The Deplosion Saga

by Paul Anlee

  Kathy worked her way through her classmates and joined Greg and Darian. “Well, that took care of the morning nicely. What say we avoid work a little longer and go for lunch?”

  “I’m game,” Greg replied. “Maybe we should change into our civilian clothes first, though.”

  Darian laughed. “Yeah, you go into a restaurant dressed like that,” he pointed to their traditional silk martial arts uniforms with their billowing sleeves and cloth buttons, “and someone might think you’re looking for a fight.”

  While Greg and Kathy changed, Darian finished his tour of the Garden with a brief meditation in the Main Hall. As he waited for his two assistants, he stared into the milky green water, looking for any tell-tale ripples made by the resident koi.

  He pushed aside the demands of his lattice to get back to work. The mystery will still be there this afternoon—he thought. Even semiconductors should take a break sometime. He chuckled to himself over that absurd comment. He needed almost no rest these days, except from the futility of their investigations.

  “Okay, where should we go?” Greg was back in his blue jeans, with his jacket draped casually over one arm; the heat generated from the thirty-minute demo was, for the time being, sufficient to dispel the winter chill.

  “Why don’t we go to Bojangles on False Creek,” Kathy suggested, “We don’t often get down this way in the middle of the day anymore and I miss it.” In addition to their enjoyment of Chinese culture, she and Greg shared a love of the water. She also hoped to finagle an after-lunch walk along the seawall once they were in the area. Getting away from their problems for a few hours would do them all good.

  They walked the few blocks down Carrall Street to the seawall. The first section up to the Cambie Street Bridge wasn’t all that nice but, by Kathy’s calculations, any sunny day by the water was a good one.

  The trio walked in companionable silence, Kathy and Greg arm in arm, and Darian alongside, enjoying the sunshine and the background hum of city traffic. They arrived at the café within thirty minutes.

  26

  “What the hell?” As they entered Bojangles and looked around for an empty table, Greg spotted Larry sitting with Lucius Pratt, Darian’s nemesis from his first day on campus.

  Larry was about to stuff a ketchup-plastered French fry in his mouth. The look of smug superiority on his face changed into a guilty frown when he spotted his three colleagues approaching. Dr. Pratt, demonstrating the value of his experience and acumen, calmly stood up, smiled, and held out his hand to greet them.

  “Ah, Dr. Leigh. How wonderful to see you. Your associate, here, has been kind enough to update me on your group’s progress in addressing this latest challenge. I do hope that you will find your way through to a solution soon.”

  “Yes. Well, my assistant, Dr. Rusalov, is free to spend his spare time as he wishes,” Darian replied as he politely shook the philosopher’s hand. “I hope he hasn’t bored you with arcane details of our profession. We geeks sometimes think everyone is just like us.”

  “Heh, heh. No, I haven’t found him boring at all. Thankfully, Dr. Rusalov has stuck to a level of generalities appropriate to my lack of training in your field. We both happened to be out on the seawall, taking in this lovely day, and quite literally bumped into each other. I trust it’s alright for me to inquire how things have been going. Since I was there at the beginning, so to speak, I feel a personal interest in your research.”

  Darian’s answering smile was reserved in its warmth. “We have no secrets, and sometimes it can be helpful to talk out one’s issues with non-specialists. My father used to say, if you can’t explain what you’re working on to your grandfather, you don’t really understand it.”

  “Ouch! I hope I’m not the grandfather in that story. Not yet.”

  “It’s just a saying.”

  “Yes, I suppose it is. Well, as it happens, your timing is impeccable. I was just about to abandon Dr. Rusalov. There are some errands that I really must attend to. I’ve been enjoying our conversation so much that it seems I’ve lost all track of time.” He turned to Larry and proffered his hand, “Dr. Rusalov, thank you so much. It’s been very educational.” He pulled out the chair nearest Kathy and invited her to sit down. “Please, all of you, enjoy your lunch on me. I’ll instruct your waiter to leave my tab open.”

  “That’s very generous of you,” answered Darian.

  “No, not at all. It’s the least I can do after taking so much of your assistant’s time. Have a lovely day.” With that, Dr. Pratt shook hands all around and made his way to the front.

  Larry couldn’t mask his panic as he watched Pratt disappear out the door. He rubbed his hands too earnestly on his crumpled napkin and placed the disintegrating paper over his fries.

  “I hope you weren’t revealing any state secrets,” Darian joked to Larry once the team was alone.

  “You know I wouldn’t do that,” Larry asserted, his tone and demeanor more serious than Darian’s teasing warranted.

  Greg inspected his friend’s face and body language more thoroughly, calling on the more finely-tuned observational tools of his lattice. He didn’t like what he saw: nervous tics of the face and hands, flushed face, slightly dilated pupils, and an obvious attempt to control his breathing. He sent a quick private message to Darian and Kathy–He’s been talking way outside his comfort zone.

  I know—they both replied.

  “Larry, relax, I’m just kidding. You can talk to Dr. Pratt all you like,” Darian said aloud. “If the worst we have to endure is that our present embarrassment goes any more public than it already has, we will survive.”

  Larry relaxed a little, and his breathing returned to normal.

  “Hey, how’d the Tai Chi demonstration go? Sorry I missed it. I forgot all about it.” Larry opted for a quick change of subject to clear the slate.

  “It was great,” replied Darian. “Kathy and Greg’s lattices give them a considerable advantage over their classmates, but everybody performed admirably.”

  “I think people enjoyed it. We did, too. It was fun, wasn’t it?” Kathy asked.

  “I’m glad we did it; I was nervous at first but it went really well,” Greg replied.

  The waiter arrived, took their orders, and asked permission to remove Larry’s abandoned meal. “Was everything okay?” he asked Larry, with genuine concern. “Would you like something else?”

  “No, everything was fine. My eyes were bigger than my stomach, I guess,” Larry answered, handing the plate to the waiter.

  Their orders given, Darian shifted in his seat to better observe the boats moored in the marina, and to let himself be entertained by the rhythm of the masts bobbing gently over the sun-dappled water. Sometimes the best approach to getting an answer is to ask no question at all–he broadcast to the other two. Kathy and Greg followed his gaze, enduring a few minutes of uncomfortable silence.

  Larry finally turned to Darian and asked, “So, do you need me to come in today, too?”

  “No, we won’t be doing any testing today,” Darian answered. Greg couldn’t tell if Larry was disappointed or relieved. He wasn’t enjoying this feeling of distrust he suddenly felt toward his old friend and co-worker.

  “If you’d like to go over some of the new experiments Darian and I have proposed for follow-up, I could come over tonight,” Greg said.

  He felt sorry for the distance that had grown between them over the past few months. Larry must feel completely sidelined from the main action. Still, it was his own decision to reject the dendy lattice and deprive himself of being useful. He could change that at any time.

  “No, that’s okay,” Larry replied, “I’ve got stuff to do. I’ll catch up with you in the lab tomorrow.”

  Something was definitely off, but Greg couldn’t quite put his finger on it. His earlier compassion for an old friend was losing ground to unsettling suspicion. He eyed his lab mate from a new perspective. What’s going on in there, Larry?—he wondered. The dendy lattice recognized a
nd analyzed hundreds of micro movements in the face, but it couldn’t read his old friend’s mind.

  Larry continued, “I’m supposed to call my folks tonight, anyway. Those video calls back to the family usually take up the whole evening, now that I work for such a famous research team.”

  Greg noted Larry’s use of the word “for” instead of “with”; they were the team he worked for, not with. A sad but telling shift.

  The food arrived, and Darian took a bite of his bacon cheeseburger. “That’s right. Your mother is Svetlana Tsarkova, isn’t she?” he asked between mouthfuls.

  Greg was pretty sure Darian knew everything that was publicly available about Larry and a great deal that wasn’t public as well. He interpreted the question as an attempt to put Larry at ease, to get him talking about something more comfortable.

  Kathy saw Greg about to add his own comment and sent him a private message–Let’s leave this conversation to the boss. Larry’s acting weird; let’s see if Darian can pull anything out of him.

  Greg bit off whatever he was about to say, corking his open mouth with a corner of crispy panini. Okay, let’s see where this goes–he sent.

  “Yes, that’s right. Have you worked with her?” Larry replied.

  “No, but her work on ultrafast lasers is well known and very well-regarded. By all reports, she’s an excellent scientist. Our research programs never really had much in common before, but maybe we could work her into one of the new experiments,” Darian added encouragingly, and looked over to Greg for backup.

  “Yeah, sure. We have a number of ideas on how the RAF could alter molecular bond formation; some of the new proposals we’re working on may have some overlap with her work,” Greg added. “Larry and I could meet next week to discuss which ones he thinks his mom might be interested in testing. If you’d like, that is. It wouldn’t cramp your style to have your mom working with us, would it?”

  “Why don’t you send him the proposals now, and he can look them over later today? Then, if it’s okay with you, we could talk to your mom about them Wednesday,” suggested Darian.

  Greg accessed his lattice, picked out a few proposals from the database server back on campus, and sent them in an email to Larry. “Done,” he said a few seconds later. “They’ll be in your email when you get home, Larry.”

  “That does come in handy sometimes,” Larry had to admit.

  Greg shrugged. “You can still take your pill whenever you want to, you know. No pressure at all; just keep in mind, it’s never too late.”

  “I’m sorry you feel you can’t accept installing your own lattice,” Darian said aloud, making everyone squirm. There we go; the elephant is out in the open now.

  “I do respect your decision, Larry, and I’m glad you’re able to continue working with the team.”

  Larry looked away without saying a word.

  After that, they couldn’t get much more out of him on any topic, no matter how harmless. They eventually gave up, finishing their lunches in silence. Larry mumbled something about having some shopping to do and left.

  Greg didn’t bother inviting him to join the other three back at the lab later on. I give up—he sent to Kathy, a defeated look on his face.

  She put a comforting hand over his. There was nothing else anyone could do.

  27

  It was 4:00 Sunday morning and Darian was restless.

  He, Kathy, and Greg had passed an infuriatingly fruitless afternoon troubleshooting the RAF hardware, software, and theory. They pored over every detail, again and again. By the end of their day, tempers were short and nobody could focus.

  It didn’t make sense. The RAF should work. Every single component and idea checked out fine. Maybe they were all too close to the problem. Maybe they’d allowed themselves to be distracted by the morning off and lunch afterward. Maybe catching Larry in that clandestine meeting with Lucius Pratt had been more disturbing than any of them had thought.

  Frustrated, they quit work at 6:00 p.m., or at least that was when Darian sent Greg and Kathy home. As long as he kept his lattice adequately charged, Darian was practically indefatigable.

  It was his biological brain that let him down; despite its minimal role in the work, it eventually grew tired. Synaptic connections could only tolerate the enforced activity of the lattice for so long before they became recalcitrant and stopped responding.

  Around midnight, he decided to give it a rest. Tomorrow would be a new start. They’d decided the best way to test the RAF generator was to build a new one from scratch, using completely different components from an alternative source. That would tell them if the defect was in their suppliers or in their design. They were getting desperate enough to start testing even relatively implausible ideas.

  Darian had something even more drastic in mind for himself. A couple of weeks earlier he realized his own computational ability was at least as powerful as the laptop supercomputer they were using to control the RAF device. Why not turn myself into an autonomous RAF generator?–he asked himself, and went to work on the viral vectors that would construct an array of resonance-generating antennae immediately beneath the surface of his own skull. He synthesized the new DNA in-house and cultured the resulting viruses himself. If the available hardware wasn’t going to work, he would try a different approach.

  Eight days after taking the completed virus for the antenna, the dendies had nearly finished assembling the sub-cranial array. He waited for the ping telling him it was ready.

  Darian allowed his lattice to go into a low-energy hibernate mode. His recent modifications usually took advantage of any downtime to expand the lattice domain, pushing into new areas of his natural biological neural net and learning how to assume new functionality. The process tended to produce a mild headache so Darian closed his eyes and rested while it ran its course.

  You’d think that the lattice would give me better access to my own subconscious–he pondered as he drifted. Maybe then I could figure out what’s bothering me, besides the obvious. He knew that wasn’t the way the subconscious worked. He’d spent some time a few years earlier reading how consciousness was an emergent phenomenon of a highly complex web of sub-conscious processes. The “society of the mind,” Minsky had called it, decades earlier.

  He managed four hours of unsatisfying rest while the agitated remnants of his biological brain obsessively replayed the chance encounter with Larry in the café. Finally accepting that peaceful rest would elude him until he determined the source of his agitation, he got out of bed and went to the study.

  He sat at his desk for a few minutes before giving in to the restlessness. He paced the floor, barefoot, in slow, purposeful steps. Sometimes the body knows best what will put the mind at ease.

  The noise in his brain monetarily quieted. He reactivated his lattice, and set it consciously on the problem. Why would Larry be meeting with Pratt, if it weren’t just a random occurrence? Why had he seemed so defensive?

  A number of hypotheses came to mind, but he could think of nothing besides the welcome luncheon on his first day on campus that linked the two men. Should I hack into their personal emails? Maybe they belong to the same church or some other organization.

  Darian didn’t take such invasions of privacy lightly. Public databases, they were no problem, but areas expressly marked “Private” were different. With the professional pressure building against him, an ethical breach would give the university the justification they needed to sanction him or, worse, to fire him. Anyway, if Larry was clever enough to keep his personal communications off the net, there would be nothing to be found.

  Nothing he could find on the public nets linked the two men, but his gut told him there had to be some connection he’d missed.

  My gut?–he mused. I’m thinking with my gut now? That’s great. Only, I don’t think my lattice has extended into that neural tissue yet.

  I could tap into NCSA surveillance records. They have no compunction about who they spy on. If he used the National Coordi
nated Security system to check up on Pratt and Larry, he’d have to be extra careful not to be discovered. Never mind the university’s reaction, he didn’t need the dark side of the feds coming down on him right now.

  Am I being paranoid? Trying too hard to force a connection that isn’t really there? Only one way to find out.

  His lattice leaped into action. While he raked through the personal emails of both men, he simultaneously searched NCSA records, being careful not to leave any record that could be traced back to him.

  Pratt and Larry had avoided direct email contact. Or maybe Larry was telling the truth; maybe they don’t know each other that well. There were no oblique references to one another through mutual acquaintances. If they are separated by less than the standard six degrees of separation, it’s only through me.

  The NCSA telephone recordings proved more fruitful. That’s interesting–he thought as he read a transcript of a conversation dated the day he was shot. Larry was the subject of a conversation between Dr. Pratt and Reverend Alan LaMontagne, the leader of the YTG Church.

  That Pratt and LaMontagne knew each other was mildly surprising. That they would be discussing Larry, was an eye-opener.

  In retrospect, it made some sense that Pratt might be a member of the Yeshua’s True Guard Church, but it was odd he would be so secretive about it. His tenured status would protect him from any conceivable recrimination for belonging to a fundamentalist church.

  Darian couldn’t imagine any way in which being a member of a religious organization, especially one officially adopted by the government of the New Confederacy, would have hurt the philosopher’s career. Maybe he’s hiding it for personal reasons, something to do with his family or friends.

  The Church of Yeshua’s True Guard had too many connections to Darian’s life over the past few months for him to be sanguine about this revelation. Using Larry to spy on him would be unconscionable. I may have said some things they find objectionable but this is starting to feel entirely too personal.