The Scarab
Page 1
The Scarab
Chapter 1 – Secret Identity
Chapter 2 – Reward
Chapter 3 – Cinderella
Chapter 4 – Spending Everything
Chapter 5 – Ghedra Designed
Chapter 6 – A Grand Entrance
Chapter 7 – Playing Fair
Chapter 8 – Wabbit Season
Chapter 9 – After the Massacre
Chapter 10 – Salvage and Goodwill
Chapter 11 – Charges
Chapter 12 – Paris and Pensatronics
Chapter 13 – Monaco and Machineguns
Chapter 14 – Formal Night
Chapter 15 – Pandora’s Box
Chapter 16 – Mysterious Disappearances
Chapter 17 – Search
Chapter 18 – Rescue
Chapter 19 – Kali and Minos
Chapter 20 – Back from the Dead
Chapter 21 – The Faust Accords
Chapter 22 – Tracking a Myth
Chapter 23 – Call a Paramedic
Chapter 24 – Everything but the Squeal
Chapter 25 – Operation Rubber Duck
Chapter 26 – Lady Macbeth versus Frodo
Chapter 27 – Egyptian Scarab
Chapter 28 – Grilling
Chapter 29 – Crash
Chapter 30 – Finish Line
Chapter 31 – Banned
The Scarab
By Scott Rhine
Amazon Edition
Copyright 2011 Scott Rhine
DISCLAIMER: This is a work of fiction. Corporations, places, and characters depicted herein are imaginary and for entertainment purposes only. Any similarity to real companies, places, or people is coincidental.
To my wife, Tammy, who believes in me.
Thanks, also, to Weston Kincade for the edits.
Chapter 1 – Secret Identity
I closed my eyes and listened to the squad car’s engine run. I liked fixing cars because there’s always a right answer if you pay attention. My dad used to say, “An engine problem comes down to a simple matter of fuel, air, and fire.” Of course, these days, there’s a lot of software added into the mix, but that’s pretty black and white as well. Sometimes, I wish people came with manuals.
I scratched my black, scraggly beard as I thought. I tell my boss that I wear it to look more credible to the customers. But the main reason I don’t shave is that I hate razors. I’m a hemophiliac and, the last time I cut myself, I ended up staying a week in the hospital. The clotting agent they gave me had been tainted by a donor who made a habit of sharing needles. I know I could use an electric shaver, but then the scar on my jaw would show.
Closing the hood, I announced, “Your harmonic balancer is broken.”
The regulars from the barber shop next door nodded, and a few dollar bills traded hands. It was a small town. The officer whose vehicle I had diagnosed wasn’t convinced. “You can’t tell that just by ear!”
I kept my mouth closed. Police usually rub me the wrong way; I’d inherited just enough swarthy complexion from my Mom that I reminded authorities of whatever group they were profiling now.
Sam, the owner of Sam’s Floater Physicians, backed me. “There’s a reason he’s the head mechanic after only five years, Deputy.”
We didn’t have money, so I did all of my Mom’s repair work growing up. I started wrenching here at age sixteen.
The officer pointed to the uniformed picture of Sam’s son, Nick, behind the cash register. Nick had died in action a year after high school. “He was your boy’s friend.”
Sam got cold and civil. “You’ve had two other shops stumped. Your engine isn’t mounted properly anymore. It fits all the symptoms you told me.”
The deputy grunted, “Just a bolt? That doesn’t sound too bad. How much?”
Sam asked, “Ethan, how long will it take?”
I replied, “It’s a three hour job, minimum. He’ll need new belts, too. If you want us to take care of that vacuum leak while we’re that deep, I can probably do it for just another half hour.”
The deputy had a small aneurism when Sam gave him the estimate. He stood nose to nose with me, but didn’t think about shoving into my personal space. In high school, I lifted weights instead of participating in contact sports. Eventually, I could bench press my own weight, and people started leaving me alone.
“I can run it without a stupid bolt for another month.”
“That could be fatal, sir,” I explained. “Follow me.” The whole gang shuffled into the shop behind me. I brought up the high-resolution surround-screen diagnostic simulator, punched in the police car’s make and model, and a three-dimensional schematic appeared. The car frame was transparent in the rendering, giving it the appearance of blue-tinged glass. I rotated to show the undercarriage and then removed the balancer connection with a click. “The ‘bolts’ remaining aren’t strong enough. If you hit another car or telephone pole at low speed…” I hit the collision button on the screen. The cam shaft on the screen detached, and the engine was totaled within seconds.
The deputy deflated. “I’ll leave the keys up front.”
Sam clapped me on the shoulder. “Good job, Mr. Hayes. I didn’t know our simulation rig had a collision button.”
“It didn’t. I learned to program in sim language a while back. I borrowed most of the code from a program at MIT,” I said, failing to mention it was from a massively interactive game site.
Excitement over, Sam helped me pack up the tools and sweep up. Promptly at seven, I turned off the lights and locked the doors. When I was alone, I rolled my chair back to the simulator, and started my second life. Slipping on the data gloves, I pushed another button on the console. On nights and weekends, to hundreds of gamers, I became the mysterious and deadly Scarab.
This close to MIT there is an enormous net community connected around the clock, and the college version of GEVSIM is popular for spectators and players alike. As the name implies, GEVSIM involves players designing their own Ground Effect Vehicles (GEVs) and racing them at high speeds on a simulated obstacle course until only one of the combatants remains. Aside from the laser targeting systems, entertainment really hasn’t changed that much since the Roman chariot races.
My boss and his parent company Exotech don’t know I play, and to help keep it that way, nobody on the net knows my real name. Exotech has strict rules about unauthorized use of its computers by indentured servants. Under the Credit Repayment Act, they only give me a minimum wage to live on, and all the rest of my salary goes to pay off my own medical bills and the debts my mother accrued during her terminal illness.
I wouldn’t call the game an addiction; I just have frequent insomnia during the summer, and the garage had air-conditioning that my squalid apartment across the street lacked.
I didn’t start out trying to design the ultimate driving machine; I just got a little bored with winning. I started by making obvious improvements to stock vehicles. Eventually I gave up and started designing my own.
Ground-effect vehicles were based on a phenomenon that occurs when a helicopter is trying to hover close to the ground. If the pilot stays within about one rotor radius of the ground, more air is forced into the area under the craft than can escape out the sides. The result is that the power required to hover in that spot drops drastically. The benefit degrades at high speeds or over grass, but works fine on asphalt.
Tonight I was entering a radical new prototype into a small side game in Finland, and I had to clear the model with the expert system referee first. Colleges had pirated the simulator code from SimCon, a yearly event which involved all the major car makers. The official simulator cared about streamlined appearance, passenger comfort, fuel economy, safety, noise pollution, blind spots, and average tim
e till repair—all the facts usually monitored by Consumer Reports. This thorough simulation has pointed out several design problems and prevented several recalls before vehicle production even began. The simplified pirate version used in local games cared about only one thing—what on-line manuals do your parts and weapons come from?
The three panel display for the simulation looked like a normal windshield and control panel. The overhead GPS map view plotted all the other race vehicles just like real cars do, using the FedNet global positioning system. FedNet uses the transponders under the front and rear bumper of every vehicle to track its location, speed, and direction. This technology was originally intended for autopilot steering, computerized mapping, and avoiding traffic jams. Mandatory transponder use, intended to enforce the national speed limit and prevent accidents, was viewed by many as a colossal violation of privacy. Unfortunately, two teenagers joy-riding in Florida broadsided a bus full of school kids and the legislation got railroaded through without debate.
After twenty minutes, I convinced the referee that I could keep my engines running at almost a constant speed. Any energy not being used for movement would be channeled into rotating the hull of the vehicle, much like the 1960’s UFOs or the blade of a spiral power saw. This greatly simplified my fuel consumption, engine design, and autopilot software, as well as giving me the ability to accelerate in almost any direction, seconds ahead of the competition. Most GEVs steer like airplanes, with fast forward movement and slow, wide turns. My design would handle like a helicopter; whichever way I leaned the joystick, that’s where I’d go.
The one disadvantage I foresaw was that if I braked too fast, the torque from the suddenly spinning hull would pop me up in the air like a champagne cork. To turn this unwanted height to my advantage, I also hung a machine gun from the underbelly of the craft. That way, if anybody was hot on my tail, I could brake fast, and strafe them as they flew under me.
I picked this out-of-the-way game so that I could work out the kinks without anybody discovering my design. Looking over the roster of logins, I only spotted two from the United States, and one from Germany likely to give me grief. By e-mail, I offered twenty gallons of fuel from my reserve tank to “Gandalf” from Belgium if he could eliminate any of the three.
The course was composed of two intersecting ovals. There were sharp embankments at the ends for high speed turning with sand at the base to put out fires. The center had light posts, oil slicks, and tank traps for slaloming and pits with ramps for jumping. One complete lap was required every five minutes to avoid disqualification. The first player to reach twenty-four laps or ten kills would win.
The virtual race started around eight. For the first twenty minutes, I hung around the perimeter of the track, avoiding conflict and pointing out kill opportunities to less experienced players. I was running in non-rotation mode in order to calibrate my controls and get a feel for how all of the other subsystems performed. This vehicle had a revolutionary suspension, improved altimeter and banking indicators, and idiot-simple pilot controls.
By the time the other players caught on, I was one of the final four, and the others were converging on me from all sides. A vicious Berkeley student calling himself “Metallica” had made a truce with “Red Dwarf” and “Red Oktober” to see who could dust me first. No one had scored me in the past thirty-seven games.
“Gonna squash you bug man!” Metallica broadcast.
I sent back a digitized video clip from some old Mummy movie with a scarab necklace killing a tomb desecrator. I can’t even send voice on the garage rig, but it adds to my air of mystery.
The kid had a point, though. Without the secret weapon, my GEV wallowed like an elephant in quicksand. When the others were about fifteen seconds away, I started rotation. At forty km/h, I noticed the first glitch. My satellite velocity indicator read forty, but the direction indicator had me traveling northeast! The period of rotation was such that when the simulated satellite guidance system looked at the front of my vehicle, it was always pointing the same direction. Holding at this rate of revolution, I tried an experiment. Nudging my joy-stick west, I watched the velocity indicator jump to forty-five, but still in the northeast direction.
The other three players fired their long-range weapons at where my icon appeared on the strategy map with no effect. They passed harmlessly through my shadow; in fact, someone’s rogue missile locked onto “Red Oktober’s” vehicle and blew it to pieces. And then there were three.
Now that they were all in close range, I began to worry about how my camouflage would hold up under scrutiny. Someone was bound to notice my blip slowly creeping in the wrong direction once the scale changed on their overhead displays. Stopping cold would make me dead meat at this point, since both enemies were behind me. Because my pilot was always facing forward and at the same angle, I couldn’t see back there to target my machine guns. This was a serious design flaw I would correct once I got out of this mess.
“Metallica” acted first with a salvo of incendiary shells. Without thinking, I increased engine output to the red line and tried to evade. My heading indicators went insane for a moment and then the compass needle vanished entirely. I disappeared from both the overhead and the forward view screens. I was rotating faster than the screen refresh rate and had made myself effectively invisible to the enemy.
“Red Dwarf” immediately assumed I had been vaporized and was out of the game. Sometimes the computer was just a few seconds late in registering the kill, especially with overseas phone lines. With the truce officially over, “Dwarf” took the opportunity to lay impeller mines in an arc around the area. “Metallica” blew himself up while turning to avoid my presumed wreckage.
“Red Dwarf” slowed to a halt, waiting for the traditional virtual blonde to come out and crown him with laurel leaves. Unable to resist the bait, I slapped the prototype into reverse. I’d run over the smug geek and he’d never know what hit him.
Design flaw number three surfaced about then. Reverse gear also tried to reverse the direction of the hull spin. Have you ever slapped your car into reverse while going 100 km/h? Chunks of simulated engine block shot half a meter into the asphalt. At the last second, my icon flickered into existence again, and my red “self-destruct” symbol came on. It was a feature most racers had. If you were just crippled, the simulation would eject your pilot and blow the car so that no one else could cannibalize your equipment and the map could stop rendering you.
The ironic part was that I was still undefeated. Since “Red Dwarf’s” pilot was outside his vehicle’s armor, he got caught in the blast radius from all the unspent fifty caliber shells I had stockpiled. Technically, the game ended in a draw because I had killed the winner before being eliminated myself. I told the other guys on the net that my new self-destruct feature only worked when another player was within a certain range. Nobody suspected that I was lying to keep bigger secrets.
Chapter 2 – Reward
For the next several months, each night or so, I began refining the various subsystems of my design, toying with only one or two new features per game to preserve secrecy. With a modified spin model, I could be totally invisible while standing still but completely visible at full speed. At half speed, the satellite could show me at any speed in between, going any direction. The more forward motion I had, the easier it would be to fix my position. I was able to stay hidden longer by painting my hull to look like the track and using terrain creatively.
In working out the design kinks, I would often drop into games under an alias, and sometimes leave before the end. Players that figured this out would have a contest to see who could “spot the Scarab” first. If they caught me, I had to stay for the whole race to protect my reputation.
Since I couldn’t rely on satellites for my own direction and speed, I installed tiny solid-state accelerometers like they use in jet fighters for backup. As a pleasant side-effect, I wasn’t instrument-blind whenever my prototype went through a tunnel. Most of my controls n
ow had double safeties. This was good because when any GEV system fails, you’re going to crash, it’s just a matter of how hard. This principle, along with the high expense of building a real prototype, was the primary reason new vehicle testing had moved toward simulation.
Next I noticed that, at high speeds, my oval hull would rotate too slowly, and the craft would wobble too much to be controlled by human reflexes. It was a matter of balancing the power. Since all the tiny elements in the grid were computer controlled to begin with, I programmed the air-cushion system and the small canard wing on top to compensate for these instabilities 32 times a second. This arrangement limited my peak speed, but made me unbeatable in a dog-fight.
I also beefed up the cockpit armor, and searched for a means to halt the hull spin in an emergency situation. I rigged the radial armor to blow off at the touch of a button. It still took over fifteen seconds to spin down to a dead stop, but if anyone were close enough to hit me, the shrapnel would put them out of commission too. Afterward, my GEV would be a traveling skeleton, but it would survive.
Now my prototype was no longer just a one-trick pony.
This week I had repeated nightmares about my childhood in Brazil. With no local games over the semester break, I began playing with variations of the invisible transponder effect. I was particularly interested in the results from the FedNet satellite traffic monitor.
One quirky variation traded the front and rear bumper transponders between two vehicles. As long as the pair stayed in the same sample grid, on the same road, the two would appear to be moving side-by-side. No matter how fast they went, the velocity indicator would be an average of the two. This glitch wasn’t of much practical use for the game, but might be a slick dodge for smugglers. The trick wouldn’t be easy to spot, but on any curves, there’d be a slight lag time between the ghost position and the real. On a whim, I down-loaded some public-access data from around the State Park system for a period of ten days. Overnight, I crunched through the numbers looking for vehicle pairs that strayed from their lanes on turns.