Then he switched on his neurovisor to examine his mnemes. The foremost in red, fear and dread, came from August Bridges, the Man with the only Plan. Calvin30 listened through them, gratified by the tense tones and tempered tantrums. To mess with the most powerful man in the solar system with all the impunity of his obscurity - wasn't that just the ultimate thrill?
The AGM was advancing, and the Captain was under heat to greet his hatchet man. That August would fly right, Calvin30 was without doubt. August always straightened up under stress. It would be nice to be a fly upon the wall, but no need for that at all. Situation uncritical and under control. Setting the stage, though, had pushed out Calvin30’s frontiers by far. Foiling an assassination was many times double the trouble of oiling the gears to get it rolling. The hardest part had been getting the equations to balance his loyalties to all sides without remainder.
Calvin30 left a missive for August via their unusually confidential neurolink.
“August, Boss. As befits the late innings my comments are minimal. I’m close to pinning down the plot to have you shot. Since you’re swimming into the AGM, I’ll just consign what I find to my man on the inside, exercising our usual discretion, of course. By the way, a small situation might require rectification. Clone in my series, 16, caught his hands on a cookie from the wrong jar. Meaning he took a look at your communion biscuits, not the ones meant for the starving masses.”
With others Calvin30 could gain from their pain, but C16 was just a dead loss. It was hard to appreciate the pathos of those fated by birth to be hated. Such a shame, Calvin30 felt, to waste more than a half thought on such a half-wit, but C16 had been a pain one time too many. Jealously sniffing and zealously desperate in his particularly pathetic way to upset the upstart, and for all his disingenuous efforts he had finally managed to catch a scent. The fool had tripped across one of Calvin30's clandestine connections that allowed him first and August thereafter, to check out the E.T. phone zone.
This was the "cookie" C16 had found his fingers lingering on - a time-lapsed pre-capture of the Neptune array intersteller in-tray. Those broadcasts were then rebounded out to space from where, a week later, they bounced back to Earth through the official channels. Last week’s mind-blowing message had, of long-awaited necessity, been for Calvin30’s eyes-only. The magnitude of the earthquake it would trigger was boundless and the time to react too short, thus the crude hack job that C16 had uncovered.
“No emerging urgency Boss. No smoking guns to ruin our fun just some loose ends to tie up. Scared the smile off the sticky beak, but between late and never we may need to formulate a more surgical solution.”
The elevator opened and Calvin30 popped down to the taxi stop. Those that passed him on his way included members of several clone series including Calvin. None, Calvin30 noted, walked or talked with birds of their own feather. Either they tried to brown their nose with some of God’s Only, or they walked alone and forsaken, muttering away to themselves under hypnosis by their neurosis. The disdain towards them evident in the faces of the Originals mirrored the hole those clones had dug in their own souls.
Calvin30 puffed out his strut. He alone had not disgraced the race. Big Daddy C0 would be so proud.
Calvin Zero came from New York, a typical mixed breed bite from the Big Apple. By all reports Calvin30 had found around, C0 was a sharp-tongued, abrasive asshole. They kept cloning him a hundred years past his due date because his replicates were generally obsequious, over achieving brown-nosers. The old Alpha would be chucking in his grave if he saw the spineless marionettes the clone mills had churned out of his genes. C0 had met his maker long before Calvin30 was pipetted out of his wet dreams, but Calvin30 felt some satisfaction in inferring that the original version of the Calvin line had constructed some strategy to maintain self-respect. The odds for doing so were obviously 87 to two against.
Calvin30 yawned and hopped down the escalator to a landing overlooking a fifty-five-floor drop. It was a pleasant day, a light sea breeze shivering the gray green eucalyptus in the platform park, brown squirrels chasing one another down and up branches. A harsh winter sun infiltrating the thin cloud filter - another hot January day. Calvin30 waved a cab down from the rank. While waiting he switched his pipe to trumpet mode and toyed with a Chet Baker tune. He braced his breath against the blast of air from the jump jets as a driver-less volantor lowered from the sky to land on the landing. Calvin30 climbed inside. “Account Type: Local, Net, or Com?” a female voice droned in his mind.
“Mirtopik ComCred 230A75X,” he thought back.
“Thank you for choosing Hsing Wen Net, please choose your destination,” directed the digital driver as a map of the city beamed down through Calvin30’s neurovisor. His thoughts pointed out a compound of buildings in the middle left.
“You have chosen the University of the Sovereign City of Los Angeles, is this correct?”
“You better you bet.”
“Please rephrase.”
“All right. Yes.”
“Please select a building,” the neuroview drove through a three-dimensional view of several building entrances. “Stop on the dot.”
“You have chosen the Lovelock Institute of Extraterrestrial Studies, is this correct?”
“Oh Yes.”
“Calculating least time pathway. Your Com charge exchange rate to ecos is 58 ComScript at current trading.”
Calvin30 leaned back in his chair in the air. Set his seat’s auto massage to attack the knots in his back, as the volantor launched off the landing pad into the uncrowded sky lanes. Down below spaghetti lines of crowded bicycle paths and criss-crossed SkyTran lines weaved over suburbs and dipped under nature corridors planted atop the old freeways. Fields in those forests were used for emergency safe landings until a driver changing a turboprop had been eaten by a bear sometime last year. Question for the court: “Was the bear still representing the State of California when he crunched said driver for lunch?”
Calvin30 surveyed the scene down the plain to East LA where the shining shimmer of cheap solar roofing tiles and aluminum rainwater tanks reflected the sun back into the clouds. Cloned homes, self-similar and self-contained, feeding the Grid to pay the mortgage. Up front, where he was flying, was Uptown, growing ever greener as it spilled into the brown hills. In better days, as LA surfed down the Second Wave and helium-3 was cheaper, terradomes of the rich and famous had shown off their wealth with garish climate conditioning. The world might be going to hell, but it’s heaven by our pool.
But since the cost of giving the finger to Gaia kept going up, Uptown domes had flipped inside out with planted tree roofs mingling property lines with trespassing canopy, swapping with the terrapod buildings bound to their roots, photons and carbon for nutrient-rich nano-loot sucked from the vegan soy latte veins of those who lived inside. The houses lorded it over the lower class down Valley where desalinization ditches switched back and forth betwixt the pod homes and the public parks.
The thing was, bling was still king in LA. The obvious split between the whipped and the rich, so key to fuelling discontent, was still laid out here like nowhere else.
Calvin30 fidgeted in his seat, impatient to reach his destination. These new automated cruisers bored him. He missed his chats with real taxi drivers. They always lived worldviews dedicated to the most fascinating conspiracy theories, which were so much fun to encourage. Sadly the confederated cab Nets now only took ecos or Hub locals, either that or the discount they put on Comscript would draw unwanted attention from the auditors. And this was LA, first center of the Second Wave, the Golden Abode. Oh, the times they were a-changing.
The cruiser climbed down to the curb. “Thank you for choosing Hsing Wen Net. We look forward to driving for you again soon.”
Calvin30 moved out and the cab hurtled off down the drive, missing the mops of a group of undergrads by an exact, mindfully micro risk margin.
He ascended some stairs into an unimpressive concrete square that must have been at least
a century past tense. The walls were clean, but the scent of mildew was omnipresent. Along the walls were holoframes brimming with maps and images of other stars and planets magnified from the miniscule into magnificence. People were seeing into the heavens these days the way Calvin30 saw into people - with great detail but you couldn’t go there.
He wound his way into a maze of hallways threaded with fiber cable conduits and stopped before a set of white doors with an environmental hazard sign painted on them. He pushed an old-fashioned intercom button. A grandfatherly English man wearing a gray, threadbare cardigan opened the doors, “oh Dr. Twelve, it’s good you’ve finally made it. Please do step in.”
“Dr. Keith Myren. My pleasure in perpetuum.” Calvin30 had bumped across the good doctor at a Dublin astronomical symposium, which he had infiltrated under cover as one of his brothers, a non-descript section manager from Mirtopik astromechanics.
“Come, come this way, I’m excited to show you something.”
Calvin30 followed him to the back of a large room stacked with boxes, filing cabinets, and white boards until they stopped at an ancient style computer console on a desk piled with yellowed papers. No one had thought to give the coffee cups a rinse for a geologic era. Faded doodles, obscure notes, abstruse comic strips, and calendars of years past littered the walls. To stand closer to the good doctor, Calvin found it necessary to reposition three freestanding whiteboards filled with scientific graffiti. Myren blithely tapped away on a centuries old computer console, navigating a long succession of directory webs before reaching his destination. Calvin30 took note of the pass code over the old man’s shoulder. No neural imprints or other impediments would interfere with his return.
“I have just found the sort of thing that you suggested to me the other day. As you know we have been working at converting the Oort telescope array to include gravimetric readings. Of course, you know, this was all your idea. I forget. Oh yes, here it is on the screen. This is Scorpio 18. A rather uninteresting star at first glance, G class, like our sun really, fairly typical. Except when we look closer.” After an awkwardly long period of staring intently at a spinning hourglass, the screen painstakingly zoomed to a new focus.
“Oh, bother this software - I refuse to upgrade. It seems to me that the Nets and the Coms between the two of them are never going to produce a stable platform. Okay there, in close proximity to the star, just at the pointer.”
It was not at all clear what, in the blurry blob, was the big deal.
“There, you see? Two concentric rings perhaps asteroid fields, except they seem to be attracted to some massive objects resting within their respective orbits. The gravimetric sensors and x-ray emissions confirm your prediction. There is no other conclusion possible. What we have here are two small black holes in close orbit about this star. Truly amazing isn’t it, I’ve never seen anything quite like this. How did you ever suspect it? Let's take a grand tour, shall we? I've generated a neurosim from the astronomical readings and from your theoreticals. Here, have a seat so you won't lose balance.”
As the neurosim loaded Calvin30 saw the floor drop soundlessly below his feet as he floated through the ceiling and above a quickly vanishing campus, countryside, continent, planet, and solar system. Light started to stretch apart, blue ahead and red behind until a sudden splash of soft blue permeated the whole view.
"Cerenkov light," giggled Myren admiringly. "Those programmers think of everything."
Behind them the red became encircled in in rings of the blue, an odd contrast of color like the spectrum had swallowed itself.
"It's impossible of course," chortled Myren. You can't go faster than light in a vacuum, but in water you can, and it gives off this kind of sonic boom composed of blue light. Very good imagination the chaps who designed this transition."
Soon the light rings began to contract back over them, tightening until they vanished into the blue, and then their view resolved into discernible things. As they zoomed in on their objective, Calvin30 shivered from deja vu. The black maw chewing up the stars and jawing down a planet. The multi-headed screams as the multitudes were consumed. Too sentient to dismiss, but too long ago and far away to fuss much over.
As they flew closer in their spaceship of thought it became clear that, instead of one hole in space, there were two.
"Amazing, simply impossible for there to be a pair like this," pondered the Professor in wonder.
The room faded back into view as the neurosim finished.
"Now how did you guess it was there?" asked Myren bending over the edge of his desk.
“Here,” Calvin30 shoved over sheaves of paper covered with mathematical formulae and incomprehensible diagrams interpreted by anonymous Syns from bits of the aliens’ feed. He was hoping Myren would give him the vital confirmation.
“Let me see,” Myren tapped at the computer to bring up some reference files. “Yes, yes, ah hum. And this here is the cosmological constant? A very unusual notation.”
Calvin nodded knowingly at the indicated squiggle and watched as the professor read and returned to the keyboard to bring up further references.
“Quite an amazing hypothesis. Yes, the mathematics checks out. Yes. Yes. Congratulations, I’m afraid that you've managed to describe here a physical process that is entirely impossible.”
“How so?”
“How so?” Myren crinkled his nose and squinted back at Calvin30. “Oh, I see you are being modest. Quite right. If this were true it would be amazing. Here,” he indicated a row amidst the arcane mathematical script that Calvin30 had handed him, “you've reconciled generating a stable region of negative energy with the Second Law of Thermodynamics. I mean, this statement here, it effectively allows you to twist space-time back on itself, but only for a while, eh? Buy now, pay later. Fascinating stuff. Of course, interesting mathematics is just a starting point. It would be necessary to check its consistency with the Physics, to create experiments to validate it. I myself am, of course, highly sceptical that it would work but the elegance of it, it is so revolutionary that you would think it had been developed by some advanced extra-terrestrial civilisation. That is what you Mirtopik chaps are all about, isn't it?” Myren scanned Calvin30 with a conspiratorial glance.
Calvin30 noted the indicated sections and repossessed the sheets.
"On that, my dear colleague, I cannot comment."
“Good God, do you think that the bizarre configurations of these debris fields might be due to the decay of some kind of locally coupled singularity. One that might have been purposely generated? Fascinating, but how is this observation connected to theory? Besides the atypical patterns of debris, Scorpio 18 is a typical class G star, one much like our own in fact. As you suggest, I see nothing that would draw my attention to it as a test case for such a revolutionary physical theory. Instead I would have thought that you would be studying high energy field dynamics around quasars or looking at black hole event horizons.”
“We can’t really reveal our antecedents on this just yet, what with resources so competitive these days. Doubtless you follow.” Myren acquiesced and grimaced sympathetically. “Yes. Competition for Com funds has become exceedingly aggressive of late - not like the halcyon days of the Second Wave.”
Calvin30 reassured his friend. “My lineup is still polishing off the speculative edges, but I promise you that the final effort will be a collaborative submission. We’ll develop the physical thesis and you'll furnish the empirical verification. Perchance by March - to Astrophysiks. I guarantee that this will be a landmark treatise but can’t reveal more for discernable reasons.”
Myren returned Calvin30 a conspiratorial smile. “Of course, I’ve already begun my draft from our earlier conversations, but I’ll need some details.”
“You are the sole person in your patch with secure access to the Oort Array, aren’t you?” Calvin30 merrily interrogated Dr. Myren’s eyes. “We don’t need the street to compete in our beat.”
“Oh no. Only myself on thi
s one. No one else.”
“And you are not connected with the Nets?”
“Oh no, perish the thought. We are a Com funded institution. I mean, this is LA after all.”
Calvin30 pondered the Doctor’s response while his thoughts composed around a possible plot. In due time, he might need his friend to rescind this loyalty. A disputable old nut shaking the tree for the Opposition could be useful, as Myren was a scientist and society was accustomed to ignoring them.
“Well then, we do have our season. For these reasons, can you restrict access to those feeds?”
“You can count on me Dr. Twelve. Pray do not keep us in the dark for too long.”
“I’ll be contacting you post haste, just keep people pointed away from that patch in the sky, and not a peep to the public, especially your pupils.”
“Oh no, perish the thought.”
Calvin30 observed with pleasure the glow building in Myren’s eyes. The old fish had sucked down the sinker and the bait, slowly sipping tea while the hook set in his jowls.
Dr. Keith escorted his mysterious, newest best friend to the door. “A Nobel Prize, I am sure of it. We must move this fellow along before it is too late.”
Outside, Calvin30’s mind revolved while he waited for the cab to drop in. Such an ecstatic buzz it was to zoom in on the cosmic residue of the aliens’ denouement. For a moment Calvin30 ruminated on the deranged game he was contemplating. Across all days of yore and the ordinary course of human avarice, it wouldn’t take a prophet to forebode that, given the choice, the aliens’ warning would be ignored. Even with clues from his dear PhD to boost the alarms, most would choose glory in their own time over some chance of future horror. Look what they’d done already, turning up the Earth’s thermostat past tolerable for the smallest of instant comforts. Why wouldn’t the desolations of strange races far away in cosmic spaces only happen in such places? Far be it for a common clone to interpose before such a probable garden path.
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