Scale Free

by Patrick Arnesen

  The officers exchanged surprised glances. Officer Martin reached for the letter and looked at it curiously.

  “Secondly, I have two copies of a document from Prime Minister Sukoi that you need to sign. This document swears you to absolute secrecy concerning this investigation. You are to be the only officers assigned to this case, and you may share what you learn with no-one. All recordings or documents produced as part of your investigation are to be classified top-secret. Please read the documents carefully and sign.”

  Officer Martin looked up from the letter and stared at the two other documents I dropped on the table.

  “Uh, we’ll have to double check this with our superior.”

  “I understand. Please send the signed copies to Mr. Speer’s and Prime Minister Sukoi’s offices, and call me again when you’re ready. Goodbye for now.” With that I punched the link for my house and made my escape from the interrogation room.

  Chapter 27

  I felt a childish need to celebrate my little victory, so I poured myself a generous gin and tonic and took it out onto the deck. The seagulls, as ever, were circling the rocks below, occasionally swooping down to grab clams from the beach. I watched one ride an air current back up into the sky and then drop its clam from a great height. It fell and smashed open on the rocks, but another seagull swooped in and grabbed the prize before the first one could descend to collect it. Infuriated, the first seagull chased the thief, squawking angrily.

  I pinged Melanie and asked her to join me. While I waited, I pulled two deckchairs together and spread out my desktop in the air in front of them. Then I took out Gaudet's folder from my inventory and added it to the desktop. The folder included a video, so I started it and settled down with my drink to watch.

  A strangely distorted set of diagonal colored bands filled the screen. Then the bands began to move away from the camera and became stripes on a tie. The tie pulled back and a shirt came into view, then a suit, and the man wearing it: an NASC agent. The camera he had just turned on had a fish-eye lens which explained the distortion. Thanks to the wide field of view I was able to make out the bank of computers, the reactor's vacuum chamber and the large metal cage containing the mysterious high voltage equipment. There was a bright blue glow coming from the window in the vacuum chamber door. Lights were flashing from the banks of computers and the high voltage equipment was humming. The lab seemed to be up and running. To clear the distortion of the fish eye view, I enlarged the video to fill the whole desktop, then curved the desktop until it wrapped clear around my field of view. Now it felt much like I was in the lab itself instead of watching a video of it.

  The agent walked off to a corner to join his companion, a dark-haired woman wearing a similar suit. They exchanged a few words and then settled down, apparently for a long shift of guard duty. After that nothing much happened. I began to jump forward in five minute intervals. At around the one hour mark things began to change. The blue glow from the reactor strengthened considerably. One of the agents noted this and walked over for a closer look. The hum from inside the metal cage increased to became a staccato roar. The large metal rings that spanned the inside of the cage started to glow a dull red. The agents were very animated now, talking to each other and no doubt contacting their superiors. The light from the reactor window became like the arc of a welder’s torch, its color shifting from blue to a blinding white.

  Suddenly a brilliant bolt of white lightning leaped between two of the rings in the cage; then another, and another. There was a terrific bang and a brilliant flash. The camera temporarily became overwhelmed and showed nothing but brilliant white. When the image returned, I could see the cage was crackling with a storm of sparks, like the finale at a fireworks display. Millions of volts of electricity had suddenly been released in an uncontrolled discharge. Black smoke billowed from melting equipment. The agents fled out the hangar entrance.

  There was second terrific bang and flash, this time from the vacuum chamber. The world’s only working fusion reactor generated magnetic fields of unearthly intensity, in the hundreds of Teslas. The magnets that supported those fields overheated and quenched, instantly losing their superconducting properties. The immense energy stored in the magnets was released in a single ruinous event. The ground shook and my field of view shifted radically as the camera’s tripod collapsed. Then the light from the window flickered and went out.

  Aside from some smoke, the reactor and the cage were now still. The only pieces of equipment still functioning were the servers. They continued humming for another minute or two, then began an orderly shutdown. Bank by bank, they went dark. Soon all was still. I began jumping forward in 5 minute intervals again. Eventually the electrical equipment stopped smoking. About one hour after the fireworks began, NASC agents returned to the hangar in force. Soon there were a dozen of them investigating the wreckage and taking photographs. One of them walked up to the fallen camera and switched it off.

  Chapter 28

  "The log states the camera was set up by the first group of agents to enter the hangar.” Melanie said. I hadn’t noticed her arrival. “Two of them were left on guard duty until a science team could be assembled".

  I restored the desktop to its usual dimensions. “Hi baby,” I said. “You slipped away last night before I could thank you.”

  Melanie settled into the deck chair beside me, took my hand in hers and gave me a warm smile, “I’d say you thanked me well enough last night. How did things go with the police?”

  “Under control for the moment; Mr. Speer convinced the PM to put the whole affair under the cloak of state secrecy, and the detectives can’t proceed until they get new directions from their superiors, which, I have a feeling will take more than a week to sort out.”

  “Nice. Well in the meantime I had a chance to look over these files.”

  “Anything useful?”

  “Quite a bit, actually. Gaudet didn’t hold back. There are details here on how they noticed the lab in the first place, and logs of their investigation.”

  “Anything useful to us? For example, why do they think VivraTerra’s involved?”

  “One of their satellites noticed the lab by its infrared signature. The hangar was putting out way more heat than its electrical or gas inputs would account for. Apparently the NASC has some pretty smart software designed to search for irregularities like that. After they noticed the lab they put a tap on its comm traffic. It was all under hard encryption, but something like 80% was with the VivraTerra servers, via a series of anonymizing routers.”

  “How did they trace the connection through the routers?”

  Melanie smirked, “They’re the NASC. I’d bet they secretly own half of them, and the ones they don’t own they’ve probably hacked.”

  “Does any of the traffic the NASC recorded match up with our erased comm entries?”

  Melanie nodded. “The timestamps are a perfect match.”

  “So now we know that the people behind the lab are also the ones who hacked our system.” I frowned, “The NASC must have tried to track the equipment makers like we did. Did they get any farther with Oshiro or any other companies?”

  “Quite a lot further.” Oshiro was a riskier target politically being a Japanese company, so the NASC focused on some of the US contractors who were hired to build the lab. Let’s see,” Melanie began leafing through the files on my desktop. “One of them was called Century Robotics. Gaudet’s men interviewed a number of their employees. They installed high bandwidth comm lines and 12 robot alcoves, and filled the alcoves with robots; basically the same model as VivraTerra uses.”

  “Didn’t they find all the other equipment in the lab a little strange?” I asked.

  “None of it was there at the time. After the robots were up and running they did all the work. Equipment deliveries were dropped in front of the hangar and carried in by the robots. They must have done all the assembly work.”

  I shrugged. “Makes sense; if you don’t want anyone see
ing what you’re doing or who you are, what better way than a team of telepresence bots?”

  “Those robots are still in their alcoves at the back of the hangar.” Melanie added. “All of their programming and log files have been wiped clean.”

  I nodded. “Did the NASC find out anything about the people who hired the contractors?”

  Melanie shook her head. “All bills were made out to Orion Research Inc. All communication with Orion was via anonymous text messages, money paid up front. When the NASC traced the comm traffic it originated at VivraTerra.”

  “What about the owners of Orion?” I asked.

  Melanie sifted through a few more files. “Here it is. It’s a front company, like you’d expect. Of course in order to create a corporation you need at least one human owner. In this case it turned out to be some retired guy in Seattle. They took him in for questioning but it soon became obvious that he knew nothing about the company.”

  “A case of identity theft then?”

  Melanie nodded.

  “Did they try to follow the money?”

  Melanie frowned. “They must have but I haven't looked yet. Let me check.” She gave the translucent desktop two hard raps with her knuckle. A menu system popped into view above the documents. She selected the search feature and said “Money, Payment, Transaction, go.” Most of the documents faded to gray but three lit up with a neon blue border and came to the foreground.

  “Says here the payments ultimately came from a VivraTerra account, number 5AE65B. Hey that’s progress!”

  I shook my head. “Whoever these guys are, they went to some length to cover their tracks. If they’ve hacked our comm logs, then I bet you’ll find that the ownership and transaction records for that account are gone too, or point to someone innocent.”

  “Ya you’re probably right.” Melanie sighed. “Still, I’ll ask Speer to get someone from the treasury to check for us. It's no wonder Guadet fingered us though. Both the comm traffic and the money trail point straight at VivraTerra.”

  “Is there anything in all these files that might help us track down the people behind all this?”

  Melanie shook her head. “Nothing I can see.”

  I put my arms behind my head and looked up at the sky. The little white clouds were drifting by like they always did.

  “You’ve reviewed a lot of these records. Isn’t there anything new you know now about the perpetrator’s actions that you didn’t know before?”

  “Well, we know that they’re from VivraTerra or at least have routed their activities through our systems. We know that they used robots to build their lab but that’s not really very useful. We know that they blew up their lab by overloading the equipment with power from the reactor... Hey, I got a lead on that reactor design by the way.”

  “Oh?”

  “It's a Bussard reactor, originally invented by a Dr. Robert Bussard around the turn of the century. It’s a pretty brilliant design, based on using electromagnets to concentrate a super-dense cloud of electrons at the center of the vacuum chamber. This creates a very strong negative charge in a single point of space. Then you drop in positively charged protons and boron ions. The negative charge accelerates them toward the center of the reactor at super high speed where they collide and fuse, releasing very high energy helium nuclei and nearly no radioactivity. That’s the theory anyway but the research was never funded through to completion. When ITER failed, all the steam went out of fusion research.”

  My gin and tonic was empty. I tapped the glass twice with my fingernail and instantly it was full again. “Apparently someone revived the idea 60 years later and perfected the design.” I said. “Does the fusion design they used tell us anything more about who they might be?”

  “They’d have to be totally brilliant. The math involved in a reactor like this is mindboggling. Some say nobody but Bussard himself really understood the physics behind it. They’d also need huge computing resources to simulate the design and work out the details.”

  “Like those servers in the lab?” I asked.

  “I guess. And they might have used some of the equipment in the cage to test the high energy particle collisions.”

  “Maybe,” I said “but in the video that equipment was humming with millions of volts, after the reactor had already been finished. The rings were glowing red. It looked to me like all the power from the reactor was going into the cage.”

  “That’s true.” Melanie said. “Using some of Bussard’s equations I was able to come up with an estimate of the reactor’s output. Based on the dimensions of the reactor and the intensity of the fields those magnets could produce, the reactor should have been producing somewhere between two and five gigawatts at full power. That’s about the same amount of power that a city of a few million people would need. No wonder the NASC’s satellites picked up the heat signature. There’s no way to hide that much power, concentrated in such a small area.”

  “Any idea what you’d use that much power for?” I asked.

  Melanie shook her head slowly. “Jarrod, I really don’t have any idea. That’s about a thousand times more power than any industrial process I can think of.”

  I grimaced. “So we’re still stuck with nothing but questions.”

  “Ya.”

  My gin and tonic was empty again and I was starting to feel a bit of a buzz. I grabbed each end of the desktop and brought my hands together in a loud clap. The desktop shrank down to nothing as my hands came together. In my palm I felt the icon it had collapsed into. I put it in my pocket.

  “I guess we’re done here for now. Do you want a drink by the way? I’m having gin and tonics.”

  “Sure.”

  I tapped the glass again, only once this time, and it sprouted a little menu in my private field of view. I selected the “Duplicate” option and instantly a second glass materialized on the little table between our chairs. I handed it to Melanie.

  “You know I really need to go see how Emma’s doing. I haven’t seen her since yesterday.”

  “She’s fine” Melanie said. “Last night she had a sleepover with her friend Sheila.”

  I took another sip and sank deeper into the chair. I looked up at the clouds again. “That forest sim you made was beautiful. I don’t know if I’ve ever slept so deeply.”

  Melanie smiled, “I doubt my sim can take all the credit for that, you had a pretty hard day yesterday.”

  “Still it was just what I needed. Thank you.”

  “You know we can go back there anytime.” Melanie smiled playfully.

  “Hmm.” I said. I took her hand in mine again and leaned over my chair's arm to place a soft kiss on her lips. We shared smiles then sank back into our chairs. I closed my eyes and listened to the waves and the seagulls. The breeze coming inland from the sea played in my hair. My breathing slowed and I began to drift, enjoying the slight buzz from my drink.

  Chapter 29

  I imagined what the two agents must have felt as they watched that 60 foot cage light up in a hail of lightning. They could have been electrocuted had they been a little closer. Their lives could have been snuffed out in a wink, their souls gone forever.

  Was I any different? I owe my existence to my host software. Several dozen times a second it slavishly recomputes the numeric states of my neural net, stored in trillions of blocks of memory. Some blocks represent neurons - each one containing thousands of memory addresses to other blocks that represent synapses - each synapse in turn containing the addresses to thousands of other neurons; trillions of interconnected blocks of memory that in their totality form the astronomically vast network that is my mind.

  As long my host software keeps running, my neural net will continue to respond to stimulation from my senses. It will continue to think my thoughts. But what would happen if that program were turned off? The memory used to store my net is not volatile. If power were lost, the last state of my mind, computed by my host program, would continue to be stored in the computer’s
memory for hundreds, maybe thousands of years before physical decay corrupted the data beyond recovery. But while the computer was off, I would not exist. Only the potential to restore me to life would remain. My consciousness is more than just a network of neurons and synapses; it is an emergent property of that network in execution. Without my host software continually recomputing my neural net, I do not exist. If nobody ever came to restore power and turn that software back on again, I would face the same fate that awaits every flesh and blood human at the end of their short lives.

  I had uploaded with my daughter partially in an attempt to escape death, but now events had brought that black reality back to us. Our existence was perhaps even more tenuous than before. Now it depended on nothing more than the property rights bestowed on a legal corporate fiction, and those rights were far from inviolate.

  Chapter 30

  Some time later, I opened my eyes and turned to look at Melanie. She had closed her eyes and was enjoying the sun and breeze. Her hands were behind her head. Her tanned skin gleamed.

  “You know,” I said, “There is one new thing that we know. From the timestamp on the video we know exactly when the lab was destroyed. Could we correlate that with some sort of activity inside VivraTerra?”