Bright of the Sky (2 page)

Marcus leaned into the audio pickup. “That could be EoSap, it still could be,” he said, wanting to blame Minerva’s arch competitor and not one of their own crew.

“No. This is a basic vector that any groomer could deliver to the sapient. Somebody sat in your chair out there, Marcus, and goddamn typed in an evolutionary training sequence.”

“If it’s simple, then yank it out,” Marcus pleaded.

She glared into the optic. “It’s not simple anymore.” She turned back to the cocoon of light surrounding her, mesmerized by the visions she saw in the Deep Field.

Runaway
, Marcus thought again. If the mSap had broken out of control, it was in danger of grabbing every resource, every qubit it needed for whatever it was doing. Such things had been seen before. The Jakarta runaway, for one, when an evolution-driven mSap had nearly taken over the world’s entire fleet of orbiting comm satellites. Korea had responded with nuclear strikes, leaving the island of Java a radioactive slag heap.

“Who’s had access here?” Marcus glanced at Anjelika Denhov, who had better know what her postdocs were up to. The people in this room were the only ones who could have interfaced with the mSap.

Anjelika turned to her three gangly charges. “Well?” She eyed them each in turn.

No movement. The team looked slightly green in the glow from the Deep Field room.

“Anybody got a theory?”

Under her stare the newest of them, Luc Diers, swallowed hard. “It was me,” he said.

Marcus turned on the youngster. “Talk. Talk fast.”

“I was just trying to salvage my program.” Luc glanced at Anjelika, his PhD adviser. “I didn’t want to fail.” Realizing that he still had the room’s attention, he stumbled on: “I kept getting nonsense readings, and I couldn’t fix it. I had no idea the mSap would take an interest. Would commandeer everything.”

Marcus didn’t know if he was relieved or sickened that it was one of his own crew.

Luc told about his simple, evolving program that was supposed to reconfigure his experiment on fundamental extragalactic particles so that it was back on track and not outputting data on impossible particles. Particles never seen before. Luc was going home next week. He wouldn’t have time to restart the program. It was just a minor program running on the mSap. He thought no one would notice.

Listening in, Helice exploded. “You thought no one would
notice
? You let go of your program goal and assigned it to my sapient?” Luc stared at the floor, and Helice turned away in disgust, concentrating again on the Deep Field.

They all watched, transfixed by the sight of a woman trying to tame a quantum monster. The eerie light flickered on her face like a tormented mind probing for comfort from the one person on-station who could understand it. She murmured, “It’s analyzing an anomalous structure. A profound goal that it can’t reach. And it’s getting lost.”

“God help us,” Marcus said. He leaned into the comm. “Call Mayday.”

The audio responded, “Sending.” The nearest help was weeks out of the system.

Helice walked out of the Deep Room, pulling off her data rings. Glancing at Anjelika, she asked, “Which one?” Anjelika nodded at the unfortunate postdoc, who cringed under Helice’s predatory stare. “Name?”

“Luc Diers.”

“All right, Luc,” she said in a too-smooth voice, “describe the anomalous readings that you retrained my sapient to fix.”

Luc winced hearing this characterization of his crime. “Neutrinos,” he said.

The group stared at him, waiting. He plunged on. “I had impossible neutrinos. Wrong angular momentum, wrong spin state. Reversed, actually.”

“Meaning?” Marcus snapped.

Anjelika broke in: “Think of it like the direction of corkscrewing. Neutrinos go to the left.”

Luc added, “And the ones I kept registering went to the right, if you want to think of it that way. And the readings were coming from everywhere at once. So it was garbage. Unless it was evidence of another dimension, it was garbage.”

Helice put up a hand to stop others from interrupting. “What do you mean,
dimension
?”

“Space-time construct. Universe.” Meeting blank stares, he went on, “Nature creates symmetry all over the place, except at the subatomic scale. So some folks figure the missing symmetry is in other universes. Like right-turning neutrinos are in the fifth dimension, and orthopositroniums’ missing energy is there. It’s all in other dimensions.”

Marcus stood and fixed a blank and hopeless gaze on Luc Diers. “Kiss your ass good-bye, son.”

Luc nodded. “Yes, sir.”

Helice said, “Get out of here, all of you. Except Marcus and Luc. Make yourselves useful somewhere.” When they left, she said, “The mSap wants this station, Marcus. And it’s taking it.”

He nodded, strangely calm, now that he knew the worst.
Runaway
. He glanced at the Deep Room. “Kill it.”

“And kill the station?”

A small moan came from Luc as the reality of their disaster sunk in.

“Maybe we can still salvage life-support systems,” Marcus said.

“You can’t. It’s dissolved your networks. You don’t have any networks left.”

“We’ve got expert systems.”

“That can’t talk to each other.”

He glanced at the room again. “Kill it, Helice.” If they could. There was the Jakarta runaway. It had copied itself into a thousand home computers moments before decoherence.

“First I’m downloading the mSap output.” Leaning over the keyboard, she shunted the data into a high-storage optical cube. She was taking it home. She was leaving. “Prime the shuttle and get us a pilot. You can assign whoever you want in the remaining seats.” She cocked her head at Luc. “He’s coming with me.” Her face softened. “You come too, Marcus.”

He heard her as in a dream. “Put the sapient down, Helice.”

She looked at him a long moment. “Putting down the mSap.” She leaned over the control board and typed in the command to collapse wave function. To blow its quantum nature, that of being in several places at once, they needed to shatter the quantum isolation. Turning on the lights inside the domain could do it.

And did. In an instant, the $1.3 billion demigod snapped into decoherence.

A soft whine came from the Deep Room, high-pitched and eerie. Aside from terror, Marcus felt relief. At least they could still kill it.

As they opened the door into the corridor, the sickening blare of the klaxons ballooned louder.

“Meet me at the shuttle bay,” she said, already heading out the door.

In automatic problem-solving mode, Marcus began prioritizing the remaining shuttle seats. Send home nonessential personnel. The researchers, the support techs, the . . . he let a wave of nausea pass through him. He decided on the six people who’d fill the remaining shuttle seats. He wasn’t among them.

His rig. His watch.

Hurrying down the corridor, Helice had Luc by the arm, heading for the shuttle bay, avoiding running but wasting no time. She clutched the data cube. The quantum platforms didn’t travel, of course. Too leaky, too vulnerable.

“I’m sorry,” Luc whispered.

Helice nodded. “Yes. Yes you are.” Sorry was only the beginning of his troubles. But first they had to launch out of here. With the mSap down and the savants isolated from each other, the station now ran on human-powered thought, which, as the case of Luc Diers demonstrated, often went awry. Hurrying down the corridor, she debriefed Luc, wringing the salient details from him, of his research gone wrong.

Then, herding him into the domain of the executive quarters, she made a quick stop for Guinevere, her pet macaw.

“Carry this,” she told Luc, passing the hooded cage to him. Guinevere gave a harsh bleat of protest as they rushed on to the launch bay.

A pilot, disheveled and pale, joined them there. Four others trickled in to join them, their faces betraying wild-eyed panic.

As they began finding their seats, she went forward to talk to the pilot. “Before you do anything,” she told him, “isolate your onboards from all station contact.” At his confused expression, she said, “Sapient’s got an obsession. It’ll eat your tronics for a snack.” The mSap was dead, with any luck. But it hadn’t been a lucky day so far. He nodded, somber.

“And go, go now.”

“Still waiting on two more passengers, Ms. Maki.”

“Not any more. Get out of here if you want to save the passengers you have.”

Back in the passenger cabin, she strapped Guinevere’s cage into one of the seats, then herself, as the engines hummed to life. Luc followed suit, looking stunned. She held her hands in a firm clasp to keep them from shaking. She didn’t give the station a snowball’s chance in hell. Go, go, she urged the pilot.

They launched, easing out of the bay, vernier thrusters working.

Holding the cube in her hand, Helice stared at it. She’d made a snap decision that Luc’s discovery was real. Because the mSap had taken right-corkscrewing neutrinos seriously. Because it had marshaled the entire resources of the station to cache its output, pursuing a problem so deep and long that it must be the toughest question in the history of quantum sapients. Helice had known all this, standing in the Deep Field, gazing into the obsession. It suggested not a sapient run amok, but a sapient probing the most astonishing question: Where had the right-turning neutrinos come from? And how could the source’s mass exceed that of the universe?

With the shuttle under way, she looked out the view port, seeing the lights dim on the top deck of the station. Then another. Deck by deck, the platform was powering down. They would freeze to death before their air ran out. She tried not to think about the dying, but the two empty seats next to her kept the thought fresh. She patted Guinevere’s cage absently, seeking comfort.

They sped homeward. She clutched the data cube in her pocket, all that remained of the mSap and its journey next door. Into an infinite land.

CHAPTER TWO

O
N A CLIFF OVERLOOKING THE PACIFIC OCEAN
, Lamar Gelde sat in his sport vehicle, straining to see the panoramic view of the breakers and distant horizon. His car headlights tunneled a blind light into the fog, in a socked-in December landscape, dominated by saturated low clouds and the pounding surf. It had been decades since Lamar had seen the ocean; and he wasn’t going to see it today, either. Instead he was going to see one of the most difficult men in the Western Hemisphere: Titus Quinn.

He brought good news, but Titus might not see it in that light. No telling how the man might react, especially as reclusive as he’d become these last couple of years. Lamar loved Titus Quinn like a son, and hated watching him throw his life away, here on this godforsaken coast where it rained forty-five inches a year and the nearest neighbor was fifteen miles away.

But this isolation was precisely why Titus Quinn retreated to the Oregon coast, to escape the company of his fellow men and women and to stay a universe away from black hole interstellar transport and the destinations that implied. Lamar carefully backed into the whiteout conditions on the road and sped toward his meeting, one that would take Titus by surprise. Titus’s own fault. The man never answered the phone.

In the warmth of the car, Lamar drew off his gloves and gripped the steering wheel of the custom ZXI 600, loaded with after-market options, gliding through the hairpin turns with a surge of power from the precision engine, worth a year’s salary of a member of the Minerva board of directors. Retired or not, he could still afford it, even without the Minerva stipend that kept him on retainer. Now, Minerva had a little task for him, one Lamar intended accomplish, both for Minerva and for the sake of Titus Quinn’s immortal soul. At thirty-four, Titus was too young to be living in the past. Today, Lamar hoped to recall him to life. That was how Lamar saw it, though he was pretty sure Titus would see it differently. He gunned the engine and grabbed roadway down the straightaway, wiping sweat from his hands so he wouldn’t lose his grip on the wheel. He hadn’t seen Titus for over a year. He hoped Titus had mellowed a bit.

Keep Out, More Private Than You Can Imagine.
The sign on the sagging split log fence had been freshly redrawn. Turning down the rutted drive, Lamar squinted at the warning signs nailed to trees.
Not Interested, Go Away
. In another few yards:
Contrary to What You Believe, You Are NOT an Exception
. The road descended into green-black trees, dripping with moss and rain.
Last Turn
Around
.
Land Mines Ahead
. Lamar sighed. He knew Titus had booby-trapped the property, but he trusted that Titus had not yet stooped to land mines.

Parking the car under a giant tree heavy with pea-green fans of cedar, Lamar struggled out of the low-slung car, hating the indignities of old bones and sagging muscles. He pulled his jacket close around him and tucked in his head against the rain that had now begun to patter through the overhead branches.
Cold
,
soggy
,
godforsaken
were the words that came to mind as he slogged down the path toward Titus’s beach house.

A high whine needled at his hearing, followed closely by a crunch and the fall of a giant branch across his path. Still waving from the jolt of hitting the ground, a wood sign proclaimed:
My Dogs Are Hungry
. Lamar stepped over the crude barrier and shouted, “Titus? It’s Lamar. Stop this nonsense, will you?”

Fog rolled through the treetops, blobs of congealed wool. Through them, he could see the melted yellow of the sun, thin and cross-looking. It was high noon, ten days before Christmas. A miserable time of year to be on the coast. Ahead he saw the beach house, two stories, brown shingles, looking like a hole in the forest and not a proper residence. Rain trickled down Lamar’s neck as he hurried down the path, surrounded by sounds of small explosions and the accompanying release of foul smells. No, Titus Quinn was not growing mellow. If anything, his property was worse than ever. Christ, we should visit the man more often. Keep him tethered to reality. “Titus?” he shouted.

Up ahead Lamar heard, “Who the hell is it?” A shutter slammed open on the second story of the cottage, and someone’s head poked out. Titus.