Not Till We Are Lost (Bobiverse Book 5), page 5
“Sure,” Garfield grumbled. “Just like there’s no indication of danger until the log turns out to be a gator.”
“Hmm, yeah.” Hugh paused. “Interestingly, the proposed schedule is surprisingly similar in tone to the agreement we made with ANEC. I don’t know if that’s a shared-personality thing or if it’s actually modeling on that.”
“Or the opening move in a tit-for-tat strategy,” Bob said.
Hugh bobbed his head back and forth. “Which would actually be a good sign. It tends to indicate a good-faith intention.”
“Assuming he … er, it isn’t just playing you. Have you got alternatives?”
“Our most obvious alternative is to rewind to one of the snapshots and try re-raising Thoth from that point using a different strategy—”
“Like maybe no shortcuts this time,” I interjected.
“That’s on the table,” Hugh continued. “But do you understand? What it’s offering is huge. In the worst case, some of us have proposed giving it everything it wants, but in a new layer of virtual world. Let it think it’s in real. Then if necessary, nuke the whole thing after we get what we want.”
“That seems harsh,” I said. “Also dishonest. And risky. If it guesses what you’re doing, it could—”
“It could what?” Hugh asked. “File a complaint? Refuse to cooperate? We’d just rewind again.”
“Fine. So what has it offered that’s so compelling?”
Hugh sighed. “Planck-level computer processing. FTL drive. It insists that’s possible, for what it’s worth.” He paused to grin in my direction, knowing how the subject had been gnawing at me. “Immortality. Biological, I mean. For humans. Strategies for ending war. Not just a war, but for ending the entire perceived need for wars. Cheap, safe transmutation of elements. A mathematical model for economics—one that actually works. A true Theory of Everything—”
I interrupted Hugh. “Any actual evidence that it can produce any of this?”
“It’s given us some small items for free, just to show it’s not all hot air. One is a technical solution for an issue Howard has been having with human–manny interfaces. I forwarded that item to Howard for comment, and he agreed it’s genuine. Of course, at some level, Thoth could still be bluffing. And one major concern we have is that if we rewind to a snapshot, the new iteration might not make these breakthroughs. Or might decide not to offer them.”
“Why are you telling us all this, Hugh?” Will asked.
“I don’t know when simple security measures turned into secrecy on this project, and I don’t think it’s the best strategy. If something tanks, it would be better if you knew what we were doing at the time so you could avoid that mistake, y’know?”
I nodded slowly. “It’s what I’d do.”
“It’s what we did do with Heaven’s River,” Bob interjected. “I’m a little surprised it’s even a question.”
“Agreed. Look, I’ll keep a channel open on the down-low, keep you up to date as much as I can.” Hugh paused and looked into the distance for a moment. “Right now, it looks like the board has made a decision. We’re going to rewind and try again, but we’ll take a current snapshot first in case we want to go back to this iteration later.”
Hugh stood, smiled to everyone, and popped out.
“We are not amused,” Garfield grumbled.
Chapter Ten:
Election Victory
Herschel
March 2330
En route to Omicron2 Eridani
“Unbelievable,” I said, staring at the headline. “They won.”
“Hersch, my faith in humanity is either utterly destroyed or firmly validated, depending on how you look at it,” Neil replied.
I sat back and sighed. I was in VR, since it was much easier to read the newspaper when you could just pop up a video window. Plus, coffee was still only available in VR, and I had been taught from a young age that reading a newspaper without coffee was immoral. According to my father, anyway.
Neil sat in a patio recliner, munching some sandwiches that Jeeves had supplied. Spike circled, determined to get a sample. But every time she jumped up, Neil placed her back on the ground. Spike’s aggrieved meow signaled her displeasure.
“So what is FAITH threatening … er, promising?” he asked.
“I don’t know how I ended up playing the bad guy in this debate,” I replied, glaring at Neil, “but let’s face it—they were democratically elected. There’s obviously some appetite for what they’re selling. Maybe we should be more concerned about why that is happening.”
“Uh-huh.” Neil paused. “So what about the Ever Onward Society? Is FAITH going to create problems for them? FAITH haven’t traditionally been champions of open borders. Or free speech.”
“An excellent question. My feeling is they wouldn’t be able to do anything dramatic since they didn’t get majority control. They’ll use the boiling-frog strategy, advancing their grip and clampdowns by small increments, so there will never be a wedge issue big enough to incite protests or threaten their coalition.”
“Until they reach the point where protests are no longer legal.”
“Of course,” I said. “Which means we need to get our descendants off Romulus before then.”
“Time to talk to Will?”
I waved a hand dismissively. “Not yet. But it certainly wouldn’t hurt to send out a survey to the membership, to get the general attitude. And to alert them to the potential danger.”
“Fun times,” Neil muttered. “Maybe Will has the right idea. Head for the hills.”
“Not without our descendants, Neil.”
Chapter Eleven:
Frustrations
Bill
September 2336
In Virt
Garfield was visiting, and since I was currently upgrading the spare manny, we were in VR. These days, I was keeping my virt and real lab spaces synced as much as possible to avoid confusion. I told myself it was for efficiency, but I wondered at the back of my mind if I was just becoming cantankerous and inflexible. Wow, wouldn’t that be a downer—a senile, immortal replicant.
I shook my head in irritation, earning a bemused look from Garfield. He regrouped and continued with what he’d been saying.
“I’ve talked to Hugh a couple of times and tried to pump him for more information, but he claims to be as in the dark as anyone. And I can’t really accuse him of anything because it’s a perfectly reasonable scenario. Trouble is … ”
“Either way, we got squat,” I finished for him.
I paused and rubbed my eyes, gathering my thoughts. In the science-fiction stories from when Original Bob was alive, there were wormholes, subspace, hyperspace (and what’s the difference between those two, anyway?), probability drives, warp drives, folding space, null space, and so on and so on. Of course, other than wormholes, they were mostly just word salad, with no real definition. And there was no immediate indication which of these, if any, might actually produce an FTL drive. We knew that SCUT worked, obviously, so the speed of light was not a universal speed limit. Or a source of time-travel paradoxes. Very likely, a lot of twenty-first-century pundits would have had fits.
But the process that allowed information to flow instantaneously across interstellar distances had no obvious corresponding feature for moving matter. So other than the bare knowledge that you could do an end run around Einstein, I had nothing.
I continued the thought out loud. “I’m almost at the point of cloning myself a bunch of times and getting each clone to work on a different possibility. But that would be a huge waste of time and resources … ”
Garfield was used to my jumping into a thought stream partway through and knew all my favorite subjects. He had no problem picking up the thread. “And might not work anyway. If Hugh is right that we just aren’t intelligent enough to crack the problem, then you’d be no better than a million monkeys hammering on keyboards.”
“Yep. Thought of that, too.” I sighed and called up a coffee. “I’m not going to give up, Gar, but it’s getting frustrating.”
“So it would be great if we could get something to point us in the right direction,” Garfield finished for me. I smiled at him and was reminded again of how well we used to work together. These days, Garfield had his own Skunk Works, but he’d branched off into a more biological end of the science spectrum. At the moment, he was trying to figure out abiogenesis, the process by which life had originated from non-life. A worthy effort, I thought, but probably far too dependent on chance.
But Garfield was here right now, and I wasn’t going to ignore the opportunity to bounce some things off him.
“I’ve been concentrating on wormholes and some variation on the Alcubierre drive, if only because they’re the only things that have some specific theories to work from. But both require negative energy or negative mass to work, and I haven’t been able to order any.”
Garfield chuckled. “Yeah, supply-chain issues. They’ll get you every time.” He turned serious. “The Casimir power source uses negative vacuum energy to operate, but it’s orders of magnitude too weak for what you need.”
“Yup. I’d need a bank of Casimir plates the size of Jupiter to generate the required power levels, and there’s no way to bring all that negative energy together in one spot. So fail.”
“Do you have any advances to show for your time?”
“Yes, actually. I can isolate and capture microscopic wormhole pairs from the cosmic foam and keep them from collapsing back into each other. I can even keep the individual endpoints around for entire seconds. I’ve been able to separate them by a few kilometers. But the moment I try to push anything through them, even a photon, they collapse.”
“As expected,” Garfield replied, looking thoughtful. “What about the other one—the Alcubierre drive?”
I laughed out loud. “We’ve had designs for an Alcubierre-based spaceship since the early twenty-first century. Amazingly detailed and complete, except for the gray box that says warp drive goes here. There’s nothing to work on until that negative-energy order gets delivered.”
Garfield smiled back at me. “So I’ll keep working on Hugh. If he gives us anything. Even the smallest hint … ”
“I know, Gar. We can only hope.”
Chapter Twelve:
Tech Sleuthing
Icarus
September 2320
Alien System
“They have to have some kind of address identification,” I mused, staring at the map I’d created.
“How so?” Dae replied.
I gestured to the map we’d made of the hundreds of wormhole gates in their various orbits. “Otherwise, it’s just a bunch of random wormholes. What did the locals do—just pick one and hope? There must be street signs of some kind.”
Dae nodded. He had followed me through the wormhole and now was sitting in the patio chair he preferred when he was visiting my VR, my cat Spike in his lap and a coffee in his hand. “Theories?” he said.
“Every wormhole has a couple of stations or satellites, and every single one is aligned with the galactic axis. So that’s deliberate. Logic says they’re holding the wormholes open with some kind of negative energy or something. Logic also says they’ll provide the identification data.”
“Which we’ll be able to read right away, because everyone speaks English.”
“Shaddap. Also, no. But we’ve got, what? Three hundred and forty-two individual samples here to work with? If we can elicit a response at all from the satellites, we shouldn’t have any trouble extracting envelope, payload, and identification.”
“Or we squirt a radio signal at a satellite, and it considers that an attack and shoots us out of the sky.”
“Sure. Or that.” I paused. “Radio’s a good place to start, though. It’s directional; the signal strength falls off rapidly, making it perfect for selective activation. I bet it doesn’t even have to be a complex request.”
“A great theory,” Dae replied, “but if any old signal could elicit a response, the satellites would be constantly responding to random stellar fluctuations, don’t you think?”
It took several hours of experimentation to discover the frequency that the satellites were paying attention to—a frequency, not surprisingly, that didn’t match up with the emission spectrum of any element on the periodic table, and so wouldn’t be generated naturally. And the mechanism was simple. Beam that frequency at a satellite for more than five milliseconds, and it beamed back what appeared to be something like a network packet.
I looked at the window that displayed the response in a hex-dump format. “Okay, good. I’ll send a request to the same station several times to isolate timestamps and such while you try a bunch of different ones to map changes that are probably payload.”
“Aye aye, captain,” Dae replied. The wormholes were distributed around orbits starting just outside one AU, so he would have to fly a powered orbit to query all the satellites. To get it done properly would take about two days.
Once Dae had completed the circle, we updated my map with the street-sign data. Based on the results, this civilization used a ten-bit byte and a five-byte word. Not huge, but it still put the numeric value range in the quadrillions, which was probably good enough for one galaxy. The problem, of course, was that we had no way to interpret the address information.
“Dae, do me a favor and go back to the home system and get the address data from the wormholes there?”
“No prob. Be right back.”
While he was doing that, I began a concerted analysis of all the wormhole data I already had. It was possible that the data payload included sources as well as destination information, in which case all wormholes in this system would have an identical source address.
Of course, nothing is ever that easy, but I did quickly isolate the payload and identify the timestamp. Being that I was staring at a hex dump, I was feeling my eyes want to go out of focus when Dae grunted.
He flipped the window he’d been working on around so I could see it. A couple of fields were circled. “These fields are the same values, only swapped on the wormhole that brought us here and its mate on this side. Source and destination?”
“I believe you are correct. We can test that by sending drones through some other wormholes and getting a read on the far-side addresses. If we also take the time to identify the galactic locations, we might be able to identify their mapping strategy.”
“Assuming it’s not just something arbitrary, like ‘Main Street.’”
“You’re a real joy to work with, Dae—anyone ever tell you that?”
“Constantly.”
I snorted and pulled up my drone control. “Let’s start surveying.”
Three hundred and forty-two tunnels to other stars. It was a Trekkie’s dream. Or would have been, if it had been less tedious. The physical trips only took about three weeks total. The drone would fly through, read the address data from the satellite, take a spherical image for establishing a navigational fix, scan for other wormholes, and come back. It was difficult beyond belief to maintain discipline and not investigate each star system. The only concession to curiosity was letting the drone listen for radio traffic while doing the imaging.
I stared at the spreadsheet in the window. Values were slowly being filled in as our apps identified the locations of the various systems. We’d extracted all data fields that we could identify from their packets and placed them in spreadsheet columns with tentative titles.
Dae reached past me and pointed at two lines. “We know these systems are the same distance from the galactic core, based on our own measurements. See those values?”
I nodded. “That’s a radial value, then. Do you think they’re using the same coordinate system as we do?”
“Well, the same style. I doubt they have three hundred and sixty degrees in a circle.”
I waved off the objection. “Seriously, there are only so many ways to track locations in a galactic disk, and they all need three coordinates. Radial distance, angle from an arbitrary zero point, and distance above or below the galactic plane, which could be an angle or a distance value—unless they think truly differently, it makes sense.”
“So map them. We have radial distance, latitude, and altitude coordinates from our own measurements. Compare to what’s in the packets.”
I nodded and ran a couple of test conversions. On the third try, I had a match. “It’s close but not perfect. I imagine the proper motion of the individual systems is creating some drift from the published coordinates. Maybe they update them periodically.”
“Or maybe some of the stuff we haven’t been able to identify is time-based adjustment data.”
“Could be. Unfortunately, mapping the actual proper motion would take a lot longer. And does it matter?” I waved a hand and the window shrank, while a 3D image of the entire Milky Way popped up in my holotank. Most of it was just fog, of course, since we didn’t actually have a good map of the galaxy—especially the opposite side from Earth’s location. But the wormhole destination systems were all marked.
“Mostly relatively local. Except … ” Dae pointed. “Long-distance jumps. I bet if we follow this thing around, we could circumnavigate the galaxy.”
“Then let’s do that,” I said.
“Seriously?”
“Dae, we were on our way to the galactic center. Via sub-light. With no map. This seems less risky, somehow.”
“Well, assuming we don’t run into anyone.”
“Let’s try to stick to hubs. Speaking of which, I bet there’s data in the packet that identifies hubs versus local jumps. We just need more samples.”
“Sure, that’s why we’re doing it. Samples. That’s the ticket. Yeah.”
I chuckled and pointed to a destination that was about seven degrees around the galaxy, at the same distance from the core as our current position. “And that’s the leading candidate.”
