Chapter 14

Despite the swirl of images and ideas in his head, sleep came hard and fast. The file system needed a serious defrag. Kevin woke abruptly, but well rested, with a memory of formulae and endless columns of numbers. None seemed directly related to the Möbius Hamster Project, but the mere fact that he remembered exact details implied that relevance would be revealed soon.

A quick check showed the CyberGirls and Crysta conscious and taking care of business. My girls were chasing dreams.

-Alice, where are we?-

-Approaching the comet, ahead of schedule. Barring booby traps, we can start feeding Amy’s tanks within an hour. Still worried?-

-No pun intended, but the odds are astronomical that an icy comet-like object could be captured, and even greater that the solar wind hasn’t scoured the water away. In addition, it is incredibly rich in the most rare of elements, proteins and amino acids.- He paused, -It’s too perfect to be anything but bait. A scientist from any embryonic space faring civilization would see answers to creation-origin questions. A corporate explorer would find it irresistible, would not give a whit about the origin, but would go for the big strike.-

-Once in the neighborhood, either sort of personality will search for more to exploit. That’s what concerns you, right? If we’re smart enough to recognize the next clue, what will we do with it? Someone wants an answer.-

-It’s a test of our base nature. We’ve proven we know how valuable the comet is. Our problem is that we might not know the grading scale. Is it judging our level of technology, our eagerness to use unfamiliar tools or awareness of how incomplete knowledge can be dangerous?-

-Whatever, I detect an anomalous asteroid exactly one hundred meters ahead of the target. Different size, different mass, but tracking precisely in the same orbit. This is artifice, not accident. Sending probes now.- Alix thought into the conference. -We found the fisherman.-

Amy added. -Advise caution. It is pre-Tau Ceti incursion or I would know of it. Alternately, whoever set it up did so while the temporal barrier was active. Both choices indicate advanced, or at least different, tech.-

-Crysta, are you recharged enough to contact the Elders on Epsilon Eridani 2?- Kevin asked.

-Yes. We don’t have much information to ask a proper question, but I can alert them to expect more.-

-That’s more than I dare ask. Alix, do we have visuals on the object?-

-Coming on screen now.-

Kevin saw a dull metallic cube affixed to an unnaturally smooth rock. The detail was remarkable. The top appeared covered by, of all things, Morse code instructions. Four short paragraphs, in English, German, Russian and phonetic Chinese, instructing the finder to touch the appropriate language for further information.

The machine monitored and updated itself?

Telemetry indicated size (a half meter square), likely composition (titanium and some unidentifiable substance) and that it was idle but not inert. The CyberGirls did not detect a known power source.

-What do you make of this, Boss?- Alice, if she had a material body, would have raised an eyebrow. -Wonder how many people would be able to see the instructions for what they are.-

-The idea is to see if we acknowledge it as a form of encryption. Reading the code is not important. Picking a language probably unlocks the box.- He got a wild idea. -Alice, when we are in position and synched with the target, point the lobby door toward the mystery. Create an airlock so I can go visiting. And ‘no’ I won’t take any scary chances, but we need answers.-

-Are you sure you be safe?-

-Absolutely. I think this is a very serious riddle we can solve by anticipating how they think and what they consider important. It will not be what we assume.-

While Alice was reconfiguring the lobby entrance and Alix steered the lab into place, Kevin geared up for his EVA at the replicator:

1- Tight-fitting body shield/AG unit with a bubble helmet. One oxygen bottle, backpack mounted, inside the armor. The suit would vent carbon dioxide as the oxygen replenished the inner atmosphere, equalizing the pressure.

2- A non-metallic, tethered assortment of tools.

3- An AG lifter equipped like the one used to move logs.

4- Optic fiber micro-camera, external monitor/recorder, linked to the lab.

5- Earwig.

He was in the lobby, ready to leave, when Alix called. -You can see it from the doorway, Kevin. Good luck.-

-Thanks- He stepped into the airlock, tested the breather one more time, spotted the cube and teleported over.

-Whoa! That was slick.- Alice laughed. -The girls are up and watching. Your secret is out.-

-So, we go audible.- “Alice, do you detect any activity?”

“Status unchanged since last check. Crysta is relaying the live feed to EE2.”

He touched ‘English’ and a seam appeared, indicating the lid. He opened it laptop style revealing a display screen.

The words ‘Status: System Enabled’ glowed brightly over a background image of what looked like a sun and planets. Underneath, ‘Disable System? Touch for Instructions’ appeared, but did not glow. Beneath the screen, there were four knobs on the top surface of the box, the first separated slightly from the others. The last had what looked like a ‘recycle’ symbol in the center.

“Are you going to disable it, whatever it is? It looks dangerous.” Marly’s voice, sounding afraid.

“No. Their definition of ‘system’ may not be what we expect. In its present state, the device is not a threat. Moreover, they made no attempt to hide any facet of the design. In fact, they went out of the way to make it available for inspection. I want to see the circuitry. It’s up to us to decipher what it means.”

Under a clear top, every component was housed in a transparent casing. The optic fiber, fed through a vent, told the tale, later confirmed by Amy and Crysta in the brownstone factory, of very beneficial science hidden in an extremely lethal wrapper. Kevin was grateful for his natural caution.

“It was not a threat for millennia and there is no evidence our discovery changed the status.” Amy mumbled, “It still seems wrong to tamper with it.”

“It is safe as it can be. Amy, I’m bringing it home.” He strapped on the AG mover. “You say it is not inert, but can detect no power supply. Yet these are live electronic circuits. I’ll admit to a certain amount of intuition, but there seem to be very few traditional choices here. Think about the possible recycle symbol and the balance of mass and energy in the universe. I think dark matter powers it and we need to know how and why. If I’m wrong, sue me.”

He teleported himself and the doomsday machine directly to the basement. Closer inspection revealed no traps. After dissection, the parts were scattered on the work surface, still connected. The two largest components on the bottom were clearly decorated in what turned out to be schematic drawings, one of which looked vaguely familiar. It was a limitless gravity multiplier, an inside-out super AG drive. The other was obviously the unknown power supply or, if Kevin was right, power collector. He wasn’t wrong.

The builders gave everyone a fair shot at reading the unspoken warning: Don’t play with fire until you know how hot it can get. Everyone who had the basic knowledge base and good judgment to see the controls for what they were, that is.

Cutting to the chase, they concluded that the device had three phases, determined by the finder. Tracing the wiring to separate microprocessors attached to a series of relays answered the riddle of purpose. It was a sophisticated gravity magnifier affecting a spherical area approximately one hundred kilometers in diameter. The first knob was a ‘mode’ selector with three détentes or click stops. Each position connected one of the other controls through more processors. The stagger of the transistors’ microcircuits was easy to decipher. You just had to look carefully and think like the designers.

The first control increased the gravity in a Fibonacci sequence recognized by both Patty and Andrea from patterns seen in nature. 1-2-3-5-8-13, etc. The tenth détente would increase the strength of the local gravitational field 89 times. Not a huge total on the asteroid, but quite impressive on a planet. The effect would be a nice adjunct to an AG drive. Placed in an otherwise empty sector as an anchor, it would add range and velocity for a race without FTL capability if the remote location could be stabilized.

The second control doubled the local gravity at each stop, 1-2-4-8-16 and so on up to 512 gees. It was getting into remote controlled industrial application territory now. The device might collapse a gas giant like Jupiter and create a star. The greedy and unscrupulous would use it for a weapon.

Misuse could quickly select a race out of the universe’s gene pool.

Only the ignorantly curious or suicidally arrogant would consider the last choice first. The third control, marked by what looked like a ‘recycle’ symbol, was terrifying. Each détente squared the previous. This set of stops had a ‘zero’ at least. 1 equaled two gees, 2 equaled four, 3 equaled sixteen, 4 equaled 256, 5 was 65,536 times local gravity. Six was over 4.294 billion gravities. There was no point in calculating any higher because the singularity would have been generated. Instant black hole. No neutron star required. A white dwarf would suffice. No witnesses to spoil the surprise.

The ‘system’, and soon all the neighbors, would have been disabled. Careless or potential menace species eliminate themselves before they become a general nuisance. Other, more rational, civilizations could solve the puzzles and benefit from the technology.