Fear the Survivors

by Stephen Moss

  Unlike its coal equivalent, though, it was not particularly flexible, and once initiated, it could only vary its yield 15% through the recycling of fuel into an energy-loosing fission reaction and the dripping of power into some tritium breeding in its tiny core.

  So its prodigious output needed to be used, and used it was. In another part of the facility, three huge domes rose out of the concrete floor of a vast cavern. Representing the single largest investment of the operation to date, matching even the phenomenal investment in Sao Tome, the three domes were the top halves of three golden resonance manipulators, each thirty feet across, each capable of taking several tons of raw materials and twisting them into anything up to the size of a Mack Truck in only a few hours.

  Their capacity was incredible, limited only by the need to pull raw materials to the site. In a rolling line they had two of the domes working at any given moment, while the other one was open, either to be loaded with raw materials for the next cycle or having the results of their efforts lifted by gantry cranes out onto the rolling stock that ran alongside the domes.

  For their first month of operation, they had focused on producing the vast cables of carbon nanotubing for shipment to Florida. Now they were making the components of the complex system that would help guide that cable to its anchorage in Sao Tome, and the elevators that would clamp to that great cable. Next they would begin on the components for the massive facility they had planned in space, components that would append to the two conjoined shuttles that now made up Terminus One, and the fledgling space station they were going to build along the elevator’s path in Low-Earth Orbit, creating Earth’s first true space station.

  But all those operations were the realm of General Milton and his team, and were but the echoes of the work of Birgit and the various other teams of the Research Group. While the three gold domes digested and formed the ingredients of the Research Group’s many creations, Birgit sat at the other end of their work, the cutting edge of the effort’s arrowhead, as she conceived the machines and weapons that humanity would send out against the coming Armada.

  And now, in the early hours of the morning, as the majority of the minds that made up the Research Group slept, Birgit worked away, enjoying the abandon of playing her music in the huge laboratory, filling its void with the muses that fed her vivid imagination.

  But she was not the only scientist awake at this lonely hour. Down the hall, a curious Amadeu Esposinho slaved away in the smaller laboratory that had become his team’s home, or the Lair, as his two English colleagues liked to call it. They were both brilliant computer scientists from Oxford, products of one of the greatest universities on earth, and highly intelligent even by its standards. But they were socially awkward at best, and he was frustrated with their inability to accept the fact that the fundamental roadblocks that they were encountering were not due to inadequacies on the side of the programming, but inadequacies on the part of their subjects.

  Of all the complex Mobiliei technologies the Research Group had been tasked with, emulating the neural interface was by far the hardest. For the majority of the tasks they faced, from the spiderweb strong nanotubing that made the space elevator possible, to the fusion reactors that now powered their many ambitious experiments, the group had been able to take the designs supplied by John Hunt and Quavoce Mantil and simply extrapolate them to their own need.

  But the technology their alien counterparts had developed to interface with their machines was based on a wholly different physiology and psychology than humanity’s. And with the expansion of war into space came an equally great expansion in the speed and lethality of the machines that waged that war. At the quickness these machines needed to work, no hand-eye interface could possibly keep up with events, let alone control them.

  So the young Amadeu, pulled from his seemingly hypothetical musings in Coimbra University in Portugal, faced what was possibly the hardest task of all of the teams that made up Madeline’s Research Group. He had to tap into the very wellspring of human thought, and bridge the gap between mind and machine. Amadeu was working on linking the brain directly to the tools it was going to need to control, exchanging arms and legs for flight and throttle control, eyes for visual sensors and radar arrays, ears for gravitic wave sensors and mass accelerometers.

  There had been discussion at first of not even attempting to perfect the link, of focusing instead on building the kind of Artificial Intelligence that could operate independent of the limitations of biologic communication. But Amadeu and his team had received word from whatever source of information was mysteriously driving all their research that this was akin to saying you would try to avoid debates on issues by instead having a bunch of children and teaching them over the course of a lifetime, to think exactly the same way you did.

  For the programming of artificial intelligences was as complex as the lengthy programming our own intellects required through the years of childhood and adolescence. Then they were told that while it could be condensed to something far faster than the decades we took to reach intellectual maturity, such acceleration also depended on the kind of cerebral links that Amadeu was struggling with, and thus they were back to square one.

  Once they had exhausted such shortcuts, Amadeu had redoubled his efforts into making the technology of the spinal interface work with the unique biology of the human mind.

  He worked with every hour he had. Alone, now, he enjoyed his solitude, allowing himself an occasional whistle, a frequent grunt, and many a soliloquy to the air about whatever challenge he was considering at that point.

  “Cale a boca!” he shouted suddenly at his screen, telling it to shut up, to stop telling him it couldn’t be done.

  He whistled as another model begun, then waited, waited, his eyes hopeful, his hands wringing, his lips contorted as he waited, waited, waited …

  “No! No se fala!” A small stream of obscenities escaped his lips as the model finished inconclusively. His words at first out loud, and then vanishing into a whisper as if they were walking out of the room in disgust.

  Despite his frustration, working at night was so much better than during the day. For in the day he felt just the same frustration, only he had to keep it bottled up inside him. Plus he felt a freedom once the computer whizzes left the room. A freedom to explore avenues of inquiry that they tended to mock.

  He might not have solved any of the plethora of problems they still faced, but he felt like he was closer. Like when he worked on one of his pet puzzles, crosswords, or brain teasers, he felt like he was in that moment before the solution dawned on him, when he could see the holes in the walls before him, the path through the maze, when the world seemed to flatten into a perceivable map, readable, understandable, and decipherable. It was resolving, he could feel it.

  He suddenly realized, as he often did, that his back was a ball of tension. Stretching, groaning, he pushed his hands out and up, pulling at his knotted muscles like separating dough.

  Finding himself at a momentary impasse, his mind wandered, and, as his world expanded from the screen in front of him, he heard the music for the first time. It was beautiful. Familiar but foreign, a taste he remembered, but from where he could not recall.

  He decided to investigate its source. Stepping into the rock corridor that joined his lab with the larger Fusion Team’s laboratory, and the even larger Subspace Mechanics Team’s space, he traced the source of the gentle music to a dimly lit doorway and gently pushed it open. Entering the bedrock chamber that held the font, it suddenly resolved itself into something magnificent. Amadeu felt as it touched him deep inside.

  His eyes came to rest on the single woman working in the room, the head of both the Fusion and Subspace Teams, and perhaps one of the most brilliant women he had ever had the privilege to meet. Stepping quietly into the room, he stood watching her. While her eyes seemed transfixed by her computer screen, her hands danced on the keyboard, and waved the stylus on the computer-aided design board with an artist’s fla
re. But though she was clearly utterly absorbed by her work, he could see the way the music was reaching into her in the way her head bobbed almost imperceptibly to the music.

  A crescendo in the piece passed, and her whole body seemed to reverberate with the emotion from the music. But her fingers never missed a beat in their own sonata as her eyes remained on the screen, feeding her brain the information it sought as her hands fed her responses back to the machine.

  “Did you ever play the piano as a child?” he asked, suddenly.

  She leapt out of her chair, a scream bursting out of her as she sent her chair sprawling backward, its little wheels trying to stay under it like tiny legs scrambling for balance. He took two steps backward as well, as stunned by her response as she had been by his sudden statement.

  “Oh. Oh, Dr. Hauptman, I am so sorry,” he said, mortified, his accent strong. “I was … I was down the hall. Oh no, I am so very sorry for …”

  Birgit held up her hand, silencing him, and took several deep breaths, trying to tame her racing pulse. It was like being awoken from a sleepwalk, and she struggled to orient herself. But the music still played, and after a few moments she was able to reconcile the intruder at her door with the mild-mannered boy that worked down the hall from her. She had met him once, maybe twice, but only in passing after one of the lunchtime talks they had started giving to increase inter-team information sharing and camaraderie. He looked distraught, and clearly panicked, and she realized he was about as little of a threat to her as he no doubt had been to the girls at his high school and university.

  “Relax, relax,” she said taking a breath. “You just startled me, that’s all.”

  “I know. I’m so sorry, please, oh my … I …”

  He stammered onwards, and she smiled, “It’s Amadeu, isn’t it?”

  “Si … yes.”

  She waited, but he was at a loss, so she prompted him with a pleasant but expectant expression, her eyes saying ‘go on’.

  “Yes,” he said, “like I said, I was just working down the hall and … well … I heard the music, and I recognized it. Well, I didn’t really recognize it, but I remembered it from years ago and …” He realized he was babbling, and that it was only made worse by his broken English. But looking through the haze of his embarrassment, he saw that she was smiling conciliatorily, and he went silent and meek. It was a maternal smile, a supportive smile, and it set him at ease.

  “Beethoven,” she said.

  He looked puzzled a moment, then smiled back, the music breaking through to him once more as the level of adrenalin dropped from in front of his eyes, and his sense of his surroundings returned.

  “It’s wonderful,” he said.

  A moment of silence passed as they both listened to the thrum of unknown fingers on ebony and ivory keys. After a long but pleasant lull in the conversation, Birgit felt the tug of an unanswered question.

  “I am Birgit Hauptman, by the way. And you are the Portuguese wünderkind that has been working on the ‘spinal tap,’ is that right?” She smiled at her little joke, and he was about respond when she then said, “I’m sorry, what did you say when you came in?”

  He stumbled at this, his mind rewinding back through the last minute to find the thread of thought that had led him to blurt his question at the poor woman. It took a moment, but when he found it, his young olive features illuminated with the memory.

  “Err, yes, Dr. Hauptman, err, I asked only, well, if you had ever learned the piano as a child,” he said, feeling the inanity of the question as he said it, out of context as it was.

  She looked at him quizzically, curious as to the root of it, but then shrugged and said, “No, I never had lessons on the piano.” Then a simple blush escaped her, “But I’ve played the French horn pretty much every day for at least forty years.”

  A shared smile spread across their faces as they both allowed the image of her with the burlesque brass instrument to come to mind. But in a moment, she saw his candid amusement turn to curiosity, and a hesitant request form just behind his lips.

  Curious, she prompted him, “Tell me, Amadeu, were you simply curious about my musical training because you wanted to see if I was qualified to listen to Beethoven, or did your question have import to something else?”

  The question bridged the gap between Amadeu’s stammering voice and his insightful mind, and the original flow of his thoughts came through like a surge of confidence. “Actually, Dr. Hauptman, I think it may be more relevant to my work than you can imagine. You see, my team and I have been wrestling with a problem for weeks now, months, really, as we try to tap into the mess of wiring that is the human brain. And I think you may have just given me a clue to deciphering it.”

  - - -

  The sound of the French horn was a strange addition to the typical whir of the air recycling plant and countless computers of the laboratory space. John Hunt had picked up on it as soon as he passed through the pressure sealed doors that guarded the Research Group’s multifaceted space.

  John had been working with the teams over the last couple of months as they developed their own version of the scientific knowledge he had managed to bring with him. He would download patches of information to teams and give guidance on application and dangers through discussions with the team leads.

  Only a handful of the leads knew of John’s real identity, and along with Neal and Madeline they decided on the ebb and flow from the massive reservoir of information John had at his disposal. They needed to balance the desire to move forwards speedily with the need to not overwhelm the teams too early with the sheer scale of the task at hand. Everyone had, of course, been given an overview of the enemy they faced, and the Armada’s approach that dictated their timeline. But to scare them with the depth of the Mobiliei’s true technological advantage risked paralyzing them with the size of the mountain they had to climb.

  But a phone call this morning from one of the Research Group’s younger members had intrigued him. Amadeu was among the more engaging and creative scientists in the group, due in no small part to the fact that the scientific establishment and the rigmarole of growing up in it had had less time to beat his creativity into submission. But then one of the other truly enigmatic geniuses he had encountered in the team was Birgit Hauptman, thirty years Amadeu’s senior and the preeminent leader in her field, so it was more than just his age that made him interesting. The fact that Amadeu had mentioned Birgit during his brief call had only fueled John’s curiosity more.

  As he approached the Spinal Interface Team’s lab, the sound of the double horn became ever clearer, and his acute hearing told him it was not a recording he was hearing, but someone playing live. The music stopped abruptly when he knocked on the door, and a moment later he stepped into the room to find Amadeu and his two English colleagues standing around a bemused-looking Birgit Hauptman.

  The esteemed scientist was sitting amongst a sea of wires and monitoring equipment that looked like a Dr. Frankenstein experiment gone right. Pads were stuck to her temples and wired under her salt and pepper shoulder-length hair to monitor her brain activity. Amadeu rose with evident excitement as John stepped into the room, and the Agent found himself sharing a quizzical glance with Birgit as the boy ran over to greet him.

  “Come in, Mr. Hunt. Come in.” John noted that the other two computer whizzes were silent as Amadeu ushered John round to where the results of his experiments were scrolling across his computer screen.

  “As you know, Mr. Hunt, the way our brain is designed is fundamentally at odds with the neurology of the Mobiliei. This is natural, of course, as we evolved in completely different ways,” Amadeu said, skipping any formalities in his excitement, and getting straight down to business. But he was unlikely to outstrip John’s capacity to process new information, so John let the young scientist run.

  “Well,” continued Amadeu, “one of the biggest differences that makes the human mind so very different is the separation of function into two distinct lobes: the
right and the left. The left lobe, as you are no doubt aware, is responsible for language and mathematics, all things logical and rational. The right side is more esoteric: spatial dynamics, facial recognition, what we like to call intuition.”

  He paused to see if John was keeping up, and got a nod as a sign he should proceed. A glance at Birgit told John that the woman was as keen for John to hear Amadeu’s point as the boy clearly was, and seeing that Amadeu had impressed the German doctor was high praise indeed.

  The boy went on, “So, as you know, the linking software that we have been working on has managed to tap that logical side of the brain with ease. Our test subjects have been able to communicate simple commands to our machines. But we have been unable to establish a link with the right side of the brain, where intuition and spatial dynamics is processed. The link allows basic systems operation, but if our pilots and tactical officers are to have a chance in combat, we will need a real-time link to the more intuitive and creative side of the brain, without having to process things through the corpus callosum.”

  Amadeu referred to the thick cable of neurons that linked the two sides of the brain: two hundred fifty million wires parsing information between our logical and creative minds.

  “Well,” said Amadeu now, his eyes becoming even more intent as a broad smile spread across his face, “after an enlightening conversation with Dr. Hauptman this morning, it occurred to me that the problem we were facing was that we were relying on language as the method by which we got information out of the brain. But we know from years of working with epilepsy sufferers and stroke victims that language is the sole domain of the left side of the brain.” He smiled broadly. “For the right side of the brain to be heard clearly, we were going to need something more … inspiring.”