State Machine

by Spangler, K. B.

  Rachel dragged the now-familiar metal printout towards her. This version of the scrap of metal hadn’t changed. It was still a shapeless blob, the faint chicken scratches that she had found on the original lost during the printing process. “And this is worth killing for, why?”

  “It’s part of a computer. Part of the first computer.”

  “Bullshit,” Zockinski said. “That piece of metal’s got to be thousands of years old.”

  Rachel sighed, and accessed Google. “Spell…Oh! Never mind.”

  As soon as she had entered the first five letters of Antikythera, page after page of information had leapt into her. Hill watched her face as she skimmed some of the lighter articles, his colors changing from orange scorn to yellow curiosity as she processed what she read.

  “An analog computer?” she asked Santino. “This is a real thing?”

  His colors glazed over. “Yes,” he said. “Star charts. Astrolabes. Sectors. Slide rules. You could even make an argument for an abacus. Analog computers have been around for millennia.”

  “Fascinating,” she muttered. It would have been, too, if some asshole hadn’t stolen her purse after she had ditched it to chase down Jenna Noura. They had taken her wallet, smashed the screens on her backup phone and tablet when they couldn’t break her password, and dumped a papaya smoothie over the rest before abandoning it at the corner of the farmers’ market. Her purse, notorious within the MPD, had somehow made its way back to her, and she was now poking through the contents to see if anything was worth salvaging.

  (Santino hadn’t let her bully him into chauffeuring her around the city to track the RFID signals on her credit cards, and she was in the process of cancelling everything in her name. At least she had been wearing her badge when she went after Noura: OACET already had enough problems with technologically-savvy trolls pretending to be Agents. She hoped losing her business cards wouldn’t come back to bite her.)

  “Render’s done,” Jason said.

  A series of green dials appeared in midair. Hill and Santino, both wearing their glasses, began to circle them in a careful clockwise inspection, while Zockinski dug around in his pockets for his pair.

  Rachel left the table, holding her sticky hands away from her body. “Lose ‘em again?” she whispered to Zockinski.

  “No,” he whispered back, his colors staying well out of the reds. Apparently, she had been forgiven in the excitement. “Not after the last time. Santino said he’d start charging me.”

  She snickered. The glasses were an investment of several thousand dollars in parts and labor. Santino must have laid down the law when he had needed to build Zockinski a third pair.

  They turned back to the space in the center of the room, where Jason was reconstructing a long-lost machine out of light.

  Jason was a showman and a showoff, both. The Mechanism came together in pieces, floating towards each other in a slow, careful ballet. Each gear was so precisely crafted that they shone like glass mirrors instead of polished metal (a detail only slightly less impressive, in Rachel’s opinion, considering that they were neither). There were dozens of them, each rotating slowly as they joined, sliding into each other to become a whole.

  Once the individual gears had aligned, Jason added the exterior details. A case of semi-transparent green emerged to surround the gears, encasing most of these but allowing two dials on the front and one on the back to remain exposed. On one side, a small handle spun. Inside the case, the gears turned, and the hands on the dials turned accordingly.

  Rachel thought it was beautiful.

  “Which model did you use?” Santino asked Jason.

  “Michael Wright’s. It’s the one with the most material available for download. Saved me a lot of time.”

  “Yeah, but that one’s out of date,” Santino said. “There’s been a few new discoveries since he put that one together.”

  Jason glared at him. “Do any of those discoveries change how my render looks?”

  “Well, no, not really, but—”

  “So,” Jason said, “this is how the Mechanism would have appeared when it was new. And this…”

  As he spoke, the case vanished. The gears began to erode, crumbling and falling apart until they resembled flattened stones more than metal. The circle and crossbars she had spotted earlier emerged, and Rachel realized that this piece of the Mechanism was significant mainly because it was the largest chunk to have survived.

  “… is how it looks today.”

  “Sad,” Zockinski said. “It was pretty.”

  “That’s what you get when you lie at the bottom of the ocean for two thousand years,” Jason said.

  “Some scholars think it also had gemstones,” Santino said. “The Mechanism was a celestial computer. The ancient Greeks used it to plot planetary movement, so it might have had gems to correspond to each planet.”

  “Right.” Jason swept a hand through the render. The pieces flew through the air and came back together, but remained in their decayed state. He spun the render and it split in two. The smaller half was made from tiny fragments; the larger, from the circle and crossbars, as well as several other goodly-sized chunks of metal.

  The larger half of the Mechanism faded away as the smaller doubled in size. “If the pieces of the Mechanism are a puzzle, this…” Jason said, as a now-familiar fragment appeared and moved to join the others, “…is where our own mystery metal would fit.”

  The piece of metal that they had recovered from Noura slid into place. There were gaps from erosion all around it, but a shiver ran down Rachel’s spine as she realized they had located the biggest single fragment from this section of the Mechanism.

  Santino was smiling like a maniac. “They’ve got about eighty percent of this thing figured out,” he said. “They know how it works, and what it does. But they still don’t know who made it, or how, or whether there are other ways to use it. If Rachel’s right, and there’s writing on our fragment—”

  “I’m right,” Rachel said. She felt detached, as if she had gone out-of-body and her mind was traveling while her soul remained at home. She reached out and took control of the render from Jason, and moved it backwards through time until the Mechanism stood fresh and new again. Their fragment fit snugly within a section covered in careful writing. “I’m right,” she said again, quietly.

  “We found a national treasure,” Zockinski said. “The Greeks are going to flip out about this.”

  “So are the mathematicians,” Santino said. “The Mechanism used a unique planar differential, so the coding processes are…” He trailed off as he realized the others were staring. “We might have discovered a new way of thinking, people,” he said. “It took fifteen hundred years before any civilization evolved to the point where they could build devices even half this complex! It’s a big fucking deal.”

  “Think we can get a vacation out of this?” Hill asked. “Be nice to go to Greece.”

  They returned to their earlier chores while they fell into good-natured squabbling over whether traveling to Greece to return the fragment fell within the MPD’s purview. Then, Rachel looked up from the mess of her handbag and glanced towards the door.

  “Who?” Zockinski asked.

  “Alimoren,” Rachel replied.

  There was a fast knock, and the Secret Service agent let himself into Jason’s office. He cradled a small black box against his side. Rachel sent a scan through it, and her heart leapt.

  “Is Noura talking yet?” asked Zockinski.

  “No.” Alimoren joined Rachel at the table, keeping some distance between himself and what was left of her purse. He pulled the 3D printout of the fragment towards himself, and carefully placed the little box next to it.

  So strange, how she could see the original piece of the Mechanism before Alimoren opened the box, but once he lifted the lid, once she was exposed to that odd piece of metal…

  She shoved her hands into the ruined mess of her purse to keep herself from touching it.

&n
bsp; “Santino asked me to bring this by,” Alimoren said.

  Yeah,” Santino said. “Rachel and Jason can scan and process it more quickly than the archivists.”

  “If it’s part of the Mechanism,” Alimoren added, “it’s going back to Greece, so work fast.”

  “How long do we have to work with it?” Jason asked.

  “Not long,” Alimoren said. “We’ve got a meeting scheduled with the Greek embassy tomorrow morning at nine. We’re going to turn it over to them regardless of what you find, so make sure you get what you need before then.”

  “Aren’t you going to catch hell from our own people? Seems as though they’d want to get their hands on this, too,” Rachel said, thinking of Maddie Peguero and the other archivists.

  “One of the conditions for turning it over will be that the Smithsonian Institution has the right to do testing and analysis. And if it is really part of the Mechanism,” Alimoren added, his colors flickering over themselves in a cornflower blue wink, “then they’ll get access to the rest of the device, too.”

  Santino whistled. “Everyone wins.”

  “Yeah,” Alimoren nodded. “Speaking of which…” He reached inside his suitcoat and emerged with a handful of somewhat rumpled envelopes. “There’s a cocktail party at the White House tomorrow night. It’s to thank everyone who helped close this case before it hit the media.”

  “Um…” Zockinski began.

  Alimoren shook his head. “The President won’t be there.”

  Of course not, Rachel thought. The President wouldn’t be caught dead (so to speak) at any event connected to the murder, even if it was to celebrate its resolution. There’d probably be a bunch of high-ranking political folk in attendance, mainly those who had interests in law enforcement, but the President and most of his cabinet wouldn’t touch it with a two-state pole. The closest they’d get to that cocktail party would be Pennsylvania, bare minimum.

  “Still, we wouldn’t have caught Noura without you,” Alimoren said as he passed out the envelopes. He looked straight at Rachel as he said, “Please come.”

  Rachel noticed his colors were holding quite a lot of her Southwestern turquoise, and she nodded.

  She slid a fingernail through the heavy paper, and banged the envelope around on her palm until the invitation slid out. The writing was embossed, which made it easy for her to read; flat ink didn’t register on her scans like the plastic polymers used to print raised text.

  “How did you plan this so quickly?” she asked. “We bagged Noura just a couple of hours ago.”

  Alimoren chuckled. “The White House specializes in social events. This is our version of inviting friends over for a backyard cookout.”

  “Plus one?” Zockinski’s colors went from an excited yellow-white to a dull red in the time it took for him to remember that his wife would need to buy a new outfit.

  “Yes. Please keep in mind your guests will be vetted, so… I hate to say this, but be considerate about who you ask, okay? We’ve had to turn some guests away in the past.”

  “Rachel…?”

  “I’ll bring Phil,” she assured Jason. Her girlfriend was out of town until Tuesday, and bringing Phil meant nobody would feel excluded.

  “Thanks,” he said, and then he turned a sickly shade of orange as he realized that Bell would most likely meet the Secret Service’s criteria for an undesirable guest.

  “She’s about my size. I’ve probably got a dress she can wear.” Rachel was glad it was a cocktail party and not another black-tie gala. She’d have hated to beg a dress from Hope Blackwell’s closet twice in the same week. Her boss’s wife was always generous with her clothes, but Rachel still had the borrowed outfit from the fundraiser at the Botanic Gardens lying in a heap on her bedroom floor.

  “Okay…um... Rachel? Would you—”

  “Nope,” Rachel cut him off as his apprehension reached her. “I am not telling Bell to dye her hair.”

  “I just thought that as long as you were helping her choose an outfit, you could—”

  She severed their link while pushing a sensation of disgust towards him.

  Men! she snarled to herself, and then quickly amended that to Humanity!

  She was as bad as Jason, really. It’d be nice to think that if people could see core colors, they’d be less likely to make judgment calls based on appearance. Deep down, she knew that was pure delusion, and she didn’t let herself buy into it. Human beings were born to fight: differences just gave them an excuse. If Mako ever did manage to replicate how she perceived the world, she’d probably be responsible for the Indigo-Khaki War of 2062.

  There was paperwork—there was always paperwork—and Rachel signed her life away to become the official temporary custodian of a national treasure, with the promise that she would deliver it to the Greek embassy at precisely nine-fifteen in the morning. Alimoren left, taking Zockinski and Hill with him, and then Rachel, Jason, and Santino got to work.

  They did their best to keep themselves from touching the fragment. Santino gave a very brief lecture about oils from skin, contamination, degradation, and so on, and made them promise to inspect it with their scans only. And she and Jason still rushed to grab it when Santino stepped out for a fast bathroom break.

  “Oh, God,” she breathed when Jason tipped it out of the box into her eager hands. The fragment was heavy and light, all at once, and she turned off visuals to let the moment sink into her.

  “You were right,” Jason said. “It was special.”

  “Still is,” she said. The piece of metal in her palms lost its chill as it took on the heat from her hands.

  “How did you know?” he asked.

  She remembered Oscar McCrindle, intent on matters of history, and couldn’t quite find the right words.

  “Can I?” he asked, and there was a brief moment of shared reverence as his skin brushed against hers. It wasn’t deep enough of a link for either of them to find the answer, and neither of them wanted to go deeper, not after the other night…and then she felt slightly empty as he took the fragment from her.

  They had it back in its black plastic cradle by the time Santino returned, the two of them pretending to have been studying the fragment in situ the entire time. He did them the courtesy of pretending to be fooled, and then put the two Agents through hours of aggressive data collection.

  Lulu forced them to take a break sometime after midnight. Santino, aware that this was his one shot at the fragment, hadn’t wasted a moment. He and Jason had worked as a team, recording and profiling the fragment from every possible angle. They had identified the resonant frequencies of its metallic properties, and Santino wanted to keep going until they were classifying nanoparticles.

  Sadly, their primary scanner had developed a roaring headache and had made enough mistakes to trip Lulu’s safeguards.

  “Ow ow ow ow ow.” Rachel’s headache had set its teeth firmly in her skull. “Guys, please. Even the computer wants to go to bed.”

  Lulu had been set to silent mode, but Rachel still felt as if the machine was waiting for the opportunity to tell Jason that it, unlike some people, could go all night.

  “Rachel’s face is red,” Phil said. He had arrived with pizza between the raster and reflection tests, and was playing solitaire while waiting for them to finish. “At least take a break until she goes down to Code Orange or something.”

  “That’s not how it works, but…yeah. Red. That.” Rachel realized she was barely coherent, and went to sprawl out on the cool of the linoleum floor. She wished—not for the first time—that someone would find a spare implant for Santino so he could stop using hers as his surrogate.

  The men joined her, settling down in a messy circle around her. She had turned off visuals, so she jumped a little as she felt Phil’s hand close over hers.

  “Let me try something,” he said. He pulled her head into his lap, and spread his fingers across her temples.

  Agents made a great alternative to aspirin. They had learned they cou
ld share physical sensations across a link, and a link enhanced via skin contact could reduce one Agent’s pain by spreading some of it to another. Rachel thought Phil was going to pull half of her headache from her; they had helped each other in this way many times before. She wasn’t expecting the feeling of his hands across her head to fall away, a sensation of drifting peace rising to replace it…

  “Damn, Phil, what is this?” Rachel heard herself giggle aloud, and couldn’t be bothered to care. “I feel high.”

  “You are high,” he replied. She could feel him grinning at her. “Jody made an autoscript the last time she smoked up.”

  “What?!” She gave a reflexive mental push, and the peaceful mood slipped off of her like a silk dress falling to the ground. Suddenly sober with a merciless headache, she flipped on visuals to glare up at Phil. “If this shows up in my pee…”

  “It’s fake, Penguin,” he said. “It’s a synthetic experience. It’s the same thing as when I trick your mind into thinking I’m sharing heat with you when you’re cold.”

  Rachel tested that logic, and decided there was nothing illegal about getting high off of a stored memory. “Well, then,” she said, as she settled back into Phil’s lap. “Let’s hope Jody buys the good stuff.”

  His hands came to rest against her temples again, and she let herself float away.

  “Why does she keep laughing?” Santino asked Phil.

  “Stress!” she shouted. Then, more quietly, “So much stress.”

  “You showing her Jody’s new autoscript?” Jason asked Phil.

  “A new script? What does it do?” Santino asked him, ever curious about the discoveries made by the collective.

  Jason explained.

  There was a long, long pause before Santino said, “That’s just not fair.”

  “Want a copy of this script?” Phil asked her.

  “Oh God no, I’d never get off of the couch.”

  It had been a long day. She might not have wanted to go into a deeper link with Jason, but she trusted Phil not to go poking around in the darker regions of her psyche. There was a quick warning between them, and then she took down the barbed wire lining the tops of her mental walls. He stumbled a bit before he found the right balance, and then, as her mood transferred to him, he started to giggle, too.