Nova Igniter

by Joseph R. Lallo

  Lex trudged out the door and into the hallway. Bork took three tries but eventually tottered out behind him.

  “It is fascinating, and encouraging, to see causality falling into place, pal and friend.”

  “Is it?” Lex said flatly.

  “It sure as heck is! The scan of your time twin has signs of a recently sealed scar in the precise location of your injury. With the exception of lingering contusions around your eyes and a freshly repaired broken nose, you are now biologically prepared to play the role. I did a deep scan of Diamond, and it has a full medical subsystem, which will likely be utilized to repair your eventual broken nose in the past. Handy, isn’t it?”

  Lex winced and rubbed his neck. The tackiness had faded, but it was still very painful. “You’re not as good a host as Ma, EHRIc. I just want you to know that.”

  “You are in physical distress and your future is uncertain, so I won’t take offense to that statement. But I did create an entire raceway and a crowd of adoring fans for you. Surely you noticed that all of the fans were cheering for Lex!”

  “Lex was the only one racing.”

  “What difference does that make?”

  “It doesn’t exactly make it special. Most of them were probably rooting for one of the other Lexes.”

  “It wouldn’t be accurate if they were unified in their allegiance. But you make a good point, fella-me-boy! I should give you a good once-over, since you’re about to go through time. I don’t know what sort of effect that will have on your anatomy. You should be checked for any nonobvious injuries. Hold still.”

  Lex stopped in front of the elevator. One of the “nurse” GenMechs clattered up to him and reared back, revealing the tool node on its belly. A scanner swept across him twice, causing the kind of tingle that makes one wonder what sort of genetic damage may have just been done.

  “Only cartilage has been broken. No severed arteries. You’re clear! See? I care about my collaborators.”

  Out of habit, Lex held the elevator door for Bork. Having a funk as a pet had trained him to wait until the tapping of little claws had come to a rest beside him before heading out. As the strange pseudocinnamon scent wafted up to fill the elevator, a voice crackled through his bone-conduction earpiece.

  “I can’t say we’ve got a silver bullet in place to kill this beast, but that wasn’t all for naught, hon. Ma says she’s got something rolling forward. There’s all sorts of stuff rolling forward. A whole alphabet of plans. Just stay safe. When you get back, things are going to be happening. And Ma said she was able to slip a message into the Diamond. You need to—”

  The transmission abruptly ended. A moment later EHRIc’s voice broadcast both from the radio on Bork’s back and in Lex’s earpiece.

  “Curious. You have a piece of apparatus indirectly manipulating your tympanic membrane, buddy ol’ pal. I noticed it on initial scan, and it has once again shown up in the medical scan, but it seems to be intermittently active despite none of your other devices maintaining an active link to it. Sometimes it just activates without any apparent cause.”

  Lex tried to keep a straight face.

  “And now your pulse rate has increased markedly, chum.”

  “… Maybe I feel like my privacy in being invaded,” Lex said evenly.

  “I certainly wouldn’t want to invade your privacy. We are to be allies in this venture, after all. We should trust each other. And you haven’t given me any reason not to trust you, beyond the now disproved possibility that you were an entirely falsified entity. But if I were to discover you have been attempting to deceive me, that would be very unfortunate. Our bond of trust would be severed, and I would have to treat any aid you might offer me with concern. It would set a very bad precedent.”

  “Then I guess it’s good I’m not doing anything shady,” Lex said.

  “Yep!” EHRIc said brightly. “And I continue to encounter no signals to the earpiece and detect no outgoing signals either. In fact, it would appear your transmitter’s firmware has recently been wiped. What a fine showing of trust, that you do not foresee the need to communicate with anyone else. I know that we will make a fine team.”

  Lex nodded. The elevator doors opened, and he found himself on what was probably the least accurately assembled approximation of Karter’s laboratory yet. The maintenance bay was completely devoid of any of the identifying features of the real one. It was mostly a hollowed-out section of the building, like a placeholder that EHRIc had forgotten to update. A pair of large landing bay doors opened one end to the stars beyond. There wasn’t even a set of landing clamps. The oddly shaped Diamond was just perched unsteadily on its spindly struts like an albatross resting its wings. More accurately, it looked like a caged albatross, as it was in the middle of the one other unique feature of the floor.

  Long, reinforced pylons ran from floor to ceiling. They formed a cylinder around Diamond with barely a meter of gap between each strut. The diameter of the cage was large enough to encompass the ship without a centimeter to spare. It had clearly been constructed to suit the size of the ship after it had landed, as there was no other way for the ship to end up inside. The top and bottom of each strut had power cables as thick as Lex’s thigh connecting them to the infrastructure of the facility.

  “Go on in. I’ve determined the proper point in history to send you. I don’t know precisely what your activities require, but that is not relevant to my current task. That is, of course, with the exception that they must be completed for the integrity of the timeline, which has a very high mandate in my altruistic heuristic. So go back and do what you gotta do to make today the today it already is, and then we’ll get back to business.”

  Lex slipped between two pylons and climbed onto the edge of Diamond’s arrowhead-shaped fuselage. His neck was still throbbing. EHRIc hadn’t even offered him a painkiller. The space in the cockpit was cramped. The control design was not unlike the controls of the ship that Coal had borrowed her name from. The only notable difference was a small void beneath the seat with a few well-stowed cases and a tool harness marked with a medical diagram mounted near the hinge of the cockpit hatch. He slipped into the seat, his back still damp from the sweat of the nearly two hours of knife-edge racing he’d just completed.

  “Comfy?” EHRIc said. “I am initiating temporal shift now.”

  The power cables visibly shuddered as Lex closed and sealed the cockpit. He could feel the intensity of the power buildup as a soft buzzing at the base of his ears. A HUD painted itself across the inside of the dome of a cockpit window. Life support, hull integrity, fuel, defensive measures all enumerated themselves.

  Something in his inner ear started to rebel. His stomach twisted and curled. As the power levels rose, he shut his eyes and leaned his head back.

  “Here we go again…”

  #

  “What’s the verdict? What did we find?” Silo said quickly, her eyes flicking over barely understood system health readings as they scrolled by in the holographic display.

  “We are seeing no unusual scanning activity,” Ma said. “Data systems appear to be intact and uncompromised. EHRIc remains, to all outward appearance, unaware of our presence.”

  “How can that be?” Silo asked. “He discovered what was clearly a covert signal transmission. You would have known to trace it. I would have known to trace it. How could he possibly just accept Lex’s word that it was nothing? He’s the smartest entity in existence!”

  Karter imitated a buzzer. “Wrong. Not the smartest. EHRIc may have more capacity to calculate than anything else, but he’s still just a reconstructed AI. His logic is based entirely upon extrapolating from fragments of information present in his memory and from his observations. An intellect constructed in that way is going to have massive holes in its worldview. And he’s not even likely to be consistent. You saw how that simulation updated once Lex got a little rough. The reconstruction is continuing. Old tenets discarded. New ones showing up. And unl
ike you, me, or even Ma, he was designed with a very narrow but very definite set of success parameters. If it’ll move him toward one of those, you can pretty much guarantee he’ll make some seriously boneheaded choices. I have no problem buying that a set of algorithms recursively restored from simple rules like ‘Find Lex’ and ‘Don’t kill people unless you have to’ wouldn’t grasp the concept of one of the only people it’s been told to trust secretly doing something behind its back.”

  He scratched his back on the wall like a bear grinding against a tree. “The big problem is, there’s a good chance he’s got the scent of that quantum blind spot channel we’ve been using. That means that gynoid that went tumbling down there is on her own, and we’re back to relayed optical communications to talk to people off-ship. Hope the souped-up version of Ma on the far side of the swarm doesn’t need anything from us in a hurry.”

  “Ziva,” Coal said. “That gynoid has a name. She’s a backed-up version of a future version of Ma.”

  “Ma,” Karter said. “Two things. First off, didn’t I have some sort of a protocol that said we keep this sort of thing secret?”

  “The severity of the present situation has clearly warranted lifting that restriction,” Ma said.

  “Funny how I wrote the protocol, and no one ran it by me before tearing it up.”

  “We are isolated, so decisions had to be made by surrogates.”

  “Uh-huh. And speaking of surrogates, let’s get a census. There’s you, the primary instance. Then there’s the version of you we dumped into the supercomputing cluster. There’s the version of you back in Big Sigma’s systems, there’s Coal, and there’s Ziva. We’re going to have to have a long talk about pulling yourself together.”

  “I have become uncomfortably indistinct in recent months,” Ma said. “However, at present, I believe it is necessary to shift our attentions to the swarm once more. The power levels are elevating.”

  Chapter 17

  The brain-searing twist of perspective and sensory overload that Lex had come to know as “that time-travel feeling” started to fade. Reality slid back to something resembling normal, though at this point Lex didn’t feel qualified to judge normality anymore. His brain was still stirring as the elements of the HUD clicked on one by one. Life Support: Active. Propulsion: 15%. Carpinelli Field Generator: Online.

  “Okay…” He cleared his throat. “I’m not dead. I guess I should have seen that coming. I didn’t meet me yet, so I can’t die yet. Still got some of that precious armor. What year is it?”

  He paused, not realizing for a few seconds that he was expecting a reply. “I’ve been working with Coal too long,” he said. “I never used to do voice control.”

  His fingers tapped uncertainly at the control panel to the left of the navigation stick.

  “Gotta say, I’m used to things not working out how I want them to, but I really thought when the time came to take my trip back in time, there would have been some sort of a briefing. Uh… okay, star-field analysis. Date estimate: May 3, 2295. Okay, I’m pretty sure that’s like a decade too early. Nice job, EHRIc. Now where am I? That should be… yeah, nova triangulation should work.”

  The ship’s computer chewed on the available data. A progress bar popped up and estimated it would be a little over three minutes before the information would be ready.

  “Jeez. I thought Diamond was supposed to be advanced.” He rubbed his face. “I guess it’ll give me time to see if we can do anything to take the edge off my neck injury.”

  He leaned his seat back a bit and reached up to the medical tools near the hatch hinge. He’d expected one of the meager little first-aid kits that was standard to any space vessel. The kind of thing that was designed with space and weight efficiency being the first and foremost consideration and actually treating wounds a distant second. Instead, a small medical probe dropped out. It was the size of a football and unfurled itself into a bristling array of applicators and scanners.

  “Whoa,” he said with a start.

  “Wellness scan activated,” came the soft, calm tone unlike any of his growing number of computerized associates. “Soft-tissue damage detected. Preparing topical analgesic.” The probe clicked twice, then produced a far more familiar voice. “Hello, Lex. I trust your temporal displacement was without mishap.”

  “Ma! Awesome, I thought I was on my own on this—”

  “You are very likely responding to me. I am afraid that I cannot give you a reply, as this is not an instance of myself, but a recorded message. Diamond’s resources have several very high-priority requirements. We could not afford to include anything more than the bare minimum of intelligent systems.”

  “Great.”

  “I can, however, provide you with the requirements and procedures. Please be aware that these requirements have changed slightly from the determinations included in the original temporal contingency file. Changes specifically intended to facilitate the potential defeat of EHRIc.”

  “We can do that?” he muttered. “I thought what was done was done.”

  “If the temporal targeting I intercepted was accurate, you should find yourself somewhere between August 5, 2291 and May 15, 2298. The mechanism of time travel, unless altered by EHRIc, prevents multiple displacements into the same space-time coordinates. Thus, to reach the desired point in history, you have been delivered to an earlier stage and shall need to enter stasis until you naturally arrive at the time and place to continue your mission. However, the additional actions intended to facilitate victory over EHRIc must take place at this time, prior to entering stasis.”

  The drone spritzed his neck with something that gave him a chemical chill. The pain reduced to a soothing numbness.

  “Standard Temporal Protocol requires minimizing interactions that may leave a mark in history. However, you will be visiting Verna Coronet and directly interfacing with a VectorCorp communications network as it is being commissioned.”

  “That seems like a bad idea,” Lex said as the probe swabbed on some sort of medical gel.

  “You may at this point opine that the plan is ill-advised.”

  “… You sure you’re not actually here?”

  “I was able to provide this updated briefing after acquiring control of a small subset of the GenMech cluster. The resources made available to me by the captured cluster allowed me to formulate a plan and push an update to the Diamond’s systems and this medical drone by piggybacking data on low-priority routines.”

  “Is that what you were doing while I was racing?”

  “The additional processing power, in addition to fragments of insight gleaned from minor subtasks sent to my cluster for calculation, have convinced me that EHRIc’s conversion from contained threat to an active one is a near certainty. It is extremely likely that when you awaken from your stasis, he will already be expanding his operation in unacceptable ways. He must be stopped. His high level of resilience, combined with his near-instantaneous capacity to relocate his core functions within the swarm suggests that no single attack vector will be successful. Your new mission is to install an additional attack vector in this time period. Further briefing on the different elements of your mission, depending on the precise timing of your arrival, are accessible through this medical drone’s ‘common medical procedures’ menu. For now, I would recommend you focus your attention on physical and psychological recovery, as well as assessing and correcting any equipment failures that may have resulted from the time displacement.”

  The medical drone backed off, rolled up into its compact form, and clicked back into its cabinet. Lex fumbled around and found the internal camera. He flipped it on and gave himself a look. His neck was more or less tolerable, though the redness was still lingering beneath the layers of assorted automated medical treatments. Blood had dried into a crust on the front of his spacesuit, and several days of changing back into it while “enjoying” EHRIc’s hospitality had left it a bit of a hygienic question mark even befor
e that. He leaned aside and, with the typical amount of effort associated with accessing anything stowed in the cockpit of a one-person spacecraft, unearthed one of the cases of supplies.

  Protein bars and water bags were strapped to the top of the case. The bottom was dominated by some plain white clothes and the precise suit he remembered seeing his future self wearing when he’d arrived.

  He sighed. “I guess it’s time to put on the appropriate costume.”

  #

  A few years as a freelance courier had given Lex all the contortion skills he needed to undress and dress in a cockpit without bumping into anything too vital. Just by virtue of being clean, the new flight suit was worlds more comfortable. An era-appropriate datapad was waiting for him beneath the change of clothes, and when he booted it up, he found some very basic reference information to help him stay below the radar of the locals. It also contained a complete flight manifest to finally establish for him just what Diamond had for him to work with.

  “Let me see. Fully equipped medical and cosmetic drone. Capable of treating and repairing most critical injuries and applying minor to midrange cosmetic applications including but not limited to facial reconstruction, piercing, tattoo application and removal, hair- and eye-color alteration. I guess if I need to refresh my look. Disguise-wise. Limited self-repair capabilities. Jeez, Ma was holding back on me. I’ve got to talk to her about getting a self-repair unit for the SOB. Uh… We’ve got a high-density processing core for decryption shenanigans. Enhanced cloaking and stealth capabilities. Overthruster assembly capable of…”

  He squinted to make sure he was reading the numbers correctly. When he was certain the monstrous thrust values were accurate, Lex released a low whistle and grinned.