The Origin Point: A Future Tech Cyber Novella (24 page)

Within the minute passing by, a transport
silently rolled into the Control Room, and the sight of the
driverless vehicle prompted Santino to jump again. The transport,
an IO Rider for indoor-outdoor, was sized and shaped like an old
snowmobile, with a closed, clear fiberglass box cab on top, and
space for two passengers sitting one behind the other. With
functionality to hover forward, backward and sideways, or move on
bare floors, carpet, gravel, grass, cement, ice, snow and heated
terrain, the Rider automatically adjusted to the ground beneath its
wheels. Santino stared at the transport and his anxiety
deepened.

The Network had processed Santino's
transport preference against the intended destination, detected his
com location, cross-referenced his image from the surveillance
camera in the Control Room, and sent the Rider directly to where he
stood. Knowing Santino had little history of leisure walking,
certainly not to the distance of Sector 2G, and almost never in
winter temperatures, The Network calculated he would not walk to
the error location. With his profile, even if Santino had preferred
to walk, the transport would follow him, and his com screen would
not change instructions until he accepted the ride. He had no
override code for the transport's operations. Without another
option, he climbed into the Rider, and as The Network registered
the pressure of his buttocks on the seat, the cab door slowly
closed. Santino did not want, or have to, look at the dashboard
screen in front of him as the data updated to display the
destination. Although all of his next required actions were
automatically uploaded to his com, he was too confused to view the
information.

The Rider departed the Control Room, but as
the vehicle approached the facility's garage style exit doors, the
wheels rolled to a stop at a walk-in closet lining one of the
walls, and waited next to a table holding a set of clothing neatly
separated from other varying sizes hanging inside. Using Santino's
already stored measurements, The Network had selected a coat, snow
pants, hat, scarf, gloves and boots, and arranged the items,
distributed by conveyor belt, at the closet entrance. Santino
stepped out of the transport and walked up to the table. He did not
examine the clothing, which was not only his size, but also his
color. Putting the items on, he would not normally question why he
was dressing warmly, but a flash in his memory considered that if
the transport had stopped for winter clothing, The Network not only
wanted him to go outside of the facility, but also to step out of
the vehicle. The building temperature was a comfortable 71 degrees
Fahrenheit, and Santino was wearing jeans and a t-shirt. Outdoors
the atmosphere was minus 20, but now in January, the biting air
would feel like minus 36. The vast, empty expanse of
semi-permafrost and razor thin trees encircling the complex was an
occupied home dominated by black bears and gray wolves. The
facility at Grand Rapids, the westernmost outpost of Canada's
Hudson Bay Hydroelectric and Water Reservoir Complex, was on the
53rd latitudinal parallel, north. In winter, the terrain was
surrounded by ice and snow as far as the eyes could see, and there
was no cover from the elements. Humans rarely ventured into the
open air as part of their daily functioning. The outdoors was for
adventurers, sportspeople, environmentalists, and the occasional
daring family with children who wanted to ensure the next
generation knew about natural trees and flowers. In cities, both
icy and tropical weather populated areas had connected most
buildings through tunnels, underground shopping centers, transport
stations, subways, overhead crosswalks, and covered people movers.
Designated industry employees, like agricultural managers,
occasionally worked outside, but only when The Network signaled a
problem that could not be remotely fixed, which did not happen
often.

Fully dressed for the temperature change,
Santino returned to the Rider and, still avoiding the dashboard
panel, stepped in and sat down. An extra few seconds would pass as
the Rider recalibrated his weight to detect he had sufficient cover
for his required pending activity. Satisfied, the transport closed
its door and moved towards the garage opening. On approach, the
garage door began to rise, and at exactly the spot where the entry
panel was three feet over Santino's head, the transport crossed
from the controlled environment of the facility into the unmanaged
wilderness. The moment the transport cleared the exit, the door
rolled back down. The silent descent was not unknown to Santino,
but he turned back to follow its close. From his vantage point, the
entryway was a gray cut in a wall of snow, unknown as the access to
a billion dollar facility currently without a single human inside
the walls. As the transport moved forward, he continued to watch
the door shrink and fade away from sight.

Despite being inside a heated cab, Santino
immediately felt the bitter cold. Living in the North did not inure
him to experiencing the region's winter. As the Rider followed an
expected path to Sector 2G, the wind whipped around the transport,
and cut through gaps in Santino's additional clothing. Defrosters
kept the cab windows from fogging and icing over, and he could see
the mix of nature and human destruction all around him. The
facility's land was covered in short pine trees, limping in the
frozen bog of winter, black and white in every direction. But the
man-made structures were gray and silver, cement and steel walls
pushed up against a body of water, flowing even in the cold, as
liquid rushing through the barrier with a force turning the world's
largest turbines, and pushing electrons out over wires for
thousands of miles. Santino did admire the engineering, and all of
the details required to create the facility, but the construction
operated on a relatively ancient design, vulnerable to terrorists,
remote and disruptive to the natural environment. Clean air had a
price, humans had learned that lesson decades ago.

The Rider traveled 50 mph, and for a minute
Santino considered he had no idea where Sector 2G was located. When
he had first obtained the hydro job, he had been told not to expect
to know the layout of the complex, The Network would lead him to
any location he was required to visit. But in his idleness with the
employment's tasks, he would scroll through distraction options on
his com, which led occasionally to searching The Network to view
maps and blueprints for the facility. Coms had an endless array of
features, but the only portal for accessing all functions was The
Network. Every business used The Network for operations,
administration, sales tracking, inventory ordering, marketing and
forecasting, and since employees needed the information for their
work, instant access was available through their coms. The same
device facilitated personal lives by displaying The Network links
to data inputted into computers as text and voice communications,
government records, education results, employment opportunities,
sports scores, movie reviews, consultations, nutrition advice,
weather warnings, and all other information stored on
globally-connected servers. Recorded movements from cameras and
sensors tracking the timing and changes in human activity were
automatically stored on servers too. The Network continuously
scanned servers, even those not exposed to the public Internet to
retrieve, cross-reference, and integrate data within controlled
spaces. Aggregated data was used to create and send appropriate
daily life instructions, specifically prepared for each
individual's com, and all other coms interacting with an
individual. Avoiding The Network was considered impossible. Some
people tried diminishing its role in their lives, but few
completely avoided the functions. The Network managed personal
lives, businesses, organizations, and government operations with
efficiency and accuracy, directing individuals throughout the day,
and even allotting time for relaxation and socializing. Millions of
programs and apps recalculated and redefined data every second, and
the data fed the human's com, and the human reacted
accordingly.

But The Network did not ignore the surfing
of its own files. If an unexpected search pattern was recorded, a
protocol determined if the issue should be escalated. After Santino
had executed several similar search requests about the facility,
The Network had sent a text message asking him to define the
information he was looking for, and the reasons for his search.
After one warning, if an employee persisted with unexplained
research, The Network would implement a punishment tailored to the
employee's preferences. When Santino had tested the protocol once
too often, The Network blocked his access to Internet sports and
entertainment sites for 24 hours. He had been left with the silence
of the Control Room. Since that day, he had not bothered to look at
the facility's layout again.

Without an awareness of his current location
or intended destination, Santino patiently sat as the Rider
continued to fly across the terrain, automatically making speed
adjustments to account for the surroundings, the activity in the
area, and the presence, or lack of, other vehicles. All transports
had sensors for assessing the environment around a route. If no
other movement was detected along the travel path, the transport
could accelerate across the snow and ice like the wolves in pursuit
of prey in the forest nearby. Santino let the wind, snow and trees
pass by him as a cascade of debris from a sneeze, and considered
for a moment that he might be enjoying the ride. But when the
vehicle began slowing down, his anxiety returned. Sector 2G arose
no special memories for Santino. He was not near the main dam, but
out along the high voltage electrical power lines running away from
Grand Rapids to all defined destinations. The dashboard was
displaying the coordinates for the area, but he was still not
interested in registering detailed information. As the Rider came
to a stop at the base of an electrical transmission tower, Santino
leaned back against the seat, and the cab door slowly opened.

Looking out into the bleak of the fading
daylight, Santino waited for his instruction. But after another
minute, he realized the transport would not be in talk mode. He was
one of the few employees who hated voice instructions. Transport
voices could be any modulation, a soprano lady, a child, your own,
but Santino preferred not to respond to electronically-spoken
instructions. Other people did not mind, especially if they were
around humans all day. But Santino had decided in the absence of
working with humans, having a computer talk to him seemed a little
desperate. His home system had available voice commands, but since
The Network already knew he had most audio turned off, the system
waited for him to read his instructions from the Rider dashboard
screen or his com. Choosing to ignore both options, Santino braced
for the cold and stepped out of the cab. A sensation overcame him
he rarely felt, surprise. He stared up at the rising extended
stretch of tower steel, glanced down at his com, and back at the
Rider.

The transmission tower was one of thousands
of identical steel structures built to the sky on needle-like
precision that minimized wind shear and maximized height. Santino
could not see the top, only sensor lights illuminating in red,
yellow or green, offering the same advisory as streetlights. At
first glance, all he saw was green. But as he looked straight up
the spine of the tower, another shockwave slowly rolled over him.
Santino felt the unfamiliar sensation again, surprise, cloaked in
an even more unexpected awareness of rising trepidation. In the
near night sky glowed the unmistakable purple light of a hovering
drone.

Unmanned aerial devices operating one
hundred percent automatically on instructions from The Network, or
automatically with a human override, or one hundred percent by a
human with a manual remote control were, by common understanding, a
drone. The machines could be any size, and had a variety of
functional uses including carrying products from instruction
documents to packages to emergency kits to repair tools, to
assisting with construction and structural repairs or disaster
rescue, and targeted surveillance. Drones could be any geometric
shape even balls or triangles, or resemble miniature versions of
helicopters and other flying machines. For delivering packages in a
city, drones were predominately one-foot square boxes, but for
military maneuvers in the desert, the machines were the size of
single-passenger airplanes. Humans co-opted the name 'drone' from
military aircraft used for missions in the last century’s desert
wars. The military and drone manufacturers had desperately tried to
encourage an independent civilian name for the machines, but the
term had long ago passed into popular use, easy to say, spell and
remember. With unlimited specs, drones could also be manufactured
in a variety of facilities, and be equipped with weapons, legally
or not. Businesses, organizations, professionals and individuals
ubiquitously used civilian drones in all aspects of their daily
lives and operations. Humans appreciated the conveniences provided
by the machines, and most were placidly comfortable with the
devices moving above them at work, in streets, parks, homes and
office buildings. Drones and humans were considered completely
compatible.

On an industrial site, the machines were
work-tools, programmed to lift heavy objects, patrol remote
facilities, and ferry goods around complexes. By law, the devices
emanated a unique fluorescent light created under patent through a
color simulation of royal purple and aquamarine blue unavailable
for use by any other aerial object. Civilian drones had to be
distinguishable from every other status light or active device in
the sky. All recognized nations had signed a treaty solidifying,
for governments, companies, and international service
organizations, the unified rules for the use of commercial drones.
In most countries, individuals could own personal drones and the
action lights could take on any hue. But the status light color
humans and The Network saw, as the drone moved through the sky, or
hovered nearby, had to be drone purple.