Containment

by Christian Cantrell

  Arik and Cadie's new pod was almost identical to the pods they grew up in, but it had four rooms rather than three. The largest room combined the kitchen, eating space, and a small sitting area into a single room. There was also a small bedroom, a lab, and a spare room which, for the time being, would probably be used as a second office, but could be converted into a baby's room once the time had come.

  Arik and Cam were hoping to get pods in the same section, but they ended up being almost as far apart as they could get. The four-room pods were in Section R, and Cam and Zaire were assigned a smaller pod in Section C since no Wrench Pod employees qualified for home labs. Cadie and Zaire were friends, but Arik knew that Cadie would miss Cam's casual company more than Zaire's. Cadie and Zaire's friendship was based more on the fact that Arik and Cam were best friends than on any type of real connection with each other, or even any common interests. Cadie and Cam didn't share much in common, either, but they had always had an uncommonly open and effortless relationship. Arik knew that Cam was probably Cadie's best friend as well as his.

  The wedding was the next evening, and the Venera Auditorium was completely full. The wall lights were down, and the polymeth above the stage showed a panoramic view of a white birch forest with luminous green leaves in columns of sunshine. Music wasn't a big priority in V1, so someone made a simple and obvious choice which even Arik recognized as a movement from Vivaldi's Four Seasons.

  The brides wore simple white synthetic dresses and carried long tulsi fern stems. They were escorted one at a time down the aisle and up to the stage by their fathers who kissed their cheeks, then took their reserved seats next to their wives in the front of the auditorium. The grooms were already standing in a line on stage, jostling each other, leaning forward to see friends further down the line. They wore dark outfits with collars, and held their hands clasped behind their backs in order to keep them out of their pockets.

  When the last father exited the stage and all the brides and grooms stood facing each other in parallel lines, the music faded and Kelley stepped out onto the stage. He stood at the leftmost end of the group facing the audience, and delivered an uncharacteristically short speech. He couldn't believe that just six months ago, he stood up there and watched Gen V graduate, wishing them well in their new careers. In another six months, he was sure they would all be back here again while these talented young men and women presented their findings on accelerated stemstock growth, more efficient forms of nuclear fusion, and, of course, artificial photosynthesis. But today he was there to wish them well in an endeavor equally important to their work: marriage.

  The ceremony was short and secular. Kelley described marriage as a practical contract, a partnership in which both parties were equal beneficiaries, a collaboration resulting in achievements which could not have been otherwise possible. Marriage was not the combination of two entities into one; it was instead the creation of a third entity whose sole purpose was to sooth and inspire the two individuals.

  The brides and grooms recited vows together. They promised to support each other in all their endeavors, to promote all aspects each other's development, and to never yield to selfishness. Kelley then pronounced them legally married, and the two lines came together amid a roar of applause.

  The wall lights changed and the ceremony led immediately into the reception. Boxed meals were carried in along with V1's modest but effective supply of alcohol. The stage was used for dancing and part of the center section of seats was removed and replaced with several small tables. The focus of the gathering was initially on congratulating and celebrating the young couples, but the event soon became a much-needed break from the general stresses of the V1 routine. The party spread throughout the auditorium, then out the door in the back. As the night progressed, the aisles became lined with forgotten punch cups and plates, and someone even left a tall half-full mug balanced on the remains of the Venera probe in the back corner. Patches of seats were gradually filled by the usual V1 cliques who were too tired or intoxicated to stand, and a few people had even shuffled their way to the center of a row of seats and fallen asleep. When everyone's cup was topped off with the last of the evening's punch, Kelley climbed up on stage.

  "Everyone, can I have your attention one more time this evening?" He paused to give the room time to get settled. His eyes were heavy and tired, and he blinked as he tried to focus on the room in front of him. "First of all, I've been asked to convey to the brides and grooms the best wishes of everyone on Earth, and in particular, the GSA. I believe the exact message they sent was 'Congratulations on setting a new galactic record, and please remember to take precautions.'"

  There was still enough life left in the party to raise a good laugh. Someone shouted "hear! hear!" and everyone with a cup drank.

  "But I'd also like to raise a special toast to two people who mean a lot to me. Arik and Cadie, where are you? There they are. Get up here, you two."

  Arik and Cadie were sitting off to the side with Cam and Zaire and two other couples. They were pushed to their feet and sent off toward the stage.

  "These two kids have been together nearly their entire lives," Kelley said. "They played together as children, grew up together, and as they got older, they worked together to accomplish things that nobody even dreamed were possible." He waited for them to finish crossing the stage, then put an arm around each of them. Arik could see Kelley's cup in the corner of his vision, and he could smell Kelley's breath mixed with his cologne. "You two are the pride of V1, did you know that? You're a symbol of all that's right with humanity."

  Kelley stepped back and brought the couple together in front of him. He raised his cup and everyone left in the room drank to the pride of V1, their symbols of the future, a perfect and indivisible union.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Easter Egg

  Arik came home after physical therapy rather than going in to work. He was only going into the Life Pod a few days a week now, partially because of headaches, partially because of Cadie. When they were both at work at the same time, they kept the polymeth wall between their offices opaque, and they made it a point to check to see if the other one was in the dome before going in themselves. If Arik was there during lunch, he usually brought Cadie a boxed meal, but after she thanked him, he carried his own back to his office and ate alone.

  Arik swallowed two pain pills, then dimmed the wall lights in his home office to ease the stress on his eyes. He brought his workspace up on the wall and immediately noticed the string of characters in the lower right-hand corner of the polymeth:

  2519658000000 922.76 40.002 DELTA

  His initial thought was that nothing was going to boot because of an unrecoverable error in the shell program, but when his workspace appeared just as he'd left it the night before, he assumed Fai's team was just doing some debugging on the live system. V1CC (the V1 Computing Cloud) was usually capable of debugging itself either proactively by using idle CPU cycles to look for potential errors in byte code, or in real-time by verifying processor instructions as they were being executed. But sometimes humans were just smart enough to introduce bugs that even computers couldn't catch which meant they had be tracked down manually.

  Most software engineers resented having to manually debug code. It was considered a waste of their time, a task which was beneath senior engineers and architects which meant that it was usually delegated to those with less seniority. But Arik actually enjoyed debugging. He found the process stimulating, even rewarding. Most errors were predictable and relatively easy to fix, but occasionally an anomaly was so complex and subtle and elegant that tracking it down and holding it all in your head at once actually pushed you to the edges of your comprehension. Sometimes fully and completely grasping both a problem and its solution simultaneously felt like stopping time.

  To Arik, these moments were euphoric.

  The message remained in the corner of his workspace for the next several hours, and Arik became increasingly curious. It wasn't uncommon to
see diagnostic output for a few seconds or maybe even a few minutes while someone tried to track down a problem with the live system, but he'd never seen something like this remain visible for an entire day. He was thinking of contacting someone in the Code Pod when he got a video message from his father asking him if he had time to look into what he called the "anomalous string" that was appearing in the corner of everyone's workspace. Darien seemed to be in a hurry, and sent off the message without any additional information or details. Arik looked at the time and realized that Cadie would be home from work within the hour. He knew that they would have to discuss the baby very soon, but now that he had a new problem that needed solving, it wouldn't have to be tonight.

  Arik wondered why the request to debug the problem had come from his father. Darien was a chemical and structural engineer. He headed up the Wet Pod and had designed several of the buildings in V1. Like all engineers, he knew computers well, but he didn't have any obvious stake in bugs in the shell program. He was good friends with Fai, however, which suggested to Arik that Fai had probably asked Darien for his son's help. Fai would have been too proud to ask Arik for help directly, and Arik imagined that the circuitous request through his father was still presented more as the Technology Department simply not having the time or resources to be distracted by such a trivial issue. But if the request did in fact originate from Fai, that meant the message was not simply diagnostic output, but probably a series of error codes that were unusual enough that nobody in the Code Pod had any idea what they meant.

  Arik stood up in front of the polymeth wall and stretched while bringing up the source code for the shell program. He had been taking pain medication all day, and he needed to stand and move around the room in order to clear his head and stay focused.

  Before he even had a chance to begin his debugging ritual, he recognized the first number in the error code, 2519658000000, as a date. Since computers weren't inherently able to distinguish one absolute date from another, they used relative dates expressed as some unit of time since a known epoch. V1CC inherited the ancient convention of expressing moments in time as the number of milliseconds since midnight on January 1, 1970. Since numbers like 2.5 quadrillion didn't come up very often in day-to-day computing tasks, when they did, it was usually safe to assume that they were machine-readable dates. And since the last six digits were all zeros, Arik could even tell that the number probably pointed either to exactly noon, or exactly midnight.

  The date was most likely what programmers referred to as a "time stamp." Error codes almost always came with time stamps so whoever was debugging the problem could figure out exactly how long ago it happened. But when Arik did the math of subtracting the error code's time stamp from a time stamp representing the current time, he was surprised to find that the result was a negative number. The computer wasn't reporting a problem that occurred in the past; it was predicting an error 2.75 days in the future.

  Although computer models were used to predict the probability of errors and failures all the time, as far as Arik knew, V1CC was not programmed to perform predictive diagnostics on itself. It was far more likely that the computer's clock had wandered prior to printing out the message, or was even wandering now. As powerful as computers were, left to their own devices, they were astonishingly lousy timekeepers. In order to keep their internal clocks accurate, they needed frequent calibration. Every 90 minutes, V1CC received a signal from a satellite that passed overhead which contained one of the most accurate clocks ever built. The clock used 12 lasers to monitor the optical light emitted by the electrons in a single atom of ytterbium. Counting the tiny pulses of light allowed the clock to break a second down into almost a quadrillion parts. By the time the Sun burned through most of its hydrogen gas and expanded to the point that all life in the solar system was destroyed, the ytterbium clock would have likely strayed less than one second. Of course, for V1CC to benefit from the accuracy of their micro-gravitational optical atomic clock, it would have to successfully receive the time calibration signal.

  Arik instinctively checked his watch which consisted of two separate dials: a digital module which calibrated with V1CC, and an analog mechanical movement which used a steel spring, rotor, gear train, escapement, and about 200 additional parts to keep time to within a few seconds a day without relying on any external power source or time calibration signal whatsoever. Although mechanical watch movements were mostly favored by obsessive and anachronistic hobbyists, several of the computer scientists in V1 found them useful for keeping tabs on V1CC. There was no way a mechanical watch could detect a fraction of a second drift in V1CC's timekeeping, but it could detect a loss or gain of time adding up to a couple of minutes or more. When things like the life support system relied on the computer maintaining almost perfect time, and the computer relied on an atomic clock orbiting 12,000 kilometers above the surface of the planet, it seemed like a good idea to have some kind of an isolated analog backup.

  But both times on Arik's watch agreed to within a few seconds, and a quick review of the logs showed that V1CC had only missed a handful of time calibrations in Arik's entire lifetime, the last one being over four and a half years ago. Whatever the time stamp meant, it was probably accurate.

  Arik ran the shell program inside of another program which could trace the rendering of each pixel back to the exact line of code that initiated the drawing instruction. He drew a rectangular debug region around the message in the lower right-hand corner of his workspace, and restarted the shell. He found that the message was being rendered by a little over a hundred lines of code interspersed throughout the shell's source, nestled in among other similar lines of rendering code so seemingly randomly that it had to have been done intentionally. Each component of the message was calculated using a long and complex equation. Some of the variables in the equations were even random numbers, yet each formula was orchestrated in such a way as to somehow compensate, always yielding the exact same result.

  Now that Arik was sure that the message was intentionally injected into the shell program, he believed it had to be an attempt to communicate with someone inside of V1 — very possibly him. He looked at the second and third numbers again, and now that he had a fresh perspective, he recognized them instantly. They were radio frequencies. 922.76 MHz was the frequency the Earth Radio Pod used to communicate with the satellites that relayed signals to and from Earth, and 40.002 MHz was the frequency that V1 used to communicate with the ERP. The ERP was isolated from V1 so that in the event of a catastrophic accident, it might still remain functional. It was a small structure only large enough for one or two people, and it was located a full kilometer south of V1 where it was well out of range of fires or shrapnel should the unthinkable occur. It had its own computer system, power supply, and miniature life support system based on tanks of compressed air. The only connection between V1 and the ERP was the 40.002 MHz radio link.

  Two radio frequencies and a date three days in the future suggested to Arik that the message wasn't so much a message in and of itself as it was instructions on where and when to find the real message. The problem was that Arik wasn't able to listen in on either of those two frequencies. All communications to and from Earth were highly secured using encryption algorithms that Arik would be hard pressed to break anytime in the next decade, even with a multi-core electron computer. That, Arik believed, was what explained the word "DELTA." In the context of radio communication, "delta" was usually used in place of the letter "D," however an alternative interpretation — the variation of a variable or function, or the difference between two values — seemed to make much more sense. The difference between the two encrypted frequencies was 882.758 MHz — a frequency which, as far as Arik knew, wasn't being used for anything, and which he should be able to easily tune in to using the V1 frequency scanner.

  By this time, Arik was almost positive that the message was intended for him. He was also fairly certain that it was either a trick being played on him by a friend of his in the C
ode Pod, or possibly a test arranged by Dr. Nguyen or Priyanka to make sure Arik was still up to the task of solving AP. He checked the source control system's logs to see who was responsible for the changes to the shell program, and was astounded to find that all of the revisions had been attributed to him.

  This was almost certainly not a joke. Embedding "easter eggs" in code for fun and covering your tracks was one thing, but attributing changes to another user was much more difficult, and in the case of Arik's account, very nearly impossible for anyone except maybe Fai himself. Not only did Arik use the standard DNA identification protocol, but he was probably the only one in V1 who combined biometric identification with gesture identification. Gesture identification required that unique shapes or patterns be drawn in order to verify someone's identity. Even if someone had figured out how to spoof his biometric signature, his gesture ID was complex enough that it couldn't be guessed, and since he almost always used his BCI to draw it, it was unlikely that someone could have covertly recorded it, or deduced it from marks or prints left on a piece of polymeth. The likelihood that Arik's account had been compromised was extremely low.

  It was far more likely that Arik's memory of hiding the easter egg had been destroyed either by the accident, or in the surgery afterwards, and that the message was an attempt to pass along information to himself in the future. The theory made perfect sense except for one thing: it implied that he had somehow been able to predict the accident.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Dirt

  Since Arik and Cam began their careers and got married, they very rarely saw each other. They both had so much to learn in their respective fields that neither of them had much time for anything outside of work. What little time and energy they had left at the end of the work day usually went into maintaining their marriages rather than their friendships. All four of them had managed to get together twice for dinner and a little four-handed chess, but both evenings ended prematurely: one night, Cam kept nodding off in his chair and drooling down the front of his shirt, and the other, Cadie fell into a deep sleep on a convertible futon between turns and had to be carried into the bedroom. She woke up the next morning asking who was ready for dessert.