Chapter 57: Abdul Hadi in the Furnace

Time: November 16, 8244 10:50 AM

I had been standing in the sealed airlock for thirty-five minutes now, having stepped in at 10:15 and entering my access request. The programming staff supporting this mission thought it would be an optimal time to try to second-guess the fuzzy logic of the automated security system. 10:15 was fifteen minutes after the normal end of morning Prayers. It was the right time for Royal to be leaving the nearby chapel and entering the main complex.

As the forty-minute mark for the airlock neared, I felt my body tensing, and I didn't want that. I tried to calm myself by thinking about my family. Such love! Such beautiful wives! And now I have a beautiful daughter.

We went live with the global holocast as scheduled at 9 AM. I'm sure we startled the world by presenting first an adoption ceremony. There were no known protocols for this, so my wives, Kefira and I designed one ourselves. My wives and I promised to love and support Kefira throughout our lives, Kefira promised her obedience as a child and to honor us as an adult. She defiantly ignored the likelihood that by the time she reached adulthood, my wives and I would be just a memory to her.

And in the airlock now I had to smile at the political brilliance of the adoption. As my daughter, Kefira now is the inheritor of all the world's promises made to me for the direction of our new society. I made that point very explicit in the adoption ceremony. My heart is at peace now that I'm not helping to return the women to slavery.

At 10:55 AM, precisely forty minutes after I entered, the airlock cycled open into the interior of the complex. I quickly entered the building and walked briskly but not too quickly across a spacious reception lobby to a guard station near a bank of elevators.

The lobby was very beautiful, as nice as my palace. Polished white marble with green swirls on the floor, plush leather lounge chairs scattered about, interesting abstract mosaics carved into the burnished steel walls, the lobby was an announcement of the Nikahaldi's power and prestige. I reached the guard's station and immediately tried to bring up a diagnostic on the security console.

I knew this system well, had trained on it for years as a boy. It's sophisticated, top of the line, but my Guild had also placed several maintenance backdoors into the software for troubleshooting. Since the backdoors could not be used to change any status or operational program, most customers allow them to remain. Running diagnostics is very time-consuming without the backdoors, and there's a hefty premium built into the service contract if the customer insists on taking them out.

Success! I was able to initialize a diagnostic output feed. The rest of the world could see me now on the holographic channel I created. It was one-way only. No information could come in, but I took a second to wave at the security monitors around me and the world that was now watching.

If I succeeded in my mission, I would use this diagnostic channel to output the Nikahaldi library to the world. Perhaps the world saw me grimace when I looked back down at the guard station console. The fuzzy-logic security system was flashing a blue-level warning. It had tagged me as (hostile, potential) which had activated the building's self-destruct sequence with a four-hour delay. The counter was now at 3:14:57 and counting down to a scheduled detonation at 2:15:00 PM.

I took a moment to think. If I left now, there was about a 50% chance the automated security system would decide that with no one in the building, it could reset and not detonate. It all depended on how severely the Nikahaldi had tuned the aggression matrix on the pseudo-emotional fuzzy logic. I could leave now, and perhaps have another shot at this later.

I started walking briskly to the elevators to ride them down to the second airlock. There was nothing that I had learned so far that would make any future attempt more likely to succeed than now. Indeed, the system's fuzzy-logic is adept at becoming alarmed at patterns it doesn't understand. A repeat of my entrance at a future time might well cause the system to tag me as (hostile, intermediate), or even (hostile, active). My swift death would then be assured.

I began my cycle in the second airlock at 11:04:25 AM, four floors below ground level. I felt chilled during the long wait. The certainty of never seeing another human again made my heart melancholy. My mind drifted among all the hugs I had gotten from my wives at 10 AM, somber moments for the world to watch. My other wives took their cues from Michal and Dodi, on how emotional to act. But most of all, now in the second airlock, I was surprised to find myself thinking mostly of Kefira and her tears, how she openly wailed her frustration to the world as she hugged me, clutching as if she would never let me go.