The Phoenix Egg

by Richard Bamberg

  When he went back downstairs, Caitlin was still hunched over the computer. He slipped his coat on and went outside. It was just over a hundred yards to the road. He hiked through the snow, staying in the ruts as much as possible until he reached the last trees.

  He moved off the road and squatted next to a large pine. Using a length of monofilament line, he fastened a CCD camera to the trunk, just above the snow. He slipped his glasses on and powered up the camera, then he adjusted the camera until the image covered the entrance to the drive and the road beyond. Setting the camera’s controls to the auto detect position, John stood up. He broke a small branch from the tree and backed to the driveway, smearing out his tracks as he went. There, they would have a warning if anyone came to the house, but it wasn’t enough. It’d only give them a few seconds at best. He needed something else; a land mine would be nice.

  Unfortunately, he didn’t have one, but something could be arranged.

  He walked back to the house and went around back to the shed where they’d found the package. He opened the door and looked around inside. There was a small stack of lumber stored on the rafters. He took a couple of used 2x4 studs down and searched the workbench until he found a box of eight-inch nails. Ten minutes later, every nail was embedded in the studs.

  John carried the spiked studs out, closed the door behind him, and went back down the driveway. Fifty feet from the road, he laid the studs diagonally across the drive and brushed snow across them.

  The Colorado sun had warmed the day, and John unzipped his coat as he walked back to the house. He reached the porch and turned to gaze across the thirty odd miles to Pikes Peak. Dark clouds enveloped the crest and everything west of the Front Range, but on this side it was sunny and the incredibly bright blue, which John always thought of as Colorado blue, lit the heavens with an intensity he’d forgotten. He leaned against one of the barkless tree trunks that held up the porch and a smile grew bright on his face.

  Why did he move to the Bay Area? The sky there, when you could see it at all, was never more than a bluish white that paled beneath the glorious skies of God’s country. Perhaps it was time he moved back. He had a nice nest egg put away. He could afford to buy a piece of land back in the mountains somewhere, maybe out near Durango. There were places out there that hadn’t been Californicated like the Aspen and Vail regions. Perhaps it was time he settled down. Perhaps even with Caitlin. Yes, she needed to disappear anyway. He would have Felipe generate new identities for them, and they could squirrel themselves away where the government, Frenchmen, and Japanese businessmen would never look for them. There were reservation schools in the Four Corners region that needed teachers. They could do volunteer work on the reservation, make a difference in some kid’s life.

  John straightened, and his face darkened into a frown. Sure, they could do that. If they lived long enough. He turned away from the approaching storm clouds and went inside.

  ***

  Felipe never opened his warehouse office until noon. Most of his business was done during the hours of darkness and afternoon drop-ins such as John and Caitlin’s were the exception rather than the rule. Usually, he spent the afternoons in the never-ending quest to keep his old database up to date and to acquire new ones. Felipe always tried to have at least one spare entry into the government’s computer files. You could never predict when some over-eager programmer working for barely more than minimum wage would detect his illegal access.

  He opened the small outside door next to the main garage doors and locked it behind him. He didn’t turn on the overhead lamps because the high windows cast enough light onto the warehouse floor to see by. Unlocking his office door, Felipe reached for the light switch as he stepped inside.

  As the fluorescents lit a voice said, “It’s about time. I was about to give up on you.”

  Felipe reached for the revolver beneath his jacket but stopped as he saw the large bore automatic pointed at his gut from ten feet away.

  “What do you want?” he asked.

  Dewatre rose from Felipe’s chair and stepped out from behind his desk. “You provided services for a John Blalock and Caitlin Maxwell less than 24 hours ago. I need the names you gave them and their destination.”

  Felipe stared at the man’s eyes and wished he’d taken that vacation he’d been promising himself.

  CHAPTER 23

  Caitlin had a fire going in the fireplace when John came in. He shrugged out of his coat, stifling a moan as he did, and laid it across the newel post at the foot of the stairs.

  “You finish reading the file already?”

  “Sort of.”

  She was smiling like the little girl who had a secret that he didn’t know. He walked to the fire and stood with his back to it. “Sort of? What’s that smile mean?”

  She gazed up at him from the couch but didn’t answer.

  After a few seconds, John noticed the gold egg hanging on its chain, just above her breasts. “Hey, you took the bicycle helmet off. Was it through doing whatever it does?”

  “Yes. It took about five minutes. Now it’s your turn.”

  John couldn’t help taking a single involuntary step backward. “Whoa, I never said anything about trying it.”

  “You have to. How can I tell if it really does what the file says unless there’s someone else to communicate with?”

  The helmet rested on the cushion next to her. The other egg was already in its slot.

  “How come I’m getting flashbacks to The Puppet Masters? You’re going to have to convince me that it hasn’t done anything to your mind before I try the thing on.”

  “John, don’t be silly. It’s perfectly harmless. There’s one thing I found that it can do which already makes it the most valuable invention since the computer.”

  He hadn’t thought her smile could get any wider, but then it did. “Okay, start talking.”

  “Come on, put the helmet on. It’ll take more than five minutes to tell you, and once the communicator is keyed into your brain waves it’ll go much faster, and you’ll understand without doubting.”

  She held out the helmet.

  John looked at it, and then stared into her eyes. “It’s safe? It didn’t mess you up?”

  “Perfectly safe. You have my word.”

  He took the helmet from her. It was a lot heavier than a bicycle helmet. Adjusting the strap, he pulled it over his head and cinched the strap down.

  “I feel foolish,” he said.

  “You won’t regret it. Here, let me show you what I’ve found.”

  Caitlin picked up her notebook computer, and he noticed that she’d attached the radio modem to it.

  “You haven’t been making phone calls, have you?”

  “No. You see the egg communicates with other units on one of the frequencies currently reserved for cell phone communications. By selecting the right band on the modem, you can link the communicator’s signal to a cell phone and therefore anything else that the phone can link to.”

  “Okay, that’s interesting, but what good is it? Oh, I see, you can use the cell phone system to talk from one communicator to another, but wouldn’t you need an access chip.”

  “The communicator is programmable. I used my computer to download the chip code on my phone and then transmitted it to the egg.”

  “Wait, until you had this egg...” he stopped and shook his head.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked.

  “You’re going to have to come up with a better name for this thing. The ‘egg’ just doesn’t sound good, and communicator is too awkward. You need something snazzy like ‘cell phone.’”

  “You’re right, how about what the inventor called it, cyber phone?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. It seems like everything has cyber tacked onto it these days. Since it works like telepathy, I’d say tele-phone, but that’s been done.”

  Caitlin chuckled. “Cute. See, you don’t have to be serious all the time.”

  “Who says I wasn't seri
ous? I know, we’ll call it an egg phone.”

  Caitlin’s faced twisted into a pained expression. “Sounds too much like a Chinese dish.”

  “I like Chinese.”

  “So do I, but let’s be serious, or at least not stoogeish.”

  “Hey! Don’t knock the Stooges.”

  “Look, when you come up with a better name, let me know. Now stop interrupting,” Caitlin said.

  “All right already.” He held his hands in front of him as if fending her off.

  “I was telling you that I linked the egg, ah cyber phone, to my computer.”

  “Yeah, you were going to explain how you loaded the chip code to the cyber phone so you could access the computer.”

  “You’re interrupting again.”

  “Sorry.”

  “I loaded the chip code by telling the cyber phone to record it.”

  “Huh?”

  “Once it’s linked to your brain waves you can modify its programming for things like that by just telling it, well thinking at it anyway,” Caitlin said.

  “So you just thought at it. Yeah, that makes sense.” John struggled to keep his face calm, even though he wanted to laugh out loud. The whole thing was bordering the absurd.

  “That’s right. Then came the really neat part. Here,” she turned the computer so he could see the screen, “watch the monitor.”

  The communications screen was open. Without Caitlin touching the computer, the active screen shrunk into the background and Scott’s file opened up. It flashed to the contents, and then begin to page down at about a page a second.

  “Whoa, how’d you do that?”

  “I told you, the cyber phone can link into anything that can receive its signal. I’m telling the computer what to do over the cyber phone.”

  “Direct access. Fan-fucking-tastic. I’m impressed, but why are you paging down so fast, you can’t read anything like that.”

  “What makes you think so?”

  The flash of passing pages doubled in speed.

  John stared at the screen for a second, then he met Caitlin’s gaze. “You’ve got to be kidding me!”

  She laughed and shook her head gleefully. “Not at all. It is fantastic, John. I can access anything on my computer one hundred, maybe two hundred, times faster than I can read it.”

  “How can that be? I mean ... hell, I don’t know what I mean, but I just don’t see how it’s possible,” he said.

  “I don’t either. I read the entire file. With the proper tools and a good manufacturing facility I could reproduce these communicators without ever looking at the blueprints again.”

  “What? How can you remember that much?”

  “I don’t know that either. Somehow, when it transmits the information into your head, you can concentrate on it, and it will be remembered. I could no more forget the contents of that file now than I could forget my mother’s name. Using a computer analogy, it’s as if you can tell the cyber phone to load the information into nonvolatile memory or regular memory.”

  “Nonvolatile? Wait a minute, then couldn’t you load in too much? Isn’t there a danger of overfilling your brain with information? What happens then? Will you be walking around remembering things that you can’t ever forget, but be unable to learn anything new, like what time you're supposed to meet someone for lunch?”

  “I don’t think that’s likely to happen. They say we never use more than ten percent of our brains, there should be plenty of storage space, but even if there isn’t, I get the impression that you could overwrite memories if you want to.”

  It took a second for what Caitlin had said to sink in, but when it did, John felt a rush of nausea. Sweat broke out on his forehead as his paranoia flared into a feverish state.

  “Overwrite memories? Good God, Caitlin. You mean someone could use this to erase your memory? We’ve got to destroy this.”

  “No, not overwriting memories like that. You couldn’t ... well, maybe you could. I don’t know John, but I know it’s too valuable to destroy.”

  “Yeah? Well so was the first nuclear weapon. Caitlin, just because it’s a technological breakthrough doesn’t mean it’s something we’re ready for.”

  A male voice said, “Adaptation complete.”

  John jerked his head toward the door. His hand automatically went to his gun. There was no one there. He turned toward the windows but still couldn’t see where the voice had come from.

  He slipped the Colt from its holster and motioned for Caitlin to stay where she was. “John? What’s the matter?”

  “Someone’s here. Stay low. It may be trouble.”

  “You heard a voice say adaptation complete?”

  “Of course I did. Didn’t you?” His gaze darted from window to door and back again.

  “John, that was the cyber phone. It was just telling you that it had finished its programming.”

  “No, I heard someone’s voice.”

  “I know John. That’s what I heard when mine finished. Look at me.”

  He turned to face her.

  “You can put the gun away, John. There’s no one here but us.” Her words were clear, but her lips hadn’t moved when she spoke.

  “Well, I’ll be hanged.” He holstered his gun. “The damn thing really works.”

  “Take the helmet off. Then let’s figure out what these things can do together.”

  John unfastened the helmet. The oval phone slipped easily from its slot. He passed the helmet to Caitlin and dropped the necklace over his head.

  “Okay now what?” he thought toward her.

  She grinned and responded the same way. “Isn’t it easy?”

  “Yeah, but we could just as easily talk.”

  Now that he was paying attention, he could detect the difference between what he heard her say and what she sent over the communicator. It didn’t really sound like sound at all, but almost like a memory of something she’d said. At first, he thought the words were set apart because he couldn’t hear the feeling that he did in her voice. It was almost as if she were speaking in a monotone. As he listened, he began to detect subtle differences in her words. There was emotional content there, but he was having trouble deciphering it. It was as if he had to learn to interpret words all over again.

  “What kind of range does it have?” he asked.

  “A mile or so, it’s just like any radio in that concern. With good conditions like over the water, it’d have a greater range.”

  “A mile is good. If it’s working off radio frequencies, then it’d be simple to rig up a repeater to extend the range.”

  “Or, you can use it like I did with the cell phone. If you have the code for a phone it’d be simple to place a call,” she said.

  “I don’t know about that part. Linking to your computer is something I still don’t understand. There are protocols for digital communications. How does it convert voice to a computer signal?”

  “It’s not really a voice signal, but the protocol is simple enough. The eggs were programmed with the basic IEEE protocol format when they were manufactured. The cell phone format was done at the same time.”

  John hefted the cyber phone in his hand. “That seems like a lot of computing capability for something this small.”

  “Yeah, that does puzzle me. I’d have thought that the designer would have built ungainly looking prototypes rather than these neat little things.”

  “That’s what I meant earlier. These look too much like a marketable device. Where are the real prototypes?”

  A wave of information washed over him. He staggered under the sudden reception of hundreds of pages of information.

  “Whoa, slow down! What the hell are you doing?”

  “I thought it’d be easier to just give it all to you rather than trying to explain bits and pieces.”

  “I don’t know if I want all that.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “I’m just uncomfortable with the idea of things being written into my memory.”
<
br />   “Really John. That doesn’t sound like you at all. You were a doctoral student in computer science twelve years ago. Don’t you still have the desire to learn?”

  As much as he hated to admit it, she had a point. He did keep up with everything in the business. This was just a faster and more efficient way of learning. “Yes, imagine what it’ll do to schools. Why you could learn a semester’s worth of information in a week!”

  “Yeah, but you know as well as I do that remembering information is not the same as understanding. I guess there are fields where memorization is enough. Ha. I remember one professor that always poked fun at the biology majors. He’d say that if you could just memorize by rote, then you could get a degree in biology, but if you wanted an engineering degree, you had to understand the information.”

  “Yes, but think of history and English, basic math, and foreign languages. All the basic classes could be learned through memorization,” Caitlin said.

  “Hey, I’m not arguing the point. I agree with you. Much of my early education was taken up with hours and hours of memorization. I never was very good at languages. I tried Spanish in high school and college, and I managed to get by, but I’ve forgotten most of what I learned.”

  “But you won’t need to learn foreign languages anymore. These communicators give anyone instant access to any language. If you only spoke Swahili and I only spoke Hindi, we could still carry on this conversation as if we were both speaking the same language,” Caitlin said.

  The heat of the fire was making John’s backside warm. He stepped away from the fire and sat down on the opposite end of the couch. “That’s a part of this thing’s capability that I still don’t comprehend.”

  He found that they had begun to carry on the conversation by both audible and inaudible methods.

  Caitlin nodded. “I don’t either. The file doesn’t go into enough detail on how it operates, just on what its capabilities are.”

  “Okay, go ahead and send me the rest of the file. I’ve gone this far. I might as well go the rest of the way.”

  He leaned back and closed his eyes. The images of the file swept over him sequentially until the index flashed by.