It isn’t a hospital, it’s a lab, probably a R&D lab. Kennedy led Martin through a maze of partitioned offices. He followed and did his best not to stagger or stare below her waist. Heads popped up here and there to check out the intruder. He gave his fly another check. More halls and labs then out to a string of the perimeter offices.
Kennedy quipped “Grant’s okay. I think you two will get along just fine.”
“I think we’ve met.” Martin was a loner but he seemed well equipped to get along with the most unlovable.
“Here’s the office.” The door was open. “Dr. Grant, this is Martin Trask. He’s still focusing like a gecko but I think he’s ready for you.”
Martin flashed a surprised smile “Oh, Doc. Sorry for the slow uptake. It’s coming back.”
“Thanks Kenny. Come on in Martin, have a seat. Oh, and you can drop the Doctor. Grant will do on this project.”
“I think people call me Trask. It’s com’n back.”
“I guess that’s to be expected. I’ll bring you up to date. And don’t worry about the rest. It will all come back in a day or so.”
“I’ve been looking through your work history folder. You are, of course, Martin Trask. You’re a technical contractor working out of Boise. Tecstaff is the name of your outfit. You’ve been working with us for about a year and a half. You’ve been on Chokepoint for about thirteen months and I gotta tell you they’re really pleased with your performance. You do a good ‘warm body’’ he smiled “After the screening and training they didn’t have much trouble with the final selection process. You’re their man!”
Thirteen months, where did that come from. I thought it was three at the most. Chokepoint, that doesn’t ring a bell either.
“Chokepoint as you may remember is multi-funded multi-agency project. The project is under the direction of the Bend State College. The prime on this is Timepoint out of Phoenix. They’re working with a Federal grant but with additional funding from various archeological and anthropological study groups both domestic and foreign.
Our part in this is to develop and produce the necessary hardware and software as well as train and select the Destinautes.
We have completed the initial T&I and now with that out of the way, we’re ready for the first bread-n-butter flight or should I say translation.
Are you still up to doing this?”
I couldn’t see that I had much of an option. The money didn’t really factor in. I just don’t have much of a choice. At any time they could figure out who I am. “You bet. I’m good to go.”
“The procedure you’ve just completed is the part of your second mission. We’ve implanted a series of devices in and on your body. We won’t be removing them unless you request it. Once you become accustomed to them, you probably will look at their removal the same way you would a root canal. The mental and physical enhancement that you receive will be considerable. Your mental function and capacity will improve considerably. Your physical performance will approach your practical physical limits.
We have grouped the modifications under the acronym of ANGL, pronounced like angel. It’s an acronym for Artificial Neuro Gel Logic.”
ANGL is a component system designed to become transparent to your own thought processes. Eventually you’ll take it for granted. The system consists of sensors, processors, saline and protein gel mass bladders and translators. The sensors augment the senses you have and add a few new ones. You have sensors for IR and RF frequency, seismic sensors, high and low level audio pick-ups, as well as pick-ups for frequencies normally beyond the auditory range. There are olfactory discriminators, auditory db amplifiers and attenuators, night vision, retinal enhancers, retinal image generators and a few others.
The two that you may find most interesting are the olfactory discriminators and the retinal enhancers.
Coupled with the CPU and your own brain function, you will be able to smell your way through a number of problem areas. You can discriminate between living organisms and nonliving ones, subtle but significant.”
“Do you mean dead ones? I can do that now.”
“No, no, no! I mean things like androids and such. With your enhanced sense of smell you will even be able to tell when someone is lying to you. You’ll put bloodhounds to shame.
That’s just what I’ve always envied; a dog sniffing strange things.
The retinal enhancer will not only enhance your vision, it will allow you to incorporate CPU generated images into your field of view”
Martin interrupted “I don’t sense any of this stuff.”
“No, right now the CPU kernel is dormant. In several days when you’ve sufficiently recovered from the surgery and the basic neuro-fibers have reestablished, then the CPU will be booted up remotely. At that point a download process will begin. Your CPU will begin to construct its own RAM and Cache memory in the gel masses. It will essentially build its own brain pathing in the gel packs located in various parts of your body. Most of the signal trunks are commandeered or shared gland nerve fibers. In addition, some stem cell generation will commence to help your body in its reconstruction. The restructured nerve fibers are intercepted at the base of the cortex where the CPU is implanted. Here the CPU can intercept, interpret, retrieve, process and transmit information as appropriate.”
“I’m a robot?” Martin retorted, a trifle indignantly.
“No, no, no!” He chuckled. “That, will never happen! What will happen is that next, all the data library modules will be expanded, science, math, theology, philosophy, medicine, linguistic, archeological, anthropology, psychology and humanities. Then areas will be partitioned to accommodate the emulation and communication data resource and storage.
Then a most important step, but I’ll help you get through it when the time comes. Then the CPU interrogator will initiate, and in a manner of speaking you will be handed the keys. You will virtually hear the CPU. You can call it Angel if you like. ANGL will initiate a conversation or interrogation that will allow it to begin to build an emulation and communication foundation. You can reply audibly or inaudibly. ANGL’s AI process is learning how to interact with you and will begin to respond in the most appropriate and transparent way that it can.”
“It isn’t going to be like talking to the phone company, is it? “
“No. The voice tone, timbre and demeanor will be of your choosing.”
“Do you mean I will be able to choose male or female?”
“Yes. You make that choice yourself. Remember you will always be in control. Emotion or humor will be a simulated response and will be as comfortable and benign as you wish. You’ll get there. Hormone level monitors will help you keep things in perspective. At first it will be a slow process but will accelerate with time. It’s like when you first learned to read. You read aloud then silently and finally without moving your lips or even thinking word for word. At some point your interaction with ANGL will be completely transparent to you. It will learn to anticipate but will intervene based on the authority preferences that you set. You’ll have to work out your own privacy protocol with ANGL. ANGL will be capable of blending what you already know with the resident module library data. It will then interact with you as your assistant. You will have complete sovereignty over the intervention and interaction just as you would your kids if you have any. In fact ANGL will be an extension of yourself.”
“Hmmm? I recall back in the 90’s that my VCR flashed ‘12:00’ for years. Will I need to take any classes?”
“Not at this point. As you progress we may develop macro routines but we’ll probably download those remotely. In any case the learning curve will be up to you. I’ll help you with the initial start-up.”
“What about my mission . . . Chokepoint? That’s right, isn’t it?”
“Yes. Certain details are classified, as I’m sure you recall. Basically we’ll be testing and further debugging both hardware and softwar
e. Just prior to the launch, as we’re calling it, the mission specifics will be down loaded into ANGL, and will be available to you as needed. I can tell you, further, that this mission is mainly anthropological and archeological in nature. The name chokepoint was selected in reference to an emerging theory relating to DNA investigations.”
“What might that be?”
“DNA studies have shown that mankind has progressed through quantum stages of development. These stages seem to have been truncated periodically; a result of natural and/or supernatural events. These throttling events, though periodic, are not entirely without pattern. They may even be intelligently initiated. In time the researchers hope to better understand these events and the part they play in the evolutionary process.”
“Why would they care?”
“Their interest was originally kindled by the Trinity Collider Disaster early in this century. Actually it was a series of accidents; accidents that coincidentally caused substantial set-backs in the research. It appeared to some of the scientists that they were actually being conspired against by . . . . a higher authority. Though the possibility was seriously considered, research marched on until the final Collider Disaster. That accident revealed some incredible things. Part of what they learned made realm generation possible. This has been central to their follow-on developments. And that was the kernel for the development of this project.
In any case they want to determine, if possible, whether this throttling event I spoke of is an evolutionary process, or an intelligence driven mechanism of creation?”
“You mean God driven?”
“Yeah!” he conceded almost reluctantly. “Or maybe some alien culture.”
And what or who might have made them?
“Do you have any other questions?”
“Yes, one more. If this is my second mission why don’t I remember a first?”
He looked at me and cocked his head to one side. He pondered a moment, “Let’s let that one go for a while. I would like to see what your memory reveals. You see we don’t really know everything about the first mission. It appears to have been a success of sorts but we are hoping you can shed some light on some of the things that still aren’t clear to us.”
“Oh one more question. I don’t remember the Trinity incident, what’s with that?”.
“Hmmm.” The Dr. Grant tried to factor this lapse of memory into the equation. “Well, it happened at the Trinity Collider in Cern Switzerland. That will come back to you. Anyway, the accident happened about two and half years after the start-up. They were running an experiment at its facility station called WENDY. Everything was progressing nicely when apparently there was a software glitch, or what looked like one. Shortly after the glitch, the system went into an emergency shut down. Every thing went quiet. The techs could be heard in the WENDY Section Control Room frantically trying to make sense of it when all hell broke loose. Something went terribly wrong. There was an explosion. It wiped out the section control room, and the technicians in it. The explosion was small when you consider the size of the crater. It was the size of several football fields and clear to the bottom of the collider tunnel.”
“Was there any chance for the technicians?”
“Well, we don’t know. It wasn’t as if the area was blown apart with pieces of hardware lying around. It all simply disappeared. Beyond the Pit there was very little damage. About one hour later there was a clap of thunder; a big clap. A helicopter overhead was in the process of surveying the damage and looking for survivors. It isn’t known if that was the same moment but a spherical mass appeared in the crater. It was about one hundred feet in diameter and quite shiny. It had no visible external features. Within a few moments seismic tremors began to occur, and it was then that the sphere began to sink into the bedrock. Judging from the amount heat generated from its descent, it was determined that this mass of unknown composition was so dense that it merely sank into the earth’s crust. The substrata simply could not support the weight. At first the heat generated by the displacement of the rock around it was so intense that the smoke coming from the pit blocked any further observation or examination.
In any case, it was decided that the experiment was a success. The collider facility simply was not designed to contain or process the results. What they did learn lead to the development of the realm generator.
The facility here at the Denver site is the first full-scale realm generator. It is capable of transporting large volumes. The T&I; Test and Integration, is complete. It is due to go on-line in a matter of weeks. That’s enough for now. Let’s let your memory recover a bit. We’ll talk again when you fire up ANGL.”
* * * * *
Chapter 8 – The Coverts
A question that sometimes drives me hazy: am I or are the others crazy?
Albert Einstein