Fear the Future (The Fear Saga Book 3) (32 page)

“But I have done the calculations myself, not just reviewed her workings, but redone them myself, separately, and … what they are trying to do … chasing the IST, it is insane.”

Madeline did what she had secretly stopped Moira from doing; she hid her reaction. She hid her disappointment and concern. She hid it behind a mask of understanding and support, and maybe a touch too much condescension.

“I’m assuming you’ve shared your concerns with Birgit?” Madeline asked, with feigned ignorance.

Moira nodded. Moira had shared her opinions the previous day, if a touch less stringently than she had just now. It was part of what had prompted Madeline to visit the girl.

Madeline thought a moment, then decided that, whatever her own feelings on the subject, it was best to leave Moira as hopeful as possible, if only to allow her to focus on the last precious weeks of production.

“Well,” Madeline said with all the sincerity she could muster, “if anyone can do it, Moira, Dr. Hauptman can. You know that, right?”

Moira nodded, but halfheartedly.

For Madeline, though, the truth was that this was not just about what Birgit could, or couldn’t do. It was a dream that had bled into countless other projects, and Madeline knew she was getting to the point that she had to make a call. It was taking up more and more time and resources, and some of her very best resources at that, to say nothing of what it was doing to Minnie’s capacity, which, though massive, was far from infinite.

She needed to talk to Minnie’s keeper, Amadeu. She needed to let the others know.

Chapter 31: TASC Manufacturing Plant 47

As Hendri stopped the loader, he stepped back and waited. It was parked now. He was not supposed to touch it while it was parked, not until the factory was done unloading it. He lit a cigarette as the factory buzzed around him. He was at the crossroads. The junction of two worlds.

He did not look up as the factory’s beasts unburdened his forklift. He had done so the first few times he had come here and the sight had not only filled him with an unpleasant blend of awe and fear, it had also brought him a series of shouted epithets from a foreman stationed nearby. He had been staring. He needed to get his loader out of the way. Another was already waiting to unload its wares. He had leapt aboard and whirled his forklift around as the foreman had continued to shout obscenities at him.

He glanced back at the foreman now as he climbed back up and put his loader in gear. The man was angry, but not uncharacteristically so. There were so many of these foremen. They did not work for the same company as Hendri. Heck, he was pretty sure they were not even Indonesian. They were supervisors for whatever company held the Aggregation Contract. He was pretty sure they were Chinese.

They knew enough Javanese to get their point across, though, and even now he was receiving some last, choice words of encouragement as he wheeled the burly forklift out through the gantry doors and down an access road to the main checkpoint. Here the three main veins leading from the manufacturing plant’s gantry doors met for sorting.

He passed back out through the Exit Gate without much ado and off down one of ten roads converging on the outside of the factory’s main gate.

Because he was leaving, he was not much of a concern to the checkpoint’s guards. There were not many ways he could take anything from the factory that it did not want to give. The majority of the scrutiny was for reserved for the incoming traffic. Security was tight here. They were not looking for explosives, per se, indeed there were supposed to be a great deal of combustibles in many of the deliveries coming to the factory. They were making sure none of said volatile materials were wired to anything that might make them a danger to the facility.

Though little was heard of the terrorist threat anymore, it was clearly still real enough to call for two black, gorilla-like automatons to be standing either side of the gate. They were not checking the deliveries themselves. They were watching the watchers. They were the enforcers.

They were still now. Very still. Like statues. But Hendri had heard stories of what happened when they came to life. Tales of the speed and strength of the robot guards.

They did not have names, indeed as best as Hendri understood it, they were only shells now. If they were needed then they would become possessed by the same method that allowed the Techs at his own depot to remotely manage and supervise all of the sorting and loading of the very materials he spent all day ferrying back and forth.

The Techs did it all directly with their minds, without using their hands or even their eyes. Just sitting there in the sterile, white rooms reserved just for them, mute and still, as a machine plugged into their necks gently whirred, sending out the orders that sent Hendri and thousands like him scurrying this way and that like worker bees in a network of hives that reached for miles up and down this stretch of the Indonesian coast.

He shuddered. He had seen the neck plugs on others as well. Most of the businessmen visiting the site had them now, as did reporters and announcers on television. But they were not for him. Not ever. Not that he could afford such things anyway, he knew, as he continued out past a second checkpoint, the road forking once more where the access route from his own depot met the roads from two others, or more, he did not know. He only knew his route across this landscape, his choice at each junction as he went back and forth between the factory and his depot.

That was his job. He was a driver. It was a job that could easily be done by a machine, or at least so he was told many, many times a day by his kepala. A man who was even now scowling at him as he pulled up to his depot.

“Thirty-seven seconds late!” he shouted, as Hendri drove past.

Hendri only nodded as the kepala shouted after him, “Pit 23!” after quickly glancing down at the tablet on his forearm.

Hendri wheeled his lifter into place behind 23. The pit was already nearly full. Thirty-seven seconds late, just so he could wait here for a few more of those precious seconds until his load was ready.

Behind the pit, the pallet was being loaded with a series of boxes. The boxes were made of aluminium. The metal box was itself one ingredient on a very detailed list of raw materials to be precisely loaded together according to a painstakingly exact set of instructions. Any deviation in either the box’s size, weight, or contents, and the financial penalties were severe. It was a harsh rule, and one that encouraged a sense of very great diligence on the part of the kepala monitoring the QA process on the other side of the pits.

But that was not Hendri’s problem. He was waiting. And at almost precisely the assigned second, the last component was loaded and he was given the green light to take the pit’s contents for delivery. Almost immediately his boss was shouting at him. Hendri breathed deep and pushed his lifter forward, grabbing at the pallet and lifting it from the pit floor.

Soon he was back out on the road. Driving more slowly now that his lifter was fully laden, though not without a sense of haste. He knew from repeated drubbings from his kepala that the only reason a robot was not doing his job was that the software license for a TASC AI cost more than he did. But it was not
that
much more, he was told. And if he did not meet deadlines then they could replace him in an instant.

He did not believe that anything as complex and clever as a computer capable of driving a truck could be as cheap as the pittance they were paying him. But pittance or no, it was a job, and a better one than he could get working anywhere for a hundred miles in any direction.

He focused. Ten minutes in and the checkpoint was coming up again now, and the checkpoints were a completely different experience coming back to the factory than they were going away. The scans came. He was surveyed by many eyes, both human and mechanical. His biometric identity was validated against the depot name, the loader’s registration, the pallet’s contents and weight, and the delivery schedule.

Once all was confirmed and checked against a host of lists, he was given a place in the system, and a timer was set from the moment he was given clearance to proceed. He moved off apace.

- - -

Clearing the main factory gate was much more intense. He could not help but glance at the big robot gorillas. Were they looking back at him? Were they about to spring to life? Would it be him they would come for? He had absolutely no reason to think they would, but like an innocent child at a hastily called school assembly, he felt the heat on his face nonetheless, the worry of getting caught, even for a crime he had not committed.

The thick black wedge barrier in front of him lowered soon enough, though, and he was waved through with nothing more than a shouted, “Door two!”

As he passed through great gantry doors into the factory proper, he felt himself doing what he usually tried not to. He looked up. There was no roof. As far as he could tell, the machines in here did not care what the weather was like anyway. And as far as he could tell there were only machines in here, barring the foremen that stood by the gantry doors keeping those delivery loaders that were human-operated moving.

As he came to a halt in his designated slot, he watched, as he usually told himself not to, as the beast came for his goods. The machine that came to take his delivery of aluminium boxes was one of several in the vast factory, Hendri knew that, but it was still, to him, almost overwhelming, both in size and form.

It stomped up to him on six thick but hollow legs. Legs of a framework of metal, articulated in a most insect-like fashion, capped by a body that was all claws and hooks.

It did not hesitate as it came to him. It bent, pulled the several tons of material up under itself without so much as a grunt, and hefted it into the air. As it lifted its load, it was already walking away once more. It did not drive down a road. It climbed right over and up into the heart of the factory, toward whatever machinery lay within, waiting to process the massive amounts of material tribute they were bringing it. Waiting to make it into whatever ungodly things they were building here.

The shout of abuse from the foreman caused him to jump, as he should have known it would. Hendri cursed himself, almost as harshly as the foreman did, and quickly grabbed at his controls. Backing his loader up, quickly he spun it around as fast as he could, and accelerated off.

Another loader was, as always, waiting behind him, and as if to emphasize the thousand times he had been threatened with being replaced by a machine, this one was without a driver. It scooted itself up to the bay without comment and waited for another mighty minion of the factory to come and takes its offering.

Hendri cursed his wandering mind and drove off. Back to the exit gate, back to the checkpoint, back to the depot to pick up another load of material to feed the factory’s massive hunger.

Chapter 32: Hekaton’s Carcass

From Milton SpacePort the elevator rose up. It did not just go to Hekaton. It went right into it. Like most of the loads for the last year, there were no people aboard these climbers as they rose up into the new moon. They carried machines, sometimes, but now their job was mostly to ferry up supplementary raw materials that had not been found in requisite quantities within Hekaton’s mass.

After three years of aggressive mining, Earth’s second moon was already noticeably diminished. But for Amadeu, she was all the more beautiful for it. Where some of his less imaginative colleagues saw something moth-eaten, an apple violated by marauding worms, Amadeu saw the work of a master sculptor.

This was in part because he understood the full importance of the pulp that continued to be gleaned from the plucked fruit that was Hekaton. But it was also because he knew what lengths Mynd was going to in order to maintain some measure of structural integrity in the ever more honeycombed asteroid.

As he zoomed in on the moon, he started to see the familiar signs of its continued vibrancy. This was not a dead thing, not at all. It was alive with activity. A thousand crawling machines, mostly variants on the wrecker that had become so core to their off-world operations, but some more specialized.

Drilling platforms buzzed here and there, noiseless in the vacuum, but violent nonetheless, biting into the rock, huge fabric lungs inflating on their backs as they caught the precious debris they were etching from Hekaton’s surface. Some of the same platforms were on the move, relocating to new veins, pulling themselves by cable and harpoon through Hekaton’s carcass, like fat, burly spidermen.

Tugs also wandered here and there among the diggers and grabbers. They busied themselves attaching to the drilling platforms to remove full debris sacks and replacing them with empty ones, like machine midwives.

The tugs did not move by cable, though. Their movements were freer. They needed no grapples to pull them around. They were mobilized by an array of fat nozzles on three stocky arms, fueled by their ever-on reactors as they ferried unendingly between the drilling stations to haul the cut meat out of the moon and deliver their prizes to one of the four factories of the Hekaton Missile-Mine Phalanx.

Unlike the factories dotted around the moon’s surface, or the hundred or so manufacturing plants across Earth’s glimmering blue-green orb far below, Hekaton’s factories hung in space, like the moons of a moon. And where Earth’s factories had trains and loaders and great mechanical spiders carrying materials to them, Hekaton’s four factories were freed from gravity’s limits. They were fed from all angles, and exuded their progeny with equal liberty, to be taken once more by the tugs, extending their midwife role, out onto Earth’s equatorial plane.

Together with Earth’s product being ferried up from the surface below by the five complete space elevators now spanning outward from the planet’s waist, the missiles now formed a thin ring. Not a rival of Saturn’s icy necklace, not even close, but viewed from the planet below it most certainly had its admirers.

To avoid collision, the forty thousand missile mines of the Hekaton Phalanx, or the ring of fire, as it had come to be known, had been arrayed in great lines reaching to each side of the tops of the elevators now rising majestically from Brazil, the Maldives, Kiribati, Indonesia, and of course Sao Tome, capped as it was by the mighty Hekaton.

Five filament spokes in the dizzyingly wide mill-wheel that Earth had become.

Through Minnie’s countless eyes, Amadeu saw the ring’s components not as a collection of single units, but as a chorus. A chorus his students were helping coordinate, one of many aspects of their training.

He brought those students to him now, into a virtual classroom without walls, the Earth sitting below them as they orbited it at an accelerated speed, flying beside, over, and around the thin but seemingly endless ring of missile-mines being prepped for launch.

Before he could even speak, Þalía, a young Norwegian girl, piped up. He was not in the least bit surprised.

“Hekaton Missile-Mine Phalanx: 40,253 supra-gravitational units. Combination chemical boosters and M-class fission drives. Projected to be at least three thousand units behind target at zero hour.”

Amadeu took a breath. The rest of the class, he noticed via his autonomic monitoring programs, were equally ‘impressed’ with young Þalía’s display. There were nearly a hundred students in total in this class. It was a feature of AI and virtual-reality supplemented education that he could have a far more hands-on experience with each of them than a far smaller class would enjoy within the confines of an ordinary school.

For this was the TASC War School. They did things a little differently here.

He made a note to isolate Þalía’s responses from now on. She was showing off. It was disruptive. She would join the seven others he had already limited. She would not know it. In fact, three of those others had kicked off the proceedings with not dissimilar outbursts. They thought they had impressed their friends and their teacher, and indeed, in their version of the simulation, their classmates around them had glanced varying looks of part-jealousy, part-awe, part-anger in their direction. Enough to fuel their ambition, but without the matching inverse impact on their peers.

And anyway, Amadeu had neither the time nor the patience for such showboating. Let one of his AI amalgams placate the louder children. He began speaking for real, letting the AI integrate his words into whatever versions of him it was generating to handle the more boisterous of his students.

“Children. Hekaton Missile-Mine Phalanx. Launch protocol begins in just over three weeks. What changes in three weeks that we must launch then?”

An array of hands went up. Several of the students began speaking without calling, and a matching number of Amadeus hushed the uninvited answers with varying levels of severity. The real Amadeu mentally glanced at the list of names pinging for a turn to speak. He picked three of them, as well as four others who hadn’t volunteered but who he wanted to hear from. The answers came in a wave, his virtual selves nodding appreciatively within the confines of their programming as the various students spoke.

He heard snippets from each, siphoned and summarized. Wrong answers were dismissed and addressed automatically by his AIs, correct but unimaginative answers were dismissed almost as quickly. For Amadeu was looking for a more complete analysis, if one was to be found.

Per Amadeu’s style, the system allowed the student mass at large to hear one wrong answer, then a correct one. From which student they heard each depended on whom they were grouped with, and thus sitting near.

“In three weeks we reach the apex of chance,” said several students, “where the likelihood of the approaching Armada seeing that we are actively preparing for their arrival outweighs the increased damage we hope can hope to inflict by continuing to build on the size of the Missile-Mine phalanxes.”

That was the correct answer, the textbook version. But one boy, a boy named Guowei, ‘volunteered’ as he had been, took a little longer to answer, as Amadeu had expected him to.

Eventually the young chinese boy, born to poor but well-educated parents and volunteered by a Chinese government keen to showcase the effectiveness of their state mandated child-assessment programs, spoke up. “In nineteen months, the light density leaving Earth will be high enough to no longer be masked by static caused by the sun’s radiation at the point where that light connects with the incoming Armada.

“At the highest reliable speed at which we can send our missile-mines, they will need to leave Earth in just under three weeks in order to stay ahead of that light for long enough to connect with the Mobiliei Armada while it remains still unaware of our work to resist them.”

Amadeu smiled. It was mimicked by every virtual version of him in the classroom.

“Yes, Guowei,” said Amadeu. “But you speak of that point in time as an absolute.”

“I do,” said Guowei, countering almost immediately now, “but only because other responders already mentioned the apex of chance. To mention it again would have been redundant.”

Amadeu stared at the boy and quickly queried the system. Guowei, pinged as he had been in the first round, had not heard any of his peer’s less detailed answers before saying his own, though from the other children’s perspectives his reply had, indeed, come after them.

Amadeu smiled more broadly now. Not just book smart, but truly perceptive, thought Amadeu, saying, “Yes, given the other responses, I guess it would have been obsolete, Guowei.”

There were smart people, then there were geniuses. But Guowei was one of those children that was bright enough to shine even among these austere ranks, such was
his
light density.

“So, is that why we are stopping production in three weeks?” Amadeu asked the greater auditorium.

Again, a range of volunteers. He picked them off quickly, not pinging Guowei this time, who once again did not volunteer. He would see what the boy did. There were some variations on agreement, some caveats and some expositions. The majority were valid, even insightful. These were, after all, very smart children. Ranging in age from twelve to thirteen, these were the best.

So good, in fact, that some of their abilities as pilots had actually started to diminish. They were all close to Banu. But they had discovered that while a certain level of intellect was a requirement when pushing the speed limit, at some point it started to actually become a disadvantage, just as it did in everyday life.

Some of these then, Guowei chief among them, were no longer pilot candidates. They would soon be pulled from those ranks. They would be groomed for something else. They would, and indeed already were starting to, play other roles in TASC’s actual organization. Administration, research, they were slowly being woven into pretty much all of TASC’s work, even if it was as seemingly simple a task as creating games, puzzles, and battle simulations for their fellow War School students, the pilot elite.

All that said, Guowei still did not raise his hand. Amadeu cocked his head. He had wanted to see if the boy would take the bait. He hadn’t.

“All good points. Guowei, nothing to add?”

“No,” said the boy, his eyes alight though, waiting to be challenged. He was enjoying this.

“Nothing?”

Some children, Amadeu knew, were happy to see Guowei getting called out like this. Amadeu let them see it.

“No, Professor Esposinho,” Guowei said, once more. Then, “Because the question is specious. Production does not stop in three weeks. It only shifts, and, if anything, accelerates.”

Amadeu answered immediately and with genuine passion, not directed toward Guowei, but at the boy’s classmates, “Absolutely right, Guowei!
Listen,
class. Listen to
everything
. Not just because I might trick you, though I may well try to do just that, but because I might be wrong. You are here to learn from me, yes, and learn you must.

“But you should assume nothing! You should take nothing for granted! Precision is all and I demand it from every one of you, all the time. You must analyze
everything
you are told to do,
every
question you are asked.”

He pinged his AI to have his avatar look every student in the eye as he said this next part, “Never assume your leadership knows all the answers. Never assume an instruction is correct unless you have considered
every
part of its foundation,
every
reason, and, most importantly, every
consequence
.”

He leant back. “That is your job. That is your part in this great effort. Because if you don’t learn to constantly analyze our strategies, our tactics, how will you be able to create new ones when you are in the brief moment of battle … when you are out there.”

He let the view unfold behind him, using his control of the simulated viewpoint that was their backdrop to swing them outward, to face the blackness, and to a specific point in that dark, a shining point, a growing beacon.

Damn, but he loved this environment, thought Amadeu. If his teachers had been able to this with their classrooms then he might have actually paid attention at university. But probably not, he thought, smiling to himself.

He let the previous point sit out there a while. It was not a new one. He probably said it, in one form or another, at least once a day. He saw more than a few unamused faces in the crowd, even a rolled eye or two, though not many. Guowei was not one of them, though. He got it.

Taking a deep breath, Amadeu moved on.