Reconfigure (16 page)

She heard a bobbling clatter and peered under the Ray K. desk to see her NAS sat there atop a couple of dried muddy outlines of her Converse shoes.

“Wake up Doc Henry.” She said as she typed.

“Unmeld”

The terminal responded.

>Unmeld complete

Doctor Henry moved state from completely static to a living breathing human again. He turned to her and asked.

“We’ve got it, haven’t we?”

“We certainly have doc, I don’t suppose you have a 12 volt PSU do you? I made it leave in a hurry last time and I didn’t pack one."

He looked and smiled at her

“Just call me David, no need for the doctor reference."

She replied “OK Dave? Or David?" As he stood up and walked to a drawer full of cables and power supplies.

“David please, if you don’t mind. Alex calls me Dave.” He answered.

Roisin set up her newly returned NAS and plugged it in to both the power and the all important ethernet socket with the cable that David brought over along with the power supply.

“I need a Mac or some sort of PC.” Roisin asked him as she made the connections.

He reached towards her keyboard. She didn’t see what he typed as she was trying to wobble the ethernet into the back of the NAS. She looked back at her screen to see a fresh looking OS X desktop.

“We run all sorts of virtual machines, usually use Windows for Powerpoint and alike. Is this the right one?” He asked, raising his eyebrows. “I don’t really do Macs.” He added.

She smiled a crooked smirk and nodded. I guess he thought they weren't for real techies, just hipsters and designers then?

She connected to the Web and began a download of the basic Unity3D environment and whilst its bar progressed she found her YouGetMyBackup name on the network. Mounting the device on the Mac virtual machine. There were her code repositories, plus stacks of photos and videos and game saves amongst many other useful digital artefacts.

She also downloaded her usual SourceTree client so that she did not have to delve into the mucky world of both a CLI and a library management system. GIT, Mercurial and SVN were all very similar, but it was a lot easier to see the branches and lists of files on a nice user interface.

It was a simple task to retrieve her last commit to the backup server repo and she had a fully accessible project once again.

“Here we go.” She announced to David.

He had been taking some readings and inspecting the other screens that seemed to be supporting Ray K’s operation. He had not touched anything, he just seemed to be filling the time it took for her to get setup. She was glad because people looking over her shoulder at progress bars was really annoying. He walked around the Ray K. table and put one hand on the desk to support his leaning forward to see her screen.

She took him through the components, how each worked, the way she had dealt with tracking and the layer of connection to Twitter.

“Here is where I need to patch into RK."

“One second.” He said.

He moved past her and tapped away at his keyboard, not bothering to sit down.

“I will generate a secure tunnel for you and some public and private keys for you to SSH into. The domain name is qsearcher.awdh.org and the keys are on your machine now in Documents/RayK.” He stated.

Roisin set to work patching her communications layer. She didn’t remove the Twitter code, just worked on a new layer beside it. She decided to add some parameters, so she could select an id to use and to stream with, should she ever need Twitter again. It was not something she was about to test but it had bugged her, being locked to a single id.

She added the secure tunnelling libraries to her project and configured them. Roisin reused the parameter code from her Twitter amendments, to make sure she could select and change keys without recompiling code. She bound the keys to the project and ran a test.

Doctor Henry felt the Ray K. view of the Universe only as a faint dream. A whisper of structures and metadata when he was in his Melded state. To actually see boxes and labels on the screen, as Roisin gave him a tour of the now working user interface to Ray K., clearly made him very happy. It was hardcoded test data, it needed him Melded to run properly. She had worked providing clever front ends to server code before. She asked her server developer, Dr Henry, for a few improvements. It was never quite clear in these relationships who was in charge, the front end or the back end. Those server techies tended to shy away from anything that normal people might interact with. Assuming the front end was just all fluff and nonsense. Roisin knew that was not the case, but she also knew many front end developers that had no idea about the back end. Putting time consuming requirements on the server because they thought the cloud was a black box full of magic. Both needed to work together.

“What I really need is a Zone based on coordinates not just on a known object in the space.” She started, “I can work around with a load of grepping and examining, but a Zone coordinate would be so much simpler. I had the coords of the NAS but it was a weird piece of shuffling I had to do to get to it. Also it would be great to have GPS coords!"

He looked at her, whilst pondering the solution.

“I can do the Zone by coordinates. It’s quite a simple change. GPS, that’s a more significant problem. The Fractal position comes directly from the quantum proximity structure around Ray K. They are not the same at all levels of fractal abstraction. Different coordinates arise at the subatomic level, relative to other components at that level. It’s probably easier for you to just do the maths for <2709>. We are actually here.”

Her screen popped up with another window, outside of her Mac OS. It showed a Google/G map of what looked like a farm complex, the pin centred on a courtyard.

“We are just under here.” He said.

Roisin already had an idea how to map the coordinates, she now had this missing piece of the jigsaw. The GPS coords of a plot of land above her head at the moment. Apparently, the lab was fifteen meters down, so that offset worked allowing for the room height and her position to give enough accuracy for sensible, no leg breaking, jumps to any location on the planet. She had to interrupt David’s own coding Flow a few times, as he was altering his server code, to ask about the coordinate system and any extra curvature that she needed to put into the maths. Ray K. dealt with a large sphere of coordinates around it. As Ray K. was in a fixed position, the calculation to GPS was an offset in iteration <2709>.

They both settled into another hour of testing and tweaks to make the toolset work. Roisin thought about her house, her office, her life. David Henry thought of Alex and how much he needed her back.

They both sat back and their swivel chairs creaked, almost approving of each of their owner’s work. Roisin asked one more question.

“Who are the bad guys then?”

David sat bolt upright again and turned to her.

“The CCSO you mean? It sounded like them, The Combined Corporate Surveillance Operation. Alex and I were conducting independent research into our quantum search. We got a number of requests.” He made two quotation marks in the air with each hand. “After we published our initial paper, to partner with a multinational technology firm. The sums of money were astronomical. We were not in it for the money. They didn’t seem to take that as a reasonable answer. The letters and visits to the lab became more and more frequent. Just your typical corporate lawyers, swimming like sharks around us it seemed. We nearly gave in. Alex’s parents were on their way to see us, we heard the screech of tyres and the crash outside. We had no idea it was their car to start off with. I remember looking out of the flat window, seeing the crumpled front end of a red city car smashed into a skip left outside on the road a few doors down. Alex came to look too. As soon as she saw the wreckage she shouted for her Mum and Dad and ran down to the street. I chased after her. There was nothing we could do. There was already a paramedic there. We lived close to the city hospital so it was not a surprise one was on the scene. Alex was sat on the kerb, not even crying just staring into space. I asked the paramedic the obvious, before I could finish my sentence he shook his head and said sorry. He was just picking up his phone, I assumed he was calling it in. He stopped and he had looked across the road. A girl with a serious camera was snapping pictures. I shouted at her to stop taking photos. I mean? It was Alex’s parents in the wreck. She shouted back, she was press and she had to. I am not a violent man but I felt aggression towards her and her lack of compassion. As I reached her she lowered the camera, only to look at her phone. A message had pinged on it. I caught a glimpse of the screen as she put the phone away and turned to walk off. It said, “CCSO - Desist." She was chimping on the camera, cursing and pushing buttons hard as if she was frustratedly deleting images. An ambulance arrived, police and the fire brigade with their jaws of life too. We talked to the police. They even sent a counsellor around who specialised in bereavement. She helped us through the next few days and weeks, the funeral, the inquest. It said that Alex’s Dad had fallen asleep at the wheel, toxicology reported no chemicals or alcohol in his blood stream. That was odd, but we did not question it. He smoked a lot of medicinal marijuana. We thought that might have come up in court, but it didn’t. His blood was clean of everything. I asked a journalist friend from college about why a photographer might get a desist message, and bother to pay attention to it. He was visibly shaken by the question. It took a lot of persistence to get him to tell me anything. It seems all the major corporations, the big ones, with all the money and resources make up a massive cartel. They cover every part of our lives and the World. They control the media of course. The CCSO is the security branch that enforces for them. The police and army and even the government spooks have nothing on them. All the other systems just carry on doing their thing, but occasionally the CCSO step in and adjust and tweak. All the press, even the freelance ones, know that a desist message is serious, deadly serious. No-one is going to be doing a piece on them. He warned me, if the CCSO were interested in Alex’s parent’s car wreck that was something to worry about.”

Roisin had listened intently, like a kid at a campfire hearing their first ghost story. She had no words, no questions, just intently focused.

He continued. “We got some more offers for our work, along with some platitudes about Alex’s recent loss. It did not add up. It had an ominous feel to every interaction with them. We had a prototype of Ray K. running in our public lab. The lawyers and a few extra minions came to see us again in person. I met them whilst Alex was inside running some tests. They wanted to come in and take a look but I insisted it was a clean environment and would take us way too long to suit up. They offered yet more money. Alex ran one of the very first quantum searches we had ever done whilst I was dealing with our visitors. I had persuaded them now was not a good time, I went back in to see how she was getting on. It wasn’t a clean room of course, I had lied. Alex showed me the screen. A mass of seemingly unstructured metadata was there, yet we could see some words and patterns. The search had found lots of data in the general area. It was pre-melding so it was quite confused and unstructured. It seemed to have a collection of humans and, the items we were not expecting, firearms and bullets in it. Lawyers with armed guards did not feel like the right sort of organisation we wanted to join. We concluded it would end up with one of us being used against the other with guns to our heads or worse. Alex was convinced, from what we knew of them, that they had killed her parents.

We completely dismantled the prototype, wiped our drives, save for our personal machines and fled to this farm. We were acting with complete paranoia. Nothing we had could risk us being traced. Phones, cards etc. We transferred all our money to what we hoped was untraceable crypto currency. That was wrapped in various blockchain escrow accounts. Alex comes from a wealthy family, not corporate money either. She had inherited quite a sum. We were able to buy this farm, via an agent using the crypto currency. Though the exchange rate was terrible. We then lay low, but kitted out the lab we are in now. There were already a lot of silage tanks and excavations here so we got the lab shell done in about 6 months. The next 18 months we spent building and working on Ray K. Bits and pieces shipped in from different suppliers. Extra care was needed to not give our intentions away. The scientific world assumed we had run off together and forgone the science lifestyle.

When we turned Ray K. V2., on the first time I remember feeling very odd. I thought it was the negative ions in the air around the lasers. It was the singularity lining up with my neural pathways. It was as if a friend was saying, come and look at this. It was just a theory but we worked on the configuration that became the Meld. Alex ran a search with me Melded. The adjusted metadata output was much more coherent. It had been part of our theory that a suitable AI and the search would enable us to adjust positions of objects, in this instance of the World, using a variant of quantum teleportation. Alex applied a Translate, by editing the metadata and resubmitting it to Ray K. The paperweight that she saw smash against the wall proved it worked. When I Unmelded I saw it too.

I remember Alex having that determined look on her face. She wanted to prove what had happened to her parents, to expose the CCSO. We built the interface commands to manipulate the metadata and Alex set off out into the World, shutting this now non existent door behind her. The rest, well, you know.”

“Bloody Hell!” Said Roisin. “That, is intense!"

She felt sorry and excited at the same time. She had had a very close shave with the CCSO, not months of subtle suggestions and lawyer visits. No! They had gone right in there with the tranquillisers and the bullets. “We have to do something about this, we just have to!” She demanded.

“Alex was working the system outside, she didn’t want to attract too much attention by zapping things with Ray K. She was aware, as we both were, that mistakes could have dramatic effects on everyone and the entire planet. We put some safety checks in, knowing when things were going to crash into one another and alike. She was planning to go undercover and try to join CCSO. I was against some of her ideas. It seemed very risky to be physically there. There was no stopping her! She developed a new identity, made up a whole life and background. She wanted it to be so convincing, she didn’t want to even tell me anything about it. She could leave, and then stay in character. Given how focussed and angry she was I fear she may have done something to herself we had not considered in order to maintain her cover.”