His highest level contact inside Red Hammer had always been Souvranamh’s deputy Kawati Chandrigarh, a musician turned gene designer whom Skinner had taken an instant liking to. One day, curious and frustrated by the lack of detail about his job, Skinner had asked Chandrigarh about the Project.
Chandrigarh had thick, bushy eyebrows that framed a cat’s face with ludicrous animation. He explained the Project was an effort to discredit UNIFORCE and the Quantum Corps by making BioShield ineffective, so UNIFORCE would have to use Red Hammer designs under license.
Skinner had done his job well enough. By the end of the year, though, he had become increasingly uneasy at the planned extent and depth of atmosphere modification being undertaken. He related his concerns to Chandrigarh, his discomfort with the extent of the modifications, wondering if “we really need to go this far.”
Chandrigarh told him not to worry.
Later, Skinner had an attack of conscience and tried to weaken the control links and blunt some of the worst effects of the Amazon Vector swarms.
That’s when his halo went off.
It was his first experience with Red Hammer discipline and it wasn’t pleasant. Skinner began to suspect he had made a mistake joining Shao Hong Ser, suspecting he had gotten into something he couldn’t get out of.
He was a competent enough nanobotic engineer, though, so he decided he ought to be able to figure out how to ‘dial back’ the worst effects of Amazon Vector. The Project wasn’t what he thought it was…somehow it had gone beyond teaching UNIFORCE a lesson and had entered new territory…now people were dying, lots of them, and whole swaths of the planet’s atmosphere were becoming toxic and uninhabitable. Serious, perhaps irreparable damage was being done to the Earth’s atmosphere.
Chandrigarh chided him for being naïve. “Don’t be so dense…that’s the whole point of it,” the Indian scientist had said. That’s when Skinner first learned of rumors concerning the leader of Red Hammer, the Keeper of the Sphere. Not even human, they said. A machine. A spirit. Something halfway in between. At first, Skinner didn’t put a lot of stock in the tales.
With conditions worsening and a global crisis brewing, Skinner tried several times to modify and weaken the Amazon Vector swarms, but his halo wouldn’t let him. To join Red Hammer, he had given up free will and control of his mind. By early ’68, he knew he was effectively a prisoner.
Out of desperation, he began looking for a way out, a way to escape. Completely opposite to his original disgust with BioShield, now he wanted out of Red Hammer and somehow, he had to let UNIFORCE know what was going on. Revenge was no longer so important. With the halo, it was more a matter of survival.
But first he had to find a way to beat the halo. After investigating and experimenting, he learned that the nanobotic control system embedded in the ventral tegmentum of his brain became effectively useless at the point of death. The brain’s ‘death chemicals’ could override the halo and blunt its effects.
Skinner didn’t want to die. He just wanted to come as close as possible to it, so he could be rid of the halo forever. He figured if he could come close enough to death to cascade a flood of death chemicals throughout his brain, the halo would be weakened enough to succumb to a quick shock injection of something like ANAD.
Late one evening, on a walking trip to the limestone cliffs on the northwest side of Kurabantu Island, he began formulating an incredible plan….
Now standing on the high bluffs overlooking the rocky surf two hundred feet below, Skinner eyed the steep drop under his feet. Waves crashed and hissed over the reefs. A few clouds scudded across the sliver of moon low in the eastern sky. Otherwise the stars had already materialized overhead.
He began opening the containment cylinder, full of Serengeti ‘bots, turning the screws and knobs by feel, as he had practiced so many times before. First, the pressure release, then the biobarrier knob, then the protective shield of ionized air. The cylinder hissed, then beeped, telling him a dangerous mechanism was about to be let loose.
Was it a mechanism, he’d often asked himself. Or was it an organism, half virus, half computer? It didn’t matter now. All that mattered was escaping from Kurabantu, from Red Hammer, from the Project, and especially from the halo. If he could somehow trigger a massive UNIFORCE response to an outbreak of Serengeti, all of these things could happen.
There was a barely audible whoosh of air as the last barrier was dropped and the Serengeti master ’bot transited the opening and escaped into the stiff breezes above the cliff.
There. It was done. Even as he felt the first twinges of pain in the back of his head, and dropped to his knees, he saw out of the corner of his eye the faint blue-white iridescent glow of replication, like a shimmering mist hovering ten feet over his head. Serengeti was already in overdrive, mindlessly copying itself over and over again, grabbing atoms and building structure as fast as it could. With any luck, BioShield would pick up the signature in less than an hour.
Skinner’s head felt like it was caught in a vise and he writhed in agony on the ground. The halo had reacted and the first fires of dopamine hell were already roaring between his ears. He screamed out loud, bit through his tongue and blood poured from both sides of his mouth.
Deep inside the ventral tegmentum of his brain, uncountable trillions of mechs were stirring the dopamine soup, pumping synapses with the stuff and sucking them dry just as fast, working the synaptic gaps like a musical instrument. Each cycle sent Skinner into shudders and spasms.
He jerked across the top of the limestone cliffs, staggered up to his knees and promptly went into convulsions, back-snapping contortions. The halo was bad shit, no two ways about it. When you had the buggers in your skull, you weren’t yourself anymore, more like a robot or a lab rat. His brain was infested with gazillions of the bastards, all working in unison, all stimulating and massaging the neural pain and pleasure circuits.
A symphony of agony played out on Skinner’s contorted face.
Even as he fought the halo, he knew he’d eventually lose the battle. But Skinner had planned on this and he knew what he had to do.
Half blinded by pain, he crawled closer to the edge of the cliffs. Below, waves crashed and hissed over coral reefs that formed a barrier across the northwest approaches to the island. From a pocket, he withdrew a small hypodermic, already loaded.
Inside the hypodermic chamber were a swarm of new nanobotic devices, called respirocytes. Experimental devices. When deployed in your lungs and bloodstream, the ‘cytes would allow you to breath in places humans couldn’t normally breathe. You could even be resuscitated from near death, if they worked right.
But first, he had to ‘die.’
Skinner was well aware of the risks, but there was no other way. If he could take his body to a point near enough to death, all the way to Stage 7 it was said, the halo ‘bots would no longer have any control of his pain and pleasure circuits. Scuttlebutt was that when the brain was flooded with death chemicals and the catatonia and unconsciousness finally came, the halo ‘bots would exit the body and you’d be free.
Skinner then figured the respirocytes would revive him, sending blood and oxygen into his brain and lungs, manufactured right from seawater.
He felt cold, shaking and shuddering, as he groped his way further out to the edge of the cliff. In the skies overhead, Serengeti had already exploded into a nebula of coruscating, shimmering, pulsating lights, exponentially replicating. He grimaced at the sight, knowing the risk, but it was like sending up a rescue flare. Soon enough, BioShield would pick up the signature. UNIFORCE would then descend on this little hellhole of an island and put a stop to this madness.
Gripping the hypo, he injected the primal stream of ‘cytes into an artery in his left arm.
Then, Skinner stared for a moment out to sea, and down at the foaming waves hissing onto the beach below.
He took a deep breath, then leaped into space
, plummeting down into the deep hiss of the waves several hundred feet below.
CHAPTER 3
U.N. Quantum Corps Eastern Command Base
Singapore
October 29, 2068
Singapore Base was a miniature replica of Table Top itself, complete down to the Containment Facility, the Sim and Wargaming center, the Ops quadrangle and the lifter pads. Only the snowy peaks of Buffalo Ridge were missing, replaced with palm trees and mangrove stumps and the strong smell of salt air. The languid tropical waters of the Selatar River slapped wooden piers near the lift pads as the lights came on inside Containment. In the eastern sky, orange fingers of dawn sunlight probed puffy cumulus clouds.
Johnny Winger tapped out a short sequence of instructions on his wrist keypad. Since the implant, he’d found it easier and more precise to send commands to ANAD this way. The quantum coupler worked, but he’d found he couldn’t always control it. Signal leakage was still a problem. Doc Frost had come along to Quantum Corps’ Eastern Command base to troubleshoot the interface.
Inside the containment capsule in Winger’s shoulder, ANAD responded to the command, readying itself for launch.
“ANAD reports ready in all respects,” came the high-pitched voice.
Johnny Winger suppressed a slight smile. “The little guy sounds like a teenager on his first date.”
“Sounds pretty eager to me,” Irwin Frost admitted. He was alongside Johnny, monitoring traffic on the quantum coupler link, a remote connection, trying to isolate the interference that Johnny had reported. If the q-c link couldn’t be made to work right, embedded ANADs would have to be commanded the old-fashioned way and some of the sought-after combat capabilities would be lost. The internal voice link had been switched to a speaker.
General Sofran Chekwarthy, commanding general of Quantum Corps’ Eastern Command, rubbed a hand across morning stubble on his chin. “More eager than I am. You sure this’ll work, Captain?”
Winger nodded. “Yes, sir, it will definitely work. It’s a relatively new technique but we’ve proven it at Table Top, during the Serengeti epidemic. Shall we get started?”
“Gives me the creeps, I don’t mind telling you,” Chekwarthy admitted. “Invading someone’s mind like this—“
“It’s just a high-powered lie detector,” said Major Sheehan, Security Branch chief. Sheehan had flown in overnight from Table Top to oversee the probe.
“Let’s get going,” Chekwarthy growled. “If this poor bugger’s knows anything about the atmospheric swarms, or Red Hammer, I want to know it. It’s too late for legal niceties now. Permission to launch.”
Strapped to a gurney inside the containment chamber, the battered, bruised and barely alive body of Nigel Skinner had been sedated and prepped for ANAD insertion. Already his body, recovered from the Pacific off some nondescript spit of coral in the Marquesas the day before, was saturated with medbots, circulating through his bloodstream hard at work on a mission of tissue repair and regeneration. ANAD would have plenty of company inside.
Skinner’s body was surrounded by a fine mesh of sensors—the vascular grid—that would precisely locate ANAD inside the body, once the mech was inserted.
Moby M’Bela patted down the incision that had been made in Skinner’s neck. “Okay, Captain…subject’s prepped and ready.”
Dana Tallant handed Moby the injector tube, attached by flex hose to the capsule in Winger’s shoulder. Inside the capsule, ANAD ticked over, ready to he launched.
“Steady even suction, Johnny,” Frost reminded him.
Winger nodded acknowledgement. “ANAD, report status—“
The teenager’s voice crackled over the circuit. “ANAD effectors safed for launch. All parameters normal. Internal bonds and states are stable. Sensors primed and registered. Core functions initialized…I’m ready to fly, fellows—“
Frost glanced up at General Chekwarthy, an embarrassed smile on his lips. “The assembler uses a small percentage of his computational capacity to simulate emotional states…sometimes, it correlates, er, inappropriately.”
“Get on with it,” Chekwarthy growled.
“Vascular grid?” Winger asked.
“Tracking, Captain,” said M’Bela. He tuned the grid to pick up the mech as soon as it was inserted.
“Let’s go, then.”
The insert went smoothly enough. A slug of plasma forced the master replicant into Skinner’s capillary network at high pressure. Winger watched his wristpad controls and quickly got an acoustic pulse seconds later. He selected Fly-by-Stick to test out the controls. A few minutes’ run on propulsors brought ANAD to a dense mat of capillary tissue.
Frost studied the sounder image. “Looks like you’re ready for transit, Captain. You can force those cell membranes any time.”
Winger told ANAD to probe for weak spots in a clump of lipids, clinging like a bunch of grapes in the middle of the wall. “I’ll try there first—“
He steered ANAD toward a cleft in the membrane lipids, pulsing one of the carbene grabbers to twist a nearby molecule just so, then released the lipid and slingshot himself forward through the gap. Seconds later, ANAD was floating in a plasma bath, dark, viny shapes visible off in the distance. He tweaked the picowatt propulsors to a higher power setting and took a navigation hack off the grid.
“Aortic cavity, gentlemen. Just past the Islet of Duchin, I’d say. Looks like we’re in. Where are we going now?”
Start Fourier Transform:
Start Delacroix Transform:
Start Trace Matching…
Skinner pulls back the sleeve of his jacket and primes the injector. The stiff wind dies off and the night sky shimmers with iridescent speckles…Serengeti ‘bots replicating like crazy thirty feet over the cliffside.
But first, he has to ‘die.’
Skinner is well aware of the risks, but there’s no other way. If he could take his body to a point near enough to death, all the way to Stage 7, the halo ‘bots would no longer have any control of his pain and pleasure circuits. The brain was flooded with death chemicals and when the catatonia and unconsciousness finally came, the halo ‘bots would exit the body and he’d be free.
Skinner figures the respirocytes will revive him, sending blood and oxygen into his brain and lungs, manufactured right from seawater.
He feels cold, shaking and shuddering, as he gropes his way further out to the edge of the cliff. In the skies overhead, Serengeti is already exploding into a nebula of coruscating, shimmering, pulsating lights, exponentially replicating. He grimaces at the sight, knowing the risk, but it’s like sending up a rescue flare. Soon enough, BioShield will pick up the signature. UNIFORCE will descend on this little hellhole of an island and put a stop to this madness.
Gripping the hypo, he injects the stream of ‘cytes into an artery in his left arm.
Then, Skinner stares for a moment out to sea, and down at the foaming waves hissing onto the beach below.
He takes a deep breath, then leaps into space, plummeting down into the deep hiss of the waves several hundred feet below.
(The imager blurs, shot through with streaks of light, peculiar starbursts and fragments, hazy, out of focus visuals, all jumbled up. The speaker crackles with static--)
Johnny Winger fiddled with his joystick on his wristpad, tried tweaking the gain on the signal. “Looks like we lost the trace, Doc. Just fizzled out.”
General Chekwarthy glared in disgust at the image being projected. “Can you get it back, Captain?”
Winger shook his head. “Faded out, General…we didn’t have a good gradient to follow. I’ll backtrack—“
Sheehan was there too, standing beside the General. “Eerie, isn’t it? Seeing things through another man’s eyes. Especially since he’s nearly dead.”
“Gives me the creeps,” Chekwarthy admitted.
“It seems to work well enough,” Sheehan said. “Couldn’t tell you the theory behin
d it, though.”
“It’s a damn circus trick,” Chekwarthy growled. “We can really play back someone’s memories like a recording?”
“Not exactly, sir,” Winger said. He was setting up ANAD to sniff out new traces to follow, his fingers flying over the keys on his wristpad. “We just put ANAD inside the suspect and replicate a few trillion times. Then we put the whole herd in ‘bloodhound’ mode and go hunting.”
“What exactly are you hunting for?”
“Everybody makes memories the same way. It’s called Long-term Potentiation. One of the chemical signatures of LTP is a molecule called glutamate…helps open a second voltage-gated channel inside the post-synaptic membrane—“
Dr. Frost intervened. “Allow me, Johnny. In plain English, General, what it boils down to is that we can construct crude renditions of memory traces existent in the subject’s brain, up to ten or fifteen days after the memory trace is laid down. We’ve been doing it experimentally at Northgate for several years now and we’ve trained specialists inside the Corps to use the same technique. ANAD simply follows trails of glutamate concentration, building a crude activation map as he goes. From that map, after some finagling and processing, we can put together a very rough version of what originally laid down that track. Then we put it on the imager, cobbled out of visual and auditory sensory traces in this particular case. They’re the easiest.”
“It’s sort of like painting somebody’s portrait from their shadow,” added Major Sheehan. “I’ve been through some of the training too at Northgate. They actually used me a guinea pig too. Kind of an echo of a memory, if you like.”
Chekwarthy was dubious. “Sounds pretty nebulous to me. Why did we just now lose the trace?”
“Unknown,” said Winger. His fingers were flying over the wristpad, managing ANAD’s configuration, checking its parameters. “Somehow, we lost the trace…just petered out. It happens. All you can do is backtrack to a known position and start sniffing again.”
***Base from ANAD…this fellow’s in bad shape…synapses are flooded with sodium and calcium…and there’s debris here…assembler debris…some radicals, some fullerene junk, like the place was occupied. And something weird too…more nanobots in his bloodstream, like little cylinders but they’re all full of seawater molecules***