The Quantum Connection (38 page)

Tatiana, Serena, Jacob, Woody, and I moved down to a ten-thousand-square-foot mansion on the beachfront at Bakersfield. We were only a few kilometers from the graveyard and Woody and I would visit there every now and then. The kids and Woody play on the beach and play fetch in the surf on a regular basis and the city that is rising up from the ashes of The Rain is becoming a great place to live and raise a family.

Tatiana and I like to watch the kids race Woody on the beach. At one and a half years old Jacob keeps up with him well and at a little over three it is no longer a race to Serena. She has to sort of trot so as not to run off and leave them. Oh, I guess I should explain that.

The enhancements that Tatiana and I had made to ourselves with the alien nanomachine technology were not just mechanical and cosmetic enhancements. In fact, the nanomachines manipulated our DNA so that the enhancements were real and would be passed on to our progeny. So in a sense, we really were superhuman, and not just altered freaks. The next step in human evolution was
us,
and we initiated it through technology, not waiting millions of years for the right mutations to come along. The nanomachines really did bring on a human revolution in many ways. Almost immediately following the birth of our children we put temple implants on them so we could keep up with them and aid in teaching them. Serena's first rudimentary thoughts were of needs like food and water and the desire to be held. After a few months she began to have more detailed thoughts and a few months after that was thinking and verbalizing complete sentences. When things were too difficult for her to say because she hadn't learned how to make her mouth or vocal cords do those motions Serena would think her needs to us. We were afraid at first that this would make her complacent about learning to speak properly, but it didn't. She would see us talking to people and really wanted to be able to do everything we could do.

Jacob was different. Sometimes I think that boy came out of the birth canal jabbering away. He was a vocal one from the get go. He also cried an awful lot during his first few months. He just needed more attention than Serena had wanted. As he grew he became more independent. At just under two years old he was running and talking and playing with Serena and Woody. We had to watch the kids carefully since they were stronger than Woody now and we were afraid that they might hurt him. Under no circumstance would we let the kids play with normal kids, not for a few more years. Oh, but they could play with Al and Annie's two girls, who were similarly genetically enhanced, since their parents had been before the girls were conceived. And Ariel and the Daniels twins had been enhanced recently, as well. So the superkids had some other superkids to play with. We kept an eye, ear, and mind, on them through the implants. Sometimes Mike or Mikhail or Michelle would babysit them for us also. The kids always got a kick out of that. We did also, because then we could turn off the kid's channel and let one of the SuperAgents monitor it. It takes a toll on you listening to the kids jabber both verbally
and
mentally.

The kids wanted more puppies and I was kind of excited about the idea as well. We bred Woody with a beautiful chocolate Labrador retriever and the puppies were amazing and brilliant. They were all fetching and sitting and heeling before they were four months old. Tatiana and I had discussed it and we decided that as we grew older and once the kids reached an age that they would really understand what we were doing, we were going to start slowly increasing Woody's intelligence via the nanomachines.

At the rate the kids were growing and maturing we suspected we could start with the project in a few more years. We thought it would be possible eventually to make Woody smart enough to carry on conversations with them after a few years. Perhaps we would use intelligence boosting along with cookies as a reward for good deeds, so that his intelligence would evolve slowly and allow him to grow into it. But in the meantime he was great the way he was, being father to a handful of new pups. The kids liked it too.

We did put temple implants on Woody because one day he got lost downtown and it took us two days to find him. We had driven the kids to the park with Woody and something must have spooked him--we never figured out what--and he ran away. When we found him, he was happy to see us and was very hungry. Tatiana materialized a bowl of dog food and a bowl of water on the spot for him and the kids cheered and petted him and gave him biscuits that I had materialized. Woody came home and licked his puppies and curled up on his favorite spot near the fireplace and went to sleep. I tugged his ears and had Mike install the implants on his temples.

It was very interesting to try to interpret Woody's thoughts. He really had only a few that were recognizable. Mike and I mapped the neurochemistry and electromagnetic signature of his brain when he would respond to certain stimuli and before long we began to find trends. Woody would exhibit a particular thought pattern when he was hungry, or when he needed to go to the bathroom, or when he wanted attention, or when he was afraid, and when he was happy. Mike was able to interpret these patterns but there was no basis for any type of language or communication. All of his responses were based on his basic instinctual emotions and the need for survival. Tatiana and I knew that this was the basic data we would start with when--and if--we decided to enhance his intellect. In the meantime, we set up signals to the kids so that they would know if Woody needed to go outside or needed food or needed just plain petting. His needs were always filled almost immediately and one could argue that he was the most spoiled dog in the history of humankind.

CHAPTER 30

We would often host the W-squared core group down at the beach house for weeks at a time. The kids would play with the dogs on the beach and the adults would sit around and drink too much and talk about our history and various philosophies and the possibilities of future alien threats.

We were sitting around the patio fireplace looking up at the stars one evening, discussing the status of the public SETI program and how wrong the Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence scientists had been.

"I always thought it was silly for the SETI guys to look only at a small band of wavelengths for signals of such mammoth proportion that a magically advanced species would have to have designed it for us and pointed it directly at us," Anson said as he held an empty beer bottle in his hand. The beer bottle morphed into a model of a radio telescope and then into a little red devil and then it turned back into a bottle of beer--now it was full.

"You know, I've never really thought about it before, but since the Grays and the red devils have been in control of the galaxy for so long, there aren't any radio signals out there to detect," I said.

"That's right." Tabitha sat down between Anson's legs and leaned back on him in the lounge chair. "As far as we can tell they use only the Infrastructure communication systems. No radio or microwave or optical systems have been found at all except for the energy transmission to the nanomachines. They only do that for a few meters and at extremely low power signals."

"Yeah, you're right, Tab. And that's just the Gray's nanomachines. Since the Lumpeyins use the miniature warp bubbles in the Dr. Who's phone booth configuration, they could put little SuperAgents in there and control them through the Infrastructure," 'Becca said.

"Hey! 'Bec, that is probably exactly how those things work. The Infrastructure transceivers in the picophage warp bubbles are probably low-level SuperAgents," Tatiana said.

"We'll have to consider that. That might give us an edge on stopping that damned picophage ahead of schedule," Anson said. He was already on another beer.

"I hate to change the subject back to where we were a few minutes ago, but," Jim said, "what about the quarantined aliens? They would most likely use radio signals. I'll bet you with the Solar Focus telescope we could pick up their signals."

"Why would we want to do that, Jim? We can just take the
Phoenix
and fly over and see them anytime we desire. No speed-of-light worries," I replied.

"Just for the hell of it and to prove that we were right about the SETI folks. Then if we find the signals we could figure out a way to detect them from public radio observatories." Jim was getting excited.

"Hey, I see where you are going here. If we can point the idiots in the right direction and find a real E.T. signal then we will have shown the public that there are indeed aliens out there. A great start in the informing of the general public process," Tabitha added.

"Well, that too." Jim smirked. "But I was thinking more along the lines of showing those Utopians up. Why can't our team be the one that goes public with the observation? It would show those guys up, big time."

"Hayul fahr! I like it!" Anson said.

"Honey . . ." 'Becca smiled. "You're still pissed that you didn't get to go to M.I.T. aren't you?" Rebecca let out an intoxicated giggle.

"Hey, we did the work. We ought to go in the history books somewhere." Jim sounded a little irked. "Hell, Anson invented the first warp drive and flew us out to other worlds and enabled us to have a first real defense against would-be alien attackers. Stevie and Tatiana over there stole and redesigned alien technologies that have revolutionized the way that we think about the universe. And all of our efforts combined have enabled us to become one of the most powerful species in the galaxy! Or at least powerful enough to hold off alien invasions."

That evening we decided to start working on a plan to get radio telescope time at Arecibo. Tabitha and Annie were going to work that through NASA and Air Force channels. Anson, Rebecca, and Jim were going to use the Solar Focus telescope to find radio signals from the various quarantined planets. Tatiana and I first bounced out to each of these systems in the
Phoenix
to determine which ones were in a technological age; otherwise, the search at the Solar Focus telescope would have taken a lot longer.

All said and done it took us about six months to pick the right candidates, detect them from space, determine how to modify the receivers at the large dish in Arecibo, and then to get dish time there. We all took a two-week vacation in Puerto Rico and spent all of that time in the radio telescope facility on top of the mountain. We had everything set up and ready to go in a matter of a couple days because the nanomachines facilitated the equipment upgrade process very quickly. In fact, there were a few times where we had trouble explaining to the facilities officer how we had changed some things so quickly.

We just told him that we had plenty of budget and that we were really good at what we did. He didn't like that response until Annie came around and told him to stop asking questions or she would have him removed from the facility. When the fellow protested that she couldn't have him removed, Annie had him removed just to prove the point. She let him back in two days later after he promised to behave himself. Besides, we had detected one of the quarantined civilizations the day before and we wanted there to be witnesses. We found a whole bunch of communications signals at about thirty-two gigahertz. They were very low power and required state-of-the-art amplifiers, but we could detect them. We also, miraculously, discovered signals around five other star systems. The radio astronomers and SETI folks hanging around the facility couldn't believe what they were seeing.

A week later, when we announced it on the international news channels, the world couldn't believe it. SETI had been at it for so long with no luck that the general public never really expected them to find anything. The announcement was made and we were all interviewed to a great extent. We all made a big point about the fact that we weren't considered part of the typical SETI community. We all got a big laugh out of that and we also all got to offer our opinions as to what types of aliens there might be out there. Here is when we really showed how different we were from the SETI folks.

We made it very obvious that we thought that the possibility that these aliens might come and give us the cure for cancer was ridiculous and it was more likely that they would want to come and eat us, or something equally unpleasant. There were a few heated debates with some of the academic community but Jim and Anson and Tabitha and 'Becca really held their own. They truly were brilliant and it was a good thing that they were on our side. After about three more years of this debate and fun, we had to go back to our real jobs--defending the planet. The damned Grays had finally decided that they would make another attempt at overtaking humanity. But we had been preparing for them all along.

There had been nearly five years with no word from the Grays except for border skirmishes along the edge of the quarantine zone. So we decided we had better spread out as best we could while we could. After all, we figured it would be harder tactically to destroy many worlds as opposed to just one.

We took complete groups of volunteers and all the materials we could muster and warped them through the quantum connection and the Infrastructure to all of the habitable worlds within the quarantine zone. We warped a complement of retrofitted alien spaceships through the Infrastructure to each of the outpost colonies. After all, we could make the inside of the warp bubble pretty much as large as we wanted to. We even warped some closed-down military facilities from Earth through to some of the outpost worlds. We took ghost towns, trailer parks, condemned shopping malls, you name it. We only took things in the middle of the night and even then we were seldom without witnesses. We would either recruit the witnesses or pay them off. We always had construction crews working the place the next morning so nobody was the wiser. Oh, there was some talk on the Internet about it but only on the crackpot sites. After all, there were no such things as UFOs and alien abductions. And there never would be again!

Once we placed a SuperAgent on each of the outpost planets we could quantum connect basically anything between any two SuperAgent locations. Our population and presence in space were growing. Our recruitment program back on Earth was put into high gear and we picked up as many volunteers as possible. With the inflow of technology and the rapid nanomachine production at the "diamond factory," we were able to offer high wages to any new volunteers. We had reached nearly forty outpost worlds and now had a fleet of more than a thousand retrofitted spacecraft with superfast quantum fluctuation drives and humanized SuperAgents. It was all kept so "above Top Secret" and compartmentalized that if you weren't "in the know" then you weren't "in the know."