04. Birth of Flux and Anchor (9 page)

Condensation was damped by computer control, although it could not be halted. In fact, from space the little world now seemed shrouded in clouds, but major weather systems were kept from forming by computer management and the upper atmospheric weather was high enough that no rainfall or other condensed water reached the surface level. That area, to approximately five hundred meters up, remained dry and desertlike.

Conditions had to be kept so, to achieve as static a situation as possible and limit as many variables as could be limited. Effective elaborate transmutation required it.

Toby Haller sat back relaxed in his controller's chair and adjusted his interface helmet for comfort. He pulled down his small microphone and said, "Tally-ho! O.O.R. Nine in position and ready!"

"All right, Haller," growled a woman's sour voice in his ear, "let's not get carried away, shall we? Guard on, network interface in ten seconds . . . nine . . . eight . . . seven . . . six ... five . . . four . . . three . . . two . . . one . . . mark!"

Instantly, he was one with the computer. Although he'd done this thousands of times, it never ceased to be a thrill and a fascination to him. If telepathy existed, it would be like this, and, in fact, the computers always seemed to be in some way another human being, although their humanness was part of their human interfacing program and bore little relationship to how the machines really thought. Still, one just—thought. One asked questions, which were always answered, or one gave commands and saw them carried out instantly, or so it seemed. The computers were so fast that a demand to do something, requiring trillions upon trillions of instant equations and ordered actions, seemed to act instantly to the slow human. It was like magic. In this case it was like being a god.

"Let there be light!" Haller commanded by thought.

"Response neither a valid command nor humorous," responded the computer coldly.

"Spoilsport. Program for Area L Zed O computed and checked?"

"Computed and checked. It
should
work, although I don't see why it would be desirable. Introduction of so much water will cause complex climatologica! repercussions."

"That," responded Haller, "is exactly the point. Let's see who's right. Run program."

The computer did not begin, however, instead, saying, "I have sufficient data to create the basics, but I have not been provided with digitized examples or programs of appropriate animal sea life beyond algae."

"We'll get to them later. I'm more concerned with climate now. Just run it and we'll see."

"Running. Let there be wet," mocked the computer, and put everything into operation.

There was a sudden crackling in the Flux as new energy was drawn from the Gates through the grid and applied to the appropriate points. The reaction of the atmosphere, friction, and general energy disturbances produced a crackling, hissing line of nasty-looking energy, marching out from his location.

A line of trees and bushes appeared suddenly on either side of him, and he found himself and his machine sitting on a grassy mat. He watched as the line of hissing, crackling energy receded from him into the distance, and he saw his sea take form.

It was impressive, even though he'd thought it up. Pretty, too, he told himself. Blue sky peeking out from behind thick fluffy cumulus clouds making patterns on the water. The site was also somewhat eerie, since now, in this island of normalcy inside a sea of Flux, the light source shifted from the thin illumination layer between the ionosphere and stratosphere called for in master maintenance to direct illumination from Madras, the great many-banded gas giant around which the little moon orbited. The light was more than sufficient, but the different colors in the bands caused the colors on the surface to seem distorted and oddly not quite right, and atmospherics further twisted it into odd wavy bands on the water. The water was not merely blue, but twenty or more constantly shifting shades of blue.

It was eerie, alien, and somewhat beautiful, but it would sure as hell take some getting used to.

"All right so far," he told the computer. "Nice job. Now increase time rates. Go."

Now it was no longer a pretty scene, but a dizzying time-lapse photographic show in three dimensions, with clouds forming and unforming and shooting across the sky, light changing rapidly and color and light bands moving like ghostly snakes prodded by jolts of electricity across the landscape.

Suddenly, he saw the water coming toward him, then overtaking him, and before he could issue a command he was completely immersed. He panicked, unable to think of anything but swimming away, getting out of there.

"Stop program!" came a woman's voice-—or was it just a thought? The Guardian Angel had stepped in.

Instantly, it was all gone, and he was sitting, high and dry in a comfortable chair in a standard lab, helmet on his head connected to the console.

He gasped and choked, still feeling as if he had to get that water out of his lungs, only there was no water there. He had never been anywhere other than the chair.

Frederika Akaba, Guard's helmet still on her own head, ignored his physical distress. "Had to save your ass on that one, Haller," she said disgustedly. "You forgot about what kind of tides that mother of a planet up there might produce under normal rotation. You'll have to adjust for that."

Haller wasn't listening. He knew his mistake almost immediately. He was very pissed off that the computer had been quite content to let him drown, a drowning that might have been truly fatal for all that it was not real. His mind and body thought it was, and reacted accordingly.

"Why didn't it stop?" he growled. "Why did it let me drown?"

"You never told it to stop. You never wrote any safety margin into the program. That's why. The computer doesn't care, so if you don't tell it to, it won't do it. That's basic, Haller. You should know better."

That, perhaps, was at the crux of his anger. Not that he had made a fundamental freshman mistake—he accepted that. That the computer knew, and did nothing, not out of malice, or for its own reasons, but simply out of apathy. It didn't care if he got hurt, or killed, or not.

Perhaps, he thought, someone ought to work on a computer core program that cared. . . .

5

DISCRETIONARY POWERS

They called themselves the Wednesday Club, although they rarely met on that day anymore. They were a number of professionals from different parts of Westrex, both male and female, close in age, who originally had met by virtue of all having the same evening meal schedule on Wednesdays. While this was no longer the case, they always seemed to find some day of the week in which all, or almost all, could meet together. Their objective was mainly just social friendship, like a college crowd or a set of regular barflies, a way in which each of them could feel more human and less alone in the sterile and gray world of the base. They came from different departments, and a prime source of conversation was interdepartmental gossip.

Lisa Wu had brought Toby Haller to the group, and both were there this night, along with four of the others who had managed to slip away as various departments suddenly got busier and busier without word as to why.

"I think they're ahead of schedule, or being pushed," commented Mark Weinbaum, a medical doctor and the only one of their crowd who was commonly called "Doc." He was a big man and generally overweight, hardly an example to his patients. "They're starting to order work on things that aren't even scheduled to begin for a year or two yet."

Sari Kittachorn, a small, delicate-looking woman with dark skin and mixed Southern Asian features, nodded. She was in the Department of Indigenous Populations, which was charged with the management and training of the "Specialists—Primitive Skills" as they were called on the job sheets. The folks who still knew how to milk a cow or grow wheat even without machines. "We have been having many meetings of late," she told them, "and they are talking of bringing the first groups through to here for acclimatization within the next few months."

"But we don't have room for that kind of mob here!" protested Caesar Fanfani, a very Italian product of Hispanic Argentina, who worked with the big master computers themselves. "My God! They will flood us out!"

"Not if we go fast enough," responded Marsha Johnson, a tall, thin, sandy-haired Australian who was a Watanabe assistant in Transportation. "I think they're ready to go. Ten ships are now being assembled off the Point right now. The tubes are ready, the programs are ready—they're going to go and soon, I feel it."

Lisa Wu nodded in agreement. "I see more of everyone else's departments than anyone except maybe His Nibs. There's been a massive acceleration in both the Soviet and Chinese projects since peace broke out. They're using far older computers and they won't be able to be as versatile or as comfortable as we will, but that hardly matters to them or to anyone. It's a race to be first, and we still might not win it. I think they'll go even if the risk factor is enormous."

Haller looked over at Johnson. "It seems to me to be one
hell
of a bloody risk if they still haven't sent folks out there and brought them back alive."

Johnson's eyebrows rose. "But they have," she said quietly.

It was a bombshell and silenced the group immediately. They all looked at the Australian woman with a mixture of expectation and nervousness. This was new even to Lisa Wu.

"You mean," Weinbaum managed at last, "that there are already people on New Eden?"

"Orbital only right now. The early animal tests worked so well, they skipped a number of steps. A volunteer crew from Engineering went—seven in all—and they arrived O.K. They've sent back extensive surveys and evaluations to back up the computer reports. The first ship to be finished will have one trial run there and back with no human cargo, then it'll return with a full load of folks from all seven major departments. No orbit, not first three stages. They're going directly to Gate One to establish a headquarters unit. If that goes well, Engineering and Signals will be sent in force to Gate Five. After that—it's us. The reason why they won't have any problem with the influx of colonists or whatever they're calling them these days is that we won't be here. We'll be there."

Haller felt the same butterflies as the rest of them at this news. It was a curious reaction, really—it was, after all, why he was here at all, and what they had all been working toward. He had, however, adjusted himself to the seven-year interval, which seemed far off even now, and to now be told that this was to be cut very short—it was, well, unexpected.

"Well, that explains why we never got the Kagan 7800's" Fanfani sighed.

"Huh?" Several said it at once.

"A new generation of computer altogether, related to the 7240's we have here only in that it's compatible with all the programs and information we've been working with. They're only a bit bigger than ours, but their storage capacity is supposed to be nearly infinite—they can directly transform Flux into added storage modules as necessary—and their computational speed and capacity is said to be just about at the physical limits of the universe. We were supposed to get the first two here to play with a month or two ago—they're so beyond anything we can comprehend that a lot of folks are plain scared of it, including the Kagan people."

Haller was appalled. "You mean nobody's ever even found out if they work?"

"Oh, they work just fine. What nobody's done is link them into a Flux network. They know they have a near godlike brain, but they don't know what it'll do when it's handed godlike powers. When you think of twenty-eight of them being networked together with nearly unlimited access to seven Gates and all the Flux they want—well, if we can't control them, we might just wind up worshipping them, and with justification."

That sobered them up. "Van Haas knows about this?" Haller asked.

"Of course. All the big folk do. They're gambling that the gods can be suborned. If they can, it'll make everything even easier. If not—who knows?"

It was a sobering idea, considering that all of them were putting their own necks in this noose fashioned by expediency and politics.

"At least this will end some of the thoughts of the bright boys in Engineering," Haller said at last. "Lately they've shifted from just designing a nice place to live to designing the folks who'd live there. I've been a lonely voice protesting this line of thinking. After all, if we can make the place over to suit our needs, why bother to remake
us
?"

"Is that possible?" Fanfani asked nervously. This was the first he'd heard of this.

"It's possible—even with just the 7240's," Marsha Johnson assured him. "In the process of reducing you to a contained bit of energy in a particular digital equation suspended in that vacuum tube, we read in the whole chain. The computer originally treated it as a whole, of course, but it wasn't much of a curiosity step to see if the machine could also decide which parts were which. We got it to where it could take a scraping, read your genetic code, figure all the basics out, then apply that to you when you get digitized in the tube. Given proper directions, on reassembly it can solidify you almost to order.''

"You mean it could make me tall and voluptuous?" Kittachorn asked somewhat lightly.

"Well, it can't add mass, not in the transport tube, so I'd say no. But it could redesign you to have blond hair, green eyes, change your metabolic rate, your hormone rate and levels—all that. It could take me, for example, tall and flat, and make me short and both curvy and busty. It can also boost the hormone levels—or reduce them—to make you sexier or disinterested, heighten your aggression or turn you passive, control your effective I.Q., and lots of other things that are physiological in nature. And it would all breed true. That's incredible enough, but if I had Caesar, here; or perhaps Toby, I could remake them as fully functioning females with all the equipment and all the urges."