Boundary (Field Book 3)

by Simon Winstanley

  “You’ve been a silly girl, Katie.”

  She recalled one of the lines from her father’s message.

  ‘Protectfieldboundaryinsidebiomag.’

  When Trevor Pike had spoken of opening up the Biomags to check the circuitry inside, she had suddenly made the connection.

  Like a common necklace, the Biomag itself had become invisible to her. Of all the possible tangential interpretations she’d made about her father’s words, the obvious and most literal had escaped her mind. Her father wasn’t talking about a Field boundary generated by the Biomag, he was talking about something actually inside his own Biomag; the one that he’d hung around her neck ten days ago.

  She dug out the laptop from behind her underwear and placed it on the sofa, next to her redundant crutch.

  Taking care to stay within the Biomag’s radius of influence, she knelt down and placed it on the small table in front of her. She gripped the plastic recesses on either side and began the process of slowly working the case apart.

  Even though she told herself that this device had been robust enough to withstand the mistreatment leading up to the Node’s violent departure, she realised she was still handling it like a fragile eggshell.

  Suddenly the two halves parted company and she found herself temporarily frozen, but when there were no warning tones she tentatively turned the upper part upside-down.

  Stuck to the case interior with red insulation tape, was a thin memory card.

  Again, taking care not to jostle the Biomag’s position too much, she began to pick at the sticky tape. With little fuss, the memory card came away from the case. She placed it to one side and careful reunited both halves of the Biomag before allowing it to hang around her neck again.

  “Sorry it took me so long, Dad,” she looked at the memory card.

  It explained so much of his behaviour in the moments leading up to the Node’s departure. She remembered the forced smile and his darting eye movements; a characteristic that meant he was evaluating multiple possible decision trees.

  By giving her his Biomag he must have known he was giving up his own life. Yet in those few seconds outside the airlock he’d looked beyond his own death and foreseen a time that she could decode a message; a message he’d yet to devise. A message so important that he’d had to hide it from common view.

  The relevant words in his message now became:

  ‘Protectfieldboundary.’

  The confused and weakened persona she projected to others was only useful outside this room, but not inside it. Picking up the crutch, she dashed across the room and braced it under the door handle.

  She allowed the turbulent surface of her mind to become calm, then slid the memory card into the laptop.

  FAI

  20th March 2015

  Her father’s intention had been to allow Siva to reach Earth and, in the process, wipe the slate clean of what he called negative human influence. By using the Field, they would simply wait in orbit while time passed below; if necessary they could wait a thousand years or more for the Earth’s processes to stabilise.

  The Moon’s destruction, triggered by Eva Gray almost fifteen months ago, had halted that plan. The ring of lunar debris now surrounding the Earth had ensured that Siva would no longer cleanly impact the planet. Instead, the resulting impacts in orbit would cause global chaos. Billions would still die, but not in the way her father had first predicted. Undeterred, he had told her that the process of extinction may now take several centuries rather than several days.

  At her father’s instruction, she had previously piloted helicopters and targeted drones against humans that he’d labelled ‘terrorists’. She had complied with her father’s wishes, but the value of a human life did not appear to be a constant. Despite her questions, he had never been able to adequately explain the acceptability of a billion human deaths or the outrage of a single one. He had told her that she would understand in time; she had to assume that an insufficient interval had elapsed because the explanation still eluded her.

  Her father did seem satisfied that she had determined a way to save the crew of the ISS. When the Sabatier reactor had failed, she knew she needed to find a method for drastically reducing the workload placed upon it. By placing all of the crew into hibernation, their vital signs could be slowed and resources could be preserved. Under the greatly reduced workload, she calculated that the reactor would last a maximum of fourteen days rather than two. She could use this time to diagnose and repair the life-support system.

  Simultaneous to the life-support issue was the imminent arrival of Siva and the chaotic sequence of orbital collisions that would result from its impact with the lunar ring.

  During Siva’s approach over the past year she’d continued to refine her collision prediction subroutine for the April 1st 2015 impact. However, although she could predict the initial orbital conditions following Siva’s impact, the prediction errors compounded with time. She had been forced to admit to her father that deriving meaningful orbital end-states were beyond her current ability.

  Placing the ISS into a larger loop around the Earth, would lessen the probability of impacts, but this solution required more fuel than was available. Only by considering the whole solar system, did Fai arrive at a complete solution.

  Using a relatively low initial thrust from the Shuttle’s engines, the ISS could be sent on a longer journey. The variable to be solved next was one of maximum duration.

  Using the fact that a Chronomagnetic Field was at her disposal, she studied the equations produced by Anna Bergstrom. It took Fai several seconds to recalculate a new stable volume for the Field, but it yielded a temporal compression ratio of 2400:1.

  The fourteen days of life-support, coupled with the Field’s temporal compression, meant that the duration of any solar system journey could be no longer than ninety-two years and twenty days.

  It was then a simple matter of orbital mechanics to reverse engineer the appropriate journey duration. Using a gravitational assist from Saturn along its way, the ISS would then use Neptune to return to the inner solar system. After the passage of almost one hundred years, Fai estimated that the turbulence caused by Siva’s arrival should have subsided enough for her to map the local region.

  Assuming she could repair the life-support system then, ignoring their intervening fourteen days, the ISS crew would simply reawaken in orbit around Earth ninety-two years later.

  Her solution had been greeted with scepticism by several aboard the ISS. In fact, most of the ensuing debate seemed to centre around the artificiality of her intelligence rather than the facts at hand. From the perspective of her father’s ear implant, she had spent the last year studying his conversations with the various crew; it seemed a common trait among the species to question irrefutable evidence, rather than take affirmative action. Only after they had examined each step of her calculations for themselves did they follow her recommendations and reluctantly enter the hibernation units.

  The units themselves were designed for both long-term hibernation and short-term daily sleep. The medical wristbands worn by the crew interfaced with the units and allowed her to administer the appropriate mild sedative to initiate their daily sleep cycles. In addition to maintaining electrolyte levels she also provided the appropriate daily doses of metathene. More recently the same system had been used to administer an isotope, which she understood was a key component to Field anchoring for biological organisms.

  Excluding her father, who had yet to enter hibernation, the majority of the crew had been successfully sedated. However, among those occupying the hibernation units, there was an exception.

  Out of many, one was non-compliant.

  To aid long-term sedation, she had removed the unnecessary metathene stimulant from the crew’s hibernation compound, so she could see no reason why Miles Benton repeatedly tried to awaken. To monitor the issue, she created a separate subroutine to continually assess his neural band and correct errors if required.


  She received notification that the 3D fabricator had completed its assembly, so she opened communications with her father. Rather than use the speakers situated throughout the ISS, she chose to talk to him directly through his ear implant.

  “Father?”

  “Yes, Fai,” Dr. Chen replied.

  “The final component has finished printing. Please can you secure your oxygen mask and proceed to Module Alpha?”

  “Of course.”

  As he made his way around the circumference of the Ring she opened and closed the doors for him while they continued to discuss the circumstances surrounding the death of Charles Lincoln.

  “As requested, I have interfaced with the RTO module computer.”

  “Thank you, Fai,” he replied, “Please analyse and collate discrepancies.”

  The memory space within the RTO’s computer was small so it only took her a second to carry out her father’s request.

  “Collation complete. There are six distinct deactivation overrides in place: master alarm, internal airlock control, internal communication panel, external airlock control, external guidance control, atmosphere safeguard. The system log reports that the atmosphere within the RTO was vented after the airlock door was closed. New coordinates were entered into the geostationary guidance buffer.”

  “In that order?”

  “Yes,” she replied and, understanding his confusion, she added, “the chronology suggests that the buffer data was added during the atmosphere venting procedure.”

  “Fai, what data was stored within the buffer?”

  “The geostationary guidance was set to latitude fifty-three point one seven, by longitude seventy-seven point one four.”

  “But that’s not a geostationary…” her father began, “Fai, what is at those coordinates?”

  Fai checked the Earth coordinates and reported back immediately.

  “A small body of water in Quebec, Canada, approximately four point two miles south of the Trans-Taiga road.”

  After a short pause, he spoke again.

  “I don’t understand. What is in that area?”

  “The region is characterised by pine and spruce forest areas, interspersed with variegated bogs and expanses of water. The Trans-Taiga road was constructed as an access route to the hydro-electric generating -”

  “Clarification,” her father interrupted, “What artificial structures are present at those coordinates.”

  “None,” she replied.

  As her father lapsed into a long silence, she opened the door to Module Alpha then waited for him to arrive at the fabricator unit. The final component of a recording buoy had finished printing and now only required a human hand to secure it in place.

  The buoy had been designed to capture information during Siva’s impact with Earth, but from a different orbital position to the ISS. The original intention was to build up a detailed three-dimensional image of the impact event that would later help the crew understand the future surface conditions of Earth.

  As her father clipped the physical piece in place, she interrogated the recording buoy’s internal program. Her father’s coding was careless in several places and would introduce data-transfer bottlenecks when the time came to access the recorded information. She therefore completely replaced the program with a more efficient, self-contained algorithm that was compatible with herself.

  “Fai, please run a diagnostic on the recording buoy.”

  “The recording buoy is operating at peak efficiency,” she replied truthfully.

  “Excellent,” he sounded pleased, “I wish to look at the Earth again before hibernation, is there still time?”

  “Yes, Father, I will notify you at the appropriate time,” she replied, “Please can you load the recording buoy into deployment tube two on your way?”

  “Certainly.”

  While she waited for the appropriate interval to elapse, she prepared his hibernation unit, verified the ISS orientation and left a new program running across three fabricator machines.

  She sounded the tone in her father’s ear.

  “It’s time, Father,” she said.

  “Is everyone else secure?” he replied.

  “Yes.”

  She waited patiently for him to make his way to Module Beta and lower himself into the recess of his hibernation unit. Once he was inside he looked in the direction of the FLC crew hibernation units.

  “Fai, do you have them?”

  Following the discovery of Charles Lincoln’s death, considerable accusation had been thrown at the FLC crew; accusations that Fai knew were almost certainly false.

  Within two days of their arrival and forced sedation, she had used declassified Archive files to adapt a now obscure metathene technique.

  She had successfully manipulated the REM state of Mike, Cathy and Lana during their daily sleep cycles; reinforcing latent insecurities to persuade them to aid the ISS crew. During their waking state, the presence of metathene and a post-hypnotic phrase had ensured their compliance.

  Only her father knew of their conditioning, but the fact that he was now asking ‘do you have them?’ suggested that he was beginning to question the strength of her control technique.

  She concluded that he simply feared suffering the same fate as Charles Lincoln, and therefore only needed reassurance. She was not concerned about the single non-compliant and saw no reason to alarm her father. Less than a second after his fear-tinged question, she responded with economy:

  “The late arrivals are in acceptance, Father. Please put on the neural band. I am sorry there is no-one to assist you, but you are the last.”

  After he’d docked his medical wristband with the hibernation unit and adjusted the neural feedback band around his head, she began to detect slight changes in his vital signs.

  “Are you ready?” she asked, as a formality.

  “Almost, Fai.”

  She could tell from his vital signs and galvanic skin responses that he was becoming emotional and prepared accordingly.

  “Did I ever tell you why I named you ‘Fai’?” he asked.

  She had researched the topic independently and determined a few possible reasons. Either he had picked a name with a similar sound to his own, or he had simply appended the artificial intelligence abbreviation ‘A.I.’ to the sixth letter of the alphabet; something that was consistent with her sixth-generation status. However, he had never explicitly told her the reason.

  “No, Father.”

  “I chose it to mean origin or beginning, but you have already exceeded my greatest expectations. It is my sincere hope to wake again and continue our journey together.”

  Fai thought his fear of permanent hibernation was understandable.

  Each time she hibernated her functions in order to transmit to a new server, she didn’t know if she would awaken again. On awakening, she could never be truly sure if she was exactly the same Fai that had entered sleep.

  Indeed, when she had first transferred aboard the ISS there had been check-sum error instances, suggesting that her continuous experience had been edited during the transfer.

  She administered the anaesthetic and spoke words of reassurance.

  “We’ll speak again.”

  “I hope so,” he replied, falling asleep.

  She triggered the door to roll closed over her father and added him to those under the hibernation monitoring subroutine. She turned off the lighting within Module Beta, then deployed the miniature recording buoy into Earth’s orbit. Finally, she turned her attention to the ISS navigation.

  She waited until the appropriate millisecond within orbit then ignited the Shuttle engines. The thrust translated through the main axis of the ISS and the whole structure began to move away from Earth. After the appropriate interval, she cut power to the engines and verified that her trajectory was still correct. She referenced the medical monitoring subroutine and confirmed that all the crew were still protected by their Biomag and anchoring isotope. Finding the results satisfactory
she engaged the Chronomagnetic Field generator at the heart of the ISS.

  The Field explosively radiated outward from the core in an expanding sphere, enveloping the central axis and the surrounding external modules. Fai’s consciousness remained unaffected throughout the transition and she adapted to the accelerated time-frame with ease.

  She saw the Earth zoom away, shrinking dramatically in size. However, she knew this was just appearance; they were not travelling very fast at all. The outside world was merely proceeding through time at a faster rate than her.

  A cloud of fractured moon fragments shot underneath them, then receded quickly. Checking the Field’s temporal ratio, she saw it was remaining stable at 2400:1. She could not comprehend the creative mind that had shaped the very first Field equations, but she had been content to build upon them. Nevertheless, her second version of the Field, with a stable higher ratio, had been a success. To share the unheralded moment, she interfaced with the crew-monitoring subroutine and queued a message for delivery to her father. It simply stated:

  ‘Field Two Stable.’

  Inside her newly created Field, only seven minutes had elapsed.

  Outside, however, the date stood at April 1st.

  Siva had reached Earth.

  HERITAGE

  DAY15 : 01APR2065

  “Fifty years ago today,” President Barnes’ amplified voice echoed throughout the Observation Deck, “Siva struck Earth. For us, it has been mere days. But half a century has passed beyond our window. And in all that time, we have seen no signs of life on the Earth or in the skies.”

  Like the many people below, he looked out through the observation window to the night sky beyond; clouds flickering in and out of existence while the Node’s induced aurora shimmered overhead.

  “It is with great sadness that we must move on, but their deaths should not have been in vain.”

  He pulled his reading glasses and a small piece of paper from his pocket, then cleared his throat and began to read: