NEW WORLD TRILOGY (Trilogy Title) (38 page)

While Andreas engages in covert R&D, Sascha and Yanyan must continue on as normal attempting to make progress towards a better world despite their beliefs and hopes having an ever-present risk of being ripped from them and the remnants of humanity.

Part 1

Twenty-two years after Last Earth Day: Venus Research Centre 15

Andreas stands up and disconnects from his virtual lab and heads towards the window of his ground-floor apartment.  He looks out beyond the transparent containment dome of his residential hub that encompasses a small group of low-level buildings, gardens and lawns; his gaze slowly scans the closely set collection of interconnected hubs surrounding his own, all of which comprise Venus Research Centre 15, his home for the past eleven years and his third redeployment since Last Earth Day.

He tries not to think about his research for a moment longer; instead, he finds his thoughts moving around in his past.  He thinks about his parents, being raised in São Paolo, and the fact that he had no idea that they were members of the Dissemination Army until after they died during the early moments of the revolution; he then put the pieces together before anyone had a chance to fill him in.

He knows it’s no coincidence that he became a scientist-technologist, but he also knows that he’s lucky to still be alive … lucky in a kind of way, at least.  Unfortunately, since Earth was successfully terraformed and repopulated with only two million inhabitants nearly three months ago, he still hasn’t been authorised to make the trip back to get a closer look; in fact, no one has been allowed to except for the select group of settlers themselves and a small number of R&D crew deployed from Facility 7.  The rest of the population in the solar system has been limited to virtual visits for the time being, which admittedly does provide some kind of satisfaction.  For Andreas and many others, it’s become a daily routine…

He looks down at the floor as though looking straight through it.  Guided by an astronomical program, he locates Earth, locks onto it and zooms in, gradually analysing the cloud formations, the blue hues of the oceans, the general geography and, as he gets closer, the layer of atmosphere as it appears against the background of space.  In lower orbit, he follows the curvature of the surface for some time until he descends rapidly upon the Atlantic Ocean and races just above it towards the coast of Brazil.  He passes the daybreak line and focuses on the horizon, waiting for land to make its first appearance; shortly after it does, he turns and heads up along the coast, spotting large schools of fish and a few sharks and dolphins as he does so, and appreciating the stark contrast between the sea, the shoreline and the lush greenery of the pristine and untouched land beyond.  He turns inland and focuses on the vast expanse of the re-established tropical forest extending well beyond his periphery…

Before he gets any further, his data stream is interrupted with an update that captures his attention; he takes a deep breath and his heart begins to pound.  He looks out the window of his apartment in shock at the news and directs his gaze to the source of the threat over in domes seven to thirty-five; everything appears as it should from the outside — quiet, clean, sterile.  But Andreas has streaming access to what’s happening on the inside, so he scans the scene purposively, collecting as much data as he can, subjecting it to analysis, and attempting to ascertain the cause.  He watches on as nearly five thousand people collapse on the floor and begin convulsing violently while their body temperatures rise rapidly to alarming levels.  In desperation, he accesses the health monitoring program and attempts a system override with only seconds up his sleeve.  His pupils dilate as he’s confronted with a sophisticated encrypted firewall that may take weeks or months to decode, if at all; abandoning the attempt, he isolates the collected data in a vault and disconnects from the scene’s feed just before the hot flesh melts and drips off the bones of the dead.

Domes thirty-six to forty-five are now suffering the malfunction
, reports the facility’s security system.
Evacuate immediately.

Using the communiqué as a kick-start, Andreas bolts to the exit hatch and jumps into his personal shuttle, which takes off and rises slowly towards his own personal exit point in the dome’s outer-membrane along with several hundred of his colleagues in their own four-seater shuttles.  He wriggles uncomfortably in his seat as he leans forward and stares across at a neighbouring dome: number forty-five.  As he approaches the outer-membrane, it dissolves and retracts in front of him, creating an adequately sized hole and being replaced temporarily by an electrostatic buffer that separates the inside oxygenated environment from space beyond; it’s only when he’s well on his way to the orbiting Venus Space Station that he sits back in his seat, puts his hands over his mouth and focuses on his breathing evenly while making the final approach to his destination in the distance.  His thoughts, nevertheless, stay firmly locked on the surface and the remaining sixty unaffected domes and all the shuttles still scrambling to evacuate the scene.

He receives an update:
All systems have returned to normal parameters.  Those personnel in domes thirty-six through forty-five are now safe and well; they will, however, be quarantined until further notice.  Continue the evacuation.  The centre will be off-limits pending a thorough assessment and official clearance.

Andreas decides to get straight to work searching for answers; he re-enters his virtual lab and begins handling the data set collected during the events on the surface.  To facilitate this, he activates a neurophysiological control program, which modulates the neural basis for his cognitive functioning to optimal levels for concentration…

Mid the next morning

Andreas awakens abruptly from a power nap, which is just about all that’s left of his sleeping habits of the distant past; sleeping is now more a form of recreation than anything else.  He looks around at the pathetically small cell-like room that he was allocated to yesterday, which he nevertheless knows he was lucky to get as those who arrived late were relegated to any remaining space they could find in the hallways and other public areas.  He sits up and leans onto his workbench where a newly brewed cup of coffee awaits him.  He reflects on the investigation he conducted all night until just before his nap and immediately resumes running programs for accommodating the data coming in from other investigators on the team.  He stretches and looks out across at Venus from his modest window and stares fixedly at the barren terrain.  “I wonder if we’ve been approaching this from the wrong angle?”

• • •

Most of the data was leading to the conclusion that it was a ‘minor’ system failure: a rare one-in-a-million event caused by a few small coinciding glitches that resulted in a temporary cascade.  The system’s functions returned to normal once the firewall had ‘collapsed’ and the technical crew were able to gain access and adjust the settings manually, which dissolved the interacting cluster of contributing factors.

While the investigators and the hierarchy seemed to be confident that they were heading in the right direction with this, and were about to wrap up the investigation, Andreas felt uneasy about the coincidences involved.  He decided that he’d better do some extra work on his own before airing his concerns.  His feelings about this were partly due to the fact that he’d done more R&D into AI than most of his colleagues.  He also had a well-established habit of staying out of social contact with most of his team and avoiding his managers to such an extent that he rarely felt the need to conform to their expectations unless he really believed they were justified: least of all did he feel like he needed to follow the leader and kowtow at all.

As a result, for Andreas, the event showed all the hallmarks of intelligence and planning, not a coincident cluster of system failures and good luck in bringing the events to an end.  What kind of intelligence, though, what it was doing there, and why it stopped so abruptly was what he was interested in determining … if indeed his assumption was correct.

Moreover, despite the established rules of the colony, he had his own personally developed firewall stretched out around his virtual lab and consciousness purely for privacy concerns and to ensure that he could conduct his research without being questioned and otherwise irritatingly distracted by others; however, as soon as he had the idea that the cause may be AI, his thoughts immediately turned to his level of security and the potential for its integrity to be breached.

• • •

While focusing intently on processing the content of the investigation, Andreas activates one of his safety room creation programs with a duplication of his consciousness and sets about constructing a series of encrypted rooms, all of which are embedded within an elaborate labyrinth of pathways and dead ends.  With each consecutive iteration of this, he incorporates a random alteration to the encryption key.  All of this increases the hacking time exponentially.  As layers continue to build up around the core, he duplicates his consciousness again and leaves it within a newly constructed laboratory to conduct research in isolation.

He then exits the program and files a short report that attempts to make it appear to any possible observer that his ‘modest experiment’ was relatively primitive and non-threatening.  He picks up a cup of coffee and takes a sip before analysing the remainder of the official data and preparing to continue the research he had been doing just prior to the disaster.  He’s careful not to think consciously about his speculation again with the aid of a thought suppression and cloaking program, and does all he can to demonstrate that he identifies with the official version of events.  All he can now do is hope that he’s done enough to stay under the radar and buy himself some time…

• • •

Three days after arriving at Venus Space Station

Andreas quietly steps over legs and weaves around seated and standing people as he walks slowly down a long hallway towards the main conference room, where R&D managers and key personnel are scheduled to have a meeting with Sascha and Yanyan about the results of the investigation and the plan to repopulate Research Centre 15 on the surface as soon as possible.  He enters the room and finds his thirty other colleagues heading towards the conference table and seating themselves.  He scans those present and soon spots Sascha and Yanyan at the other end of the room huddled together by the window with the lead R&D manager of Venus talking confidently and perhaps verbosely to them both.

Andreas takes a seat next to a colleague, nods politely and takes a sip of his now-tepid black coffee, which he brewed in his quarters.

One colleague leans in towards him and says softly, “How long’s it been since you left your apartment?”

Andreas responds without thinking, “Five minutes, I suppose.”

His colleague grins at his naïvety.  “No, I mean, on the surface…  When was the last time?”

“Oh, um … during the evacuation.”

“Your absence at the real and virtual mingling hubs and the meetings has been noted not just by me.  Do you know what I mean?”

“It doesn’t matter,” states Andreas dismissively.

“Of course it does, my friend.”  His colleague continues to grin but remains silent as they both notice everyone is seated and the meeting is ready to begin…

Andreas stares at Sascha and Yanyan sitting at the head of the table together and analyses their appearance, noticing that they look exactly the same as they did twenty-two years ago back on Facility 7, the last time he laid eyes on them.  He’s suddenly bombarded with the minutes of the meeting and supporting references attached to each point contained therein; his engagement program begins processing each page of each document simultaneously, as well as each moment of each video file.

He duplicates his consciousness and creates a private room in order to keep some distance from the data flow.  He then locates the data hubs of all those present and places a stealth containment shield around their activities, allowing him to proceed unnoticed and unimpeded.  He establishes a link with Sascha and Yanyan and funnels in duplicates of their consciousnesses…