Containment (26 page)

Arik was now working on a new metaphor to help him comprehend what was happening in his mind. In his History of Computation and Computing class, Arik had learned about a data storage technique called RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Disks. When magnetic and early solid state media was still used for data storage, the world's most critical data was sometimes stored across multiple hard disks, or a redundant hard disk array, so if any one drive failed, no data would be lost. Some RAID levels could even protect against multiple drive failures simultaneously. As an additional precaution, data used to be backed up on a regular basis. It was compressed, encrypted, copied, burned onto various types of permanent physical media, locked away in two or more geographical locations thousands of kilometers apart to guard against natural disasters, hackers, war, terrorist attacks, and, most dangerous of all, simple human error.

Although Arik had no idea how memories were stored, he now understood them to be stored in a fantastically complex and redundant fashion. They were copied, broken down into individual components, distributed among different parts of the brain, associated with as many other memories and given as many paths to and from them as possible. Perhaps over time, some memories even migrated out of the brain and were distributed across our entire nervous system where they sat in our stomachs, our hearts, our legs, our fingers, and our eyes, ears, and noses. Perhaps some lessons learned were even selectively encoded into our DNA and passed down to our children in order to save them from having to make some of the same mistakes we did. Wherever and however experiential memories were stored, Arik now believed that you could not destroy them without destroying the entire organism; the best you could do was make the brain forget where to find them and how to piece them together.

But even that information was redundant. Every piece of lost information contained the address of every other lost piece, so all you had to do was stumble upon one and the rest could be restored and remapped and eventually fully reconstituted. As soon as Arik understood the meaning of the message he had left for himself, he began to understand everything. He remembered the first time he pinched and rubbed the little pyramid of sulfur-yellow earth between his fingers; the fear and exhilaration of stepping outside for the first time; the morning he nearly knocked the outer airlock door out of its track when Cam was teaching him how to pilot a rover; the ill-conceived plan to use a pressure washer to deploy experiments outside the Public Pod; the seizing and spasm of the dehydrated muscles in his legs; the burning of his lungs as he tried to suck a breath out of an empty environment suit cartridge, and the rush he got from the deep, cold, oxygen-rich gasp after stumbling into the airlock and ripping off his helmet.

Arik remembered the wall, the thick steel door, the ruins of the nuclear reactors and cooling towers. He remembered the black viscous ooze that had once been a lapping, breezy blue ocean, but was now almost indistinguishable from the burnt shores that contained it. He remembered the massive hollow eye sockets of the skull, the blow from behind, and the red and yellow guts in the muzzle of his plug gun, sucked through the abdomen of his attacker. The inhuman face looking down at him curiously just before bursting apart and painting his visor red and black. The men who retrieved him: one who Arik had liked and felt safe with, the other who seemed unpredictable and dangerous. The red glow of the oxygen lockdown and the calm and detached voice reciting instructions. The masked faces of his father and Dr. Nguyen. The stained and contaminated environment suit and all his equipment and clothing going into the bin. Standing in the dock naked, arms raised, shivering, the metal grate pressing into his feet. The field decontamination. The powder that scoured his pale dry skin. The stillness and isolation of quarantine. Rosemary's staged suicide. And finally the time capsule which proved to be the catalyst that reignited all the pain and amazement of his discoveries.

Something else about the human brain was becoming apparent to Arik. Unlike computers, not all data was alike. There was a fundamental difference between the way the brain preserved memories, and the way it stored information. Although Arik was able to remember conducting terraforming research, he wasn't able to recall the research itself. Although he remembered transferring the data to ODSTAR, he had no recollection of what he had transferred.

Arik looked behind him at the shelf on which the ODSTAR device once sat. He knew that Cadie had destroyed it along with all the DNA inside it, and that he himself had deleted the only copy of the protocol library that could be used to communicate with it. But he also knew that the data it held was not lost. He knew that his unborn daughter's genetic tattoo was much more than just a stunning image of a near-extinct planet. She also had within her the power to recreate it. It was encoded in her DNA, contained in her very composition, locked up where no one would ever know to look for it, and where no one could ever take it away.

T
he question Arik was presented with was this: how do you fool a foolproof system? The answer was obvious: you don't.

But Arik suspected that Cam's claim that the airlock was foolproof actually implied qualifications. Given
a
,
b
, and
c
, you can always expect
x
,
y
, and
z
. To remove those qualifications was to essentially declare the system perfect, to hold it to an impossibly high standard, to invite a relentless barrage of randomly shifting conditions until just the right combination unlocked events that might have seemed completely inconceivable one moment, but were tragically obvious the very next.

Arik knew well the story of the first spacemen to die in the line of duty. Three Apollo astronauts asphyxiated when a spark from faulty wiring ignited their pure oxygen environment and a hatch without explosive bolts prevented their escape. A situation that should have given a first year chemistry student pause somehow escaped the notice of a thousand of the best engineers in the western world. Arik knew that every situation and environment had buried somewhere within it the components to cause it to ignite. It was mostly luck that kept reactive elements apart from one second to the next. Millions of people had smoked at petrol stations, ridden roller coasters with microscopic stress fractures, flown in planes with leaky hydraulic lines, all without even knowing that the mysterious laws of the cosmos had put them on trial and, for whatever reason, decided in their favor. A great deal of effort went into the systems that tried to keep entropy contained, but sometimes there were just too many variables to keep track of.

Of course, sometimes chaos was intentionally unleashed and used to one's advantage.

Arik needed to get outside one last time, and he needed to do it in a way that was supposed to be impossible. All the environment suits and helmets were now secured inside of lockers with independent biometric electromagnetic bolts. Since the locks didn't interface with the V1 Computing Cloud in any way, they couldn't be hacked, and since they contained their own shielded power source, it wasn't possible to easily disrupt the current. Other than providing it with an approved genetic fingerprint, the only way to get one open was to destroy it. Shattering or cutting one open would have probably been relatively easy if not for the fact that the necessary tools (liquid nitrogen, hydrologic snips, power hammer, laser cutter, etc.) were now likewise secured.

Going to Cam wasn't an option. Cam had presumably been kept away from Arik in the Doc Pod for the same reasons Cadie had, but Arik and Cam never reconnected after the so-called accident. Arik didn't know exactly what was keeping them apart, but between Arik's empty promise not to go back outside, emotions surrounding the baby, and the trouble Cam must have gotten into once it was discovered that he was the one who had given Arik EVA training, there was certainly no shortage of material.

In the same way that Arik's ability to communicate had been taken away while he was in quarantine by blocking his access to network protocols, he was now being kept inside V1 by his inability to access an environment suit. But as far as Arik could tell, that was the only precaution that had been put into place. He was still able to access the Wrench Pod, even in the middle of the night when nobody was around, and he couldn't see any physical modifications to the airlock itself. But every environment suit in V1 — even the emergency suits stored in the dome next to the nutrient tank — were now biometrically secured, and even if Arik could figure out how to break open one of the bolts, it would be extremely difficult to do it in a way that wouldn't be detected very soon after he did it. It wasn't enough just to get outside; he needed to do it without anyone knowing.

The one thing Arik had going for him was that he knew even foolproof systems could only guard against known vulnerabilities. By its very definition, there was no way for the unknown to be anticipated and accounted for. Just as Fai couldn't have taken into consideration communication protocols that he knew nothing about, those in charge of the Wrench Pod could not account for the one piece of key information they didn't know Arik had: technically, you did not need an environment suit to survive outside.

Arik didn't know how long it was possible to endure exposure to the radiation and poisonous gasses in the atmosphere, but he had witnessed it himself. None of his attackers on the beach had been using any form of life support more sophisticated than a respirator, and although prolonged exposure had obviously taken its toll on them, Arik assumed that he could recover from a single exposure of limited duration. It was always possible that the homeless only spent a few minutes, or maybe even just a few seconds, outside at any one time, but the visibility was good enough on the beach that day that Arik would probably have seen any nearby vehicles or structures from which they could have emerged. They had almost certainly traveled at least a few kilometers on foot before reaching him which meant it was probably possible for Arik to survive the one kilometer walk between V1 and the Earth Radio Pod — even completely exposed.

Obtaining a respirator was easy. There were several hundreds of them strategically placed for emergency use throughout V1, although in order to minimize the possibility of detection, Arik decided to build his own out of items in his lab and from the Life Pod supply closets: shatter resistant borosilicate glass which was easily moldable at 822° Celsius, plastic tubing, rubber sealant, a microfiber filter, and miniature perchlorate "birthday" candles which, once ignited, produced enough oxygen for one person for about one hour. He fashioned a hood out of a shirt to cover his head and face, and selected a pair of tight-fitting goggles which, although useless against radiation, would keep any caustic particles in the air out of his eyes.

But even though Arik was willing to leave V1 without an environment suit, he knew that the airlock wouldn't permit it — at least not knowingly. The airlock walls were equipped with sophisticated spatial analysis technology which was used to create an extremely detailed three-dimensional model of all the objects inside. Before the outer airlock doors were allowed to open, the number of functional environment suits had to be exactly equal to the number of human entities it detected. Arik's first thought was simply to make himself appear as something other than a human entity. What if he crouched down and made himself the size of one of the small robotic rovers? What if he laid down in the trailer and covered himself with a tarp? As he read through the airlock's specifications, schematics, and repair manual, however, he realized that the system would not be fooled so easily. In addition to using radar and visible spectrum scanning, the airlock's sensors also scanned in the infrared range, allowing it to detect temperature variations down to a millionth of a degree. It used ultra-sensitive electrodes to detect the electric field generated by the human body's central nervous system, and it was equipped with microphones sensitive enough to pick up individual breathing patterns and heart beats, even through environment suits. After every object in the airlock was analyzed and identified, its total weight was measured and compared to a calculated estimate. Finally, all this data was fed into an extremely sophisticated algorithm which was designed to answer one simple question: was it safe to open the outer airlock doors?

Arik wasn't prepared to call the system foolproof, but he was willing to admit that fooling it probably wasn't practical.

In Arik's experience, whenever a great deal of attention was paid to one part of a system, it was often to the detriment another. As sophisticated as the early Apollo training capsule was, under the right circumstance, it was reduced to little more than a crude and extremely expensive incinerator. In order to fool a foolproof system, you simply had to take a step back and look for the one thing that nobody else thought of. It was always there — you just had to know how to find it.

While reading through the airlock's specification, Arik discovered that there was one way to override the computer's decision making process and force the outer doors to open. Outside the airlock, just to the left of the doors and flush with the wall, was a lever that could be pulled to mechanically force the two doors apart about one centimeter at a time. The designers of the airlock had no doubt weighed the risks of a mechanical override against the possible advantages; it was obviously designed for emergency use only, and since it could only be operated from outside, there was no way anyone inside the airlock could use it to force the doors apart. Additionally, since the inner and outer doors were physically linked, there was no way both the inner and outer doors could be open at the same time, potentially contaminating the entire dock and Wrench Pod, if not all of V1. It therefore seemed perfectly reasonable and safe to provide a means of reentry in the event of a complete power failure. From the perspective of the designers and engineers, it must have seemed entirely impossible for someone to intentionally use the emergency ingress mechanism to subvert the airlock's safety procedures. It couldn't be done, and even if it could, why in the world would anyone try?