Nucleation

by Kimberly Unger

  “I don’t think anybody in this room would agree with the idea that this should be handled by a machine. Even a Turing-certified unit like James will lack the interpretive nuance we may need,” Ivester responded. “However,” he held up a hand, “we will be using all of our not inconsiderable resources to help interpret and analyze the data as it comes back. The AI team will be kept in the loop at all times. That is all.”

  And that’s a hell of a lot, Helen reflected.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  “We are live, we are live, we are live.” Elliot’s voice filtered in over the speakers from a billion miles away.

  Helen forced herself to listen, to watch Elliot slowly pick his way through the protocols she’d put together with the Analysis team’s input. Unlike the nearly disastrous “secret” run Mira and Bright had taken weeks ago, this time the gallery was packed. Even support personnel who only had a vague reason to be present crowded the back of the room.

  Helen resisted the urge to move away from the Fishbowl window. This was on her now. She needed to set the example, to own her work. As much as she wanted to hide in the back of the room, it wasn’t a place she could afford to be, not if they were going to push this project forward. Not if she was going to get out to the Golfball any time soon.

  The soundproof windows between her and the Fishbowl lit up as the information from the waldo started to come down the line. The moment Elliot and Zai connected, the clock had started counting down. At the four-minute mark, the numbers would turn yellow, and with thirty seconds left, they’d go red. Easy enough to understand without thinking about it too hard. Nobody wanted to see it hit the five-minute mark.

  Watching the mission from this perspective, a billion miles away, Helen felt very much like she’d been bound up in a straitjacket. Unable to act, unable to affect anything in the room beyond. She clenched and unclenched her fists.

  Two deep breaths to curb her frustration and Helen focused her attention on the data coursing across the big screens, the ones thrown up on the far wall for the spectators. Graphs and charts and images designed to convey the mission information to the layperson. She idly wondered if James ever got bored dumbing everything down for all the observers.

  “So far, so good.” The low voice off her shoulder came from one of the coffin techs. He wasn’t assigned to this mission, but everyone wanted a look-see and people were sneaking their friends in.

  “Elliot’s got this,” she murmured back. She’d managed to wrangle a spot near the front window.

  “Is it really different?” he asked her quietly. “Running the spider waldo?”

  Helen pulled her attention away from the data and back to the conversation.

  “Not all that different. It’s more complex. There are more working parts than on a mole or a jackrabbit. But the setup is the same,” she replied.

  “Did you hear the second mission’s packet was finished? They’re firing it through the wormhole towards Cygnus Three at the end of the week.”

  The coffin techs, Helen reflected, were terrible gossips. Being closeted away, monitoring coffin life-support and systems for days at a time tended to make them hungry for information, even bad information.

  In the room beyond, Zai splayed his fingers out across his dome of touchscreens to issue instructions to the Golfball. In her mind’s eye she could see the inside of the capsule, mission parameters sliding in and out of vision like ghosts of past mistakes. The checklist popped on Zai’s screen. Helen could barely make it out from where she was standing. Short list.

  “Hey, Helen, you forgot to put the parking brake on.” Elliot’s voice filtered out over the room speakers. “That’s the last time I let you drive the new toys first.”

  The room chuckled, each OP adding their own particular note and cadence to the mix. Helen had no way to respond, even as Zai looked over his shoulder at her with a grin. Helen shook her head with a half-smile and flipped him the bird. Another chuckle from the room.

  “I think you’re going to have to pry the keys from her cold dead fingers, Elliot.” Zai turned his attention back to the console.

  “Oh man, too freaking soon.” Helen heard the tech behind her mutter under his breath. He wasn’t wrong, but it would never not be too soon and Elliot’s mind was a billion miles away. Helen wasn’t about to hold him accountable for the lapse in judgment.

  “Okay, checklist complete.” Elliot’s voice rang down the line. “This waldo is significantly diminished. Please see the report and advise.”

  The observation room seemed to grow warmer as the mission clock cycled through the numbers on the far wall.

  “Confirmed. Adjusting protocols.” Zai consulted one of the other techs in the room and gestured at Keller, who joined him at the console. From her side of the glass pane, Helen couldn’t hear what they were saying and she leaned closer, trying to catch a glimpse of their faces as they spoke. She couldn’t shake the feeling that something was coming. Something had already begun to go wrong, they simply hadn’t figured it out yet.

  Don’t be stupid. We’re ready for this.

  Helen resisted the urge to tap on the glass. The bodies in the gallery pressed just a little bit closer. Helen focused more closely to try and keep the slowly creeping feeling of panic at bay. She’d helped develop the protocols herself. She knew exactly what could be done with the tools they had. There was nothing out there that Elliot couldn’t handle.

  “Confirmed, new protocols have been set, begin at your discretion.” Elliot’s voice came over the intercom, and Keller and Ivester both moved away to focus on other tasks.

  The chattering pressure in Helen’s head lessened just a touch; the panic took a step back.

  “This is kind of a lame list, Vectorovich. Don’t you want me to do something cooler? Arm the cannons? Prepare to be boarded?” There was a touch of teasing in there. Helen ignored it, but she could feel the glances directed her way. Beauchamp had been running the rumor mill full-tilt in the off-hours. Helen’s original “ate the Golfball” comment had been turned into an all-out alien invasion. Helen knew if she bothered to respond, she’d waste all her time spiraling down a tide of ignored denials. She assured her friends that Beauchamp was mistaken and ignored the jabs and insults at the commissary. As a result, though, she’d been spending less time with Flight Ops and more with Analysis. It weighed on her. The longer she was off-rotation, the harder it was going to be to get back out there.

  Zai, to his credit, cast a wordless look over his shoulder to read the room behind him. Helen held her hands up to her face, framing her eyes with huge imaginary goggles like the eyes of a little grey alien. He gave her a thumbs-up to signal he’d keep the banter rolling. Anytime you had a mission with a casual audience, rather than just the higher-ups, it had the potential to become a show. Zai and Elliot were very good at putting on a show.

  “Sorry, Elliot,” Zai told his OP, “I can’t send you the secret protocols until after you get properly probed.”

  “You can keep those protocols under lock and key then, thank you very much. Okay, NAV, beginning the secondary list.” The room chuckled again. Beauchamp’s campaign to keep Helen on the outs with flight operations was starting to backfire.

  The displays on the far wall gave the layout of the Golfball as it was supposed to be with a glowing red dot showing the location of the spider near the middle. Helen was pretty sure Mira and Bright had ditched it out by the mite traps near the controls for the payload. Elliot’s current position was a long way from where he should have started.

  Helen had intended to stay offline. Her part was done, the protocols and checklists already in play. Flight control access codes, everybody’s access codes, were locked out to avoid any accidental crossovers between communications. Ivester wanted a clean run, no interference from her or anyone else watching. But it was her mission; she’d been buried in the minutiae of it for weeks. Helen couldn’t sha
ke the feeling that this detail was important. There were no wind currents in space, no one else had driven the waldo since Mira and Bright had abandoned it. It should have remained pretty damn close to where they left it. The shift was unanticipated. Neither Helen nor Dougal had thought to add checking simple elements like the waldo’s positioning to the checklists. It meant the shift might go unrecorded.

  Helen might be locked out of the command communication, but that didn’t mean she was locked out of everything. An Operator, any Operator, was far from useless as long as there was computer access handy. She composed a plain five-word sentence. Keller was offline, so any message would just sit in his accounts until end of mission. There had to be another way to get the idea in there other than just playing charades on this side of the window.

  Zai and Elliot were entangled, so neither was a good option anyway. Talking directly to them would be regarded as interference, helpful or not.

  A whisper in the ether caught her attention. She had been hearing them more clearly over the past few weeks, when she bothered to pay attention. Sensitivity to the building’s pervasive wireless network went with the job. All operators could pick up on the ghost of communications. As the chattering of panic in her head grew less overwhelming, Helen had realized that her sensitivity to the wireless networks had been dialed up to eleven.

  The whisper told her that Ivester had not closeted himself away from communications. The CTO had kept a line open, despite the protocols. That meant she could reach him through the communications system.

  Helen sent the note before she even finished her train of thought. Breaking protocol, she reminded herself. Interfering with the mission in progress, the voice in her head pointed out. Well, Almighty Ivester left himself open for it so . . . She could not shake the feeling that this was important, maybe critically important.

  Ivester approached Keller and the two exchanged words. Keller looked annoyed and the two disappeared back out of sight to one of the senior consoles. That may not have worked as well as you hoped. Helen stayed in her position close to the window, focused on the display data ahead.

  Elliot was on the move, the bright red tracking marker sliding across the map.

  “I wish they’d kept the spider,” the tech said.

  Helen glanced over. “The what?”

  “When you were on the first mission, someone in the control room had mapped in a spider to represent the waldo. Keller was officially pissed about it.”

  “I wish I’d seen that.”

  Officially pissed was code for, “Very cute, now knock it off.”

  “OP, can you hold position for a moment?”

  Helen refocused on the Fishbowl as Zai’s fingers drummed frantically on the console’s touchscreen.

  “Affirmative.”

  The data sheeting across the glass stuttered. Keller reemerged, no sign of Ivester. He spoke to Zai, pointing at the table readouts, but Helen couldn’t tell what they were discussing.

  “Okay, let’s return to protocol.” Zai’s tone was terse, clipped. Whatever Keller had said had taken the sparkle out of his attitude.

  “Affirmative, moving to confirm.”

  “Roger that.”

  The countdown passed the two-minute mark.

  The gallery began to clear out, people departing in ones and twos. The Entanglement, getting control of the waldo back again, that was the exciting part and now it was over. It was expected to be all data and long bouts of silence from here on in, nothing nearly as exciting as the potential for a spectacular failure.

  Helen rubbed sweaty palms on her hips and stayed near the window, staring into the Fishbowl. She could see the cramped interior of the Golfball in her mind, illuminated not for the benefit of the waldo, but so the cameras could send back a good clear record.

  “Looks like we still have a clean Feed. Moving to trigger Golfball reclamation and Phase II.”

  Elliot’s voice over the speaker brought Helen out of her mental spiral. Data reclamation was the big archive. It would start the process of retrieving every moment, every second of information that had gone into building the Golfball. Following that, the Golfball would be reconfigured and sent to join the payload at Otlyan23. As long as the interference didn’t kick in and corrupt the data, this mission was a success.

  “Roger that. Linking up to the Golfball mainframe to verify.” There was a long pause. “Hold please.”

  “Affirmative.”

  A smattering of applause had come from the remaining personnel in the observation room. A few high-fives and backslaps came her way and she gave as good as she got, putting up a grin for all to see. No matter what the follow-up, the core mission parameter had been achieved, which meant that phase three of Line Drive was one step closer to a go.

  “Hold please.”

  Helen pulled herself back from the congratulatory swell. That wasn’t Zai’s voice, that was the automated system. The soundproofing in the control room had kept her from noticing the tumult beyond the glass.

  “Hold, please.”

  Everyone was moving too quickly for Helen to get a look at Zai. The countdown on the screen had gone to red, the numbers passing 5:05 . . . 5:06 . . .

  “Hold, please.”

  Oh gods, not again. Helen held her breath.

  No word from Elliot, nothing that Helen could hear over the speakers, just the flat, slightly scratchy sound of the recorded warning.

  “Hold, please.”

  She stood, helpless outside the glass, debating whether she should signal the medical team. She couldn’t see Zai’s condition, couldn’t tell what had happened, just a wall of rapidly working bodies around the console while Ivester stood in the middle trying to lock in the connection.

  “Hold, please.”

  Helen refused to give in to the rising tide of panic. She turned and started shooing people from the room. If the team hadn’t disconnected Zai in time, rumor would start to spread. There were no blinds to block the window between the observation room and the command center. Everyone piled out slowly, some still rubbernecking.

  Helen waited until the room was clear, then shut and locked the door, preventing anyone else from entering. She took a seat in the back of the room, far enough back where she could no longer see Zai’s console in the room beyond.

  “Hold. Please.”

  It wasn’t until the panic finally subsided that she noticed the stinging half circles in her palms from where she had driven in her fingernails.

  “Control, this is Operator Elliot. Did Zai make it out in time?”

  There was a very long pause.

  “That’s an affirmative, Elliot. Any sign of interference on your end?” Ivester’s voice cut through on the line. Helen took a deep breath, pulled the sleeves of her shirt down to blot her eyes on the cuffs. It worked. Holy shit, it worked. The interference had failed to materialize in the Feed. The lag she was hearing meant they had commandeered the emergency channel to allow for continued communications between Control and the waldo. By removing the NAV from the equation before the five-minute mark, they had, very possibly, found their workaround.

  “Not yet, Control, but rest assured, I’m dumping out of here the minute I hear something go boo!”

  Another long pause. Helen counted off in her head. Almost three seconds of lag, which meant they were going to have to rely heavily on the OP to riff if anything went wrong.

  “All right, Operator Elliot, let’s move you to the next set of list items.” Ivester waited as Zai finished disconnecting from the NAV chair and took over the voice-only emergency comm. “Take your time, this is all gravy. Since we seem to have some amount of communications lag, I’m going to have to ask you to be extra careful with my waldo. I want her back without a scratch.”

  “Sir, I’m missing three legs and I’m pretty sure half my face got eaten off. You’re going to have to cla
rify what you mean by ‘not a scratch,’” Elliot said. Beyond the glass, Helen could see Ivester grinning.

  “Just carry on, Elliot. Save as much as you can. I’m sending the bonus protocols to you now.”

  Helen got to her feet and risked a look into the Fishbowl. Zai was on his feet, watching the readouts alongside Keller. The EMTs hadn’t moved from their places along the wall. On the other side of the glass, Ivester gave her a long stare.

  “Well, Operator Vectorovich, it seems we have our workaround,” he said. “Be sure to congratulate your team for me.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Helen lowered herself into the coffin and wiggled her butt into the gel lining out of habit. She’d talked Hofstaeder into clearing her for short salvage runs with an AI NAV. Nothing too stressful, nothing too fancy, less risk of Beauchamp mucking things up.

  She’d been working short missions in around her regular schedule, squeezing them in where she could. She needed the time in the coffin if she was going to get re-certified and back onto rotation for Line Drive, but setting up Elliot and Zai’s run had consumed all of her official work hours. Even the training runs Keller set up got rescheduled, leaving Helen to favor-trade and make deals wherever she could. Fortunately she had a few favors owed and there were still operators who hadn’t bought in to Beauchamp’s ever-present “loose cannon” innuendo.

  “How’s the coffin, Operator?” The tech on duty hovered near the control panel on the coffin’s exterior.

  “Perfect, as always.” Helen keyed the switch on the armrest that slid the lid closed. She didn’t bother to hide her excitement. This was her last run. Complete this mission and she’d be on track to get back out to the Golfball again.

  “Ready to go?” The tech’s voice sounded in her ear now. The coffin linked to the computer that would entangle her mind with the Myrian23A5 particle. Insight came to life around her, icons and information popping up for her attention, then sliding out of the way. One long breath in, one long breath out.