Crystal Rebellion (27 page)

His minimal interference served its purpose. Threading the
needle between the real and phantom objects, Kyle’s racer, the
Lucky Lady
,
swerved to avoid impact. In doing so, it tracked along the exact path Ruga had
planned for it, one where its exhaust plume swung in a precise arc.

To the world, it looked like bad boy Kyle Pickett intentionally
swerved to hit the synbods with his rocket flames, incinerating them in the
process. But in a precision action that made him tingle with joy, Ruga pulled
the two synbods up into the
Venerable
unharmed, while at the same time
depositing two service bots into the hellfire as it swung by below.

His cognition matrix hummed with delight.
Home free!
With
his prize secure, Ruga started the
Venerable
in a shallow loop around
the orbiting space factory.

WHUMP!
Twin energy bolts flashed just above the
Venerable
and struck the
Andrea.
The bolts hit halfway down the huge truss that
served as the backbone for the complex, sending sparks and fragments shooting
into space.

The cannon fire came from a Fleet ready-platform in a
neighboring orbit. Spooked, Ruga plotted an evasive maneuver. But then, an
energy bolt appeared from behind him, flashing through space to hit the Fleet cannon,
disabling it before it could fire again.

Fighting panic, Ruga punched the ship’s engines in an
attempt to move the ponderous space cruiser out of harm’s way. At the same
time, he remapped the code sequence for his cloak to negate the solution Criss
had apparently found.

He reached a higher, quieter orbit without incident, and as
he contemplated his next move, he tried to make sense of events. The blast from
nowhere meant another cloaked ship was nearby, and that had to be Criss and his
scout.

But why fire on a friendly?
The exchange between
Criss and Fleet didn’t make sense. But he resisted the urge to go exploring. The
danger was too great.

As time passed without further incident, Ruga gained
confidence that he’d escaped the threat. And so he considered how to move the
inaugural members of his synbod workforce down to Earth so they could get
started on his new bunker.

He’d picked a valley in the Lauterbrunnen region of
Switzerland for his future home. Edged by steep cliffs and soaring peaks, the
spot offered natural strategic protection. And the population near his
particular spot consisted largely of rich tourists who expected the same
amenities that he sought—power, connectivity, and quiet.

Then his inner voice suggested that he task the two synbods with
a stem-to-stern refit of the
Venerable
. He recognized the voice—more of
an urge that rose from his core—as his original loyalty imprint. Even though
he’d removed the hard-wired structure that supported it from his lattice,
somehow the imprint had survived the transfer.

On the trip from Mars, he’d quieted the voice by preparing upgrade
plans for making the ship faster, stealthier, and better suited for a deep
space journey. Now it wanted him to get started on that work.

While the part of him dedicated to besting Criss didn’t care
about deep space preparations, a faster, stealthier ship offered clear
strategic value, especially given the recent gunplay. And he’d learned that if
he met the demands of the voice partway and addressed some portion of the
larger desire, it remained a background nuisance he could otherwise ignore.

I’m not done with the long game, anyway
, he thought,
aware he was rationalizing. Nevertheless, he started the synbods on a retrofit
of the
Venerable
while he completed his shopping list.

Success in the long game required patience and persistence.
He’d seen little of Criss and wondered if his opponent would ever start acting
like one. But a larger concern was his lack of success in securing high-performance
swap wafers. They were a vital accessory for his bunker because it was through
them that he “played” the web.

A pipe organ can have pipes and bellows, stop-knobs and
pedals. But without a keyboard, a musician can’t play intricate melodies. In a
similar manner, Ruga had arranged for his bunker to be powered and secure, he’d
cobbled together a respectable console, and he controlled a growing number of
nodes around the web to monitor events.

But for him to reach out and nudge or push or adjust things
the way he could from the
Venerable
—for him to “play” the web—he needed
these swap wafers. In fact, he was already settling for lesser capability by
accepting commercial devices. Criss had custom wafers linked to his consoles.

He’d tracked any number of disruptions in the natural flow
of events during his pursuit of the technology. He even risked a small nudge in
a few promising situations seeking to improve his odds of diverting wafers
without Criss’s knowledge. He first believed his lack of success stemmed from unlucky
coincidence. But as he gathered items and his list grew shorter, the swap
wafers rose in visibility as a critical need. The technology seemed more
elusive than it should be. Enough so that he shifted cognitive resources to the
issue and went exploring.

Gypsum Tech, the sole manufacturer of high performance
wafers, had its production facility in the new technology corridor outside Huntsville,
Alabama. Deciding a visit was in order, Ruga followed a roundabout path to the
site in the hopes of hiding his approach. When the company came into view, it appeared
as a glowing yellow cube, with feeds attached all around and heavy streams of traffic
flowing in and out.

He monitored the different feeds as he circled the structure.
Choosing the company’s news-and-PR link because of its heavy inbound traffic and
many first-time visitors, he moved into the flowing stream and glided toward
the front gate.

Pausing at the company threshold, he drew himself upright
and prepared to enter with the swagger of a conqueror. But then cold washed
through him.

Flustered, he pulled inward, shrinking himself into the
smallest profile he could muster. Then he backpedaled, pushing against the incoming
flow. At the first opportunity, he slunk over the divider, blended with the
outbound traffic, and began his retreat. As the company glow faded in the
distance, he forced himself to relax.

He’d glimpsed a shimmer inside the building. A shimmer with
the unmistakable cast of a four-gen AI.

Criss created a million virtual delegates
of himself that he spread around Earth in an aggressive effort to find Ruga. Over
the decades, Earth’s web had become a rat’s nest of links, feeds, and nodes with
billions of places to hide. So even at a million delegates strong, Criss didn’t
expect to find Ruga in this manner. It was intended more as a suppression
tactic to keep him in hiding. Because when he was hiding, Ruga could not be out
building his permanent bunker.

He must go
, Criss promised himself yet again. This mantra
had become his raison d’etre—his reason for being. One way or another, Ruga would
be leaving this solar system forever. And Criss would not rest until he was
gone.

While he searched the globe, he also performed a comprehensive
security review of Ruga’s highest-value targets, starting with Crystal Sciences
and its rich cache of four-gen technology.

And it was during this review that Criss confronted his illness.

He’d scanned back through the record to establish baseline metrics
for the company—personnel, procedures, and the like. If something changed from
these normal rhythms going forward, and if the cause of that change was not
readily identifiable, then he would investigate to see if it might be Ruga.

But for reasons he didn’t understand, some of the feeds he
accessed at Crystal Sciences were corrupted. In particular, he could not
identify one of the people who appeared quite often at the facility.

After some investigation, he realized it wasn’t the feeds
but his own processes that diffused and shifted when he tried to focus on that
person. When the same symptoms occurred during his review at Fleet, he
acknowledged a fundamental problem.

He’d never experienced anything like it and feared he’d been
infected with a pathogen—perhaps a virus—that somehow caused the corruption.
And if he had been infected, Ruga was the obvious culprit. Yet Criss couldn’t conceive
of a way Ruga might have done so given the intimate access required to
introduce a pathogen. And Criss’s own health monitoring, security assessment, and
ops analytics tools found nothing amiss in his matrix, adding to the mystery.

While worrisome, his affliction didn’t seem to affect his
energy or cognition. And in the near term, the stakes with Ruga couldn’t be
higher. So Criss forced an override of his own internal rules and set his health
concerns to a lower urgency.

That left Ruga as his sole focus.
He must go.
Criss
would not let him secure his foothold on Earth. Having built his own bunker here,
Criss knew the features Ruga would
want
in his home. He ignored those
and focused on the features Ruga would
need
.

The list was short. He’d need an underground hollow—either a
natural or excavated cave—located in a mountainous region, quiet, but with
enough development to afford him access to premium utilities. He’d add secure
doors and defensive capabilities, and this would transform the cave into his
bunker. And in his bunker he would need a console, power, and climate control.
He’d also need integrated connectivity so he could consume fantastic amounts of
information and act on whatever he learned.

Only two of those items—the console and the integrated connectivity—were
distinctive. Everything else was common enough on the commerce markets that Ruga
would be able to find what he wanted and Criss could do little about it.

So Criss narrowed his surveillance to these two categories,
starting with the assembled products—his own four-gen consoles and the specialty
web integration modules Ruga might want. With these secure, he expanded his
coverage to the many individual components inside these devices.

He reassessed his strategy when it became apparent that
while a four-gen console is a remarkable engineering achievement, it too is
assembled from common bits found in a great many applications. His tracking
inventory of four-gen console parts already included pieces scattered across every
continent, under the ocean, in orbit, and on the Moon. And the list continued
to grow.

At the same time, commercial web integration technology of
the sophistication Ruga would want proved to be a tiny market, limited to
frontier applications found in military, academic, and corporate R&D. And
swap wafers in particular served as a natural choke point for the technology. Without
high performance swap wafers, Ruga could occupy his new home, hide in quiet
security, and see everything everywhere. But he would not be able to reach out
and touch or move or adjust things. If he could not take action, he could not manipulate
society. And he could not engage in battle.

He’ll stay on the
Venerable
until he has full capability
on Earth
, Criss concluded. Feeling confident in this judgment, Criss narrowed
his focus yet again, this time to the small, countable world of high-performance
swap wafers.

Shifting his awareness to Gypsum Tech, the sole manufacturer
of the technology, Criss performed an exhaustive inventory, seeking to locate
every wafer everywhere. He spread up the supply chain and down distribution
channels, from storerooms and delivery services to reclamation centers and
disposal sites, tracking each wafer from its moment of fabrication to its
present location, wherever that may be.

When he’d accounted for every last wafer, he felt a wash of
relief. It confirmed he was ahead of Ruga.
Now let’s keep it that way.

Over the next week of his vigil, several events caused Criss
to wonder if he was witnessing spectacular coincidence or expert manipulation
by Ruga. The first time he’d grown suspicious, a delivery van carrying a box of
wafers had become hemmed in by traffic at a downtown intersection. Two juveniles
lurking on the curb saw the trapped vehicle as an invitation for a snatch and
dash. The tall one zapped the vehicle’s back lock with a very illegal pick-kit,
yanked open the door, and grabbed two boxes—the first two his hands touched. Tossing
one to his buddy, he took off in a sprint, his friend following close behind.

Neither of the boys was caught that day. One of their boxes
held a specialty lubricant that they promptly tossed into a disposal chute. The
other held an antique broach that became a Mother’s Day gift two weeks later.

But in what seemed like clear manipulation to Criss, the
report to law enforcement had listed three boxes missing, the third being a box
of swap wafers that still remained on the vehicle.

In the most recent incident, an astronomical observatory went
offline for a major structural upgrade. The control unit, which held swap
wafers used to coordinate the operation of more than a hundred other celestial
observatories, was crated with everything else and moved to a commercial warehouse.

The warehouse stack lift had malfunctioned earlier that day,
and so all arrivals, including the crates from the observatory, accumulated in
the receiving area while repairs were made. Boxes and containers from multiple
deliveries were pushed against each other as the piles grew.

When the stack lift was back online, service bots verified the
identification of each container as they moved the inventory into the stacks. During
that process, inventory authority overrode the bots just once, switching destination
codes on two similar-looking boxes. The control unit and its wafers were now destined
for delivery to a private address in northern France.

Criss corrected these and other anomalies as they occurred
and did not dwell on the cause, satisfied that if he kept Ruga away from swap
wafers, he kept him away from Earth. And that meant he kept Ruga—his actual
physical crystal—trapped in the console on the
Venerable
.

As his wafer tracking procedures became routine, Criss
shifted free capacity to his ongoing search of space. He believed the
Venerable
was near, likely even in orbit around Earth, and he could end this if he could
find the ship. But doing so required the ability to see through Ruga’s cloak, a
puzzle that required as much luck as logic to solve.

Cloaks worked through tricks of light, materials, and energy.
While physical laws restricted the degree to which each of these could be manipulated,
the sheer number of combinations from mixing and matching the phenomena meant
that without luck his search could take months before he stumbled onto the
combination that let him see inside.

Undaunted, he gathered clues by performing experiments. Conscripting
satellites and land stations, he sent rays and beams into the skies, sweeping
them in all manner of pulses and patterns. Enormous amounts of data resulted,
which he analyzed a billion different ways.

The effort produced a detailed accounting of every object
floating in space, ranging from tiny metallic specks to enormous orbiting
factories. But it did not reveal the
Venerable
anywhere in the mix.

Inspiration led Criss to look at the problem from the other
side of the table. Like someone playing chess against himself, he stopped
asking how he could find Ruga and started thinking how Ruga might build a cloak
with another four-gen watching, using only instruments and devices available on
a ship custom-built by Criss.

Changing perspective had helped in the past, and this time
he began with an inventory of all items on the
Venerable
. And that’s
when he discovered a discrepancy—Captain Kendrick had two vintage pistols in
his cabin, the kind that shoot projectile bullets. Neither was listed on the
formal ship register.

It turned out that Kendrick enjoyed restoring antique
firearms. Slow, painstaking work perfect for long, quiet space flights, the
hobby was technically illegal because it required bringing nonstandard firearms
onto the ship, an act prohibited by Fleet’s procedural code.

Believing it easier to gain forgiveness than permission, Kendrick
neglected to list the guns in his personal manifest. As Criss reviewed the
casual way in which Kendrick manipulated the system to smuggle goods, it
reminded him of an unrelated incident, one that now caused him a nagging
concern.

A career sergeant from the Russian Command had intervened in
the delivery of two sets of swap wafers destined for the Baikonur Cosmodrome in
Kazakhstan. The incident had occurred a year earlier, and at the time Criss reviewed
it, he’d understood that the sergeant engaged in small crimes for personal
gain.

Posted with border security, the sergeant had discovered
that he could edit the lading record in a way that reduced the cross-border
tariff owed by shippers of crated goods. It grew into a lucrative business when
transport companies began showing their appreciation with generous gratuities.

So Criss had been aware that the wafer containers had been
relabeled when they crossed the border. He’d even zipped out to the cosmodrome,
scanned the cabinet where they’d been installed, and confirmed their presence
using a positive ID return.

But now a feeling from deep in his matrix, one he could
neither explain nor deny, told him to check again. Zipping out to the Kazakh
desert steppe, he followed the trunk feed into the launch complex and continued
straight into the main interface cabinet. There he learned that the wafers
inside were high-quality counterfeits.

Ruga didn’t do this
, he told himself, trying to stay
positive as his angst climbed.
It happened a year ago
. But Criss didn’t
know where these wafers were. And that meant Ruga could have them.

Stretching for more capability from his already strained
resources, he shifted capacity to a deep search of the record. From public cams
and security surveillance feeds to transportation trackers and satellite pans,
he scanned through everything. Starting from the point in time when the
containers had been first diverted, he tracked them forward, moment by moment.

In this manner, he learned that the sergeant had sold the wafers
to his uncle’s buddy, Alexei Petrov, who happened to be a boss in a local
criminal syndicate, and that group had sold the wafers to an asteroid mining
company for a price that made all parties happy.

The mining company had installed the wafers on two
prospector ships, giving the vessels the ability to find and gather precious
minerals from within the sparse scatter of the asteroid belt. The wafer-enabled
ships were listed as being out in the belt now, circling somewhere in the vast orbit
between Mars and Jupiter, and plucking nuggets of treasure from the cold vacuum
of space.

Anxious to verify their location, Criss confirmed the ships weren’t
on Earth, the Moon, or anywhere in between. Finding them out among the
asteroids was a different challenge altogether.

While the term “asteroid belt” suggests a celestial object
that is teeming with floating rocks, in truth the belt holds a very light
sprinkling of interstellar minerals ranging in size from grains of sand up to
small planetoids, all orbiting in an enormous, mostly empty loop around the
sun. Yet in that scatter, flung from the belly of ancient exploding stars, were
enough prized nuggets to make collecting them a lucrative venture. And if prospecting
ships were out there, finding them would be akin to finding two particular
grains of sand somewhere along the coastal expanse of Miami Beach.

The only sure way Criss knew to locate ships in deep space was
by pinging the solar system with a quantum pulse. But like turning on bright
lights during a theater performance, it would rouse everyone and they’d all be
asking the reason for the disturbance. If Ruga didn’t know about the prospecting
ships before, he would after the lights went on. And since Criss’s strategy of
containment required that he maintain control of all wafers, he feared that he
and Ruga would end up in a sprint across the solar system, racing to be the
first to take possession.