***ANAD receiving…ANAD receiving…there seems to be some kind of signal there…who’s calling?***
“ANAD…it’s me. It’s Johnny Winger. ANAD, can you hear me? Can you feel me…we’re linked in.”
***Johnny…Boss?...is that you? ANAD to Base…I’m getting fragments now…just fragments…it’s so great to have you nearby again…what happened…what’s our next mission…the mission always come first***
“ANAD, you’re in containment. Back at Table Top. You’re home. Doc Frost has been fixing you up—how do you feel?”
Frost was amused at Winger. “He can’t feel anything, Johnny. He’s just a mechanism.”
But Winger knew the Doc was wrong. ANAD was more than just a mechanism. Somewhere inside that processor core was a heart and a mind and feelings and fears, just like anyone, just like he’d had as a child. That’s what ANAD was: a small child. A really small child.
***I don’t know exactly…okay. I feel stronger, my effectors are not all completed. But all core routines are functionally within parameters. I feel…pleasure, I believe is the word you have used before…I searched for that term in my language tables and correlated it with state signals from your side of the coupler…a high-probability match. Therefore, I have calculated that I feel pleasure at the presence of your signals. And you--?***
Winger looked quizzically at Frost. You could never be sure but he thought Doc wasn’t aware of what ANAD was communicating to him. It wasn’t a voice link…just the pure quantum signals, transmitted through the coupler, disentangled and buffered into his mind. Unless somehow, the Doc could read his mind—
“What is it, Johnny? You look funny. Is ANAD responding normally?”
Winger waggled his hand. “Yes and no. He recognizes me, I think. His speech seems disjointed a little. One moment, he sounds like a brother or a pal, the next moment, he sounds like more synthetic, artificial.”
Frost seemed to relax. “Perfectly normal, Johnny, at this stage. The coupler needs adjustment. The link is, for want of a better term, a bit rusty. This isn’t the same ANAD you knew and worked with before, remember that. This is a completely new master.”
Winger nodded, not sure whether to be glum or relieved. “I know that, Doc. I guess I was just expecting the same camaraderie and spirit as before. It’s different, but I can’t say how exactly.”
Frost was understanding, even sympathetic. “Different master. He’s got the same processor but the loading of routines and modules is always slightly different every time you do it. Plus your coupler still needs work. Some of what you’re hearing…er, experiencing, is an artifact of a Version 1 coupler trying to interface with a Version 2 assembler. We can adjust and fine-tune that out, given time.”
Winger, mindful of the briefing he had just come from, said, “I’m not sure how much time we have, Doc. While you’re bringing ANAD along, can you go over these differences with me?”
Frost delegated his adjustments to two techs and took Johnny to another console. He had SOFIE bring up some graphics to depict ANAD’s new capabilities. Soon, a three-D image of the assembler was floating over the projection table like some ghostly image.
For the next half hour, Frost detailed improvements he had made to ANAD. The doctor demonstrated some of the assembler’s new capabilities and explained how the new cognitive quantum processor was both faster and better protected against the sort of interference Johnny had encountered in the Antarctic.
“I’ve changed some of the architecture, Johnny. Basically, I’ve altered the way the processor executes commands…sort of given ANAD a new language to speak with. If I’m right, the entanglement wave interference won’t be as big a problem. ANAD’ll be able to perform his normal functions better than ever.”
Frost went on to describe how the assembler would be better coupled with Johnny through the containment capsule in his shoulder. He had Winger removed his uniform and clucked over some minor adjustments to the capsule that needed to be made.
“The best news is that this version of ANAD has new effector tip designs…a few extra hydrogen abstractors and a new silicon radical tool for snagging carbons…haven’t had that before, have you?”
“Just give me something I can use to smash the bejeezus out of Amazon, Doc. That’s all I need now.”
“I’ve upped ANAD’s morphing speed too. Really souped up the replication routine in tests the other day,” Frost said proudly. “ANAD’s capable of turning over molecules at better than twenty cycles per second now.”
That raised eyebrows on Johnny Winger. “A real hot rod. Good work, Doc. After Lake Vostok, I figured you’d be tinkering under his hood.”
Doc Frost had something else he wanted to show Winger. “Remember those small spheres you brought back from the Pacific?”
“The ones that Dana said were being implanted in the demonio? What the hell are they, Doc?”
Frost took Winger around to the other side of the containment vault. “I’ve put them in here, under Level Four containment.” He pointed to the monitor.
The huge semi-spherical containment vault was subdivided into several smaller compartments, each isolated from the other. On the monitor mounted on the outer wall, Winger studied the scene inside.
Three white spheres were suspended in mid-air, held in position by converging electromagnetic waves and air currents. Sensor arrays surrounded the spheres, providing details on structure, signatures, emissions, anything that could be detected. Above the spheres, the sinuous trunk-like cable of a quark flux imager undulated like a snake. A technician at the console was maneuvering it into position to probe the interiors of the spheres.
“Are they what Dana thought—some kind of control devices for the demonios?”
Frost rubbed his chin. “They seem to be at least that, and maybe more. We think we’ve detected decoherence wakes periodically emanating from at least one of them, though the jury’s still out on that. Very faint, these wakes.”
“That would mean some kind of quantum comm channel, wouldn’t it, Doc?”
“It should. Juan here—“ he indicated the tech running the imager controls “—thinks the spheres are part of some kind of networked system, peer to peer or maybe master-slave. We’ve been tinkering and experimenting here with the waves, trying to capture and record quantum states, with an eye toward maybe decoding them.”
Winger blinked hard. “Decoding quantum states? Isn’t that sort of impossible, even in theory?”
“In theory,” Frost admitted. “But we’ve learned a few tricks lately. Sometimes, if we’re careful, we can kind of cheat Mother Nature and get enough of a whiff of an entanglement wave before it collapses to make an educated guess as to the signal, or rather the state that generated it.”
Winger watched as Juan drove the imager closer to the spheres. He stopped the ‘snake’ just above the trio and parked it in position to begin probing. “Imager gain set, Doctor Frost. We’re locked in and powered up.”
Frost moved back to the small panel that controlled the quark stream. Once he had removed all the safeties and enabled the beam generator, a steady stream of cesium nuclei inside the housing above them would be ‘cracked’ open like eggs and the quark components inside captured and collimated into a beam.
“I’ll try a few bursts at first, just to register the beam and get some test data.” He toggled a few switches. A low hum emerged from the housing. On the monitor, there was no discernible effect on the spheres. When he was satisfied, Frost hmmm’ed and pressed more buttons. “Now, I’m initiating a deep field scan, targeting the outer layers of the sphere surface. We’ve been lucky at the surface a couple of times…that’s where we’ve been able to grab some waves—“
Frost ran the probe for awhile, then turned the controls back over to Juan.
“Let me show you what we’ve found before, from earlier scans.” Frost went over to the projection table where SOFIE had generated
ANAD configurations in mid-air. “I’ve taken the liberty of washing the wave fragments through a new algorithm I developed, originally for ANAD. I found something odd and I can’t explain it. When I first ran this algorithm and fed it the wave data, I got a sort of gibberish that didn’t make any sense at first, not that I expected it to.” Frost was cycling the controls, revving up the table to create a 3-D display. “But when I applied some of the same routines that make up ANAD’s processor core, I got this—“
The space above the table began to blur and thicken into an image, a grainy image. As it materialized from the loop that Doc Frost had created, Johnny Winger felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. The image was eerie, and eerily familiar. He shook off a chill.
Frost was explaining something but Winger was only barely listening—
“—Now…just why a set of ANAD routines should be able to translate these wave fragments, I don’t really understand. It could be a coincidence, but I doubt that. More likely, there’s some kind of commonality between the waves that come from quantum states generated by these spheres and waves that come from quantum states generated inside ANAD’s processor. That puzzles me…Johnny, what is it? You look a little pale—“
Johnny Winger shook off the feeling. “I don’t know, Doc. Just a feeling, I guess. It’s just that this image seems familiar…I’ve seen it before.”
“Really?” Frost rubbed his beard thoughtfully. “Where?”
Winger remembered the strange impressions he had encountered at Via Verde, impressions of another world, a world of nanoscale mechanisms, an entire world of ANADs. He had decided the whole thing was nothing but a scrambled snippet of memory, probably brought on by leakage from his coupler.
Until now.
He described the sensation to Frost. “It was like I was flying over the ground, Doc. I kept flying higher and higher and soon I was in space. I could look back and see this world. The whole place was full of nanobots. The planet was made up of them…like a swarm on a vast scale, assembled into the image of a planet.” Winger shuddered. “Gave me the creeps.”
“Johnny, there may be more to what you’re saying than you realize.” Frost fiddled with the projection table controls. “Here, let me show you something else.”
The 3-D imagery shifted again, blurring out and morphing into something else. This time, a grainy, ghostly image formed, similar to the first one, only poorer in resolution. As Winger watched, the image gradually sharpened. After a few moments, it resembled the very image he had been trying to describe.
“Is this what you saw, Johnny?”
Again, he felt a cold chill. “Pretty much. What is it, Doc? You’re saying this imagery comes from those spheres?”
Frost wanted to be careful in what he said. “I’ve spent the last day decoding and reconstructing decoherence waves that are generated by these spheres. And I’ve come to the conclusion that these spheres are basically a form of transmitter. Perhaps a communication link would better explain it.”
“Link to what?”
“It’s fuzzy and I’m still gathering evidence to test my ideas but I think these spheres are a communication link to some place else, very likely this place you’ve encountered yourself. Perhaps, it is another world altogether. Maybe it’s even a world of nanobots, a world made of nanobots. I’m not sure of that.”
“Then the demonios are in contact with another world? Another intelligence?”
Frost shrugged. “It’s a conjecture right now, Johnny. It fits a lot of the data, yours and what I’ve found here.”
The possibilities made Winger’s head spin. “If the demonios are just colonies of nanobots, versions of Amazon Vector bundled together into something vaguely human-like, wouldn’t that mean that Red Hammer is effectively in contact with another race, another intelligence?”
Frost nodded. “You could draw that conclusion, yes. But it’s a rather extraordinary conclusion. We have no independent evidence that intelligences other than our own exist anywhere any where else in the Universe. It’s one thing to prove the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence. But to prove that such intelligence exists and that Red Hammer is in contact with them and no one else knows about it…” Frost shrugged. “That’s two separate claims, Johnny. The first claim alone would overturn all of science and a lot of our philosophy and religion. The second claim, if it was true, would re-arrange political and economic power on this planet like nothing ever before. Imagine what it would mean, Johnny: a criminal cartel in contact with another intelligence. The consequences boggle the mind…that’s why we must be very careful here. We have no irrefutable proof at the moment, only conjecture and supposition.”
Winger walked around all sides of the flickering 3-D image, examining it from every direction. The picture it revealed strongly resembled the impressions he remembered. The distant horizon, the landforms like mountains and seas, but not quite…the atmosphere, all of it nothing but nanobots. An entire planet constructed of nanobots.
How was such a thing even possible?
“If you’re right, Doc…if you’re even remotely close to being right…we’ve got one hell of a problem with Red Hammer.” Winger thought back to all the surprises the Asian cartel had sprung on Quantum Corps over the last ten years, starting with the quantum coupler itself. The Serengeti Factor. Amazon Vector.
Major Kraft and Quantum Corps intelligence had long assumed Red Hammer had a stable of scientists and engineers in its clutches, able to devise ever more sophisticated means to pursue their criminal interests. There had even been reports from Japan and India of rashes of kidnappings and unexplained disappearances of certain academics, the most notable being the Indian physicist Chandrayan…Taj Singh had brought that to Winger’s attention, as the physicist had come from Bangalore, the same as Singh.
Maybe there was a lot more to the technical expertise of Red Hammer than anybody realized.
“Doc, we’ve got to take this to Major Kraft. And to Q2. The intel people may have other evidence we don’t know about. There may be a pattern here they can detect.”
“I’ll put together a report. But most of this is conjecture on my part, Johnny. You know me…just an old tinkerer and dreamer. I see some facts and try to find an explanation that fits them.”
“That’s the problem, Doc. Your explanation is bizarre and maybe it can’t be proven. But it does explain a lot of things.”
By the end of the day, Major Kraft had called another briefing in the Ops Center. Winger, Tallant and all the other platoon and company commanders were ordered to appear…along with representatives from other battalions: 1st BioMed, 1st EnviroChem…an all-hands meeting.
Something was up. Something big.
Kraft didn’t mince words as he paced about the briefing theater.
“Gentlemen, I just got the word from CINCQUANT. UNSAC has approved an assault on the Red Hammer base in Tibet—“ he paused for a few moments, as an excited stir rolled through the room. “As expected, the Chinese have strongly objected and walked out, threatening some kind of retaliation if their territory is violated. But the order stands. Conditions are worsening all over the world and UNSAC feels the evidence points overwhelmingly to this complex in the high plateau of Tibet as the central nexus of swarm control. The order stands. It’s now up to Quantum Corps to execute the order.” Kraft read the orders from a sheet. “’Quantum Corps is to plan, prepare for and execute an assault on the suspected Red Hammer facility at latitude eighty eight degrees fifteen minutes East and thirty-one degrees forty two minutes North. The purpose of this assault is to render this facility inoperable. Collateral damage to surrounding communities and infrastructure is to be minimized. Efforts will be made to capture key enemy personnel for intelligence purposes in any follow-on operations. A tactical plan will be developed and forwarded to UNSAC O-1 for approval not later than 0800 hours 17 November.’”
Kraft looked up, grim
and tight-lipped. “That gives us two days to develop a plan. I’m assigning primary assault duties to 1st Nano, with support from 2nd Nano and all other units. A special assault task force will be formed. This force has my permission to draw personnel and equipment from anywhere in the battalion.” Kraft leveled an even gaze at troopers from 1st Bio and 1st EnviroChem in the front rows. “CINCQUANT has personally assured me that other battalions will fully support the objectives of this mission.” The troopers squirmed uneasily under his gaze. “To ensure this support, General Linx himself is flying into Table Top to participate in planning. He arrives at 1430 hours this afternoon.”
Kraft then dismissed the assembly but not before announcing that 1st Nanospace personnel would assemble at 1500 hours in the Sim Tank three floors below.
Johnny Winger and Dana Tallant decided to catch a quick bite in the commissary before heading down to the Tank.
“What do you make of it, Wings?” Tallant asked. She chomped down on a protein veggie wrap and chased it with coffee.
Winger slurped his own drink, a jolting concoction of neuroboosters and fruit juices called kox, thoughtfully. “I’ve seen some of the early staff work on assaulting the Tibet compound, Dana. It’s a tough nut to crack. Intel from the vidsats and what little ground surveillance we have shows the place is literally a fortress. It’s built into and under the side of a mountain. Up top, the place is set up like a monastery, something called Paryang. Apparently, it’s a real working monastery, too which has always made UNIFORCE a little nervous about assaulting it. But it’s tucked into a narrow valley with steep mountains on all sides. Getting close enough to mount an assault without being detected is going to be tough.”
Dana Tallant chewed on her wrap for a few moments. “So why can’t we do what you did at Kurabantu?”
Winger had been mulling over the same idea. “You mean—“
“Exactly. Assault the place from underground.”
Winger sipped at the kox. It made his eyes water. “The scale of the operation would have to be so much bigger. At Kurabantu, we came in from underwater. ANAD had maybe a quarter mile of rock to go through. And the tunnel was—“ Winger shuddered at the memory. “…let’s just say, the tunnel was cramped. We had a hell of a time just getting all our gear and weapons through it. Kurabantu was a small isolated complex, lightly defended, as it turned out. This place…from what Q2 has shown us…would be a whole different ball game.”