Satellite grunted, thought more about it, and decided the seal was right. “Thanks, Seal. Not any relation to Navy SEALs, are you?”
“Please, no talking about the day job. You try sticking magnetized bombs on the hull of ships all day and see if you don’t need some music to relax to.”
Satellite felt his face distorting without really giving it any commands to do so. “Why would that be so important? We’re out in space? Or do you swim through deep space too?”
“Quiet!” the seal stage-whispered. “Don’t give the bitch any ideas. Nope, I just do underwater scenarios for now.”
“But—”
“Hey, the way I understand it, this chick likes to make sure she has all her bases covered. Be thankful you just have to deal with one reality at a time, and you don’t have to interact with her probabilistic universes. Techa help me, I am simply going to have to clone myself. No one can take this kind of pressure.” He jumped back into the water and was gone—presumably back to work.
Satellite reflected further on the matter; If the Nautilus’ supersentience was drafting crew mates into scenario games that had less and less chances of playing out in reality over time… And just like that he shut down his mind. He decided he really didn’t want to think about it.
He put through a request to the supersentience to beam him back to his barracks.
And he waited.
Just how long would it take her to queue him up, her priorities being what they were?
***
Laney opened her eyes and felt cocooned. She sat up and ran her hands over the nylon fabric. What the hell was she doing in a tent? She looked over to her side and there was Natty sleeping next to her. She shook him harshly and with prejudice.
Natty stirred. His wide-eyed look was filled with disbelief. “Why would you ruin a perfectly good sleep?”
“You want to tell me what I’m doing inside a tent?”
“Oh that. I might have kidnapped you while you were asleep, stuck you in a cryo-tank, flash-froze you, wheeled you over here, and dumped us in Narnia.”
She gave him the hang-jawed, “What kind of psycho did I marry?” look.
“Don’t give me that look. We both needed a break from our workaholism. Consider this tough love.”
“With the universe in the balance? Really?”
“Couldn’t imagine a better time.”
She was about to give him a piece of her mind when she heard the tent unzip and in crawled a chinchilla. It promptly scampered up to the rim of the picnic basket at the foot of their sleeping bags and gazed at the bounty. “Is this what I think it is?” The chinchilla grabbed the granola bar and affixed its giant eyes—relative to the rest of its small head—on the picture on the wrapper. “Jackpot!”
“Hey, that’s mine!” Natty complained, sitting up.
“Possession is nine tenths of the law, pal.”
Natty grabbed the granola bar out of the creature’s hands.
“Yes, it is.” Natty peeled back the wrapper. “Besides, don’t you guys east grasses and twigs and things like that?”
“I got two words for you: genetically enhanced.” The chinchilla folded its forelegs and tapped it’s right hind leg on the rim of the basket. “You wouldn’t dare.”
Natty took the first bite out of the bar.
Laney was chewing her lip watching the drama unfold between Natty and the chinchilla. She had long since forgotten the comic relief her childish husband was good for—buried under an avalanche of one too many of her own temper tantrums.
The chinchilla groaned in a high-pitched, voice-throwing manner. “I want you to meet my little friend,” he said in his best Al Pacino right-out-of Scarface voice.
The tent went flying and so did Natty; all apparently on account of a grizzly standing on its hind legs with a hell of a throwing arm, so to speak. The granola bar had fallen miraculously—or with much trained practice—straight into the loving embrace of the chinchilla who wasted no time going to work on it.
Laney stood and looked around for her husband and promptly started chuckling. She put her hand to her mouth in a mock attempt to stifle said laughter, but she had no real intention of stopping—ever. There was her husband, landed high in a tree. “Okay, for the record, I don’t do heights,” Natty said, looking down from the tree limb he’d landed on.
“You could always try practicing your high dives,’ Laney shouted, noticing the tree overshadowed a sizable body of water.
Natty glared at her. “Have we met? I get vertigo squatting over the toilet.”
Laney went back to her snickering and to attending to the picnic basket. It was drawing quite the crowd and she could see at a glance she was needed to adjudicate.
Part of her was still so angry at her husband right now, but the truth was, she was kind of a nature diva, and it had been a long time since she had been up close and personal to the very biodiversity of rainforests that had given rise to her passion for bioengineering. “All right, everyone, calm down. There’s something for everyone, I’m sure.” She’d just have the Nautilus supersentience keep synthesizing more food in the basket if the animals kept coming. Techa help her; she was a big part of why there were such things as talking animals, but it wasn’t like she could ever entirely get used to the idea.
As she took her seat in the circle about the basket she took a deep breath and realized this was the first time her head hadn’t hurt in days and she hadn’t felt fatigued. The raccoon, rubbing its forepaws over one another anxiously said, “All right, who else has dibs on the chicken legs?”
Several of the animals made pained faces. “I’m vegetarian.” “Yeah, me too.” “Yeah, could we please not talk about severed animal parts; just kills the appetite.”
After the chorus of responses, the raccoon stopped his hand rubbing. “Thank Techa, thought this was going to get ugly for a minute.” He stared up at the Grizzly. “What about you, big fella? No chicken leg fantasies?”
The bear, sitting now on its rump, Buddha-style, shook its head. “I’m on a diet. How do we look with the low-glycemic berries?”
Laney’s eyes were watering and she was biting down on both lips so hard she was afraid by the time she opened her mouth again she’d be lipless. In the background her husband was mouthing something like, “No, No! God, no! Oh shit!” She glanced over and evidently he thought he’d tightrope-walk the branch he was on to get back to the trunk, but he kept losing his footing and staring down at the water beneath him. “I can see my reflection in the water!” he said, “and I look scared as hell! That can’t be me; I know that’s not me. I look fearless even when I’m about to pee my pants.” He screamed as he finally lost his balance and fell.
He never made contact with the water. Some—up until now perfectly camouflaged—giant lizard flicked its long tongue at him and reeled him in to his mouth. Natty’s head and legs were sticking out opposite ends of the mouth, and with the tongue coiled about him, he looked as if he’d been pulled up from the bottom of the sea on a wench controlling a metal cable, or possibly as if he was some strange S&M master’s bitch. “Appreciate the rescue, pal,” Natty exclaimed, still unable to get his eyes off the water. Laney thought he ought to be more rightly concerned about the gullet he was now hanging over.
The giant chameleon lizard let Natty down gently, uncoiling its tongue until he fell just to the shore at the edge of the pond—lake was being too generous.
Natty stood up, and brushed the leaves and sand off him. “Hey, I think I finally have a way to cure my fear of heights!” He scampered back up the tree, padded back out on the limb and prepared for his next high dive. The whole time he was hamming up the every-fateful-step, the precarious balancing act—then again, this was her husband. He probably thought he was being quite heroic.
When he got out far enough, he jumped—straight into a grouper’s mouth. The giant fish happily leaped out of the water to meet him half way down. Laney was cackling and clapping. The animals joined in the applause.
“Okay, obligatory clapping out of way, could we get on with divvying up of the spoils?” the seal said. It emitted a few barks to punctuate its sense of exasperation.
Laney got the sense that the rest of the animals had been clapping only out of keenly felt hostage syndrome as well. She sighed. “What are you doing here, seal? This isn’t even the right temperate zone for you?”
“I live in the arctic a few decks down. You blame me for fleeing to this tropical paradise every once in a while? Now, just to be clear, I’m the only serious contender for the salted fish, right?” He looked around. There was nothing but grizzly expressions and a couple animals looked like they might hurl even at the thought. “Excellent.” He craned his head to Laney. “You mind, lady? These hands kind of suck for grabbing.”
“No worries.” She reached into the picnic basket and got out the salted fish. It was meant to be used in a preparation with vinegar and chopped vegetables, and eaten on bread. She broke off a piece for the seal. He swallowed it whole then proceeded to gyrate about. “Ooh! Ooh! Oh, my God. Wowsa! Reminds me of the time I was in Chinatown and thought those salted prunes were going to be the death of me. Couldn’t stop eating them either.”
“You were in Chinatown? Really?”
“Oh, yeah, the ocean in the arctic zone—however many floors up, I forget—borders the Chinese fish market. Personally, I find that a bit suspicious, but I can’t argue the synergy of such a dynamic. I get to gobble down fish without actually working for it. And they get to chase me with those cleavers over hill and dale to help me work off the waistline.”
Laney stifled a laugh. “You’re positively ridiculous.” It had never occurred to her that every so many floors there might be another habitat entirely in the center of the ship. It was an invitation to explore. For that matter, these habitat zones may well not be confined to the ship’s courtyard.
The fish spit Natty out in the opposite direction; he landed back on the branch. It turned out that was more of a puffer fish than a grouper, and it could swallow enough air to act as quite the catapult. Natty staggered his way across the branch, saluted the fish for his help, and promptly fell into the water—by way of a few unwitting corkscrew turns and somersaults.
He crawled out of the water on his own. “Did you see that! I’m an Olympic diver now! Techa, I’ve worked up such an appetite.” He collapsed in front of the basket and started digging into the food to the gasps of the audience who had been led to believe it was all for them.
In an effort to avoid a mutiny, Laney walked away from the circle, whistling a tune and manifesting foodstuffs out of thin air. For her first magic act, she allowed glistening sweat to bead all over her with a honey-like flavor, drawing the giant butterflies from all over the forest. The Nautilus supersentience was doing as she hoped, granting her higher access to the atmospheric nanites now that she was in her domain. She wouldn’t try these stunts across the rest of the ship.
Laney had to admit, she hadn’t felt this good or this energized in ages. The trials of Hercules that awaited her back at her work station now seemed so much more surmountable.
The other animals, gathered around the picnic basket, looked on at her in awe. “Yowsa!” the raccoon said. “Don’t look now, fellas, but I think the parade has moved on.” The animals followed him as he followed Laney.
“Hey, where’s everyone going!” It was the first time Natty had taken his eyes off the bowl of chicken legs. He caught the image of his wife playing Pied Piper to a bunch of butterflies and a long trail of animals. “Cool.” He returned to his chicken leg eating, his 20-ounce drink slurping, and staring at his wife wandering off. “Yep, best picnic ever.”
TWENTY-SIX
ABOARD THE NAUTILUS
“I thought it was time we had one of our little talks,” Leon said, entering Natty’s chamber. He parked himself on the opposite side of Natty’s workstation on what could pass as the patient’s chair in a psychologist’s office. Techa knows, Leon felt like putting money on the table for a session. Natty swiveled away from his experiments in VR and the wrap around bank of monitors to face Leon. “You got my uploads?” Leon asked.
Natty launched himself out of his chair, pulled at the hair on the back of his head, and paced. “Crumley’s report of the so-called farmers of the cosmos…!” Natty was gesturing as he talked. “The idea that there are conscious entities living inside that pentagram floating outside the window! Oh, yes, and even better—your idea that five pulsars will ignite in tandem to beam their gamma rays straight at the tips of that pentagram-shaped portal to power it up!” He stopped in his tracks to glare at Leon. “Look, for the record, I do the mind-blowing stuff around here, okay? You… You’re just one of the sidekicks, more of a GI Joe doll I pull out to play with once in a while because what toy chest is complete without them—even one such as this!” Natty said gesturing to the Nautilus.
Leon hit him with the stone face; he wasn’t rising to the bait. Instead, he let the kettle blow off steam. Leon took it on good faith that at some point the neurochemicals in Natty’s brain would rebalance themselves and he’d start spewing genius, as he usually did. Instead Natty just collapsed into his chair, appearing like a beaten boy-man, the eighteen-year-old-looking twenty-three-year-old. “I ran the analyses, by the way, or rather I had the Nautilus’s AIs run them—surprised she’s still taking orders from me. There is a real sense of entitlement going on around here and far too many self-important people who feel they have just as much right to her computing power, to say nothing of her own nebulous agenda.” Natty ran his hands back and forth through his mop of hair as if by provoking more blood to his head—his face was indeed flushing red—he might dislodge his latest insight like the brain clot it was, so it could travel into his heart and finish him off, painlessly. Finally, he looked up at Leon, “Turns out you’re right about the pulsar thing. Go figure. Not sure how to feel about a partly psychic special forces leader, except perhaps to be grateful.”
“The thing has five points, Natty. I took a wild shot as to why. Or my quantum unconscious that makes all of us geniuses, according to you, found a moment of weakness when my defenses were down to shout something really screwy in my ear.”
Natty snorted. The tuft of air discharged from his nose sounded like one of those booster rockets correcting the trajectory of a satellite—the sound they used in the movies anyway, being as sound did not actually travel in space. “As to a robot maintenance crew inside the star gate that activates as needed, well, that’s not all that screwy sounding, even if I can’t prove it.” Natty massaged his closed eyes; they were bloodshot from staring at his monitors. One glance from Leon at the displays and he wasn’t surprised. The images were of robots small enough to swim around inside a single bio-engineered bacterium, no doubt supplied by Laney; she and Natty were coordinating their efforts again. Leon averted his eyes before he went mad. The idea of an army of those things crawling around inside him taking orders from the Nautilus as opposed to him was not one he cared to linger on.
Natty bounded out of his chair again and resumed his pacing. He was pulling at his lip this time. “As for that bone fragment I got from the White Indian…I can’t believe you figured out how it fit into the big picture.”
“Understanding what intel I have in my possession bears on a mission does fall under my purview. All the same,” Leon said, touching his fingertips together and flexing the fingers of both hands. “Has it occurred to you that merely being in the proximity of that star gate is acting as a brain tonic, helping to forge connections between the quantum mind and our conscious mind?”
From the way Natty did a double take Leon’s direction and from how wide his eyes had gotten, Leon figured he had not. Speaking no more gently, Leon continued, “I’m guessing your father built the Nautilus to amplify chi energy flowing through it, so it acted like a power spot wherever in the cosmos it was, being as you’re both as fluent in Eastern science as Western science? It’s possible the Nautilus is digesting the radiation
coming off that star gate now to just those ends.”
Natty glared at him, clamping down on his jaw. “Even if you’re right, we can’t count on either of those things helping us once we’re across the gate. Still, you might have just helped me clear a stumbling block in my thinking regarding how to get my robots to interface with Laney’s viral vectors better, come time to infect the crew with their next upgrades.”
Okay, so those were viruses on the monitors Natty was studying, not bacteria. Leon ought to have been able to tell the difference even with his basic scientific acumen. There might have been something else going on he hadn’t detected. Maybe he wasn’t sure what he was looking at because it was a synthetic creation of Natty’s and Laney’s or perhaps… It occurred to Leon that it might be alien in nature. It was possible one of the lifeforms aboard the Nautilus had gotten closer to an answer to how to marry the conscious mind to the quantum mind better than Natty and Laney had, and they were borrowing from his or her biochemistry. It might have to do with the nanite cloud alien from the star gate. Finally, while viruses were traditionally a great deal smaller than bacteria, if this thing were alien in nature, who was to say it wasn’t a hell of a lot bigger than the viruses Leon was used to, acting more like a mother ship once inside the body, dispersing its smaller weaponized viruses like so many babies?
“Why are you really here?” Natty asked catching on to Leon’s frustration trying to make sense of what he was seeing on the monitors, and apparently not willing to share information just yet. Leon didn’t care for the implications; there was no reason not to share intel unless the shock value was just too great and could compromise the functioning capacity of the asset or team member in question. Leon let the point go; the truth was he did already have enough mind-blowing revelations he was entertaining in his head.
“My gut tells me we’re still missing pieces to this puzzle, and if we don’t have them all in place before we pass through that gate, we’re going to end up like the last ship that tried.”
The Star Gate Page 24