Nucleation

by Kimberly Unger

  “I wanted to show you this bit first. Mira and Bright had the sense to send back snaps before the interference could get started.”

  Helen stared at the image that floated in front of her, trying to pick out the detail Dougal had his stubby finger on.

  “Okay, so these guys look like our eenies right?” Dougal continued with barely a slowdown.

  In the image, the microscopic clusters of silvery robots littered a pockmarked surface. The extreme magnification made them look as large as discarded sneakers on a badly mown lawn. There were thousands of them in-frame, many of them clumped together, whip-like flagella locked as if holding hands.

  “Those are the Hoovers. Their job is to collect and package materials.” Helen’s knowledge of the eenies that went into the making of the Golfball had improved over the past few weeks.

  “That’s what it looks like.” Dougal adjusted the magnification with a flick of his wrist. “We’ve been operating under the assumption that the software developed an error somewhere along the line.” He swept a hand from right to left, bringing up the next image in the sequence. He repeated the gesture, jumping from page to page in the ever-growing report until he found what he was looking for. “And it had to be something higher up in the programming, because it affected more than one class of eenie.”

  Helen pulled up the relevant data and checked the comments.

  “Right, but Far Reaches hasn’t been able to replicate the error on our end,” Helen responded carefully. “So far . . .”

  “So far we’ve been working just off your report, which, to be honest, was a little bit out there. But this mission got us access to the code currently being run by those broken Hoovers.”

  “So the working theory is that the eenie instructions got a bit flipped when we passed them through the wormhole back at mission start a few years ago?” Helen frowned and tapped the image with a fingernail. “The same error across enough of them to cause this? Seems a bit of a stretch.”

  “Less of a stretch than your alien theory,” Dougal chided.

  Helen winced. She hadn’t actually floated an alien theory, but Beauchamp had gotten a copy of the mission report. Give that asshole a one-liner she could get her teeth into and she’d flog it for effect for weeks. It was starting to grate on Helen.

  “BUT,” the analyst continued, “look at this!” Dougal isolated a few strings of the output code to make his point. “They ran into something. This piece here, this has re-tasked the eenies. They’re not building the Golfball any longer, they’re rebuilding it.”

  The eenies were supposed to construct the Golfball from available materials. Once done, they boxed themselves up to wait until Far Reaches told them what to do next. The code Dougal was showing her said that the Golfball had experienced massive levels of damage and had to be repaired. Constantly repaired. The eenies had never had the chance to shut down.

  “Now this is pretty weird, because this is not the result of a bit error.” Dougal continued enthusiastically. “This is a reaction to external stimuli of some kind, so we’re not looking at all those eenies going rogue. And if they’re not broken, that means we can get them back under control again. I saw the suggestions you sent Mira while the mission was live. We need more of those if we’re going to get back out there,” Dougal continued on. “The fact that the interference in the Feed is something we can actively track is a key element. We won’t get caught by surprise again. There’s a bucketload of unknowns in play already; we need more data so we can put those in the ‘knowns’ bucket instead.”

  “So how do we do all this?”

  “We start by pulling apart the code Mira and Bright sent back, figure out what happened to our eenies. The eenie lab is in orbit and due to be decommissioned anyway, so if we do bring back an uncontrollable replication event with that code, it will be easier to contain. None of that stuff’s getting down here.”

  Helen rocked back on her heels, considering. “So our own eenies are breaking the Golfball down and rebuilding it? That doesn’t make sense. Why would they rebuild over and over again?”

  “Well, we need to get back out there and get more data to know for sure.”

  The question of why the NAVs were the ones affected by the sound in the Feed remained unresolved. Helen would have preferred that this first mission back to the Golfball answer the question of why Ted had come away with his brains jellied while Helen had little more than panic attacks. Still, one step closer was one step closer.

  “How familiar are you with Catherine Beauchamp?” Dougal asked offhandedly. Helen cast him a glance. The analyst had thrown the report up onto larger screens that covered the far wall, spreading out the pages so he could move between them faster. His stubby fingers moved quickly, flicking all the reports into order.

  “Familiar?” The question seemed odd. Maybe Analysis didn’t really have a handle on the underpinnings in Flight Ops.

  “Mira and Bright have asked to be pulled off the project, so your Keller is working on lining up a replacement team. Beauchamp put a direct request to me to transfer over.”

  Helen spent a long moment in silence before speaking, then decided to choose the high road. As much as she and Beauchamp might be in conflict, the woman had skills. If it had just been Beauchamp, Helen probably wouldn’t have batted an eye at letting her rival OP take on a risk like the Golfball. However, it wasn’t just Cat. Her NAV would be taking the risk as well. Helen didn’t have it in her to make Beauchamp’s NAV pay the price. Making an end-run around Keller though, that was a bit weird . . . Well, it fits Beauchamp’s personality.

  “Beauchamp is a skilled operator, but she should have gone through Keller first,” she said carefully, measuring her words.

  “Keller thinks she’s interested because she wants to show you up. She wanted the launch mission, and now she’s got a chance to show everyone why it should have gone to her,” Dougal replied.

  Ah, so Dougal did check with Keller.

  “Hell, now that I know what I know, I’m pissed she didn’t get the launch mission,” Helen said a little sourly.

  “Think she could have done better?”

  Helen paused again. That’s a loaded question now, isn’t it? Hofstaeder’s words about why Helen had been put on Dougal’s team still hung fresh in her memory.

  “Does it matter? I can’t fault her skills, but you’ll need to be very clear with her protocols. She doesn’t make good decisions working fast outside the box.”

  “We’ve got the opening, it’s going to need to be filled.”

  “Yeah, and I can’t get back out there if I don’t have a NAV,” Helen snorted. “But don’t think for a second Beauchamp’s going to be an easy one to manage.”

  “I’ll keep it in mind.” Dougal turned his attention back to the records hanging in the Insight space. Helen got the sense that a checkbox had been ticked off. It was almost like Dougal had promised to talk to Helen and now that the requirement had been met, the conversation could turn. She’d have to ask Keller about it later.

  Helen eyeballed the eighty pages of mission data that she and Keller had been working on. The images were grainy. Nothing to be done there. The magnification had been cranked down so tight that the latticework of the carbon fiber control panel was clearly visible in minute lines and crosses.

  “The camera sucks,” Helen said.

  “We’re just working with what Ivester built into the waldo.”

  “So what exactly do we expect to see in these?” Helen reached up and zoomed the image out, a dizzying move that made her feel briefly ill. “Look, here’s the dust from the mission reports.” The surfaces on the console were smooth, but the crisp edges of the detail were all muddied, like the silted-over forms at the bottom of a river.

  “Those are the eenie castings you talked about in your initial report.” Dougal selected a second image and suspended it in the air. This one
showed an even denser concentration of dust, puddled in the corners, the lines, in the control surfaces inside the Golfball.

  “You know how engineering likes to bogart resources. All these castings should have been used up by the time the Golfball neared completion,” Helen pointed out.

  “If something interrupted the building process, the eenies would just shut themselves down,” Dougal said, selecting a third image, this time examining a cutaway section where construction had just stopped. Helen had seen eenie building errors before—they were fuzzy, like tufted fleece, and sometimes poetic lattices were formed, delicate square tiles and gossamer fingers. What was on the screen now looked nothing like that. This was not an error in creation; this was a reduction. The edges were sharply cut, nibbled away as if by the teeth of minuscule rats.

  First built up and then chewed back down again, Helen realized.

  “Dougal, are you seeing this?” Helen shuffled through, eyeballing thousands of defunct shells that drifted and fetched up in the corners. They overlapped like fish scales, making little moiré patterns that danced in the camera image.

  “Wait. Go back.” Dougal took over the Insight. “See that there?” He slid the image back and hit the magnification to dial in on something Helen had missed.

  There, among the loops and whorls of the discarded shells, was a tiny spot of color. Color was expensive; color would cost molecules that could be put to better use elsewhere. Everything developed, designed, and released into the wild by Far Reaches was a million different shades of grey.

  Helen’s heart skipped a beat. The color seemed to shimmer and shift as the computer zoomed in. She knew what it was. She’d forgotten, or maybe she had lost it in the rush and rumble of the mission drop-out. The chattering pressure in her head whispered, words that were just out of reach, but she ignored it, pushed it back, and focused on that tiny bright patch.

  She saw it move. Between one frame and the next. Just a twitch, just a single motion like an asteroid skipping. Just enough to know it was there. Helen took a deep, ragged breath and for a moment she was back in the crippled waldo, feeling the nibbling at her fingertips and joints.

  “Shit. Helen. We have to show these to Ivester,” Dougal said breathlessly. “I think we’ve found our saboteur.”

  With an effort of will Helen pushed the memories back, reasserted her focus. It went a little easier each time, every time she had a bit more of herself back a little more quickly. Dougal opened another image in the series, giving James the parameters to look for. The computer identified even more tiny spots, more than a dozen. Nothing major until Helen opened the fifth and sixth images.

  The screen erupted in thousands of points of color.

  Around them the room fell silent as one by one the others caught note of what Dougal and Helen were examining and came over to look.

  “Helen. This is important,” Dougal breathed. “This is . . . this is unprecedented. If we can prove who designed these little scales . . . We have to get back out there.”

  “What do you think I’ve been saying all this time?”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Helen’s original sketches had been recalled and thrown back up on the whiteboard wall as a starting point, but they had already been forgotten. Dougal had placed the sequence of images Helen had found in Mira and Bright’s data alongside and clicked through them, one at a time. The motion was clear to everyone. The room full of analysts and engineers was silent except for the hum of climate control.

  “Play that again.” Ivester’s voice cut through the silence.

  Click.

  Click.

  Click.

  The images that Mira and Bright sent back somehow managed to convey a level of chaos that Helen’s hand-drawn sketches had missed. The precise edges of the eenie shells showed up against the background in sharp relief. Greys and whites predominated until the third frame, when one of the supposedly dead eenies extended a brightly colored leg. Followed by another. The full set was only fifteen frames in total, but it had rendered the room completely silent.

  At the back of the room, Ivester removed his glasses and tapped them thoughtfully on the palm of one hand.

  “It would appear,” he said carefully, “that we are not the only ones interested in our little orphan star.”

  The chatter began low as the engineers started talking in twos and threes. Helen stared at the now familiar intruder. Whatever they were, they had hollowed out the eenies, wearing their skins like hermit crabs. Mira and Bright had found exactly the right thing to turn the conversation from “OP gone crazy” to “industrial sabotage.”

  “So what we have here, ladies and gentlemen,” Ivester said to the room, “is a nano-machine of unknown origin. These stills are from the images that NAV Mira had the presence of mind to take before the interference on the entanglement Feed began. It is still entirely possible that this is simply a variation our own designs.” He got to his feet and gestured to the images projected on the wall. “It’s still possible something went wrong during the eenie generation cascade. We need make sure we have exhausted that option first. But I don’t think I’m going out on a limb to suggest there might be something more exotic than a simple case of cascade failure. Industrial sabotage is now the top item on our list. This microscopic Scale,” Ivester placed quotes around the word with his fingertips, “has laid siege to our technology and we need to figure out exactly what is driving it.” He pinched at the air and one of the images zoomed in, filling the wall with a single, brightly colored Scale. “Ladies and gentlemen, we are hearing hoofbeats. While we need to make absolutely sure it’s not horses, unicorns are no longer off the table.”

  A hand shot up in the front of the room as the chatter began afresh.

  “Are we trying to keep a lid on this? The press, and our various partners, have been keeping pretty close tabs on all the data since the mission went off book.” It was Dr. Swati who spoke. Helen remembered her ice-cold acumen after the original debrief. She wasn’t wrong. Much as Helen had been suffering the slings and arrows of gossip and rumor among the members of flight operations, Far Reaches had been suffering the same on the public front. Tabloids and competitors spun all manner of theories as to why the project had suddenly gone dark.

  Ivester’s look of resignation was legendary. It lasted only a moment before being smoothed back over into the million-dollar smile, but it was clear he intended for the room to see it.

  “I will be sitting down with our liaisons after this meeting to go over our findings so far, but I’m not going to lie to you. Our relationship with pretty much everybody is going to need to evolve very aggressively in order to stay on top of the situation. As of right now, this still belongs to Far Reaches and damned if I’m going to let anybody take this project away from us.” He paused for dramatic effect. “I hope you all feel the same.”

  There was a smattering of applause at that. The room was filled with realists who knew full well that some of Far Reaches’ governmental strategic partners, notably absent, could steamroll them and take control. Their saving grace was that nobody knew the technology quite like Ivester’s team did. The bodies in this small, dimly lit conference room represented the single best source of information about the Line Drive project.

  Helen briefly felt a twinge of panic as she looked, really looked, at the people assembled in the room. Fewer than fifteen people. That wasn’t a lot of institutional memory to work with.

  Now you’re just being paranoid. It was infectious, this need to keep looking over one’s shoulder. This shit is way above your pay-grade. She cast a glance over at Ivester. He wouldn’t go down without a fight. The man practically shone with purpose. The distracted look that had plagued his features since Line Drive went pear-shaped was gone. In fact, his entire focus was here in this room; she couldn’t even spot the flicker of Insight in his heavy glasses.

  “Our next trip back out
will be in three days. Operator Helen Vectorovich is developing the protocols, so please be sure you copy her on all requests and questions.”

  A couple members of Flight Ops whooped at that; one held up a hand. Helen’s Insight tablet chimed and ID’d him as one of the coffin-tech team.

  “Do we have an answer about what happened to Vectorovich’s NAV on the first run-through?”

  His name was Ted. Helen’s whisper failed to reach her lips. Reminders of the Ted-shaped hole in her life still stung. It had been over a month already, and the rawness of the loss was gone, but reminders still caught her off guard with disturbing regularity.

  Ivester adjusted his glasses.

  “At this moment, the consensus is that NAV Theodore Westlake encountered quantum feedback due to problems with the communications array. The medical technologies team will present their findings to any interested parties on Wednesday, but those of you who need the details now can find the raw data available on the secure server. Just message Kaitlin in infrastructure for access.” Ivester shifted his gaze to encompass the entire room and continued, this time speaking to everyone.

  Helen appreciated Ivester calling Ted by name, rather than using any of the more distant stand-ins she’d been hearing around the building to avoid admitting he was dead.

  “The data we’ve collected suggests we have a five-minute window before the feedback kicks in. At four minutes and thirty seconds we will be triggering the exit protocols to give our flight team plenty of time to get out. Anything you want to do on this next mission out must be executable within that time window.”

  “Are we planning on tasking an AI to handle NAV for this mission? Would that allow for longer mission times?” Another question from Flight Ops.

  Helen held her breath as the room felt silent. They knew already that the answer would be no, but hearing it out loud would make everyone feel a whole lot better. Funny how most OPs weighted the risk to the NAV versus working with an AI partner. The odds of death would have to be a whole lot higher to convince most of them to switch.