04. Birth of Flux and Anchor (21 page)

"Insert your key now," he instructed. "On my mark—three, two, one, mark!" He turned his own, and found the status lights all green. He was in contact with the enormous Kagan 7800 beneath the headquarters building.

The 7800 was a far friendlier-seeming beast than the 7240 series, and seemed to go out of its way to appear to the operators as just an old and interested friend. Both the machine and the company had worked hard on the shell that accomplished this, but nobody but an amateur was fooled that this was anything more than a shell masking a totally alien and incomprehensible intelligence of enormous power. They didn't trust it for a moment.

"Good morning. Seventeen," he said. Each Kagan 7800 was assigned a code number just for geographic purposes, and while some had named theirs, he'd kept it on a business level.

"Good morning, Toby,"
responded the computer. The communication was only in his mind, but the voice always sounded to him like the pleasant baritone one might hear deliver the national news, complete with, to him, a total lack of accent—which meant an accent just like his, of course.

"Bring up the two-kilometer core design, please."

"In place." Suddenly, in Haller's head, an entire detailed blueprint of the layout was as clear as if he were looking straight at it, including symbols for vegetation, paving, communications and electrical systems—everything, to a great level of detail. If he wished, he could count the number of bricks in the walkways in the park.

"All right," said the engineer, "we've run all the models again and again. Run a check on the area to make sure we're not catching anyone or anything we shouldn't, won't you?"

"All clear, Toby. The staff monitors are just outside the lines of demarcation, and all other personnel but you are inside the administrative block. Clear to send."

"Any last-minute recommendations based on current conditions?"

"Recommend we implement the minimum climatological series to match the affected area. Otherwise it's not going to work as well or remain as permanent."

"Very well." Haller reached down and picked up a small module, an unassuming-looking cube that was no larger than his palm, and inserted it into a slot. "Enable core program inserted," he told the computer. This program, worked out and tested on other, non-7800 computers, would allow the enormous power of the 7800 to be used, but only within its proscribed limits. After a lot of creative work with Seventeen and supporting 7240's, they had established an end result and defined it, they thought, absolutely. Seventeen was now free to enable whatever powers, memory, and programming it needed to reach that goal, even if it overstepped the program's bounds, so long as it came up with the desired result. Haller often thought of computer work as the profession of making bargains with the devil. The trick wasn't getting what you wanted, it was finding and plugging all the loopholes.

"Enable on and checked," the computer informed him. "Could I have the base agricultural models as well, please? We may as well do it once."

Haller nodded to himself. "Connie, can you plug those in for me at your end?"

"Will do," came the woman's voice from deep below them. "All right. Haley's plugged them in."

"The information is sufficient," Seventeen told him. "Enabling—
now
!"

Haller held his breath. Even his team didn't know that this was the first time even he had played with a program this complex.

There was a crackle and discharge of energy all around him, and he thought he could smell something like ozone. He turned in his chair to watch what he could and almost fell out of it.

There was a wall of thin fire, or so it looked, coming out of the very ground itself. Now it divided, and divided again, and you had to look sharp to see that in fact it was carefully following the meter-squared grid that underlay the whole planet, as it did Titan, Flux and Anchor alike.

It moved out, not high, but still at four meters or so. and began to march in all directions, the point at which it reached the ground seeming to sear what it touched. One wall came across right to him, then
through
him and the big amp itself. He felt nothing, but it unnerved him even though he was warned of the effect and had experienced it in simulation. Like the operations building, he and the machine were coded out of the program, but it still had to get under him and around him to do its job.

The program did not materialize, it just
was.
He was able to watch it form in the distance opposite as the wall moved outward, and what formed on the inside looked like it had always been there, just blocked from vision by that wall.

Now, instead of dirt and grime and an ugly pinkish-gray nothingness, there was reality. A series of great stone steps led up to the main entrance of the headquarters and operations building. At the bottom there was a plaza formed of red brick that went out in front of the building for thirty meters, then a break for a fairly wide and paved street, then in front of that a park filled with green grass and small shade trees crossed with a brick wall in the shape of an
X
and a little circular miniplaza around a single, larger tree at its center.

There was green life in Anchor Luck at last.

Small, globular streetlights ran around the park but not through it save for the center area, hooked up but not yet working. The connections and controls for them would have to be enabled the hard way down in the headquarters basement, but that was a small price to pay.

Other streets, also with lights, had been filled in, but the blocks they outlined on all sides of the headquarters building were nothing but grass, although each had a thin power access strip that would allow a great deal of lighting and machinery to be attached to the master power grid should things be built there. This was necessary because the new depth and texture of the ground in the designed area no longer permitted contact access to the computer's own power grid supply—and it was the reason why they had to get it right the first time.

There had been a lot of debate about designing and putting in core area buildings, but they'd all come to nothing when plans for who needed what and the designs of those places kept changing daily and getting more and more caught up in the bureaucracy. It was finally decided to just allow for the power strips and to build the buildings the slower, harder, old-fashioned way, with prefabricated units and robot labor, to suit the ultimate tenants.

Haller sighed. He liked it the way it was.

"May I build the minimum climatic bubble while I still have sufficient Flux concentrated?" the computer asked.

Haller was still awed by what had been done. "Nobody's stopping you. Go ahead."

The area above the four-meter mark was still very hazy, but now a new wall formed, this one creating a pinkish ceiling as if out of thin plastic, which, once stretching over the whole area, began to rise and was quickly out of sight.

The light became suddenly more intense, the coloration sharper, although the disturbing distortion caused by its source increased dramatically as well. Haller hardly noticed. For the first time he was looking up at the full splendor of Oberon, the enormous gas giant that was New Eden's light source and gravity captor. It wasn't like the moon, or even the Earth from the moon; it filled the sky almost completely, and although it was distorted through the atmosphere, its multicolored bands could be clearly seen.

"Holy Mother of God!" swore the good Presbyterian lad on the big amp.

"You don't approve?" the computer asked him, sounding puzzled and a little concerned.

"Uh—no; that is—yes. I
do
approve. I do indeed."

Deep down inside him a little voice whispered.
With this kind of power, we are no longer estranged from the gods.

"Let's have a party!" Connie Makapuua screamed delightedly over the radio.

And they
did
have a party, in their mostly barren new offices inside the headquarters building. Chambers and conduits had been built into the interior walls to allow access to Flux chambers of varying sizes. Most of these were not connected to anything like the 7800, but could handle fixed programs of specific things, such as food and drink. In the files of the computers were the digitized codes for some very fine wines as well as other food and beverage service and even some drugs. The meats were total synthetics, but they looked and tasted right.

Toby Haller was oddly quiet while his colleagues celebrated. He'd spent the better part of the day inspecting his new creation centimeter by centimeter, and the enormity of what his machines had done at his direction just floored him. It awed the rest of the Anchor staff as well, in more ways than one, but only seemed to feel the unease in the process and its perfection.

Connie had joined in the revelry, although she was strictly the organic-fruits-and-vegetables type, but she noticed him off to one side and came over to him. He'd given them an enthusiastic enough pep talk earlier, but clearly something was troubling him. She, like he, had a Ph.D. in computer management, but she often spoke half in pidgin English and liked to make out that she was just a regular
wahini.

"So, boss man, why you over here in big funk?" she asked lightly. "Seem to me we got us one pretty li'l world here."

He looked up and smiled wanly. "Not enough sex," he responded.

"Bullshit! You got victory stickers plastered all over your tent. You woman's man. What'sa matta? You no like the little
wahini's
program?"

"Oh, it's perfect. Perfect . . ." He let his voice trail off a minute. "Connie, doesn't this kind of thing
bother
anybody but me?"

"Huh?"

"If you know how to work the machine, and have access to it, you're a god in almost the literal sense. Let there be light, and there was light. It took them two years to build this place. It took us two minutes or so today to landscape it, put in streetlights and brick walks, create preplanted trees, and grass and flowers, and even pave the bloody streets!"

"You gettin' religion or something?"

"No, it's not that. Not exactly. We've got the keys to the god machine, so we're complacent, happy. But we've only been loaned those keys, and anytime they want, the owners can take 'em back. Connie, love—if we can do what we did today, and do what we plan to do in the days and weeks to come, it's more than just making us a nice little country here. I just wonder what it can do to people."

She looked at him, half-smiling, more curious than worried about the question. Like most of them, she saw such questions as academic and interesting, not really applicable to the real world and its worries.

"I dunno," she responded. "Maybe tomorrow we'll ask it."

But they discovered, when they tried, that there were limits to that line of questioning.

"Toby," said the computer, "I feel I must warn you that if you pursue this line too far, you'll be flagged by people you might not like and who get paid not to like you."

"Security forces, you mean."

"I can't say, but it's a good guess. Do you still want to pursue it? Connie will be flagged, too, because she's listening in at Guard."

He thought about it. "Will you tell me if I get to a flag area before the flag is thrown?''

"If I can."

He tried to phrase his questions in terms that could not arouse suspicion. "Seventeen, what would have been the consequences if people who had been in the target area yesterday without being excepted from the program?"

"They would have been removed, digitized, and stored in my memory."

He was surprised. "How is that possible without the vacuum and with all the anomalous elements like clothing, effects, and nonindigenous matter they would have on them?"

"That's not really necessary here, since all of the elements would be creations of the master programs anyway. They could be filtered out without much problem. There
is
a risk, however—the condtions aren't hard to create but are complex to explain—which is why it's not a good idea if it can be avoided. There is a possibility of fragmentation beyond my ability to reconstruct. In that case, I would have to implement the digitized matrix I currently have on file."

"You have a digitized matrix of all of us on file? How?"

"When you passed through the transmission tunnel between the Gate and headquarters. A check file is always maintained in case of a problem in the line of losses in transmission."

"And it's not erased when we arrive O.K.?"

"Under ordinary circumstances it would be, but I have a far expanded memory capacity by simply creating additional storage and access from the rock under and around me."

The implications of that suddenly struck him. "You mean—if I were to die, you could reconstruct me, make me live again?"

"Within limits. It would have to be within an hour or so, and whatever I had in storage would be dated. It would be the Toby Haller of months ago, but, yes, it can be done, and would be if you were flagged as vital personnel and something went wrong. That, by the way, is a quasi-flag, not in the sense of reporting it, but it can be told only if all personnel on the line qualify as essential."

"Wow! I'm essential!" Connie broke in on the radio circuit.

He decided to go after that line of questioning. "Why the hour or so limit, Seventeen? Why not anytime, even years later?"

"The soul doesn't wait that long to leave, decompose, or dissipate, whichever it does."

He had run into the Kagan family's preoccupation with souls before. "You mean that after that time passes you'll only construct a dead body?"

"That's right. It varies with the individual and the severity of the injury, but an hour is about average. Perhaps, one day, if we can separate and quantify the soul, it will be possible to do it an infinite time later, but in spite of all attempts, it eludes us."

"Seventeen—we took Flux energy, dirt, rock, and gasses of various kinds out there and made trees, plants, streets, even daisies and rose bushes. If the program called for it, could we create people too?"