Analog SFF, July-August 2006

by Dell Magazine Authors

  There! She pressed the emergency equipment panel, got the suit out, and released its tiny life support unit. Fortunately, the fittings were standard. Then she got her helmet from its niche, put it on, asked for max, and breathed deeply, then turned it back to normal as she felt fully recovered.

  Now what? Her shuttle was gone, of course; a look through the airlock door window showed both that and the fact that the outer airlock door had been left open. The bastards had been thorough. Maybe, with a clear head, she could get the station powered up again. There was a spare CPU.

  Still suited up and clear headed, she went back to the control center.

  Working alone, in a spacesuit, the CPU swap took an hour and a half, but the new one knew nothing about any shut down. So it quickly powered the system up. A comm light went on indicating the station's AI was standing by. “Computer, patch me through to operations."

  “Visual and audio transmitting capability has been physically disabled. I can only receive visual and audio transmissions,” the station's computer announced.

  That had seemed too easy, and it was.

  “What is the status of Ten-Ten?"

  “The experiment has not been conducted, as indicated by the continued presence of the MES. I cannot query for data in a receive-only mode..."

  “Computer, what is the status of the transmitter repair?"

  “A full repair can be accomplished in two days."

  “What's happening?"

  “You are giving an interview to InterplaNet News,” the AI told her.

  “Me?"

  * * * *

  Chapter 5

  BHP Solar System Experimental Station, 3 Jun 2257

  * * * *

  The atmosphere on the press ship was tense, with all eyes glued to the data displays and the scene from BHP operations. The latter lacked the drama of bygone eras, Torsten thought. No consoles, no headsets, no big central display; the physicists just stood around in groups of two or three, occasionally saying something to each other. Rossov was back among them now, coolly going from one group to another and patting people on backs as if he'd never been anywhere else. But the relaxed appearance was misleading; voice stress indicators were at 160% and nobody but nobody was sitting down.

  The south pole of BHP central faced the experiment and Dr. Sarah Levine was at a south-facing window, hands gripping the rail.

  There were consoles aplenty in the nerve center of the media ship, a disk-shaped section of the spherical hull just below the observation dome. A half dozen had been bolted to the ceiling of the room, creating what was in effect another floor. They'd even, Torsten noted, tacked down a Velcro walkway between the ceiling consoles and all but one of them had people sitting/hanging behind them. In zero gravity, as long as everyone watched their heads, that worked.

  Torsten grabbed a towel someone had thoughtfully attached to the console and blotted up his sweat—it didn't run in zero gravity, just accumulated on his skin in great salty drops. Behind him was a chaotic mess of wires, conduits, and bodies careering this way and that; his editors would replace that with a giant version of the magazine logo. In the middle of all the chaos was a central desk, at which sat anchorman Ashira Nagato of InterplaNet News and Dr. Hilda Kremer—at least who they all thought was Dr. Hilda Kremer.

  Torsten started his own voice-over. “This is Torsten Ried for Popular Issues. We are within minutes of the most breathtaking and potentially the most dangerous physics experiment ever initiated, the precursor of an even bigger experiment that will either, according to some, give humanity the power of gods or, if it goes wrong, destroy the entire universe. Let us leave that aside for the moment; this will be big enough. Not since the days of nuclear weapons has a man-made explosion so huge been attempted. Some think this threatens the very fabric of our existence, but the physicists have constantly assured us they know it will not. We shall have to hope they are right!"

  With a glance of his eyes and a mental click, Torsten selected a view of the experiment vertex.

  “This is where the collision will take place. The small structure you see will be totally vaporized in the explosion, but its instruments will send their important readings nanoseconds before they vanish. Physicists will use these readings to refine their model, the one that says there is no danger, and ask the Interplanetary Association Senate for final approval to attempt to make a black hole.

  “But what Senate? Whose viewpoint will this experiment support, the ‘forward forever’ liberals of President Owomba or the ‘enough already’ Consolidationists led by Senator Lars Ried's Conservative Union Party? We should all know in about five minutes. In the meantime, we will join Mr. Ashira Nagato, who is conducting the pool interview of Dr. Hilda Kremer, the chief theorist behind this gargantuan challenge to nature."

  A nod to his AI took Torsten out of the flow. He sighed and turned his attention to his monitor. Anna looked very much like Hilda, but had a kind of snooty carriage that he'd never seen the real Hilda affect.

  The audio fade-in caught her in mid sentence. “...no problem whatsoever. It's really only a small nuclear explosion; bigger ones were conducted three centuries ago, right in Earth's atmosphere."

  Nagato frowned. “Can you explain for new viewers, in words that we all can understand, what aspects of the standard model you hope to verify with this experiment?"

  “Certainly. Our model predicts we can do the black hole experiment safely. It also predicts certain readings from this experiment. If they match, we maintain we can do the black hole experiment."

  “But the black hole effort will be billions and billions of times bigger."

  “You do what you can,” Anna/Hilda said with a superior shrug.

  Torsten found himself sweating. Anna/Hilda's answers had none of the depth that Hilda's would have had. By now Hilda would have explained what a “quagma” was and talked about compression constants and calibration. The general public might not have detected the difference, but someone like Dr. Levine certainly would. The whole house of cards was starting to fall apart in his mind.

  “Mark one,” someone said. “The accelerator coil field strengths are nominal."

  I'm on, Torsten thought, suddenly too busy to worry about the deception.

  “The biggest gun ever built by humankind is about ready to fire. Transient fields a billion times stronger than those that propel our starships will be applied in sequence to send its ten-gram bullets at ten times the speed of ... I mean to a gamma of ten, that is to say to a speed so relativistic that they'll hit with ten times the mass they really have. I sincerely hope I am still here to report the results.” Torsten took a deep breath. He was definitely rattled. What he had said was pure hype, but if there was even a chance in a billion that Hilda was wrong and the most vociferous of the critics right, they might have been his last words.

  There was a momentary silence in the newsroom, as if the same thought had occurred to everyone else.

  * * * *

  A million nightmares raced through her mind. A recording? An experiment-induced time warp? A virtual doppelganger? “Let's see it."

  She'd seen herself before, of course, recorded or through real-time monitors. But here she was, with Ashira Nagato, no less, on InterplaNet News.

  He asked, “We have reports about an abnormal amount of gamma rays on the preliminary tests. Can you confirm that?"

  “Without using a lot of technical jargon,” her double said, “the latest round of tests showed an unnatural, inexplicable, amount of gamma rays escaping the collider collisions. Gamma rays are one of the most lethal forms of energy in the universe."

  Hilda winced at how the double played up a danger that was nonexistent to anyone over a few hundred kilometers away from the experiment.

  “Your calculations failed to predict this radiation?"

  Hilda's image shrugged and gave a distracted look into the camera. “Yes, but it's not enough of a loss to keep us from making a black hole, so we don't consider it important."

>   “So we are going ahead with the final test anyway?"

  “Of course,” the double said with a voice that was dripping with contempt.

  Hilda stared at the image, stunned and in shock. Not only the public image of the project but her reputation was being trashed by this impersonation. She dug her fingernails into the palm of her open hand. Had Torsten been in on this sabotage all along, she wondered? To set back everyone's work for at least a generation? To destroy her life's work and that of her dearest friends? What kind of monster had she been playing with? How was she ever going to face Brad?

  Academics and Earth were another life. She couldn't look to Tse Wen, or Sarah, or Brad to solve this. She had to do it herself. But how?

  If she could only get word to Sarah. Hilda thought furiously. She had a radio, in the suit. It was just a matter of gain. “What's the power of my suit radio transmitter?"

  “Three watts."

  “Do you have a parabolic dish pointed at the station? How big?"

  “I can point the north pole ten-meter radar dish at the station."

  Hilda did the calculation herself—the suit antenna was essentially omnidirectional, so its three watts would be spread over ... Maybe...

  “Get the airlock ready. I'm going outside."

  * * * *

  It was hard to make good time over the dusty surface. If she tried to stride or hop too hard, she would put herself on a trajectory taking many minutes to return to the surface. She found the best way was essentially to go hand over hand on the surface, pulling herself along from rock to rock as she emerged from the pitch black shadow in her helmet light. But the surface of the asteroid's polar night was barely the temperature of liquid nitrogen and there was only so much the few nanometers of high tech fabric of her gloves could do about that. Her fingers grew numb with cold. She flexed them furiously between grabs.

  It took fifteen minutes to reach the dish. It was on a tower over a hundred meters tall with a despin platform on top of that. More hand over hand work. She looked down and shivered at the height—despite the low gravity. She pulled herself over the rim of the dish, launched herself toward the feed horn at the focus of the dish and grabbed hold.

  “This is Hilda Kremer calling Dr. Sarah Levine. Emergency."

  “Person calling on suit radio for Dr. Levine, your voice does not match Dr. Kremer's."

  They'd hacked the data base, Hilda realized. “Your data base has been compromised. Let Dr. Levine make the identification. Tell her ... tell her thanks for making me take my helmet with me..."

  * * * *

  Torsten stared at the time display; it didn't move. A hold, he guessed. The media deck was silent as if every comment that could be made had been. In the silence Torsten heard Anna/Hilda say, “I'm fine, Sarah, go ahead ... let me check ... no problem, that should be fine."

  He could only hear this side of the headset conversation. Was Levine suspicious of something? Had Anna/Hilda allayed those suspicions?

  “Resuming count at ten,” someone called out.

  Torsten stared at the image of the Ten-Ten's vertex, not trusting his voice.

  “Five ... four ... three ... two ... one..."

  “We have data!” someone shouted

  “What the hell?"

  “It's all neutral pions!"

  “Look at the magnetic transient!"

  The silence had turned instantly into a babble.

  Torsten stared at the facility.

  It was still there. No ten-megaton nuclear explosion. But people all around him were yelling about data. Something was terribly, terribly wrong. Well, it was supposed to go wrong, to discredit the experiment. Maybe he had misunderstood how wrong. At any rate, he had better start talking.

  “Something unexpected has happened,” he intoned. “The experiment vertex is still intact, but instruments are reporting the results of a huge explosion, albeit not quite the kind of explosion expected. Perhaps time itself was affected; perhaps we aren't even in the same universe anymore!"

  Steady, Ried, his producer said. Keep your feet on the ground you know.

  Torsten nodded and took a breath. “Or maybe there's some kind of massive instrumental problem.” It occurred to him that Anna was prepared for this. “Let's see what Dr. Kremer has to say."

  Anna/Hilda looked white-faced. The plan was for her to look confused and unconfident, but this looked too real. She talked, at any rate.

  “The last round of tests showed an abnormal amount of gamma rays escaping the collider collisions. As I said, gammas are one of the most lethal forms of energy in the universe. They can also carry away the energy of collision before it has a chance to compress the matter enough. The fact that we have so many ... uh ... gammas..."

  “Neutral pions,” someone shouted, apparently trying to be helpful.

  “They turn into gammas right away,” someone else said.

  Anna/Hilda looked around. “Gamma, pions, we, uh, don't know what happened. Our models must be wrong. The energy could have gone into small black holes that consume ordinary matter, or produce something, uh, strange. I just hope this is contained."

  Nagato jumped on that. “If the models are wrong, it would not be wise to go ahead with the Black Hole Project, would it?"

  Anna/Hilda seemed to recover with that cue. “No, in all honesty, I'm forced to say it would not."

  He nodded. “The critics in the consolidationist alliance have a point then?"

  “Yes, I'm afraid they do."

  Anna/Hilda was now having trouble keeping a smile off her face; however unexpected this result was, it played right into their plan. It was time to get back into editorial mode. Torsten checked the setup and nodded to his AI to be ready to break in.

  Nagato's frown was deep and angry. “I must then observe that these unexpected events hark back to the cautions that the Conservative Union Party espouses. They say scientists do not really know what they are doing, and this is the apparent proof. We must now all consider our votes very carefully and take into consideration the power of these science experiments and their effect if left unchecked by proper oversight. Meanwhile, everyone here is still trying to figure out what happened."

  Daring to hope, Torsten wondered how this was playing with the staff. He paged Rossov. No answer. He called up the monitor showing the scene in the station common area. There seemed to be none of the confusion and chaos there that was in the media center. Rossov was nowhere to be seen. Then he saw Dr. Sarah Levine's face. It was one great big grin.

  She knew. They'd been set up. Oh, shit. Anna, vanish. They're onto it.

  He looked back to the press room pool desk. Ashira Nagato seemed lost in concentration, listening to something. His mouth dropped open and his eyes got very big. Then his lips closed to a thin line of anger and he whirled around to the seat next to him. It was empty.

  Torsten looked around; the room was a sea of floating bodies. Anna had somehow dropped her Hilda persona and vanished among them. He tried to imagine how—switch badges, let her hair out, wipe off some makeup? Anna Messenger would appear again. But there could be no such exit for him, he knew. He was hung out to dry.

  Or was he? Was there any way he could backpedal himself out of this? And help Lars as well? Perhaps, he thought, perhaps. The knot grew in his stomach and he turned grimly to his pickup to try to talk his way out of it. He was good at that, he told himself—between Anna and his mother, he'd had to be.

  “There have been some new developments,” Torsten said. “Often, when nothing else can explain what has happened, the answer turns out to be some form of human manipulation, and that is apparently the case here. What we were told was to be the actual Ten-Ten experiment, was apparently not.

  “Which leads to the question of where the data came from."

  He sent a query toward Sarah Levine. What happened?

  To his surprise, she answered. As if you don't already know, Ried. Saboteurs apparently hoped to substitute false data for real data. We suspected that and di
d a precursor shot that triggered their mechanism, and revealed it.You can quote me. Levine out.

  He did quote her, and hoped he sounded innocent and confused. He certainly sounded rattled, no doubt about that. Text began scrolling on his monitor. Station security was looking for Rossov.

  “What this looks like now is an attempt to sabotage the experiment by very well-prepared opponents or, conceivably, if our imaginations run free, a staged sabotage attempt conducted by equally fanatic proponents seeking to embarrass consolidationist forces.” He waved at all the media consoles, all occupied now with earnest people speaking rapidly. He could even smell, despite the best efforts of the Gulliver's environmental maintenance systems, the presence of too many excited bodies.

  He looked back at the screen showing the common room to locate Sara Levine. It didn't take long; she was facing a video pickup and seemed to be grinning right back at him.

  You haven't seen anything yet, Ried, she sent.

  Then she turned to her window as if to watch something.

  What? In the middle of all this confusion? They couldn't ... they wouldn't...

  The countdown clock had started again, at T—60. The audacity of it took his breath. But what better time? He glanced at some of the other displays; he didn't understand the numbers, but they had all apparently recycled to pre-shot status. Rossov's false data had played itself out of the system and he would not have a chance to plant another set.

  Or was he doing that now? If Rossov had slipped out on a small repair bot to the instrument module to cover his tracks or plant another set of spurious data and they made the shot, he'd be vaporized.

  Torsten started to call security, to ask them to hold the experiment. Whatever Rossov was guilty of, for whatever reasons, he was still a human being, with a life to lead ... Then Torsten stopped. If he called, he'd expose his own role in all this and involve Lars as well. Also, Rossov, if anyone, would know that the real shot was in progress; if he was at the Ten-Ten's vertex, it was by his own choice. So be it.