Johnny Winger and the Battle at Caloris Basin Read online

  Now, Dana could no longer keep a few tears from dribbling down her cheeks. She found she didn’t care as she stuffed the capsule in her bag. “Dr. Falkland, I’m sorry…I…what can I say? I want my Jana back. You’re the only one who can help.”

  They hugged briefly. Falkland placed his hands on Dana’s shoulders. “Just get Jana here, Ms. Polansky. We’ll take it from there.”

  Dana swallowed a few sobs, wiped her cheeks and eyes and told herself to suck it up, girl. “You’re my last hope. I have to believe this can happen…Ship of Theseus or not. You’re my last hope.”

  Chapter 13

  Inside the Mother Swarm

  Date: Unknown

  Time: Unknown

  He felt like he was being smothered. For what seemed like forever, he had been floating around in a warm bath, not a care in the world, then the world constricted itself down to a narrow tunnel and he found himself hurtling at breakneck speed down this curving corridor, first one way, then another, contractions increasing in frequency, smothering him…squeezing him…pressing in so tight he could hardly breathe…until he thought he was going to die but he didn’t because at that very moment, the world exploded in light.

  Then something slammed into his backside and it hurt like hell and he cried out.

  He felt himself turning, squirming and he felt hands all over, pressing and squeezing.

  “A fine boy—“ a voice said.

  Warm wet rags and sponges slithered around his body and before he knew it, he was cleaned up, dried off and firmly wrapped in some kind of cloth. It was so incredibly bright, he had to squint to see anything…mostly there were only forms, snatches of images, a face here, lips, a mouth moving. Someone’s lips touched the top of his head.

  After this topsy-turvy carnival ride, he was secured in a better place…warm, cuddly, lots of soft sounds, a reassuring heartbeat rhythmically pounding in his ears.

  Gradually, over what seemed like hours, his vision improved and things became clearer. A face appeared. A man’s face. Somehow he knew it was his father. Jamison Winger. The face had a broad smile and before he knew it, strong hands were lifting him up. Now he was dangling in air—not safe! not safe up here!—he kicked a little and squirmed some more and the hands put him back down after a time, again in the warm, tingling, smothering embrace of soft cloth and thick blankets and sheets.

  Bassinet popped into his mind.

  His father’s face appeared with a broad grin over it. Fingers tickled him under the chin, brushed wisps of hair on his head, poked him in the cheeks and side. Hey! Not so hard, big guy!

  Now, his father’s mouth was moving…he was saying something…the words, he couldn’t quite—

  “…very proud…really, it’s a miracle…I don’t even have words—“

  Another voice, a feminine voice, slipped in. “He’s got your eyes and my lips…isn’t he beautiful--?”

  Now, his father bent down, putting his stubbly face right into Johnny Winger’s. “I’m proud as I can be…what a day…you passed every test. All the config changes. All the checks…we’re done with all that now. A great day, so proud.”

  The feminine voice: “Go on, give it to him.”

  His father produced something yellow in his hand and swooped it down into the bassinet, landing it right on top of Winger’s chest. His heart was thumping so hard, he thought it might jackhammer its way out of his chest.

  It was a toy. A yellow, plastic toy…a model biplane, with wings, wheels, a tail. Winger squinted, reached out to caress the thing. He could just make out Spad on the side and a red, white and blue tricolor. The Lafayette Escadrille.

  “Here, John…this is for you—“ His father released the model into Johnny’s awkward fingers, which promptly dropped the biplane into the covers. That earned a chuckle. The toy was promptly placed back in his grasp.

  “With this, you can go anyplace you want. It’s like magic.”

  He fondled the thing for a long time, feeling its smooth texture, its edges, the rubber wheels, the thin edge of the labels and decals. It was cool, but there was much to explore with the biplane. After a time, his fingers groped their way to the tiny plastic figure of the pilot, his jaunty head poking out of the cockpit. There was a helmet, perhaps a scarf, all very interesting, and inside the cockpit, down in the footwell, his fingers eventually found—

  The Button!

  Without a second thought, Johnny Winger pressed the button. In an eye blink, he was back in the tunnel, whizzing past pyramids and dodecahedrons and polygons and all manner of shapes, hurtling at breakneck speed through a curving corridor, and he thought he would pass out from the g-forces, but finally he came to a rattling, teeth-jarring stop in a blinding light, with a roaring rush of deceleration, landing with a hard bump on his butt.

  Jamison Winger had been re-arranging furniture when Johnny pressed the button inside the biplane cockpit. Let’s see: chest over there, rocking horse there, my old Navy trunk back there.

  He turned back to the bassinet to check on his week-old son and found that Johnny was gone. The bassinet was empty, save for tousled covers and blankets. But he wasn’t upset. Not at all. It was the way things were supposed to be.

  Jamison Winger just smiled and went on with his re-arrangement of the furniture. He’d done everything he could possibly do for the boy and now he was on his own.

  Chapter 14

  The Surface of Mercury

  Latitude 31 North; Longitude 190 West

  Caloris Basin

  November 12, 2155 (Earth U.T.)

  When Johnny Winger awakened, he was no longer in a child’s bassinet in a small wood-frame house in Pueblo, Colorado. Where the hell was he?

  He looked around the darkened space. It seemed to be a small room, almost like a closet, but with a very low ceiling. With a start, he realized he was in a bed, a bed that resembled an oblong pod, with a lid on top and bedding below, a container. Images of ANAD containment capsules came to mind.

  “Doc, what is this place? Where am I…are we?”

  ***Analyzing signatures now…this appears to be some kind of containment pod…detecting launch and capture system to your right…temperature and medium controls… interface and comm…Johnny, this is unlike any containment in my memory***

  Containment, huh? Winger tried feeling around, noting the solid interior structure, the tight seals. It felt like he was lying in a bed but that could have been just a memory…he’d had lots of memories lately.

  “How the hell do I get out?” he asked himself. But before he could poke around to find out, he felt a strong pressure drop. A stiff breeze circled inside the pod and he felt like he was coming apart…it was sucking him toward the port…he tried to fight it but it was like a tornado, scooping him up, throwing him around…his arms his legs his face …it was all—

  Then he was free. The winds died down and forces he couldn’t explain pulled him together. He could feel pressure in spots, he was growing a form, some kind of body…in minutes, he looked like a human being again…but he could still feel forces he couldn’t explain, winds and breezes and tugs and yanks passing right through his body.

  That’s when he saw the Shadow Man.

  He stood clad in a long robe or shoe-length coat, with a hood pulled up over his head. Inside the hood, he saw no face, only a deep black speckled with occasional pinpricks of lights, like fireflies.

  When the Shadow Man spoke, it was like hearing a hundred voices at once, all coming out of a barrel.

  “John Winger…you’ve passed all the tests…this is your final configuration…how do you feel?”

  Winger was still examining himself. There are my two hands, my ten fingers, my two arms. I feel like myself, sort of. He could run one hand right through the other, but then he was an angel and he knew that. The outer form was still solidifying, still filling in.

  “Kind of cold, I guess. I look kind of pale…f
eel that way, too. Can you ‘feel’ pale? Where am I?”

  Now the Shadow Man moved his robed arm and the walls opened up. Before, there had been only a dark barrier but now the walls devolved into a sort of semi-transparent membrane and he could see beyond them. Wherever they were, it seemed everything he saw was like a nanobotic mesh. Structures formed and re-formed as if they were fluid things, one flowing into the next.

  “This is Caloris Basin, Johnny. You’re on the surface of Mercury.”

  At first, Winger thought he had misheard the Shadow Man. He gathered more photons to see better and found that the Shadow Man was right.

  ‘Outside,’ he could see a black sky, with the harsh glare of strong sunlight flooding out much of the ground detail. There were mountains, a few craters, jagged cliffs in the distance. More details came to him, probably from the Shadow Man, in answer to his questions: a large impact basin…1500 kilometers in diameter…crater walls more than two kilometers high…the floor is covered by a lava plain, with radial stripes of ejecta outside the crater walls for hundreds of kilometers…

  “Why am I here?” he asked.

  The Shadow Man turned to face the great lava plain outside. “The Mother Swarm is coming. She needs the energy of your sun. A great base will be built here to gather that energy…energy for the final assimilation. You will help build that base.”

  “I don’t know anything about building bases.”

  “What you need to know will be provided. Johnny, you’ve passed all the tests. Your configuration is in a nearly final state. A few last adjustments…once the base is finished, a great ring will envelop your sun. This ring will direct the sun’s energy to receivers here at Caloris Basin. This is very important, Johnny. The Prime Key cannot be finished without it. Assimilation is coming and the Mother Swarm has need of your sun…indeed, all your worlds. It will be as it once was. Now, you must be prepared to receive the final adjustments…the knowledge you will need to help build this installation. “

  With that, the Shadow Man waved his arm and Winger felt another breeze tugging at him, blowing right through him. Something was happening, it was like he was being ripped apart, scattered, dissipated. Forces he couldn’t explain gathered him and pulled back into the containment pod. He felt light-headed…but he had no head. How could you feel light-headed when—

  Doc, I don’t know what’s happening…everything’s getting blurry…I’m getting dizzy….faint…I can’t—

  The breezes grew stronger. Once, when he was six years old, he and his Dad and brother Brad had been briefly caught in a sudden thunderstorm on Pueblo Lake…late summer that was and the storm fronts sometimes swept down out of the Rockies with a speed and a force that could catch unwary hikers and boaters by surprise. The wind and waves blew their small boat onto its sides, nearly capsizing them. Johnny felt like he was being lifted off the deck, he clung to a rail, ducked his head, heard the unearthly howl of the wind and thought a great beast had come down from the skies. They had barely made it back to the dock when the heavens split open and the deluge came.

  This was like that, only it was stronger. The wind was blowing right through him. In the back of his mind, he thought he heard Doc’s voice whispering….

  ***New configs, Johnny…they’re loading new files…files being rearranged, re-named…the buffer file might not—“

  Then it was dark. And the dark seemed to last an eternity.

  When he came to, he seemed to be in the same containment pod. He felt the bedding below, the rumpled sheets, all askew, felt the close top, just beyond his nose. He could almost lick the thing with his tongue, but he had no tongue.

  “Doc, is this the same place?’

  For a long time, Doc gave him no answer and he was afraid that something had happened. Doc had warned him, right before lights out, that files were being changed, re-named, re-written. Did his file, the Config Buffer Status Check file, survive?

  He felt the same. But his coupler remained silent. What had happened to Doc?

  Just then, the breezes picked up again. Something was happening, he was being sucked down toward his feet, a port was opening.

  Moments later, he had exited the containment pod and was beginning to gather himself into a form that once would have been called Johnny Winger.

  His coupler chirped. It was Doc.

  ***Johnny…is that you…are you there?...I cycled the port…extraction was automatic…I’m detecting familiar signatures, thermals…Johnny--?***

  It was the most welcome sound he’d heard in a long time. “Yeah, Doc…it’s me. Did you really pull me out of containment? How’d you get outside?”

  ***I was never in the same containment you were, Johnny…I managed to trigger the launch process by interacting with certain molecule clusters…it works differently from what we use***

  “No doubt, Doc…you know, I feel kind of funny. My mind is just swimming with…I don’t know, facts, designs, figures, layouts, schematics…it feels like I was some kind of builder or architect.”

  ***Not was, Johnny…you are…the Central Entity has loaded your processor with details of this base they’re building…plans, materials, operational details…remember what the Entity said: you’re some kind of expediter or overseer***

  “But why me? I don’t know anything about building a base on the surface of Mercury…except, maybe I do…now…this is weird.” He found that by extending his hands and interacting with the molecules of the wall, he could cause the wall to fade slightly, so that he could ‘see’ outside. Doc had explained it as gathering photons and processing them into some kind of image. ***Your processor does what your eyes and mind used to do, in forming visual images…except now, you can interact directly with the photons.***

  He made the wall fade into a sort of translucent veil. Beyond the room they were in, he could see the burning, sun-blasted rockscape of Mercury, of Caloris Basin, ringed with distant mountains, punctuated with smaller craters, hundreds of them scattered like buckshot across the lava plain, and smaller peaks nearby.

  He found that just by thinking of all the plans and schematics swimming around in his mind, that the crater surface morphed into vast compound of structures, yet another image but this one of a future construction, construction he had been designated to lead or assist in some way. There were, in his mind’s eye, overlaid on the crater floor, domes, and huge antenna fields, excavators and trenches, dishes that looked like parabolic radiotelescopes, tunnels and grids and wireways and transmission towers, all projected onto the crater floor in a sort of ‘here’s what it should look like’ view.

  “Doc, I see it…all the parts of the base. Wow…I’m supposed to guide this? I don’t know the first thing—“

  ***But you do, Johnny…I’ve scanned your processor arrays…every register is full, some overflowing…you have the knowledge, Johnny. The Central Entity gave it to you. You’re like a program control module, executing a long-decided, well-thought out overall plan…you know what you have to do with these plans***

  Johnny Winger ‘blinked’ and the overlay of the complex faded away. “You’re right, Doc. This stuff is intel…valuable intel. I’ve got to get it to Quantum Corps. But how? Here I am…stuck on Mercury. How the hell do I get all this to Earth?”

  ***Johnny…remember what the Central Entity said…this base is designed to gather a fraction of the Sun’s energy and that energy will assist the mother swarm when it finally arrives in this region of space. They need a lot of energy to break down planets and moons and assimilate them. That’s what this complex is all about. I have detected strong quantum coupler signals from a position beyond those central peaks you see. After analysis, I concluded the swarms that are already here are using a coupler to travel around the solar system***

  This puzzled Winger. “A quantum coupler…I don’t understand—that’s for comms—“

  ***Think of it like this, Johnny. You and I are now just patterns of
atoms. Our patterns are what matters. The atoms can come from anywhere. Why travel back and forth across the solar system by carrying atoms around? Why not just transmit the pattern…and re-assemble the pattern at your destination…with different atoms? As long as the pattern holds and you have some way to impress the pattern on atoms…you can travel as fast as any electromagnetic signal…at the speed of light. Earth to Mercury in less than five minutes***

  Winger nodded, though no one could see his head nod because there was no head. John Winger was a collection of nanobots configured to loosely resemble a human being. But he remembered nodding and the instinct was still there.

  “That’s how we get back to Earth, isn’t it, Doc. We beam ourselves back…or at least our patterns. Do you think it’ll work?”

  ***It has to work, Johnny…now to see about getting out of this place***

  After some reconnaissance, Doc II announced that they were ensconced in a sort of shelter mounted on top of one of the central peaks inside Caloris Basin. The shelter had ports for entering and departing. Doc found a way to seep through one of the ports.

  An hour later, the swarm that might once have been called Johnny Winger, with its embedded Doc II element, was outside the shelter, and drifting like a dust devil across the seared ground of the crater.

  For a long time, strong radiation gusts blasted them and made navigation difficult. Doc homed on the intermittent quantum coupler signals and they made their way laboriously across the lava plain, tacking first one way, then another, as radiation storms swept the surface. Winger let Doc do the piloting and tried to come to terms with what they were and where they were.

  Jeez, I’m a cloud of bots drifting across the surface of Mercury. This feels like a comic book or a superhero vid. Or maybe just a bad dream.

  But it was all too real.

  Winger found he was glad that he had no actual body. Human bodies weren’t meant to trudge across the surface of Mercury under the baleful eye of the Sun, scoured and flash-fried like meat on a grille. Doc had a difficult time just keeping some semblance of their configuration together. The Sun’s radiation was more than powerful enough to strip electrons off every atom in their formation, and make atom junk of what was left.