There was one more thing Arik wanted to do before he slept. He felt like he needed to review the environmental and atmospheric measurements that Malyshka had collected. He could save a detailed analysis for after he'd gotten some rest, but he wanted to see if his eyes could detect anything prominent in the data — any sort of anomaly salient enough to grab his attention at first glance.
But before Arik could bring up the data, something made him pause. He was conscious of his heart beating in a way that he'd never experienced before, escalating into a violent pounding that he could hear as well as feel, and although the medication had dulled the pain in his head, he was aware of an unsettling accumulation of pressure inside his skull. His breathing grew shallow and rapid. He began to sweat from every pore in his body, and when he looked down, he could see that beads of perspiration had already formed on his chest and arms. His throat opened involuntarily, and his stomach convulsed.
Arik instinctively ran to the bathroom and vomited for the first time in his life.
CHAPTER THIRTY
Moving Parts
Arik didn't go into work at all the next day. Or the day after that. But by the third day, he had almost completely recovered.
Cadie begged Arik to see Dr. Nguyen, but Arik convinced her that the best thing for a viral infection in a closed environment like V1 was rest, fluids, and above all else, quarantine so as not to infect anyone else. He assured her that his body would take care of itself, and by the time Cadie checked on him on the morning of the third day, it apparently had.
But Arik knew that he hadn't actually recovered. He had become what those in the nuclear field refer to as a "walking ghost." He had entered the deceptive and almost cruel latency period of radiation sickness — the incandescent honeymoon, as it was sometimes called. He knew that he would get sick again, but what he didn't know was when or how bad the symptoms would get this time which meant that he needed to use his reprieve as effectively as possible.
* * *
The day Arik started feeling better, Cam and Zaire received a short and cryptic text message: "Work late tonight. Leave at exactly 2100. Take the maglev home."
The maglev cut a circular path through V1 with the Life Pod and Dome at the center, and most of the other pods positioned at intervals along the outside of the track. The train consisted of sections which were magnetically levitated 15 millimeters off a single wide rail in the center. The magnetic cushion almost entirely eliminated friction and allowed the train to be conveyed completely silently in either direction simply by applying electromagnetic currents. Aside from the emergency calipers, there wasn't a single moving part anywhere in the train or the rail system which meant that it was extremely reliable and almost entirely maintenance-free.
Eliminating moving parts from machinery was the best way to improve reliability. Since the subatomic laws of the universe dictate that it's physically impossible for any moving part to move in precisely the same way every single time it moves, each and every moving part in a system represents some measure of unpredictability and unaccounted-for variability. A vulnerability, you might even say. What if one critical part didn't move quite enough? What if it moved too much, or too quickly, or with slightly more or less velocity than the last time it moved? What if it didn't move at all? How many times can it move before it wears out? How will friction change the way it moves over time? How long will it take to break down the lubricant designed to reduce that friction? How does temperature affect the properties of that lubricant? And if (or when) one moving part fails, how will it affect all the other moving parts downstream of it? The amount of unpredictability in any given moving part wasn't usually the problem; it was when all the tiny swirls combined into one massive vortex — when they accumulated and compounded and cascaded into a chain reaction that was far too complicated to be fully understood even after the fact, much less beforehand when there was still time to prevent it.
Another advantage of the maglev's incredibly simple design was that there was no theoretical limit to the number of sections that could be linked together. Unlike a locomotive or a pulley system, each maglev section was individually propelled which meant that to add sections, you only needed to add power. As V1 grew, its transportation infrastructure could easily be expanded to keep up with demand.
But Arik had never seen the maglev more than four sections long. V1 experienced a light rush hour in the morning and another one in the evening between 1800 and 2000 hours as shifts changed, but even at its busiest, having to wait for the maglev to come back around again was very rare. It also helped that those with particularly sedentary responsibilities often chose to walk to and from their shifts along the paths on either side of the rail, applying their daily commutes to their weekly exercise quotas. Whether walking or riding, by 2100, almost everyone in V1 had found where they wanted or needed to be for the next eight to twelve hours which made the maglev an ideal place to have a private conversation. Not only was it a good place to be alone, but the maglev sections had no roof and only very low walls which meant that it generated a fair amount of wind noise while piercing the tunnels between pods, and there were no conductive polymeth surfaces to covertly gather sound waves.
When the maglev stopped in front of the Wrench Pod, Cam and Zaire were standing on the platform. Arik knew that things would be awkward between he and Cam, but as he watched them step into the last section and seat themselves opposite himself and Cadie, it occurred to him that things could also be very awkward between Cadie and Zaire. He wondered how much Zaire knew about the baby. Had she encouraged Cam to do what he did, or was it possible that she didn't even know that the baby had once been her husband's? How would her feelings toward Cadie affect her feelings toward Arik, and how would all their emotions influence their ability to listen objectively to what Arik had to tell them?
Arik realized that the moving parts that drove human emotion and interaction were far more intricate and delicate and explosive than anything found inside manmade machinery. He knew that in order to change all of their lives, he needed to tear down everything that had been built up between them, compact it all down into a clean and solid foundation on top of which he could start building something completely new, something with no moving parts, something so towering and imposing that none of them could dismiss it.
"The first thing I want to say is that all of us need to put everything that's happened between us aside. Everything. Anger, guilt, hard feelings — whatever. Agreed?"
Nobody spoke, but Arik could sense a nonverbal agreement among them. He could see from their expressions that he had everyone's full attention — that curiosity had, at least temporarily, given him an opening.
"There are things about this place that all of you need to know, but that I can't tell you." Arik looked at each of them in turn, let his words take effect. "You're going to need to see them for yourselves which is why I'm going to ask you do something that none of you are going to want to do, but that I promise you will be the most important thing you've ever done in your entire lives. You're all going to have to trust me unconditionally."
Cadie's curiosity had turned to concern. Her hands were folded over the bump under her dress. "Arik, what are you talking about?"
"In ten days, I want all three of you to leave V1."
"What?" Cadie blurted out. Zaire didn't react, but Cam was slowly shaking his head.
"Just listen to me," Arik said. "Two hundred meters out from the airlock, there's wall, and in that wall is a metal door. Cam, you know what I'm talking about. All I'm asking you to do is in ten days from now, suit up and take a rover out to that door. Everything you need to know will be waiting for you there."
"Arik, I'm sorry," Cam said, "but I can't be a part of this. I should have never let you go outside. I don't know what happened to you out there, and I don't know what's happening to you now, but I can't be a part of this anymore. This has to stop."
"Then I'll do it," Zaire said. Everyone looked at her. She tried to conceal he
r discomfort and apprehension behind her resolve.
"No you won't," Cam told her. "I won't let you get involved in this. None of us are doing this, not unless we know exactly what we're getting into."
"I don't need to know," Zaire said. "All I need to know is that Arik is asking us to trust him, and I do. I think we owe him that much. You don't have to do this if you don't want to, but I'm going."
"No," Arik said to the group, "all of you have to go. It's absolutely imperative that all three of you go out there. I can't stress that enough. It has to be all of you, and it has to be at exactly the right time."
"Then we'll all do it," Zaire said. She looked at Cam.
"Listen carefully," Arik said. "At exactly eleven hundred hours in exactly ten days from now, the three of you are going to suit up and take a rover out to the wall. You're going to leave a locker open for me, and twenty minutes later, I'll meet you out there. We're not going to talk about this again between now and then. We're not going to debate it, and I'm not going to remind you. You just have to do it. All of you. You have to swear to me."
"Even if I wanted to help," Cam said, "there's no way all of us can get out of V1. Zaire and I can get the suits, but there's no way we can get Cadie through the Wrench Pod and into the airlock, and there's no way you'll be able to follow. Things have changed since your accident, Arik. People will stop us."
"There won't be anyone around to stop you," Arik said. "I'll take care of that."
"How?" Cam said.
"By doing the only thing that's guaranteed to bring every single person in V1 together into one place," Arik told them. "I'm going to solve AP."
The maglev stopped at the Life Pod platform.
"Don't let me down," Arik said as he stepped off the train. "I can promise you that we will never get another shot at this."
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Red Herring
The term "red herring" originated from the practice of distracting hunting dogs from the scent of a fox or a badger with the pungent odor of a cured fish. It later came to be used in the areas of literature, science, and politics to refer to anything that lured attention away from the issue at hand.
Arik had come to believe that the term "artificial photosynthesis" was an innate red herring. Instead of describing a problem, it inherently suggested a solution. The issue at hand wasn't actually how to reverse engineer a photosynthetic plant's metabolic pathways — the real problem was how to generate large amounts of oxygen using readily available elements as quickly, cheaply, and efficiently as possible. But at some defining moment in V1's history, someone had been unable to escape the confines of their own experiences and imagination, and had confused inspiration with implementation. Emulating photosynthesis in an attempt to generate oxygen was exactly like trying to achieve flight by copying birds, and so far, the exercise had yielded just about the same level of results.
To solve AP (clearly a misnomer, but the phrase had become a convention), Arik knew that he had to play by a different set of rules. Plants' ability to produce their own food and expel oxygen as a byproduct had evolved over the course of more than a billion years, starting with the simplest forms of algal scum. Their technique had been judged and refined by what has always been the single constant and only valid measure of success: survival. Millions of years of minute and almost imperceptible genetic mutations had steered hundreds of thousands of species of plants down paths that had proven to be evolutionary dead ends, yet some small percentage of mutations had proven beneficial, compounding and accumulating into unimaginable complexity, specialization, and elegance. To reverse engineer photosynthesis in less than ten days was about as practical as trying to understand the principles of flight by taking apart a heavy Sagan rocket with a screwdriver. But using an electron core computing cloud to model and dramatically accelerate the processes that gave rise to photosynthesis in the first place might just be possible.
Arik's previous attempts to crack AP had consisted of building software models of the tulsi ferns that were cultivated in the dome along with their aeroponic life support systems, but even with the help of a team of extremely competent chemists and biologists, Arik felt like he would never be able to do better than what he perceived as a rough approximation. Computer models had always been rough approximations, and rough approximations had never been good enough. Weather had never been consistently and successfully predicted beyond a percentage of certainty, and models of the universe could only suggest general theories regarding both its origin and its eventual demise. Beyond a certain point in the development of computer processor technology, the problem was no longer a shortage of CPU cycles, but instead reflected humanity's inability to ask their binary counterparts the right questions. For years, electron computers had been sitting relatively idle waiting for their creators to finally pose a challenge worthy of their unimaginable faculties.
Arik understood that the effective use of an electron computer required a realistic and practical division of labor between computer and human. Humans were good at intuiting possibilities while computers excelled at testing those possibilities by the trillions. Therefore, rather than starting with something incredibly complex like modern day photosynthesis and trying to distill it down to something that could be modeled and programmed, Arik decided to start with a small number of simple elements and use the computer to see how they might evolve into more complex results. Rather than reverse engineering photosynthesis, Arik believed that he could arrive at photosynthesis — or perhaps something even better — through a process he liked to call evolutionary engineering.
Assembling the virtual environment for Arik's experiment was fairly straightforward since he already had most of the software models he needed. Years ago, he had built precise software abstractions of protons, neutrons, and electrons, and written algorithms to model gravitation, electromagnetism, and strong and weak nuclear forces. (Of course, this software had already existed for decades, but Arik only trusted code that he himself had authored.) He then used his low-level nuclear models to assemble higher-level models of all the elements in the periodic table, and then used those models to assemble still more complex molecular models. Since he began working in the Life Pod, Arik had also added to his software library several routines for simulating things like temperature, atmospheric pressure, and all wavelengths of light energy.
Arik had all the software models and most of the algorithms he needed; what he didn't have was an efficient way to combine and test trillions of permutations.
Random mixing and matching wasn't good enough. Arbitrarily combining models of the physical world in a virtual environment might eventually yield some interesting results, but even an electron computer could easily spend months or even years playing such a complex and unconstrained guessing game. Arik needed a much more intelligent approach. He needed an algorithm that knew how to pursue paths that were promising, and swiftly abandon those that were obvious dead ends. It had to understand how to build on success, learn from failure, branch out and pursue multiple possibilities simultaneously, and it needed to understand how to build increasingly complex systems out of proven simpler ones. Arik needed an algorithm intelligent enough to condense over a billion years of evolution into just a few days.
He wondered what it would be like to be able to actually witness and perceive evolution. He imagined entire species coming and going at the speed of soap bubbles forming and popping; ice caps expanding and receding at the rate of a rapid heart beat; continents drifting apart and dispersing like sea foam. Even watching a simple vine grow at as little as ten times its normal speed makes what we perceive as a dumb and static tendril look like the long thin appendage of an intelligent primate skillfully searching out better light and more secure anchorage.
As Arik worked, he gradually began to repartition his life. He no longer thought in term of day and night, and he stopped trying to keep track of mealtimes. He slept when he was exhausted and ate when he was weak. The only schedules he observed were
the cycles imposed by pain pills and stimulants. Cadie stopped asking him when or if he would be home, and started bringing him changes of clothes and boxed meals, instead.
In place of his own circadian rhythm, Arik adopted the rhythm of the computer. For reasons he didn't fully understand, his program seemed to reach milestones at predictable intervals. A milestone was defined as the completion of a simulation that yielded no less than a tenth of a percent more oxygen than a previous milestone. Every time a milestone was reached, Arik assembled an experiment in a borosilicate tube and brought it down to the dome to physically validate the results.
Between experiments, Arik tried to understand the formulas that his program was producing. With Cadie's help, he had been able to make sense of the first few milestones, but the output had rapidly grown too complex for either of them to really comprehend. With every milestone, the computer was getting closer to solving AP, and Arik and Cadie were getting farther from understanding how.
The definition of when AP was technically solved was somewhat subjective. Subha had suggested that nothing less than the production of one dioxygen molecule for every molecule of carbon dioxide that went into the process constituted a viable solution. She called it the "One-to-One Rule." Arik and Cadie had verified a 1:1 ratio milestone over forty-eight hours ago, and with time to spare, Arik allowed the computer to continue. If increasing photosynthetic oxygen production by a factor of two didn't guarantee him an audience with everyone in V1, nothing would.
When the computer predictably and unceremoniously achieved the 2:1 milestone, Arik assembled two verification experiments. He and Cadie each carried one down the corridor and into the dome. Both of the absorption disks turned blue within moments of being exposed to sunlight, and the oximeters sealed inside the tubes verified the results of the process. Cadie touched Arik's pale and gaunt face. His pupils were artificially dilated from his regimen of stimulants, and he squinted in the bright natural light. Neither of them spoke, but they shared a weary and almost unbelieving smile as acknowledgment of what they had accomplished.
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