Immune Page 25
81
Heather had the pillow wadded so tightly in her hand that the seam had split, sending the goose down puffing out through the rip, but that wasn’t what held her vision. She was so close to recalling the dream from which her violent shaking had awakened her. Deep inside her head, something hammered to get out, the pressure building to the point where her skull threatened to explode.
“God, just let me see it,” Heather breathed.
But it wasn’t happening. The more she tried to focus on the strands that remained of the dream, the faster they unraveled. A gasp of frustration slipped from her lips as she pushed herself upright in bed, the sudden movement sending fifty-four feathers floating away like a line of tiny paratroopers leaping from the back of a combat aircraft.
The sound of a door closing at the far end of the hall brought her back to the moment. Was it morning? The light coming into her room said it was, but what day? Was it Saturday already?
Heather stood up, then immediately sank back as a wave of dizziness narrowed her vision. The feeling passed as quickly as it had come. Must have stood up too fast. Moving more slowly this time, she made her way across her bedroom and slid into her summer bathrobe. It took her two tries to tie the bow that held it closed, so badly was her hand shaking.
Heather held her hands out before her, palms down. There was no doubt that the unremembered dream held a terror and a need that called to her, but it wasn’t causing this. The tremor was only in her left hand and had been getting worse for the last two weeks, a side effect of her new antipsychotic drug, Thorazine.
She regretted mentioning the rising intensity of her unremembered dreams to Dr. Sigmund. The doctor had increased her dosage and then switched drugs altogether in an attempt to bring peace to Heather’s sleep, expressing a fear that if the dreams got stronger they might reassert themselves in her waking life. As for the drug side effects, Dr. Sigmund had assured Heather and her parents that they would most likely stabilize when the drugs and dosages were finalized.
A shower. That’s what she needed. Worry damn sure wasn’t going to fix anything.
As she stepped into the hallway, she almost bumped into her mom.
“Oops. Sorry, Mom. Didn’t mean to run you over.”
“I was just coming to wake you for breakfast.” Mrs. McFarland smiled, the early morning light accentuating the lines in her face. It seemed to Heather that her mother had aged ten years over the course of these last few months.
“Do I have time for a shower first?”
“Sure, but not a long one. The Smythes will be over in half an hour.”
“Okay. I’ll hurry,” Heather said as she stepped into the bathroom and closed the door behind her.
By the time she had washed her hair, letting the pulsing showerhead massage the back of her neck, Heather finally felt ready to mix with other people. Throwing on some faded jeans and a summer blouse, she made her way down to the kitchen.
Although the pancakes and bacon were fabulous, the jovial atmosphere of their weekend get-togethers failed to make an appearance. Their parents’ conversation turned to the assassination of the president, leaving little room for pleasantries.
Heather caught Mark staring at her left hand, although he quickly averted his gaze. It was stupid to let something that trivial upset her, but it did. Their attempts at conversation evaporated, leaving the adult discussion unchallenged. By the time breakfast ended, Heather could hardly wait to leave the table.
As she made her way to put her dishes in the dishwasher, Mark moved up beside her.
“Can you come over for a while? We need to talk.”
Heather looked into his eyes, but failed to see any hint of the disapproval or worry she had been expecting.
“I guess I can stop by for a few minutes.”
“Good. Jen and I’ll be waiting.”
Heather found the twins in their garage, standing in the corner they had come to call their workshop. Jennifer leaned back against the tool bench, her arms folded across her chest. From her smug expression and the thunderclouds gathered behind Mark’s face, Heather could tell that she had interrupted an argument.
Mark’s face lightened as he saw her.
“I didn’t come over here to get involved in another fight,” Heather said as she walked toward him.
Mark swallowed. “I don’t want to fight with you.”
“Just with me,” said Jennifer.
“That’s not fair, and you know it.”
“Do I?”
Heather held up her hands. “I don’t care. Lately it seems like all we do is argue. I’m sick of it.”
Mark took a deep breath and Heather noticed the muscles in his face relax.
“Point taken.”
“So what did you want to discuss?”
Jennifer leaned forward. “He wants us to hack into the Rho Project.”
“What?”
“That’s not what I said.” Mark glared at his sister. “But we do need to talk about what is happening over there and what we should be doing about it.”
He pointed at the laptop computer that sat on the workbench. “Ever since that damn science contest, we’ve only done one thing. Leave that computer up and running so Jack and Janet could access it using the quantum twin link to their laptop. We’ve been so involved in our own problems that we’ve had our heads stuck in the sand, hoping that Jack and Janet would work a miracle and stop the Rho Project.”
Heather felt her heart rate tick up a couple of notches. “I don’t know what else we can do?”
“Besides nothing? We can get back in the game.”
Jennifer laughed. “You seem to have forgotten that we already played that game. That went really well. Head of the NSA dead. FBI director dead. President Harris dead. Jack’s team destroyed. Jack and Janet on the run. Dr. Stephenson more powerful than ever. Face it, Mark. We lost.”
“Not to mention,” said Heather, “we don’t have the Second Ship anymore. Stephenson has it.”
“I’m not saying things don’t suck. But I know this. Every second that goes by, Stephenson is making progress on that Rho Ship. And that scares the crap out of me.”
Heather stared at him. Never, in all the years she had known him, had she heard Mark admit that he was scared of anything. She could feel the probabilities swirling in the back of her mind. Something had happened to him that he wasn’t sharing.
“So what are you suggesting?”
Mark’s eyes locked with hers. “I don’t know why, but we were the ones who found the Second Ship. We were the ones it chose to change.”
“Yeah,” said Jennifer, “us and the Rag Man.”
“Mark,” Heather interrupted, “the ship probably would have changed anyone who tried on the headsets.”
“Okay. Doesn’t matter. Right now, we are it. And I think that if we don’t fight this thing, the whole planet is going to get flushed right down the toilet, just like all those worlds we watched being destroyed in the imagery on the Second Ship.”
The air of smugness left Jennifer’s face. Heather could see that, for all the bluster from her friend, Mark had struck a nerve in her too.
He moved in closer to Heather, invading her personal space in a way that focused all her attention back on his face.
“So what do your probabilities tell you?”
Heather felt a blockage rip loose in her head. It wasn’t a vision, but the equations in her mind cascaded through a set of multidimensional matrix calculations. For several seconds she just stood there, so involved in the complexity that she almost forgot that Mark and Jennifer stood next to her.
As a new wave of dizziness came and went, she slumped down into the chair.
“Heather?” Mark asked. “You all right?”
When she looked up again, she felt her jaw tighten.
“We’d better get busy. We have a lot of work to do.”
82
Mark had been meditating for more than three hours, periodically pausing to mentally
tag everything about what he was feeling. The idea had come to him shortly after he had finished savoring the last piece of Mrs. McFarland’s legendary apple pie at dinner. When the final morsel had been swallowed and the wonderful sensations in his mouth were only memories, it had come to him.
Memories. Thanks to the augmentation he had received on the Second Ship, his memories were perfect in every respect. Sitting on the couch he had played back the memory of eating the slice of pie, the flaky texture of the crust, the sweet tang of the fresh apples, the cold smoothness of the vanilla ice cream as it mixed with the still-hot filling on his tongue. He could feel it, taste it, smell it every bit as realistically as the original experience. Amazing.
If he could do that with an experience like eating, maybe he could get control of his emotions using the same technique. The problem with meditation was that it took time. But remembering how he felt took almost no time at all. If he could play back the feeling in his mind, every detail the same as it was during meditation, he should be able to achieve exactly the same brain state.
Retiring to his bedroom, Mark sat down on his bed, vividly recalling how he felt during one of his meditation sessions. Almost instantaneously he was there, calm yet completely alert, aware of every hair on his skin. There was no doubt in his mind that if he were hooked to a device that displayed his brain waves that they would be an exact match with what they had been during that past meditation.
Thrilled with this new discovery, Mark moved his memory around through different parts of previous meditations, adjusting his brain state accordingly. One thing he determined was that he needed a better system of recalling exact levels of meditation, depending on the state he desired to achieve. Borrowing Jennifer’s idea of tagging memories in a scheme that let her easily find the memory she desired, Mark set to work. Rather than play back and tag parts of old meditations, he started fresh, taking himself through a wide variety of meditative techniques, progressively going deeper and deeper. As he did, he began setting the mental tags at points he thought he might want to recall quickly.
Finishing with a close approximation of the deathlike trance in which he had frightened Heather and Jen on the starship, Mark brought himself back to full alertness with a shift of thought.
Rising from the bed, he pumped his fist in the air. “Yes!”
Despite that they had all attained the ability to use 100 percent of their brain capacity, most of that potential was completely untrained and yet to be explored. Mark had no idea what might lie along those unexplored neural pathways, but tonight’s success left him more eager than ever to find out. In one fell stroke, he had accomplished something that had eluded him for weeks—he had regained his sense of self-control.
83
So close. As Heather watched Jennifer’s fingers stroke the keyboard, she could feel the equations in her head converging. The software approximations Jen had implemented on the computer were almost within the variance allowed by Heather’s mathematical derivations.
For two weeks, the three friends had immersed themselves in the new project, to make a miniaturized version of the subspace receiver-transmitter. To make it truly portable this one had to be no bigger than a laptop computer and include its own internal power supply and wave packet generator. The only truly challenging piece of the effort was this last item.
To generate the wave packets that produced the proper range of frequencies to create the tiny gamma pulses required laptop modifications. That meant the addition of four central processor chips and four floating-point processors. Even these additions proved inadequate until Heather worked out a mathematical approximation, which provided much faster computational solutions.
News reports from around the world only added to their sense of urgency. The new president had requested, and been granted, a special assembly of the United Nations, one in which he brought down the house. Never had a United States president been given a larger or longer standing ovation from the traditionally hostile assemblage. Not only had he acknowledged the legitimacy of the UN’s requests for access to the Rho Ship’s nanotechnology, he had promised to begin worldwide shipment of the serum by Monday, November 5, a date that provided time to ramp up production and to get the necessary congressional approval.
This last had proven to be the sticking point, with a small but vocal congressional minority joined in adamant opposition to the plan. House approval was a certainty, but the Senate appeared to be just short of the support required for cloture, the three-fifths majority required to cut off filibusters. At least that had been true until yesterday, when the leader of the opposition, Senator Pete Hornsby of Maine, was killed in a fiery automobile accident on the Acadia Byway as he returned from a Bar Harbor weekend getaway.
Heather looked down at the modified laptop and then across at Mark, who was also watching intently as Jennifer ran through what they hoped were her final software modifications. Without Mark’s incredibly steady hand doing the micro-soldering, there was no way they could have completed the circuit board changes that had been required. Feeling her own quivering left hand, Heather was certain that she could not have done it. Even Jennifer lacked the complete control of her neuromuscular system manifest in each of Mark’s movements. As they watched him work through the lens of the microscope, his hand was as steady as a rock. If his hand had wavered at all she would have seen it, but he hadn’t.
“Got it.” Jennifer’s voice snapped Heather’s gaze back to the computer screen.
A glance told her all she needed to know. Jennifer’s program was working even better than they had hoped.
“Beautiful,” Heather said, putting her arm around Jennifer’s shoulder.
Mark grinned broadly. “Gotta hand it to you, Sis. You play a mean keyboard.”
Jennifer smiled at her brother for the first time in weeks, an action that gave Heather a glimmer of hope. Since the government discovery of the Second Ship, the twins had barely spoken to each other. That, combined with Jennifer’s strange new aura of self-confidence, had made her wonder if the estrangement might not become permanent, something that would be nothing less than a tragedy.
Heather’s eyes took in the data scrolling across the display, her savant brain comparing the readouts against the equations the program was intended to model. Good. Better than good.
She nodded. “Looks like it’s ready for a trial run.”
“About time,” Mark said.
He had been chomping at the bit for weeks, desperate to find out more about what Stephenson was up to. Initially Mark had argued they should use the computer and subspace transmitter that was already set up and working, but Heather had talked him out of it. The heavy pattern of access on that system meant that Jack and Janet were on the trail of something important. To use it would have meant disconnecting them, a thought that filled Heather with a deep sense of dread.
“You have a coordinate for me?” Jennifer asked.
Mark recited the coordinates for the L-shaped Rho Division building. “35.83333 degrees north latitude, 106.30303 degrees west longitude.”
Jennifer initiated a new feature of the program she had just finished, a scan that adjusted the coordinates in tiny steps, searching for any computer networks within a short distance of the given location. For over a minute, she remained focused on the readouts as the scan progressed.
Finally, she looked up. “Looks like we have a hundred and thirteen separate subnets in the building.”
Mark shrugged. “Pick one.”
“Might as well. We’re going to want to check them all,” Heather agreed.
“Okay, but it’s going to take quite a while to make sense of the data going across each subnet.”
“See if you can isolate any that Dr. Stephenson is using,” Mark suggested.
“That might be tough.”
“We should be able to pick up Stephenson’s activity by the way others respond to him,” said Heather. “Dad says he has scared the crap out of everyone on his inner team.”
“He may be using more than one,” said Heather.
“Most likely. All we can do is try to follow the bread crumb trail.”
Suddenly, Jennifer leaned forward, staring closely at the computer readouts from the scan. “Now that’s weird.”
“What?” Mark and Heather asked simultaneously.
“I have no idea. It looks like another computer network in the building, but it’s not using any form of Internet protocol, at least none I’ve heard of. From the look of the data signature, it must be one of those new massively parallel systems the lab is working on.”
“Why do you say that?” Mark asked.
“The data is just zipping around in one localized area, appearing and disappearing on separate nodes.” Jennifer paused, a stunned look spreading across her delicate features. “Christ. I can’t make any sense out of it.”
“Maybe the data is encrypted,” Heather said, leaning forward to look over Jennifer’s shoulder.
“Maybe. But I don’t even understand the data flow. Must be some new type of neural net.”
Mark stiffened. “Or an old one. What if you’ve accessed the computers on the Rho Ship?”
Heather’s gaze locked with Jennifer’s wide eyes.
“Oh shit.”
84
Raul felt the anomaly as a tingle in his skin. Turning away from his repair work, he let his consciousness roam the ship’s neural network. The data disruption was tiny, a semi-random power variance jumping here and there among the neural nodes, briefly sampling the node strength before moving on.
A probe!
The shock of realization stunned him. The Rho Ship’s systems were being probed from an external source, something that none of the scientists who had worked all these years on the Rho Project had even come close to accomplishing. Until moments ago, Raul had believed this impossible.