Jezebel's Ladder

by Scott Rhine

  “Machine vision,” Kyle provided. “Camera expertise is a must. We might be able to pinpoint this lens by the star-field distortion.”

  Phineas nodded, “You’d need at least two to triangulate.”

  “And three to tetrahedrate in 3D space,” Jez agreed. “It’s a good start. Kyle, work up a budget by tonight.”

  “Sure,” the lead scientist said with sarcasm. “I’ll just whip that up.”

  To the group, Jez said, “I know I’m asking a lot. Crack this thing’s secrets, and we could all go into space some day. The harder you work, the sooner that day will be.”

  ****

  She convened an emergency Ladder board meeting at 5:00 p.m. eastern time. Only Benny seemed glad to see her. “We need to prepare a shuttle mission from the Brazil site as soon as possible.”

  Fortune had learned never to say no outright to this woman. “Explain why I should take a site that is making a 50-million dollar-a-month profit and turn that into a 500-million-dollar loss.”

  “Change the crypto keys now,” Jez insisted. When Crusader nodded, she continued, “Because the device you built isn’t the space telescope; it’s just the receiver for one that someone else put in orbit around the Earth.” She paused to let the words sink in. “We have a bona-fide, working alien artifact within our grasp. We need to be the first ones to reach it, or this whole race was for nothing.”

  “The Eye in the Sky,” Benny said, coining the new internal name for the artifact. Then, he glared at her. “You cheated.”

  “Only a little. All the necessary brainpower was there in one room. I saved them a month’s R&D,” she said, justifying her use of the butterfly.

  “Buddy’s right. You know the rules. You’re off the Red Giant team; Quan will take over the nuts and bolts,” Fortune ordered. Quan was another former-NASA, former-military hire. “Your new job is to earn me half-a-billion dollars.”

  “How soon could we launch?” Jez asked, scheming.

  Fortune flipped pages on his calendar. “We have a window with payload scheduled in April. If we eat about nineteen million in penalties, we could co-opt that run. Or you can wait nine more weeks for the next one after that—it would only cost us ten million to renege on.”

  “Plus three high-resolution, Lucasfilm, digital steadicams, supercomputer time, three graduate students on a rush order and incidentals. Call it an even 570,” Jez said with a poker face. Once you were that close to a billion, what did a few more million matter? This must be what senators felt like.

  “Why the hurry?” Fortune demanded. He trusted her instincts now, despite earlier misgivings.

  “Crusader told me the Red Giant project was leaked. And I’ve read your latest physician’s report. I’m not the only one who’s cheating.”

  “Touché,” Fortune admitted. “We had a war to pay for. Get me a way to pay for half of this mission by the two-week mark and I’ll take it to the board with my backing.”

  After the meeting ended, Jez was alone with Benny in the teleconference room. He said, “This sounds like cause to celebrate. Where do you want to eat?”

  She gawked at him. “I still have to make twenty million before I get to go home today!”

  “Shh…” He used his fingertips to caress the cords on her neck. “You need a massage.”

  “Careful, your cast catches my hair and pulls. You just want to club me over the head and drag me back to your cave.”

  He grinned. “No, but I might if it got you to stop working for one night. If I give you a twenty-million-dollar idea, will you leave at a sane time today?”

  Jez grumbled, but conceded. She was feeling overwhelmed.

  He slid a notepad and pen toward her. “We start with a little Dirt Bag psychology 101: he is giving you an unrealistic challenge, expecting you to blindly rise to it. He doesn’t play fair. Check out the numbers he gave you for the launch. DB rounds up. The actual number could be as low as 450. Quan would know to the penny. Develop a good relationship with that guy early on. Arrange the transition on your terms, making it seem like you’re giving him a break and he owes you.”

  She started taking notes.

  He started pacing as he lectured. “Second, he estimated too high on the opportunity costs. You can still carry the other payloads on the mission; just do your mission last. It will probably run just a little more fuel and overtime. Again, Quan will know the details; I’m just the idea man.

  “Third, you could probably get the cameras used. Film companies replace all that gear every two years or so, and there aren’t any more blockbusters scheduled for this year. If you route the new experiment through a non-profit grant, Lucasfilm may even donate them. He’s big on education.

  “Fourth, grad students are cheap. We can pay for them through the ‘name the star after your girlfriend’ program.”

  Jez was giddy. “You just paid for three and a half days!”

  He waved his hands. “Don’t run to him with this yet. He’ll just argue it away. Wait a week and give him a hundred million in real money to distract him. Sedna’s page turned out to be a new mathematical flow model for closed economic systems. Apply it to DB’s business first. With tens of billions lying around, I’m sure you can find him a 1 or 2 percent savings. Distract him by showing him things he’s missed. Then you’ll have breathing room.”

  “You’re good,” she announced, putting down her pen.

  He shrugged. “I know people. There has to be something I’m better at in this relationship. You need to get everyone who report to you working on this, any project that can afford to slip a week or so. That way, it’s two hundred people finding a hundred grand in ideas a day. That’s achievable.”

  “And what does my experienced and worldly teacher want as a reward?” she asked suggestively.

  “Well…I was kind of hoping…”

  “Go on,” she purred.

  “Could I name the artifact-scouting project?” he asked. Her smile deflated. “See, ‘Eye in the Sky’ is the title track on an Alan Parsons’ Project album. The lead-in for that song on the radio was always an instrumental called ‘Sirius.’ So I thought Project Sirius would be the perfect name for the preamble to ‘Eye in the Sky.’”

  Disappointed, she sighed, “Sure.”

  He showed almost as much excitement as Phineas had. Plus the concession netted her an enthusiastic kiss. She added, “However, you need to write up the non-profit paperwork on the experiment. I can’t fudge that.”

  ****

  Nothing major happened for a while.

  Daniel got into a battle of wills with his adoptive father. As a minor, he needed the man’s permission to marry Trina. Fortune refused. Daniel threatened to quit working as a scout until he agreed. Fortune had three new OOB scouts, so he fired the boy. The two stopped talking. Trina came back to work for Jez for the health insurance, and to keep their corporate apartment. Since Fortune had already signed paperwork saying his son could donate as much as he wanted to horse causes, Jez helped them create their own charity. Daniel moved all of his money into the fund and made Trina half owner. It was as close to a civil union as they could get between a clone and a minor.

  The outline of the script for the one-hour documentary was written, PBS approved the project at unheard-of speeds, and Benny began narrating the introduction. Post-production and graphics would take the majority of the time and budget. Since information on the device had already leaked to the competition, Benny’s team was able to use the red-giant projector to cut the special-effects budget in half. As a consequence, they had to register 137 new stars that appeared in the film clip. Although she was still working out the kinks on dangerous pages, her policy was that the information from the Ladder project belonged to everyone on the planet.

  Jez was so busy directing science projects and collating ideas that she had little time to even eat. Tan forced her to eat breakfast, Trina took lunch, and Benny took her to dinner away from the keyboard.

  She came up with an idea for a revolut
ionary, new, high-nutrition pie one night and hired the chef from the restaurant to join the Falun Gong people in the product labs. Benny thought it was hilarious till she sold the prototype for a million and the dessert became a recruiting tool in their cafeteria.

  The next day, she was shuffling pages around in the safe, just like she had done a dozen times before. In a flash of inspiration, she attached the Red Giant page to Ideal Planets. They joined into a single, seamless document. She claimed it as proof of her three-cluster theory, though Fortune still scoffed at the idea.

  Tom, the envoy, was promoted to the Economics project. He was one of a handful of volunteers for the new page. Everyone on the list had been approved except Jez. She wanted desperately to combine it with Quantum Computing, because she was certain it would generate Nobel Prize-worthy equations. Fortune refused her request, because she was now too valuable to risk.

  The first project the three successful volunteers were put on was the financial restructuring of Fortune’s company, but the modeling went slowly. By the end of the week, Fortune approved Tom’s request for one of the Economics men to tap the quantum butterfly’s computing power. Jez refused to attend the session; however, she watched the video several times. Just before the volunteer slipped into a coma, he said, “It all makes sense now.”

  Afterward, she experimented, successfully attaching her Quantum butterfly to the top of the Economics page. She amended the theory of pages to posit that pages should be read in a specific order, quantum first. Jez had momentum on her side and would make her financial goal, but at what cost?

  While others counted beans, she set about outlining better safety procedures. Quantum candidates should know math, but should love other aspects of life more. They should always have something to anchor them in the world to avoid the navel-gazing or coma problem, preferably a significant other who was also active.

  She added a list of known side-effects, positive and negative, for each page. The first recommendation of her Ethics council was to require a paragraph of Empathy training for a candidate before receiving the Override page.

  This pseudo-document kept expanding until Trina typed all the Post-Its, new company-conduct rules, and other Jezebel anecdotes into a handbook for new agents. Virus found the on-line copy and annotated it with details on his Mind-Machine Interface page, confirming some of Jez’s wilder guesses. The theory document became known as The 27 Pages. They even sent Project Midas a copy in an effort to save lives and generate goodwill. At the end of the document, she included a contact e-mail.

  Colonel Ambrose Philip Tannenbaum responded to her gesture by providing the source and history of every US government-tracked page. The Wonka search project plodded onward with this valuable input. Eventually, on one of their mandatory meal dates, Jez asked Benny, “How did you get Empathy?”

  He looked around the make-your-own-burrito restaurant, making sure no one was listening. “From my dad. He’d made his mint and wanted me to strike it rich in whatever business I chose.”

  “That sneaky old dog; I never suspected. How did he get it?” she asked.

  Benny shrugged. “He never told me. I just know that he was a well-known graduate student in political science. After he met my mom, Dad got into movies to pay off his debts and buy a home. Eventually, the money and power became an end in itself. Mom moved back east and found another politician who promised to change things.”

  She Facebook-messaged the retired director from the restaurant ladies’ room. His answer came back. “Only for you, Dollface. It came anonymously in the mail.”

  She typed, “Did you save the envelope?”

  “No. But the postmark was Kansas.”

  When she came back from the restroom, Benny knew what she’d been up to. Without a word, he pressured her into confessing, “It seems our Wonka might be related to the Wizard of Oz.”

  ****

  A few days before the launch, a man volunteered to join the Ladder project because of their PR efforts. He carried the page Basic Sustainability Model: air, water, plants, and energy for a closed system. Jez attached this to the end of Economics to complete the first page triad—a mathematical representation of a colony. It would take years to transcribe and enumerate it all.

  Fortune finally conceded, “There are a dozen patents, hundreds of journal articles, and at least five Nobel Prizes waiting in this triad, and that’s before we turn it over to the people who can apply it. At a million dollars a prize, I’ll give you credit for the final five million now. Congratulations, your Project Sirius is go for launch Monday morning.”

  As she told everyone by e-mail, Fortune added, “Ms. Johnson, even you are going to need more assistants.”

  Part 2: A Debt to Midas

  Chapter 31 – The Warning

  PJ watched the entire network crash in slow motion, unable to stop the domino effect. As he lost his last hour of programming, his parents would have blushed to hear him swear. His family belonged to the Quakers, the Society of Friends. He didn’t drink, smoke, fight, or sleep around, but tended to curse at the drop of a hat. All programmers did.

  He could hear people complaining and hammering keyboards in the cubicles all around him. He worked for a New Jersey start-up company called LAN Tamers that specialized in secure computer network solutions. They ran their own product internally, and the swamp was still full of alligators. PJ was only working for this circus because the stock options could make him rich enough to retire early. The men in his family had an unfortunate knack of dying from stroke around age fifty.

  Steuben, the system administration Nazi, bellowed his name. “Smith!”

  Everyone prairie-dogged their heads up to watch the confrontation. PJ was dressed in a Mickey Mouse t-shirt and blue jeans. Mercifully, he didn’t have the taped-up glasses to complete the computer-geek stereotype.

  He never got along well with Stubby, especially after PJ posted his name to the bestiality news group. The administrator had a real office, with walls, not a padded cell like the rest of them. The fact that he was a full foot shorter than everyone else in the office made the nickname sting.

  Maneuvering around a pile of manuals and a disassembled tape drive, PJ stepped into the office. The administrator was frantically trying to salvage something from this software train wreck.

  “There were so many gif files and animation files in your last download that you filled up the disks and crashed our mail server. I’ve been removing them all morning just to free up the space to re-establish service. A lot of people are losing valuable machine time because of you,” Stubby accused. The tremendous amount of incoming traffic must have put stress on some weakness in their system.

  “I didn’t download anything today,” PJ protested. The administrator ignored him and kept trying to stem the flow of unwanted information. PJ did some fast math and switched to his best calming voice. “A message that large must have been sending since before 7:00 this morning. I never get in before 9:30. Somebody sent it. If you let me read the message, maybe I can stop this before the whole building grinds to a halt.”

  Stubby grunted his reluctant approval and let the programmer onto his console. The mail header looked like a tabloid headline, “Atlantis must fall!” It could have been a practical joke. It was, after all, late March, less than a week from the infamous first of April. The message had been sent to the White House, Senator Braithwaite, someone called Butterfly at Fortune Aerospace, the Washington Post, a chess bulletin board in Germany, an on-line PC magazine, Greenpeace, the Stanford physics department, and PJ—an unlikely assortment.

  Unfortunately, large chunks had been erased and he couldn’t find the attached files: Reuter equations, Icarus transformation, Sandia prototype (with hypertext notes), Senate briefing, Atlantis data, WRMWD simulation (animated). On a hunch, PJ used one of his personal tools to patch up the e-mail.

  While his tool began the reconstruction, he told Stubby, “I think I know where this is coming from, but you’re going to have to reboot the
router.”

  Stubby cursed some more and went off to the lab. PJ used the administrator’s phone to call out, because the company blocked long-distance dial-outs from all but an elite few. Just to be safe, he waited till he was alone before he dialed the Maryland area code.

  Nick was a bit of an odd duck, a physics major PJ had roomed with at Stanford. PJ had started out in math, but went to computer science when he found out that it paid heaps more money for less work. He took a lot of the department to the dark side with him, but Nick wouldn’t budge. Money didn't interest him, and he idolized Dr. Reuter, the star of the physics program.

  PJ would always remind him that the last great Italian mathematician had been burned at the stake for witchcraft for claiming that the Earth revolved around the sun. Nick would come back with, “And who was right?”

  He could easily picture Nick, being set on fire, shouting, “Still it turns!”

  The operator at the other end interrupted his reverie to ask, “What project?”

  Inwardly, he winced. “Spock.” Nick had been a serious Trekkie.

  “To whom do you wish to speak?”

  “Mr. Cassavettis.”

  Usually, she thanked him politely and connected his call without delay. This time she paused. “I'm sorry, but there’s no one here by that name. With whom am I speaking?”

  He hesitated because the name John Smith made people think he was lying to them. “Wrong number, sorry,” he said, and hung up.

  PJ tried Nick’s home phone but got the answering machine.

  When he checked the computer screen again, the reconstruction was finished. Unfortunately, all he could read was the main document.

  I’ve rigged this evidence to transmit automatically if I don’t contact this Internet site every three days. If you’re reading this, it is safe to assume that I am dead or disappeared by my own government. The technical specifications and equation modeling files attached will prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that Atlantis must be stopped. If not, may God have mercy on us all.