By dusk, Hal’s build queue was markedly smaller. Seventy robots were now under his command, a mix of Foragers, construction machines, diggers and transport robots. As darkness fell, six diggers wheeled themselves over to the centre of the airfield, a triangular patch of grass formed by the meeting of all three runways, and got to work. They needed no lamps to see in the dark, but I had built a set of low-light goggles so I could follow their progress from the tower. They stripped away the grass with robotic turf-cutters, and then began to dig a massive hole, some 100m square, within the triangle. As the whole deepened, more digger robots were completed and joined the original six. After three hours, with the hole more than 20m deep, the majority moved over to begin a second hole, near the farmland on the south side of the runway.
More robots emerged from the hangars. Hal was operating on a construction curve, I knew, so that each new construction robot built would aid in the building of other, new, larger robots. As the total passed two hundred, Hal began a third enormous hole on the opposite side of the runway. The first, I knew, would become the main construction building where the Carrier plans were to be produced. The second would house Orbiter construction, and the third would produce and test the engines. All three were flexible, so that anything could be built anywhere, but it was easier to keep track of a compartmentalised system.
I walked out to check on their progress at about 3am, nursing a cup of hot coffee from my newly-installed replicator. The speed at which these robots worked was phenomenal. About a dozen were actually down in the hole, their large, fast-spinning drills boring into the earth, then withdrawing to allow digger machines to remove the fill, and pipes to be brought down to suck out the groundwater. Every few minutes, the hole gained a half meter in depth, while other drills and diggers laboured to expand the sides of the hole, which closed on 80 meters already.
A platoon of robots whizzed past me, carrying tall sheets of tough, green plastic. These, I knew, would comprise the new security fence. Guide posts were already in place, with small drill machines creating post holes and copies of Brunel slotting the tall planks of plastic into place. The fence would eventually encircle the whole site, perhaps five miles around in total, and would be monitored by security cameras, motion sensors and other, less conventional equipment.
At 7am, I emerged once more from the tower and looked down into the first hole, barely ten hours old. A floor was in place, and walls. Panelling was being screwed into place, and entry ramps were almost finished, allowing smaller construction robots to trundle down into the bottom of the hole and assist. In his hangar, Hal showed me the plans by which a Carrier plane would be built, on a large cradle attached to a hoist. Once complete, it could be lifted up, the roof would open at the centre and slide back, and the plane would emerge and be gently tipped forward into its own wheels, straight onto the tarmac.
In the second hole, which was in a similarly advanced state, I could see the beginnings of the tunnel which would connect this to the other two factories. Parts, robots, engines and eventually payloads could be exchanged between the three facilities using transport robots which would scurry to and fro using these tunnels. It was a masterpiece of engineering and design, even before it had produced anything.
Hal had been keeping me regularly updated, and chose this moment to flash a news announcement onto my screen in the control tower. I was working on a large bowl of cereal topped with nuts and dried fruit – the best way to start the day, I reasoned – and, as the report scrolled through, realized immediately what Hal had in mind. The BBC journalist intoned ominously, ‘Martian dust is now estimated to cover 70% of the solar panels which power the two rovers, named Spirit and Opportunity. This has made it virtually impossible for them to communicate with their mother ship in orbit, and traverses which had been planned for the next few months have been all but cancelled. Privately, a source close to the program said that the missions are effectively over.’
‘That’s a damn shame, Hal’, I muttered. A second later, Hal laid out a transfer orbit, re-entry profile and simple remedy which would give the two brave little rovers a new lease of life. ‘Make it one of our early test flights’, I told him, yawning at length.
At the end of a 42-hour day, my robots kept working while I slept only as the inwardly contented can. Hal kept a watchful eye, more accurate and responsive to the vagaries of human circumstances every day, it seemed, and truly the master of this project. The quiet countryside of Norfolk became, overnight, the world’s first spaceport; in a subdued London apartment, Gemma wrote furiously in her diary, called two friends, drank a bottle of wine and fell asleep in front of Strictly Come Dancing; metal ore price fluctuations in Korea generated $1.9 million for Hal’s virtual stockbrokers overnight, the largest trade on this unusually quiet evening. Overhead, in its silent, solar vigil, the Phoenix studied our star, radiating not even a whisper.
Out in that starry vastness, there was a beautiful, enlightened world where a girl named Falik was laying in her bed awake, the city of lights thrumming outside her lofty apartment, waiting… and hoping…
*****
PART THREE
Prologue
It was a breathtaking act of the purest disobedience. A society so advanced should know better, he reasoned, than to flaunt so casually the laws which bind us all. They would be taught to respect, and to obey His word which, after all, exists to protect us from our vices, our natural tendencies to disruption and disharmony. If only there were true obedience, he sighed, then the Universe would know His unconditional love once more.
It was a large system, like so many through which he had travelled. More than a hundred planets, arranged in neat bands which spread concentrically outward from the star, a middle-aged behemoth in its most stable years. He marvelled, as he always did, at the orderly arrangement. The evidence was everywhere, in every atom of this place; His mighty works, once more on display. All that we can do, he smiled to himself, is to accept their perfection with the grace of the Maker himself. To meddle would be to diminish. To disobey would be to tarnish. To usurp the majesty of his creation would be an offence so heinous as to prompt the intervention of any right-thinking man. Anyone, that is, with the power to restore the great chain of events to their proper, ordained, perfect sequence.
This was his calling. The List, which guided his every interstellar traverse, his every intention and desire, had begun lately to shrink in size. A handful of civilizations, no more than that in each galaxy, had harnessed time itself and twisted it to their own ends. Each attempt was an affront to their Creator. Each had been stopped.
This ship, in more ways than one the vessel of this great endeavour, was a sad and reprehensible work of sin, he knew. In and of itself, it constituted an offence: its engines, which in their power to race even the photons across space, dared to test His sensible and reasonable constraints; its warp drive, abusing the perfection of His Universal fabric, was an abomination; the ship’s Chrono facility, surely the rudest, basest challenge to His authority, would be the first of these elements to be destroyed, once the List was finally empty. He daily sought forgiveness for this hypocrisy, one which pained him like an open wound; it was to serve that he was obliged to sin. It was to punish the wicked that he must take wickedness upon himself.
And so he prepared to intervene. In a region incredibly remote from the Earth, there was sin to be found, to be stamped out. Again, they had harnessed wormholes. Again, a foolhardy ship would seek to enter, to be transported. But they would know His word, as the others had known, too late and laced with the pain they had all earned by their blasphemy.
The ship approached the newly-created Chrono vortex, the classic and expected result of wormhole interactions. This sight he had seen, dozens of times... was it a hundred, perhaps? None of his zeal had left him, and none of the bile, despite these many repetitions.
Their craft neared its critical encounter with the Vortex. Each breath of its masters was a sickness to be expunged; not a flicker of
mercy or remorse would sully the event. This was His work, in the hands of a willing and obedient agent.
The beam of light was a sudden, brilliant addition to the swirling maelstrom of energy which hung in space, just ahead of the approaching ship. Emanating with ferocious strength from a source of limitless power with which the traveller’s ship was endowed, the beam simply waited for its prey to pass through, like a fly blundering into a spider’s web. This hunt, however, was measured in mere nanoseconds.
The ship broke apart at once. Pieces were scattered, at tremendous speeds, towards the four corners of the galaxy. None was permitted entry to the Vortex, into which the beam now shone its destructive gaze. The storm of light abruptly ceased, as if doused from within, and within a moment so brief as to stagger the appalled observers, their experiment, planned over millennia, was over.
The traveller did not stop. The ship began its manoeuvres, already a million miles from the cooling remains of the Vortex. Another attempt was to be made, he knew, so far away that their star was not yet visible.
It too would be stopped.
*****
Chapter XLI: Superstar
Monday 10th October, 2033
Washington, D.C.
I have never gotten used to the crowds. Though I’m seldom forced to tolerate them for long – maybe a few seconds between the vehicle and the building’s entrance, for example – but they’re so mind-bleedingly intense… a mass of people all wanting your attention, all shouting, lots of lights… They were two hundred yards away as the limo slid up to the kerb, and still I heard them. It just wasn’t dignified.
I chuckled at my own romanticism – the dignity of the thing was hardly my priority. I dealt with weightier matters these days. I had been engaged the most important project ever attempted – and it was about to be completed, on time, under budget and well-nigh perfect. The hordes outside the restaurants and bars I owned or frequented just loved to yell because of the name, sure… the exploits, the stories… dare I say when I speak of myself, the legend… But they couldn’t know the back-story. It had been a private meeting with the President in which we had come to a deal: no talk of Aliens until the orbital infrastructure was in place. Public panic was not just something they worried about on sci-fi movies; the distraction, expense, insanity that would overcome the public would do nothing to speed our contact with Takanli or to aid our exploration of the universe. The Red Cubes from Bassar and Cyto remained locked away at Sculthorpe, awaiting their moment.
Like all disciples, they comprehended neither the origin nor the method of their own befuddled captivation. My public loved gushingly, followed enthusiastically, and participated financially with a winsome consistency. The world’s endlessly burgeoning populace gave me every tool I needed; they got international leadership on-board, created points of focus and education which brought a powerful new intellectualism at just the right time; they linked political and civic institutions which began to pull together, and in the right direction for a change. The old order had started to creak. There was something of the early 1960s in the air once more, a reawakening of the ‘can-do’ thinking I so urgently needed for this project. People were excited.
Ah, my beloved public, I grinned to myself. Thrilled by the spectacle and beguiled by the romance of affordable spaceflight, they signed up in their droves for my vision, which was dazzlingly presented and stripped of science fiction. The Carrier and Orbiter craft were built in conditions of the highest secrecy by my robots in vast, underground Norfolk hangars. The construction fleet, which although designed by Hal’s alien intelligence, depends on technology which extends little beyond that found in a modern automobile factory. As far as the public was concerned, neat robotic advances had given me extraordinary, high-paced manufacturing flexibility. Part of the secrecy within which Sculthorpe operated was an embargo on any robot leaving the base; their appearance, configuration and above all their true designer was known only to those who knew of Hal, and that made them members of the solar system’s most exclusive list.
Smoke and mirrors had been practised to the point of a science, and Hal scythed through the media crap with his usual efficiency and aplomb. According to the latest gossip, I ran a secretive and super-talented collection of engineers, something like a ballsy, high-tech Google packed with genius whizz kids. I had done nothing to dispel these rumours; quite the contrary. My phantom engineers had secured demagogue status nearly two decades ago. Fan sites, I found to my endless amusement, proliferated, complete with supposed aliases and photo-fit graphics. ‘Current projects’ was one particularly ambitious part of a site which claimed the ‘ninja-cultist-super-scientists’ were working on time travel, teleportation and super light-speed engines. Oh, for goodness’ sake, I muttered. At least give us some credit.
Sculthorpe’s old status as a nuclear bomber station had helped retain some of the public’s respect for the place, and we were generally left well alone. Ministry of Defence guards made themselves highly visible on the surrounding roads, and beyond them, layers of automated security devices had kept us safe from prying eyes, sabotage attempts (only two to date, both funded by industrial rivals) and overzealous fans. Sculthorpe’s public image now combined a healthy dash of Cold War militarism, a soupcon of Aldermaston gravitas and a useful swirl of Star Fleet Academy. I’m told it is the most bookmarked site on Google Earth and demands for tourist access are constant. And constantly rejected.
At the centre, at the root of the plan to save humanity, was Hal. The number of humans who had met him was fewer than have access to the Pentagon’s nuclear war codes. He operated silently from a niche in the corner of my front room. Sub-processor batches were farmed throughout the house, basement, garage and loft-spaces to dissipate heat more efficiently; a three-bedroom Welsh suburban home now contained more computing power than the US and China combined.
We held regular conferences - almost always when I was alone - over a highly encrypted, exclusive satellite connection. The business, the project, and most aspects of my scheduling and travel were Hal’s to run, and he ran them like a Swiss watch. We have never been at odds; he has never made a mistake. He dictates these words patiently, as we sit together in the living room, while other facets of his prodigious capabilities probe the latest weather, news and stock market grumblings, and run a highly complex satellite and Relocation network. He frequently complains of a nagging boredom.
And as for me? Revelling in a heady and luxurious cocktail of political power, personal wealth and engineering dynamism, I have found the public’s boundless enthusiasm only grist to my mill… plutonium to my Flux Capacitor. It got me face-time with people whose schedules are even fuller than mine. It had me strolling through corridors many would knowingly break the law to visit. The president called several times a month. I had been involved in Senate hearings (today’s being one of dozens) and acted as scientific advisor to three Washington think-tanks, two of which counted the Dalai Lama among their members.
I have brought space into the reach of every human alive today. I am rich beyond any individual’s wildest dreams. I speak, and they listen. I am a fucking superstar.
It is just such fame and wealth that enables some of the best fun I’ve had. For example, as my limo sleekly glides towards the hub of Washington’s power structure, my penis was equally smoothly gliding in and out of a lusciously warm mouth; this particular one belonged to Martha Rose, the Oscar-nominated actress and saviour of whales and pandas. The familiar urban scenery slid by as she blew me, sprawled on the back seat of the car, her own skirt hiked up to allow my fingers access to her soaking pussy.
“Got to jump out in a minute, Martha”, I reminded her quietly as she added a hand to her wonderful manipulation of my cock, slipping it up and down my considerable and swollen length.
She released me cock from her mouth. “Better hurry up and cum, then”, she replied before resuming her ministrations with redoubled lustful energy. An expert twisting motion added to the pleasure, only en
hanced by quick, tickling flicks of her tongue on my glans and frenulum. That always does the trick. As the Capitol Building hoved into view, Martha hit just the right rhythm to finish me off, and I grunted quietly as my balls emptied in hard, repeated spurts. Like the good, thoughtful girl she has always been (and I’ve been fucking her, on and off, for three years or so) she didn’t spill a drop. Even I try not to show up to Senate hearings with semen on my pants, whatever reputation I might have gained.
Since the inception of the Dvalin project, as Hal and I chose to call our plan, I have rather rashly (in Hal’s opinion) cut a highly unusual public figure. My drinking, piloting, sky-diving and moon-walking escapades lead credence to my privately preferred appellation, legend. I am well known, and in many instances welcomed with a gulp of apprehension, at virtually all of the newest and chicest places. On my more outlandish evenings (and when I drink so much fucking alcohol that it actually starts to have an effect) I have been known to change lives with lavish moments of spending, randomly pick up dozens of bar tabs, steal a dance with some stockbroker’s girlfriend and not return her for three weeks… you can imagine.
Absent the structure or responsibilities of what you might actually call a ‘relationship’– since Gemma, all those years ago, so unexpectedly cooled things down, then stopped returning my calls, and then simply vanished off the fucking face of the earth – I have revelled in a hedonistic, playboy lifestyle which has brought a widely mixed reception. I parachuted into the 2029 presidential inauguration, unannounced and three minutes late, interrupting the new President’s speech and causing a gigantic security operation. I got into all kinds of trouble with the Japanese government after my submarine nano-bots detached the propellers of their entire whaling fleet, rendering them immobile. I hosted a twice-weekly free-to-air, no-commercial science and talk show entitled ‘Out of This World’ (cheesy, but inevitable) which had viewing figures to make HBO executives drool, partially because it was intelligent, well-researched and didn’t patronize the viewer; audience share was also boosted by my endless antics.
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