“Okay, go ahead,” Antonio said, as he positioned the oscilloscope probe’s tiny tip into the test point on the mysterious little device. It had taken him more than a few minutes to coax the probe into the right spot this time, and he was looking through a stereoscope, sort of a big microscope for both eyes, so he could see the tiny circuitry well enough to keep the probe in the right spot. The first time they tested this odd prototype servo controller, the readings were inconclusive. The little board would not power up and boot correctly, and they thought it might have been due to the way they grounded the probe. This time, Antonio had soldered on a capacitor to AC-couple the probe’s ground, in hopes that they could get some useful information without overloading the delicate circuit. Still, he really didn’t know why this was such a big deal. And why didn’t they just buy this off the shelf? Robust digital servo controllers that someone else had already debugged were a dime a dozen. But this was his job, and even though the non-disclosure agreement was very unusual and a little bit scary, it was a really great job. What they were working on was interesting, to say the least.
“Okay, I’m powering it now. Hold what you’ve got,” Kyle Martin instructed the Puerto Rican technician. Antonio kept one eye on the oscilloscope’s screen while the other was glancing into the stereoscope so he could try and hold the tenuous position of the probe until the tiny device could complete its boot cycle and Kyle could start the test program. Within a few seconds, the flat line on the oscilloscope’s screen began to jiggle and spike. It looked like Antonio’s idea of using the capacitor on the ground lead was going to work. Maybe this would be the turning point, and they could finally get this Daedalus machine, whatever it was, to work.
“Okay, it’s finished booting. I’m starting the test program now. Is the scope recording?” Kyle asked.
“Yeah, it’s been recording since before I put on the probe.”
“Alright, then. Here goes nothing.” Kyle hit a few keystrokes and watched briefly as text began to scroll on the screen’s terminal window, and then he abandoned the computer and joined Antonio at the other end of the bench to watch the oscilloscope screen. With any luck they’d see the correct pattern on the scope that would prove that this last piece of the complex framework that made up the Daedalus’ control system was functional, so they then could begin testing the entire device.
Kyle Martin was the lead engineer on the top-secret Daedalus project that a defense contractor called Thermion was running on a private island they had leased from the U.S. government off the coast of Puerto Rico. Kyle was more than just an engineer working on a project. He was a rare genius, with an almost supernatural intuitive sense of how the theoretical quantum physics concepts common to science fiction applied to the real world. It was only because of Kyle’s practical aptitude that the Daedalus project had ever gotten off of the ground.
Kyle was maybe the only person among a team of real geniuses who truly understood the ramifications of the Daedalus device they were building. This was a device that, if everything did not work perfectly, could in all likelihood destroy the entire earth. There had previously been a great outcry of well-founded and legitimate fear that CERN’s Hadron supercollider could potentially destroy the earth, and this well-publicized campaign to stop it was much more than ravings of loons and conspiracy nuts. If only they knew about Daedalus. In terms of risk, the Hadron collider was dwarfed by Daedalus. Fears over the Hadron collider were due in part to a theory that certain theoretical materials might be accidentally created. The properties of those materials were unknown by scientists, but sound theory predicted catastrophic consequences beyond any human imagination if those materials were to come into contact with the matter that the earth itself is made of. But the Daedalus scientists had already discovered one of these materials, and the Daedalus device intended to control and contain it. If the Hadron collider scientists were like children playing with matches, then Daedalus scientists were like teenagers tossing a live hand grenade with the pin removed back and forth in a game of catch. One missed catch and the spoon flips open. Everyone dies.
It was nothing less than the fate of humanity that was pressing on Kyle’s conscience as he watched the oscilloscope screen. This was a precarious tightrope walk between discovery and danger like no other. Perhaps this was the greatest demonstration of the arrogance of man in all of history.
“Looks good?” Antonio asked, as he looked at the stair-step shape being displayed on the screen. It was a familiar shape, since one very similar was presented in the printed test procedure in the ring binder open on the bench, partly buried among tools and components. Kyle, to be double sure, pulled the test manual from under the pile and held it beside the oscilloscope.
“One volt per division,” he mumbled. “One microsecond…” He counted in his head. He pointed a pencil on the screen, comparing the precise waveform to his test spec. “Looks stable.”
Antonio was getting tired of holding this position, afraid he was going to slip and end up shorting out the delicate little circuit board and destroy a week’s worth of work. He asked Kyle, “You got what you need?”
“Yeah, I got it. Hold on while I power it down.” Kyle stepped back over to the terminal and stopped the test program. He quickly initiated the shutdown sequence and it took only seconds to complete. The oscilloscope screen changed its pattern to blips and what looked like static while the servo controller was shutting down and then as both men watched, the screen took on the wrong pattern altogether. It held a distorted version of the picture they had seen before and it was frozen. The scope had crashed.
Antonio looked up at Kyle who was standing just behind him. “Well it looks like we got what we need just in time,” Kyle said. “Has this scope crashed before?”
“No, never.” Antonio wondered if something about the test they were doing could have affected the scope. He dismissed this idea almost as soon as he considered it. Then he said, “Maybe RF interference? Magnetic?”
“I don’t know,” Kyle replied. “Could be anything. At least we got the result before it went down. Let’s just reboot it.”
Antonio hit the reset button on the front of the oscilloscope. These modern digital sampling oscilloscopes were essentially highly specialized versions of ordinary computers. They had a traditional computer CPU and motherboard, and they ran a customized version of a normal, common operating system like you would see on most normal computers and laptops. This particular scope ran Linux, but many ran Windows as well. Rebooting it was just like rebooting a computer. They watched, expecting the scope manufacturer’s splash screen to come up. But instead, it did something that made Kyle’s heart skip a beat.
It showed a message on the screen. It began, “This message is for Kyle Martin.”