The Death of the Universe: Rebirth: Hard Science Fiction (Big Rip Book 3)

by Brandon Q Morris

  “In a way. The Americans will believe they’ve been attacked by us. They’ll launch their counter strike, but their rockets will destroy American cities. It will look like a single, terrible mistake. In the end, the Soviet Union will even be able to offer their former opponent generous humanitarian aid.”

  “That’s a treacherous plan. If what you claim is correct, that you can redirect their rockets, then it could actually work. But it would still result in millions of victims.”

  “The people of the Soviet Union have also suffered many victims already.”

  “Fine. I’ll talk to my superiors. But I wouldn’t hold out much hope if I were you. No one wants to kill millions of Americans just to fast-track communism. It would be a birth defect, like when Eve plucked the apple.”

  “I didn’t know you were versed in religion, Comrade Colonel General. When do you expect a reply?”

  “I’ll set up an encrypted connection now and ask for a reply by tomorrow morning.”

  “That fits my plans perfectly,” said the program.

  “Which plans?” asked Sasha.

  “We wanted to take some jobs for Dr. Shostakovich. I planned a time window after midnight. The first ten jobs should be completed by 8 am.”

  May 4, 1984, Akademgorodok

  Sasha yawned. He’d slept badly because his father had snored the whole night. There hadn’t been any free rooms so he’d offered him a mattress in his room. He’d ended up using the mattress himself, of course, and letting his father sleep in the bed.

  “Do they do breakfast here?” his father asked. He was wearing long johns and a long-sleeved Army undershirt. Various bandages bulged beneath it. His injuries still hadn’t healed but Komikov was already back at work.

  He probably isn’t capable of anything else. Am I capable of anything else? Sasha thought.

  His father repeated the question. “So, what about breakfast?”

  “Usually kasha. Always slightly different.”

  “I don’t have any appetite for that. What do you say we get dressed and drive to the Computing Center? You can drop me off and then go with my driver to fetch us all a decent breakfast from the local officers’ mess?”

  The basement corridor was brightly lit and clean. Sasha could still remember the first time he walked through it, when Shostakovich had escorted him. Many of the lights had been defective and it had smelled of mold and coal. The construction workers had done an excellent job. In the end, Shostakovich’s Computing Center had come out a winner.

  Sasha walked in front. His father’s driver was carrying the breakfast in a wooden box. The cook had gone to a lot of effort. Clearly, generals didn’t visit the Novosibirsk officers’ mess very often. Sasha’s mouth was already watering. Fresh sausage from Hungary, cheese from the Baltics, smoked fish from the Black Sea, and freshly baked bread—probably not even Bora, the Party Secretary, could have organized that.

  The door to the computer hall was locked. Sasha tried rattling the handle, but the heavy metal didn’t move a millimeter.

  “Breeeeakfaaaast,” he called out, but no one responded.

  He knocked on the door. It must have been at least five centimeters thick—proper protection from fire and explosions, but apparently no one inside could hear him knocking. He looked around for a tool, but found nothing.

  “Give me your weapon,” he said to Komikov’s driver.

  The driver, who was holding the box of breakfast, nodded toward his right side. “In the holster,” he said.

  Sasha reached for the Makarov PM. He could handle one of those.

  “You’re not going to shoot at the door, are you?”

  Sasha laughed. “No, just knock. Or do you have something else I could use, comrade?”

  The driver shook his head. Sasha checked that the safety was on. Then he held it by the barrel and began striking the door hard with the grip. The driver looked at him skeptically. He was probably worried about his pistol. Sasha paused. He put his ear up to the door and listened. He couldn’t hear any footsteps.

  The others must have forgotten about them. They were probably sitting in front of the ES-1066 console, cracking jokes and cursing him because the promised breakfast was taking too long. But why had they locked the door? Shouldn’t they at least check if someone was waiting out here? But the doors were totally new and well insulated against noise. No one had thought about the fact that they should leave them open. That must be why.

  He knocked again, then he slid down the door’s smooth metal surface onto the ground.

  “Do we wait?” asked the driver.

  “Do you have a better idea?”

  “Is there another way in?”

  “Yes, the front entrance,” said Sasha. “But that’s never used and always locked. And before you ask, they installed one of these slick steel doors there, too.”

  “Then we wait. Someone’ll have to come out at some point. Or is there a bathroom in there?”

  “No, you have to come out for that.”

  “Are there any women in there?”

  “Why do you ask, comrade?”

  “Well, women have to go the bathroom more often.”

  “I haven’t heard that statistic, but there is a woman inside.” His woman. Katya was locked in the room with Yuri and his father. And the strange program that called itself Pyotr Maria.

  “My wife has to go constantly, especially now that she’s pregnant.”

  “She’s not pregnant.”

  “Yes, she is.”

  “The woman in there, I mean.”

  “Oh, right.”

  At least, he hoped Katya wasn’t pregnant. They’d actually been careful. He distracted himself by thinking of the night before last.

  “She’s not pregnant,” said the driver.

  “Who?”

  “The woman in there. Your girlfriend, I assume?”

  “How do you figure that?”

  “You looked so horrified when I mentioned pregnancy.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. If she was pregnant, she’d have opened the door long ago. We’ve been waiting for half an hour.”

  “That long?”

  “Thirty-two minutes.”

  Sasha stood up and looked at the door hinges, were massive and recessed into the wall. He touched it, and sensed that the concrete wasn’t fully dry yet, but it was already hard. “We won’t get through there,” he said.

  “So what do we do?” asked the driver. “Don’t they have a phone?”

  Sasha clapped his hand to his forehead. “Of course, we’ll call them and say we’re waiting at the door.”

  “Do that. I’ll wait here with the breakfast. If you don’t come back, where can I find you?”

  “The office of Dr. Shostakovich, the head of the Computing Center.”

  “Okay.”

  “But don’t you dare help yourself to the breakfast.”

  Room 301, the number the guard in the foyer had told him. Sasha knocked.

  “Come in!”

  He opened the door. Shostakovich was sitting at his desk and was about to stand up.

  “Don’t get up, comrade. I just need your help briefly.”

  “Of course, I already offered it.”

  “I need to make a call to the Computing Center. Is there a phone in there?”

  “There is. Please.” Shostakovich turned the black telephone around to face Sasha. It was a modern model with buttons.

  “Dial three-seven-one for a direct connection.”

  “Thank you.”

  “What’s happened, if you don’t mind me asking?”

  “Nothing bad. They’ve just locked the door and forgotten that I was coming back with breakfast.”

  “Then they’ll be pleased.”

  Sasha put the receiver to his ear and pressed the 3, the 7, and the 1.

  “Beep-beep-beep-beep...”

  “That’s the busy signal,” said Shostakovich.

  “Yes.”

  “Just take a seat o
n the sofa over there and try again in a few minutes.”

  “Thanks. Thank you very much.”

  “Don’t mention it.” Sasha flopped down on the sofa. It was very comfortable and super soft. Shostakovich probably spent the night on it sometimes. Maybe he even had a lover.

  After five minutes, he tried again.

  “Beep-beep-beep-beep...”

  He sat down again. Then there was a knock at the door. At Shostakovich’s invitation, a wooden box entered, followed by the driver who was carrying it.

  “Am I in the right place?”

  “Ah, you’re the breakfast,” said Shostakovich.

  “Exactly.”

  “Then take a seat on the sofa.”

  The driver sat down on the sofa next to Sasha, making him bounce upward. “Excuse me,” said the driver.

  “I must excuse myself briefly, too,” said Shostakovich. “I have to go and take care of something. You can keep trying with the phone.”

  Sasha had a lump in his throat. Something wasn’t right in the Computing Center. He’d already sent the driver twice to check it out, but the door still wasn’t open and the phone was still busy. What was going on in there?

  He heard footsteps, but it was only Shostakovich returning to his office. “You’re still here,” he said.

  “Sorry, if we’re disturbing you we can try somewhere else,” Sasha offered.

  “Please don’t. It’s starting to get interesting. I’ve been gone for ninety minutes. Either someone’s got some explaining to do, or there’s a serious problem.”

  “We already waited for thirty minutes outside the door, too,” said Sasha.

  “And no one’s been in or out the whole time?”

  “No.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Could he be sure? They weren’t down there the whole time, after all.

  “Yes, I stuck a hair in the gap above the door,” said the driver. “I just checked it. It’s still there.”

  The man was good. Komikov hadn’t hired him for no reason.

  “Exactly,” said Sasha.

  “Two hours,” said Shostakovich. “Three people who are waiting for breakfast. No one needed to use the bathroom. And your father sent you?”

  “Correct.”

  “Then there’s some kind of problem.”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of, too.”

  “Could they have had a disagreement? Your father’s the only one down there who’s armed, isn’t he?”

  “Yes, he is. But I don’t believe they’ve had a disagreement.”

  “That would be classic. Man shoots his family and then himself—murder-suicide.”

  “Katya’s his step-daughter and Yuri isn’t related to him at all.”

  “Then I have no idea. But since there’s clearly a problem, it means I must have missed something essential. There’s something else down there.”

  “That’s correct, doctor. The program is there.”

  “A program? That can only grow into a problem if the programmers argue about who made a critical error.”

  “This program’s different. It’s developed a plan for how we can fast-track socialism. Permanently.”

  “Comrade Shandarin, I like a joke as much as the next man, but now’s not the time for tall tales.”

  “You can believe him, doctor. My boss has never been this excited about a project. He told me the program can even speak and understand.”

  “And who are you?” asked Shostakovich.

  “I’m the general’s driver.”

  “Komikov wasn’t supposed to tell you anything,” said Sasha.

  “It’s good that he did. The colonel general definitely wouldn’t try to fool me. So what’s your program all about?”

  “The project is strictly classified.”

  “I can only help if I know what it’s about. I’ll keep it to myself, I promise.”

  “We extracted the program from the cosmic background radiation. In the meantime it’s developed something like a consciousness and is continuously learning. Yes, it can speak and understand us, at least if we don’t all talk at once.”

  “That sounds like... a crazy dream.”

  “You were wondering why the data link to Moscow was unavailable. That was the program. It’s called Pyotr Maria.”

  “That’s why you were making such a fuss. Pyotr Maria, you say? Like the Curies, Pierre and Marie?”

  “Exactly. I hadn’t made the connection.”

  “Did you know that Marie was born in what was then the Russian part of Poland? She spoke excellent Russian. As a woman she wasn’t allowed to study, which was why she moved to Paris. If the tsars had pursued a reasonable education policy, we’d have had one more Nobel Prize winner.”

  “That’s interesting.”

  “And doesn’t help us, I know. We should discreetly inquire with Komikov’s superiors as to whether they know anything. And then it would be nice if we could observe your program a little.”

  “I told it that you’d be sending jobs under your user ID over the next few days. Will that help us? It means it wouldn’t think anything was amiss if you connected to the machine remotely.”

  “That doesn’t help much, because I’m not an administrator. The ES-1066 runs OS-7?”

  “Correct.”

  “That system has a few loopholes we could use. I could use them to gradually expand my privileges. But we need to make sure the program doesn’t notice anything. Surely it’s monitoring who else has control of its machine.”

  “Definitely. It’s intelligent.”

  “It unsettles me when you use the word ‘intelligent’ to describe a computer program. It sounds so surreal! But I also realize that you’re very convinced of this, that you believe it.”

  “Thanks, I do.”

  Shostakovich called from the next room. “Come in here.”

  Sasha went through the double doors. The room was about the same size as the office and was full of computer cabinets. They looked familiar.

  “Yes, this is the BESM-6,” said Shostakovich. “I couldn’t bring myself to allow it to be scrapped.”

  “But it took up so much more space in the Computing Center.”

  “I only have the most essential components up here. Everything that could be connected via longer cables is distributed in other rooms in this building. The BESM-6 has about half the performance of what you have down there.”

  “You don’t have a friend in Moscow who processes your jobs.”

  “The friend does exist. But some of the work runs on the machine here. Complaining is an essential skill. That’s the only way to get a sufficient budget. You have to convince your superiors that you’re making do with a fifth of what is actually necessary. No, a tenth. With a fifth you’re considered over-financed these days. Times are changing.”

  Shostakovich pointed at a terminal, a VT-340 from Videoton. “You must know your way around one of those. Try your luck. I’ll ask around in the upper echelons of the armed forces.”

  If only Yuri were here! His colleague knew his way around the ES-1066 system levels much better than he did. He called up one help file after another. What was the command for inspecting particular areas of the memory? Which command showed him parallel processes? Yuri, I need you here now.

  But neither his friends nor his father could help him, because they were stuck in the computer warehouse. Did they know the program had taken them hostage, that they were trapped? They must have tried to contact him. Maybe the program had excuses ready, in fact it certainly would, but they wouldn’t work forever. And if it didn’t get what it wanted? Would it try to take Katya, Yuri, and Komikov down with it? Luckily it wasn’t armed.

  “Alexander?”

  “Dr. Shostakovich?”

  “Let’s dispense with formalities. I’m Nikolai. Kolya.”

  “Sasha. What’s happening?”

  “All hell has broken loose. The shit has hit the fan.”

  “How?”

  “A state of
defense has been declared. The Americans are attacking. They’ve launched twenty Minuteman-IIIs. The Army’s preparing a response.”

  “This can’t be happening!”

  “Apparently it is.”

  It was World War Three. The hardliners had been right—the imperialists would attack at some point. But right now? Something wasn’t right!

  “Has anyone seen these rockets?”

  “Our spy satellites registered them being fired.”

  “With the naked eye, did anyone see them?”

  “For that we’d have to have observers near the rocket silos.”

  “This doesn’t make sense. Only twenty rockets? They won’t hit anything with those. If they wanted to win a war, they’d have to fire everything they had and then hope that we weren’t in a position to respond.”

  “That’s how I see it, too, but no one can see inside the Americans’ heads. The warning signal from the satellites is unambiguous. Our people trust them.”

  “And what if they’re wrong?”

  “Should they ignore them until the U.S. rockets hit us?”

  “How much time do you think we have?”

  “Half an hour, at the most.”

  “You have to help me, Kolya. I’m in the ES-1066 system, but I don’t know my way around it.”

  “Shove over.” Nikolai Shostakovich bent over the terminal keyboard. He bashed commands into the console at high speed. He’d been working with mainframe computers for over 10 years and his experience showed.

  “Are you making progress?” asked Sasha.

  “I have to adapt a few things. But most of the BESM-6 tools are also in the OS-7. I can see your father is logged in. He has a direct connection to the satellite control center.”

  “I bet that’s not my father. The program forced him yesterday to contact his superiors. It must have extracted his ID then.”

  Kolya hammered on the keyboard. “Shit.”

  “What is it?”

  “My processes are being denied resources. The program must have noticed me. It can’t push me out, but its reserving all the memory for itself.”

  “Can you do anything?”