The Quantum Brain (Pulse Science Fiction Series Book 2) (2 page)

Mark searched instead for a particular part he needed for the suit he was building. It was a relatively simple design and concept, but he wasn’t leaving anything to chance.

After all, the job had just gotten so much bigger.

“Have a seat, Dr. Kell.”

Thomas Kell looked around the leather furniture and dark wood of the executive suit. With the pristine white of the labs he was used to at CDR, he had trouble processing that this lavish suite was even in the same building.

He cleared his throat and lowered himself onto the center of a long, leather couch. It was too soft. The back was too far away, so he started to lean back, but then gave up and leaned forward again sitting on the front edge of the seat.

Thomas balanced the folders he had brought with him on his knees. He preferred a screen, but the equipment was restricted to the lab, so he had to print out hard copies like it was the 1990’s all over again. He offered to meet with her in the labs, but she insisted that he come up to see her.

Thomas thought about setting the folders on the coffee table between them, but it was decorated with a large porcelain figurine of a shirtless warrior slaying a lion with his bare hands. There was also a china tea set that looked to be just for show and then some sort of silver case with intricate etchings on it.

His folders would clash with the décor, so he kept them balanced on his knees and awaited instructions.

Hazel Conrad sat quite comfortably across from Dr. Kell in one of the bowed back leather chairs. It looked like a throne and Thomas was sure she was sitting a few inches higher than him.

She was wearing a severe dress with a high collar. It was some color between burgundy and copper. Her hair was grey and stacked on her head in tight braids and buns. There was no way that she achieved that look alone. Thomas had trouble remembering going home to sleep or whether he had showered that day. He could not imagine a team of people helping him get ready for a day of work.

Her lipstick and eyebrows looked painted on. They might have been tattooed. The brows look sharp enough to cut glass. Both her eyebrows and her lips looked to be coordinated in color to compliment the unique color of her dress.

He looked her over as he waited uncomfortably for her to address him again after he obeyed her by taking a seat. In the pause, he noticed there was a ticking of a mechanical clock. It reminded him of the clacks he hated on a keyboard. As soon as he heard the sound, he couldn’t unhear it and it was messing with his focus.

He wondered if she had plastic surgery and how many times. Her skin looked pulled tight. He knew she was old. He believed she was the oldest of the current partners. She was the daughter of the original Conrad. She had to be pushing sixty or seventy. She must have had plastic surgery, he decided.

“Dr. Kell, I’d like to congratulate you on your recent breakthrough,” she said. Her voice had a sing song quality. He thought it might have been put on for effect. Some formal tone of a bygone era, he thought. He had not met directly with any of the partners enough to know for sure. He preferred to stay in the labs and deliver electronic reports to project managers.

Thomas cleared his throat and looked down at the folders on his knees. “Which breakthrough do you mean?”

She let out a high laugh. “Very good, Dr. Kell. I like confidence in our prize researchers. Even overconfidence can be useful as long as you keep delivering.”

Thomas blinked and said, “Yes, ma’am.”

He had no idea what she meant. Her comment made him feel like she looked at him like a piece of equipment she had bought to perform a task or like one of the cows on one of her family ranches in Montana or Idaho or wherever it was her family owned half the state.

She said, “I mean, of course, the progress with communicating with the Q1 project.”

Thomas nodded. “Yes, ma’am, we are pleased with the sudden boost in activity. It’s moving quickly toward its full potential finally.”

“Finally, indeed,” Hazel Conrad said. “The partners are ready to move into the next phases and we want to tap you to oversee the entire production.”

“Production?” Thomas narrowed his eyes. He was expecting to be giving reports on the current projects, but this seemed to be turning into something else entirely.

“We are ready to move on the design parameters on Q2 processors and begin application into the android division,” she said.

“Androids, Ms. Conrad?”

“Yes, we believe the second generation will finally give our android designs the autonomy we need to make them broadly economically viable.”

Thomas took a deep breath. “With respect, I’d like to slow down a moment to understand exactly what we are discussing.”

She waved a hand up from the arm of her grand chair in a motion that almost looked like a dance move. “By all means, Doctor.”

He nodded and looked down at the tea set as he spoke. “We are still trying to understand what we have in the first generation, Ms. Conrad. Like you said, our recent breakthrough, though promising, is very recent. Moving forward with Q2 at this point feels very premature to my thinking.”

“I can understand why some would feel that way and see things that way,” she said to him in her sing song tone that suddenly felt mocking. His eyes moved from the tea set to the warrior tearing apart the porcelain lion with his bare hands. She continued. “That’s not how the CDR Group sees things. That is certainly not how we became the innovators that we are today and that is not the vision that will take us into the future. The next generation of our work is far bigger than you or me, Dr. Kell. This is about the next steps for humanity that will change the world for generations long after we are gone and CDR is still carrying on the work of changing the world. It is time for us to move forward. I know that you are the man to see us through this, Dr. Kell.”

“I thank you for your confidence, ma’am.” Thomas looked up from the lion to her face again. Her stare felt too intense like she could see through him. He looked away from her face to the hard coppery buttons on her dress. “I am fully engrossed in the Q1 project right now. I’m not in a position to oversee multiple divisions and still complete the work that needs to be done there.”

“I’m going to say this as nicely as I can.” The sing song of her voice had all but vanished and an edge had replaced it in her tone. “I’m not asking. I’m informing you. You are bound to CDR in your research, so you’re working for us regardless of how this conversation plays out and you’ll be doing that as we direct. We appreciate your work and will continue to support you as you carry out the projects which are in CDR’s best interests. So, you will be overseeing the android design and production of the Q2 projects as you continue to develop Q1 to its full potential. Your work on the first generation will inform the work on the second, so we need you to be involved in both to see them forward.”

“Of course, Ms. Conrad.” Thomas swallowed and said, “You said Q2 projects as in there will be multiple projects?”

“Yes, Dr. Kell, there will be an industrial android division and a domestic companion model. Both will utilize the Q2 processing technology which you and your teams will develop off of what you are learning from the Q1 project. Of course, you will be given a team of the best individuals available in the field for each project you oversee. There will be real time communication and coordination with our production facilities around the world. The project managers will all be answering to you in these projects for the time being instead of the other way around.”

Thomas gripped the folders with both hands until the papers inside crinkled. He could hear the ticking clock again and had to fight the temptation to look around the suite for it. It caused a pulse of pain and light behind his eyes with each tick as he tried to process what she was telling him. He was not prepared for all of this today.

“We’re going to be coordinating work with other facilities?” he asked. “I can’t even take a touch pad out of the lab. How are you going to secure open lines with factories and labs around the world?”

“We will gear up quickly,” she said. “We have a cyber security expert coming in to update all our systems and networks to keep everything encrypted and secure.”

“A contractor?” Thomas asked.

“He has passed our background checks and has the references and skills to do the work quickly and effectively,” she said. “You will be overseeing his work as well.”

Thomas sighed. “The more I have to watch over, the more likely something will be missed.”

“Have faith in yourself,” she said. “I want that overconfidence I saw at the beginning of our meeting – which breakthrough, indeed. Classic stuff, Dr. Kell. Besides, do you want our cyber security contractor setting up the parameters on your working systems without your direction?”

Thomas showed his teeth and shook his head. “No, that would not be good. I take your point, Ms. Conrad. Thank you.”

She stood up. “Well, I’ll let you get back to work again then, Dr. Kell. I know you have a lot to look after.”

He blinked and stood up slowly. Thomas held out the folders in his hand. “Did you want these reports on our progress that you had me prepare, ma’am?”

She looked down at them and shrugged. The motion moved her high collar. “I have learned all I need to know from our meeting. You have your instructions. I don’t need to look at a bunch of charts. I appreciate your thorough work though as always.”

He swallowed and nodded. Thomas turned away with the folders under his arms and walked toward the door. “Thank you, Ms. Conrad.”

“Be sure to shred all of those before you leave the outer office, Dr. Kell.”

He stopped while facing the door, but did not turn around. “Shred them?”

“Yes, go ahead and shred the folders, the papers and everything,” she said to his back. “We can’t have any materials about our work floating loose in the world. There is a large industrial shredder to your right as you step out into the outer office. Feed the folders in one at a time and it will chew them right up. It will be fun.”

Thomas found himself thinking of the image of the warrior killing the lion. “Yes, ma’am.”

He reached down and turned the knob to leave the executive suite.

Mark Spencer paused to listen. The hum of the machinery around him almost sounded like crashing waves. He could sleep to the white noise of these supercomputers. He imagined having them stacked in his apartment living room to use for his extra curricular activities. He’d have to take out the floor and take over the Russians’ apartment to make these monoliths fit in there.

CDR had the best of the best and they were working on even greater secrets than these.

He heard no one else in the stacks with him at the moment, so he continued his work. This was tricky because they weren’t letting him bring in his own equipment. He was having to use their devices to create his backdoor and that was a dangerous game indeed even if he wasn’t trying to mess with CDR.

He reached into the open panel and unhooked hard wire connections. Mark plugged into the device CDR had given him for the work. The tablet came up with the server ID and Mark input his temporary security code assigned to him by Calvin Hall, the fellow that read Mark the riot act when he came into the building for the first time.

Mark ran a diagnostic. As the green bars mounted up on the screen indicating everything on the server was functioning, he moved into the backlog sections of the device. A red series of numbers indicated that the server recognized that it had been tapped, so it was automatically isolated and the activity recorded.

“Smart,” Mark whispered.

Mark worked behind the diagnostic and created a clone account and masked it within the device’s operating system. It was like a virus or a Trojan horse whose only job was to hide itself. Easy enough. Then, he went through that account to bypass and redirect the security recording of the server. He watched long enough to realize that the system thought it was still recording, but Mark’s dummy account could operate undetected.

He flipped back to the main screen and saw the diagnostic was almost over. He needed to move fast. He scrolled back through to his other functions and broke out of the server’s lockout. Data began rolling through the screens of his isolated account. He didn’t bother trying to make sense of it yet.

Mark checked the security recording again, but this time from out in the security system itself. The protocols thought they were still recording. All indications were that server was still locked in and there was no breech of the system.

Mark went back to the diagnostic and set it on a loop. The green bars vanished and started ticking back up again. He reprogrammed the device to recognize the loop as a single diagnostic run instead of a repeated one. He then went back out into the security system and hard set the time stamp of the diagnostic so that it would appear upon review that it had only been one run and nothing out of the ordinary occurred during or after it.

Mark smiled. Calvin Hall with his severe scowl and probing eyes would see nothing of what Mark Spencer was really doing. Hall and his men might be looking at the monitors right then and Mark would seem to be doing exactly the job they sent him to do.

“Looks like your probing eyes don’t see as much as you think they do, huh, tough guy?” Mark muttered. “You let me in, didn’t you?”

Mark stopped and listened to the ocean sounds of the servers around him. Still no other activity.

He went back into his ghost account and brought up the black and white squares of the security camera feeds. He worked through floor after floor. They were mostly hallways. The ones in the labs were shutdown. There appeared to be none in the executive offices. Mark started to bring up the lab cameras, but a box for a security key popped up. He decided not to push it.

Mark locked in the camera feeds for the hallway outside the server bank, the feed from the lobby, outside the elevators on his current floor, and outside the main lab where he had seen Dr. Thomas Kell go in after Calvin Hall introduced him as the top project manager and researcher. He was apparently supervising Mark’s work this Kell was. That made him important. He would be giving the specifications on the cyber security and encryption on the global uplinks. That meant Kell was the man dealing with projects all across CDR’s global reach.

Mark licked his lips and whispered, “So, he’s the man working with the really good stuff.”

Mark zoomed in the image on the lab where Dr. Kell had disappeared. Mark wasn’t certain the man was still inside, but either way whatever he was working on would likely still be locked away inside. Mark memorized the lab ID off the door. He went into the file server of CDR and looked through that lab. He found login records for who went into and out of that lab for years. That wasn’t really useful. Mark found inventory lists for equipment inside, deliveries, and code numbers for projects. They were endless. There was a lot of top end equipment in there. Not knowing which projects mattered though, he could spend the rest of his life breaking into files for each project code and still not know what was worth his time.

He shook his head and left the file server. Mark worked his way around one security wall after another through an endless trail leading into the active computers within that lab. There was not a direct uplink, but the data was being stored in these servers. Mark could eventually trace it all back and look at exactly what had come out of that lab. He wanted to see what was going on though. If data was coming out, he could swim upstream and get inside at that very moment.

Mark went in and looked at which computers were delivering data. He eliminated the uninteresting ones and found the devices that seemed to be giving the most significant feedback. All of those happened to be logged in by Dr. Thomas Kell, of course.

Then, Mark paused.

There was something odd. There was something processing at an exponentially higher rate. Kell’s computers were monitoring whatever it was, but they kept skipping and losing data. CDR systems were the most advanced processors in the world, but whatever they were “looking at” was processing at a rate they could not even follow. It was like a horse and buggy chasing a sports car.

“Or a concord,” Mark whispered.

It wasn’t another computer. There was biometric data being monitored too.

“A bio computer?” Mark shook his head.

That wasn’t right. Was there something actually alive in there that they were monitoring? Could a living thing process at those speeds and be monitored directly by other computers. Mark stared at the choppy data read for a moment longer. This was something else entirely. Mark had expected “the good stuff” to be in there, but this was something he literally couldn’t imagine. What could they possibly have created or found that would give data like this? Mark shook his head again. He was beginning to picture an alien life form with electrodes plugged into its brain.

The universe was becoming a mystery to him again like it was when he was a kid. There was a gravitational death wave on its way to Earth. The first ripples had passed through largely unnoticed. People were dealing with normal disaster scenarios of earthquakes and sink holes. They had no idea it was something bigger and the worst was yet to come.

Mark Spencer fully intended to exploit his knowledge of the coming trouble on an astronomical scale and he intended to exploit everyone else’s ignorance of it. Even the great CDR had no idea it was coming. Mark started picturing a physical path in his head from the street to the floor the labs were on and then to the lab with this unknown force at play.

He shook his head. Too soon. He had a lot more to figure out before he even considered moving his plan to the CDR building.

Still, Mark looked through the scanned data and took the parameters for the dimensions of the chamber containing “It.” Not very large at all.

“They don’t make alien overlords like they used to.”

He pulled up data on the weight and design of the mystery chamber. It could be detached. It was light enough to carry. “Especially if it was carried when gravity on this side of the world took a short vacation.”

The universe was full of mystery again and the new, biggest mystery was what exactly this “it” in the center of Dr. Kell’s lab really was.

Mark went back to the devices within the lab that he was monitoring and began swimming up stream again. He saw someone was typing into the tablet. Mark brought up the conversation on his screen and then opened the microphone on the tablet so he could have audio in the room. There was a clicking noise from the keys. Why did people like that sound on a touch screen? Mark shook his head. He was sure it was a mistake that might give him away, but he turned off the key click sound anyway. If Dr. Kell really missed it, he could turn it back on.

There were footsteps on the lab floor. Objects were being picked up and sat down in the distance.

Dr. Kell or someone over the tablet that sounded exactly like what Mark remembered Kell sounding like when they were introduced said, “Finally, that racket is off. I thought I was going to lose my ever loving mind.”

“What was that, Dr. Kell?”

“Nothing. Continue what you were doing, please. We need faster feed or we won’t ever know what’s going on.”

“The only thing we have that moves that fast is the thing we’re trying to monitor.”

Mark did not understand everything they were talking about, but he suspected they were struggling with the same mystery before them that Mark wanted to figure out.

Dr. Kell was texting with someone on the tablet. It might be related to the thing in the lab, but Mark decided to come back to it later.

He moved through the other devices in the room looking for something he could use as a camera feed. The tablet camera looked up Dr. Kell’s nose at the ceiling. Mark didn’t want to overload the device with malware and possibly alert the doctor. He left the microphone open, but switched the camera back off. None of the other consoles in the room were much better. Each one was looking out into the lab. The chamber in the center of the room remained a mystery.

Mark left a couple of the color camera feeds on for perspective with the other security feeds he was monitoring off of the hallways. He would just have to try to make sense of what he heard along with the spotty data.

As he watched and listened, he swore he saw a golden light shining off objects in view of the camera feeds. That couldn’t just be for mood lighting. The chamber was giving off its own light it seemed.

Mark dug deeper into the data, but only grew more confused. If he didn’t know better, he would swear whatever was in the box was bigger on the inside than on the outside. The data was analyzing “It” on a quantum level. It was a deep quantum level. The thing in the chamber was manipulating the quantum or it was highly reactive to being observed.

Quantum physics was not Mark Spencer’s area of expertise by any means. He considered himself smarter than average in most things though. It knew more than the average person about most subjects. Maybe not more than Dr. Kell about Quantum Mechanics and whatever was in that box.

Mark had a bitter taste in the back of his throat as he contemplated Dr. Kell being smarter than him about something. Mark knew the jealousy was irrational. A research doctor working on some mystery object in the realm of quantum physics would logically know more than Mark Spencer, a consultant and computer expert. Still, the thought of being inferior to anyone galled him.

“If you are so smart,” Mark growled, “how do you not even know you are being observed while you think you are the one doing the observing, Doctor? I guess the universe still holds mysteries for you too. Doesn’t it?”

Whatever had Mark’s blood boiling, he wasn’t sure, but he forced himself to calm down. Being upset led to mistakes and while hacking CDR from the inside was not the time to start making mistakes.

He couldn’t even put his finger on what was really upsetting him. Everything was going smoothly. He was poking around undetected and had possibly found the big treasure he was seeking by taking this job. The forces of the universe were literally aligning to allow him to pull this whole thing off. So, why the bitterness? Something about being alone in the server core on his knees watching from the outside while men like Dr. Kell got the breaks in life to be on the inside was embittering. Mark could handle it from hacking government mainframes from his living room. That felt like spy games. It was fun. Being in CDR sneaking around the maze of computers like a rat, made him feel smaller and disregarded. It was a moment of looking up at something vast towering over him and realizing his real size and place in the universe. And he did not like it.

It was Dr. Kell overseeing Mark’s cyber security work. It was the quantum physics geek thinking he was going to tell the lowly contractor boy how to do his job. It was the snide, dismissive stare of thugs like Calvin Hall looking on Mark like he was something dirty invading the clean halls of CDR. They gave Mark the devices he could use because his equipment was dirty and not good enough. They gave him his limited codes so they could watch what he did. They told him where he could go and what he could do because he was the unwelcome outsider. Once his work was done, they would march him back out and pay him to go away. He was to crawl back into whatever sewer he crawled out of because CDR was too good, clean, and important for the likes of him.

It was at that moment on his knees in front of the server spying on Dr. Kell’s work that Mark Spencer decided that he was going to be breaking into CDR on the big day instead of the Federal Reserve. It was a decision made in anger and it was made with finality.