Nova Igniter

by Joseph R. Lallo

  “This information, specifically the scope and duration, was withheld because I suspected you may have had reservations about applying it if you’d known what you were doing beforehand. This virus will proliferate, undetected, through VectorCorp systems and all connected systems. A small fraction of the computing power of all major devices will be consumed by this subroutine. It will run for decades, first breaking Karter’s security, then continuing. The aggregate computational time will, by the time of your departure from EHRIc’s swarm, achieve something in the same order of magnitude of several minutes of EHRIc’s computational capacity. At the risk of being unduly colloquial, EHRIc has become something of a werewolf. You have now initiated the creation of a single silver bullet. It is up to us to make it count.”

  “Poetic,” Lex said. “Almost makes you forget you just had me commit the biggest information crime of all time. It’s one thing to sneak something into the network for a few years. But this? I swear, if this is the reason my datapad was so slow during college, you’re going to get a real talking to.”

  He guided the cloaked ship out of the atmosphere and picked a spot to wait a few years until it was time to help himself through the previous near-fatal clash with the GenMechs. Once the ship was locked in and jumped to FTL, he gazed at the ETA.

  “Four hours, fifty-eight minutes until we get there, then, what? Seventeen years of drifting in deep space in stasis. May as well get a head start on it.”

  He brought up the stasis menu. In yet another example of Ma’s impressive foresight, it was preset with his wakeup call. He tapped the confirmation.

  “After the last couple weeks, it’ll be nice to get some sleep.”

  Vents in the cockpit released a milky-white vapor with a peculiar, astringent smell. Muscles that he hadn’t realized had been knotted with stress and anxiety began to loosen. His eyes became heavy, his thoughts sluggish and muddled. He slouched in his chair.

  Sleep.

  He jumped in his seat as a piercing tone filled the cockpit. Lex wrestled his eyes open and fought to focus them on the screen beside his left hand.

  Stasis Complete.

  Time: 21:00 GST

  Date: April 14th, 2312

  “What… What?” he said as more brain cells joined the party. “It didn’t even feel like sleep? You let me sleep for years and it didn’t even feel like sleep?!”

  He tried to raise his hand to touch his nose. The limb felt like it was made of lead, barely willing to respond to his commands. A few seconds of dedicated effort restored enough feeling and control for him to confirm that his nose was largely, but not completely, healed.

  “You even kept the lousy bruises?”

  He coughed and fumbled for some water. The one thing that seemed to feel the way he expected it to after all that time was his mouth. His tongue was like sandpaper. A full bag of water was able to reduce it to a tolerable level of cotton mouth.

  “At least last time I got frozen it felt like I was asleep for a couple hours. You didn’t even let me doze off!”

  He pulled the old datapad out and flipped through it again, then poked through the navigation system and mission monitor. While he was sleeping, the impressive amount of computing power packed into the ship had done its work. The decryption attack for the control systems of who he liked to think of as Bad Future Karter was ready. That was ostensibly why he was here, to unlock the door and give his former self a chance to succeed, then pick him up and give him a ride before it was too late. He’d already been through this the first time. Now it was time to save his own bacon.

  Lex brought up the internal cameras and looked himself over. The half-healed broken nose. The long-healed scars. The silver band on his finger. The tattoo. It was all in place. The time had truly come. Lex sighed.

  “Let’s get it done.”

  Chapter 19

  “We’ve got a massive power surge,” Silo said, eyes on the visualization.

  “As anticipated,” said Ma. “This is the time-displacement activation. Lex has been sent back in time.”

  The intricate web of blue lines connecting the swarm of GenMechs flickered and faded in what looked like a rolling blackout on the display.

  “Give me a visual on that fake version of my lab and the surrounding swarm,” Karter said. “Let’s see what this so-called superintelligence did to itself.”

  The display added an inset of the facility. It had gone dark. The flickering force field around the entire facility was down, and the energy being beamed in to fuel the place was notably absent. Every nearby GenMech had gone completely inert. For most, that meant previously extended legs were curled in like those of a dead spider. Some were in an off-axis rotation caused by an ill-timed thruster burst or simply an errant mechanical motion upsetting their position.

  “Zero activity in afflicted GenMechs. This confirms volatility flaw is intact,” Ma said.

  “What’s the radius of the afflicted region?” Silo said. “And do we know the status of EHRIc?”

  “Radius of inactivity is seven kilometers,” Ma said.

  “That’s not enough to punch a Nova Igniter through,” Karter said. “GenMechs on default software can and will close that gap. And that’s not a big enough radius to guarantee a full wipe of EHRIc’s central-processing cluster.”

  “Confirmed,” Ma said. “The diameter of inactivity is rapidly decreasing. Local inactive GenMechs are being replaced by unaffected units from outside the radius of the power drain. Coordination of motion suggests unified control. EHRIc is still active, to some degree. Processing… There is significant signal disturbance on the far side of the swarm. Incoming transmission. Correction, incoming distributed data link. My injected instance is requesting reintegration.”

  “That sounds like an enormous security risk,” Silo said.

  “Yeah, and Ma is smart enough not to do it unless she has to. Especially that Ma. Link up,” Karter said.

  “Establishing coprocessing link. Reintegrated.”

  Ma’s voice shifted subtly with the final word. There was a clarity that was previously absent. Her somewhat choppy, piecemeal voice still retained its distinctive individual tones, but each now seemed sharper, more defined. It was as if she’d re-recorded all her voice lines with higher-quality audio.

  She continued. “Immediate action is required. Threat sufficient to justify direct connection and risk of revealing our positions,” Ma said. “Data requests filtering in from outside of my portion of the cluster suggest EHRIc has identified the volatility flaw and has developed an iteration of the design that lacks the flaw. We have approximately four minutes before the damaged portion of EHRIc fully reconstructs and redeploys. At that point, three actions are likely to follow. All GenMechs not actively running calculations or vital routines will organize into clusters and reconstruct themselves to be robust against power failure. EHRIc will awaken Lex. EHRIc will continue his mission, which will mean locating Silo and Garotte, followed by locating Karter and/or the rest of the Neo-Luddites. Retreat guarantees EHRIc spreads beyond the system. Failure to retreat guarantees discovery, followed by execution of stated secondary objectives, which also guarantees spread beyond the system and traumatic alterations to the human race.”

  “Lock and load,” Silo said. “If we’re going down, we’re going down fighting.”

  “Martial preparedness is advised, but I have deployed the following counterplans. I am aggressively expanding the portion of the swarm under my control. I have already overtaken seventeen percent of the swarm and have yet to face significant pushback. This will change as EHRIc’s system fully reconstructs, but every unit removed from his control and added to mine extends the duration of the resulting battle of wills. If I can surpass fifty percent of the swarm, I may be able to assume complete control in time. Even if I fail, EHRIc will require all available resources to hold off my advance and reclaim lost units, thus delaying the refit of the GenMechs and retaining their volatility flaw. Regardle
ss, situational stability is compromised. Complete victory or the beginning of an eventual defeat predicted within no more than two hours.”

  “Can I blow something up? Tell me I can blow something up,” Coal interjected. “The shield is down. Now would be an excellent time to blow something up in the laboratory complex. Arming fusion devices.”

  “Cool it, Coal. It won’t do any good,” Karter said.

  “Has anyone contacted the android that got deployed to the surface? Or whoever that was? I’m losing track,” Silo said.

  “Ziva knows what she has to do,” Ma said.

  #

  Ziva streaked across the field of slowly rotating GenMechs, alternately bursting her thrusters and leaping off them like steppingstones. She’d been keeping still, biding her time. Upon her arrival, she could tell by the energy readings that she wouldn’t be able to make her way through the force field protecting the facility. After the time jump and the resulting power drain, it had dropped. She reached the disk of fabricated stone and continued on her trajectory. The gravity generators were also disabled, thus she was not drawn to the courtyard as she whisked by.

  There were three buildings in the rebuilt facility, but Ziva didn’t need to waste any time searching the others. Everything always happened in the laboratory. Her flight took her toward the front door. She pivoted and directed her thrusters opposite her trajectory. Reinforced fingertips dug long, shallow furrows into the textured courtyard surface, slowing her further. Precise application of thrust and friction brought her to a stop just outside the door.

  “How accurate did you make this door?” she mused to herself. “There should be a power-isolated external release box here.” She grazed her fingers across the doorway and found only seamless metal. “Not perfect, but the motors are in the same place, so…”

  Ziva flexed her fingers and punched easily through the metal of the door panel. She touched two contact points and energized her fingers. The door clicked open and rattled with the release of a breath of trapped atmosphere.

  “Oh? The interior is still pressurized,” she said. “That will simplify things, in the event…”

  She paused. Directional sensors alerted her to motion behind her. GenMechs were approaching. Ziva stepped through the door and deftly popped the panel from the control mechanism. Another burst of energy from her internal stores closed and latched the door. A few torn wires disabled the motors entirely.

  Getting through the inner door took only a few more seconds, and confirmed that the facility was still pressurized and within an acceptable temperature range. The lights were off, and without windows the halls were utterly black. She intensified the illumination of her red irises and guided herself down the zero-g hallway with light taps against the walls and ceiling.

  “The walls are too thick for a life-sign scan, and someone in stasis would be a weak signal besides.” She popped a panel on her forearm and viewed the screen it concealed. “The transponder for the stasis pod is active, but the walls are attenuating the signal too much for a positive lock. I only know that I need to go… up. That’s enough for now.”

  Ziva made her way to the elevator. With a pressurized atmosphere inside the laboratory, her hearing was once again of use. The information her ears provided was not overly helpful. In fact, it was chilling. The sound came of the distant tapping of robotic limbs upon the exterior walls of the facility. GenMechs arriving. It was unclear what their goal was. In theory, they were after Lex, but there had just been a disruption to EHRIc. There was no way to be certain how they would behave. They could have reverted to original programming. They could be seeking to restore the facility to operation, or they could be in some undefined state, executing random code. She double-checked that the protective transponder code was still broadcasting. In theory, it would continue to effectively conceal her from detection. The success of this mission was depending on an increasingly tenuous string of unproven theories.

  She guided herself to the stairwell. It was electronically locked, like the rest of the doors. That was good news; it meant each floor was individually pressurized. Additional layers of safety. Additional options.

  A similar procedure defeated and resealed the door to the stairwell. While protected by the walls, she could risk an active ping for the stasis pod. The signal was leading her upward. Progress was swift. Without gravity, she was able to gracefully haul herself up the stairs, tugging at handrails and weaving between landings. The clatter of GenMech legs was constant, like an unrelenting hailstorm.

  Near the sixth floor of the laboratory, the power flickered. Gravity reasserted itself suddenly, causing Ziva to plummet from one landing to the previous one. Her body proved sturdier than the railing, which buckled beneath her with the force of the impact. She pulled herself up and ran up the stairs with bounding steps.

  She reached the appropriate door. With the power reestablished, there was no need to manually power the door. She tapped the controls. The door opened. She froze in place.

  The room, like so many in this not-quite-accurate recreation of Karter’s lab, was unsettlingly designed. The floor was largely empty, and almost painfully well lit. For some reason when EHRIc had reconstructed it, he had provided all surfaces with flawless white finishes, polished to a glassy sheen. The light came from the gaps in the ceiling panels, creating a brilliant grid of white that reflected in the walls and floor to produce a strange, infinite mirror effect of repeating patterns. The stasis pod, which was little more than the disconnected modular cockpit of Diamond, had been placed in the center of the room like some sort of religious altar. It stood vertically, Lex’s preserved body visible through a hatch coated with dust.

  But Lex was not alone.

  Five GenMechs stood in a ring around the pod. They were perfectly motionless save for the glass lenses of the sensor cluster that took the place of a head, which twitched and shifted, constantly scanning.

  That they had not made a move suggested they were still vulnerable to the stealth transponder code Ziva was broadcasting. She took a tentative step forward, boots clicking against the polished floor. The GenMech sensors twitched toward her. Each of the mechanisms slowly pivoted to face her, but still did not move. They were aware of her presence. They simply were being instructed by their programming to take no action.

  Ziva activated every passive scanner available to her as she approached, cycling through the different readings. These units were only communicating with each other. They were cut off from the rest of the swarm, and since they weren’t part of the power distribution network, they had been spared the effects of the power drain when the temporal displacement happened. They were guard dogs, plain and simple, cut off to avoid being compromised. EHRIc took Lex’s safety very seriously.

  She navigated between them and approached the pod. This would have to be done very carefully. While she did have some limited weaponry, the moment she armed it, she would pass the power threshold of the stealth. And there was no telling precisely how these GenMechs had been programmed to defend the pod. Each individual unit was extremely limited in its program sophistication. There was every chance that something as simple as opening the hatch would remove the pod and its contents from the pattern match in their code that protected it.

  Ziva turned her attention to the latching mechanism of the pod with the focus and care of a technician defusing a bomb.

  #

  Decades earlier…

  “That’s that,” said Lex, dusting off his hands as he stood in the already frigid cave with his earlier self. “The beacon will go off about ten minutes after Karter and Ma return to Big Sigma after sending you off.”

  “Great,” said Past Lex. He rubbed his nose, still tender from his bout with a mildly more hostile future version of Karter. “Hopefully Ma will have the medical bay set up for me. I look like I lost a fight with a wrecking ball.”

  “She will. As you can see, she does a pretty good job on the nose,” Lex said.


  He resisted the urge to shake his head. Oh, if it had only been so simple that the fight with Karter had been the reason for his crooked features. Better to let him believe that. Explaining he was going to start a massive brawl in a still earlier time period to commit massive cybercrimes would have been a bad idea for all sorts of reasons. At least now he understood why he said it.

  “Hey, do you mind if I ask, does this whole stupid thing work? Do we beat the GenMechs?” Past Lex asked.

  “I don’t mind you asking, as long as you don’t mind me not answering,” Lex said.

  “Of course.”

  Back then, he had thought the phrase was meant to prevent his earlier self from learning something his future self knew. Now he realized the real answer was “I don’t know yet.”

  “Hey, look at it this way,” Lex continued. “You live at least long enough to come back and do this like I did. Most people don’t get to learn that, so you’re ahead of the game.”

  It felt good to install the short-lived feeling of invincibility that had sustained him for those precious months. In fact, it was becoming increasingly clear why he had to give himself a pep talk, even if it wasn’t strictly true. He probably wouldn’t have gotten this far without one.

  “You’ll have some ups and downs,” he continued. “It sucks getting this scar. But overall I’d say I’m doing better now than you are, so things are looking up for you. At any rate, I’ve got to get out of here.”

  “You’re not freezing yourself here?” Past Lex said.

  “I’ve got to pick a different spot. Plus, I’ve got one or two more things to handle. Sleep tight.”

  “Yeah, okay. See… uh… be you later.”

  “Uh-huh,” Lex said.

  He walked toward the mouth of the cave. An errant throb from the well-preserved injury from his fight on Verna Coronet reminded him of something. He turned back.

  “Oh, and just remember. Orange is a really bad color.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”