by S. J. Ryan
“It looks like an old-fashioned portable memory device,” she said.
“It is.”
“Doesn't it belong in a museum?”
“Actually, they were still being used in our time. Dad had some laying around his office. He said they were useful because sometimes hand-carry is the most secure way to transfer data.”
“What was it doing under the shelf?”
“It must have fallen out of someone's pocket. Possibly Dad's.”
“So what he said was the most secure system turned out to be the – I'm sorry, he's your father, I shouldn't be making jokes.”
“Dad didn't take the data side of his job too seriously. He believed Star Seed was what Eric claimed it to be, a publicly funded project with full transparency, and it had nothing to hide. So he didn't see why we needed data secrecy.”
“I used to think that. Can you read the data?”
“Ivan,” Matt said. He touched his finger to the metal tip of the device, permitting Ivan to interface. He relayed Ivan's report: “The magnetic fields are faded, which is to be expected, given its age.”
“So the data can't be read?”
“Just means the media has to be scanned forensically. Takes a little longer. There we go . . . oh. It's encrypted.”
“So it can't be read.”
“Well, let's see. Dad would write security codes by hand onto paper, so that they couldn't be hacked from a computer system, which is a good practice. But then he would leave the papers face up, on top of his desk, so that anybody could see them if they walked in. Ivan, scan the telemetry of the times I was in Dad's office . . . yes, Ivan, try the master code . . . hey, what do you know, Synth, the file is decrypting.”
While he was watching the pop-up window and providing further instructions to Ivan, Synth crept behind him and abruptly fell upon his back, wrapping her arms around his neck.
Matt Three winced. “Ouch! My ear! How many times have I told you, don't nibble so hard!”
She giggled. “You solved it! You solved it!” Still clinging, she rocked him back and forth as she sang in a throaty accent: “Yer a wizard, Matty! Yer a wizard!”
“No longer Toto? Okay, we're done decrypting. Hmm, kind of a letdown. Looks like ordinary, publicly available data – flight tracking logs and all that.”
“Show me.”
Together, they gazed at the augmented-reality display: lines and lines of pod designations, followed by catapult power and targeting data.
“Emmy,” Synth said. “Compare this to the data that was publicly released.”
Matt Four remembered how he had stared with growing bewilderment at the line that Synth's implant had highlighted.
“The coordinates are different,” Synth said, pointing to the fields where the catapult targeting coordinates were listed. “Very slight – but why would the internal version be different than the public version?”
“Because it's for pod 3025H,” Matt Three said quietly. “That was my template's pod number.”
“Emmy, run a course projection and compare it to astrographical data.”
The three dimensional plot showed the expanse of interstellar space between Sol and Alpha Centauri. Connecting the star systems was a threadlike green line, labeled as the course projection for Pod 3025H. Synth made hand motions. The display zoomed on the far end of the projection, where the pod would enter into the Centauri Oort Cloud. Dust clouds of varying density were shown in violet. The course pierced a small but dense cloud . . . .
“We've got him,” Synth said.
“What do you mean?”
“The official version is that your template's pod was damaged by an encounter with uncharted dust cloud. Yet here we see that the cloud was charted, and the pod was aimed toward it. Roth deliberately ordered your template's pod into harm's way. We've got him.”
“We don't got him.”
“What do you mean? The proof is right here.”
“Synth, in a courtroom trial, a lawyer will claim that the data was fabricated and the judge and jury will require us to prove otherwise. And we can't. All we can say is that we found a little piece of plastic.”
She stared quietly, then pointed to the end of the data line. “There's an addendum. It's dated forty-three years later. About the time your template's pod would have entered the Centauri Oort Cloud.”
Matt swiped the image to the addendum page. Light years from the proton cannon array's effective range, there had been a revised course projection.
“How is that possible?” Matt asked.
“The magsail could brake against the electromagnetic field of the dust cloud. It would be tricky, but it would alter the course.”
“To where?”
Synth made motions at the image, causing it to move rightward. The green line dove deep into the gravity well of the sun known as Alpha Centauri, then emerged safely and hurled into deep space. Synth zoomed out, then followed the green line as it coursed away from Sol and Centauri Systems. Finally, far from Sol and Alpha Centauri, the pod's course encountered a third star system: Delta Pavonis.
“Ivan must have overridden the pod navigation system,” Matt Three said. “He tried to save them by deflecting the course toward Delta Pavonis, in the hopes that something would be there in time to catch them.”
“There is something there now,” Synth replied. “The cloneporter station.”
“Yeah, but can it catch a star pod?”
“It's equipped with thorium-ignition fusor tugs to retrieve the components of Station Two. It'll retrieve his pod automatically, once he's close enough to be detected.”
She must have noticed the hard expression on his face. Her expression changed to puzzlement.
“Matt, are you okay with this?”
“I thought I had finally put my identity crisis behind me.” He avoided her gaze. “I'd never see him again, no one ever would. So it was okay to assume living his life.”
“You're not an imposter, Matt. You're both real. And you're the one I've gotten to know.”
“You know, he had a real bad crush on you.”
“He's still in suspension, he's still just a kid. Goodness, I must be thirty times his age! I don't think it's going to work. Anyhow, assuming that he is rescued by the station, he'll be nineteen light years away.”
“I know, I should be happy that he's going to be rescued, instead of thinking of him as a rival.”
“If he ever comes back to Earth, I'll fix him up with one of my great-great-great-great – well, you get the idea. If he ever comes back to Earth.”
She gently turned his face toward hers. She pressed her lips again his. She backed away and smiled.
“Let's thoroughly scan this area,” she said. “If the data was being hand-carried, I want to know where.”
Swirl . . . .
They were walking rapidly down the hallway toward the old Mission Control. Chopper loped quietly beside Synth, carrying a chest large enough to fit both humans. Matt too carried a bag – and a major frown. Synth divided her attention between the path ahead, Matt's face, and the floor beneath her feet.
“Are you still mad at me?” Synth asked.
“You've been sneaking here every Friday for months without my knowledge,” Matt Three replied. “I told you, this place is not safe. I thought you figured that out after we encountered that security robot.”
“One decrepit, ancient robot on trickle battery charge. You disabled it by reciting a master passcode.”
“And if I hadn't?”
“Tin Man has his sledge hammer.”
Matt Three scowled. “What is this about?”
“Well, it all began when I was exploring a sub-passage and found some trace DNA.”
“Whose?”
“Not a who. A what.”
Halting in the control room, Synth summoned a pop-up display and connected him. Matt Three saw a front and profile diagram of a monkey-like creature. It had been genetically modified to sport batlike wings.
“I gather Roth like you was a fan of The Wizard of Oz,” Matt Three said.
“You remember saying that the old memory device you found was to be hand-carried? Well, this is what was assigned to carry it.”
“Genetically engineering a flying monkey seems to be going to a lot of trouble for such a simple task.”
“Not so simple. I'll show you why.” She willed the diagram to fade away and pointed. “Down that passage, second room on the right.”
He followed her down the hall, turning into the room. He stopped short, barely in time to avoid falling into the meter-wide hole that evidently Chopper had pounded into the floor. Matt Three peered over the edge. His flashlight beam faded before it reached the bottom.
Synesthesia continued: “There being courier monkeys made me suspicious that there was a hidden passage for them to courier through – I realize my syntax is atrocious, I'm excited, but anyway, I scanned the walls and floors for hollows. The monkeys used to fly up and down the hole, carrying your portable storage devices to a permanent device at the bottom.”
“And you know this because?”
“I've been down there. But I've reached a dead end trying to crack the security code. That's why I need your help.”
Chopper opened the chest that it had been carrying. It removed a pair of two meter high posts and erected them on either side of the hole, then placed a cross beam that spanned over the hole at about Matt's neck height. On the cross beam, centered over the hole, it placed a mechanical device about the size of a suitcase, and upon that it installed a crank handle. As Chopper turned the crank, from the bottom of the device unspooled a dark thread with a hook at the end. Synth dressed in a harness and fitted on her hard hat, and directed Matt to do the same.
She saw the look on his face. “What's wrong?”
“How far down is it?”
“Half a li.”
“Couldn't we send a robot?”
“The shaft is booby-trapped to detect and kill conventional AI substrates. That's why Roth used flying monkeys and why I lost two robots finding that out. We'll be all right, though. I've done this a dozen times already.”
“This rig looks kind of flimsy, Synth.”
“You said you scaled cliffs on Tian. How is this different?”
“I use pitons and rope. Not thread I can barely see.”
“It's starcaster filament. Stuff they make space elevators out of. Coming or not?”
He took a deep breath. “I'll come.”
“All right. Well, shut down your implant's AI functions, or your head will be blown off in the first twenty meters.”
“Ivan, you heard the white rabbit.”
“White rabbit?” Synth asked.
“Yes, and following you makes me Alice.”
“I'll have to tell my friends about that one, when I get around to telling them about this.”
Synth went first. She hooked her harness to the thread and gave a wave to Chopper the Robot. The robot turned the crank and the thread unspooled and she descended out of sight. While waiting, Matt Three opened the bag he'd been carrying, and took out the double-barrel shotgun. He loaded two shells into the chambers and stuffed several more into his pockets.
The hook returned, Synth-less. Matt attached his harness, and after brief hesitation, lifted his legs and allowed himself to swing freely over the hole. In dim, flickering light, Matt Three watched as the rig's filament reservoir extruded black thread above his head like a giant spider spinning a strand of silk. The circle of overhead light shrank and faded. Matt Three looked down the shaft, whose sides shimmered with the reflected illumination of his hardhat lamp.
Synth was waiting at the bottom. The air was cool and damp, and in the surreality of the hardhat lamp light she seemed to have regressed to her teen years. Her smile faded at the sight of the weapon in Matt Three's hands.
“Matt, what are you doing? If we get caught with a gun while trespassing on private property – “
“Synth, the next security robot we encounter may not be 'decrepit.' Now, if you're really as close to the truth as you think you are, Roth will have something here to keep it from us. I want to be ready.”
“If this is because I ambushed you with a squirt gun while we were on our honeymoon . . . well, the escalation is a bit excessive.“ She rolled her eyes. “Matt, I've been down this tunnel many times, and there's nothing here but you and me and the blob. Now let's go meet the blob.”
The passage was tall enough to accommodate a stooping person. The walls, carved through hard rock, were gray, rough and lifeless. There were no fixtures, curves, or branches. After two hundred meters, they straightened up into a small spherical chamber. In the center, resting upon a pedestal, pulsated a misshapen heap of seemingly organic material, about two meters wide.
“This is different,” Matt Three said.
“Organic systems can rejuvenate and repair themselves,” Synth said. “Roth was thinking long-term, not just centuries but millennia. Also there's no way to circumvent the security protocols by cutting into the storage medium, because that will kill it.”
“I'm pretty sure Dad had nothing to do with this.”
“I'm convinced that there are things inside the blob that Roth wanted no one else to know about.”
“Then why not just destroy the evidence?”
“Roth is an egomaniac. He can hide the truth about himself, but he can't bring himself to destroy it, because that would in effect be destroying himself.”
“How do we interface with it?”
“We don't. It interfaces with us. Just put your hands on top, and wait.”
“Synth, I have huge reservations about this.”
“Matt, I've done this half a dozen times. I assure you, it doesn't bite.”
She gently pressed her palms against what he had come to think of as the 'hide' of the sphere. As he copied, he felt warmth and what could be described as a pulse. The sphere reacted to their presence by gently heaving. Matt felt an itching sensation in his palms. Leave it to Roth, he thought, to find a way to make data base access as unsettling as possible.
Matt had expected a pop-up window to appear. Instead, his entire field of vision filled with the scene, a VR simulation where groupings of data were represented by clusters of stars in a galaxy. By willpower, he moved his avatar through the clusters, sensing but not seeing the presence of Synth nearby. Low-level safety protocols protected his consciousness from being consumed into full VR immersion, yet he surely missed having Ivan awake and watching out for him.
Synth's presence moved closer, then somehow connected with his own, and then somehow conducted them toward a nearby star in the data galaxy. Orbiting the star was a black planet. As they rounded the horizon, towering mountains came into view. They were in the shape of words: ENTER PASSWORD.
“Cute,” Matt Three said. “Not as cute as you, but cute.”
“I can't access the data because it's encrypted,” Synth said. “So I need to know, what is the password?”
“You're asking me?”
“I am asking you, dear. Please use your Security-Dad superpowers to solve this mystery.”
“Well, for starters, I don't think any of the master passcodes that my father had will work here.”
“Those were twenty digit random alphanumeric sequences. We need something that a genetically modified monkey could remember. Probably no more than ten letters.”
Matt Three squinted at the word-mountains. “Hmm. It says, 'password.' Not 'passcode.'”
“Is that significant?”
“Could be. I once read that back in the early days of the personal computer revolution, people would use as passwords a word or term that had significance to their personal lives. Like their pet's name, or the place they were born. Well, Roth was born in the first half of the twenty-first century, so maybe he retained that habit.”
“Let's see.”
Matt Three felt Synth's consciousness direct itself at the password-planet. A rectangular canyon a
ppeared beneath the word-mountain range, and a row of asterisks appeared. The planet flashed for several seconds, and then the asterisks disappeared, leaving the canyon blank. Synth willed another row of asterisks into the canyon. Again, several seconds of flashing, and the canyon went blank.
“I'm surprised you know Roth's birthplace off the top of your head,” Matt Three said dryly.
“I am obsessed with the man. But not in a nice way, like I am with you. Do you have any other password guesses, Matty?”
“There's a whole list that the old-time hackers would try. People, places, things familiar to the user.”
And so for hours, Synth tried one guess after another: ATHENA, MANITOBA, STARSEED, RENAISSANCE – an endless list that made him realize that Synth hadn't been exaggerating about obsession.
Matt Three didn't mind the wait. Much like 'blobbing' on the Internet, the tunnel-blob's organic interface seemed to connect them together, almost as if they were one body and one mind, and while it was strange not having Ivan and Emmy hovering over them (metaphorically speaking), it also seemed to enhance intimacy for the two humans to be alone together. Matt Three contemplated that it was how lovers felt when they were alone together in the eras before incessantly-connecting technology. Perhaps, he thought, without need of a blob, they should try being 'just the two of them' now and then.
Matt Four had inherited all the memories of Matt Three, and it all came back to him as he watched the telemetry from another world, long ago: his sensory experiences, his emotions, his ruminations. These memories of the two of them kneeling before the blob two hundred and fifty meters below the fields of Kansas were particularly vivid, for these were his final moments with Synth – the last time in his long life that he hadn't suspected that the universe was a horrible place that only gave people happiness so that it could rip it away and leave them in eternal mourning at the unfathomable loss.
“Nothing,” said Synth. “Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Any more ideas?”
“Well, uh . . . . “ Matt Three racked his brain, wishing that Ivan was there to help. “Remember the artwork outside his office? How about that?”
Synth tried variations: APOLLO, CHARIOT, PLAINOFTRUTH, LUDWIG, CASTLE, MADKING, VANGOGH.