04. Birth of Flux and Anchor (35 page)

"But my husband has an important career of his own in Anchor Baker," one woman protested. "He couldn't come with me here either. I can't make a decision without consulting him that would wreck his career or our marriage!"

"Those of you with such problems should see Chief Shindler in my offices today or tomorrow," Cockburn told her. "We can help ease the way, and Shindler will be able to make calls via satellite to those who need them. Those spouses who lose careers will, I assure you, find equal or greater-responsibility positions with the project. Sensitives or not. Nor, I think, should you consider yourselves being consigned to some sort of high-tech prison. Security personnel responsible only to us will of course be monitoring you when away from home, but you will still be free to visit old friends, dine in the capital, that sort of thing."

Well, that's something,
Haller thought dryly.
You're free to go anywhere and do anything you want—providing you understand that all your movements and conversations will be monitored, all your intimacies recorded, and everyone you talk to investigated.
Still, he knew he'd sign up. As the man said, you don't turn down a crack at the cutting edge of your field.

He couldn't help but wonder if that was also the way Suzuki's Special Project had started, and how they'd all rationalized their own actions to themselves and each other. Still, it was what he was and what he did. Nobel had thought that his invention of dynamite would end war. The atomic scientists thought the same. The first gene splicers and fabricators were just going to end hereditary diseases and grow new crops. Yeah. And all he was going to do was explain why some people on this little moon could be gods.

Rembrandt van Haas greeted Haller warmly, although he couldn't possibly remember the engineer, and told him to take a seat.

"I wanted to talk to you personally," the director told him, "because I want to explain exactly why some decisions were made. First, I must tell you that from a performance standpoint and from a psychological evaluations standpoint you are the most qualified of the group to be the project director. I must also tell you that the computers selected you for that position before anyone even arrived here."

He felt a slight thrill. So maybe they were going to make
him
the boss! "That's very ego-gratifying, sir."

"Indeed, but I'll deflate you fast. You are not going to be the director, primarily on my say-so."

"Huh? What?"

"Haller, I started off as a committed scientist. My dream was first the establishment of the Titan Experimental Base, then the exploration program. New Eden was my wildest dream, but I never believed I'd actually live to see it. I dropped everything to work for it. I lied, cheated, stole, did all that I could do to get it. My punishment was to be made director of the entire project. Do you understand why I say that?"

What the hell—bluntness was called for here. He'd already had the prize snatched from him. "No, sir, I do not."

Van Haas sighed. "I haven't done a lot of research—hell, I haven't done
any
research—in almost a quarter century now. I've been too busy playing politics and riding herd on a massive project and an even more massive budget. I've been drowned in approvals, disapprovals, reports, arguments—you name it. The politics of Heaven before the Fall pale before the politics of this organization. I've had to play ambition against ambition, power play against power play, ego against ego, and I've had to sacrifice a lot of good innocents to the most despicable sons of bitches Earth has sent us because the s.o.b.'s had one bit of genius, one useful or unique talent or ability essential to the project."

Haller nodded absently, but he really didn't see where this was going.

"If I make you chief of this," the director went on, "you'll have forty to fifty people under you with great power. Great power. And their job will be to make themselves more powerful. They are scientists, but they're also human. They'll fight, they'll squabble, and if they master this thing, they will indeed be gods of a sort. Gods in power, but no less human in their hearts and souls and minds. Anyone who directs this project will spend most of his or her time doing among that group what I have to do for the whole project. Pacifying Lucifers, wondering if your Gabriels can really be trusted, and agonizing over decisions that may cost someone life or sanity. Research, and personal development, will be completely secondary. You have the mind-set, will, and sense of excitement to make this project bear fruit, but as an experimenter, not an administrator. I want you to lead the research, not become an administrator. Now do you understand?''

"Well, I
think
so, but I'm not sure I agree. However, I'll do my best in the field."

"I know you will, son. And I think we did pick the best administrative mind for the job out of the lot of you, and I think you'll go along with it."

The chief of Special Flux Projects, it turned out, was Lisa Wu.

It seemed ironic to Toby Haller that they decided to set up the project in Anchor Luck, but it was comforting too. Although they settled in a small communal village right on the border in the northeast sector, a village that also served several farming collectives, they were but two hours from the capital city and all his old friends and associates.

He had, in fact, almost expected it. Suzuki, after all, still held sway up in the administration building. Perhaps a
lot
of sway.

His relationship with Mickey had continued, somewhat to his surprise. They had hit it off right away, and they hadn't made any commitments but they were now living together in a single large flat. He'd taken her up to the capital when he'd turned over his own position there and moved his stuff down, and he'd taken her to see Kitten. Mickey was absolutely fascinated by the transformed woman, and sunk off and on into a near trance over her for the next few days. Toby had gotten used to this sort of behavior from Mickey, who was quite light and frothy on the outside but whose mind was in some ways not quite human either.

To say that Mickey had a mathematical mind was an understatement. He often thought she had a computer hidden in her brain, although she said it was just a very good calculator. He never got around to pointing out that, when all was said and done, that was an excellent definition of a computer and the reason they called it a computer in the first place.

She could glance for a second at a page of budget figures and offhandedly give you the total. She always knew to the exact decimal how much credit was left in their accounts. She could hold a running conversation while picking out a hundred differently priced items in a store, then tell the total of them before they went through the computer debiting system. She would glance at her watch, a shadow, then look at a tree so far away it could hardly be seen and be mad at herself when her distance estimate was off three or four
millimeters.

Three nights after they returned from the capital he was reading over some heretofore classified reports on the mad ones out in the void-signals had taken to nicknaming them "duggers," a sort of perverted counterpart to "diggers," a term they reserved for themselves—while Mickey was sitting in a chair, half in darkness, apparently just thinking. Suddenly, he heard her say quite clearly, "Of course! It's a simple logic progression!"

He walked in from the bedroom, frowning. "You say something?"

"I've been working on the mathematics of a program that would produce a Kitten," she told him. "I think I've got it."

"Huh?" He was dubious. She hadn't touched a computer as far as he knew in a couple of days.

"Big programs are just little programs chained together, and all programs are given as mathematical expressions. You know that."

"Obviously."

"Well, given the original physical data of Connie—the molecule-by-molecule, atom-by-atom pattern, which we call digitizing, I could do the exact same thing to her that they did."

"Elementary, my dear. But no human mind could hold that matrix. You know that."

"Of course, of course. But the computer could, and did. It did a readout of her as she sat under the interface on the big amp. A hundred percent updated just before activation—
just
before. Instants. Nanoseconds or even faster. That's why it worked—outside of the lab, outside of the chambers where everything is exactly controlled."

"O.K., but all you've done is show what they've known how to do for ten years. Big deal."

"Uh-uh. I've got more. When you're out there in the void, on the grid, you are in one to four squares of the grid but in all cases in total physical contact with the computer nearest your location. The grid was designed as an external computer interface, so that the 7800's could monitor air, temperature, you name it, and apply whatever corrections were needed, hundreds of times a second."

"All right, I'll grant that." He was beginning to see where she was heading, and the idea made him a little uneasy.

"The primary atmospheric envelope, the layer comprising the Flux boundaries and also the primary atmospheric elements—the troposphere, as it were—is almost twenty kilometers high. Beyond that is a stratosphere with essential radiation filtration properties, then an ionosphere beyond that to deflect as much nastiness as possible going all the way out to four hundred kilometers. Although it's static at the densest level of Flux, right at the surface there is movement and even turbulence above that we don't see or sense and whose effects aren't noticeable on the ground, but it's an incredibly complex system that must be always in perfect balance.
What keeps it in balance, Toby
?"

He sat down in a chair. "The damned computer grid. The bloody damned computer grid. A hundred times a second. Christ!"

Any disturbance
,
any mass, within any square had to be known and compensated for to the smallest degree. The 7800 and its supporting crew of 7240's did this by taking a digitized reading of everything and everyone in each square. Reality in the void was an illusion. At least once a second, and perhaps once every hundredth of a second for—what?—a millisecond or so, everyone and everything was digitized just a surely as they were in the transport tubes. Digitized and then put back with all compensations made to the surrounding area. Not in Anchor—there physical contact with the grid was removed, and maintenance was made possible by fixed landscape and climatological programs balanced by this continuous maintenance of the surrounding void.

"You see?" Mickey asked, excited. "When we're in the void, we're a part of it, part of its master program, the same as Kitten is part of the Anchor program. Like Anchor. Kitten is permanent. Fixed. But in the void there's an update every hundredth of a second. The void is maintained by a complex and ongoing series of transitory programs, not fixed ones, each one just a hair different from the rest."

"Yeah, but that doesn't explain how some people are able to access the computer. It just shows how the computer can access people."

"The flaw in the basic program is really just that we were first. We did it before anyone else—the Soviets, the Chinese, the Franco-Brazilians,
anybody.
We didn't have the benefit of our own experience, as they did. They wrote better, tighter programs that clearly delineated the machinery and interfaces that were proper. We were sloppy in that regard because we didn't know if our machines, like Signals' god gun. would work or if they'd do the trick. So we made it intentionally a little bit more vague, so that we could allow for the development of new and better interfaces when we had some hands-on experience."

He nodded. "And so what you're saying is that the computer network cannot distinguish between a Sensitive sending an order and somebody with a god gun. And because the grid interface was designed to be used by Signals—soldiers and maintenance personnel—it was designed to respond to more generalized programs, to create water, or hay, or a chocolate bar, sent in plain English by anyone who could sufficiently phrase his exact wants and wishes. That's why the Pathfinders developed the ability to see their bloody strings without their funny glasses and filters. It was the thing they desired most in the routine performance of their duties, and the computer simply—updated them. Christ! Why didn't all us big brains see this right at the start?"

"Because us big brains have grown up in homes that are served by robots, drink computer-brewed coffee, depend on computer-scheduled buses and we've forgotten how to work without them. We take them as much for granted as early man took fire or modern man took the light switch. So when something magical, mysterious, and impossible arose, we turned to our computers for the answers—and the computers gave none."

He frowned. "Yeah. Why didn't they though? It's simple enough."

"They
couldn't
don't you see? They know there is a problem because they have been told of it in exacting detail. They are programmed to find all the evidence and sift it and solve that problem, so they tried. They tried, but they couldn't even
find
the damned crazy fools out there. Seventeen could see Kitten and know that she was there and just what it was doing because it was following a third-party program on a specific individual. But, out there, it can't distinguish between a Sensitive and a device. To it, there is no anomaly. There is nothing to report. Therefore, it cannot document the problem and so can only spew out the fifty million possible theories only a computer could come up with to explain unobserved and unmonitored phenomena. It's a theoretical problem to them and nothing more. Don't you see? Out there, to the big computers,
we are simply a part of the computer network, a component, requesting a localized adjustment!
It really cannot distinguish us from—itself."

"Three bloody days on the job and you've solved the whole thing," he noted. "Wonder why I bothered to pack?"

She came over and sat in his lap. "Uh-uh. I've explained most of it. I haven't solved anything. I still haven't got why we can do it and Sam the fruit man down in the village can't. We'll find out, but it doesn't
solve
anything. If anything, it makes it worse."