“Can we get that kind of feedback? I mean, something is coming back to the coffin software, otherwise I wouldn’t be able to operate anything. Is there a way to read it to tell us the layout of whatever we connected with?”
“Yes, I think I can adapt the coffin software. So what else do we have to work with? What do you remember about the entanglement experience?”
“Well, the eenie or Scale was still running under its own software, so it was hard to get it to respond at all. It wasn’t like running a waldo, which just waits for my input.”
“Internal software? Did you get the sense it was intelligent, like an AI?” Ivester sat bolt upright.
“It had a purpose, and it had instructions. I don’t know if you could call it intelligent.”
“Was it receiving instructions from outside? The eenies we build hold everything in a cache until it gets cleared, then a new protocol gets loaded from the outside by a NAV. So if whatever you waldoed was more like part of a hive mind, that’s going to suggest it was a Scale.” The idea had lit a fire under the engineer. “But if you’re getting external commands, we should be able to listen in, capture those, and cross-check it against our own programming.” He got to his feet and pulled open a larger window in the Insight, opening up the coffin’s programming.
“Can you please wait until you’re sober before you start reprogramming my life-support?” Helen griped.
“I’ll comment all the changes, don’t worry about it.”
“Ivester, I am worried about it.” Helen sat up and leaned forward on the couch, elbows on knees. “OPs and NAVs aren’t machines. We’re already dealing with entanglement problems that are beyond the pale. Let’s not get clever with the software at the last minute.”
She’d touched a nerve she hadn’t known was there. Ivester looked pained. “It’s not the first time I’ve been lectured on that.” He was quiet for a few moments. “I’m trying to find the perfect ideal, a way to entangle with the remote systems with zero risk at all. Far Reaches’ entire entanglement system was designed to minimize the risk. And then . . .” He sighed and scrubbed his hands through his hair. “Today I was reminded that no matter how careful my engineering is, there is still no way to keep everybody safe.”
“Safe is relative.” Helen got off the couch and approached the engineer where he sat on the floor. “Safe is not what I need out there. Stable is what I need. Consistent is what I need. I have to be able to rely on what this coffin and software is going to do. I can work around limitations. I can get clever. I can push the boundaries. But if I can’t rely on where those boundaries lie . . .” Helen reached up and closed the programming window. “Then the ground’s going to collapse under my feet.”
Ivester was silent, considering what she’d said.
He failed to meet her eyes when he asked his next question.
“So you think we should keep going?”
“Aren’t you the one who showed up in my hospital room arguing that all this would be worth it?” Helen headed back to the couch, angrily scattering windows and numbers about the Insight as she went.
“People keep dying.”
Helen recognized the tone in his voice, the darker notes of depression creeping in. Shit, how do I fix this? Whatever Ivester had been on must be wearing off and taking his emotional state down with it. Get him thinking about something actionable.
“Well, look, if someone murders you, I promise we’ll stop. Until that point . . .” Helen turned and frowned at the engineer. “Until that point, I am getting my ass back in that coffin and figuring out just what we ran into out there. They took Ted, they took Keller, and they very nearly took me. As far as I’m concerned, I’m already all-in on this one.”
“There are only three of us,” Ivester mused.
“Four if you count Doc, but she’s bitey. I don’t think anyone will bother her.” Helen kept a careful eye on her temporary companion. Glib dismissals weren’t going to keep him from heading into a funk; probably only some actual sleep could help there. She changed gears, trying to draw him back into the discussion.
“While I was looking through the files we have from Elliot and Zai’s Golfball mission, I had an unpleasant thought.” Helen opened up a window on her tablet with the Golfball specifications and tossed it out into the space between them. “The Far Reaches eenies are designed to break down the inactive elements of the Golfball first.”
Ivester stared muzzily at the information she’d floated. “Correct. We leave the active components alone until the last possible second. Once those get broken down, we’re in the dark until the eenies finish building the new hardware.”
“If that’s the case,” Helen said, “then we have another item on the ‘Scale’ side of your list. Whatever is out there began attacking the waldo way back during my first mission, while it was an active component. Our eenies shouldn’t have touched it. Mira and Bright, then Elliot and Zai, both confirmed that was an ongoing problem. So whatever that is, I think it’s safe to say it’s hostile. Maybe not ‘take me to your leader’ hostile, but it’s actively moving against our tech. Why else go after the only piece of hardware that can act?”
“That’s why we’re evaluating, to see if the Scale is hostile. If we can allow that gate back home to be opened at all.”
“It may be worse than that.” Helen wasn’t finished with the bad ideas. “We control the opening and closing of the gate from this side through a redundant set of entangled particles. We own the only key on this side, and we own the only key on that side. But if these Scale have the key . . .”
Ivester’s already pale face went ashen. “Then we may not only have built a door back home, we may have left the key under the mat.” He stared at the mission specs for a long moment.
“We need to get back out there to see what information we can get from the Scale,” Helen said.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
“Holy shit, it worked!”
Despite herself, Helen grinned at the surprise in Dougal’s voice. Ivester’s sober adjustments to the software meant the information coming back from the Golfball made more sense this time.
She rolled her shoulders and wiggled her fingers and toes, trying to get a sense of what she was driving this time. That was the tricky part. With a little help from James, she needed to figure out what she’d connected to and how to control it. Her clumsy attempts last time had resulted in the Scale getting torn apart and recycled.
One more checkmark in the “Fucking Boring” column, I suppose, she reasoned. The Far Reaches eenies were programmed in swaths, all keeping an eye on one another. If one tiny robot started to get out of line, the rest of the tiny robots in its swath would tear it down to its component particles and recycle it. It was the key reason the engineers shot down the “rogue eenie” theory that had been floated early on. It was simply hard for them to go rogue.
But, insofar as telling a Scale from an eenie, it might not be much of a help. Just because Far Reaches had programmed in a behavior didn’t mean the Scale couldn’t or wouldn’t have a similar behavior of their own.
“We are live, we are live, we are live,” Helen responded, the call sequence putting her into the proper frame of mind. “How’s it looking on your end?”
Helen’s screens lit up, giving her a look at the information going back to Recovr’s computers. Ivester’s software was busily crunching numbers, sorting out what all the data meant before she tried to control anything at all. This time the eenie/Scale she was waldoing was different. There were fewer legs, a greater variety of sensors, but the chattering, the sense of information passing from sib to sib to sib, was still there.
“We’ve got something to work with. Wait until we give the word before you start making things move. By the numbers, if you please,” Ivester responded. Helen called up the protocol she and Dougal had put together, a long list of signals to map out. She could feel the een
ie/Scale resisting in new places, adapting to her presence.
In the space around her the Golfball started to resolve, the vault of the inner wall rising overhead like a starfield, sputtering idiot lights standing in for celestial bodies. Helen was struck by just how small this borrowed body was in real terms.
The spider waldo had been completely consumed, the remnants only visible as a massive collection of carbon black boulders floating in the midspace. The Scale—she presumed they were the Scale—swarmed over the remains en masse. From Helen’s new point of view, they resembled an army of sea urchins, shells wild with color, almost identical copies of one another. As Helen’s gaze passed across the scene, each type triggered a different response in the eenie/Scale she was riding. New datasets came in: health, rate of consumption, and a host of other things Helen’s Insight couldn’t decipher just yet. They methodically chewed their way across the surfaces of the waldo’s remains, gouging tiny trails in the surface. They added the consumed material to their shells, the spines growing longer and branching like a forest on a turtle’s back. As Helen watched, they rose in waves off the surface to be collected by a completely different class of Scale, this one with fins and jets, to be carried away.
“Ooooooh, Ivester. Those do not belong to us.” Helen exhaled the words, afraid that if she spoke too loud they’d startle and all fly away like a flock of sparrows. Through the Scale she was riding, she got a sense of the ebb and flow, the way that systems upon systems braided together towards a larger purpose. Every system had a way to get at that information flow, whether it be a log file or a debugger of some kind. If she could get access to it, or rather, if Ivester could get access to it, they’d have an eye into the Scale’s greater goals.
So just what are you up to? Helen whispered, half to herself. She asked the Insight to record and pass pictures of the fields of Scale back down the line to Ivester and Dougal.
“Make sure you guys are saving everything,” Helen said. “I don’t know how long this will last.”
“Don’t worry, we are double-redundant on this end.” Ivester’s voice this time. After much back and forth, Dougal had convinced them that having as many eyeballs on the entanglement as possible could only make their case stronger.
“Holy shit, Helen. Is this what you’re seeing?” Dougal’s voice now. “I mean . . . are those that colored dust we were seeing in the images from the first couple of missions?”
“I think so. We’re just looking through this little guy’s eyes this time. The waldo . . . Well, as you can see, there’s not a lot left of it, so I think our theory that the entangled particles got re-purposed may be right on the nose,” Helen responded.
“See if you can give us a mosaic of your field of view. Start with as far left and up as you can see and then take snaps from left to right and so on.” Dougal again. “We’re looking to document as much as possible as quickly as possible in case something happens to the line.”
Helen obliged, giving the images priority transmission back down the entanglement Feed. Less because they had to go first than because they were breathtaking. She took another moment, just for herself, then turned her attention back to the Scale she was riding.
“Okay, let’s take this little guy for a ride.”
“If you push too hard, it’s going to get shut down again,” Ivester warned.
“Not again. This is a different Scale than last time. Between our last trip and now, the entanglement particles changed hands, got reincorporated.”
“Are you sure it’s a Scale?”
“It recognizes all its little friends over there, so I think it’s safe to say. I’ll try to be careful about what I ask it to do.”
“We need to be operating under the assumption that any Scale that starts to act up gets attacked and turned back into feedstock, just like we do for our eenies. There’s no guarantee the particles will keep getting re-used every time in a fashion that we can use to connect, so be very careful with this guy.”
Helen relaxed into the “waldo,” trying each connection in turn. The images in her Insight shifted constantly as it dialed in on the specifics. She didn’t try to force it to do anything. Instead she just went along for the ride, feeling each motion, listening for snippets of conversation and instruction while James chewed through the signals coming in. This was an information-gathering mission, and as long as information was flowing to her, she didn’t need to push too hard.
The first time, Helen had had a sense of lateral information flow. The instructions were accepted and repeated across millions of tiny selves. This time, it was much more vertical, and she was higher in the hierarchy. The Scale she was riding was the one receiving and disseminating instructions to a class of subordinates more often than sibs. She could almost visualize the layout, an inverted tree of command units and subordinate units. It was logic she could get her head around. The farther up the tree you went, the more sophisticated the unit. It was an eerie reflection of the fractal command trees the Far Reaches eenies used. She idly wondered if James used a similar system in dealing with the hosts of tiny robots that maintained the building.
“Ivester, I’m sending you what looks to be the command framework.”
No response from either Ivester or Dougal, but Helen barely noticed. Entranced by the ebb and flow as the Scale chewed up and harvested the remains of the spider waldo, she was listening, listening, listening to the much more conversational chatter between them. She still couldn’t understand what was being exchanged, but she could sense the stops and starts, the long pauses and abrupt endings. It was hypnotic, a perfect system of actions, reactions, and expectations. Every Scale had a task, every rank had a purpose.
So just what the hell are we going to call you? Helen idly formed the question in her mind.
To her surprise, the Scale answered in words she could understand.
Then it turned on her.
Holy shit.
Helen found herself pinned, unable to act as the Scale she was riding asserted full control. She thrashed about in her mind, willing fingers, elbows, knees to move in an attempt to find one joint, one muscle that could still cause a response. Nothing. All physical control had been cut off, restricting her to input only. She could still see and hear and feel, but the active physical connection to her body had been severed.
She still had control of her Insight and it was still pulling input information from the Scale. Out of desperation, she canceled the remaining images to be transferred and simply streamed the raw data back as quickly as she could, grabbing as much as possible before everything went ass over teakettle.
“Helen, what’s going on in there?” Ivester’s voice again. “We’re getting a massive influx of information, but no feedback, can you move at all?”
“Something’s pissed it off, I’m under some kind of attack, can you see it?”
“I can see something, but it’s all gibberish. Hang on.”
Helen cast about for an action, something to do. If all you have is a hammer . . . She started digging around in her Insight for a software option. If the Scale was a machine, then she might be able to mess up its programming, force a hard reset. Let’s see what running our own debugger does. She engaged the program, following the checklist that presented itself. She might not be able to move her body, but any operator, once linked into their coffin, was far from defenseless. This Scale was, as far as Helen was concerned, just another recalcitrant waldo.
The Scale reacted violently. Helen felt it jerk and twist as her Insight software started aggressively passing commands back and forth.
“I’m going to have to abort.” Helen ground out the words, trying to keep her focus.
“Hold on for just a few more seconds,” Ivester replied. “I’ve almost got a handle on it.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
The fields of spiny colored Scale had erupted into the air like a
n explosion of dandelion fluff, frantically fleeing something Helen couldn’t yet see. The Scale she rode, however, knew full well what was coming their way. The only word Helen could find for it was “terrified.” It began to issue orders, canned sets of instructions streaming out over the thousands of connections that Helen could see but not directly affect. As Dougal and Ivester worked behind the scenes, Helen’s Insight mapped all those connections to get a sense of the battle plan.
That’s when she saw them, droplets of translucent glittering grey streaming towards the Scale from every nearby surface like rainwater shaken from a tree. The Far Reaches eenies were faster, better controlled and clearly on a mission. As each droplet approached, it broke up into a host of much smaller units, coating the surface of each Scale they encountered, consuming then moving on to the next closest Scale. They didn’t leave anything behind: the consumption was total, and the mass grew larger as it consumed more.
Well, that’s terrifying.
The surge didn’t last for long. As Helen watched, the wave of silver-grey eenies began to slow down, break apart. The mass began to change color, in small pinpricks and dapples at first. Each spot of color coalesced, came together inside the larger mass, then continued to pass from eenie to eenie. They sprouted spines, grew cornices, their whole appearance changing as the Scale took them over.
The Scale are converting the Far Reaches eenies from the inside.
Holy shit.
The Scale are converting OUR eenies from the inside.
It wasn’t until the rush of silver swarmed her that she hit the abort button.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
“Goddamnit!” Helen punched the release button inside the coffin and impatiently waited for the lid to cycle open. The Scale had brought pressure to bear in a way she hadn’t expected. Helen was used to recalcitrant waldos, gummed-up joints, glitches in the code. Having a waldo fight back had been painful, like trying to wiggle your fingers and biting your tongue instead.
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