Wormhole - 03 Page 4

  Slipping into a wicker chair, Heather inclined her head toward Mark and Jen, each occupying a similar chair, all three arranged around a low wrought iron table. In the center of the table, an open aluminum case held the four alien headbands, the area dimly illuminated by an oil hurricane lamp that hung suspended from a support beam.

  Jack leaned against the wall, his eyes studying the full moon that shed almost as much light as the lamp itself. The scene reminded Heather of a séance more than a serious scientific experiment. But then, in a strange way, maybe that’s what it was.

  “You ready?” Jack asked, his strange eyes locking with hers.

  “Yes.”

  “Good.” Jack pulled up a wooden stool, seating himself where he could see the faces of all three of his trainees. “Because tonight you’re going up against the artificial intelligence controlling the Bandolier Ship. Your mission is to gain access to the ship’s restricted data banks. In order to make that happen, you’ll have to convince the ship’s artificial intelligence that you are truly the crew and not just candidates that have attuned to the headsets.”

  “And how do we do that?” Jennifer asked.

  “That’s something you’ll have to figure out together once you’re all linked in. Don’t rush it. Heather’s intuition should guide you, but she won’t be able to do it alone. The ship must fully accept you all.”

  “And if something goes wrong?” Mark asked.

  “I’ll be here watching you. If I think you’re in trouble, I’ll remove the headsets. But remember, you have to retain control of your own minds. Don’t lose your way back.”

  Heather reached for the metal case. The four headsets lay nestled in its dark foam-padded interior, each exactly like its mates, the strange metal picking up the dancing lamplight so photons seemed to bead up and crawl along its surface. Wasn’t it odd how her hand was drawn only to the one she recognized as her own?

  Lifting the light band from its resting place, Heather leaned back, letting Jennifer and Mark select their own. Then, as their eyes met, they all slid the bands up over their temples.

  As the small nubs at the ends of Heather’s headband touched her head, they elongated, the massaging pulse spreading through her body as each sought its optimum position. Then the world dissolved.

  She was on the starship, her virtual self standing on the command deck, its smoothly curved walls, ceiling, and floor as beautiful as she remembered. Glancing to her right and left, she saw Jennifer and Mark settle into their crew couches, the translucent material flowing around them to cushion their bodies, as if they were preparing for takeoff.

  Jennifer had been the first to discover this unique capability available to wearers of the starship’s headbands, something they had come to call the Avatar Projection. If they imagined themselves physically on the starship, the interaction between the ship’s computer and their own enhanced minds created the impression that they were physically there. It was an illusion, but it sure as hell felt real, far more real than a dream, so real that she could reach out and touch things, including Mark and Jennifer.

  While they were in the Avatar Projection, all their senses worked. Not just when they were roaming the ship either. From the first summer they’d spent exploring their Bandolier Ship, they’d known how to have it surround them with sights and sounds of other places and scenes, like Bora Bora or the starship’s arrival in this solar system. But now when the ship presented sensory experiences, it went far beyond mere sounds and scenery. This was the full monty.

  The closest thing she’d seen to this was the dream implants in the movie Total Recall, which provided all the neural stimulation of a real experience. It played out in such detail that it surpassed Heather’s visions of the future, making it hard to remember she wasn’t physically there. That was the reason Jack had cautioned them against losing their way back.

  Heather settled into her own command couch, opening her mind to the touch of Mark’s and Jennifer’s. They were all there sharing the same link—to varying degrees, sharing the same thoughts. It was another aspect of exploring the ship’s neural linkages that had, at first, startled Heather. Jennifer had been the one most familiar with the experience, having used a version of the ability on other people for several months.

  But this went well beyond what Jennifer could do. If they weren’t careful, they found each other sharing their innermost thoughts and feelings, something that went beyond frightening to downright embarrassing. After the first experience, Heather had de-linked, refusing to wear the headset again unless she did so alone. Only Jack’s insistence that they retry the experiment had overcome her resistance.

  In a series of tentative practice sessions, Heather, Mark and Jen gradually learned to establish mental barriers that effectively shielded parts of their minds from each other. Connected through the headbands, their minds each had the capacity to open to the others. Fortunately, that openness could be selectively disabled, effectively firewalling off layers of thoughts and feelings. The bad news was that if a person got interested, aggressively pursuing another’s thoughts, it became very difficult to disentangle him or her from the deeper parts of one’s mind.

  After every headset session, Jack and Janet directed an intense debriefing. Upon discovering the difficulty Heather had encountered in mentally ejecting an uncooperative headset wearer, namely Mark, from her mind, Jack locked in on the problem. He devised a series of trials that became mental wrestling matches. One by one they would each probe each other’s mental defenses, under strict instructions that once they had penetrated another’s barriers, they were to disengage and debrief.

  Over the weeks, as Mark, Jen, and Heather grew stronger, it became harder and harder to bypass their opponents’ mental blocks. But when a block failed, those brief glimpses into each other’s souls were both traumatic and thrilling.

  Now, settled into the alien couch on the Bandolier Ship’s command deck, Heather recognized Jack’s deeper purpose. All their mental wrestling practice had been designed to ready them for this moment. Only this time their opponent wouldn’t be a living, breathing person.

  Mark? Jen?

  Right here. Mark’s mind softly touched hers.

  Me too, Jen intoned. Following your lead.

  Heather centered, focusing her thoughts on the Bandolier Ship, its crew, and the headbands, pulling forth the visions that lurked just beneath her mind’s calm, dark surface. And as those visions intensified, she felt herself sucked across the boundary into a different alien reality.

  Mark felt the alien couch enfold his virtual body as Heather’s visions whispered at the corner of his awareness. Lowering all barriers, he allowed the visions in, succumbing to the raw power of Heather’s mind.

  In rapid succession, she played back every time they had been on the Bandolier Ship, every time they had been connected to the headsets. Mark felt Jennifer join the effort as Heather absorbed his sister’s solo visits to the Bandolier starship.

  Again and again the sequence replayed itself, and each time the emphasis of the vision shifted, replaying the scenes at different speeds and from different perspectives. Suddenly the focus narrowed and intensified.

  Gabriel! The name rang their joint minds like the tolling of a distant bell. One of three biblical archangels, regarded as the angel of mercy by most Christians, as the angel of judgment in the Jewish tradition. It was said the sounding of Gabriel’s horn would signal the end of days.

  The Rag Man had been the first to find the Bandolier Ship, the first to wear the fourth headset. He had seen the alien visions, his sick mind interpreting his assigned role as that of the new Gabriel, the one destined to sound the horn to end all things.

  And the Rag Man had watched as Mark, Jennifer, and Heather had found the cave and the alien craft. The probabilities clicked into place in Heather’s mind. He had known they had worn the other three headsets. The Rag Man’s access to the starship had been more extensive than their own. The ship had used the Rag Man to evaluate them,
seeking to assess their fitness to fulfill the roles represented by the other three headsets, gradually granting them more access as they were deemed worthy.

  The shock of that realization stunned Mark. Their Bandolier Ship had granted the Rag Man full access to its data banks, something it continued to deny them. And in the end, the Rag Man had decided that Heather, like Jack’s partner hanging on the meat hook in the Rag Man’s cave, was only worthy of death. What kind of artificial intelligence could be complicit in such judgments?

  At the edge of Mark’s consciousness, a subtle change drew his attention. Withdrawing slowly from his link with Heather and Jennifer, Mark shifted his focus toward the thing that had distracted him. The déjà vu feeling reminded him of when he had first detected the pinhole anomaly in his bedroom, the feeling of being watched. But this was different. The cold shiver that crawled slowly up his spine told Mark they had now attracted the attention of something far more dangerous.

  The Bandolier Ship filled the back end of the cave, the soft magenta glow so evenly distributed it seemed to emanate from the very air. Against that backdrop, the tables of computers, fluorescent lamps, and monitors made a garish contrast.

  “It’s happening!” Yin Tao’s loud voice startled Dr. Joann Drake so that she sloshed her coffee.

  “Ow! Shit!” She’d burned her hand. But Joann’s annoyance faded as she glanced over the graduate student’s shoulder at the instrument readings spiking across the bank of flat-panel displays.

  Spinning on her heel, Dr. Drake grabbed her iPhone from its docking station, her finger speed-dialing Dr. Hanz Jorgen as she raised the phone to her ear.

  “Yes, Joann?”

  “We’ve got another event.”

  “Now?”

  “Just started.” Joann glanced at the nearest monitor. “Thirty seconds ago.”

  “On my way.”

  The line went dead, and Joann returned her phone to the charging station.

  As badly as she wanted to walk over and ascend the ladder into the ship, Joann knew that Hanz expected her to wait for him, the act a slight deferential nod to the Rho Project’s senior scientist. She supposed that when she had won two Nobel Prizes she’d expect that same level of respect from her staff.

  Besides, despite Dr. Jorgen’s expansive waistline, he could really move when he wanted to, often acquiring so much momentum on his descent of the steps carved into the canyon’s steep wall that Joann regarded his ability to stop at the bottom a violation of Newton’s first law. On cue, Dr. Jorgen passed through the Bandolier Ship’s camouflaging holograph at the cave entrance, his quick stride carrying him directly toward Joann, more specifically toward the bank of monitors behind her.

  His eyes scanned the displays, ignoring Yin Tao’s attempts to offer him a chair.

  “Good Lord!”

  Joann nodded. “The strongest we’ve ever measured.”

  “Why’s it ramping up now?”

  Joann understood the reason for Dr. Jorgen’s query; she just didn’t know the answer. The science team assigned to the Bandolier Ship had first observed the power fluctuations several weeks ago. The events lasted several hours and had recurred every Sunday since. They produced no visible effects, but the sensitive instruments that draped the starship’s interior and exterior recorded significant changes in electromagnetic flux, the signals indicating a dramatic increase in shipboard computer activity. The events correlated with a spike in neutrino measurements at the Super-Kamiokande Cherenkov detector in Japan and with similar measurements at the Sudbury detector in Ontario.

  But why Sunday? The seven-day week was a human calendar artifact. Why would an alien ship suddenly begin exhibiting an arbitrary human cycle? More relevantly to Dr. Jorgen’s question, why was it suddenly breaking the pattern with a Thursday-evening event?

  “Get the folks at Sudbury on the line.”

  “On it,” Yin Tao said, already dialing the number. He spoke a few words, then pressed the speakerphone button.

  “This is Dr. Hanz Jorgen at Los Alamos. May I speak to Dr. Oswald?”

  “Dr. Oswald is off tonight. This is Dr. Kravitz.”

  “Hi, Joe, didn’t know you were back from Banff.”

  “Got back yesterday. My legs couldn’t take any more. Haven’t skied powder that deep since college.”

  “Listen, Joe, are you guys experiencing any unusual neutrino detections?”

  “Funny you should ask. The Cerenkov photomultipliers are indicating a big event, possibly another supernova detection. We were just about to check with Kamiokande. How did you know?”

  “Wish I could say, Joe. Sometimes the damned research classification here at Los Alamos makes me wish I were up there with you guys.”

  Dr. Kravitz laughed. “You know you’re welcome, Hanz. Anytime you want to stop poking around on alien starships and get back to real science, let me know.”

  “If I weren’t so addicted to it, I would, in a heartbeat.”

  “Right. Anything else you want to know? I really need to place that call to Japan.”

  “No. That’s it. Thanks, Joe.”

  “Anytime.”

  Dr. Jorgen pushed the OFF button, breaking the connection. Motioning for Joann to follow him, Hanz turned toward the Bandolier Ship. Joann knew he probably didn’t understand his desire to get inside the ship any more than she understood hers. All she knew was that, for whatever reason, something now called to her as irresistibly as an Anthemoessan siren.

  At the edge of her awareness, Heather knew they’d managed to attract the starship’s attention in a completely new and dangerous way. The AI was reacting in a manner that indicated a friend-or-foe reassessment of all three of them.

  Almost immediately she felt a presence try to push its way into her thoughts, scanning, seeking to determine her intentions. Thousands of independent probes scampered through her brain, trying to bypass the barriers she’d erected.

  Heather felt a shudder pass through Mark’s mind, felt his focus shift away from her and Jen, toward the Other. And although a series of horrifying visions clotted her thoughts, she released him. Marcus Aurelius Smythe had been made for this moment, his protective nature the likely reason he had chosen his particular headset, or perhaps the reason it had chosen him.

  Heather coupled her mind more intimately with Jennifer’s. Jen was the key. As Heather let herself become one with that key, she felt Jen’s desire consume her.

  The alien presence filled the void, a computing consciousness devoid of emotion, yet filled with need. That need probed her, probed Jennifer, seeking to violate the most private parts of their minds.

  The Other paused, quintillions of simultaneous calculations weighed and measured across its artificial mind. The three young humans had altered their previous protocols in a way that placed the ship’s protective systems at yellow alert. Whereas these crew surrogates had previously shown high degrees of individual curiosity, they now probed as a team, seeking to assert control, bypassing computational shields in a concerted attempt to access restricted data. Only one human had previously been granted such access, one who had opened his mind completely, one whose commitment to the mission had been absolute.

  While these three showed great promise, they had not yet demonstrated the required level of commitment to the cause. As badly as the Other needed a crew to complete its mission, its security protocols stood paramount. This coordinated probe of its defenses required a counter-probe, and if that probe proved more than the human minds could tolerate, there should still be time to find suitable replacements.

  Analytical feelers played out across the millions of synaptic connections into the human brains, seeking sufficient data to make a decision. As the probe intensified, the humans countered, severing connections almost as fast as the Other could instantiate them. One of the humans detached itself from the group, turning its focus in direct opposition to the probe, the one that thought of itself as Mark.

  The Other was not surprised.

  Mark felt
the presence so strongly that his view of the command deck shifted, the walls fading away until he appeared to be in a transparent bubble that reminded him of the inside of one of those novelty plasma balls. Only here, the lightning launched itself from the outer sphere toward the center. It crawled across his body, working its way into every synapse of his brain, the pain even more intense than the first time he had tried on the headset. And behind those thought tendrils Mark felt the alien consciousness, felt its need to know his deepest thoughts and purposes.

  Reacting automatically, Mark blocked the attacks using the same techniques Jack had forced him to practice against Jennifer and Heather. And although his defenses held, the pain intensified, easing momentarily whenever he became distracted and let a barrier drop.

  Shit. The damned thing was trying to train him with such rapid punishment-and-reward variations it would soon have him salivating on demand like Pavlov’s dog. The bad news was that the broad spectrum of the attack seemed to be working. Mark felt sure that somewhere out there a voodoo priest was leaning over a rustic wooden table, rapidly pushing pins into a little cloth Mark doll.

  Mark was certain of one thing. If he succumbed, this bastard of an alien computer would turn its full attention to Jennifer and Heather next. But if he could just hold on long enough to let those two find a security hole, they’d have a chance to override the ship’s defenses. At least he hoped so.

  Mark steeled himself, cycling through remembered meditative states in an attempt to wall off the pain. Although he failed to accomplish this objective, he came close enough that the Other’s progress at breaking him slowed from a run to a crawl.

  Jennifer felt the alien presence ease its attack on her mind as Mark withdrew from their three-way mental link, somehow taking with him the vast majority of the alien AI’s attention. Apparently the opportunity to crush the isolated opponent was the bait that caused the AI to withdraw.