GALACTIC SURVEY (COLONY Book 3)

by Richard F. Weyand

  JieMin ran the software against the video of Janice Quant announcing the colony project lottery, which would select the people to go to the colonies.

  Fake.

  That is, it was not a real video of Janice Quant in her office. It was a constructed video.

  JieMin searched on all the videos they had from the project, and queued them up into the analysis software. It would run all night, but he would be able to see the results as they came in.

  Toward the close of the day, JieMin checked the results. The image analysis software had sorted the colony project videos into two groups, the fake and the real.

  All the videos of the fantastic, like the unlatching of the factories and warehouses from the spacedock, the slingshot launch of the factories and videos to the Asteroid Belt, and the instantaneous transport of the interstellar probe and the interstellar transporter were real.

  All the videos of the mundane – and any videos containing people – were fake.

  Videos of Anthony Lake and Donald Shore? All fake.

  Videos of Janice Quant? All fake.

  Videos of mission control during the factory/warehouse launch and during the testing of the interstellar probe and transporter? All fake.

  What the hell?

  On Friday morning, ChaoLi, JieMin, and Karl Huenemann had the project status meeting. JieMin had a chance to check the output of the image analysis software before the meeting. It had finished with all the videos, and they had all continued along the same vein as yesterday.

  All the videos of the fantastic were real.

  All the videos of the mundane were fake.

  During the project meeting, they discussed the construction of the next-generation hyperspace probe. ChaoLi had told Huenemann on Tuesday that Chen Zufu had authorized the construction, and he showed up at the meeting with his list of supplies, tools, and parts to be purchased.

  After the meeting, JieMin hung back in ChaoLi’s office.

  “ChaoLi, can you take the rest of the day off? Out of the office?”

  “Well, I have to get purchasing started on Karl’s toy list....”

  Something about JieMin – the sense of urgency she picked up from him – stopped her.

  “I can hand that off to someone else. What’s going on?”

  “I want to see if I can trigger an integration. It’s very important.”

  “Sure. Give me fifteen minutes.”

  On the Arcadia Boulevard bus back to their apartment, ChaoLi asked, “Where we going?”

  “The beach.”

  “Sounds good.”

  When they got back to the apartment, they stripped out of their business clothes, and, nude, went to the Chen family’s Uptown Market across the street and bought lunch to take with them. They walked to the Arcadia Boulevard bus stop at Fifteenth and Arcadia, took the bus to the transfer station, and transferred to the beach bus. When the bus got to the beach, they got off at the third stop, the one closest to their secluded cove.

  Throughout the whole trip, JieMin was very quiet, lost in thought on the project. ChaoLi recognized the signs, and let him be.

  That was part of the problem. With his mind so engrossed in the project, the integration of all he had seen could not come. He had to disconnect, somehow, so the integration could occur. JieMin didn’t know why his mind worked that way, but it did, and he knew it.

  Once they got to the beach, though, he started to open up.

  “It’s a beautiful day,” he said.

  “Yes, it certainly is.”

  They walked together, hand in hand, up the beach. The Sun was shining, just coming up on noon, and the cool on-shore breeze kept them from being overheated.

  They walked past the end of the widened area of the beach, past where the people thinned out, and finally came to their secret cove. They had sometimes discovered others there, but not today. They were alone with the ocean, the sun, the breeze, and the rocks.

  They had lunch, then lay in each other’s arms on the sand. ChaoLi, now thirty-seven years old, was still so beautiful. Cuddling inevitably took the turn toward lovemaking, slowly and tenderly, on the beach.

  Afterward, they went out and floated in the water. Buoyed by the calm salty water, they hooked arms and floated in the cove, their faces held out of the water by the buoyancy of their arms.

  JieMin let his mind float, too. He was very contented. After lunch and sex, floating with his beautiful wife on such a lovely day, his mind drifted.

  When the integration hit, it staggered him. It was like throwing all the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle up in the air and having it land assembled. He could see the whole thing now, had the picture. As improbable as it was, he could see it clearly.

  JieMin completely forgot where he was and tried to stand. He ended up dunking himself and came up spluttering.

  “JieMin, what is it? Did you have your integration?” ChaoLi asked.

  He looked at her, and she saw his eyes were filled with wonder, like a child seeing their first fireworks.

  “Oh, yes. I see it now. Clearly.”

  “See what, JieMin?”

  “I don’t think I can tell you.”

  She made a moue, and he chuckled.

  “Don’t tell me you haven’t kept family secrets from me,” he said.

  ChaoLi couldn’t argue with that. She had been involved with the family’s finances now for almost twenty years, and she never discussed her work with JieMin.

  He pulled her to him in the water and kissed her.

  “I need to see Chen Zufu.”

  “Right now?”

  “Right now.”

  “Well, let’s go.”

  They packed up the debris from their lunch and walked back down the beach to the bus stop. While they were waiting for the bus, JieMin suddenly grabbed at the railing and staggered as if he would fall.

  “JieMin?” ChaoLi asked.

  JieMin shook his head and looked at her.

  “Sorry. Major aftershock.”

  Once on the bus, JieMin sent on ahead a request for an immediate meeting with Chen Zufu and Chen Zumu. Then he looked for the video of Matt Chen-Jasic announcing the coup d’etat by which he had overthrown the Kendall regime on Arcadia over seventy years before.

  And there it was: ‘The strange sequence of events started the day before yesterday, Tuesday, when I anonymously received the bank and communications records of the chairman and the council.’

  JieMin now had all the pieces, knew what had been covered up and, for the most part, why.

  What to do about it was another issue entirely.

  Revelation

  When ChaoLi and JieMin got home, they put on lavalavas and flip-flops, then JieMin went off to his meeting with Chen Zumu and Chen Zufu.

  When JieMin was shown into Chen Zufu’s tea room, MinChao and Jessica were seated on pillows before the great teak-beamed doorway that led out into the gardens.

  “Please be seated, JieMin,” MinChao said, waving to the pillow opposite them.

  “Begging your pardon, Chen Zufu, but it is important that no recording be made of this meeting. In fact, I would much rather hold the meeting out in the gardens.”

  “Why, JieMin?”

  But JieMin said nothing, only shaking his head.

  MinChao shrugged.

  “Very well.”

  MinChao and Jessica stood. One of them apparently sent instructions in their heads-up display, because MinChao’s tea girl and several other young people showed up and picked up their pillows, carrying them out into the garden ahead of them.

  Two young men were unrolling a large bamboo mat in the center of the gardens, at the intersection of the major gravel walkways. The pillows were placed on the mat.

  “Is this better, JieMin?”

  “Yes, Chen Zufu. Thank you.”

  MinChao waved to the pillow as before, and MinChao and Jessica sat on their pillows. JieMin waited for them to sit, then sat facing them.

  MinChao’s tea girl adjusted quickly to
the change in venue. She served them all tea and then withdrew without a word.

  JieMin looked around.

  “I have dismissed everyone in the gardens for an hour, JieMin,” MinChao said. “We are alone.”

  “Thank you, Chen Zufu.”

  MinChao waved a hand to JieMin, giving him permission to proceed.

  “You know that I was set to the task of finding the other colonies as part of the hyperspace project. If we have hyperspace ships, where will we go with them? I thought this would be an easy exercise, for, even if we were not told where they are, their locations must be in the colony records.

  “But they are not. They are nowhere to be found. Now, if they had simply not told us, not made it public, that would be one thing. But they are not anywhere in the archives. That goes beyond mere reticence. I concluded their locations were deliberately hidden.

  “That got me to wondering what else might have been hidden. I started to look into the accounting records of the project.”

  “Follow the money. Always a good strategy,” Jessica said.

  “Indeed, Chen Zumu.

  “In reviewing the accounting records, I found things I couldn’t explain. I asked ChaoLi for help, and JongJu sent MinWan and her team of accountants to help me. I showed them what I was seeing and what I was looking for. What was being hidden? They spent three weeks in this analysis.”

  MinChao’s eyebrows went up.

  “Three weeks? Did they find anything?”

  “They found that many of the companies involved in the colony project were false fronts, and many of the people involved were false identities. In particular, they found that Anthony Lake and Donald Shore were false identities.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense, JieMin,” Jessica said. “Why use false identities? They are a lot of work to build and maintain.”

  “Yes, Chen Zumu. That was my question. But the accountants could not account for motives, only for what was done. And hundreds of companies and thousands of individuals were completely fabricated. I verified this with the image analysis software we discussed on Tuesday. All the pictures of people involved on the project were constructed images. Even mission control was a figment. Such a room might not even have existed.

  “And it always leads back to why. I had an integration this afternoon, and I believe I know why.

  “One of the things the accounting team found was that billions of credits of project money went into a computer project of Bernd Decker.”

  “Was he the Decker of the Decker Architecture in computer science, JieMin?” Jessica asked.

  That’s right, JieMin remembered. While Chen Zufu had a financial background, Chen Zumu had a technical background.

  “Yes, Chen Zumu. One and the same. He had a big computer project on which the colony project spent billions of credits, but nothing was ever published. No reports were made. As near as I can tell, the computer architecture he was working on was never disclosed.”

  “How big of a project, JieMin?”

  “Two hundred and fifty thousand multiprocessor blades.”

  “My God,” Jessica said. “I think the biggest computer on Arcadia is two hundred and fifty blades.”

  “Yes. Which explains how all the work creating and maintaining thousands of false identities was done. How all the fake videos were created. They used a huge computer to do all that work.”

  “That, finally, makes sense,” MinChao said.

  “Yes, Chen Zufu. But there are two more pieces of the puzzle. The computer project was called the Joint Autonomous Neural Intelligence Computation Engine, or JANICE, and Janice Quant was also a false identity.”

  “You can’t mean–“ Jessica started.

  JieMin nodded.

  “Bernd Decker was successful beyond his wildest dreams. He created a computer so powerful, it masqueraded as thousands of individuals, ran the colony project, invented the Lake-Shore Drive, and served as chairman of the World Authority. This is what they were trying to keep secret.”

  MinChao and Jessica sat stunned. They turned and looked at each other, then back to JieMin.

  “And I think Janice Quant still lives,” he said.

  JieMin looked back and forth between them. Jessica finally shook herself.

  “After a hundred and twenty years, JieMin?”

  “Such an entity would not be limited to its original hardware platform, Chen Zumu. It has probably upgraded itself several times. But it was certainly alive seventy years ago.”

  “Explain, please,” MinChao said.

  “When Matthew Chen-Jasic overthrew the Kendall regime, he noted that he had been anonymously provided with the bank records and communications records of Kendall and the ruling council. I believe those records were provided to him by Janice Quant. No one on Arcadia could have accessed those records and written them into Chen Zufu’s account, but Janice Quant could have engineered herself a back door into the colony computers, which she loaded.”

  “But that would mean Janice Quant also has faster-than-light communications,” Jessica said.

  “If one can send huge buildings instantaneously across thousands of light-years, can one not send electrons, Chen Zumu?”

  MinChao looked at Jessica, and she nodded.

  “Of course,” she said. “But that means there is a transmitter in this system.”

  “Yes, Chen Zumu. And it also means a recording of this meeting stored in your computer records would likely be accessible to Janice Quant.”

  “Who would then know we knew her secret,” MinChao said, nodding.

  “Yes, Chen Zufu. Which is why I asked for this meeting in complete security. I’m not sure we want Janice Quant to know that we know about her.”

  Jessica nodded.

  “Yet all we know about this computer entity was that she acted on our side, JieMin. She supplied and transported the colony in the first place, and intervened to overthrow a government gone astray.”

  “Yes, Chen Zumu. Perhaps those actions served some other purpose, however, and other actions to serve that other purpose may not be so benevolent. Without knowing the actual motives of this entity, I think we cannot be sure which applies.”

  “I understand, JieMin. Well, it is a pretty puzzle you have brought to us. Let us think on this. What will you be doing now?”

  “I still do not know where the other colonies are, Chen Zumu. I also do not understand why they were hidden. This seems to be part of some other subterfuge than hiding the results of the computer project.”

  “Very well, JieMin,” MinChao said. “Come back to us when you have more to report.”

  “Of course, Chen Zufu.”

  After JieMin left, MinChao and Jessica remained in the garden for a bit.

  “Do you think he’s right?” MinChao asked.

  “Oh, yes. MinYan assigned FangTao and his group and JieLing and her group to work on this problem. That’s a lot of horsepower, so we know the accounting findings are correct.”

  “And JieMin’s insight? His conclusions?”

  “I think we have to assume he’s right. First, he’s never been wrong on a major insight before, and he has a long track record. Second, none of it makes sense until you consider his answer. Why spend all that time on false identities? To hide that it’s all being done by a computer. Or rather, by a true artificial intelligence.”

  MinChao snorted.

  “It just all seems so fantastical.”

  “And having the entire colony transported here in an instant, three thousand light-years from Earth, is not?”

  MinChao held up his hands, conceding the point.

  “The big question now is, What do we do about it?” MinChao asked. “And I guess underlying that is whether or not we trust Janice Quant.”

  “I don’t know. I need to think about it. She’s never been anything but a positive with regard to Arcadia.”

  MinChao nodded.

  “As far as we know, at least. I’d feel better if I knew why the other colonies’ locat
ions were hidden. We still don’t know the why of that.”

  “Yes, but JieMin is working on it. We’ll see what he comes up with.”

  MinChao nodded.

  “He certainly does come up with the strangest things.”

  “All of which prove out,” Jessica said.

  “Yes, there is that.”

  For JieMin’s part, he didn’t quite know where to start. He was convinced now that the colony locations had been deliberately obscured and he was unlikely to be able to find them. There was very little chance, given that a massive computer entity like Janice Quant was involved, that someone had slipped somewhere and the colony locations were in the colony project records.

  Instead, JieMin went back to Janice Quant’s statement on her inauguration as World Authority Chairman: ‘Set mankind on a more secure footing against a global catastrophe.’

  When JieMin got back to the office on Monday, he entered ‘global catastrophe’ in his search terms and started auditing materials in the vast library of humanity’s written records.

  After several days, he added the search term ‘racial extinction event.’

  The First Hyperspace Ship

  Karl Huenemann had learned one thing in the bureaucracy: You should always be ready to spend money if the budget comes through. As a consequence, he had his shopping list for the new hyperspace probe ready for the staff meeting that Friday after ChaoLi told him Chen Zufu had given her the go-ahead.

  Now, three weeks and change later, parts were coming in. The government had given the project priority in the queues for the factories that churned out the commercial and consumer products Arcadians used every day. The biggest piece to arrive so far – and the one they needed first – was the ladder frame, the spine of the ship.

  For ship it would be, not just a probe. The other big piece that had come in was the cockpit part of the cabin, a modification of the standard large-shuttle cockpit. Two primary seats, for pilot and co-pilot, with a pair of jump seats behind. The cockpit for now was set to one side. Mounting all the hardware on the frame would be first.