Chapter 4

AI reported, "Andy, it is now safe for your gang to approach Ceefour. The voltage regulator modules we borrowed from Ceethree are doing the proper job, so the gravity should hold within its nominal limits."

That was great news, and we poured on the speed to get to Ceefour as quickly as possible. As we approached the border of Ceethree, the trees grew closer to the ground and leaned more and more toward the horizontal in the direction of Ceefour. We did see a number of animals with multiple legs having great difficulty walking because what must have felt like 0 g to them. They all moved very slowly, and we expected them to be a great food supply for the Ceethree predators as soon as those beasts realized the bounty that was available.

We were absolutely amazed when we finally crossed over into Ceefour. For as far as we could see, there was nothing but perfectly flat ground relative to the wall of the Dyson shell. It was flat enough to make a billiard table jealous! There were no hills or rocks projecting above the surface of the ground. The 100 g gravity had smashed those things long ago to not even memories. There were no plants or animals anywhere except right at the edge of the gravity zone where a few animals had wandered over the line onto the desert that Ceefour had become.

Well, there was no point in us hanging around there. There was simply nothing of interest to see beyond what we had already seen. We could see the curvature of the shell push the far reaches of the gravity zone up so that we could see them as a kind of dim expressionless nothing of a uniform blah color. None of us were interested in hanging around the few thousand years or so required to turn Ceefour back into productive fields and forests.

I asked AI to call in the fighters to ferry us to some place where there was still some life left in the sphere. There were still enough unblemished landscape to hold millions of exciting possibilities, and we were anxious to go there. Any place would be superior to what we could see of Ceefour. The fighters arrived in only a few minutes, and we wasted no time in entering and taking our seats. AI was going to move the scooters as a separate shipment, but inside the same worm hole as we were using.

From the fighters, now that we knew what to look for, we could see the scorched wasteland where the gamma-ray burst had done the most damage. I asked AI to take us there for a fly-over. We wanted to see just how much damage the gamma-ray burst had done at its worst. Literally, in no time, we were hovering over the remnants of gravity zone Teefourteen.

The gamma-rays had been somewhat attenuated by the hyperdiamond shell from which Dyson was made, but the intensity of the beam was so great that it had still wiped out the interior of Dyson where it had made the most direct contact. There was nothing to be seen at the center of the contact area except the raw hyperdiamond of the structure's shell. This extended in an elliptical shape for klicks in all directions with the major axis of the ellipse following the direction of spin of the shell. I couldn't help staring at the exposed shell and marveling at how good an engineering job the Ancients had done. I wondered if they knew just how good they really were.

We could not see for the 200 million klicks to the far side of Dyson, but AI assured us that the exit point of the gamma-ray burst was essentially the same as what we were seeing here. He could take us there if we wanted to go, but he really did not think that it was worth the effort. We flew slowly for a couple of hours just trying to take in the immensity of what nature could do in the midst of a rampage. As far as I was concerned, I had seen all I wanted to see of the mess made by the gamma-rays. What I wanted to do now was to try to clean up some of the crud left by an unfeeling nature.

The other seven in our party agreed with me that we should do what we could to help the people left behind by the disaster, but we were at a loss as to how to go about it. Of course, we could help individual groups like the Arlo to better their lives, but there had to be more groups of people here than we could possibly help. What we needed was to do something fundamental that would help everybody uniformly. To do that, we had to find the central computer and get it back into operation as nearly as we could to what it had been before the gamma-rays struck.

The first step was to try to find the location of the central computer. Hopefully, it was not too near the center of destruction. The grunt work of the search could best be done by AI, but we organic beings could help by suggesting leads to follow and using our imagination to link the clues as we found them. AI had long ago admitted that he did not have an imagination-circuit and could only solve problems by gut force. That's where we organic types might be able to shortcut the search.

The first thing we needed to do was to contact some of the local AIs and get from them all of the information that they had on the central computer's possible location. Only a small fraction of AI's capacity was needed for that part of the search, and he launched into it right away.

We jumped to a section of Dyson that seemed to us to be one of the least affected by the disaster. Hopefully, that would mean that the local AIs would have the best access to their ancient memories. AI asked them to share with him whatever they could find in those never-used storage banks regarding the location of the central computer. In every case, the answer was, "I do not have any record of the location of the central computer. All I know is that I had to select thus-and-so circuit connections, and I was eventually in contact with one of the central computer's interfaces."

One thing that bothered me was why was the location of the central computer kept hidden from the only things that could use it? I thought about that for a long time, and I never could come up with a satisfactory answer. All I could think of was "That seems damned peculiar!"

AI was stumped at this point, so I made a suggestion. "Why not ask each of the AIs to try to contact the central computer as they once did in their past. This should start the flow of electrons along certain paths. Hopefully, you can detect these electrons as they 'move' and build up a map of where they are when they are stymied. If we can get enough paths to follow, we might get at least an idea of where the central computer is located."

"Okay, Andy, I will give that a try. However, it may take some time to find all of the paths. I will have to ask each local AI to take a turn so that there is no confusion in the paths. If your idea works, we should be able to identify the general section of the shell where the central computer is hiding. Incidentally, I wonder why it is so carefully hidden."

"I don't know. Maybe we will be able to answer that question once we have found the central computer."

AI started his search right away, and he gave me a report of his progress every few minutes. Dammit, the more AI searched, the more confusing the map became. It seemed to lead off to random points scattered all over the shell. No point was more that a few milliseconds away from the local computer making the inquiry, but the paths did not seem to lead to a coherent answer to our question.

Then AI had a stroke of brilliance: "The central computer had to have some way to reach an individual local AI within a reasonable time. Even at the speed of light, a majority of the local computers would be beyond immediate contact. Therefore, the central computer had to be communicating at FTL (faster than the speed of light) to talk to all of the local computers with a minimum of delay. The only way I know of for that to be possible within normal space would be to use a facet of quantum physics.

"When paired in a certain way, two photons can be made to seem to react to each other no matter where they are located within the universe. That is how FTL radios can be made to work within normal space. Otherwise, it is necessary to shift into hyperspace as is done by the normal spaceship, and that would not be practical over the relatively short distance of this Dyson shell.