’t afford to ignore what this girl’s telling us. It may be disinformation. It may be processing errors in the Quantum State Grabber. I say grab as much as we can…milk the girl for everything we can get…and try to find patterns. Patterns will give us actionable intelligence. If I can give Hawley and his crew even a little heads-up, even a little advantage over whatever they’re facing, I’m damned well going to do it. I’m sorry, Winger, if that thing in there still resembles your daughter. There’s your disinformation. It’s just a disguise, has been all along. She’s no more your daughter than I am.”
Winger looked over at Dana Tallant. She had a look of resignation. Her lips were a tight line. Winger knew she was having trouble letting go of Rene, of the idea of Rene, of the pattern or configuration she had always known as Rene. It was painful.
But it was necessary. Every scrap of intel they could get from her would help.
Winger knew now with a conviction that was hard to put into words that the only pattern that mattered was the memory of the little girl they had lost years ago to Config Zero. The pattern in the containment chamber wasn’t Rene.
The real one was in their minds.