Nucleation

by Kimberly Unger

  “Yep, we got lavender or shower-fresh scented. Operator’s choice.” Under Keller’s experienced touch, the coffin powered up with a comforting hum.

  “You know neither of those actually smells like the name, right?” Helen grabbed her bag and closed the door behind her without waiting for an answer.

  It was over an hour before Helen came up for air. Whatever half-finished state the rest of the lab might have been in, the Insight interface with the coffin was downright stunning. Clean lines, responsive, attentive. Ivester had put the time in on the software, even if the room didn’t have enough chairs for the whole team to sit down.

  It wasn’t until they broke for lunch that Ivester outlined the entirety of the plan.

  “I’m sure you’re all wondering why I called you here this afternoon . . .” he began in a sonorous tone that belied his wiry frame. It elicited a chuckle from the team.

  “Well, I’m not, but we probably should get the new kids up to speed now that they’re on the payroll.” Keller threw in his two cents.

  “And under NDA,” Ivester returned.

  “Up to speed on what?” Dougal spoke first. The news Feeds had been buzzing with speculation about the recent announcement from Beyond Blue. Helen held her tongue, let Dougal do the digging.

  “The Recovr team,” Ivester made a gesture that encompassed all four people present, “has taken over Golfball operations. The Board wants us to do a little R&D, figure out how to make this thing safe, and then they want to sell it off to the competition.”

  “So we’re not building a salvage operation?” Dougal seemed confused, still eager, but not quite on the same track. Helen wondered just what had prompted him to sign on. An analyst like Dougal should have had no issue finding a new spot at a rival firm. Whatever he thought Recovr was going to be going after, it had to be big. Ivester folded his fingers together.

  “Let me explain. The official goal of Recovr is to prep the Golfball assets for sale. You’re all still Far Reaches employees, we still have access to those resources, but we are no longer a key asset. However, while we are crossing all the Is and dotting all the Ts, we have an opportunity.” Ivester paced back and forth in front of the group, trying to assemble his phrasing.

  Here we go.

  “You’ve all been privy to the . . . unusual circumstances surrounding the Golfball, the first phase of our Line Drive project. More to the point, you’ve all been exposed to some of the . . . broader implications of those circumstances.”

  “Oh my god, you really do think those are aliens.” Dougal said it first.

  Ivester paused for a few moments, staring at the analyst in bemused silence. Then he cracked a grin. “Well, let’s cut to the chase then. Yes. We’ve run out of horses to examine, which means there are only unicorns left in the stable. I don’t know what kind of life form these . . . Scales are, but I would very much like to find out.”

  That cleared up any confusion. Dougal turned to Helen, an incredulous look on his face. “So after all that crap you caught for saying it was aliens, it turns out it’s aliens?”

  Helen opened her mouth to answer, closed it. She hadn’t realized they’d brought the analyst in without full disclosure, so she chose her words carefully. “It didn’t really work out that way. What I saw on the first mission certainly wasn’t anything I’d seen before, but the first theories about sabotage were a hell of a lot more likely.”

  Ivester raised an eyebrow at Helen. “Right,” he said, “we explored those options, and came up empty.” He tapped his fingertips together. “Now, engineering is pursuing the idea that those strange eenies we found are likely a mutant generation. It’s still more likely than aliens, true, but it’s the kind of thing that will require a ground-up redesign to root out. It will take months of time and the payload is already in orbit around our little orphan star, collecting material for assembly of the jumpgate.”

  “According to Far Reaches’ annual filings, they’ve declared the Golfball portion of Line Drive a total loss and are turning all resources to support the jumpgate that will connect Otlyan23 with our solar system,” Helen added.

  “Nobody reads the filings,” Ivester interjected.

  “I was in the hospital for days; I read the filings. Do you want me keep speculating or not?” Helen asked.

  Ivester nodded, taken aback.

  “Here’s the thing: the Line Drive mission is a success. As long as the eenies do their jobs, the jumpgate is going to be open in two months. When the gate to Otlyan23 opens, there might be a whole new nano-scale lifeform waiting for us on the other side.” Helen took a deep breath and reminded herself not to flinch at how crazy the next part sounded.

  “We think we encountered something alive,” Helen carried on, “something that got to the Golfball and killed my NAV. So, the plan is to confirm and evaluate what we’re dealing with before that gate gets opened up.”

  Dougal’s eyes lit up. “You’re talking about a first contact scenario?” he said somewhat breathlessly, then pulled himself back to reality. “We’ve never encountered anything more alive than amino acid sets with an attitude problem. Why the hell isn’t anyone all over this? This is huge.”

  “Also, not technically first contact. Helen already came into contact, she just didn’t know it at the time,” Keller cautioned.

  “And Theodore paid the price for it,” Ivester added sourly. “Far Reaches is in the business of salvage and exploration. If we start blowing the ‘first contact’ horn without being careful, some of our government-level partners are going to walk in and take everything off our hands without so much as a penny to pay us back. The board’s logic is that someone else can take the financial hit if this does turn out to be a living organism. They want to dump the project and let someone else take the risk.”

  Ivester and Keller exchanged looks before the CTO continued. “I can tell you that every mention of your recent findings at Myrian23A5 was diverted, buried, or simply deleted. The only reason I put two and two together is because Keller came and filled me in during the salvage mission. Close on the heels of that, someone tried to murder Helen in her coffin and I was handed a leave of absence from the board.”

  “So someone else within Far Reaches wants to keep it a secret?” Helen asked. The idea that someone had been actively working against her, that Beauchamp was part of a larger effort, gave her a chill. Operators and management had issues all the time, but Beauchamp had been a devil she knew. She was even more worried about the devil she didn’t.

  “Maybe, but I don’t yet know who or why,” Ivester said. “With most of us being on the outs, we are unlikely to get a satisfactory result on that front. So we need to turn our attention to the things we can do from our well-appointed little basement here. Which, right now, is getting back out there to Otlyan23. Since our unknown adversary did such a splendid job of keeping the board in the dark, they, in turn, were willing to let me keep the keys to the Golfball.”

  This elicited a couple of grins. Getting away with the entanglement key was a pretty big deal. Helen wondered what else he’d had to give up in return.

  “There is something else to note,” Ivester said, more quietly this time. The shift in tone gave them all pause. “Far Reaches is about to open a full-sized jumpgate into deep space. That’s a permanent, two-way, star-powered wormhole, which means that we can visit Otlyan23 anytime we want. That also means that anything near Otlyan23 can come and visit us if it has a mind to. Once we link that gate to its power source, it doesn’t turn off until somebody blows it up.”

  He paced the end of the table, hands clasped behind his back.

  “Even if we’re not talking about an intelligence, we’re talking about something that can interrupt our entanglement communications on a quantum level. Even if it’s just some flavor of galactic space bacteria, incapable of getting through the gate unassisted, it’s only a matter of time before it co
mes through stuck to the bottom of a cargo container because someone got sloppy.

  “We have to get back out there and prove whether or not there is SOMETHING there and what it’s capable of. We may need a valid and compelling reason to delay bringing that jumpgate online.”

  “Can we even do that?” Dougal asked, incredulously.

  Helen sympathized. They were talking about bringing a multi-year project with a price tag in the trillibits to a screeching halt. The inertia alone might flatten them all in the process.

  “Let’s get our proof first. Then we can better evaluate what we’re up against.”

  Dougal sat back and drummed his fingertips on the tabletop. The vibrations made the paper wrappers left from lunch shift and crinkle.

  Helen studied the analyst. He was giving the plan his consideration, but there was a hesitancy. Things weren’t quite clicking. Helen had come to her own decision well before she’d accepted Ivester’s offer, but she’d had a view from the inside. Add to that the need to resolve, and maybe now avenge, Ted’s death was still rattling around in the back of her head. Dougal’s motivations weren’t so clear, and Helen wasn’t sure if she should appeal to his vanity or his skillset.

  Keller picked up on Dougal’s hesitance too. He passed a glance to Ivester, then back to Helen.

  “I’m on clean-up, since Recovr paid for lunch,” Keller announced, gathering together empty containers and motioning for Helen to do the same. She gratefully took the hint and helped collect the wrappers.

  “Let Ivester talk to him. He doesn’t need three people at once pressuring him into this,” Keller said once they were out of earshot.

  “I don’t get it. Didn’t you guys give him the heads-up? Why bring him in cold?” Helen kept her voice low, risked a glance over her shoulder to where the engineer and the analyst were talking at the table.

  “Dougal came to us. Once rumor got out that you’d joined the Recovr team, he wanted in.” Keller chucked the trash in the recycle bin. The flash as the wrappers and other leftovers came in contact with the eenies inside made his pupils contract to pinpoints. Helen was silent for a moment, digesting that information.

  “I’m . . . I’m not entirely sure what to do with that.”

  “Do good things. We need an analyst on the team if we don’t want to screw all this up. Dougal’s a rock star. Having his name on the documentation and analysis means it’s going to get taken way more seriously. If you’re right, and if Ivester’s right, then we need every advantage we can get.”

  “So if Dougal bows out, do we have a second option?”

  “If you added your two cents, asked him to stay . . .” Keller countered.

  “Asked? You mean help Ivester put the screws to him? Didn’t you just tell me to do ‘good things’? If we’re wrong, he’s going to take a career hit. It’s one thing helping to package up a trillibit asset sale, quite another to be on the ‘ooOOoooo it’s aliens’ side of the table. I’ve been there for months. It sucks.”

  “We don’t have a lot of options.”

  Helen ran arguments through her head, looking for something that might be interesting enough, amazing enough to make it worth the professional risk to Dougal.

  “We don’t need a lot. We just need one. Remember Myrian23A5?” she asked.

  “The one that almost killed you?”

  “Look, the whole super-secret point of Recovr is to figure out if those little Scales are actually alien. Let’s use Myrian23A5 to get the system properly calibrated. We can test the limits of the new setup and maybe get the whole team in sync. We know the Scale were there. The mission’s been mothballed—I know, I checked.”

  Keller hesitated, but not for as long as Helen thought he would.

  “All right, let’s try it.”

  “I got this.” Helen headed back over and stepped into the pause in conversation. Dougal looked distressed. Ivester was putting some kind of full-court press on him for sure.

  “Gentlemen,” Helen said, “lunch break is over and we have things to do if we’re going to pull this off.”

  Ivester was annoyed at the interruption. Helen saw him cast a glance at Keller, but whatever signal Keller gave him, it was enough for the engineer to put a lid on it.

  “But we haven’t . . .” Dougal protested.

  “Save it. Keller and I need to get the gear calibrated anyway, so stick around and see what comes back down the pipe. If you change your mind later, we’ll chalk it up to a short-term contracting gig.” Helen cocked an eyebrow at Ivester. “We’re going back out to Myrian23A5.”

  “I . . .”

  “Great, let’s go.” Helen pointed in Keller’s direction, the Flight Ops lead already calling up the information on the wall of touchscreens. Dougal gave in and went to join him with a shake of his head.

  “Ms. Vectorovich, I don’t appreciate . . .” Ivester began.

  Helen held up a finger, waited a beat until Dougal and Keller were in conversation before beginning.

  “Look, we need him, right? Let me show him why he should stay. You said Myrian23A5 was the tipping point for you, so let’s show Dougal what we found out there and see if it convinces him too.”

  Ivester considered a moment. “Okay. See what you can do.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  If the mole had moved, run out of power, maybe turned into a giant space worm while she’d been away, Helen would not have batted an eye. Finding it right where she’d parked it was a bit anticlimactic.

  “Operator Helen Vectorovich, personal identifier T4T4-957. We are live, we are live, we are live.” She repeated the official communications identifier. Going back out to Myrian meant Helen was flying without a NAV. The AI NAV had failed to connect on her previous mission, the computer simply never answering. Keller was playing a lite version of the role through the emergency channel, just in case. It meant they wouldn’t have access to anything that was normally under the NAV’s control. The micro-jumpgate and any remaining eenies would be useless unless she could access the NAV computer array using the mole.

  Ivester’s voice came down the line. “Okay, Operator Vectorovich, let’s see what else we can find on this rock.”

  “Get off the party line, boss, NAVs and OPs only,” Helen returned.

  “I can see we’re going to have to revisit the team structure before the next run.” Keller’s voice now.

  The emergency line could be accessed by anyone at the console for communications. Ivester had used it to take over for Ted. Keller and Ravi had used it on her last trip to Myrian. There was potential for distraction if Helen didn’t establish the boundaries up front. She made a mental note to talk to Ivester about it later.

  “Okay, Keller. What should we go check out first?” Helen settled back into the sightless body of the mole, flexing the outer carapace and trying out each of the paddle-like feet in turn. A quick ping with the sensors showed her the network of tunnels closest to her, unchanged.

  “Let’s pull the local activity logs. We’ve got a jumpgate built, and the NAV particles not responding, and a bunch of bogus data in the reports. Hopefully we can get more accurate information from the NAV computer on-site,” Keller said.

  “Okay, open up . . .” Helen caught herself. “Sorry, forgot you’re not entangled like a NAV. I’m going to head over to see if I can plug this waldo into the computers.” Manually interfacing a waldo with a NAV’s computer array was an emergency measure, a backup of a backup.

  “According to the schematics James has on file, everything’s in a central location, but we haven’t been able to access it from here. It ought to be easy enough to find in there,” Keller said.

  “That’s efficient.” Helen tickled the mole’s computer and called up a map of the tunnel system that BrightWinds had bored under the asteroid’s skin.

  “Well, BrightWinds was trying to develop a completely AI-run system. Aut
omation all the way down.”

  “I take it that didn’t work out well.” It was bad enough that most exploration got done by remote first; removing humans entirely from the equation left Helen cold.

  “They explored farther out than the rest of us—took bigger risks. The AIs started to run into stuff they couldn’t handle and they had to bring in live NAVs. That’s about the point the cost-benefit ratio went sideways,” Keller elaborated.

  “Hey, Keller.” Now that Helen was back in the mole with all its information and sensor logs laid out before her, things had stopped adding up. Whoever had decided that Far Reaches should buy up BrightWinds’ mining assets clearly hadn’t looked too deeply into this one. The maps and tunnels didn’t match up. Like the moles had started to dig and then lost their sense of direction. The tunnels crisscrossed and went every which way, erupting to the surface, diving to the center of the asteroid, more like tunnels dug by real-live moles rather than waldos. “It was the AI NAV that declared this a total loss, right? Not the human OP?”

  “Not just Myrian23A5, but about a half dozen of BrightWind’s operations out on the fringe,” Keller confirmed.

  “What are the odds that BrightWind’s AI NAV ran into that same signal that killed Ted?” Helen directed the mole to return to the micro-gate, allowing it to set its own route. An idea had started to emerge and she was in a mood to air it out.

  “That’s . . . Well, that’s not the worst idea I’ve heard. You’re thinking that BrightWinds kept it under wraps?”

  “Maybe. The tunnels here don’t match the maps at all, it’s like all the protocols went haywire. If that signal got to the AI NAV, it might have caused this kind of breakdown. Tell Ivester. See if he has any insight.”

  “I can hear you just fine, Ms. Vectorovich,” Ivester cut in. “There was no mention of any kind of disruption in the files, but we clearly don’t have all the information at hand. Maybe the local mission logs will tell us more.”