“Abso-fucking-lutely,” Helen replied. She wiggled her fingers and toes, feeling the slightly sharp tone as the waldo configuration was matched by the computer buffer first, giving her extra limbs and adjusting her senses. The transition was important. While it was possible to link a mind straight into or out of a waldo, it was always better to take the extra few seconds for a smooth transition. The buffer made sure you didn’t end up with phantom limb syndrome for body parts you never had in the first place.
“Entangling now.”
The lights spun, dropped to black and the waldo’s senses became her own.
This was an older model “mole,” one of the many assets acquired when Far Reaches had bought BrightWinds a few years back. The same buy-up that had brought the pain-in-my-ass Beauchamp into the fold, in fact. The other firm had poured far fewer resources into operations design; the Insight was all edgy greens and sharp right angles, not a curve to be seen. The mole had no eyes, worked almost solely by sense of touch, so everything came in as pure data. It was like surfing without a wetsuit.
“This is Operator Vectorovich, personal identifier T4T4-957. We are live, we are live, we are live.” She turned her attention to waking up the sleeping waldo.
The Myrian23A5 mining project was on the outer edge of human expansion. The AI NAV that BrightWinds had been running had declared the mining site a total loss and ejected the operator. The entire operation had been abandoned.
Normally a waldo would be recycled, broken down into a new packet of eenies, quantum particle and all, and sent to the next closest target via a low-power micro-jumpgate. This one had been floating, unpowered and unused, in a zero-grav mining tunnel for a few years. Helen was mildly surprised when the mole booted up and began to report as if nothing had ever been wrong.
“Operator Vectorovich, confirmed you are live and are receiving signal. Your NAV is still coming online.” Keller’s voice sounded in the background, slightly tinny, she noted.
More glitches in the system. Helen signed internally. The NAV particles on the BrightWinds assets had gotten sold off to Beyond Blue along with their entangled AIs. Far Reaches had gotten the people and the OP entanglement particles. This ensured that neither company gained a significant advantage. That also meant that Helen had to run her mission with a NAV communicating through the emergency channel, the same back-channel that Ivester had used when Ted had been . . .
Helen avoided finishing that thought. Doesn’t matter. She could handle a few bit-errors in the system if it got her the hours she needed to get back into a coffin.
“Confirmed, Keller. Aren’t the AI NAVs supposed to be faster and better-looking than the rest of us? The waldo has woken up and is reporting all clear, which seems a little strange given the mission file.”
“Well, let’s dig in and see what we can find out. I’ll get the AI NAV on here as soon as I can, but might as well warm everything up in the meantime.” Keller let the “better-looking” quip slide on by.
Never a good sign.
Helen dug around in the mole’s memory to see if she could make some space to store the mission data. Goddamnit, this whole waldo’s a piece of junk.
“Confirmed. Remember, that NAV was built for AI/human team-ups using a standard NAV entanglement. Maybe there’s something left in the cache. Check your settings,” Helen reminded him.
“Hang on, let me double-check.” There was a pause as Keller made some adjustments.
Helen found the log, a list of all the activities of this particular waldo since launch. In a moment, she’d copied the files over to her own system. She could trickle them back over her own Entanglement link to the coffin. It would be slower—tiny chunks of data squeezed into the gaps and pauses in her own communication, but it would get there.
“No luck OP, NAV’s being touchy. Want to abort?”
“I can store the mission data files locally,” Helen pointed out, “I’ll trickle everything back over my Feed.” Anything as long as I don’t have to abort. I need the hours in the coffin. Next open mission wouldn’t be up for a week and Helen only needed one more after this before Hofstaeder could re-certify her.
“Confirmed.”
Flight Operations’ shit show is my best day this week. She grinned.
“So far, the waldo is waking up just fine. What does that official report list its as condition as?”
“AI NAV registered catastrophic failures on multiple fronts, but the OP could not confirm. BrightWinds decided to go with the NAV’s assessment and shut the whole thing down.” Helen could hear the change in Keller’s tone that meant he was reading the acquisitions report as they went. “That’s . . . strange. Okay, stay on your toes, keep the cursing to a minimum, I’m recording everything.”
“You got it, boss. This looks to be a third- or fourth-generation mole, so what do I need to do to trigger the eenie recycling sequence?”
BrightWinds specialized in asteroid mining operations, pushing farther and farther out to find more exotic materials. That made workhorses like this mole their bread and butter. Not a tool, joint, or jet more than needed for the job at hand. Helen relaxed and wiggled her fingers, feeling the side grips on the mole rotate in response. Helen’s task here was to assess the mining site, confirm the available resources, and queue the waldo recycling process. Once she’d triggered the sequence, the waldo and the entire asteroid would be chewed up by eenies into feedstock. The resources would be marked as ready for reclamation and another OP flying a different class of waldo would be along to gather it up.
“Fourth generation,” Keller confirmed. “So you’re looking at a manual key code for recycling. You’ll have to get to the main computer hub and plug the mole into it.”
“That’s a little old-school. Do we have the manual key code? Or do I have to go over to the NAV computer and dig it out of the memory? The mole’s in great shape, though. I’m not seeing why BrightWinds abandoned everything.” Helen flexed, feeling her external shell press up against the walls of the tunnel.
While “blind” and slow, moles were exceptionally flexible and tactile. She could feel the smoothness of the polished tunnel against her “skin,” the warmth of the melted stone as it absorbed the waldo’s waste heat.
“BrightWinds used AI NAVs pretty exclusively,” Keller replied. “And you know how picky a poorly coded AI can be. Too picky, in my opinion.”
“I’d expect to see at least a few warning lights. Maybe they just needed the insurance money.”
“Let’s finish running the diagnostics and see if anything pops,” Keller advised.
“I’ll add it to the protocol list.” Part of this entire exercise, the main reason Helen had selected a lost cause for this run, was in order to practice building protocol lists on the fly. Working with the analysis team had given her a different perspective and she was itching to try it out in real time. But she’d expected to find a waldo that needed a software rebuild at best. Helen pulled back and fiddled with the controls, testing the motion on the stubby digging surfaces, feeling the hardscrabble of the tunnel floor under her fingertips. She unconsciously compared the action to the precision of the spider. The two waldos were so very different in feel, in responses.
Without warning, the chattering noise reappeared in the back of her mind, twisting her perception of the sensor data. Her heart rate spiked. She was alone, a billion miles out into the black, but she knew, as the audio tone shifted and her vision began to distort again, that whatever had killed Ted was coming for her now. There was no way back without encountering it. Her heart beat even faster, bleeding through the Entanglement link to shake the waldo where it clung to the wall of the Golfball.
It’s not real. It’s not then, she told herself. Pull yourself together.
“Well, shit.” Keller’s voice snapped her back to reality, the memory passing, everything reverting to her new normal. Her panic attacks were fewer and f
arther between. Helen had a handle on them now and, while she couldn’t stop them, she could ride them out without anyone else being the wiser. Except Hofstaeder, who seems to be psychic about these things.
“What?”
“Are you okay? I’m seeing a heart rate spike, and my comms just lit up with Doc making angry eyebrows in my direction.”
“I’m fine. Just off on a tangent for a sec,” Helen lied. Her heartbeat worked its way back down. Different place, different waldo, she reminded herself and turned her focus back to the information scrolling across her view.
“Keller,” Helen changed the subject, “this waldo is an absolute piece of junk, but everything is in working order. This salvage mission is getting weirder by the minute. I’m going to do some exploring, see what else we have out here.”
“Ready for more weirdness? The gate’s out of power.”
“What?”
“There’s a micro-wormhole gate already built and they sent something through it before they shut down operations.”
“So?” Helen began her slow crawl forward, comparing what she saw through the mole’s ground sensors to the maps made by the previous OP.
There was an established pattern to asteroid mining. First you opened a micro-wormhole to the asteroid and sent in your eenies to build a few moles and clear out the low-hanging fruit like solid ore deposits. Next, you chewed up most of the waldos to build a micro-jumpgate to ship the ore to a central location for processing. Lastly, you unleashed the eenies to turn the rest of the asteroid into useful feedstock. If everything had gone as planned, there would have been nothing left for Helen to entangle with. Nothing was wasted: even the quantum entanglement particles would have been sent along, leaving only a cloud of dust.
“I’m looking at the checklist from the previous OP. Nothing on here about the micro-gate being built. Nothing about shipping anything out to the next site. Helen, do you get the feeling we’re missing some information here?”
“I always feel that way, Keller. Nobody tells us OPs anything. That’s why I always read the mission briefs.”
“I’ve got something else to tell you.”
Helen came to the end of the tunnel and the floor abruptly dropped away. The mole went tumbling out into a large, open cavern.
“Ow.” She felt it on her skin, the scrape of the mole’s outer shell on the wall as it tumbled. “Tell me what?” She rolled, curling the waldo’s flexible form around and bringing it back under her control as it reached the wall on the far side of the room. Helen fired off the engines, feeling the warmth under her belly as the hundred stubby legs scrabbled for purchase and brought her to stop.
“Guess who the operator was.”
“No idea, never worked with BrightWinds.”
“Catherine Beauchamp.”
“You’re fucking kidding me. I’m cleaning up Cat’s mess here? That’s choice.”
There was no response of the end of the line.
“Keller?”
“Hey, Helen! This is Ravi from Operations.”
A quick moment of panic, quickly squashed.
“What’s up, Ravi?” And where the hell did Keller go in such a hurry?
“Keller asked me to take over the comms until your AI NAV gets booted up. Ivester grabbed him to review some data over at the primary console.”
“How’s that NAV looking?”
“We’re rebooting. Looks like you were right about something being in the cache. He’s approved you doing a full exploration run, so just let me know what you need on this end.”
Helen wiggled, pulling her legs free from where they’d dug into the cavern wall. A fine powdering of dust rose into the vacuum. She could see the patterns as they messed with the sensor inputs. Whatever the dust was made of, it was starting to play havoc with her ability to “see.” She’d have to move on, melting the dust ahead of her before she stirred it up. Without enough gravity to pull it down, it would hang, weightless, suspended in the empty space. Sure, the particles could be pulled together through their own minute gravity wells or static, but Helen didn’t have that kind of time.
“There’s a lot of dust, getting a little sensor trouble,” Helen said out loud for the record.
“Makes sense. If the micro-gate is already built, they must have ordered the eenies to break down the rest of the asteroid.”
Helen shifted her attention to the readout. “There’s an awful a lot of organic material in there. It’s not just silica and iron.”
“Contamination, maybe? Pull a sample for review, maybe it’s a starter-asteroid.”
“Good idea.” Unlike the spider waldo she could never quite put out of her mind, the mole kept all of his collection apparatus close to its chest. Helen kicked it into gear and moved forward through the particulate, opening the vents and sucking dust into the collection grid.
Dust again. Helen turned her attention back to the sensors as they compensated. Sand, regolith, gravel, ice, you name it, she had danced a waldo across it. This superfine dust could cause problems all across the board.
Except.
No. It was just dust from the mining process.
Just. Leftover. Dust.
She had to calm down and quit overreacting. Helen called up the electron micrograph.
“Helen, Doc says she’s seeing an upset in your biochemistry. What’s going on?”
“Tell you in a second. Just checking something out.”
“It’s only mining leftovers. Whatever process BrightWinds used must leave the dust as a side effect.”
“I worked the moles for about two years, Ravi. I ran into a lot of different mining techniques.” Helen elaborated on her thought process. “What the rock is made of makes a huge difference in the type of mining, whether you just dig through or heat it up or both.”
“So?”
“Well, the tolerances of this mole are tight. If you get rock dust in between the joints, it’s going to cause problems. There’s no way you’d operate a waldo like this in a place like this if this kind of dust is your by-product.”
“Maybe that’s why they went bankrupt.”
The data from the electron micrograph began to sheet across Helen’s vision. She focused on the numbers, allowing the mole software to translate them into pictures for her. She held her breath, afraid that if she said anything out loud, the image dancing in the front of her mind would vanish.
The dust was the same, or at least remarkably similar, to the Scale left behind in the Golfball.
“Ravi, I’m going quiet for a sec so I can send you the scan I just got. Can you get these images to Keller, Dougal up in Analysis, and Ivester, and have them recheck what I’m seeing?”
“Roger that.”
Communication cut out for a five count as the image was compressed and sent back down Helen’s entanglement Feed to the Fishbowl. She was careful to use the opportunity to send a copy to her personal drives at the same time. It wouldn’t stand up as evidence, but it would keep her sane if anyone tried to convince her she was seeing things further down the line. Because we learned our lesson last time, right?
“Helen, is this coming straight off the equipment? You’re not running it through any interpolation software?” Ivester’s voice came down the line.
“This is raw data.” But Helen checked again to be sure.
Go very carefully. Helen held her breath and asked the mole to suck in a fresh sample. She carefully turned on every sensor, every analysis tool in sequence. She needed to find out everything before something happened to kick her out of entanglement.
You’re not running away from this one. It’s just you and the waldo, no one else out here to get hurt.
“Confirmed, Ivester, you have virgin data.”
“Confirm it again,” Ivester snapped.
Helen didn’t mention that she’d checked twice alread
y. She checked again.
“Confirmed.”
There was a pause, then Ravi was back on the line. “Well, whatever you found, it sure lit a fire under him.”
“How do you mean?” Helen asked.
“He dumped a copy of the file to the network and bolted out of here. Didn’t say anything else.”
If we’re lucky. If we’re very, very lucky, we might just have found a match for the eenies that sabotaged the Golfball. Helen felt . . . not giddy, but lighter. This was live data with a different set of entanglement particles. They might have a way to solve this without putting anyone else at risk.
“Okay, let’s get back to exploring, shall we?” Ravi brought her back to task.
“Affirmative.” Helen called up her protocol list and added a few new items. “This salvage run just got a whole lot more interesting.”
The images in front of Helen started to stutter. The reactions of the mole grew more sluggish.
What the hell?
“NAV, I’m running into a feedback issue of some kind.” Helen slowed the mole down, started engaging the parking sequence.
“Hold on, Keller’s just back.”
“NAV.”
Helen’s tongue felt thick and heavy, swollen. She tried to talk around it, tried to . . .
Oh god, bleedthrough. She was supposed to be fully entangled with the waldo, so what the mole felt, she felt. If she was feeling with her own body, while still under full control of the waldo, that meant something was going very wrong back in the coffin.
“NAV. Eject. NAV. Eject.”
The techs on duty will catch it, will get you disentangled any second now. The thought was slow to come together. Helen could see the individual pieces that comprised it. Layered images in her mind’s eye, but stringing them all together to form a whole was harder than it should have been.
Still no panic. That worried her. After the hundred little panic attacks her trip to the Golfball had cost her, there should’ve been a fight-or-flight response kicking in, pushing her to do something, anything. The bleedthrough must be going both ways. The waldo was fine, so she was fine.
Nucleation Page 14