Annihilation (Star Force Series) (10 page)

I nodded impatiently. “Yeah, that makes sense. This is a wonderful development, Marvin. I want you to grab control of that ring and turn it off.”

“Naturally, that would be the happiest outcome.”

I paused and my eyes narrowed. “What do you mean, ‘would be’? I thought you said you could control it.”

“I said I could take control of it. I can put it into program-mode, so to speak. But I have no real idea of what commands to send it. I don’t know its protocols or packet control structures. I would have to experiment once I opened a session.”

I nodded slowly and my face fell. I was beginning to understand his hesitation. I also understood now why he’d asked for absolution before making an attempt to do this.

“Marvin,” I said. “I get it. You’re talking about hacking this thing. About attempting to get it to do what you want. But you know you don’t understand the interface. You’d be making guesses, and bad things might happen as a result.”

“Exactly.”

I thought about it. What if Marvin reversed the ring’s direction of flow and put the other end of it into the flaming surface of an unknown star? Anything was possible. He might destroy Yale, or save it.

I knew a little about hacking. It was a hit-or-miss thing. Usually, there were a lot of misses before hits were registered. It would take time, and it would be dangerous. But really, what other choice did we have?

“You know Marvin, this interchange represents a shift in your behavior. I think you might be maturing. Instead of hiding the possible disasters that may occur, you brought them up ahead of time. I’m proud of you, Marvin. You’re learning about responsibility and honestly, I think you’re growing up.”

“That’s an unexpected compliment, Colonel Riggs.”

“Keep it in your RAM,” I told him. “I don’t give a lot of those.”

“Audio saved.”

I smiled and summoned Captain Jasmine Sarin and the rest of my command staff. We had a decision to make.

“I think the Crustaceans have to decide, Colonel,” was Jasmine’s opinion. I wasn’t surprised. Everyone felt that way. We’d discussed it for nearly an hour, and the prevailing decision was clear.

I nodded and contacted Professor Hoon. They all listened intently. No one seemed more interested than Marvin himself. He desperately wanted to make the attempt, of course. His main interest in this meeting was spreading the blame for it afterward, in case it turned into a royal shit-bomb. No one could blame the crazy robot if he’d gotten us all to agree it was risky.

Professor Hoon’s answer was quick and decisive.

“Yes, by all means. Make the attempt. But be warned: there will be an investigation afterward. If this is an elaborate ruse to increase the speed of our world’s demise, there will be a censure forthcoming.”

I tried not to smile. After all, we were talking about billions of possible deaths. The fact they were all doomed in the near future seemed almost immaterial to them. What mattered more was the correctness of the procedure. I thought about asking Hoon who he thought was going to perform this investigation and censure, but held back.

“Understood, Professor Hoon. We’ll take every precaution.”

“We also request dissemination of the results,” Hoon continued.

I hesitated. This was a sore point among my staff. If we did gain some level of control over the ring, they didn’t want to give that powerful technological advantage away to the Crustaceans. They’d been hostile just a month ago. They were cooperating now, but were not really our allies.

“We will consider it after the successful conclusion of the operation. Possibly, we will utterly fail, in which case there’s nothing to disseminate. If it does work out and relations between our governments are normalized we can consider sharing technologies. We have a lot of things to share, far more than just this little trick.”

“We accept your conditions, because we have no choice.”

I turned to Marvin and the rest of them. Marvin was barely able to crouch at the conference table, he was so excited. No one else was sitting within a chair or two of him for fear they’d get slapped by a tentacle or knocked in the head by a drifting camera.

“Can I proceed, Colonel?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said, “there’s no time to waste. See if you can turn off that damned ring, Marvin.”

“Channel open,” he said.

Suddenly, Marvin froze up. Every tentacle stopped moving, and he resembled a still-motion photograph. The effect was uncanny. No human could have gone from such a state of agitation to a completely motionless state. It was as if someone had switched off his primary generators, but he still had enough residual power to maintain rigidity.

“What’s wrong with him, Kyle?” Sandra asked.

“I think he’s okay,” I said, standing up and walking close. “I think he’s switched over all his computing power to this hacking effort.”

“I think he’s locked up,” Kwon said, poking at a camera near his elbow.

Marvin made no response, so Kwon prodded him more vigorously. “I see this all the time. He crashed. He needs to reboot, or something.”

I waved Kwon back. “Just give him some air,” I said, getting nervous. I was as worried as the rest of them, but tried not to show it.

About a minute after he’d frozen in place, Marvin finally came back to life. We all began breathing again in relief.

“Transmission sent,” he said.

“Well? How did it go? Give me a full report, Marvin.”

“Impossible,” he said, “to verbalize a full report of my transmissions would require a period of time longer than your projected lifespan, Colonel Riggs.”

“Yeah, okay. Give me the condensed version. What did you do?”

“I sent a sequence of likely codes to the ring.”

“How many of them did you send?”

“Just over six billion.”

“Did you try everything then? What are the results?”

“Unknown.”

I brought up the display of Yale on the conference table. The world looked pretty much the same. But I knew the currents of a worldwide ocean would take longer than a minute to reshape themselves.

“What do you mean, ‘unknown’? Did you get through to the ring or not? Did it accept any of those six billion commands?”

“Yes. It accepted one. The last one I sent.”

“Okay... So you sent a barrage of spam at the ring, and apparently it finally took one command and executed it. That sounds like blind hacking, Marvin. I was under the impression you had some idea of what you were doing.”

“It was not a sophisticated algorithm,” he admitted.

“What command did it finally take?” Sandra demanded suddenly. “What did you tell the ring to do?”

“I have no idea. That’s why I stopped when it accepted a command. In order to learn how to control an unknown device, experimentation is required. The next step is to observe its behavior, and thereby update my knowledge base.”

“I don’t like the sound of this,” Sandra said. “I thought you knew what you were doing. It sounds like you just pushed every button on the remote control until something happened to the TV.”

“An accurate analogy,” Marvin said.

“But what if you found the self-destruct button?” she demanded.

“I doubt that function exists. But if it did, and I had managed to trigger it, we would have seen dramatic results by now.”

All of us stared down at the conference table. Yale was depicted there, blue-white and lovely, filling the screen under our collective elbows.

Everyone was squinting. Several gritted their teeth, as if wincing in pain or worry. What had we done to this beautiful, stricken world? Had we made things even worse somehow for the hapless inhabitants?

Like Marvin, I figured we would find out soon enough.

-9-

“Professor Hoon is attempting to contact us, Colonel Riggs,” Marvin said. “He seems agitated.”

“Probably because you did something horrible,” Sandra said.

I hesitated before I told Marvin to open the channel. Hoon was in a much better position than we were to know what had happened down there. Very possibly, Marvin had turned the suction effect up a notch, shifting the controls to
high
.

“Aren’t you going to talk to him, Kyle?” Sandra asked.

“Yeah, sure. Open the channel and start translating, Marvin.”

“Channel open.”

“Professor Hoon,” I said, doing my best to sound upbeat. “We’ve made some preliminary tests, and—”

“I’m astounded,” said Hoon, interrupting me. “All of my academic staff have been forced to reevaluate your ratings. It’s obvious to me that our screening systems are inadequate. We’ve misjudged you by a startling margin.”

“Well,” I began, uncertain where he was going with this, “I can safely tell you I’ve been misjudged more than once.”

“Yes. Your seemingly simplistic, emotional responses to stimuli had us fooled. Despite measuring at a nearly bestial level of reasoning, your species has performed a miraculous feat of engineering. We’re trying to explain it, and would like your help in investigating the matter.”

“Um, okay. We can do that. But first let me ask: the results are positive?”

There was a hesitation on the channel of several seconds.

“You’re response casts suspicion on your accomplishments, Colonel Riggs. It indicates a lack of confidence in the results, which in turn indicates a lack of competency in the instigator.”

“Look,” I said, becoming annoyed again despite my intentions. “We’ve performed an experimental attempt to improve your conditions. We don’t have the same level of equipment at the scene to measure the results. I’m just asking you for confirmation.”

“But you omitted a key element of the confirmation query. You have not asked us to confirm a specific change in the situation. I’m afraid this is a familiar pattern. When an apprentice queries his master in this fashion, it often indicates one of two possibilities: either he cheated, or he got lucky.”

I looked at Marvin. The Lobsters had nailed it this time. If we had solved their problem, we’d both cheated and gotten lucky. I didn’t want to tell them that, however. For one thing, this race bugged the hell out of me. But also, they might be less grateful and willing to work with us if they knew the truth.

“Professor Hoon,” I said sternly, “we in Star Force are unaccustomed to accusations of incompetence. Let’s review the facts: you’ve been dealing with a catastrophic technical problem for an extended period of time. You failed to solve the problem or to mitigate it in any significant way. You called us for help, we arrived to render assistance, and you attacked us.”

“We’ve explained our reasoning. Repetition of points previously made is not customary for our species.”

“I’m not asking you to repeat anything. I’m making a point. Despite your failures and your thoughtless attack, we’ve managed to fix your technical problems within hours. After all this, your prejudice against Star Force has led you to yet another folly: Rather than graciously assuming the role of the student at his master’s feet, you’ve persisted in coming up with fantasies. Here at Star Force, we deal in measurable facts. Now, as the Principal Investigator in this experiment, I’ve requested twice for confirmation of critical data.”

“You’ve not specified what data you are looking for.”

“I want a raw report. Specifying what we expect to see will bias your input.”

“Ah,” said Professor Hoon, as if in sudden understanding. “I apologize. We’ve misconstrued your intentions. I apologize again for our suspicious line of questioning. You are correct. In this situation we must assume the lowly role of apprentice, despite the fact we’re unaccustomed to it. Perhaps there is bias in our system. Interesting. I will demand a full analysis of our entire interchange later today—but never mind that now. The key fact is that the ring in the bottom of our sea is no longer transferring liquid mass off-planet.”

I smiled, and everyone around me smiled. Only Kwon leaned back in his chair, bored. The rest of them were breathing sighs of relief.

Sandra got up out of her chair, walked to Marvin and hugged his chassis.

“You pulled it off, you crazy robot,” she said.

Surprised, Marvin lofted his cameras and viewed her from every angle, but he didn’t flinch away. I chuckled. It was probably his first hug from a real, live girl.

“You really do like nerds, don’t you?” Kwon asked her.

“Yes,” she admitted.

I wasn’t quite sure how to take that, so I ignored it. I considered the situation with Hoon. It was time to press for concessions from him, I decided. When would it be a better time? We’d just saved a third of their population.

“Professor Hoon,” I said officiously. “Now that the current crisis has been averted, I would ask you to consider another matter.”

“I’m very busy, but I’ll allow the interruption on this occasion.”

“You’ll be glad you took time from your busy schedule to listen to this, Hoon. I’m offering you a golden opportunity, right here, right now. Switch allegiances. Leave the service of the Macros and join our federation of worlds. Star Force will be officially obliged to protect you once you do so. Cast off your people’s chains. Be a free biotic species. What do you say?”