Analog SFF, March 2012 (3 page)

"Yes. But so is a five-hundred-million-year-old-but-still-intact machine."

"Five hundred and fifty,” she said. “Anyway, if this thing beamed down or whatever, what about the rock that was here then? It should have been pushed aside or something, right? So we'd see fractures."

"Who knows?” I said. I was just trying to pressure test her claim. Who could judge which was the most parsimonious hypothesis: a machine that could survive more than five hundred million years of crushing geological changes, or a machine that teleported from somewhere—another dimension? outer space?—and maybe switched with the matter already there?

I stared. I paced around it in a circle, pondering. But finally another question intruded into the wonder of it.

"What are you planning to do? I mean, you have to get a team up here, right? Or wait for your students to come back. Or something."

"No team,” she said. “This is state land here in the Adirondacks. We announce the machine, the government takes this away from us immediately."

"You want to cut it out, tote it away?"

"Maybe. But who knows how big it is? How far into the stone it goes? It may not be an easy matter to cut it out."

"Hey—wait—hasn't the semester started already?"

"I called in sick."

"For the whole semester?"

"I told them I had cancer."

I shook my head. I didn't know where to begin on that one. A lie that big was going to cause her trouble. But another question struck me as more pressing: “Why do you need me?"

She bent over and pointed at the front of the sleek nose cone. We had to get down on our hands and knees on the hard stone to peer at it: a small square outline was just visible. A strange pattern of dots surrounded it, mirror imaged on each side:

.

. .

. . .

. . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . .

"Primes,” I said.

She nodded, and tapped the small square area with her finger thirteen times.

It disappeared, leaving a gaping square of dark about the size of two postage stamps.

"Whoa,” I said. “Whoa. Whoa. Whoa. It still . . . does things."

She nodded. “The front door."

"Oh,” I moaned, shocked as everything fell into place. I sat back on my knees and pressed my hands to my forehead. “I thought you were going to ask me for money. I thought you were going to ask me to fund you."

"No,” she said.

"You want my robots."

She nodded. “I want your robots."

"You want to go in,” I said.

"I want to go in."

The next day we stood on a busy sidewalk in Boston, staring up at a dingy factory building.

"I'm having second thoughts,” Karen said.

"Don't,” I told her.

"We bring in another person, we exponentially increase our chances of a leak. Let's just do it the slow way."

"You asked for my help, this is the way I say we have to do it. This guy is the best. With him, we'll be exponentially more efficient. Besides, three is a good number. One for base while two ride the bots. Come on."

I pulled her along a pitted sidewalk to a heavy green door. Thick wire-threaded windows, the muntins caked along their edges with a heavy history of dimly colored industrial paints, looked onto a dim hall and stairs. I pushed an old-fashioned black buzzer that hung uneasily in its mount. There was no sound: no way to know if the thing worked. But after a moment the door hummed and clicked, then drifted open.

We climbed the broad steps. A door stood ajar on the first landing. Through it we could see a big room punctuated with tall windows rising over a procession of work benches. Halogen bulbs strung on naked wires blazed down at us.

We went in, then pressed the door closed behind us. The space seemed even bigger now. I-beams thrust through the floor at seemingly random places held up a two-story ceiling clotted with exposed ducts and wires and pipes. Tools hung along the walls between the windows, below flat wall monitors displaying strange algorithms working silently. The air smelled of solder and—it took me a minute to place the smell—sage.

We took a few steps toward the windows. “Is that them?” Karen asked, nodding toward a rack of what looked like black clothes, standing by a tool cart.

"Best VR suits in the world. Unbelievably smooth pressure feedback. But those are off the rack. The point is that this guy's software is even better. This guy is the best interface man on the planet."

"Hey!” a voice called from a far corner. A wheelchair shot toward us. A heavy man with long black hair and a thick beard slammed his palms into the wheels, speeding forward. He seized the wheels and skidded to a stop just inches before our shins.

"How are things, Steven?"

He held out a hand. I shook. “Things are interesting."

"Poor bastard. I saw what those venture capitalists did to you."

"That's on the boards already? Well. So: Daltry Ericson, this is Karen. Karen and I went to grad school together."

Daltry looked at her frankly, shook her hand, and then turned back to me. “You want something to drink? Cappuccino? While I make it you can tell me the deal."

Daltry always started right in. He didn't really know how to do small talk. Or maybe didn't care to do it.

"That'd be great,” I said.

"Wet or dry?"

I looked at Karen. When she shrugged I explained: “Lots of milk or not much milk?"

"Wet,” she said.

"Three wets. Follow me. Talk."

We walked quickly, struggling to keep up as he sped across the heavy planks of the old industrial floor and into a corner kitchen. The kitchen was surprising clean for the pad of a bachelor ubergeek. Polished tile stretched into dust-free corners. Bright copper pans hung over a low gas stove. There were flower pots on the windowsill, and they were full of herbs. While Daltry worked a frightening Italian chrome machine, I told him, “We have a device. Unknown provenience. Unique, in every possible sense you can imagine. We want to reverse engineer it in a non-destructive way."

"A dive inside?"

"Right. My bots, your suits. Secret location, very tight non-disclosure agreements."

He sniffed. “Sounds dubious."

"I can promise you it is not illegal,” Karen said.

"Well, careful,” I said. With Daltry, it was important to be very precise. He was screwed a few times on contracts, and so he thought now that anyone he caught fudging was secretly a pathological liar. “There is a chance that the government could try to claim the machine from us, or at least complain that we didn't share earlier."

Daltry nodded. I knew the idea of beating the government to something would appeal to his anarchistic side.

"I could do it in the Spring,” he said. “Maybe. I'd need to know more."

"We have to do it now,” Karen said, looking at me. There was a hint of anger in her voice: I had dragged us all the way to Boston for this.

"She's right,” I said. “It must be now. The day after tomorrow. I'll need tomorrow to gather the robots and the other equipment we'll need. But then we pick you up and we leave."

"I have such responsibilities that starting anything new the day after tomorrow would cost an insane amount, just to pay off the contractual obligations I have."

"No,” I said. “Here's the deal. You come with us, bring all the gear you can. Give us a week. I'll pay your expenses."

"Now you're insulting me,” he said. He started frothing milk. The machine roared. I waited till it quieted down before I finished: “And,
and
, if you don't say, on the first day—no, if you don't say in the first
hour
—'Steven this is the most interesting, the most important thing I have ever done in my life,’ then I'll pay you whatever you want."

"I want a lot."

"I still own 38 percent of my company. I'll give it to you."

"I.P.O. date?"

"June."

He looked at me, at Karen, back and forth, the metal frothing cup forgotten in his hand. “Man, you must think you got something really interesting."

"Oh,” Karen said, “you have no idea."

Daltry wouldn't let me push his wheelchair. When we finally returned to the camp—his van following Karen's Audi—and climbed down from the cars, he shot ahead of us and half-slid down the hill to the tent, wheels churning pine needles.

"This is it?” he asked dubiously, as I reached for the zipper on the tent flap. “You decided to hide your machine in the woods?” He spun in place, working his arms in contrary directions, crushing pine needles under wheel as he took in the whole rustic scene. “There's nothing here. What if that fuel cell of yours doesn't pump enough juice? This is a stupid way to hide your device."

"We're not hiding it,” I said. “It's stuck in the stone."

"What?"

I held up the flap. He rolled in. He stopped at the edge of the cut, his wheels balanced precariously on the lip of stone. He stared a long time, silent. Then he circled the device slowly, wheeling around the pit. Finally he whispered, “It's extraterrestrial, isn't it? Is it extraterrestrial? It's alien."

I shrugged. Karen told him, “It's five hundred and fifty million years old. So if it isn't from outer space, then it's from someplace even weirder."

He stared, mouth hanging open.

"Well?” I asked.

"Get the equipment."

"But?"

"But yeah what you said."

"I can keep my shares in my company?"

"Not if I die here of anticipation. Get the goddamn equipment."

"Aye, aye, captain."

I held my open palm out before Daltry. All three of us were dressed in his VR suits. Daltry's was a specialty he'd rigged up: it went down only to his waist. He'd built special hand controls to simulate leg pressure and walk a robot.

Karen bent over to peer down into my palm.

"Not so close,” I told her. “Don't breath on them, you might blow one away. We'll be in big trouble trying to find it in all these pine needles."

"Sorry,” she said. She backed off. “It's just, I can barely see them. They look like three dead fruit flies."

I nodded. “That's about the size. Just over three millimeters long. They're heavier than flies, of course. Internal atomic power source. They can run about a week without replacement of the battery."

I looked over at the device. We had set a dish antenna out before it, the bell aimed straight at the tiny opening on the front. “These robots should be able to transmit clearly to that antenna, at least till we're in there a few centimeters. But we can carry line in with us if we have to. We should practice on something, shouldn't we?"

"No practice,” Karen said. “I've waited long enough. We go in."

"Right,” Daltry agreed. “This is a probe drop, not an astronaut launch. I want in there now."

"You were supposed to be ground control."

"The hell with that,” Daltry said. “We're all ground control. You want ground control, pull your helmet off. This is VR. Worse case scenario we lose some of your toys there."

"Worst case scenario this thing spits out green men who eat our brains."

"And with that, ground control is going to help you how?"

I shook my head. There was no arguing with him. We were a rogue mission anyway. Dropping more protocols could not make the mission more improvised than it already was.

"Okay, we go in. But a short dive. A few centimeters. We see what we see and then we back out, we assess, we plan our next steps."

"Just drop the bots in the slot,” Daltry said. He pulled on his helmet. They were ungainly helmets, with bulges over the eyes and ears, and a cut that left the mouth and nose exposed. He looked like a seated insect with a human mouth.

I had air tweezers to lift the robots. I placed each individually on the rim of the small open rectangle on the Ediacarian machine. Each bot had gecko feet, carbon nonfiber tubules that could clench onto nearly any material. They held. When the three bots were lined up, I stepped back and pulled my helmet on.

In a few moments my eyes adjusted to the pale colors of the robot-eye-view, flanked by dark readouts. “Karen? Daltry?"

"Here,” Karen's voice sounded like it came from my right. Instinctively I turned my head. I saw the bug-eyed twin sensors of her own microbot avatar look back at me.

"Your software is good, Daltry,” I whispered.

"I know,” he said. His voice seemed to come from the left, and I turned and looked at his robot. The voice of course did not come from the robot, but directly over radio. But the software placed it in space so that it seemed to come from his robot. It was hard to overestimate how helpful such smooth interface features could be. Humans have a lot of hard-wired capabilities in their brains, and it was better to take advantage of those abilities instead of trying to learn to fight them. Little tricks like this—placing the other robots in sound space—could save time and energy when you wanted to find the other robot. It was far better than having to look at a three-dimensional map, for example. We already had three-dimensional maps in our head; good software exploited those maps.

The same was true for the bodies. They were roughly humanoid, and of human proportions. That was not because human form was optimal for a small bot, but rather because it meant that we needed negligible time to prepare to run a humanoid robot. Something with twelve arms would have required years of practice for competent control. Two legs, two arms, twin forward facing eyes, and you could run it in minutes.

Karen's robot lurched forward. “This is weird, controlling the legs."

"Just walk in place till you feel comfortable with the pressure sensors,” I told her. The suits allowed control of perambulation by sensing the electrical nerve impulses to muscle control, and then interpreting them as commands. At first, you had to walk to make it work, but with practice it seemed you just had to think about walking—sending minimal efferent nerve signals to your leg muscles—and the bot would walk.

I walked my bot over and stood beside Karen's, right on the threshold of the door to the machine.

"All right,” I said. “I go first. You all follow a step behind. We stay together until we agree as a group to part. If you see something, even if you think the rest of us must have seen it, sound out. We need to be sure we're all on the same mission while in there. And remember. I've got only four of these robots. Take it easy."