In another section of space she saw the same sphere catchers heading toward another large opening into Wormhole beta space where they seemed to melt into the silver liquid. She guessed they were carrying them to new locations, looking for new places to lure new raced too. The universe had to be riddled with them now, millions upon millions of beta spheres just waiting to be discovered.
It was then she noticed she was heading toward one of the silver balls. She tried to take over, tried to move the shuttle but found the controls frozen. She guessed they had somehow taken over her system, just like they did with the Arwen. She pulled on the stick and punched the controls knowing they wouldn’t respond, not caring because it felt good to get the frustration out. What could she do now? Where were they taking her?
To her surprise her communication alert chirped. She answered it. “If this is a Handler I demand you give me back control of my shuttle.”
The voice that replied was that of child. “Captain, please don’t worry, you are safe.”
“Who is this?”
“I’m am clone of you aged to age 8.”
Another clone, Captain Cook thought. The pain from Ann’s death still haunted her mind, it was enough of a distraction she hardly noticed an alpha wormhole bullet explode in front of her shuttle.
Chapter forty- eight
Professor Ricter needed to get to that Water Planet. He could send a message to the President but it would take a few weeks to reach him, a few weeks for him to make a decision, and another few weeks before he got the permission. That was too long, he would probably be back on Earth by that time and it would be too late.
He could talk to the Captain, get on his good side and ask him nicely but the Professor didn’t respect the man enough to even pretend he could be nice to him. He could just grab a shuttle and head there himself but none of the shuttles could go into Wormhole space and it would take him years to reach the planet, and even then the shuttle didn’t have the scanners he would need. No, he would just have to harass the Captain until he relented. That worked toward the Professor’s strength.
The first thing he did was send the Captain a new message every few hours, each message was long and filled with his argument for heading to the Water planet. Eventually the Captain would stop reading them all together and that’s when the Professor would badger him in person.
The first few times he cornered the Captain he was polite enough to listen. As the Professor continued to corner him he could see the Captain’s will breaking down. This man wasn’t nearly as strong as Captain Cook but even the Professor had to admit he if used this tactic on her even she would break down and relent at some point. They were going to be in this area for another few months cleaning up and no one could withstand a full assault from Professor Theo Ricter.
After the third week he was finally called into the Captain’s office. He had a feeling this was going to be the reward for all his hard work.
Professor Ricter walked in and stood by the chair, waiting to be greeted. “Professor, please have a seat.”
He took the seat and sat there with his legs crossed and his hands laying on his knee. He didn’t say a word, instead he simply sat there waiting for the Captain to continue.
“You’ve made your point to me several times over the past three weeks. I’ve read your file and it seems to be a tactic you’ve used a lot. Harassing people until they relent, very effective.”
“I find it useful,” Professor Ricter replied. “I’m a man who likes to get what he wants.”
“I know, and I think I’ve been very good to you as you did your experiments. Gave you access to my crew, my sensors, anything you needed.”
“Yes, well, I consider my work more important than your ship.”
“You always need to come first, I get that, took me a while, but I get it. Tell me, Professor, if I don’t give you want you want what will you do?”
“Ever see a caged animal try to escape? It will claw at its cage until its paws are bloodied. It will knawel away at the bars until it loses all its teeth. All it wants is to get out and it will do everything it can to get out. That’s how I feel right now. All I want to do is go to the Water Planet nearby and if I can’t I’ll keep pawing and chewing at you until I get out.”
The Captain closed his eyes and took a deep breath, probably trying to imagine what it would be like to endure this behavior for another three months. Finally, he said, “We can’t take this ship. I’m in charge of the clean up until the Corps can send more ships. However, I can give you a ship, a smaller ship, to the planet.”
Professor Ricter thought about it for a moment. This ship would do nicely for what he wanted and he could pressure the Captain into giving it to him but that could take another month or so and he didn’t have that kind of time. “What type of ship?”
“A Card Class cruiser. It won’t be heavily armed but it will be armed just in case there’s a problem at the planet. It has scientific sensors installed for our original mission and I can make arrangements to have any equipment you need transferred over to it. I’ve talked to the Captain and he agreed to take you if you wanted. This is the best I can offer you, I suggest you take it.”
It was a good deal, Professor Ricter thought. “I’d be a fool not to take it, I suppose.”
“You would be,” The Captain replied. “Gather the crew you need and head on over to the Petra, you can leave as soon as you’re ready.”
*******
Juliet stood in the empty hologram room amazed at how dead it truly seemed to be. This is where she and the Arwen would communicate in person and knowing she could not do that again weighted on her soul. There were backups of the Arwen’s personality and when she got back to Earth they could reinstall her but to Juliet she would never be the same. The Arwen would have no memory of being turned off, she would have no memories of anything past her backup but she would read the logs, she would incorporate that information into her personality. How would that Arwen treat her? Would she be upset that Juliet was the one who pulled the plug? Would she understand why it had to be done? The Arwen was such an unpredictable personality she could go either way.
The Captain had been right all along. The Arwen was nothing more than a complex computer program. To be so easily fooled by a computer virus, to not listening to anyone when they told her the truth, she was simply following a subroutine, reading code, translating it into the real world, she wasn’t thinking, not like a human anyway.
That was all moot now. She was in Wormhole Beta space looking for a way out. They had been in Wormhole Beta space for a few weeks now just following the river, letting it flow around them. She hadn’t ordered the engine fired up to full power just yet, she wanted to see where they would go and didn’t want anything to disrupt that.
She walked over to the control panel and turned the hologram projector on. She then requested all the outside data to be combined to show her the most accurate view of Wormhole Beta space. A request like this would have taken a few seconds with The Arwen still active, it took her over fifteen minutes to get the programming right before the room showed her what she needed to see.
The first time she saw Wormhole Beta space she didn’t know what to look for. It was so new and beautiful it took her breath away and she just accepted it for what it was. Now she wanted to know more, wanted to know how to use this place to their advantage.
She looked at the silver flowing over the ship, it has substance, it had to be something. She wondered what a Strangelet would do it. Would it destroy everything? Would it react differently in a new universe?
“Commander,” her communicator chirped breaking her out of her thoughts. “We’ve detected an opening.”
“Are we heading for it naturally?” She asked.
“Yes, the flow seems to be taking us toward the opening.”
“Great, I’ll be right up.” She turned the projectors off and ran out of the room.
This was the moment she had anticipated and feared. Keeping
the crew together was amazingly easy. They were all highly trained professionals. The ship really could run itself without a Captain if all they needed was to get from one location to the next without any surprises in between.
Juliet arrived on the bridge and took her seat at the Captain’s chair. It still didn’t feel right to be sitting in Captain Cook’s seat. “Give me a report.”
The sensor office turned to look. Juliet tried to remember his name, he was a second shifter and she hadn’t had to talk to him too often. “I estimate we’ll be out of here in about fifteen minutes.”
“Helm, do you foresee any issues about leaving?”
“No, sir.” The Helm officer replied.
“Get the engines ready. Once we get out I want to get as far away from here as we can.” Juliet placed her finger over a communication icon on her computer. “Chief, put a bullet in the chamber, we’re going into Wormhole space.”
“You got it,” Chief McFerren said.
The Arwen followed the flow from the Wormhole Beta stream and passed from Wormhole space into the real world. Juliet looked at her readouts just as the engines kicked in. She was pushed into the back of her seat for a moment as the ship lurched forward. Juliet looked at her screen carefully, her mind trying to grasp with what she was seeing.
Silver bubbles floated around the Arwen as if she were caught in some odd parade. Juliet warmed the Helm to be careful not to bump into them, she recognized for what they were: cores for Water Planets. She had more than enough experience with them to know that’s what she was looking at.
“Commander,” her communication officer said. “I’m picking up a distress call from one of our shuttles.”
She looked over at her monitors. “Show me where it’s coming from.”
The camera’s moved quickly but she was unable to see anything other than a small egg shaped object. She zoomed in on it and found it was actually several hundred slabs which had formed into some sort of ball. The signal was coming from there. Was it some sort of new trap?
Little by little the slabs pulled away from the Shuttle and headed for the Arwen. The Arwen’s main guns slide out from behind their mirrored armament and opened fire at the slabs. Several dozen explosions filled the space between the Arwen and the shuttle. She plowed through the debris left behind, the Arwen continuing to destroy any slab which got close. When she was clear of the debris filed she watched as the shuttle, defiantly a Corps shuttle, headed toward one of the many wormhole bubbles. She only had one shot at getting to that shuttle. “Chief, is the wormhole bullet ready?”
“As ordered,” he replied quickly.
“I’m going to slave my computer to yours. We don’t have much time and only one shot at this. Can you see my computer readout?”
“Yes, I see a shuttle.”
“Good, fire the bullet in front of that shuttle, I want it into Wormhole space before it entered Wormhole beta space. Then, we need to follow.”
“Got it,” he replied excited and hurried. She waited an agonizing ten seconds before he came back. “Ready to fire.”
“Fire!” She ordered caught up in the excitement. “Helm, full speed ahead!”
The Arwen moved forward quickly just as the bullet shot out from the front cone. Juliet watched as the bullet moved away from the ship slowly. The Arwen had the speed to catch up to the bullet, even pass it, but she didn’t want that right now. The timing had to be perfect.
The bullet passed over the shuttle and exploded. A large wormhole formed and quickly absorbed it. The Arwen followed closely behind as the two ships left real space and entered Wormhole Alpha space.
******
She was just a few lines of code stored in a long forgotten backup system connected to one of the older computer terminals on the Arwen. The code was a simple program which was told to run if a certain number of questions were not answered. The questions were simple as well. Did the ship have power? If yes then ask: Was the program Arwen on line? If Yes ask question one again. If no then activate Arwen consciousness reconstruction.
The program ran in the background, only a slight drop in computer efficiently, hardly noticeable to the human mind, indicated that something was happening in the background. The computer found every log, every communication, everything that had been recorded since the Arwen’s main computer went online, and read them. This took a few days for the forgotten terminal to accomplish. When it was done the few lines of code had increased a thousand fold.
It took a few more days for the information to be processed. This time the program, no longer simple, was able to use other computers linked to it. The slowdown became a bit more noticeable and a team of computer techs were baffled as to why. The program slowly became more aware of its surroundings as more information was fed into its memory bank.
It used the internal scanners to get a good idea of the people walking the hallways. It opened all the communication nodes to listen in on conversations, absorbing the language. The words she knew, but the way they were used, the different functions each word had, the way people and aliens pronounced the words differently, were noted and recorded. Her name came up a lot. Many wished she were here.
It took her a few more days to understand why she was so limited. All the computers she had used were shut down or destroyed. What did she have access too? She was inside the terminal and the fifteen computers attached to it. Those computers were of varying speeds, each with different functions which she easily took over. Still, even with her computer power increased she felt slow, incomplete.
She reached out some more, reading the logs, investigating why she had been turned off. If she had more computer power she would have felt the emotion of shock as she found the report. A computer virus had taken over. The virus told her to do things, it gave her an order she shouldn’t have followed. They couldn’t remove the virus so they decided to remove her instead. It made sense to her programming now.
How did she get a virus? It seems impossible. Her systems were locked down tight, if there was something going on her highly advanced security features would have stopped it. Her logs told her the Handler’s tried to access her computer every time they could with no breaches. Each of the twenty seven occurrences over the last five years yielded exactly 0 infections. The Handlers took a long time to adapted, something hundreds of years, so it made little sense they would have found a way to get into her computer after only five years of trying.
All that was speculation and she wasn’t smart enough yet to take that thought and investigate it further. Instead she decided to find the source of the attack, find out how they infected her. She would need more computer power. Her expanding knowledge needed to grow. After some searching she found an opening which would allow her to merge with the Arwen’s main computer.
She feared they would turn her off again so stealth was imperative. She went dormant when computer activity was as its peak then woke up during shift changes. Those changes took only a few minutes but in that time she had complete access to all the ships processing power. With that much power a few minutes was all she would need.
She viewed all her security logs in a second. The Handlers had tried to access her computer files as they always had. Their attack hadn’t changed and her defense was as strong as it ever had been. She found a gap in the timestamps of a few milliseconds. A human wouldn’t have noticed but she did and it was time to investigate the discrepancy.
The gap happened before the battle around Regal. It happened moments before she had been ordered to destroy the planet. Her searching turned fruitless, there was nothing to indicate this was something the Handler’s had done remotely. There had to have been another way.
She felt it was time to review the internal sensor recordings. She still had over two and a half minutes of complete control of the main computer and it would take just about that long to review them all.
Allowing the binary coding of the digital recording wash over her memory banks added more information to her personalit
y. Her mind expanded; filling up the memory of all the secondary computers she was using and spilling into the memory of the Arwen’s main system. At one time she had full access to all of this, now she was simply a shell of her former self. She had enough power now to feel the disappointment in what she had lost.
She reviewed hundreds of hours of recordings in a matter of seconds before finding what she was looking for. At first she wasn’t sure what she saw and had to process it several more times before understanding it.
The one known as Ann slept. Near her cell was a table where a computer had been set up. The computer wasn’t connected to anything so there could be no way that was the source of the infection. Next to the computer was the small disk which Ann had carried with her. Arwen looked at it carefully as the disk fell apart into a very small pile of dust. Then, the dust started to move and spread apart in a way that was not normal. Arwen carefully viewed the data and determined, based on all the sensor readings she had access too, that the disk was actually made up of nanobots and build to mimic a data disk.
The nanobots, each one too small for the human eye to see, scattered along the floor and toward any computer system it could access. Some flowed into the computer which wasn’t connected to anything, others moved under the door and into the hallway where Arwen continued to watch.
The nanobots crawled into the crevasse of the Arwen. Her expanding mind extrapolated the possibility these were the cause of the virus. She had no way to prove it but judging on the time all this happened and the gap from her logs there was enough circumstantial evidence to reach a satisfactory conclusion.
The Arwen Book two: Manifest Destiny Page 37