Johnny Winger and the Battle at Caloris Basin Read online

  ***Config patterns are stable, Ben. Injector guns are primed and ready to trigger on first alarm…feed valve is closed, but powered up. Memory field at state one, ready to transmit…all parameters within normal tolerances…it appears that everything is ready. How do you feel about the experiment today?***

  Falkland sniffed. Nice of you to ask, DAD, he thought. He’d programmed that into the angel’s core routines just last week…a new sympathy module he’d swiped from the Net. At least, the cloud of bugs had the smarts to know when to invoke it.

  “I’m feeling confident, today, DAD…one last check of all systems and we’re ready to go.”

  A quick look around the containment controls assured Falkland that nothing had been overlooked.

  “Okay, DAD…here goes--“ He pressed a button, opening a port inside the cell. Instantly a swarm of nanobotic disassemblers flooded the compartment, enveloping Simon in a faint mist that flickered with pinpricks of light. The Shih Tzu stared out longingly, tail still wagging. Soon enough, his face was lost in the fog.

  ***Reading normal activity, Ben…solution parameters within tolerance. EM levels normal and in the green range…all configurations holding…***

  As before, the swarm filled the containment cell and began disassembling poor Simon, atom by atom, molecule by molecule. Falkland had sometimes wondered what that would feel like…would it hurt, did it happen too fast, what went through your mind? During the earlier runs, he had avoided peering into the compartment…not wanting to see his subject’s face half-eaten away or in some unfinished state of disassembly. This time, he couldn’t help it and took a look.

  Mostly, there wasn’t much to see. The mist that was the swarm filled most of the view inside the porthole. He could catch occasional glimpses of a shadow; presumably that was Simon’s body. He seemed remarkably calm for Simon, not squirming and fidgeting around like he usually did. Maybe, his neuromuscular functions had already been--

  Then he saw the face. It was still recognizably Simon, but grayed out somehow, washed out and devoid of features. He had whiskers, a mouth, a hint of beard and his nose wiggled, but texture was missing…almost as if Simon were unfinished lump of clay, waiting for final touches. Then the mist covered his face and he was gone.

  Falkland shook off a brief shiver and concentrated on the displays, showing the progress of deconstruction. “Memory field stable, we’re scanning now, DAD…looks like everything’s stable, within range.”

  ***I detect no anomalies in the field emitter…containment field also holding well…disassembly operation now sixty five per cent complete…structure file buffer overload…I recommend truncating peripheral details until the buffer clears…***

  Falkland saw instantly what DAD was talking about. The atom bond energies and geometries that made up Simon were overloading the memory registers of the system. Well, Simon was a complicated guy, Falkland thought. I mean is a complicated guy, he corrected himself.

  When deconstruction was over, if all went well, Simon the Shih Tzu would be reduced to a hopefully well-contained field of disassembled atoms and molecules and nothing more. At that point, Falkland’s memory field would sweep through the chamber, reading each and every atomic bond, measuring electron-volt energies, analyzing each atom’s geometric construction, recording it all and saving it in a massive file that constituted the physical ‘essence’ of what had once been a wiggling, yapping little dog.

  And if all went well, Falkland would write that same memory field over the contained atoms of the now disassembled Simon, instructing the bots to re-build the very same structure, atom by atom, molecule by molecule, according to what was held in the memory field.

  When it was all done, if Falkland had done his homework, the new structure would be Simon once again, at least in every physical way that mattered. Whether his mind and thoughts and habits would return as before….well, Dr. Ryne Falkland himself had long ago decided to leave that to the philosophers.

  First things first, he told himself. “DAD, let’s see if we can bring Simon back to physicality. We have good structure on the containment?”

  ***All data seems clean and within expected variations, Ben. I have finished all check routines and variations are minimal. There was some dropout in data collected from Zones 41 through 45, but I have activated interpolation routines to make up for the loss…I don’t think the subject will be affected***

  “Zones 41 through 45--“ Falkland consulted a handwritten list he had taped to the console. “We’ve seen that before…the hind leg muscles…not sure what’s happening with that. Hope Simon doesn’t come back walking with a limp. Well, here goes--“ He stabbed a button and the system monitor beeped and flashed warnings: MEMORY FIELD OPERATING….KEEP CLEAR…

  He looked inside the chamber.

  For a few moments, the mist continued to swirl, speckling and twinkling and popping like a miniature thunderstorm. Falkland knew the bots were slamming atoms as fast as they could, using the memory field as a blueprint, re-building Simon molecule by molecule. At least, he hoped that’s what was happening.

  Then, slowly, the swarm mist began to clear. The first shape to appear was a nose, then a mouth. Falkland peered into the chamber closely, checking for texture, patterns, evidence that the memory field had worked.

  The mist began to thin out and that’s when Falkland’s heart sank. It was Simon, all right, at least something recognizable as Simon. All the parts seemed to be there: a face, four legs, a squat little furry body…it was black and tan in coloration, that seemed normal…a tail that wagged.

  But Simon was transparent. Structure wasn’t filling in properly. Falkland realized he could see right through the structure.

  “I’m adjusting the field to compensate--“ he announced. Falkland fiddled with some dials on the console, trying to bring a stronger memory field to bear, to override the structure that was being formed. Trying to force the atoms and molecules that made up Simon back into normal position, normal geometry. The overall look seemed right, but there weren’t enough molecules.

  Simon was little more than a cloud.

  In the end, Falkland couldn’t get Simon’s structure to fill in. The mist that was the swarm rebuilding the little dog stubbornly refused to coalesce into something more substantial. The basic pattern was there but memory field integrity was being lost somewhere in the process.

  ***Buffer overflow…truncation at all higher registers***

  DAD announced a problem with the config generator memory…too much data, too many patterns to reconstruct. The atomic complexity of living organisms had defeated many attempts before. Falkland swore under his breath.

  “--not again, not again….”

  The only humane thing to do was abort the operation. He’s have to let Simon go, be dispersed. Just like Jiggs before him. Reluctantly, Falkland killed the config generator and the memory field collapsed. Simon, what was left of him, slowly faded from view and was lost, his atoms and molecules scattered throughout the chamber. Soon, only a faint haze clouded the containment cell porthole.

  “Simon, you’re in there somewhere. Maybe not in a physical sense, but I’ve got the configs…we can do this. We have to do this.” He rubbed at his hairline and worried with a loose strand of hair.

  ***Major Bridges will not be pleased at the outcome of this run, Ben. He had great hopes that your configs and memory field would be strong enough to maintain structure, and bring Simon back***

  Falkland shut down the system and the containment cell went dark. He sat down heavily in a nearby chair, sipped half-heartedly at a warm cola drink. “That’s not the worst of it, DAD. I’ve got a demo scheduled at UNIFORCE Paris in less than two weeks. What am I going to show them…a bunch of slides and graphics? General Quint wants results…all I’ve got is theories.”

  The DAD swarm roiled and drifted over toward the containment cell. ***This technique is not ready for more complex structures
, son. It will months before it can be tried on human volunteers, or anything that complex***

  “Thanks, DAD…I figured that out for myself. And I don’t have any more pets to donate to Science either. But we’ll have to think of something. I’ve got ten days to put something together for Paris.”

  He watched as the DAD swarm swirled around the containment cell, almost as if the swarm were ‘tasting’ or ‘feeling’ the device.

  Maybe the Assimilationists are right and that’s what Simon and Jiggs are telling us, he thought. Maybe it’s not structure that’s important. It’s the pattern, the configuration. Maybe that’s what makes us truly unique.

  The great conundrum that philosophers called the Ship of Theseus kept coming back to bite them again and again.

  Dana Polansky peered into the containment cell, watching as the form of a small white lab rat began to materialize.

  “What exactly is this Ship of Theseus problem you mentioned, Doc?”

  Dr. Ben Falkland pressed a button on his wristpad. Instantly, a 3-d image was launched into the air over their heads. It was a wooden ship, complete with rowers and oars churning in the air, a replica of an ancient Athenian trireme.

  “Behold…the Ship of Theseus,” Falkland said. “In ancient Greece, the philosophers debated on this for centuries. A fellow named Theseus came back from a visit to Crete. He was much loved and the Athenians wanted to preserve the ship. But, as with any long term preservation project, occasionally they had to replace parts of the ship…the wooden planks, the oars, and so forth. It was Plutarch who related the problem: at what point, during this on-going replacement, does the ship cease to be the same ship, when all its parts have been replaced?”

  Polansky looked puzzled. “So what’s the answer?”

  Falkland had a mischievous smile. “That’s the conundrum. It’s a question about what is real…or I should say, what is more real? Is it the wooden planks themselves? Or some underlying pattern? They never resolved the matter.”

  “I can see how this might pertain to Assimilationism. What do you think, Dr. Falkland?”

  Here, Falkland sighed, killed the 3-d and pointed inside the porthole of the containment cell. The lab rat was still forming and he watched intently for a long minute. “I lean toward the pattern-people. We can disassemble all kinds of structures with our assembler bots today. We can build all kind of structures as well. But if we break down something and try to re-construct the same thing, is it really the same thing? Does the pattern persist in time and space? I say it does. Of course, Hector here—my experimental subject—might want to weigh in on the matter too. Looks like he’s coming in nicely…the memory field seems to have held up this time.”

  Polansky studied Ben Falkland for a moment. He was thin, almost skeletal in the face, gaunt and a little pale. He had a shock of sandy, almost white hair that seemed to forever flop into his right eye. And he squinted when he talked.

  “Dr. Falkland, I won’t mince words here. Several months ago, my daughter Jana joined the Assimilationists. She went to one of their awakenings and then she went into a booth. She’s gone now—“ here, Dana scrunched up her nerve to hold back a few tears moistening her eyes, “I want her back…I just want her back from those freaks. I have a contact at UNIFORCE in Paris. Staff aide to General Quint…CINCQUANT. She told me about you…and your father. How you’ve been working on….er, bringing people, angels, whatever, back. Re-constructing them, I guess.”

  Falkland seemed to understand. His eyes softened. He stopped squinting. “Well, it’s true that our lab has been working on this for a long time. We’ve had some modest successes.”

  “So you can do it? This mouse…this rat…you’ve just reconstructed him?

  Falkland hastened to clarify himself. “What I mean to say is we’ve had some successes at deconstructing small animals, lab rats, dogs, frogs, and so forth, and reconstructing them. We’ll do days of tests on Hector here. Of course, I’m not sure we can say we’ve actually reconstructed the original…Hector doesn’t say. But examinations and tests have shown little to no difference between the original and the reconstructed version…at least, the things we can measure.”

  Dana Polansky described in detail what had happened to Jana. Falkland puffed on an unlit pipe, as she did so, all the while finagling with controls for the containment chamber. Inside, Hector was squirming to be loose, his thin tail flopping about with agitation. Lights winked on and off on a small panel near the hatch.

  “So you can do this…you can bring my Jana back?”

  Falkland smiled faintly. “I can’t make any promises, Ms. Polansky. To be honest, we’ve never tried our memory field process on a live human yet. We need permission to do that. Where is your daughter now?”

  Polansky shook her head ruefully. “Who knows? I’ve seen her from time to time…at least, I think I’ve seen her. At first, I thought I was hallucinating. You know, distraught mother and all. But now…” Dana held out her hands, like she didn’t know what to do with them. “Now, I really believe it was Jana. My daughter’s like an angel, a swarm entity of some kind, and she seems to be able to come and go at will, like dust motes. I don’t really understand it. It’s like she comes back to re-assure me that everything’s okay. Maybe I am dreaming all this, Dr. Falkland, but I don’t think so.”

  Falkland said, “The Assimilationists claim that all their ‘volunteers’ are taken up into the mother swarm…or eventually will be.” His smile abruptly faded. “That day may soon be upon us, if what I’m hearing on the news is right.”

  “Can you bring my Jana back, Dr. Falkland? Or is this just some kind of fantasy here?” She indicated all the tanks and pipes and containment vessels.

  “Oh, no, Ms. Polansky, it’s no fantasy. It’s an ongoing research project, with UNIFORCE direction and funding. Of course, there are some practicalities here.”

  ‘What kind of practicalities?”

  Falkland thought, fussed with his pipe. “We’ll have to locate your daughter…somehow. Get her in here. And there are authorizations and waivers to deal with, UNIFORCE, the University, local and state agencies…I’m sure you understand. This is a military project, so there are security considerations.”

  Dana became alarmed, feeling her best chance to get Jana back was starting to slip away. “Dr. Falkland, I’ll sign anything you want. I’m not here as a reporter. Solnet knows nothing about this. I just want my Jana back.”

  “Of course…of course. You do present an interesting problem, Ms. Polansky. But we have to work out a way of finding your daughter and getting her, maybe enticing her, here. All my equipment is here.”

  Dana gave that some thought. “My contact at UNIFORCE is a staff aide to General Lamar Quint. Don’t spread this around, Dr. Falkland, but Colonel Goncalves, my source, has told me General Quint has seen things like I have…an angel, maybe an apparition. Only in his case, she said it was like an angel of General John Winger.”

  Falkland whistled. “Winger…the General John Winger? I thought he died—“

  “He did…or at least, we think he did. That mission to Europa back in 2120. This is what my source is telling me. According to her, Quint’s experienced several instances of this, mostly in his office, where Winger or the Winger angel shows up. She said Quint’s tried to convince others it happened, but not very successfully. Rumor is Winger’s some kind of agent, inside the so-called mother swarm…but nobody really believes that.”

  “So how does this help us get your daughter here to my lab?”

  Dana sort of half smiled. “A cock-eyed idea, really. I’m almost ashamed to admit I had it…but maybe I can convince General Quint…if I can get an interview with him…you know on what the Corps is doing to get us ready for the Big Day…maybe I can convince him to contact General Winger. If Winger’s an angel, maybe he can find Jana. Bring her here—“ Dana looked down at her black pumps. “I know that so
unds—“

  “No, no…it’s okay. It’s worth a shot, Ms. Polansky. “Really, I think we should explore any avenue. It would help me if you could get me some personal effects of your daughter…favorite toys, clothes, shoes, anything that might have come into contact with her. I could do some tests, try to tune my equipment to be compatible with her…shall we say, patterns. And some pictures too, would help.”

  “That I can do now—“ Dana pecked a few keys on her wristpad, causing the thing to emit a 3-D image of Jana, which she quickly animated. “Christmas morning, about five years ago. She was ten. See, she just opened up her new mindpod…she always wanted one. Look at that big grin—“

  Falkland watched the animation proceed. “Ms. Polansky---may I call you Dana--?”

  “Please.”

  “Dana, if you can somehow get your daughter to come here to the lab, I’m sure I can get her into containment. Once you’ve signed all the waivers and we have permission from our sponsors, I’m surely willing to try to get her back. Of course, I can’t promise anything. All this is still experimental. And there is the Ship of Theseus problem as well.”

  “You mean what results from the process may or may not really be Jana…is that what you’re saying?”

  “I’m saying that, to be clear and honest about this, if my procedure works as it has for only smaller subjects, I think I can produce an…an entity, shall we say…that is Jana in all the ways that matter. All the important ways. Is it really Jana? That, I’m afraid, is a philosophical question we may never be able to answer. In the meantime—“ he handed Dana a small capsule, with a hexagonal top covered with a few buttons and indicator lights. The lights were dark. “---in the meantime, take this with you.”

  Dana accepted the capsule, turning it end for end. “What is it?”

  “A containment capsule. On the chance your daughter shows up again in front of you, press this button here—“ he put her index finger gently on one of the buttons. “That’ll open the capture port and start a sequence of events. Swish this through your daughter’s form…wave it right through the densest part of the apparition….the angel, whatever. You may get lucky and capture the master bot. Do that several times and then toggle that same button. The capsule will close. Whatever you’ve captured will be inside in strong containment. Then, get this back to me. It’s worth a shot, don’t you think?”