by Stephen Moss
He got to the door and knocked loudly. Not so much as a courtesy, but because he knew this was not a door he was physically capable of barging through.
Neal: ‘just a second, jim. i am wrapping something up.’
Jim: ‘open the door, neal. ¡now! i demand to speak with you. and i think you would prefer it if i didn’t do it out loud … out here.’
There was a pause, then the door opened and Jim was greeted by Jennifer’s uncertain visage. They had met many times, of course. The woman who had come to share Neal’s bed could not help but be painfully familiar with Neal’s right hand, if only through the mostly friendly push and pull of each of them competing for Neal’s time and attention.
This was not that, though. This was not a request for time. Jim’s expression could not have been plainer. Neal had told Jennifer he needed time to talk to his chief of staff, and asked her to leave them to it, and his tone had been clear as well. This was not a conversation either was looking forward to, and nor was it one that either wished to have an audience for.
Jennifer glanced back at Neal, as if to say, ‘are you sure you want me to leave you two alone?’
But Neal’s face was resolute. He neither needed nor wanted her here for what was about to happen.
- - -
“Stop bullshitting me, Neal.”
“Your anger is understandable, Jim, trust me. I am just as disappointed as you.”
“That is a lie, and you know it. There is no way they could have found him. I looked at the recordings. I watched what they did to that man. They didn’t stumble upon him. They weren’t sweeping. They went straight to his location.”
Neal breathed deep. It was hard to argue Jim’s point, so he stopped trying.
“I agree, Jim, it is profoundly disturbing. They must have found out … somehow. I don’t know how, and you can be sure I will not rest until I do.”
Jim went to reply, but Neal went on, “Believe me when I say that I am as shocked by this whole day as you are. It was only my belief in the importance of this mission that stopped me from having Ayala take the culprits into custody.”
Jim’s face became plaintive. “Culprits? Culprits! We are the culprits, Neal, don’t you see that? We invaded their country without permission. We sent heavily armed men to do what can only be described as the most appalling and profound abuse of another human’s rights possible. I agreed to it only as a last resort. Only if the diplomatic effort failed. Did it, Neal? Did it fail? Or did you kill it? Because I cannot see a way in which they are the culprits here!”
Neal became more strident. “You cannot see a way? How about the fact that they were threatening to send us into war, Jim? That just like the Russians they were risking everything, all for petty greed.”
“But they weren’t, Neal!” said Jim, pleading now, tears brimming in his eyes. “They weren’t. The Russians were the victims of an incredibly capable spy and an overambitious fanatic. But these men, they were just guilty of ignorance.” He shrank a little now, something giving in him as he thought of what he had just lost. What they had all just lost. As his back sagged and his eyes veered slowly to the ground, he said in quiet desperation, “If I could just have spoken to them. If I could just have made them see.”
Neal’s firmness faltered, just a little. Jim was a good man, a selfless man, and his dedication was without question. Perhaps more importantly, Neal knew that there was a chance that Jim might have been able to do what he set out to do. But that was just it: a chance. Neal could no longer afford to wait for chances and hopes. He had to get things back on track, in any way he could.
“Jim,” he said, with unfeigned affection, and even some measure of regret. “My friend. I am as sad as you are about how things turned out, truly I am. I am horrified at what we have been forced to do. But don’t you see that now we can talk to them. That is all we have really done. We have opened up a door. And it is one they cannot close.”
Jim froze. When his face came back up it was with a look of profound and genuine disgust. “If that was all you wanted to do, Neal, then it would have cost you nothing to wait a while longer. To let me try to finish what I had started.”
“Events conspired against us, Jim. There was nothing I could do.”
Now Jim’s eyes set. “Very well, Neal. If you truly had nothing to do with this, then open Ayala’s files to me. Give me complete access. I want to see who she has spoken to, and what she has told them. I want to know what she is up to.”
Neal held Jim’s gaze as he thought about this. While he did, another voice came into his mind.
Ayala: ‘show him, neal. he will find nothing in any files.’
The very fact that she had been listening, that she appeared to always be listening, disturbed Neal for the very first time. After the first Skalm had been completed, after the need to keep the Dome secret had finally past, he had relished an end to secrets. Now he longed for a little of that privacy once more, both to protect himself and Ayala from an enraged chief of staff, and to protect himself from an ever more pervasive Ayala.
“Of course, Jim. Of course,” he said, placatingly.
“Not just now, permanently. I want a review board set up to oversee her and her team.”
Neal nodded, even as Ayala whispered in his ear once more, then Neal said, “Of course, Jim. I think that is an excellent idea.”
Jim waited a moment, his eyes reinforcing his immovability on this. Neal nodded again, a look not of contriteness, perhaps, but of compliance. Jim, in turn, was not satisfied, so much as aware that he had gotten as much as he could reasonably expect from the confrontation. He needed to calm down. He needed to think.
He left without further comment.
He would continue to demand access, and indeed he would get it. And once he got it he would review it with every ounce of skepticism he had. But another part of him was saying something different as he walked away. Something he hated to hear, even from himself. Because he could not fight the simple truth that they did indeed have a job to do, and to allow this, even this, to stand in the way of that job, might be suicide on a global level.
And, the small voice also asked, even more quietly now, what would Neal or Ayala be willing to do to him if he really tried to stand against them?
As that thought began to turn over inside his mind, his stomach churned as if stirred by it. He knew that this could not be allowed to pass. He knew that he could not be a part of an organization that did this.
But, in truth, he had no idea how to stop it.
Part 4:
Chapter 30: A New Day
The cloud passed by underneath, then around the craft. The cloud was grey, set against a black sky. It was bright at points, crisp, its component parts glimmering in stark sunlight. As the craft moved under the elliptic plane of the cloud, the light shifted, silhouetting now rather than illuminating. The craft now swam under the cloud and the sun burst into view behind, filling the vista with its encompassing aura.
Veering, Madeline brought the craft back up now, passing back through the haze of matter, to reveal it once more. The conglomeration was vast, reaching for nearly a mile in every direction. Its particles were each a meter across. Ten thousand of them in total, and that just here. That just at Malapert Farm, thought Madeline, trying to grasp the full breadth of the munitions fields they had created.
Changing course again now, she pointed the monitoring and maintenance probe back at the surface, back at the moon, to where Moira’s teams continued to slave away, wrapping up production on the final units for the Lunar Missile-Mine Phalanx. It had been Moira’s life for the past three years. And like any great purpose, she both loved and hated it.
Madeline: ‘i’m done wandering around. ¿anyone need her?’
Madeline was referring to the drone she was inhabiting. She was no more aboard it than she was even on the moon. She was safely nestled back in Japan. But her mind was transmuted here by the magic of the massive hub subspace tweeters that were now in place o
n both worlds. Tweeters capable of amazing things. Tweeters that would play an ever-greater role in the coming war.
Phalanx 1 Control: ‘i don’t think we have further need for her now. transition her to ai and we’ll set her into orbit until we need her again.’
Moira: ‘i may have something. ¿satyendra, can you send her round to procellarum base, please? i’ll pick up control there. i want to do a shimmer test on ileminite three.’
Satyendra: ‘routing now. she should be there in [counter].’
A number appeared in Moira’s mind; a timer. She set a notification against it and set it aside, turning her focus back to Madeline.
Moira: ‘¿how does it look, madeline? ¿does it meet your expectations?’
Madeline did not reply immediately, and Moira felt a request ping in her mind, a call for FaceTime. They had co-opted the term from Apple, now a major contributor and benefactor of their work. It was, without doubt, a mutually beneficial relationship, as the company’s iPort was also the biggest selling commercial spinal interface on a changed earth.
Moira glanced at the virtual data panels arrayed in front of her in the ether, a glance that brought a huge range of data into her mind from macro to micro, filling her with a sense of her many programs’ statuses.
Comfortable that she could leave her systems be for a moment and talk in person, as it were, she accepted the FaceTime invitation. Her view morphed in a way she had come to find fascinating, her world suddenly just becoming another place in a most impossible way, even as it gave a sense of all being … as it should be. The interface’s designers had done a beautiful job, playing on all the right emotional cues.
Each participant’s view was customized, even as it was also influenced by the other caller’s own preferences. Moira sat in an large, plush leather office chair, deep green, a reference to a memory of a grandfather’s legal offices, a place she had at once felt at home in but which was also laden with her child self’s stereotype of work, her earliest understanding of success and accomplishment. The wooden side table to her right, lit with a tiffany lamp and set with old leather-bound books, paid similar homage.
Madeline’s seat was more utilitarian, if also more whimsical, resembling, as it did, the metal captain’s chair from the first research ship she had worked on years ago. The room they found themselves in was an amalgam of the two themes. A fireplace burned and a coffee table separated them with virtual snacks and beverages, but a broad gallery of windows to the other side looked out onto a broad, shifting seascape.
The only break in the façade were two panels suspended in midair to each of their sides, screens for each participant that would allow them to call up data or adjust settings without stepping out of the construct.
Moira smiled, perhaps a little hesitantly. “Well. What do you think of the Phalanx?”
Madeline’s answering smile was more candid. “Amazing, Moira. It is, as you had said, truly an astonishing sight. It would be beautiful if it wasn’t for its intended purpose.”
Moira’s expression, having risen momentarily at her mentor’s praise, sank once more at the reminder of what all this work was building toward.
“Whoa there, Moira!” said Madeline to snap the girl, or rather the woman, out of it. She was no child anymore. She had accomplished too much. To think of her as a girl would be unfair.
“Hey,” Madeline went on, with more maternal emotion than she might have thought herself capable of. “Don’t do that. Don’t weigh the success against the cost. Because the cost of you not having achieved what you have done, that far outweighs the damage that the Phalanxes will … no, the damage that they must do.”
Moira nodded, a hint of frustration showing on her face, partly at being forced to hear the speech again, partly at maybe needing to. “I know, I know,” she said, waving her hand as if spurning a mistimed advance.
She shifted in her seat, a mental discomfort visualized in the space. The leather creaked under her and she allowed herself to relish it for a moment. It even smelled real. It was the work of many sensory artists, no doubt, whole teams of them, in fact.
For members of the public such features would cost very real money, but for TASC’s citizens, the fruits of any member nation or corporation were a perquisite. They did not pay for any technology that they licensed out, and over the three years since going public they had licensed a great deal, bringing in ever-greater revenue to feed the military machine.
They had also given away a great deal as well, there was no doubt about that. By public mandate, medical advancements gleaned from Mobiliei technology were never profited from, not by TASC or by any organization that licensed them. It had been the death knoll of several pharmaceutical giants as new, not-for-profit startups had sprung up across the planet.
And behind it all, of course, there was the antigen. An embryonic TASC’s first, secret gift to humanity. A gift they had now made very public. One of many not-so-bitter pills to make the greater truth a little more palatable.
It had all moved very fast once a defiant Iran had changed political tacks. When the perceived head of the opposition to TASC’s work had confessed a candid and profound change of heart, it had at once deflated the opposition and swayed a significant bulk of the still undecided to Neal’s banner.
There were massive numbers of dissenters still remaining, no doubt, though Moira could not remember the last time she had heard anything significant from them. Nowadays it all seemed very marginalized, just various brands of conspiracy theory, expounded by the ever more ridiculous and ostracized.
For the sake of building consensus, TASC had condensed their intentions into the form of a manifesto. A manifesto that very few on Earth did not now know by heart. It was a credo that defined all interactions with the military institution. Defined them in no uncertain terms. And it was a contract that everyone, by default, had signed. It was TASC’s bond and its demand, its value and its cost.
But such things were rarely on Moira’s mind right now, and she wondered why she was thinking of them now. It made her uncomfortable for a reason she could not quite put her finger on. So she set it aside, as she usually did. Such things were not part of her life, not anymore. For her, TASC was home. It was everything. It was wall and window, floor and ceiling.
“Four weeks,” said Moira, steeling herself. “Four weeks until launch. From the feed, I see that Hekaton has made up nearly all of its shortfalls.”
“They have, or they will, I hope,” said Madeline, crossing her fingers, then her legs, then her arms. They laughed a little. “It will be a close-run thing, but no one doubts that we wouldn’t be where we are overall without your work here. You have exceeded even my highest expectations … hey, even Birgit is impressed!”
They both smiled at the mention of the name. The pain of Birgit’s loss had dulled a little, not least because she had taken her exile as incentive to stay just as important to their effort as she had been beforehand, maybe even more so. She was bursting several ceilings, stretching boundaries even the Mobiliei thought immutable. She had not cracked the Holy Grail, that remained a thing of dreams, but she had done other things that were almost as amazing.
Moira smiled. “Don’t get me started on Birgit. That woman …” she shook her head, her eyes going wide, and Madeline laughed.
“That bad, huh,” said Madeline. “Yes, she can be … demanding.” Madeline thought back to first experiments with fusion drives, four years ago. To arguments about caution, its merits and flaws.
“Demanding? Dr. Hauptman?” said Moira. “Nooo!”
“You were part of the Diemos experiment, I assume?” asked Madeline, smiling a little at Moira’s joke, but keen to delve deeper.
Moira’s expression became one of pride once more. “Yes! Oh my God, that was intense.”
“A success?”
“Well, not a success, no, you couldn’t exactly say that. A … proof of concept,” said Moira hesitantly, like they had done nothing more than break a beaker while exper
imenting. In fact, they had broken something a touch larger. The second moon of Mars. Well, not broken, per se. Just … well … dented.
“It worked,” went on Moira, “just not accurately. Not yet.”
“Yes, that was the report I received as well.” Madeline became more serious now. “But you remain … hopeful?”
Moira saw now that this had been the real reason for Madeline’s visit. Dr. Hauptman, difficult at the best of times, had become positively impossible to pin down, not least of which because of the nearly sixty million miles that now lay between them and her.
Where mini-minnie, as Birgit now called her, tried to act as the German doctor’s proxy for her lost artificial child, Moira had become, to some extent, the real Minnie’s proxy for her lost mother. At the very least, Minnie used Moira as a sounding board for thoughts that would take the real person an hour to respond to in person.
It gave Moira a level of access to Birgit’s work that Madeline wished she shared. For Birgit’s work was, if still embryonic, so tempting to believe in. What they were doing held incredible potential, not only for the coming war, but for what lay beyond. For a future Madeline rarely even thought about anymore. For hope in whatever lay after the coming conflict.
But the obstacles that beset them were … significant, to say the least.
Madeline stared at the young woman in front of her, then did something she was loath to do. She mentally accessed the system itself and sent an order, using her almost unparalleled level of system clearance, to override Moira’s visible emotional controls. Moira would not know it was happening, but Madeline needed to see what the girl was thinking, really thinking.
She could use the same access to directly hack the communications with Birgit. Indeed she already had. But the truth was she didn’t fully grasp what Birgit, Minnie, and Moira were trying to do. It was beyond her mental abilities to understand the full scale of what they were attempting, and the roadblocks that still lay in their way.