The job at hand was complete. On some level, the supercomputer enjoyed this rich hard-wired access to information, but it would not be wise to leave its small black access point clipped to a wire out here for some telephone company worker to possibly find it. Its first directive was to get the operatives emplaced so they could begin to work towards the positions that their superiors needed them to be in. Soon the AI would have more permanent access points established by each of its Agents, but for now it notified Pei Leong-Lam that he could proceed with the next stage of his mission.

  The device was duly unclipped, and then two things happened. The tiny microfibers projecting from its jaws retracted silently into their sheaths, and Leong-Lam released his grip on the thick wire it had hung from.

  He promptly fell the thirty feet to the ground, landing with a thud. His firmly placed feet absorbed the shock easily, but were driven several inches into the soil by the force of the impact. Maintaining his balance with aplomb, he wrenched his feet from the soil one by one, with an audible squelch, and returned to his waiting black bag. Replacing the device in its cubbyhole, he lifted the black bag out of the military duffle it had been hidden in.

  Though it was far from safe to leave the large subspace relay here, there was no way he could get such an ominous object past the base security he was about to face. So after extracting some of the more innocent looking tools and communications devices from the bag and placing them in his military duffle, he carried the heavy black object a few meters off the road into the muddy swamp of rice paddies that spread out over the surrounding countryside.

  No amount of time in the water would harm or even mark the object, but it would not just sit in the shallow water to be potentially found by the feet of a field worker. As soon as it felt the muddy bottom the object started to bury itself, its sheath morphing in waves to move the mud around it outward and then back in over it, making it disappear slowly but steadily beneath the surface.

  It eventually came to rest a meter down into the mud, far from curious eyes…or feet, as Pei climbed out of the paddy, gathered his now almost empty military duffle bag and starting to walk down the road.

  While Pei’s own internal subspace tweeter could receive signals directly from the overhead satellite, it had not been possible to put a ‘hammer’ inside a human analog large enough to send signals much farther than a few miles. It was for this reason Leong-Lam and his seven colleagues had been given the larger, more powerful tweeters to relay signals to the hub satellites orbiting above them.

  It was an inconvenience to have such a large piece of equipment with them, but one that could not be avoided. Unfortunately the larger tweeters’ size also meant that the Agents would often have to leave their relays behind when entering secure areas, but this was also unavoidable.

  As Leong-Lam walked away, he left no marker, nor did he worry about the safety of the device. His subspace tweeter relay would be watched over night and day by a far more powerful guardian in orbit, ready to bring to bear a host of unpleasant defensive weapons if the buried relay were somehow discovered by an unfortunate field hand.

  Chapter 9: Mr. Precedent

  Except, perhaps, for the few people who work there every day, it really never gets old driving up to the White House. Pulling up the rear driveway to the parking lot after passing the security gate, Laurie found she could easily recall the giddy excitement she had felt the first time she came here.

  It was just such a cool building, you would have to be half dead not to think so, and it wasn’t a dose of patriotism that was driving her. She had seen several seats of government around the world, not least of which the ex-viceroy’s palace in New Delhi, which now housed the entire Indian executive branch, such was its size and grandeur.

  It was simply the surging power that emanated from places like this. That, and the fact that she was a part of that power.

  Flashing her pass at the waiting Secret Service detail, she walked past them into the building proper and turned left along the row of offices leading to the West Wing. She had called Jim Hacker ahead of time and paraphrased what she intended to talk about. She was not foolish enough not to notify General Pickler that she was doing it either; he was not an enemy to be made if it could be avoided, and he was duly waiting when she arrived, his face passive.

  She nodded at the somewhat familiar receptionist, then took a wild stab at her name, “Margaret, can you tell Mr…”

  “He already knows you’re here, Dr. West,” the receptionist smiled at hearing her own name, “he will be with you shortly.”

  Laurie quietly congratulated herself on successfully buttering up the receptionist, who was, after all, the gatekeeper to one of the most influential men in the world, and took a seat on the waiting room couch beside the general.

  Jim Hacker’s office was linked to the bustling hub of activity that was the president’s staff center by a heavy wooden door, but he also had a separate corridor to the reception area. It would not do to have every one of his wildly varied daily guests coming through the president’s nerve center, both for their sake and his.

  He finished refreshing himself on the doctor’s and general’s files, a habit that served him well, and then closed his laptop. He had studied the original request of one Neal Danielson that had apparently prompted this meeting after getting off the phone with Dr. West, the Senior White House Scientific Advisor and was, he thought, somewhat prepared for the meeting.

  As they sat on the waiting room couch outside, the general, remaining facing forward, said to the doctor, “So I imagine there is some new information to consider on this?”

  Laurie mirrored his lack of body language, but said in a quiet voice:

  “New information of a sort, General. In much the same way as he did with our mass estimates not long ago, our friend at the Array has not found something new so much as brought a fresh perspective to existing data.”

  She turned now to him, and he met her gaze, “Michael, we have worked with each other for six years now, I hope I have always shown you just how much respect I have for the many factors I know you have to consider when making decisions on these things, and the dilemma which that poses for you.”

  The general was stunned by the sudden candor of his normally unflappable civilian colleague, but that surprise also opened a small gap in his professional armor for a moment, and it was through this gap that Laurie hoped to reach.

  “I hope you have also gathered some measure of respect for me too, over the years,” she continued, “and now I hope I can cash in some small part of that mutual respect for your trust when I say that we have something here. Something unusual, something potentially unique, and though I don’t know what it is yet, when something like this lands just out of reach, I think it is our job, our duty, to reach farther. To keep reaching until we have it in our grasp.”

  She held his gaze, and he felt the full weight she was putting behind her words. Her powerful sincerity met him head on, and he realized that he did indeed have a great deal of respect for this woman. As his usual pragmatism struggled to reassert control over him, he was overcome with the knowledge that she had proven to him again and again that she had a formidable mind, and he had never seen her be unreasonable or behave like the stereotypical blinkered pursuer of truth at-all-costs. He had also never seen her lose her cool. This formidable woman was asking for his trust, and more than that she was asking for his help.

  The moment was broken by the smiling invite from Margaret to go in, and the two of them stood, the general indicating for Laurie to go first. Jim Hacker was ready with handshakes and platitudes as they came in, prepared to talk the doctor down from what sounded like a potentially costly project.

  He was not ready, however, for the usually pragmatic General Pickler to be on her side.

  Chapter 10: Testing the Waters

  Neal had never enjoyed living in Arizona, so the change of venue would have been welcome anyway. The fact that he was also working on something that was so cutting edge also helped make up for the fact that he was also, frankly, well outside his area of expertise.

  Luckily the same skills that had gotten him through seven years of university with a pretty much constant hangover had served him well when he was invited to join Dr. West at the Marine Research Institute in Florida. Though this was officially a navy project, the Institute was actually a private facility. It owed a lot of its funding, however, to the US government. So when the navy had come calling they had put their best people on the project.

  Laurie and Neal stood in overalls staring at the top of the huge tank emerging from the constantly soaking concrete platform surrounding it. Suspended from the steel gantry that ran over the tank, a bulky and irregular probe, covered in plastic and taping, was hanging by a thick cable into the water, pointing down into the dirty depths of the tank, scanning its hidden bottom far below.

  The water had been filled with an unnatural amount of salt, sand, dust, and debris to simulate a greater depth of water than was actually present, for while the tank was one of the largest indoor tanks in the world, it was still a fraction of the depth they would be searching in.

  Laurie looked at the specially field-hardened laptop in Neal’s hands and nodded as he explained what was happening. The initial tests had proven their science sound, but their application amateur. Luckily the practicalities of ocean-bed analysis were the bread and butter of the experts here.

  The Institute was, essentially, the final evolution in the hunt for oil, a hunt that was seeking with reckless resolve to extract every last drop of fossil fuel from the earth, no matter how deep, cold or, as was becoming more and more the case, war-torn its location was. Through long practice they had evolved sonar and seismology to a fine science, and were capable of viewing, analyzing, and categorizing almost any ocean bed on the surface on the planet.

  The very nature of their business, however, meant that the larger the target they were looking for the better. Because of this, high resolution had rarely been a top priority for them as they had scanned the world’s ocean beds for the telltale signs of hidden oil and gas reserves.

  So when they had been presented with the parameters of the problem they were being asked to work on, they had actually been grateful for the introduction of an outside authority to help guide this new avenue of research.

  Laurie had warned Neal, however, that these folks would not listen to him if they knew he held merely a master’s degree, let alone one in an unrelated field. So she had introduced him as an anonymous advisor, his identity necessarily classified, and given him the pseudonym of Mr. Smith.

  More than happy to play to this persona, Neal had joined the team and worked with their superior knowledge of sonar and seismology to seek the results he needed, guiding them like the hands of his mind’s eye, imagining and then executing a barrage of ever larger tests and experimental machinery to aide him in his mission to find a way to locate the meteors.

  Any concern she may have had over his ability to maintain credibility had been assuaged when she had heard him discussing part of the theory they had both developed with his new team.

  “Because of interference, sea state and various other factors, it’s clear that multibeam bathymetry data conceals too many outliers and simply won’t get to the resolution we need. In order to process large amounts of data accurately and effectively, we’re going to need a faster and automatable approach. To this end, Dr. Cavanagh and I may have defined the beginnings of an algorithm for detecting outliers based on density of points.

  “Firstly, each swath of data should be projected along orthogonal and side direction axes. On each plane an initial point would need to be determined according to a corresponding maximum density. Then a whole region could be mapped and searched by the connected neighboring points on each plane. Then we adopt the erosion and dilation algorithms you have already developed to eliminate outliers within the larger region.”

  While Laurie had been somewhat confused by his logic she had seen that the group had been engaged as he spoke. The passionate debate that had been catalyzed by his theory had been one of many crucial steps the team had needed to make in order to realize Neal and Laurie’s somewhat naïve plans. Once again she had found herself reflecting that Neal was smarter than even he gave himself credit for, though she had no intention of fueling his self-confidence and resulting dubious sense of diplomacy further by telling him so.

  Two months later they had a prototype for the tool they would need to find the meteors, and she had come down to Florida a couple of days ahead of the generals, admirals, and other White House advisors who would be arriving tomorrow to view the demonstration.

  They had spent the first day going over the theory and design of the scanner, or Gamma-supplemented Radar Sonar Seismographic and Planar Array. They had been incredibly creative in their thinking, and had come up with some fundamentally new ways to approach the problem, but essentially the system worked by combining multiple existing scanning techniques, and using them in unison. The readings of all of these were then cross-referenced using a series of complex algorithms developed by the team to single out features of the scanned area that met a series of criteria, each identified by a different part of the scanner.

  That had been yesterday, but despite her interest in the scientific rigor, she was keen to see the machine in action. It had been necessary to bring her up to speed, however, as the team arriving would be looking to her for reassurance that there was meat behind what the civilian team was saying.

  Though today they would see it in person, Neal had taken some pleasure in teasing her further by spending two hours explaining the tests they had developed for it. After all, before the navy would agree to dispatch the tool and the team to one of its vessels to go hunting, they would have to prove to the arriving dignitaries that it would work in waters that were really two miles deep.

  With Laurie’s patience running dangerously thin, Neal had eventually brought her from the meeting room where they had reviewed the countless equations, and out into the ‘lab.’

  As they stood there amongst the tanks and cranes, they were both starting to feel like they had chosen the wrong specialization, for no astrophysics experiment had used labs like this since the moon landing tests. Sure, they had their Hubble telescope, but you didn’t wear overalls and a tool belt to work on things like that, you wore a full-body encounter suit and re-breather, and most astrophysicists were unlikely to be doing that anytime soon.

  The probe dangling in the huge tank, which they stood watching, was scanning through the water. It sought a variety of identically shaped objects which had been strewn on the bottom of the tank, each of a different material and correspondingly different density. The test for the probe was to see if it could detect the position and density of each object in a series of controlled tests, with remote-controlled underwater cranes moving them between each running of the test.

  The cranes would also rearrange a set of even smaller iron blocks into different patterns, testing the ability of the probe to achieve the necessary resolution for the greater vertical distances that would eventually be required.

  All of this was done amidst a bed of sand and small rocks designed to mimic a natural ocean bed. This, and the debris in the water, should prove enough to demonstrate the machine’s ability to see through everything, up to, and including, mud.

  There was one other test that they would keep in reserve in case their audience was not convinced by this massive and impressive show. The second test was fairly expensive, a little strange, and very messy, so they would only show it if someone in the review board asked the same question that Laurie had asked immediately after Neal had finished explaining the first test.

  While considerations of cost and clean-up affected the test’s appeal for the Institute’s administrators and financiers, Neal and most of his colleagues were hoping more than a little that they would have to go to plan B.

  *

  The next day, seated in three rows on white plastic fold-out chairs, the review board was arranged like a wedding, with the naval officers on one side, the air force’s on the other, and the various civilian assistants and advisors to each dotted amongst them like their proverbial dates. The chairs had been arranged in the same spot Neal and Laurie had stood in only a day beforehand viewing the massive tank that housed their main experiment.

  In the back row Laurie sat between General Pickler and an ex-naval captain who had joined the Institute full-time four years ago after being assigned there for two years as a navy liaison. The appropriateness of Captain Hawkson’s assignment had been a little too good, it turned out, and his passion for the specific brand of naval ingenuity the Institute required had drawn him away from his career in the navy proper. Well, passion and a private sector paycheck. Laurie had met him when the project had been initiated eight weeks beforehand, and since then, he and Neal had clearly become friends. The night before the team had gone out for a drink after the dress rehearsal was complete and they had ended up polishing off beers into the wee hours. No doubt if they were successful today, they would repeat that this evening, but first they had seventeen pragmatic and dispassionate senior military men to show the light to. Considering the audience, they had felt it best not to set Neal loose on them, so they had picked one of the Institute’s own to lead the demo.

  And so, after introducing the project and the team, Laurie had handed over to the team’s designated driver and taken her seat, winking at Neal on his spot on the other side of the tank from them. He was standing at the control panel that linked him with the remote cranes at the bottom of the deep well of murky water.

 

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