by Kim J Cowie
were all on the same few topics. The first he looked at, EP 426310 "Method and apparatus for verifying an image pattern" was all about scanning objects one line at a time and comparing a product label with a reference text. He discovered that the library regularly received requests for patent details.
The hardware was working, and though the team leaders had not taken him into their confidence, he was almost sure there were other units in other places. The telekinesis heads were continually being improved and made smaller. Sometimes they made improvements that didn't seem to have been designed locally. Like a smaller boson source. But it was the software where they were putting in the big effort."It's the software that makes a modern VCR or dishwasher what it is; the hardware just spins round and round," McCall said once. "Or in the telekinesis, snaps matter from one place to another."
There was a lot of software to steer the far focus, make it able to scan and sense through the focus, and identify materials and the shapes of objects. It had four spectrographs and analysers attached to it, but they were trying to do away with them and replace them with cleverer methods and more software. Derek found the technology fascinating. They used ultrasound a lot for sensing; the machine transmitted ultrasound just by transmitting sampled puffs of gas.
Boothby explained it at the weekly seminar."When it arrives at the near focus it turns back into ultrasound. It's kind of a technical trick; like digitally coded sound is used on compact disks. Just to give you an idea how powerful the software is, it can turn it into a device for eavesdropping at a range of thousands of miles, by transmitting the air vibrations."Sally heard that workmen were digging up the lawns to lay heavy-duty power cables from the substation direct to the Project. She asked her husband about it. "I'm not supposed to talk about it," he mumbled.
"That's stupid!" she snapped. "I can see for myself what they're doing! Everybody can!"
"We do need more power for the Project," he explained, with some embarrassment. "But I'm not allowed to tell you why."
Military secrecy or no, Derek was doing a little digging of his own. He had heard that Chenier was bragging in bars about what easy marks the project scientists had been. One lunch hour he got out the gear used to monitor the original experiments and stripped it down. Inside, as he had suspected, he found some modules disguised to look like normal components, but actually made to inject false weight signals in response to radio commands. Somebody had gone to an astonishing amount of trouble to cleverly fix the equipment that was supposed to validate Chenier's telekinesis.
Derek found it much less unbelievable than mind-over-matter. Carefully, he put everything back as he had found it.
A few days later, Sally noticed that they had stopped the trenching work and taken the cable drums away again. Why? It seemed as busy as ever. She had little time to wonder about the reason, because of some good news of a pay rise that Derek brought home, and because of a strange incident that happened in the neighbourhood the next day.
There was a fire at a house next to the College boundary fence. Sally saw it when she drove to the shopping mall. The fire was on the shingle roof and the wall below, but the rest of the house seemed untouched. Soon the fire brigade soon put it out with hoses, but when she went past on her return trip there was a strange burn or melt mark, very narrow, across what was left of the house, across the garden, the garden wall, the footpath and the road. Some men in military uniforms were there, trying to scuff it out with their boots. She didn't get out of the car or speak to them. Derek was very tense that evening and slept badly. He wouldn't talk.
Derek found out that one of the visitors to the Project was a big software man who also worked on the team that worked on developing the guidance for the cruise missiles used for precision attacks on Iraq. The image analysers for the guidance systems had incorporated ideas from fractal analysis and chaos theory, which sounded like science fiction to Derek.
Derek came home early on 17th September 1993. When Sally came in he was sitting in an armchair and staring at the wall. Then he went to the cabinet and filled a glass with whisky. His hand shook and rattled the glass."They paid me off, Sally. They sacked me. They said it was because my work was no good, that I made mistakes. Everybody makes a few small mistakes." He took a large slug of the whisky. "I guess I opened my big mouth too often and criticised the way it was going. Then I told them Chenier was a fake."
"How can you say that, and tell me your machine works?"
"He was a phoney, but they believed him and invented the real thing. It's all his fault...”
"He can't have been a fake,” she said. "I don't believe it. What's happening now?"
"I'm not allowed to say. If I speak about it, I go to jail for thirty years. But I got to tell somebody. You sure you want to hear."
She nodded, a little too eagerly."You want to hear? You may never be the same again."
"Yes."
"Because we gotta decide what to do .. decide what to do about it, before it's too late." He put down the glass. "A machine that can eavesdrop and sample at a range of thousands of miles is not a lab toy.""Thousands of miles!" Sally exclaimed."I didn't mean to let that out, but what the hell, it does have a range of thousands of miles. We've got sputterings of exploded nickel-iron from the Earth's core to prove it.”She stared at him."Is the penny beginning to drop?" Derek asked. "It could make a whole lot of things obsolete. It can analyse an object, get the raw materials for making another. They are developing all sorts of software modules for it. So if you want to make it do a terrible new thing, you don't need to change the Machine at all, you only have to link different software modules together."She looked blank."Suppose you want to attack an enemy formation. You have a module for finding warm things. You have a module for recognising enemy uniform. You have a module for killing men. Link them together and you got dead enemy soldiers, OK?"
"Suppose they're not in uniform?"
"Then you kill the small guys carrying Kalashnikovs. If it had the data on disk, changing the program would take only a few seconds."
"So it can kill people?"
"Sally, almost anything it does can be adapted to kill men. You can poison them, cut them, burn them, irradiate them, whatever."
The screen door clattered. Derek had gone to the 24 hour store to buy more whisky. Looking back over what he said, Sally found it hard to believe any of it. She still didn't believe Chenier had been faking. Derek talked about doing something to stop it, but he obviously feared it might already be unstoppable. Was any of this real? Had anything happened? She opened her diary and wrote down what Derek had said and her thoughts.
Derek behaved strangely when she tried to read him his horoscope the next morning. He snatched the paper and flung it on the floor, and growled "Don't spook me with that shit."
That morning Sally thought she saw a small green light flicking on and off on the edge of her diary which was closed. It didn't even look sinister, just like fireflies. An hour later men in uniform came to the house and told her they were moving Derek and herself inside the nearby base. They made it clear what would happen if they didn't co- operate or tried to leave the base or communicate with anyone. She told Derek about the green fireflies. He said it must have been the machine reading her diary for the military. It must have been listening to them too. Two days later they and all their belongings were in a white clapboard house on the military base.
Derek stared out of the window. "What now? It's as if they are waiting for something. They haven't even bothered to charge us with anything."
"Why? We haven't done anything wrong." She looked at him. "Or-?"
"What I did wrong was having anything to do with telekinesis. I'll tell you some more of what they were working on. Don't worry, it won't make any difference even if we are overheard. The scientists think that parts of the Machine could be located in subspace as virtual machines to speed up the operation."
"Virtual what?"
"I mean, where the Machine creates something that behaves like hardware but
it's only software. We made a virtual coffee-cup that would hold boiling coffee in mid-air without any cup. Virtual machines are a whole new game with it."
Sally's lips tightened. "There are Indian Yogis who can do things like that."
"Then there are the voice commands and symbolic controls."
He waited all the way through the washing up to be asked, "Derek, what's a symbolic control?"
"Suppose I have two pieces of yellow Lego. I stick them together; that means ON. I separate them, that tells the machine OFF."
"That's just like magic!" Sally exclaimed.
Two days after their confinement began there was an accident at the University. Parts of a two-storey building collapsed without warning and several students were killed and injured. Next day, lorries with military escorts started moving equipment from the Project on campus, to an unknown destination. Derek and Sally did not hear about the accident till a week later.
"That's the worst accident so far," Derek remarked grimly.
"There've been others? Apart from that house fire?" she added quickly."
"Quite a number. They happen because of faults in the program control. Usually when that happened, somebody hit the panic button, or it ran out of bounds and stopped by itself."
"What do you mean, ‘out of bounds’?"
"Like a runaway train, it's gotta stop