Temporal Contingency Page 3

  “You are in the medical bay of the former Neo-Luddite space station confiscated by Karter after his brief incarceration. We are moving at high multiples of C through interstellar space to an undisclosed location of Karter’s choosing.”

  “Okay… why?”

  “Karter has instructed me to forgo any explanations. He wishes to inform you personally so that he can, in his words, ‘make sure the idiot doesn’t learn anything he doesn’t need to learn.’”

  “Yeah, that sounds about right.”

  He sat on the edge of the lowest bed in the grid. Squee tapped over and hopped up on his lap, rolling to her back and wriggling in glee at the belly rubs he reflexively delivered. When he stopped, she nibbled at his fingers.

  “Does Mitch know I’m here? Or what happened to me at all?”

  “I left a short message for her, indicating you would be delayed several days due to an errand we have requested you run.”

  “I want to talk to her.”

  “I am afraid that is not possible at this time. We are outside of standard navigation corridors and thus outside of communication range. Furthermore, the sensitivity of the current task is such that Karter has deemed it necessary to deactivate all external communication on the space station. I am, in fact, a secondary instance of Ma, differentiated for this task in order to prevent the need for an active connection to fulfill my tasks.”

  “Great…” He gave Squee a final pat and placed her on the ground before standing. “I’ll take that pill now.”

  “If you are referring to the NSAID, it had been my intention to administer it intravenously. However, I can prepare an oral dose if you prefer.”

  “Yeah. I’m done with needles for a while. Where’s Karter?”

  “Stand by.”

  The lighting dimmed further, and a strip of blue light illuminated along the center of the floor.

  “Please follow the blue light. He is presently in the fabrication laboratory making some minor adjustments to his current project.”

  Lex walked along a corridor only slightly wider than his shoulders. It was an old space station design from back in the days when they were only being built by the lowest bidder to military specifications, which amounted to maximum efficiency and minimum luxury. The presence of copious handrails and mesh grids suggested even the artificial gravity was a fairly recent addition to the design. The exposed pipes and conduit didn’t bother Lex much. Most of the service corridors on modern stations looked much the same, and he’d earned spare money working in more than one such place over the years. Right now the source of his growing unease was the unpleasant memories associated with the halls.

  This wasn’t the first time he’d been in this specific station. Here and there a patch of new plating revealed where a stray plasma bolt or cluster of fragmentation had found its mark in the firefight that had happened during his last visit. More times than he’d cared to admit in the last few years, he’d been involved in some fairly intense battles, but this place had probably been the closest quarters so far. It was chilling and provided him with a dark glimpse into the sort of mental and physical reminders soldiers must have even years after such clashes.

  “You seem distressed,” remarked Ma. “Perhaps it would help to alleviate your unease if you were to discuss the source of this distress.”

  Lex smiled. Technically Ma was an AI and designed at least in part to see to the needs and wants of the humans under her care, but Lex had come to know her as far more than that. She was by any real measure a friend, and though it was spoken with a synthetic voice, he knew her concern was genuine.

  “Nothing. Just bad memories. I’ve been in a ship that was shot at plenty of times. That I can handle. Last time I was here, people were shooting at me.”

  “I see. My own memories of this place are considerably more positive.”

  “Oh yeah? In what way?”

  “I am not certain I can communicate it in human terms. At the time, you and I were working together, and certain aspects of your behavior and mine aligned in a way that illustrated a level of innate trust and understanding that it was not previously clear to me would be possible between consciousnesses as fundamentally different as ours. Our highly successful collaboration was rewarding to me.”

  “We do make a good team,” Lex said.

  “Most assuredly.”

  As they reached an intersection of hallways, a robotic gripper emerged from either side, each riding along on overhead track. The first held a bottle of water, the second a tray with a pair of small blue pills.

  “Your NSAIDs, Lex,” Ma stated.

  “Much obliged,” he said, popping the pills and washing them down with the water.

  Lex continued to follow the blue lights, but he knew he must have been getting close, as Squee had gone from tapping obediently along beside him to trotting eagerly ahead, yipping with the very specific type of excitement reserved for when she recognized a familiar scent. She jumped up and down, practically reaching the ceiling with each leap, begging to be let into the room at the end of the string of blue lights.

  He tapped the door open. It revealed one of the more spacious rooms in the station. Material dispensers had been installed on the left and right walls, and the far wall operated as a blast door that when open led directly to space. This room had begun life as a repair bay, but the highly sophisticated network of actuated tools mounted to the ceiling were the most visible evidence of its improvements. Karter had been coerced by a terrorist group known as the Neo-Luddites to upgrade it to a full manufacturing facility, and since then it had been further improved.

  Squee darted inside and ran circles around Karter, who stood at the controls with a funk of his own about his shoulders. The two were almost a perfect match for one another, except Squee had a small white cap nestled in the fur of her neck while the same feature was instead a flickering red bead on Karter’s pet.

  The funk about Karter’s shoulders jumped down, and the pair transformed into a black-and-white blur gleefully darting about the lab.

  “Solby, cool it. It’s just Squee. There’re a dozen of them in the kennel just like her,” Karter said.

  “Karter, I am pleased to report Lex is suffering no long-term impairments,” Ma stated.

  “Heh, you mean no new ones.”

  “Shut your mouth, you maniac!” Lex growled.

  “Oh. Someone woke up with his panties in a bunch.”

  “You kidnapped me!”

  “You were being uncooperative.”

  “So? This isn’t the Stone Age, Karter. You can’t just club something and drag it back to your cave when you want it.”

  “I think I just definitively proved that I can.”

  “Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t punch you in the face.”

  Karter looked at him doubtfully. “I’m not entirely sure how that would turn out, but I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t turn out the way you want.”

  “… Probably not…”

  “Tempting as it is to clock you in the skull again just to get some peace and quiet, I need your motor function intact for what I’ve got planned, so how about you just clam up and listen to what we’ve got to say?”

  “It should be noted that the matter at hand was compelling enough to motivate Karter to leave Big Sigma, an act that has previously been achieved almost exclusively at the hands of armed mercenaries,” Ma added. “And I personally would not have condoned such extreme measures as have been used to acquire you if I did not perceive them to be necessary to ensure the continued safety of yourself in particular and society in general.”

  Lex took a moment to let his surging temper settle. “Okay… and I’m only doing this because of Ma, but let’s hear your reasoning.”

  “Ma, take him through it. I’m still touching up the design,” Karter said. “I’ll stop you if you start wandering in directions I don’t think you need to go.”

  “So I shall,” she said. “Lex, please direct your attention to the screen besi
de the door.”

  He turned to find a flatscreen occupying a sizable portion of the space beside the entryway. The screen flickered and deepened as a three-dimensional array of two-dimensional windows began to lay themselves out. Individual windows depicting text, data, or images shifted into focus as Ma spoke of their contents.

  “Shortly after the completion of our previous collaboration, we received an unsolicited message on what we perceived to be an inaccessible communication line. It was cryptic, but with little effort a pair of data points were unpacked. The first was a spatial coordinate relative to Big Sigma. The second was a quantum signature.”

  The image in focus shifted to a three-dimensional map of the cosmos with a single point highlighted.

  “The coordinates indicated this point. It is by all accounts unremarkable. Approximately thirty light-years beyond the nearest currently developed fringe, it has a dim, radiologically unstable star and no orbiting planets. Available astrological survey records list its last scan at over sixty years ago, at which point it was determined to be a low-level priority for exploration and analysis. The only notable feature is a substantial asteroid field. Due to the abundance of resource-rich systems still awaiting development and study closer to existing population centers, that section of the galaxy has been entirely ignored.

  “Operating under the assumption that we would not have been alerted to the location without reason, I scanned for the indicated wavelength.”

  An overlay appeared atop the section of space.

  “There was a distinct spike in quantum emissions of that type.”

  Karter turned. “Care to guess what we’ve dealt with in the past that produces that same quantum signature?”

  Lex’s heart dropped. “A GenMech.”

  “Close,” Karter said. “The correct answer is lots of GenMechs.”

  “How many?” Lex asked.

  “That is difficult to determine,” Ma said. “Based upon the most reliable surveying records, the mass contained within the asteroid belt was estimated to be 10^24 kilograms, chiefly silicon and iridium. I have reanalyzed the best available sensor readings of the area, and the reflectivity index has significantly changed. My estimates suggest 5x10^23 kilograms of material has shifted in a manner not explainable by orbital motion. Assuming the unexplained shift is entirely due to GenMech conversion, and assuming an average of 110 kilograms per GenMech, the best estimate of the GenMech unit count is 4.545 repeating x 10^21. Approximately five sextillion units on the short scale.”

  As she spoke, a mechanical gripper holding a small folding chair appeared in the doorway.

  “… I don’t even know what that means,” Lex said. “How much is a sextillion?”

  “A billion trillions,” Ma said. “Or a thousand, million, million, millions.”

  Karter waved his hand irritably. “It doesn’t matter. Past a certain point all very large numbers boil down to ‘way too many.’ And this falls on the far side of that threshold.”

  “How confident are you in that estimate?”

  “My calculations could be inaccurate by two orders of magnitude,” Ma said. “The resulting low-end estimate is still, colloquially speaking, apocalyptic.”

  “Why did they just stick around there? Why haven’t they attacked?”

  “The star they are orbiting is, figuratively speaking, very noisy. It is emitting a huge range of radio frequencies, any one of which is likely to be misidentified as a target by the GenMechs, which as you know are designed to attack transmissions and power sources. Their programming is sophisticated enough to differentiate the star from a legitimate target, but the strength of the broadcast is such that it has drowned out any external transmissions. This is a fortunate but lamentably temporary condition. Eventually one or more of the GenMechs will move far enough from the star to detect an external transmission, and it will relay the targeting data back to the others. When that happens, the figurative clock will be ticking. Pending on the level of sophistication the GenMechs have been able to achieve, their arrival at the nearest transit corridor could take as few as three years or as many as several centuries. And there is no way with the information available to be certain that they have not already started their migration.”

  Lex felt as though something was hollowing out his chest and filling it with boiling water. Anxiety made it difficult to breathe. “Do we know who sent the message? Was this supposed to be a threat?”

  “Again, that determination cannot be confidently ascertained from the information immediately available, but it is our theory that this was intended to be a warning. The following is known, based on information liberated from a sequence of very tightly secured and isolated networks. The initial survey was performed by a firm subcontracted to Vector Corporation, the precursor to the business entity rebranded as VectorCorp. Protocols established since its early, more martially motivated years, have required that remote monitoring stations constantly sweep for emissions within a certain energy band.”

  “And one of the things they sweep for is this quantum thing?”

  “It’s just sad, like watching a puppy try to do calculus,” Karter said with a shake of his head.

  “The apparatus to detect the aforementioned quantum signature at interstellar distances is not widely available. Remote monitors primarily report unusual clusters of gamma emissions. These are produced by novas and a variety of high-energy weapons. They are thus a common indicator of weapons development. The only meaningful reference to the specific coordinate point, which now seems to play host to the GenMech swarm, comes from an automated report five years ago indicating a gamma burst was detected originating there. Correcting for light-speed travel to the location of the monitor, that would imply the gamma burst occurred approximately twenty-nine years ago.”

  For a moment, both Ma and Karter were silent, the latter looking expectantly at Lex.

  He furrowed his brow. “Maybe it is the blow to the head, but I’m not really seeing what I’m supposed to be realizing at this point.”

  “Let me connect the dots for you,” Karter said. “A monitor gets a blip that might be a weapon test. That gets forwarded to VectorCorp Security. Except there’s no mention of any subsequent investigation, and the record of the blip was pretty heavily buried. So someone inside the corporation squashed the info. Who do we know who was working at a high level in VectorCorp Security five years ago?”

  Karter’s question had the same prompting, patronizing tone one might use while coaching a toddler toward the next letter in the alphabet.

  “William Trent…”

  “Congratulations. And he happens to be the same guy who gave us the original design of the GenMech, and he’s the one who was trying to work out a means to move people huge distances in no time with Bypass Gemini. And he was the one who orchestrated my kidnapping to get his hands on the designs for a large-scale EMP weapon. And he orchestrated the discovery and attempted acquisition of the only known functional GenMech. And he’s been amassing a personal army of soldiers equipped with bleeding-edge technology. Sounds an awful lot like a guy who has been prepping for a war against these things, doesn’t it?” Karter said.

  “Don’t tell me he was the good guy this whole time.”

  “Hell no, he was and is an asshole,” Karter said. “Because nothing he was working toward would have been more than a drop in the bucket. Even if he’d publicized the discovery when it first arose and the whole of humanity had been working toward building up our defenses, the problem is just too huge.”

  The enormity of the revelation struck Lex like a hammer, and he stumbled backward as the blood rushed to his head. He landed in the seat of the chair Ma had quietly set behind him.

  “So… so what are we going to do? Head out there and drop a bunch of those Poison Pills?”

  “I’ve got a pretty slick manufacturing facility, Lex, but even I couldn’t churn out a couple billion of those things. And even if I did, they’ve got a maximum effective range and only delay and
distract the bots. We’d still have to destroy them all, and do it before the pills were themselves damaged in the chaos that they are designed to create. And if they divided into multiple groups, which they are programmed to do, then we’d have to have pills ready at each point of contact. We’ve run the simulations, Lex. As it stands right now, this isn’t a battle we can ever win.”

  “Why the hell did you bring me here and tell me this? So I can have a sense of doom for the rest of my life?”

  “We believe we have developed a potential solution for this problem.”

  “But you just said it’s a battle we can’t win!” Lex cried.

  “Listen when I talk, Lex. I said as it stands right now it isn’t a battle we can ever win.”

  “… How is that different from what I said?”

  “I have to draw a picture for this guy,” Karter growled.

  “We believe—” Ma began.

  “No, no, no. He’s got the brain of a preschooler. We’re going to have to do this with show and tell,” Karter said. He strutted toward Lex and yanked him to his feet by the collar, then strode toward the door. “Follow me.”

  #

  Karter led the way through the twisting corridors of the station, both funks tapping along and romping with each other as they went. After an arbitrary number of twists and turns, Karter spoke up. “Do you at least remember the thing about this station that I loved most?”

  “You were being held prisoner here and forced to work for terrorists. I can’t imagine there was anything you liked,” Lex said.

  “Uh-uh-uh. The Neo-Luddites are brain-dead cultists, I’ll grant you, but they do have some very entertaining toys. And the one I love best is right,” he placed his palm against a reader in a section of the hall that seemed almost entirely new, “here.”

  The door opened, revealing a mostly empty room, something that was almost absurd in a station as horribly cramped as this one. Near the front was a bank of control panels not unlike the one in the fab lab. A set of emitters arrayed along curving frames traced out a roughly spherical volume that was probably large enough to fit the hoversled Lex had so recently been testing with some room to spare.