by John Akers
He was in a circular room with a clear dome. The only wall was the one Elena had walked out of a minute ago. The rest of the room gave a 270-degree view of the outside, and in every direction, as far as he could see, there was nothing but water.
“Oh—my—God!” Pax yelled.
“As I told you, you are on a boat,” said Elena. “This ship is much more technologically advanced than any ship ever made. Its design eliminates more than 95 percent of the normal motion of the waves. That, in addition to the fact your proprioceptive system is dulled by the neuralizer, is why you weren’t able to sense the boat’s motion.”
“Where the hell are you taking me?” he cried.
“I’m sorry, but we can’t tell you that right now, Mr. Pax,” she said.
Pax stared out the window beyond the foot of the bed, in the direction the boat was moving. The room they were in appeared to be two floors above the main deck, which continued 70 to 80 feet before reaching the prow.
Pax tried to calm down. In a tight voice, he said, “Look, if it’s money you want…”
“We don’t want money, Mr. Pax,” Elena scoffed. “Money is the least of our concerns.”
“Then what in God’s name do you want?” he yelled as he whirled around to face her. Elena didn’t move, but Angelo took a step forward, in front of her. The sheer size of the man penetrated Pax’s anger and forced him to calm down.
“Look, do you really think you’re going to get away with this? You know who I am. Very soon there’s going to be a worldwide manhunt for me. In fact, it may have started already. Even out here on the ocean, you won’t be able to hide for long. I wouldn’t be surprised if the U.S. Navy isn’t closing down on our position already.”
“No one is going to find you until we want you to be found, Mr. Pax,” Elena said.
“You’re nuts,” Pax said. “You won’t get away with this.” But for some reason, his words rang hollow in his ears.
“Perhaps,” she replied. She picked up her Univiz and handed Angelo’s back to him. “In the meantime, if you’re feeling up to it, why don’t you take a tour of the ship with Angelo? I think you’ll find it quite interesting, and moving about should help you feel better.”
Pax paused. He wondered if it was some trick to lure him somewhere else he wouldn’t want to go. But that didn’t make sense—they could have put him wherever they want to when he was unconscious. Plus, nothing about their demeanor suggested they were intending to hurt him. Learning something about the ship seemed useful, since there was always a chance he’d discover something that might provide a possible means of escape, or at least a way to contact the outside world for help.
“Fine,” Pax said. He pushed off the bed, and his legs buckled just slightly before he caught himself and stood up under his own power. He looked at Angelo and said, “Lead on.”
Chapter 24
Saturday, March 17, 9:35 AM PT
Two Dead in Los Altos From Malfunctioning Internet Connected Devices
By Sienna Gutierrez, Contact Reporter
San Jose Chronicle
Several residents of Los Altos have been involved in a series of disturbing incidents that have claimed the lives of two people, severely damaged several homes, and left other residents fearing for their safety.
Friday afternoon at 1:30 p.m., longtime Los Altos resident Jerry Cunningham was struck and killed by an automated car while leaving Stanford Hospital after being treated for an accident he had suffered in his home. A Kia Spark transporting its owner deviated from its programmed route and drove more than two minutes in a different direction before fatally striking Mr. Cunningham. The vehicle is now being examined by cyber-forensics investigators from the San Jose Police Department.
A few hours later, at 8:29 p.m., a pacemaker failure led to the death of Nicholas Mitchell, 57, a nearby neighbor of Mr. Cunningham’s. Mr. Mitchell and his wife, along with several neighbors, had come to the aid of their next-door neighbors, Sandra and Rajesh Batterjee, whose water heater had spontaneously exploded a few minutes earlier. No one was hurt, but most of the Bhatterjee’s garage and the front of their house were destroyed. Neighbors reported Mr. Mitchell came over shortly after the explosion with his wife, Suzanne, and offered to assist the Bhatterjees when his pacemaker apparently malfunctioned, causing a cardiac arrhythmia that led to a heart attack. Mr. Mitchell never regained consciousness and died a few minutes later.
According to neighbors who witnessed the aftermath of the explosion at the Bhatterjees, Mr. Bhatterjee publicly accused Mr. and Mrs. Sanchez, who had stopped by only a few minutes earlier, of indirectly causing the explosion due to their close association with the Cunninghams. Mrs. Sanchez had reportedly offered assistance to Mr. Cunningham after he had suffered several injuries due to malfunctioning internet connected devices in his home. Mr. Bhatterjee claimed that whoever had been harassing Mr. Cunningham was now after the Sanchezes, and that the explosion at his home was actually an attempt to kill them.
When asked to comment on the possibility a hacker group was somehow monitoring and attacking people through internet-connected devices, police declined to comment until their cyber-forensics division could complete their investigation.
Memorial services for Mr. Cunningham will be held on Saturday at 10 a.m, and for Mr. Mitchell on Sunday at 10 a.m.
Chapter 25
As Pax nervously followed Elena and Angelo out of the bedroom, he glanced quickly at the wall opening to see how it worked. To his surprise, he couldn’t see any gap in the wall into which the door might have slid. The edge of the wall looked completely solid, as if it had always been that way.
Then, rather than entering a hallway as he’d expected, Pax found himself in a vertically oriented cylinder eight feet high and eight feet wide. The walls, floor, and ceiling were the same light clay color as the room. He turned around to face Elena and Angelo, then reached behind him with one hand and touched the wall. To his amazement, it felt as solid and frictionless as glass.
The opening closed behind Angelo, again the wall material seeming to magically seal itself up, leaving no edge or impression of any sort to indicate there had ever been a door there. At the same time, the entire ceiling suddenly emitted a faint white luminescence. Strangely, the light seemed to come from the material itself, rather than from a point source behind it. Angelo’s head was only a couple of inches from the ceiling, and he seemed to take up more than half the space in the room. Pax waited for him or Elena to do something, but neither moved. They simply stood there.
Just as Pax began to feel uncomfortable, the opening in the wall appeared again. Angelo stepped back out, and Elena moved aside, motioning for Pax to go back into the room. What’s going on, he wondered, but just then he looked into the room and gasped.
The bed was gone and the room was now empty. Pax looked in astonishment at Elena.
“Stop number one,” said Elena, as if nothing unusual had happened.
Pax walked forward, slowly. As he stepped into the room, he saw the dome overhead was gone as well, replaced by a ceiling the same color as the walls.
Behind him, Elena said, “See you later, Mr. Pax,” before the doorway closed again without so much as a whisper. Pax was standing a foot away from it as it closed but couldn’t see any mechanical parts at all. As far as he could tell, it wasn’t a trick of perception, like the door to his office was, but an actual separation and re-fusion of a solid substance.
Suddenly, he began to get a very strong “not-in-Kansas-anymore” feeling. Warily, looked at Angelo.
“What’s going on?” asked Pax. “How did the room just change like that?”
“It didn’t. We’ve moved down a level. The room we came from is directly above this one.”
“What the hell are you talking about? We didn’t move at all. I didn’t feel a thing!”
Angelo walked over to the window. Staring out at the ocean he said, “As Elena mentioned upstairs, the technology on this ship is far more advanced than anything anyone
has ever seen before. The interior walls, floor, and ceiling are made from a material that can be manipulated at a microscopic level into any desired formation. When the ship detected our intent to leave the previous room, it opened a space in the wall. Then, when we were all inside, it moved the space down here. The nature of its motion is undetectable to our rudimentary perceptions, so to us it appeared as if we walked out of and then back into the same room.”
Still feeling disoriented but trying not to show it, Pax walked over to window as well. “What room is this, then?” he asked.
“This is the bridge,” said Angelo.
Pax looked around but didn’t see any sort of control panel. At the back of the room, in the center of the wall, directly under where the head of the bed was in the room above, were eleven small circular openings, arranged in a circle like the times on a giant clock, except for a blank space at the 12 o’clock location. The openings were all about a foot in diameter and looked to be about a foot deep. The Pax wondered if the blank space at the top was really a space, or whether it was an opening like the others that had been sealed off using the same mechanism for opening and closing doors.
He looked around the rest of the room, then realized something else. “There aren’t any instruments,” he said.
“Correct,” replied Angelo. “This voyage is being remotely managed by a quantum computer.”
“What? A computer?” Pax yelled. He stared at Angelo in astonishment.
“Not just a computer, Mr. Pax. A quantum computer. We call it the Infinet.”
“Bullshit,” said Pax.
“The Infinet designed this boat,” Angelo continued, “and is currently piloting it, with the aid of more than fifty airborne and torpedo drones. They provide the Infinet with a continuous stream of data about the speed and direction of the current, swell size and shape, and much more. The Infinet processes this information instantaneously and integrates it into a timeline model. It knows exactly how any incoming forces will affect the ship more than a minute ahead of time. This allows it to optimize the adjustments needed to make our movement as smooth as possible. All of this consumes less than a trillionth of its overall computing capacity. Even so, it controls the ship far better than any human crew.”
Pax continued to stare at Angelo, dumbfounded. “But, what happens if something goes wrong? What if we run into a bad storm? My God, we’re in the middle of the Pacific!”
“The Infinet analyzed information from various international weather services about the broader weather patterns along our route, allowing it to determine whether it would be safe to undertake this voyage. I can assure you there is no chance of encountering any dangerous weather on this particular journey.”
Although Pax still felt queasy about being on an unmanned ship, there was no doubting things had been uncannily smooth so far. He looked at the direction the ship was sailing and saw the sun was well past its apex.
“What time is it?
“A little past two o’clock, Pacific time.”
Damn, I was out for half a day! It occurred to Pax that was probably why he wasn’t feeling more affected by the Scotch he and Cevis had drunk. The thought of Cevis reminded him of Project Aegis again, and he felt his stomach lurch. Only a few hours ago, he’d been thinking about starting on a treatment for eternal life. Now, he was on a boat headed for who-the-hell-knew-where, at the mercy of two strangers and an unmanned ship. The surreal nature of the past 24 hours made his head swim. He stood up and put one hand against the window.
“Are you okay, Mr. Pax?” asked Angelo. Through his nausea, Pax detected the genuine anxiety in Angelo’s voice.
“I’m fine. I think it might help me not to sit still right now though.”
Angelo turned and walked back to the wall, and the opening they’d come in from reappeared. “In that case, let’s continue.”
Chapter 26
Angelo and Pax re-entered the capsule and waited. Once again Pax couldn’t feel anything, even though this time he was paying close attention. A few moments later an opening appeared on the opposite side, and they exited onto an exterior walkway that ran the length of the ship’s starboard side. Angelo grasped the railing, leaned over the edge, then motioned for Pax to join him. Pax walked up and peered over.
He saw they were riding on what looked like a giant insect. What looked like five giant legs emanated from the main body of the ship, extending out at least 30 feet before angling downward another 50 feet. At the end of each was a cylindrical hull eight feet long and four feet wide that acted as a sort of foot. The legs moved constantly up and down, in and out, back and forth, adjusting to the motion of the waves underneath. The cylindrical feet at the bottom also moved continuously, rotating and angling up and down , to carve through the water with as little friction as possible. Pax had no idea what material the legs were made with, but they moved with such impossibly smooth precision, like the legs of a gigantic water bug. Pax was so astonished he couldn’t even speak.
“The undersides of the feet are covered with a laser-etched nanoparticle-sized pattern that creates a superhydrophobic surface,” said Angelo. “If a drop of water fell onto the underside of one of them, it would bounce off its surface like a tennis ball on concrete. Rather than increasing drag, they help the ship go faster. In combination with the water repellant surface, the ability to adjust their position in real-time eliminates 95 percent of the drag, pitch, and planing normally associated with traveling by boat.
All Pax could say was, “Wow.”
Angelo turned to the right and walked toward the stern. Pax followed a short distance behind. When they reached the rear of the ship, Angelo grasped the railing that ran along the top of the four-foot wall and peered over. Then he motioned for Pax to do the same.
As Pax looked over, he was astonished at how fast the ship appeared to be moving. Additionally, it produced almost no wake. Fifty feet past the end of the ship, there was no foam or ripples in the water. It was as if the ship had never been there. He heard a faint drone of some motor, like that of an outdoor air conditioner from across the yard.
“What sort of engine does this thing have?”
“A single electromagnetic thruster,” answered Angelo. “That’s why it’s so quiet.”
“So how fast are we going?” he asked.
“A hundred miles an hour.”
“A hundred!” exclaimed Pax, stepping back from the rail. “I’ve never heard of a boat this size going more than 65!”
“Actually, no ship of any size has ever managed a sustained average speed of more than 50 miles an hour for more than 24 hours continuously.”
“How can a single electromagnetic thruster move a boat of this size that fast?” Pax demanded.
“It’s similar to ion propulsion in space. Because there is so little resistance from the water as a result of the hydrophobic coating on the hulls, even a small amount of thrust continues to build over time. Granted, it takes a long time to get going, but theoretically this ship could go even faster if the water were completely still.”
Pax stared at Angelo, trying to see if he was pulling his leg. Angelo’s face, however, was as stoic as a Roman statue’s.
“So you’re telling me this ship is traveling more than twice as fast as any other ship ever built?”
“Yes,” he said. “I know it must sound fantastic, but as you will see, with the Infinet, anything is possible.”
“Who are you people?” Pax asked. “How have you come by this technology?”
Angelo looked down at Pax. “Our society began forming online about ten years ago,” said Angelo. “After discussing the concept of building a quantum computer on a private newsgroup for a couple of years, enough funding was collected to actually build it. It took about five years to build and went live a little over two years ago.”
Angelo pushed back from the wall, his forearm muscles rippling under his tunic. Pax noticed again how Angelo’s clothes, like Elena’s, seemed somehow different than when he’d b
een walking along the side of the ship moments earlier.
Suddenly a question occurred to Pax. “So does this hunk of junk have a name?” he asked.
Angelo smiled. “It does. The Ludibrium. It’s Latin for ‘trivial game.’” When Pax gave him a quizzical look, Angelo continued.
“It’s partly a reference to the fact that, as advanced as this ship is compared to existing technology, it was a trivial matter for the Infinet to create it. It took less than 15 minutes, using a minuscule fraction of it’s processing power, to come up with the core design, including the creation of materials never invented before, such as the walls and the hull materials. It also has a secondary meaning, but the explanation of that will have to wait.” Angelo glanced at the sun. “We should head back to your room so you can rest a bit more before dinner.”
“All right,” Pax replied. He didn’t feel particularly tired, but the idea of being left alone and having a chance to digest what he’d seen was appealing. Angelo walked toward the wall near where they were standing, and another opening appeared. They entered into another capsule and waited a few moments before exiting again into the bedroom from which they’d started.
Angelo stepped in, then moved aside for Pax to enter. Once Pax was inside Angelo said, “There’s a cleaning station through the wall on the right side of the bed. Just take off your clothes, go in, and follow the directions it gives you.” He pointed at a small, neatly folded pile of clothes on the edge of the bed. There’s a uniform you can wear afterward. Dinner will be ready in a couple of hours. I’d recommend you try to rest in the meantime.” Angelo ducked down and backed out through the door. “See you in a bit,” he said as the door sealed shut.