The Resolute

by G. Weldon Tucker

  “Damned good!” Bryce exclaimed. He paused, leaning in closer, then asked, “Can you make it, say, red for inner, blue or green, bright, for the outer? But keep it thin, something the eye can see without distraction?”

  More of those quick key clicks. When she demonstrated it, the colors were there. But, as was designed in the game, the inside reticule lit up as a square in orange, preparing to fire.

  “Gotta take that orange color out. We will not have time for the computer to tell us to shoot. Can you pull out the reflex in the game?”

  Minutes later, it was perfect. The shot was up to the player.

  David spoke up, then, “Damned good indeed, Dyna. How about the speed? Look how that slowed down with the double rectangle. The lines, maybe? You’d be dead before you got a shot off!”

  Dyna said, “That has to do with overhead. If I take out the detail in the rest of the screen, we are left with a reticule complete. But, right now, the target will not show unless it is inside the rectangles. That won’t work, so let me play with it a few.”

  This took her some time. They ordered up lunch, delivered in a dumb waiter, a name dumber than it sounded, they’d joked, but it did save a lot of running up and down a hell of a lot of stairs. Simply opening a cabinet in the inner wall revealed dinner for all.

  People were working on the elevators, something desperately needed, since there were so many decks. But elevators to cover seven hundred decks was a hell of a lot of design and work. The only elevator operating on the entire ship ran from the bridge, downward, just to the quarters for the high level Officers. A good start.

  An hour later, Dyna rebooted the game, and all of the area outside of the rectangle was a simple black. And the rectangle moved like lightning in response to the joystick. And like molasses with the arrow keys, Bryce noted.

  “I like the speed, and the view. Now, how do we get it to see something live? You would never see the target until it is too late!” David asked.

  Bryce could see David was excited by the possibilities. Hell, he, too, could feel the sweet sense of success. They were already miles ahead of the game. Many more ahead of the ship’s system. But he had a secret wish. He wanted to beat David, and he thought he knew how. It was coming with the new game. Unpredictability.

  “We have a game setting, people. Not a live camera shot. I can fold in a very basic background, like black sky and white target, a simple ball. If we use a few dots for stars, they need not move. They don’t appear to move, now. Maybe other dynamics, but black backgrounds with more targets. They respond quickly. That won’t slow it down much, except between the target load ups. And out in space, the radar will pick up the target as a blip, so we probably won’t even see it. I will make the targets smaller, more efficient, and that, too, will speed it up. I want random patterns, though, at one time. Like fighters attacking our ship. Give me until tomorrow. This is going to take a lot longer.”

  All the others had to smile A lot longer for Dyna was another day. It would have taken them weeks.

  After lunch, and four hours before duty call, the others headed down to the rec room. Bryce was already anticipating the new assignment for his team… Weapons platforms. Of course, he was not stupid. There was a very high chance they would never be needed. No one had ever seen or heard of an alien…. Just Cyborgs. And mankind had made that one themselves. Still, the day he could not defeat a video game had not come… would never come. But he still had not yet reached David’s skill level.

  That, too, would come. He was counting on it…

  CHAPTER 8

  Two days later, at ten hundred hours, ten in the morning for the civilians, there were four Commanders at his shoulders when Bryce opened the reloaded simulator for trial.

  Of course, all of them, including David, the ace, found this game a hell of a lot harder, but once you got the hang of the joystick, it seemed, to Bryce, anyway, a piece of cake… And he suspected none of these ‘older’ folks had ever seen a joystick. They might have grown up on the moon, hell, they all did. But only a select few had access to the equipment and the games.

  Out of the dark corner of the screen a white dot whizzed out in front of him, growing as if in attack mode, looking just like it was turning into him.

  In half a second, he had centered, pulled the trigger and disposed of it. Then two from the bottom of the screen. A tad longer, but he was riding high.

  A group of four came out of the top, and two from the bottom. They did not have time to do more than double in speed, and he had them all. High score in less than one minute. Gleefully, he entered his initials. Four slots above David! He grinned back at the Commanders and said, innocently, “Anybody want to try it… Sirs?”

  The first Commander gave up after five minutes and no kills. The second learned by watching and he realized the arrow keys could not do it. But he was sloppy as hell on the joystick, and he got only one out of ten targets.

  The third Commander declined to play. He said, “Not yet. Let me see what it can do, first!”

  The fourth was an enigma, because he was younger than the others, but older by five or six years over Bryce. Stephen Books had, at least seen a joystick. He made a credible showing, five out of ten kills.

  This Commander sat still for a long minute, then said the magic words, “If I can get Captain DePaules to clear it, how long before your team can make it happen on the weapons platform?”

  Dyna, right behind them, handled this technical question. “Sir, I have to set it up to work off the radar feed, rather than a graphic representation. You noticed the pattern of dots was pretty repetitive, so you can learn to high score this fairly soon by predicting what is going to happen in groups of ten.”

  “Just like a vid game.”

  “Yes, and I will bet you learned quickly that the practice session you had did not have repetitive targets… Sirs?” She was, as are all Lieutenants, very respectful.

  “Yes, Lieutenant, good call. But we are not yet sure how that would work with a radar generated target, especially at longer range,” Books offered. Seeing a long discussion that did not yet concern them, the others moved off to their posts, leaving only this one.

  “Let me reprogram this system to give you a variety of sizes, speed, direction and multiplicity. Something random. Then you will have something to practice with that makes sense… Sir!”

  “How long will that take, Lieutenant?” Commander Books asked her. In fact, he had already seen enough to know that if it was set up right, it would be one hell of a trainer. And they had four simulators. Eventually, the weapons platform would be invincible.

  “I can have it done in a week, certainly, if you will lift my kitchen duties for that time. I don’t mind doing both, but it will make me much slower on the programming… Sir.”

  “You programmed this? How did you do it?” the Commander asked. At least he had gotten five out of ten.

  “Not from scratch, Sir. I used a fighter pilot video game and restructured the code. I did not have time to put random variables in, so that is the next step… Sir.”

  “Huh! You may be far more valuable that anyone thought, Lieutenant. If you can program it for random variables, and show us how to train on it, you have a new assignment. Once it is set up for training, and approved, you will need to find out how to get that process without the variables to talk to our radar for the weapons platform. Would that be in your interest, Lieutenant Lister?”

  Eyes shining, a hint of pink in her cheeks, she snapped to attention and saluted Commander Books. “Yes, Sir… Sir!”

  “What about the rest of you layabouts? What function, besides being one hell of a crack shot do you fill, Lieutenant Washington?”

  “I can train anyone on any game… or simulator, Sir. I helped build this club. Uh, Sir!”

  “Is that so… But I understand Lieutenant Morgan is the best you have. So the rumors go. How about that?”

  “Yes, Sir, he is… on the fighter game. He has learned the predictable moves of an
y part of the game, and he runs ahead of them. It makes him unbeatable. He has yet to touch me in this new simulation and with true variables, I believe I can beat him, Sir!”

  The Commander thought for a few moments, calculating, perhaps, then said, “Okay, then, I am going to stick my neck out. We have lots of people who can work in the kitchen, study star maps and do laundry. I am reassigning all four of you, temporarily, of course, to this simulator build out. If you do it right, and I can get the old man to buy in, you may be apprenticing for the weapons platform.”

  Four simultaneous, “Yes, Sir!” salutes rang out.

  “But, remember, it is temporary, while we watch for results. You program it, you perfect it, you test it to death, and you report it to me. No one else. You are hereby assigned first watch. Eight to four. You have two weeks, and I want to see how you intend to insert it into an active radar. Got it?”

  Several voices called out, “Yes, Sir!”

  The Commander left the room, not unaware of the high fives and fist pumps that occurred behind him. He was not that old.

  CHAPTER 9

  For only a week out, the Resolute kept in touch with the moon base. It took three days to break three hundred thousand miles an hour. And the next four to reach five hundred. Now the hydrogen based outer engines were about done. Imagine, going around the entire Earth in less than three minutes! Except, with few exceptions, Resolute would be carrying strawberry jam! So now, only the gentle, persistent push of electrons out of the nuclear engines, though miniscule, were in sufficient numbers to slowly ease the speed upward. They had a long way to go.

  The types of radio used was amplified, very high frequency shortwave, and frankly, it had limited range. If not for the amplifiers, it would not have reached the base.

  But it could not hear the return. It was akin to the old days with headphones and lots of static, trying to pull a recognizable signal out of noise.

  Working in the radio room, the apprentice signalman, Lieutenant Jake Washington, the missing member of Bryce’s club at the moment, was frustrated. What point was there in being a signalman, if there was nothing out there to talk to, or to listen to? Especially when he had the answer.

  Jake had been into electronics since his early teens. He built his own radios, much as Ham Operators did in the nineteenth and twentieth century. And he built them using transistors, chips and equipment salvaged from the shuttles. Though the whole habitat city was barely a few miles wide, it was exciting and fun to talk to people he might never meet.

  On rare occasion, he got signals from Earth, underground operators who tried to keep up the good fight, but over time, those, too, disappeared. But no matter the power, there was no long range to the shortwave process. It could reach maybe a few thousand miles, through the amplifiers he built, but he knew full well that receiving a signal was very unlikely. And that was on the moon. At the end of that first week, they were nearly twenty million miles out. No chance.

  However, out here, the signal was a straight shot, with a parabolic antenna, but was far too weak so many miles from the moon. The distance was increasing almost exponentially, the nuclear engines pulsing along perfectly. Shortwave was history.

  He had studied digital signals, a process of much smaller, encapsulated information at a much higher frequency.

  It was not something widely accepted, as this was the same process the Cyborgs used on Earth to exchange information. But he’d found a way around that.

  The signal could be compressed to literally take up no space, a point, really, then vectored, sent out high speed as a packet, and it would proceed at medium power for billions of miles, unless it was interrupted. Like, by a receiver on the moon. He knew that their vector was maintained within thousandths of a degree to enable eventual communication.

  He had built a unit much more powerful than his on-base experiment, that part was easy. And his friend ‘Boomer’ Alexander, so named because of his huge voice on a big frame, was waiting with a transceiver of his own. He hoped.

  Before the launch, Jake and Boomer had experimented with the packet process many times. They did not have enough distance to really show how it worked, but no matter from what they bounced the signal, it came back crystal clear.

  Boomer, because he had not finished college in time, was left behind. But he was plenty sharp. The Navy had signed him up for the academy, and like Jake, they recognized his skill with communications. And they put him to work. Also like Jake, an apprentice signalman.

  He had more to listen to, because there were far more antennae on the habitat then just for the arks. They listened to the incessant back and forth on Earth, as the Cyborgs relentlessly hunted the few remaining humans. It was mostly computer code and there was nothing anyone could do, but the main point was to listen for chatter about the moon…

  But, right there on his desk rested a simple black box about the size of a paperback book…

  -----

  Well, Jake knew that the moon base had four special designated antennae, highly sensitive levels, parabolics, each vectored after their respective ship. He could get his signal in there, encrypted, but it would be only a microburst of high static. Not even a military communications expert could decipher it. Probably would not notice it. And, without a key, no Cyborgs would, either. If the aim was true, as it should be, the Cyborgs would not even pick it up. It was like a bullet with little side energy at all.

  Jake also knew that he was treading thin ice. He had mentioned his idea to his Commander Al Yardmen, but the man was too much ego and not enough curiosity.

  He dare not go around him. What he was about to do would have him shoveling sheep shit for the rest of his career, or it would make him a hero.

  He pulled his own pocket book sized black box out of his carry bag and took a few moments to look around. No one was inside the radio room. No one in the corridor headed his way. He hooked into the antenna cable through a short link connector, then pulled the memory card from the computer.

  Just a minute ago, he had encoded a message, a digital file, compressed it to almost nothing, and put it in the memory card. Now, moving the card to a slot in the box, the data was gathered, packaged and would be blasted out with the touch of that button. He closed his eyes and pushed SEND. In about a thousandth of a second. Just that simple.

  The packet left the Resolute at light speed, back down the unwavering vector to the moon base. It hit in about twenty seconds, exactly coordinating with the distance the ship had traveled from the moon.

  Boomer, on the base, jumped to his feet in surprise and glee, as a green LED suddenly flashed twice in a second. His reaction startled the hell out of his team in the radio room. “I got one! Look at this! A message from UE Resolute!!”

  The others gathered around as he pulled the memory chip out of his own black box and put it in his tablet. He got a start indicator, pushed it, and in two seconds, the message came in, very clear on screen. “Boomer! Tell everyone down there it works! Shoot me one back!”

  “Holy shit, the Resolute is, what twenty, thirty million miles out? Goddam, Boomer, this is something!” Commander Grayson Danieler exclaimed. “Can you get a message out?”

  Commander Danieler was Boomer’s superior, overseeing his apprenticeship, and, to tell the truth, the young man was not excited by the Officer watching his every move. Boomer was not stupid. “How about I get back to you after we have exchanged a few messages. Then I have something of real value to show off… Sir?”

  “Is this a Cyborgs thing, Boomer?” Grayson asked, scowling. He was thinking spy, but Boomer was too much a patriot for such stupidity.

  “Similar, but not one they can read. Let me tell you all about it, after we see it work. It has to be consistent or it is worthless. Will you let me do that, Sir?”

  “Yeah… yeah, I see that. Sure. Let me make it clear, Boomer, you screwing around with Cyborg equipment can get you shot!”

  Not that anyone faced firing squads, anymore, but they all knew the threat.
More likely to get spaced...

  “Guaranteed not, Sir. We built these from scrap. Besides, no one can read this but the designated receiver with the key. Not even the arks’ great computers could break this in a thousand years. Me and Lt. Jake Washington have been working on this for about three years. Let me prove its worth, first, Sir.”

  “Do it.”

  “Yes, Sir!” Boomer saluted, turned around and sat down, put his fingers over his keyboard and then looked up at Grayson. “Sir? We are a long way from impressing anybody. Give me a few minutes and I will report status. Okay, Sir?” The Commander had to get off his back. It made him nervous.

  “Oh. Yes,” Grayson said, after a moment’s thought. He left the room.

  Boomer typed out a simple question about his sister’s middle name. Only she would know it. Jake could track her down on the Resolute. He saved it to the small, old fashioned SD memory chip, then put the chip in the box. He pushed the send button.

  “How do you know it went anywhere?” one of the men asked, eyeing the process.

  “No one knows. It only shows us when it does not, or on incoming. That is the beauty of it. We need to let him find my sister. So it might be a while, guys. They were all the same rank, and friends, and they were pulling for him. Boomer was a hell of a nice guy.

  The radio room went back to work. Most of the packets escaping Earth were lines of code, compressed down to two second packets. And all of them were becoming decoded as the experts on the moon, with their fantastic brains and standalone computers, applied their skills. But no computer on the moon had wireless or hard wired connections to another. Therein lay the previous trouble on Earth.

  So, every line of code was run and analyzed on a simple, quarantined system, and nothing touched the working gear of the UE Navy and its ships…

  CHAPTER 10

  Jake was ecstatic. Not only had his packet been received on the moon, but it had been returned with a new question. Total turnaround under five minutes, but that included Boomer’s typing the reply. Neither event took much power, and no one could intercept it.