Johnny Winger and the Battle at Caloris Basin Read online

  Mahmood Salaam was a picture of scorn and skepticism. His black moustache twitched like a mouse and his eyes sparkled with barely concealed mirth, as if Quint’s little joke on the others was perfect for such a stuffy and somber staff meeting.

  “So where is your little apparition now, General?”

  Quint had to admit he hadn’t heard from Winger for awhile.

  “Well,” intoned Dr. Vishnapuram, “I guess this is to be expected. I know what happened to Earthshield was a shock to everyone. We invested a lot in that mission. Now, we rely on hallucinations for our next tactic.”

  Before Quint could object, the SG’s avatar held up a hand, then maneuvered itself to hover like a malevolent ghost right over Quint’s head. CINCQUANT cleared his throat and decided to shift away from the suffocating presence of the avatar, now practically sitting on top of him. Honestly…learn how to control yourself.

  “I’ve been working up some names for a negotiating team. I’ll squirt them to all of you after this briefing is over. I recommend we work through Config Zero. I assume he’s—or it’s—still in Kipwezia, but I’ve heard the MOBnet barrier may be on its last legs. Angelika, I’ll issue an order for the barrier to come down immediately. We’ll send a team of negotiators to Config Zero, and use them as a way of contacting the Old Ones, seek some kind of terms for accommodation. Or at least, see if they’ll agree to terms. I don’t see as we have any other choice.”

  Quint almost said something, but held his tongue. There are always choices, you dolt, he almost said, but didn’t. He could see Komar was onboard, but Salaam wasn’t buying any of this crap at all.

  CINCSPACE muttered, “This feels like the last days of the Japanese Empire in 1945…trying to negotiate an end to conflict and save face, save something.”

  The SG didn’t like that at all. His avatar frowned, a clownish gesture that would have been laughable if the situation weren’t so serious.

  “What are you saying, Mahmood…that I’m Hirohito in your little historical fantasy?”

  Komar shrugged, ready for the whole briefing to be over. “I just hope the Old Ones don’t do a Hiroshima on us.”

  Quint was still smarting from their comments. “They may not need to. We’re doing it to ourselves.”

  Chapter 12

  Paris, France

  November 9, 2155

  1725 hours (U.T.)

  Dana Polansky sipped at her Merlot and watched the crowds brushing by her outdoor table at the Café Antony, wondering if maybe this wasn’t such a great idea after all. She’d been waiting on Colonel Goncalves for the better part of an hour but Esther was late, got diverted, forgot about the lunch date, or something like that.

  Really, this is nuts, Polansky told herself. I should have my head examined. Journalists are supposed to deal with facts…just the facts, ma’am.

  But if there was even a remote chance that Esther Goncalves could help her find Jana, could help her get her Jana back, then it had to be explored.

  No matter how nuts it seemed.

  Dana had known the staff aide for some months now, ever since she’d been assigned to the UNIFORCE beat and spent some time around all the brass that worked under CINCQUANT. Esther was CINCQUANT’s Q1, in charge of personnel and manpower inside Quantum Corps. In a recent interview, Goncalves had implied that the Corps had an ongoing relationship with a Dr. Ben Falkland, who was doing research on ways of combatting the spread of Assimilationism and angels, specifically on ways to ‘re-construct’ people who had been assimilated. Dana had filed that nugget away for later use.

  And when her own daughter went the way so many millions already had, and locked herself into an assimilator booth at one of Symborg’s awakenings, and wound up as so much atom fluff, Dana dredged up the Goncalves interview from somewhere deep in the back of her mind.

  Re-constructing assimilated people from atoms and molecules, huh? If I didn’t know better, I’d say that was borderline fairy tale, pure and simple. But Goncalves insisted it was legitimate and she couldn’t afford to ignore the possibility, however faint and unbelievable it might be.

  Goncalves showed up full of apologies and mea culpas. “Sorry, Dana…staff meeting went on too long…we’re trying to up our recruitment of chemistry and physics majors at the big universities. Everybody’s got a pet idea. Nobody’s got any details. You know how it is.” Goncalves was in her light blue and gold day uniform, with a dark blue beret making her look stylish in the noontime crowd of the 5th arrondisement.

  “Don’t sweat it, Colonel. I’m just glad you could make it.”

  The two women ordered more wine and a plate of baguettes.

  They exchanged pleasantries for awhile, munching on their sandwiches and pommes fritas, sipping at the wine, until Dana explained what had happened to her daughter and why she was interested in learning more about Dr. Falkland.

  Dana squinted tears back, then decided to put her sunglasses back on. It was a cloudy day, but at least, the glasses hid things.

  “Colonel—“

  “Hey, call me Esther, please…I’m a mom too, you know. I know this must be terribly hard for you.”

  Dana swallowed hard. “That’s putting it mildly. Col…er, Esther, tell me more about this reconstruction process. You mentioned it when we did the interview a few weeks ago.”

  Goncalves swirled the red liquid in her glass. “Right. Well…it’s called VISER. If I can recall what that stands for, yeah…it’s Vivionic Seeding and Re-animation. Something like that. Developed originally by someone named Mullinex. Emory University USA, I seem to recall. Dr. Falkland, and his father Dr. Ryne before him, has had some small-scale experimental success with it.”

  “Really? You mean, he can actually reconstruct assimilated people?”

  Goncalves shook her head. Her hair was short, dark brown, almost page-boy and the beret was set at a jaunty angle. Probably not regulation, Dana thought.

  “Oh, heavens no. Not people. At least not yet. But he claims to have been able to do this with small animals, lab rats and that sort of thing.”

  “Can you explain how it works?”

  Here, Goncalves smiled. “I’m no scientist. Just a glorified HR girl. But I can do better than that. I can put you in contact with Dr. Falkland directly.”

  “God, Esther…I’d be so grateful, if you could do that.”

  Northgate University, Autonomous Systems Laboratory

  Pennsylvania, USA

  November 12, 2155

  1130 hours

  The accident had been nobody’s fault but that didn’t make Dr. Ben Falkland feel any better. Any time you lost a loved one, it hurt like hell. And when the loved one was Mr. Jiggs, twelve-year old hybrid Shih Tzu, lifelong companion, confidant and lab policeman and cleaner-upper of anything that dropped from the table, the loss was even harder to take.

  Falkland sighed deeply. Jiggs was just a dog, wheezing, limping, half-blind in one eye with all his cataracts, not long for this world anyway, but still…it was like a hole had opened up in his heart.

  Well, at least there was still Simon.

  I need someone to talk to. Falkland finished cleaning out the containment chamber and went over to a small capsule on a workbench nearby. Maybe DAD can help me sort things out. He thumbed a control stud on the side of the capsule. Momentarily, a faint vapor began issuing from a port on top. The vapor twinkled and sparkled in the late morning sunlight, thickening as it spread and expanded into a visible mist. Falkland paid no attention to the mist, while it began forming itself into a recognizable, if shadowy outline of a face and shoulders…a reasonable facsimile of Dr. Ryne Falkland himself, founder of the Project and Ben’s long-deceased father. Falkland instead busied himself with prepping the containment chamber for another run, checking the electron guns, the pattern buffer, cycling the interior ports and feedstock reservoirs.

  The facial outline of the DAD swarm beamed down at Falkland with a bemus
ed half-smile, still twinkling in the shafts of sunlight as the bots configured themselves into final patterns, grabbing atoms and slamming molecules to form up the image.

  ***You are preparing the Lab for another run, I see, son…you’re always quite thorough in your work***

  Falkland looked up briefly, critically appraising the realism of the swarm image. “I’m not sure what happened, Dad. Christ, I hated to lose Jiggs…maybe it was the pattern buffer. Guess I’ve got a little tweaking to do.”

  ***Maybe more than a little, Ben…there seem to be some anomalies in the drivers…perhaps I could help?***

  “I was hoping you’d say that…I’ll load up the routines and we can both take a look.”

  It had long been a dream of Falkland’s to find a way to re-assemble deconstructed objects, to reverse the process that the Assimilationists were using to disassemble their nutty volunteers and send them on to the Greater Swarm, or wherever it was they went to. It ought to be a simple matter of scanning the entire configuration of a living person, then imposing that same configuration, that same pattern of atom bond energies and geometries, on new feedstock and re-assembling the same person.

  Ben Falkland had continued Dr. Ryne Falkland’s work of decades, experimenting with a special kind of configuration pattern emitter that imposed a sort of memory field on the new molecules. A memory field that was supposed to hold the scanned pattern and impress that same pattern on the new molecules. But it was damnably hard to do this with living systems, always had been. Nanobotic assemblers could break down anything they could get to. And the same assemblers could slam atoms and pretty much build anything that had a repeatable pattern, even now, organic material.

  But the great question was this: was the re-assembled pattern actually the same as the deconstructed pattern? Was B = A? Or was it just a clever analog, a simulation, an angel swarm entity like DAD? Philosophers called this conundrum the Ship of Theseus. Was a ship that was maintained by swapping out all of its wooden planks still the same ship, once all the planks had been changed?

  So he had been experimenting on living things the last few weeks, spiders, cockroaches, lab rats, and now one of his two pet Shih Tzus…Mr. Jiggs. He’d finagled with the pattern configs for weeks, trying different approaches. He’d tested the emitters, buffers and injectors with all manner of atomic feedstock, just to be sure. He’d managed to disassemble and reassemble all manner of critters, but you could never really tell with rats and cockroaches. It wasn’t like you could ask them questions: Are you really the same thing I just disassembled?

  Jiggs had been placed inside the small containment cell, after he’d done his business outside in the bushes, of course. No sense introducing any more organic matter into the experiment than necessary. A small-mass nanobotic swarm had been released into the cell. Jiggs was rapidly disassembled and the resulting atomic debris was held in a special containment field that kept the relevant atoms in close proximity. The pattern buffer also read and maintained a ’memory’ of the original configuration. This memory field was a new design of Falkland’s, in which all the original atom and molecule configurations and their bond energies and geometries were stored and used to re-construct the original.

  The memory field containing the atomic patterns of the original Jiggs was then run through a new config pattern processor and the new config re-imposed on the atoms in the memory field. The result was a ghostly likeness of Jiggs, but the shadowy image wouldn’t hold on its own and Falkland, reluctantly, had to let it go, let it disperse. The technique still needed work. And Falkland had only Simon left. He wasn’t too keen on donating his only remaining pet to Science just yet.

  For nearly an hour, Falkland and DAD examined the software loaded into the pattern buffers, debugged the configs and speculated on what might be happening, why the new field didn’t hold the originally scanned pattern and thus why the original object could not be properly reconstructed.

  It was well after noon, when a loud buzzing at the Lab entrance shook Falkland out of his funk. Someone was at the secured doors outside the Containment Center. Falkland checked…it was Major Lucian Bridges. Oh, crap…he’d forgotten completely. Bridges had been invited to a little demo that afternoon…only Falkland no longer had anything to show the Quantum Corps officer. He let the Major into the containment center anyway.

  Bridges was a program manager from Table Top, overseeing several efforts that ASL was running for the Corps. He was a likeable, if someone prickly administrator…program managers tended to be that way…. Tall with a red hair buzz cut and long delicate fingers like a pianist, which he sometimes was in his spare moments, Bridges came over and peered into the containment cell.

  “I don’t see anything, Dr. Falkland. You said you had something to show me, some new kind of config generator.”

  “I did,” Falkland admitted. “But the results of my last test weren’t worth keeping around.” He explained what had happened that morning.

  Bridges shrugged. “So where do you go from here?”

  Falkland ran a hand through his thinning hair. “Is the Corps still interested? I’m not that far…I’m sure of it.”

  “Hell, yes, Doctor. The Corps’ interested in anything that can counter what the Assimilationists are doing. What I’ve seen of your work…there’s still a lot of promise. What else do you need from me?”

  “Well, DAD and I are still working out the kinks in this blasted pattern buffer and emitter. What I’d like to do is this: once we’ve got the buffer working…I’d like to have the Corps’ permission to do some live experiments, with actual people.”

  DAD’s shadowy face made a slight tightening of its lips, at least that’s what Bridges thought he had done. It was hard to tell with some angels…it depended on how good the config was.

  ***Dr. Falkland and I have a slight difference of opinion on this matter, Major…clearly the config buffer needs additional testing…I would not recommend scaling up the experiments quite so fast***

  Bridges rubbed at some stubble his razor had missed that morning. “You think this gadget will actually work…didn’t you just tell me you couldn’t get your dog back? What makes you think it’ll work with humans? What evidence do you have that this thing will actually retrieve people who’ve already been assimilated? There are a helluva lot of people at Table Top who think that’s nonsense…that it violates the laws of physics and so forth.”

  Falkland took a deep breath. “Call it a hunch, if you want, Major. I can produce just as much evidence the other way. The basic philosophy of Assimilation is wrong, on a lot of different levels. Here, let’s look at this logically. Assimilation begins with one great question: does assimilating mean just enhancing our minds and bodies as is, inserting bots and swarms to take over or develop or enhance new capabilities in our more or less original bodies?

  “Or does Assimilation mean ‘deconstruction?’ Breaking down the human body form into its constituent atoms and rebuilding it as a multi-configuration swarm, able to look and act like humans (as angels) but also able to act and look like other beings and structures as well.

  “Enhancement versus reconfiguration…that’s the great divide in Assimilationist thinking.”

  Bridges understood. “I guess I’ve seen both types of thinking among Assimilationists. Nowadays, they seem to go in for deconstruction, as you call it. You’ve heard the complaints…our DNA is old and creaky, full of junk. Multiple-configuration is way better, more resilient, able to adapt to change, you can’t die, just change config. I can tell you one thing: UNIFORCE is looking for any and every technique they can get their hands on to stop them…”

  “Precisely,” Falkland said. “DAD, show him the chart.”

  The DAD swarm pinched off a small set of bots and began swirling into a new pattern, eventually forming a small two-column chart hanging right in mid-air.

  Falkland went on. “So you can see there are pros and cons on e
ach side. You’re right, though, Major. The Assimilationists have changed their tune. They deconstruct everything now. To me, it’s just a form of murder.”

  “They want to get rid of humans…that’s what’s behind the movement,” Bridges was sure. “Do the Old Ones’ work for them.”

  “Would Quantum Corps be interested in funding more experiments, Major? Experiments with live human volunteers?”

  Bridges nodded. “I don’t know about Quantum Corps. But UNIFORCE might. Tell you what: write up a proposal, explain what you need in funding and equipment, any kind of resource. I’ve got some contacts in Paris. Plus CINCQUANT himself is there…that’s General Quint. He’s an old atomgrabber from way back…I’m sure he’d listen, maybe put in a good word for us.”

  Ben Falkland did as Major Bridges requested.

  Two weeks later, the project had come to a critical juncture. New methods and new configs for retrieving and re-constructing nanobotically disassembled and assimilated people had been developed. Falkland and DAD had worked for weeks, night and day, to find every bug, fix every flaw, run sim after sim. The idea was to combat the advance of the Assimilationists, by showing adherents and followers that what they did could be undone. Their subject today: another of Falkland’s pets…this one another Shih Tzu, named Simon.

  Falkland wanted one last live experiment before advancing the project to human volunteers.

  Simon was a black and tan brother to Mr. Jiggs. Falkland fed him a few treats, then hoisted the little bugger up into the containment cell, closing and securing the hatch behind. From the other side of the porthole, Simon munched on the last bits of his treat, then stared morosely out at Falkland, slowly wagging his tail.

  “Simon, don’t look at me like that. This will only take a few minutes. DAD, how’s the buffer looking?”

  DAD swirled and sparkled in the late afternoon sunlight. The swarm angel was only a barebones head-likeness of Dr. Ryne Falkland today…more apparition than real. DAD was devoting most of his processor to managing the config buffer and little to keeping up appearances for Falkland.