“Okay, so now what do we do about the lights?” Sam asked.
Veyron patted him on his shoulder. “Relax. The EMP wave lasts less than a minute.”
“Then the power comes back on?”
“Should do.”
Next to him, Tom shuffled in the copilot seat. “And until then we’re sitting blind ducks.”
Veyron laughed. “Do you see any green glow outside our bubble?”
Sam silently looked around in a world devoid of all light. A moment later the power returned to his controls. The backlighting in a series of instruments started up. The headlights flickered on. He carefully powered the craft around to face the entrance.
Where the light from outside the cavern glowed green.
Chapter Eighty Six
Sam pushed the electric motors to their top speed and Sea Witch II sped towards the opening. He reached it and his eyes began to adjust to the strange color. It was similar to the green bioluminescence, but not quite the same.
“What is that?” he asked.
Veyron shuffled forwards in his seat. “That, my friend, is another submarine.”
Sam approached it. The entire thing glowed green. Tom gritted his teeth. “Is this wise? I mean, we were set up to fight a gazillion microscopic machines, not another submarine.”
“It’s all right Tom, I doubt very much they are either,” Sam replied.
“Right, so what are you planning on doing? Going right up to it and then asking the pilot to the surface for some coffee and a chat?”
Sam moved in close to the submarine. “Not a bad idea. Why not?”
It was a similar shaped submarine to the Sea Witch II with two small hulls and a bubble like dome that protected the pilot. Only the one in front of them was only just big enough for its single occupant.
They were no more than twenty feet away and Sam could quite clearly see the man in the pilot seat. There was something familiar about him. Using the diver’s thumbs up signal, he asked the other submariner to surface. The man acknowledged in return and slowly raised his submarine to the surface.
Sam expelled the remaining water from the Sea Witch’s ballast and began to surface. “See Tom, that wasn’t too hard.”
Tom shook his head. “This will be good to see.”
The Sea Witch broke the surface of the calm waters. Sam popped the hatch and climbed on to the left hull of the submarine. Tom and Veyron followed him. They waited less than a minute for the man from the second submersible to climb out. He was tall. Brown hair. A kind smile and a thick cleft chin that some women would consider attractive.
Sam smiled. It had been a long time. “It’s good to see you Luke. You’re looking a lot better than I was led to believe. You’d better come aboard. There’s a lot to explain.”
Chapter Eighty Seven
Sam stepped on board the side of Luke’s submarine. He shook his old high school friend’s hand and then passed him a rope to tie the two hulls of the submarines together. “It’s good to see you. And you’re alive!”
Luke took the rope. “It’s good to see you too.”
“This is Tom Bower my Deep Sea Projects Director. And this is Veyron Blanc. No relationship to the supercar –he’s my chief engineer.”
“Pleased to meet you both.” Luke shook their hands warmly. “I hear you’ve been busy, Sam. Found a lost Nazi aircraft or something? Then, found the remains of some old ship in a country somewhere on the other side of the planet – where was it… Austria?”
“Australia,” Sam corrected him.
“That’s it.” Luke smiled warmly. “Located Atlantis… and then lost it again. Oops. It’s good to see you’ve been using that keen mind of yours, and not just using it to squander your father’s fortune.”
“Thanks. On that subject. I hear you’ve been busy too. Do you want to tell me your story and what you were doing here tonight?”
“Of course. It might take some time.”
Tom looked curiously at the glowing paint covering the submarine. It looked like an off colored phosphorescence. “Luke, I have to ask, what’s with the paint job?”
“You mean, why’s my submarine glowing?” A childish grin came across his face.
Tom nodded his head. “Yeah.”
“It puts the plankton at ease.” Luke wrapped up the loose rope.
“No. You’ve got to be kidding me,” Sam complained. “Plankton doesn’t glow to make itself feel good. It glows as a deterrent to would be predators.”
“Yes, I agree. I don’t know why this works. But I do know that before we lost control over them, they would literally destroy any yellow submarine that entered the cavern. I don’t know why, but they did. We stopped losing submarines when we made them glow with phosphorescence. Weird huh?”
“Yeah, little about these creatures seem to make sense,” Sam agreed.
Veyron began climbing back down into the Sea Witch’s cockpit. “I’m going to call for the Maria Helena. We still have to find where the hive went.”
“I can tell you that.” Luke said.
They all looked at him.
“If the cavern’s empty, it means they’ve gone out to hunt.”
Chapter Eighty Eight
A bright light heralded the arrival of the Maria Helena. Sam brought Luke aboard to talk in depth. “We can bring your submarine on board if you like.”
“No thank you, I have to return to the cavern to gather some more evidence. It will be necessary if we’re ever to win this.”
“Suit yourself. You can tie up alongside the Maria Helena and at least have a meal while we work out what’s going on.”
Luke squatted down on the side deck of the Maria Helena and tied his submarine to its side. “Where do you want to talk?”
“We can go to the back deck. It’s private and you can talk freely. Do you want a beer?”
“No, thank you. I’ll have a strong coffee. Black. If you’ve got some.”
Sam stepped into the bridge. “Hey Matthew, when you see Genevieve, can you please ask her to bring us two strong, black, coffees.”
“Will do boss.”
“We’ll be out on the aft deck.”
Luke checked his lines again and then followed Sam. Down the side deck. Onto the aft deck. He stopped to look at the Sea King. “She’s a beautiful ship with a striking helicopter to match. You look like you’ve been having fun. Good for you.”
“I haven’t lately. We’ve had a problem. One you intentionally brought me in to fix. So, you may as well fill me in. Elise, one of my crew – she’s kind of a computer genius, is currently tracking the area with military satellite surveillance. Looking for their glowing lights. We might have to go at any time if she finds them.”
“Good. Tell her to look for intermittent electrical depolarizations.”
“You mean like the discharge in a storm cloud?”
“Precisely. Each plankton is producing electrical charge through kinetic energy. If she can’t see their bioluminescent glow, she should spot a five-mile area containing multiple electrical discharges.”
“Okay, thank you. I’ll let her know.”
Sam went inside to give Elise the tip. He returned a couple minutes later. Luke had stopped at the most aft section of the ship and was staring out into the calm seas. He looked up at Sam, smiled and then said, “How long have you known that I was alive?”
Chapter Eighty Nine
Sam took a deep breath. Smiled. “I had a feeling when I watched the video of your purported death. You appeared to be moving downwards. It wasn’t that, so much as your smile. It wasn’t even the fact that you appeared calm. It was the fact that you looked proud.” Sam shook his head. “It was nothing but a hunch until Tom told me about the green ghost he’d met. And then when I saw it with my own eyes, I knew that you were involved somehow.”
“It’s not what you think,” Luke reassured him.
“I never thought it was. So tell me about it.”
“Timothy Locke, Benjamin White and I have spoken for nearly
twenty years about the need to harness the power of the ocean. I’ve known it since I was a child. If we’re ever truly going to become self-sustainable as a species, we needed to capture some of the energy from the ocean. About five years ago, the time had come for us to act. We’d reached the perfect time in the history of civilization. Timothy Locke had the knowledge and the power to make small machines, Benjamin White was an expert on the movements of the oceans, and I had spent my entire life studying alternative and mainstream energy sources. I’ve studied everything from solar panels, windfarms and wave generators, through to nuclear and thorium conductors.”
Luke stopped as Genevieve arrived with their coffees. She dropped them off, left a pot of black coffee, and quietly left without saying a word. Luke watched her go. “She’s quite stunning, isn’t she?”
“Forget it you dirty old man. She’s not interested.”
“In men?”
Sam shrugged his shoulders. “In anyone.”
Luke hadn’t changed with age. He was always known as a lady’s man – attractive, intelligent, funny and loquacious around women in a way that they never seemed to find annoying. And as far as Sam could tell, they just liked him. Of course, it had probably been the cause of all three of his divorces.
Luke smiled when he finally accepted that Sam wasn’t going to give him any more information. “Okay, where was I?”
“You’re an expert in the development of clean energy.”
Luke took a small gulp of coffee. It was 4 a.m. after all. “None of those sources were limitless and without damage. Even windfarms require large amounts of mining to gain the materials to build. Wave generators destroy the local marine life and require the use of oil, which naturally seeps into the ocean, to maintain. In many ways nuclear and thorium reactors appear the only feasible long term solution, with the one major drawback being our inability to remove the waste.”
“So you created a swarm of nanobots intent on destroying humanity?” Sam interrupted.
Luke smiled good-naturedly. “So we looked at it from an entirely different perspective – we looked at breeding a species that worked symbiotically with nature to produce energy. Kinetic energy, small amounts, absorbed through the natural movements of the sea, covering trillions upon trillions of plankton cells.”
“Okay, so how far did you get before someone offered to kill your research?”
“It took more than a year to build fifty nanobots. The sheer practicality of such an undertaking made it impossible for us to continue without the ability to increase production substantially. Even if we wanted to, we would die from old age before we could build a relevant colony.”
Sam had heard this argument against nanotechnology before. “So you looked to the plankton to grow them for you?”
“Yes. As you would know, certain plankton procreate through cellular division. At its most basic level, the cells make an exact replica of themselves. It’s inside their DNA – the building codes for all cells. So we thought, why not reprogram the DNA with nanotechnology?”
“Because up until the time I watched it under an electron microscope I believed that it was impossible,” Sam said.
“I did too, but Timothy Locke assured me it could be done. In fact, he wasn’t even concerned about how to do that. For him, it related to computer codes. And coding was something you could do at any level. His concern was our ability to produce substantial numbers.”
“Why? If he could reprogram the DNA to include the nanotechnology and plankton cells divide every 24-48 hours, the population must grow rapidly?”
“They do, but not fast enough. You have to realize that the type of plankton we were using had a complete life cycle of eight days. That meant that although we were doubling the colony every 24-48 hours we were losing an entire generation every ten days.”
“So how did you overcome that?”
“We genetically modified the plankton, by increasing the rate it divided. If all requirements were met, such as warmth, nutrients, and building blocks for the nanoparticles – the cells would now multiply every 2-4 hours.”
Sam frowned. “Yes, Veyron showed me. We were wondering why anyone would do that.”
“But it didn’t just produce more symbiotic plankton. The process ended up having an unexpected side effect.”
A small wave lapped up towards the side of the ship. Sam stepped back to avoid the splash. “What was the side effect?”
“It sped up the life cycle and generations of the plankton.”
“What would that do?”
“It’s an old theory in evolution. You see, if you subscribe to current theories about evolution you learn that everything evolves through generational responses to external stimuli. For example, in a small cave system in Bolivia a certain breed of fish have become entrapped in complete darkness. As the species evolved to survive without light, their eyes became smaller and smaller until today’s cavefish no longer have eyes. Instead, they developed whisker like sensor at the edge of their mouths which pick up tiny movements.”
Sam nodded his head. He’d read about the Bolivian Cavefish in college, but he still didn’t see the relevance to their nanocreation. “What happened?”
Luke finished his coffee and immediately poured himself another. “We shortened the generational cycle of the plankton – and increased their rate of evolution.”
Chapter Ninety
Sam started on his second cup of coffee. It was unusual for him, but so was this story. “You increased its rate of evolution. But how much does plankton evolve?” Sam still didn’t feel like he was getting anywhere.
Luke smiled patiently. “It turns out quite a bit. Also, you have to remember, this wasn’t just plankton. It now shared its DNA with the nanobots which served a basic point. They were basically designed to create kinetic energy as they moved with the swell of the ocean.”
“How were they storing the energy?”
“They weren’t. We hadn’t gotten to that point yet. All we wanted to know was that the energy could be produced. We had a number of theories about how to then capture that energy, but the entire program was still in its infancy.”
“And the colony was growing and evolving?” Sam persisted.
“Yes. Incredibly fast.” Luke took a deep breath. Swallowed. And then continued. “We started off a small private island in the Bahamas, using a small lake. Each day, I would take more nutrients and building blocks down to the lake. Soon they would meet me at the jetty, like carp they would wait to be fed. Eventually, they befriended me as someone who fed them.”
Sam threw the last of his now cold coffee overboard. “Are you telling me this thing developed AI?”
“No. Artificial Intelligence kind of went out of vogue after the turn of the millennium. Too many Venture Capitalists got burnt by what it was supposed to be capable of. We talk about the term Predictive Response. This is where machines are designed to mimic the appearance of cognitive function by applying a series of answers to yes and no questions to solve a common goal. You have to remember these were still a series of machines performing very basic tasks as a collective to achieve a common goal. Such as, move here when man comes down and get food.”
“None of the AI theories proved possible?” Sam asked.
“Sure they did. It’s just the scientists asking for the money from the Venture Capitalists were off by about thirty years’ worth of research.”
Sam persisted. “And yet you built a working prototype?”
“Yes and no. Evolution sped up the process of their mimicked intelligence but we hadn’t taken into account the simple fact that plankton is alive. Single cellular or not, all living things share one common desire – they want to survive. It was after the colony had survived for a year that things began to get super weird.”
Chapter Ninety One
Sam looked at the starlight, fading into the twilight of dawn. The possibilities were limitless now. “Okay, tell me how things got weird?”
Luke sat down. He app
eared tired but at the same time frustrated because he needed to get some things off his chest, and he still had a job to do before it was finished. “Because I came down to the lake one day and the colony started to raise itself out of the water and take form.”
“The green ghost we saw?” Sam asked.
Luke stared into the dark water. “Ah, you’ve met one of them?”
“One of them? You mean there’s others?”
“Yes. Not at first, but eventually they multiplied. They liked to mimic things. Soon they were copying my general shape and eventually they were able to perform simple tasks such as creating the shape of my eyes, and face. In the end it was like I was staring at a reflection, albeit a little greener.”
Sam looked at him. He appeared close to tears. “So what went wrong?”
“We needed money. We’d raised our initial capital ourselves. Timothy was one of the worst hit. He had to sell his house to put in his equal share. I think he wanted to ask us for a loan, but had too much pride. Besides, we all thought we were on to something. This was our big break.”
On the horizon Sam watched a shooting star race towards earth. “Okay, so where did you raise the funding to continue? I would have thought with that kind of story you’d have Venture Capitalists trying to throw money at you.”
“No way. Not anymore. Too many broken bridges with nanotechnology. No one was interested. After all, what had we really created? A microscopic machine that could create a single face out of water. No one knew of any particular uses for that. No, we needed to increase the size of the colony so that we could begin progress towards energy production.”
“But someone did fund your research?”
“A friend of ours knew a person who could get us the cash we needed. In fact, they could get us all the funding we would ever need – because they’d just discovered exactly what they could do with machines that made seawater rise and fall into the air.”
“They wanted a weapon!” Sam shook his head.
The Sam Reilly Collection Volume 2 Page 21