Nucleation

by Kimberly Unger

  They’re not attacking, that’s good, right? So now what?

  The prompt reappeared. Yes/No.

  Helen stared at it for a good long minute. It didn’t make sense. Why ask for a response to . . . nothing? As far as she knew she hadn’t been asked a question. She didn’t speak the language of the Scale. But if they couldn’t recognize each other’s language, why was she being asked to respond?

  The Yes/No prompt fuzzed, broke apart and was replaced by 1/0.

  Oh.

  Maybe not Yes/No as the response to a question, she realized.

  Maybe positive and negative? It was two states: one on, one off. It was the most basic metaphor behind the quantum entanglement used to command a waldo. Arrange the particle one way to get a one, arrange it another to get a zero, and with enough ones and zeros strung together, you had information shuttling back and forth across a billion miles of empty space. It was simplistic but it was a place to start a conversation.

  Shit. I’m not qualified for this.

  Without access to Insight, Helen was limited to the information in her own head, but an Operator, any Operator, understood something about the science that makes running a waldo possible. So if they’re asking about a language we can both use, simple is good. Ivester’s theory was that if she could waldo a Scale, they might have a similar logic to their programming. If he was right, and they had more similarities than differences, then this might be their suggestion for a common language to use. She reached out an arm and a multi-jointed limb came into view.

  The prompt ahead of her fuzzed and returned to Yes/No.

  Well, I’ve rarely regretted a yes. Helen reached out and tapped at the word where it hung in the air. It vibrated, wobbled like jelly. She looked closer, felt the familiar strain as she cranked the focus tighter. To her surprise, she found that the numbers and letters were made up of an even smaller class of Scale, hexagonal forms that reached for one another and clung to form larger shapes. Around the corners of her vision, the blue and orange fairy lights of Insight reemerged, like they’d been shadowed over by something.

  Is this how they got to Beauchamp? Helen asked herself. Or was what she seeing now something else entirely? A version of the Scale free from Beauchamp’s influence might be something they could actually work with.

  “OPERATOR HELENA VECTOROVICH, I can see you’re NOT DEAD YET, so you damn well better answer . . .” Ivester’s voice erupted from the perfect silence that had encapsulated her. Helen jumped, guiltily, at the note of panic and dialed the volume down. Around her the vaguely colored walls of the bubble pulsed in time, as if the sound waves from Ivester’s voice were passing through.

  “I’m here. I’m still here,” she replied, a little more slowly than she would have liked. Her tongue felt thick, dry, like she’d been sleeping with her mouth open.

  Bleedthrough, she realized. The Scale she was riding didn’t have lungs, or a tongue, so she was getting bleedthrough from her own body back in the coffin.

  “What the hell was that? Did it work?” Ivester’s voice again.

  “I’m getting bleedthrough on this end,” Helen replied. “Can you guys fix that? I might be out here for a bit longer.”

  “On it. Then tell me what’s going on.”

  Helen now had full control back. She stretched her arms and legs, watching the information come through to be translated by Insight and sent back down the line to the coffin.

  “Guys, you need to air-gap the coffin. We don’t want James or any of the other house computers hooked up directly right now.”

  “Why? What the hell is going on out there?” Dougal’s voice now, he must have swapped in for Ivester.

  “I cut Beauchamp off from the Scale, so they’re not attacking our eenies anymore. They’ve gone back to the same ‘eat and rebuild’ loop they were on when we first connected with the Golfball. Our eenies are on the offensive for now, but we might want to call them off.” Helen asked the Insight to bring up a binary translator. Something that could turn a string of ones and zeroes into something she might be able to use for conversation. “I think we’ve bought some breathing room.”

  All around Helen, jelly-like clusters of the tiniest Scale had begun to come together into strings of abstracted ones and zeroes.

  “Guys, I can’t read that off the cuff, you’re going to have to give me a few . . .” Helen said out loud to the room, more for her own benefit than the Scale. She felt back on her game now. The idea that the Scale might be something more than a space-going ant, that Ivester might just be right about a first contact scenario, was exhilarating. She opened the lenses as far as possible, found the gap that suggested the start of the string of numbers, and began sending images back down the line to Ivester and Dougal.

  “Can’t read what? And what in the hell is THAT?” Ivester was back online again.

  “That . . .” Helen fired her tiny maneuvering jets to follow the string as it continued to develop, making sure she caught each number in the sequence as it gelled out of the air. “That may just be the first contact you were hoping for.”

  “You’re talking to them?” This from Dougal again; they were playing hot-mic back in the lab, but this time Helen couldn’t care less.

  “When I cut off Beauchamp’s influence, they got a lot less bitey. It looks like they’re suggesting we start with some kind of binary language, so this is what we are getting to work with right now.”

  “What happened to Beauchamp?” Dougal asked sharply.

  “I took back the particle. I don’t know what that looked like in her coffin, but I bet she was pretty pissed about it.” Helen finished collecting the message. She’d have to wait a bit to be sure all the images made it down the line before jumping out. It meant she could spend some time getting to know the Scale a little bit better.

  “Okay, stay there for now, give us everything you can. I’m going to grab Hofstaeder to see if we can fix the feedback problem,” Ivester said.

  “No problem. The Scale are just waiting on something, maybe a response to whatever that string of numbers says.” The eenie she was waldoing remained eager to please. It was delighted that a connection had been made, but she couldn’t quite understand why. There was no pushback, no real mind outside of some core programming. Nothing to fight, no siblings to talk to, no sense of being part of a greater whole. It was a little lonely. Helen hadn’t noticed sooner because being alone was a much more natural state for her. Now that she noticed, and compared to her earlier time with the Scale and even the eenies, the lack was clear.

  “Oh. I’ve been air-gapped.”

  The Scale had captured this eenie without destroying it. She’d been cut out from the rest of her network. Without sibs to talk to, to give commands to, she was just a single mote of dust. No influence, not a threat. Her only hope, if she needed to pick up the fight again, was to disentangle and hope the OP particles had ended up somewhere good.

  “If they can do this, why didn’t they just isolate Beauchamp?” she wondered aloud. “Why let her run the show?”

  “Oh, that’s simple enough. Cat was always much further up the command chain,” Dougal said matter-of-factly in her ear.

  “Makes sense, I suppose, but now that we’ve cut that particle loose, she’s going to have a hard time using it from here on out.”

  “I’m sure she’s got a few Scale left. They’ll recapture it soon enough.”

  “Wait . . .” Realization dawned just a little too slowly. “How do you know anything about Beauchamp’s Scale?”

  “There’s a funny story behind that,” Dougal said smugly. “Time to come back.”

  The disentangle caught Helen by surprise and she was yanked, unceremoniously, back though a billion miles of space.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  Helen opened her eyes, then closed them again, seeking the comfort of the Insight behind her eyelids. The lines and l
ights failed to materialize. She was alone in her own head. No Scale, no Insight, no NAV particle.

  That’s not right at all.

  “Helen?”

  She opened her eyes again, staring at the depths of the Recovr lab ceiling. The sides of the coffin had been folded up, wires removed so she was back inside a self-contained unit. She cast about with her eyes, the only other part she could move, to find Dougal smiling down at her.

  “Dougal, what are you up to? Where’s Ivester?”

  “I sent him to get the doc, which means now I’m on a time limit.”

  Helen tried to move and found her limbs still restrained by the supersuit. It could take hours for everything to wear off unless she could get to the coffin controls. Dougal hadn’t bothered with the buffer. Her brain hurt, her body hurt, phantom pains of being pulled apart again and again. She could feel where every limb had been severed in the push to stop Beauchamp, dozens of phantom arms up and down her ribcage. Somewhere in the back of her head she could hear screaming. She wasn’t sure if it was hers.

  Damn, if the drugs are still in effect, I shouldn’t feel anything. But that didn’t count with phantom pain, nerves firing without any actual physical cause. It was distracting, even more so because she knew there was no recourse, just time.

  “Why Hofstaeder?” In the corner of her vision, the lights of the Insight began to emerge, a “reboot” icon flashing as the entanglement system tried to right itself.

  “Oh, that’s easy. The system will show a call went out, I made my best effort, but Doc got here too late to save you.”

  To save?

  “Cat thought you might cause her some trouble out there.” Dougal moved closer to the tangle of wires and tubes from the coffin, voice lowered. “And logging in through the NAV particle, that really was a risk, don’t you think? I mean, first Ted, then Mira, and now you. There’s no way Far Reaches is going to keep this project on the books. Beyond Blue’s already putting together the paperwork.”

  It took a few moments for Helen’s brain to catch up.

  Oh shit. Dougal’s working with Beauchamp.

  “Dougal, I don’t know what you’re thinking, but don’t do anything foolish.” The phrase sounded stupid as it left her lips. Dougal’s eagerness to join the Recovr team, his quiet defense of Beauchamp, his insistence on trying every other theory before recognizing the Scale. Helen had been focusing on just one adversary. She hadn’t counted on lingering loyalties. Beauchamp hadn’t quite cut all ties at Far Reaches. Helen fought down the rising tide of panic as the understanding that she was alone, paralyzed, and defenseless set in.

  “Dougal, you helped me cut off Beauchamp’s communications with the Scale. It worked, I made contact.” Helen’s mind raced. Her only hope was to keep the analyst talking, keep him engaged until . . .

  Until what, Ivester gets back? One of the other techs wanders in?

  “That was an unfortunate risk. Ivester wouldn’t let me touch the programming, so I had to rely on Cat to be a better waldo-jockey than you. That’s not a mistake I want to repeat. Beyond Blue will be handling all contact with the Scale from here on out.”

  “And me?” Helen cast about for questions to ask, anything that would allow her to keep Dougal occupied for just one more minute.

  “You? You will suffer a catastrophic equipment failure, simple enough. Experimental setup, known problems with the entanglement Feed. I’m afraid you’re going to have to sit there and feel it all while I fry your nervous system.”

  “Why? What’s the point?” Helen asked, as calmly as she could. In the bottom corner of her vision, the Insight reboot icon vanished and the loading sequence began. If she could just keep Dougal from doing anything fatal until she got control of the coffin computer again . . .

  “The Scale are coming, Helen. Beyond Blue has a plan to handle them.” Dougal unplugged one of the fat ropes of cable from the side of the coffin and checked the contacts before returning it to its socket.

  “Dammit, Dougal, we don’t even have a handle on what the Scale ARE.”

  “You don’t. We do.”

  “YOU? You mean Beyond Blue? What, you think you can handle some kind of alien invasion all by your lonesome?” Keep him talking. The Insight lit up and Helen tried to connect to the coffin, but whatever Dougal had been doing kept it offline. Shit. Okay, call for help. She reached out, found the link to Recovr’s communications system and connected, only to find herself blocked.

  “Of course we are. Once we control the jumpgate, we control the access. We can choose when and where they come through. We can even dictate when and where they land first. Anyone that wants to escape being overrun will have to cut a deal with us.”

  Helen’s blood ran cold. “Deal with you? That’s just evil.” Helen cast about inside the Insight, looking for other opportunities: fire alarms and warning systems were cut off, she was blocked from accessing Ivester’s touchwall, maintenance systems . . . MAINTENANCE SYSTEMS.

  Like every room at Far Reaches, things like the maintenance of the surfaces or the trash disposal were all handled by a wide array of eenies. Every one had a direct link to James, who controlled everything in the building from door locks to vending machines. If Helen could get access to the maintenance system, she might be able to get a message out.

  “Oh, don’t worry, we’re not going to let them overrun the planet. We’ll keep them pointed at the orbital resource platforms, the lunar bases. Distant Sun’s going to be parking a comet in orbit next year, so that goes on the list of things we want.”

  Helen’s fingers and toes began to tingle. The paralytic, the spinal block that kept her body from thumping about in the coffin while her mind was a billion miles away, was starting to wear thin. It wasn’t going to be quick enough. Helen reached out to Far Reaches’ maintenance eenies through the Insight and kicked in the “Catastrophic Overrun” protocol Ivester had given her to deal with the Scale. She wouldn’t be able to waldo them, not without a quantum particle, but she could use them to cause some chaos. The security warnings began to cascade outward through the system, opening up new avenues, unlocking the millions of little nano-machines that lay sleeping in the rafters, under the floors, deep in the trash cans.

  An Operator, any Operator, was far from defenseless once they got their coffin connected into a computer system.

  The reaction was immediate, starting with a series of sharp thunks and a sudden tightness in the air as the Recovr lab sealed itself off from the rest of the building. The fire-suppression robots unlocked from their cubicles in the corners of the room, three child-sized tanks on treads, ready to cover anything too hot in retardant foam. They were programmed to avoid anything that registered as living. Live bodies were a job for the human emergency responders Helen hoped would be on the way.

  “What the hell did you do?” Dougal was immediately on the defensive, stepping back from the coffin, which suited Helen just fine. The lights in the room dimmed, shifting from workday yellow to watch-your-ass red. In the shifting colors, the tattoos across his skin seemed to crawl and twist, an eerie callback to the corrupted waveform Helen had first seen laid out in the Analysis lab.

  Helen started laughing as she realized that the maintenance robots thought she was the only human in the room. Dougal had done her a favor. He’d made himself invisible to Far Reaches security cameras, showing up as an inanimate object, a piece of lab equipment. It must have been the same trick he and Beauchamp pulled when they’d poisoned Helen’s coffin the first time.

  It meant that the fire-suppression robots wouldn’t have any reason to treat him as anything other than a hazard.

  Helen waded into the computer system and took control of the largest of the maintenance robots. It wasn’t a waldo; she couldn’t simply slide it on like a glove and wiggle her fingers, but she could point it at Dougal and convince it that the analyst really, truly was on fire.

&nbs
p; “Waldoing the maintenance robots? I should have killed you faster.” Dougal did the math and stepped up, throwing switches on the side of the coffin. Helen hasn’t about to correct him. Helen wasn’t about to tell him that, by stepping forward toward the coffin, where Helen was still recognized as a living, breathing body, he’d triggered the emergency response. Maintenance saw Dougal as a bit of flaming lab equipment rolling towards an incapacitated human.

  The wall of flame-retardant foam that hit Dougal knocked him backwards onto his ass. While Helen directed the largest robot over to the coffin, placing it between Dougal and whatever switches he might start messing with, the other two robots joined in, keeping their streams directed on his thrashing form. Dougal spluttered, shielding his face with one upraised arm as the force of the jets slid him backward on a concrete floor now gone slick. When he hit the edge of the mats, close to Ivester’s touchwall, he managed to get his feet under him again. The robots backed off. Now that he was well away from the lab’s only “living” occupant, he was no longer an immediate threat. No amount of prodding by Helen could convince them to continue the pursuit.

  Shit. Hurry up. Hurryup. Hurryup . . .

  Helen’s fingers regained some feeling and she worked them frantically, trying to restore muscle control a little bit faster. She was still bound in the supersuit, but if she could reach the manual release, she’d have a chance at actually defending herself.

  “Fine.” Dougal spat the word. He engaged the touchwall, opening up the software to bring Helen’s coffin back online so he could access the computer. “I’ll kill you from here.”