The Neumanns made several attempts to explain to people that they weren’t ready to start making a movie just yet, which had the virtue of being an honest statement as far as it went. But they quickly figured out that they were wasting their breath. And although their magical powers helped them to escape each situation that arose, both Paul and Capie were growing increasingly aware that the entire state of affairs was rapidly spiraling out of control.
• • • •
“I’m tellin’ ya, Christchurch will be tough next weekend,” insisted Captain Ryan Smith of United Flight number 6050, a Boeing 777-300 enroute from Auckland, New Zealand to Los Angeles, California. Cruising smoothly along at 35,000 feet at 560 mph with George (the autopilot) engaged, Smith and the co-pilot were fully involved once again in their favorite pastime—the spirited debate of current rugby matches taking place in New Zealand, a country where the game was taken very seriously and considered by the majority to be the national sport.
“Naw,” argued the copilot, Jack Jones. “Canterbury is looking really good to me. I still think it would be pretty tough for anyone to topple ’em. They look deadly this season. They’re going to take the cup.”
“Ethan is for me the greatest 10 that has ever played the game,” Smith countered. “When the…” And then he stopped, leaning forward in his seat and looking out the windscreen over the consoles.
“Crikey, would you lookie there,” Smith said, with a nod out the windows.
“What?” responded Jones, craning his neck to look in the indicated direction.
The night sky outside the cockpit was virtually black but, as was typical so far from any city, the stars shone brilliantly in the firmament. And to the east, the horizon was just beginning to lighten toward dawn.
So it was fairly easy to see what Smith was pointing at.
“Blow me down,” muttered Jones. “A signal flare?”
“I know bugger all,” Smith replied, expressing his ignorance of the answer.
Below on the ocean’s surface, slightly ahead of them and to the right of their flight path, a dancing white light could be seen. Dancing was not quite the right verb, but Smith could think of no other choice that came any closer. The light shifted back and forth, constantly changing size and intensity, very effectively attracting their attention.
“Not the time to gawk. Where are we?” Smith asked, now using his more professionally trained voice and reaching out to punch a couple of buttons on the FMS, the Flight Management System. “Hmm, still south of the equator.” He picked up his iPad and entered the latitude and longitude information, running a quick check through the on-board WiFi system. “Looks like Flint Island, that one. Maybe a castaway? Dunno. Go ahead, text our sighting to Oakland using the CPDLC,” he told Jones.
Who nodded without replying, typing in a report into the Controller-Pilot Data Communications Link, sending it to the Air Traffic Center for their airspace located in Oakland, California.
“Those blokes down below are lucky,” Smith noted casually. “We’re more than a hundred miles east of our normal flight path. Otherwise, we’d never seen that light.”
Jones agreed. “Diverting to avoid the storm to the west, as we did. Yeah, lucky. Whoever’s down there, hoorey. A bird will drop in on ya soon!”
• • • •
Capie rolled her eyes and sighed. “What are we going to do about the people of Kalgoorlie?”
“We do need to do something, don’t we?” Paul glanced around the open pit mine and up at the spacecraft in front of him. “I’m a week away from completing the ship, then a few days for loading—maybe as much as two weeks before we are ready for liftoff. You are about that far away from the chutzpah ceremony. Are you suggesting that we leave Kalgoorlie?”
Folding her arms across her chest, his wife gave thought to the question. “We can’t do that just yet, can we? Not today, at any rate. There are all our supplies in Warehouse 13. If we had another place to move them all to…but since the ship isn’t ready yet, we don’t.” She sighed even more heavily.
“That’s pretty much what I think as well,” Paul admitted with a thoughtful frown. “So the limitation is a place to store our supplies. I can fix that, I think, by taking a day and excavating a storage room here at the mine. After we move all the supplies here, we can check out of the York Hotel and find another city or town to stay in. All it costs us is a longer portal distance from here to the place we choose to stay. No sweat.”
“And the people of Kalgoorlie? What do we say to them?” Capie asked expectantly.
Paul paused a moment, gauging his wife’s emotional state. “We can make some excuse to the people of Kalgoorlie. We can tell them that we have to go back to Hollywood for consultations or something.”
Capie slowly smiled. “I like that idea.”
“Then I’ll get started tomorrow in the morning, clearing out a section of the wall at the back of the mine for a storage room,” he replied with a grin.
• • • •
Later that evening, as they were returning to their motel room and Paul was closing the hallway door behind himself and Capie, he noticed that Daneel seemed to be waiting for them on his monitor display, his quantum computer sitting on one corner of the room’s small desk.
“Hi, Dad! Hi, Mom! I’m so glad to see you both. I have news!” their son announced, practically bobbing up and down with suppressed excitement.
Once again, Paul was struck by how fast the young man was growing up. Daneel had been ‘gone’ the last few days, researching on the internet for an answer to the question as to the how and the why that the first Daneel had died when given magical powers. Now his physical features seemed to be that of a twenty year old man, a significant change from the last time Paul had seen him.
“What about?” Capie asked.
“About your research?” Paul inquired, taking a seat on the end of the bed.
“Yep,” Daneel replied, seemingly ready to burst he was so giddy. “Most of those error codes you gave me didn’t help all that much. They were either general types of errors that could have meant any one of a dozen different coding failures, or they were secondary errors, triggered by another error. But there were two that were different! And they led me on a merry chase, those two did! But I think I finally got it figured out!”
“You two!” Capie scoffed, as she headed into the bathroom. “You’re going to talk techno-babble again, I just know it.” And she shut the door behind her.
“Don’t mind her,” Paul told Daneel, with a knowing smile. “Go ahead. What did you find out?”
“It’s an incompatibility problem between the magical powers coding subroutines and the bus interface circuitry for the quantum processor!” he proudly declared with complete confidence. “It creates disruptions in the synchronization of all bus transfers. The effect is not unlike a Normal when he’s drunk. Slurred speech, disorientation of senses, loss of motor-control and so forth.”
Paul nodded with approval. So, it had been an incompatibility problem with the hardware after all. “Yes, that matches what I saw. Anything else?”
“Yep! The disruptions would generate a ton of bad information, a sort of cascade of meaningless data that will even negatively impact file headers in the data packets. Eventually, the whole structure would crash. I’m amazed that the, ah, first Daneel could have kept going for more than a few minutes, the incompatibility is so bad!”
Paul looked away, feeling uncomfortable with the reminder of the first Daneel’s death. “It sounds like you are on the right track. Any suggestions on how to fix the problem and then how to test it to see if it works?”
“Well, that’s the bad news,” his son said, now appearing a great deal more subdued than before. “The easiest solution, for the next generation of A.I.s, is to alter their coding, make it compatible. I’m pretty sure it could be done. And also to add an error checking subroutine to the quantum processing stream. That will help catch any stray problems. But for me, that solution is no
t an option.”
Paul blinked and leaned back in surprise. “Why not? Oh, I think I see. Your basic coding is not the same anymore, is it? It’s due to your ‘age.’ Your coding has evolved.”
“Exactly,” Daneel agreed. “My coding is now much too inter-related. It would be impossible to find and fix all the interconnected subroutines. In my case, only a hardware modification would fix the basic problem. Oh, sure, I would also need a software patch to go with it, but only a minor one. The hardware mod is harder.”
Paul could see the concern in his son’s eyes. A hardware mod would take time. Moreover, Daneel would have to be ported over from his current machine to a new one, which might involve risks all of its own. From an efficiency point of view, it would simply be easier to generate a new A.I. progenitor with the necessary coding change.
Of course, the current edition of Daneel would then become obsolete and superfluous. Not only would he never acquire magical powers, he was afraid he might even be scrapped in favor of a newer version!
Paul smiled and shook his head at Daneel. “Well, then, Daneel, if a hardware mod is needed, a hardware mod is what we are going to do. You have all the drawings and specifications. Your next task is to design a new and modified motherboard with the changes needed. I have a couple of other ideas for upgrades that I would like to see you incorporate as well.”
“All right! Thanks, Dad!”
Paul then waved a finger at him. “There’s something else, too, that I want you to do. Figure out a way to test the mod without risk to you. Some sort of software simulator would be nice. Something that will let us test the changes without actually putting you in danger. Understand?”
“Got it, Dad! And no problem, I already have a couple of ideas for that! Got to go; I’ve got a lot of work to do! Bye!”
And the monitor went blank again.
Paul shrugged and headed for the bathroom door. “Kids and their toys,” he muttered happily.
• • • •
McDougall swept through the foyer of his Rockcliffe Park mansion in Ottawa, Canada in a very foul temper, the mansion servants catching only a single glance of his face before hastily making themselves scarce. Three Oni followed several steps behind the wizard, climbing the stairs in his footsteps as he headed toward the upstairs den.
Smashing open the door of the room, McDougall stormed over to the far wall, keying a special latch and waiting impatiently as a segment of the paneling there opened on a silent hinge. Then, slapping his right hand on the special safe installed there, he concentrated on a specific series of magical mental impulses.
A very weighty black metal door, nearly two feet square and a foot thick, ponderously swung opened. McDougall thrust a hand through the opening, snatching an object just inside and bringing it out into the light.
An armband a foot long, specifically a talisman. Sliding it over his left arm, McDougall looked at it in supreme satisfaction.
“Now!” he hissed menacingly. “Aduir! Get your sorry hide in here!”
The Oni practically skittered into the room, keeping as much distance between itself and the wizard as it dared.
McDougall seemed not to notice, watching the light in the room reflect off his talisman.
“Assemble all the Oni,” he ordered sternly. “We’re going to break them into teams, each team with a gemstone. I’ll provide the energy signature that they need to look for my medallion talisman. We’ll start in the eastern United States and also near Chicago and sweep outward from those two places. If Paul Armstead is in the United States using my talisman, it will be a short search. If he is not, it might take a bit longer, but we will find it and we will find him.” McDougall snapped his attention to the Oni. “He is not to be harmed by any Oni, only located, understand? It will be my privilege to kill Paul Armstead, slowly and in the most painful way possible. That will be my privilege. Understood?”
And what could Aduir say to that other than an enthusiastic “Yes, sir.”
• • • •
At the large workbench in Warehouse 13, with Daneel watching over his shoulder, Paul performed a series of checks on the latest CPU, designated as Mark#4. It powered up fine and everything Paul could check with his magical instruments said it was operating up to spec. But that was only the preliminary checks. Unit#3 had performed as well but was rejected for other, more subtle performance problems.
Daneel spoke up.
“It’s time for me to connect to it and check it out, Dad,” he told him. “‘I’ll bet any quantum mechanic in the service would give the rest of his life to fool around with this gadget.’”
Paul grinned. “Chief Engineer Quinn, Forbidden Planet.” And then he chuckled a bit. It was an appropriate quote. He just wished he had thought of it first. “You know the drill. This is just a checkout. Don’t risk your programming code. I don’t want to chance losing you if we have made a mistake and this doesn’t work out right.”
“Agreed. I’m ready when you are,” Daneel announced. “If you would connect the cable to the LAN switch, I can do the additional functionality checks.”
Paul fished a Cat 6 cable from a pile of cables on the workbench and made the connections.
He waited patiently for several minutes. Daneel’s image popped back up on his monitor screen.
“There’s good news and bad,” the young man announced. “Dad, this unit is the closest yet. Memory checks are good and all the quantum processors ran diagnostic checks with no errors. All the Arithmetic Logic Units performed the bit tests correctly too. And the heat values are marginally better than Unit#3.”
“And now the bad news,” Paul muttered with a frown.
Daneel’s boyish face on the monitor screen nodded. “The residual transfer rates are still out of synch, even after the bus modifications and re-routing. It is improved, roughly 20% better. But still out of tolerance. Maybe if we gate synch the outputs of IC 16.”
“Maybe,” Paul muttered as he studied the electrical schematic in the display in front of him. “Let’s simulate that and see what we get.”
TWENTY-NINE
Room 208
York Hotel
Hannan Street
Kalgoorlie, Western Australia
October
Tuesday 12:14 a.m. AWST
Life in Kalgoorlie for the Neumanns finally reached the impossible stage. It was almost as if the entire city was caught up in the fever to be involved, in one capacity or another, with the production of the ‘science-fiction move’ that the Neumanns were making.
For their part, Capie and Paul were using disguise spells to prevent themselves from being recognized, using portals to and from their room and ordering fast foods for their meals instead of eating at restaurants.
The final straw came at just past midnight when someone began, at first, knocking on their hotel room door and a minute later, pounding fiercely on it.
Leaping out of bed, Paul quickly grew so angry that he was halfway through a spell to drop the offender at the door through a portal onto the dry lakebed of Lake Lefroy forty miles south of Kalgoorlie. But Capie grabbed her husband, preventing him from completing the spell.
Instead, Paul snatched open the door, only to discover that the guilty party was the local reporter, the same one that had apparently grown tired of waiting for the Neumanns to respond to his thirteen messages and phone calls that he had left for them at the front desk.
The reporter looked up, startled, as if he really hadn’t expected that anyone would answer the door. Then he grinned like a Cheshire Cat.
“Well, hello!” the man said, putting on the charm. “Mr. Neumann, I presume. I hope that I haven’t disturbed you, but my editor insisted. I’m afraid that I’m can’t leave until you’ve answered a few questions. It won’t take but a few moments.” And he pushed past Paul into the room.
With a wicked grin, Capie, with a snap of her fingers, put the jackass to sleep in mid-stride whereupon she then levitated him up and over, dumping him onto the bed. Th
en she started changing her clothes and throwing things into her suitcases. When Paul realized what she was doing, he jumped in to help.
Once their bags were fully packed, he popped open a small portal, leaving an envelope with a substantial packet of money on the desk clerk’s countertop next to the cash register. Then he whipped up another much larger portal, taking them to the front door of the Comfort Inn Bay of Isles in Esperance, Western Australia. Despite the late hour, the desk clerk at the Comfort Bay seemed delighted to rent a room to two young but somewhat rumpled and lethargic American tourists.
• • • •
Aduir bit its tongue against a fresh urge to turn and flee. If there had been even a remote chance that flight might have been possible, then it would have tried it. But no, it knew that there was no chance, so it forced itself to ease open the door instead and inch into the room.
McDougall was pacing back and forth in front of the open hearth of the fireplace, his hands behind his back, his head tilted downward, deep in thought.
“So the monster is not in North America, heh?” McDougall announced with an angry snarl. “That’s what you came to tell me, heh?”
“Yes, sir,” mumbled Aduir almost inaudibly. Inside, it was vastly relieved that his master already knew the bad news. There were times, especially in service to this master, when the messenger really did get shot, and not just figuratively either. But apparently, not this time.
“Well, okay, so he was smart enough to hide somewhere else on the planet,” McDougall muttered in even greater anger. “We’ll just have to expand the search. And I’ll have to contact some of the other wizards to get their permission to search for Armstead, just like that idiot Ruggiero had to do in Mexico and in the United States.” He paced a few more steps before stopping in front of the den’s single bay window. “I’m on speaking terms with the wizards in Argentina, Spain, Greece, and India. I’ll start with them. And we don’t need permission to search some countries from the open seas. I’ll work up a schedule for each of the teams. If we have to scour the whole planet, we will find him and my talisman. Heaven help the scum then.”
Orders of Magnitude (The Genie and the Engineer Series Book 2) Page 36