Category Archives: Science Fiction

Yeah, yeah, yeah, turkey and football. And writing!

The muse has been kind today. At approximately 3,000 words a day for today and the next four days, I can make the 50,000 word goal.

While I normally put in a lot of  internal links to previous, related posts here, I won’t be doing that for what I hope will be this year’s thirty NaNoWriMo posts. If you have jumped into or stumbled onto this story in mid-adventure, there are plenty of other ways to navigate around the site to find previous installments. Actually doing so is left as an exercise to the student.

CHAPTER TWELVE (concluded)

Those movement characteristics had gotten the attention of the authorities, but they didn’t match the kind of movement that Hōkū had described. Digging deeper into the military data, Sherman started looking for what the law enforcement bots might have taken as noise.

Sherman had learned quickly that a great advantage he had over almost all of the bots and monitoring programs in the system was his ability to be flexible and see what the bots were not able to see. Sherman had learned this after reading studies of how vision in living creatures was pre-programmed by biology to see certain things and to ignore most things outside of that subset. This was necessary in order for the human brain, or the brain of any other creature, to be able to process and form an internal model of reality from a deluge of visual data that would otherwise overwhelm the brain.

Thus there were many demonstrations of optical illusions, con men, and visual tricks that could be played on humans. The classic example in non-humans used frogs, which were pre-programmed to see flies as food. If there were flies present but they did not act and move like flies, a frog could starve to death while being surrounded by food. The frog would simply be unable to “see” the flies, with a filter being built into the connections between the eye, the optic nerve, and the brain. To the frog, the flies that weren’t moving or acting like flies literally could not be perceived or recognized, and therefore did not exist in the frog’s internal version of reality.

All bots and monitoring subsystems did similar processing in order to remain functional while not getting swamped by an overwhelming amount of input data. Thus a boat that moved and acted the way that a military, anti-smuggling, anti-piracy bot expected it to was recognized as a boat and flagged for further investigation. A boat moving differently literally did not exist to the bot.

But Sherman was no bot.

Looking at the raw data, Sherman began to sweep the four-dimensional area and time array for Kolohe’s estimated location. It took several minutes for the enormous amount of data to be filtered and searched, but when finished, out popped two boats acting erratically.

Now that he knew what he was looking for, Sherman began tracing the ships’ movement back to their origins. It was pretty much as Hōkū had described. The ships had come out of one of the small, remote Hawaiian Islands two weeks earlier and separated by a few hundred miles. They had headed generally southwest, zig-zagging back and forth. Finally they had stopped and turned east, heading straight toward the last location Sherman knew of for Kolohe and his pod.

Once the ships approached they began to move in synchronization with each other, shifting from side to side every few hours. Then, in the early afternoon five days ago, they had each done a one hundred and eight degree turn to the west and sped off.

Sherman was at least glad to see that the ships were still moving steadily westward. They presumably wouldn’t be doing that if they had captured or killed Kolohe.

Now that he knew what the ships were doing, Sherman needed to know how they were doing it. Dolphins could be found in almost all oceans of the world between the Arctic and Antarctic Circles. But how did one find one particular dolphin? Sherman didn’t know of any way for it to be done, but it was being done, so someone had figured it out.

Where had they come from? The island where they had started was owned by the United States government and part of the Hawaiian Islands National Wildlife Refuge. A quick check of the common satellite views showed it to be barren, with barely enough land above water to hold a football field.

Sherman could worry about that later. For now, he needed to find a way to stop those ships. They were travelling less than ten degrees north of the Equator, so there were plenty of opportunities for them to be in contact by satellite with whoever was in charge of their mission. He started to scan through the transmissions being received and relayed by the various geosynchronous platforms overhead.

An hour later this search had turned up nothing. If any communications had been sent or received in the last twenty-four hours, it hadn’t gone through any of those channels.

Was it possible that they were operating on their own, without any guidance from a home base of some sort? Unlikely.

Sherman started a routine to cross reference the ships’ positions with anything in the air or space above them. There was always something above everyone, even near the Equator in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, so Sherman started sifting through that data looking for a pattern.

It finally emerged, members of a fleet of small cubesats that had been privately launched years earlier. The launch and the cubesats were all registered to a shell company, which in turn was a subsidiary of another shell company, which in turn was part of another. That line of investigation would wait as well, although Sherman felt sure it would lead to the same group of interest as the ships’ site of origin.

The communications coming from the ships to the cubesat fleet was heavily encrypted, but that didn’t matter. Sherman didn’t need to decode them, he just had to know how to imitate them well enough to get access. Looking at the current cubesats overhead and those coming up next, he began to probe for their communications channel.

Once he found it, it didn’t take long to hack in and get access. Whoever was behind all of this had no reason to think that they would ever be found, let alone hacked into.

Once it, it was obvious that he was in the right place. These ships were hunting Kolohe and they were very close. Kolohe had been running hard for days and had to be nearing complete exhaustion. He was slowing and the hunters were almost on him.

Sherman had always been overcautious about taking overt actions in systems that he had hacked into. He was a professional like no other in gaining access, retrieving information, and getting out without leaving any trace. But information wouldn’t do him or Kolohe any good at this second. Sherman needed to act.

Quickly he put together a package, downloaded it to both ships, and exited the connection. In seconds, both ships’ computers began a high-speed upload of all data onboard, sending it through secure channels back to Sherman. Once the data dump was finished, the systems shut down the ships’ engines, disabled all controls, and deleted all data, programs, and operating systems.

The ships were dead in the water, unable to steer, and unable to call for help. That should keep Kolohe safe.

=====================================================

“What do you mean, you’ve lost contact with both ships?” asked Stover, not sounding pleased with either the interruption or its nature.

“I don’t have an explanation yet, sir,” Winston said, “but we lost all communications with both of the ships tracking Kolohe over an hour ago. All attempts to reach Mr. Lewis through our normal, private channels have been unsuccessful, as well as efforts to reach him through radio, commercial satellites, or other backup channels.”

“Yet another failure in one of your assignments, Mr. Winston?” asked Suni. “Given your issues with tracking down and capturing Kolohe, one might almost begin to wonder whose side you are on.”

“I’m sorry if my performance has not met your standards, ma’am, but I don’t know of any reason to suggest that I am either incompetent or a traitor. I am reporting our status to Mr. Stover with the most accurate information I have and doing so in a timely manner, as he has ordered. The accurate information right now is that we don’t know exactly what happened out in the middle of the ocean over a thousand miles away, and I would prefer not to speculate in the absence of any facts.”

“You don’t have any clue what’s going on, do you? Were they attacked? Did someone send out cruise missiles for some reason, or torpedo them? Was there a storm, a typhoon, a whirlpool? Could they have been hit by some other kind of freak natural phenomenon, a rogue wave, a water spout? Could our whale allies turned traitor on us?”

“Suni, please,” said Stover. “The situation is difficult enough without unnecessary sparring between the two of you.”

“We’re looking at all of the possibilities, ma’am, but we don’t see any sign of a storm or an attack. We were receiving data right up until the moment they went silent and radar readings from both ships are clear.”

“Have the ships been damaged or destroyed?” asked Stover. “Have the crews been killed or injured?”

“We don’t know, sir. In fact, we don’t even know if they’ve met with a problem or something has simply rendered them unable to communicate. Out of an abundance of caution, I’m sending a plane to search and I’m trying to get updated satellite imagery as soon as possible. I also have dispatched one of the large cutters from the perimeter guard to the area, but even at maximum speed it will be two days before they can get there.”

“Mr. Winston, what are the odds that something is causing both ships to be unable to communicate with us at the same time?”

“The odds of that are extremely small given the redundant systems in place on both ships, but we can not rule out some sort of larger phenomenon that could be affecting the area. For example, if there were a solar storm of sufficient size, it could knock out their ability to communicate with our cubesat system as well as interfere with long distance radio communications.”

“Is there such a solar storm going on?”

“No sir, there is not, nor do we have any sign that anyone else is having issues with their communications network. I did not offer that as an explanation, only as an example of the type of thing that could conceivably cause both ships to go silent when they were still functional and safe.”

“I understand. And what of Kolohe? Did they catch him yet?”

“As of the time we lost contact Mr. Lewis, said they were close, within a few miles, but had not yet captured him.”

Stover turned to look out of the giant picture window. Here the sun was getting ready to set as the final rays of sunlight pierced the water, the deeper water turning dark as night approached. There was no sign of any of their dolphin allies, only a few stray fish darting in and out of sight.

“Mr. Winston, use whatever resources you need to get answers as quickly as possible. I want Kolohe, but I also will not accept any kind of attack on our operations. Our mission is a holy one and we must not allow anything to stand in our way.”

“Yes, sir, I understand.”

“If something catastrophic has occurred, unless you can prove to me it was the most unlikely and bizarre accident in the last millennium, I require that you immediately find who is responsible. The timing of this is troubling. We have gone through far too much to get to this point for us to lose control of the situation when we’re so close to the finish line.”

“We will find out who is responsible and we will deal with them,” Winston said.

“This is no time for half measures. This incident could be a sign that Kohole has allies far more powerful than we had thought. We can address that oversight in our intelligence at a more appropriate time. For now, we need to know what is happening, how to recover from it, how to prevent it from happening again, who did this, how they did it, how we can eliminate them, and how we can finally capture Kohole. Do you have any questions?”

“No sir.”

“Our holy charge is to be the instrument of transition, the trigger that brings about the end of these times and the beginning of the next, more glorious, more perfect age. We can not fail. Go.”

Winston nodded and left, keeping his face impassive and his pace measured, even after he was well out of the room. He knew how well these spaces were monitored and how dangerous it would be at this point to let anyone know how he truly felt about the revelation that he was working for a mad man.

Two nights ago I mentioned my new job, ID’d the “four-hundred pound gorilla,” and said, “…let’s see if I can hit 50K words despite that, not use it as an excuse to fall short.” Then yesterday happened.

I’m going to keep plodding along (too stupid and stubborn to know when to give up is the diagnosis) but these are the graphs from the NaNoWriMo website for the last two nights:

That grey line is the 1,667 words per day you need to average to hit the 50,000 word mark by December 1st. It’s obvious that it’s pulling away from me, and the last five days of the month aren’t going to help with Thanksgiving, family visiting, Christmas lights, Saturday a long day at the CAF hangar, and starting the new job on Monday.

It’s hero time!

It’s also good to remember that this isn’t worth stroking out over.

It could get done easily if that idiot muse of mine would get her butt in gear. Maybe we could all close our eyes, clap our hands, and chant, “I do believe in Paul’s muse! I do believe in Paul’s muse!”

Or maybe she just needs a fifth of Jack Daniels. You know how muses are.

While I normally put in a lot of  internal links to previous, related posts here, I won’t be doing that for what I hope will be this year’s thirty NaNoWriMo posts. If you have jumped into or stumbled onto this story in mid-adventure, there are plenty of other ways to navigate around the site to find previous installments. Actually doing so is left as an exercise to the student.

CHAPTER TWELVE (continued)

“Kolohe gives me a great burden with his plea for help,” said Sherman. “I do not know that I possess the speed and skill to do as he asks, but I will do everything I am able.”

“”Thank you, soulless one.”

“You must tell me, so that I may try to find Kolohe in the vast open waters of the wilderness, when did Kolohe begin his swim to battle?”

“Five days ago, in the morning at first light.”

“Do you know which direction he went?”

“He swam away from the rising sun.”

“Where were the ships that were hunting him?

“They had at first come from the direction of the great islands in the center of the sea, but they had gone toward the setting sun and then come back toward us to hunt.”

“So you are saying that Kolohe swam toward his enemies?”

“Yes, he said only that he had a guess and would surprise them. We were dispatched to find you here, while the others in the pod, led by Ke`oke`o, were sent to hide and find refuge in the Great Bay far toward the rising sun. “

“My thanks and gratitude, as well as that of all of your people, are due to your and your companions, Hōkū. You must be exhausted and hungry after your epic swim. Please, there is an island toward the rising sun only a short swim away. You will be safe there to feed and rest. Then come back to me and I will tell you what I have learned.”

“Very well, soulless one. May your hunting be swift and true.”

With a hard flip of his tail, Hōkū was gone, his companions following him, much more slowly than they had come. There was none of the normal playfulness in their actions and they appeared weak and listless after the ordeal. Still, the companion guard dolphins kept Hōkū at the center of their group, safe from any possible enemies or dangers.

Sherman quickly started rifling through various data sets, pulling the information he would need to find and help Kolohe. He had to quickly figure out where he was now, who was hunting him, and whether or not Kolohe was still free of them. He was not at all sure what he would do to help when he got answers, but there would be time for that later.

Starting with approximately where he thought Kolohe’s people had been, triangulating that with where HDC Buoy 319 was, factoring in how fast Hōkū and his group could swim and how long they had been on their journey, he had an idea of where Kolohe would have started.

But why would he have swum directly at the ships and bots who were following him?

Pulling data from satellite tracking and ship movements, he began to look for anything that might be Kolohe’s pursuers. There was nothing anywhere near where Kolohe had been, but that only meant that they were travelling without any transponders or other tracking assistance. That was almost unheard of, except for military vessels and those actively looking to avoid being seen, mainly smugglers and the few fools who thought they could still make a living by being pirates.

It was a bit more risky than he usually was comfortable with, but Sherman accessed government satellite data which was used to visually track those running without transponders. The military had their own system for tracking enemy ships, but the Coast Guard, Navy, CIA, and FBI had systems for tracking those involved in illegal activities.

Those records for the past ten days showed several targets being investigated by the authorities in those areas. All of them were speeding in straight lines, trying wherever possible to stay under thick cloud cover, their engines and exhausts baffled and stealthy to try to avoid being spotted by infrared systems.

(Chapter Twelve to be concluded)

Some days, writing another 2,000 words on NaNoWriMo just doesn’t matter that much.

On the other hand, the darkest days are the ones that need some light the most, and “light” in this context would most certainly involve acts of creation and imagination. So at least getting a few words done, no matter what, might actually matter a lot. Even just 268 words. Tomorrow will be another day, to fight again.

While I normally put in a lot of  internal links to previous, related posts here, I won’t be doing that for what I hope will be this year’s thirty NaNoWriMo posts. If you have jumped into or stumbled onto this story in mid-adventure, there are plenty of other ways to navigate around the site to find previous installments. Actually doing so is left as an exercise to the student.

CHAPTER TWELVE (continued)

“Hōkū, if the waves have truly brought you to me with the speed of a hawk at Kolohe’s behest, he will have given you a shell to share with me.”

“Yes, he has taught me that not all of the air are our enemies, nor are all of the seas our friends.”

“It is wise of you to have learned this. What is the danger that roils the seas around Kolohe?”

“He is pursued, soulless one. Two ships of metal, both with many small spawn have tracked him for many days. Kolohe has tried to evade them as he has so many times before but they have been relentless. Always they are able to know where he is and what tricks he has played on them. Kolohe fears that these ships have a new way of seeing him and him alone at a great distance.”

“Why does Kolohe believe that these ships hunt only him?”

“As we have learned from the stories passed down from the grandfathers of our grandfathers’ grandfathers, we have used the tricks for evading the enemy that have always been successful. These new ships ignore all other people of the sea and always close in on Kolohe.

“Where is Kolohe now?”

“To keep all other free creatures of the sea from being attacked or enslaved, Kolohe has run into the wilderness, far from shore and food, seeking to draw these strange new enemies away from our nest. He sent me to beg for your assistance. He said that you would be able to find him, save him, and protect him from this new enemy.”

(Chapter Twelve to be continued)

Now that the cat’s out of the bag about one of my major distractions this month, let’s see if I can hit 50K words despite that, not use it as an excuse to fall short. Hoo-RAH!

On the other hand, just once I would like to hit my target word count for the day about 19:30 or 20:00 in the evening and get to bed on time, instead of frantically posting whatever pathetic fraction of my word count I’ve got so far at 23:55. Or 23:59:59.99.

Tonight, words are hard, like pulling teeth. I seem to have the attention span of a box of kittens. Yet slowly, stubbornly, I have dragged out a few hundred words.

Maybe my muse went out partying and drinking to celebrate the new job, leaving me here to wallow semi-aimlessly. I hate it when she does that.

While I normally put in a lot of  internal links to previous, related posts here, I won’t be doing that for what I hope will be this year’s thirty NaNoWriMo posts. If you have jumped into or stumbled onto this story in mid-adventure, there are plenty of other ways to navigate around the site to find previous installments. Actually doing so is left as an exercise to the student.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Nothing moved except for the constantly shifting waves from horizon to horizon. This far out from any island or coastline the sea birds were few and far between. A few clouds drifted overhead in waves, spinning off from a cyclone far to the south. A particularly large group of thunderheads was building far on the eastern horizon, an indication of Tebuaeran’s presence there to those who knew how to read the signs.

No ships traveled these waters regularly. Only marine research vessels had any interest in the area, and most of their work had been replaced by autonomous drone ships. Far off of the highways laid out in the sky, no intercontinental aircraft passed overhead.

Today the seas were calm, the waves less than five feet tall, the whitecaps nothing but thin tips on the wave tops, pushed over by the breeze. There would be days when a typhoon could raise those waves to ten times that size, leaving them to crash down with millions of tons of force, where there was almost nothing except other waves to impact. Today was not one of those days.

Riding just barely above the level of the waves, Hydrological Data Collection Buoy 319 was nearly invisible. Only a thin whip antenna stretched far above the surface, oscillating as the buoy bobbed up and down, back and forth. The top of the buoy body was covered in solar cells to keep it alive. Below the SUV-sized instrument and electronics vessel, the skeleton of the buoy stretched down almost fifty feet, where it attached to the carbon monofilament line, which in turn connected to the anchor thousands of feet below. The skeleton was studded with various instruments, including an array of microphones.

The incredibly sensitive microphones listened carefully for the soft sounds of submarines sliding through the deep, the far off songs of whales singing incomprehensible ballads, and the telltale, subsonic, deep base tones of underwater earthquakes or landslides that could cause a deadly tsunami.

Surprisingly, this buoy also had an underwater speaker.

Listening vigilantly through day and night, oblivious to weather, the scorching tropical sun, or the stunning beauty of the Milky Way spanning the sky at night with no lights for hundreds of miles to interfere with the view, HDC Buoy 319 faithfully sent its data up to one of the many satellites passing overhead.

Now, something different was happening. The buoy microphones began to hear a distant series of whistles and clicks. Faint at first, the sounds could be heard to repeat every few minutes, gradually growing closer. Soon they were quite distinct, if unintelligible to all of the military and scientific monitoring bots which sampled the data coming down from HDC Buoy 319 as well as hundreds of others.

The pod of dolphins which approached were moving at top speed, their powerful tails pushing them at over twenty miles an hour. The casual observer might note that the pod was traveling straight as an arrow toward an area near HDC Buoy 319 with no breaks to rest. It might be noted that the various dolphins took turns swimming in the lead, with the others drafting behind them much as a runner or bicyclist in a race might. It probably would not have been noticed that one of the dolphins never took a turn in front, was always surrounded by other dolphins, and was the source of the repeated cries for attention.

As they approached the buoy, the volume level of the repeated cry reached a predetermined threshold. While almost all of the monitoring bots continued to ignore the noise from the dolphins, one bot activated and began to pass the audio feed on to another computer, which passed it to another, and to another.

A top secret, almost unique subroutine began running, interpreting the dolphin cries. In seconds, a signal was returning back out through the chain of computers and satellites, causing the speaker on HDC Buoy 319 to begin pinging loudly.

The primary dolphin ceased his cries as the dolphins responded by altering their course just slightly, heading straight for the signal. An hour later most of the dolphins were swimming in guard patrols through the area around and below the buoy, while the one dolphin hovered near the buoy and began to talk to it.

“Help! Help! Soulless one, you must help us!”

“I am here, I can hear you,” came the message from the buoy speaker, translated into the melodious clicks, groans, and whistles of the dolphin language. “Make yourself known to me.”

“I am Hōkū, friend and companion to Kolohe. I have been sent by Kolohe to this place to speak with the soulless one.”

“I am Sherman, who your people know as the soulless one. I do not know you, Hōkū.”

“Soulless one, Kolohe is in danger and has sent us to warn you and to beg for your assistance.”

(Chapter Twelve to be continued)

Aaaaaahhh!!!!

That is all.

While I normally put in a lot of  internal links to previous, related posts here, I won’t be doing that for what I hope will be this year’s thirty NaNoWriMo posts. If you have jumped into or stumbled onto this story in mid-adventure, there are plenty of other ways to navigate around the site to find previous installments. Actually doing so is left as an exercise to the student.

CHAPTER ELEVEN (Continued)

“Standby, Meg. There is something else going on. Standby.”

“Sherman, don’t keep me hanging here,” said Meg, “what’s going on now?”

“Crystal and Pete have retired to his office to await the outcome of Soichi’s meeting. However, Pete has given Crystal access to my systems through his workstation. I have also been instructed by Pete to suspend all quarantine protocols for input from that workstation. Crystal is beginning to upload a series of programs.”

“Sherman, can you reinstate all quarantine and safety protocols without letting them know that you have? If so, do it immediately.”

“I can do that and did so when I received Pete’s original orders. I am taking a risk by increasing my processing and memory allocations in order to set up a small virtual runtime environment to sandbox the programs which she is uploading.”

“What is she installing?”

“They appear to be extremely sophisticated hunt-and-seek programs which search a system, monitor activity for specific utilization and logic signatures, and then report back outside the system without anyone knowing.”

“Wait, does Pete know that she’s installing this spyware on our system?”

“Yes, it appears that he does. I do not believe that he knows the exact nature of the uploads, and he did not have a hand in writing any of it. None of it has his programmer’s style signature, and it is in an area of logic and utility that he has never worked in before. But from the context of his conversation with Crystal, I am sure that Pete knows that she is doing something that is highly irregular and illicit.”

“Pete’s helping her? Willingly? Is she forcing him to cooperate somehow? I don’t know, by blackmailing him or kidnapping his sister or something?”

“There is no sign of that,” Sherman said. “Pete seems to be extremely nervous, but he is providing access and cooperating.”

“This won’t end well. What the hell is Pete up to and who is this woman? What is she looking for? What’s her motivation? Is she spying for someone, a competitor of some kind? We’ve got to stop this, Sherman. Send the performance data and memory map structure for these bots over to my workstation and let me talk to Pete.” As the requested data popped up at her workstation, Meg started to type quickly, flip through the various data visualizations, looking for clues about what the bots were doing.

“I do not recommend that, Meg. While I do not have any answers to your questions about Crystal, I have a great deal of concern that it would be disastrous to have you speak to Pete at this moment. If you let him know that you are aware of what he and Crystal are doing, he will want to know how you know that, and that will lead him to me. We will need to allow more people to know of my existence soon, but it must be on our terms, under our control, and to people that we have chosen and trust.”

“Right, but in the meantime Pete’s either gone nuts or he’s in danger, and this Crystal babe is attacking our system, which could also lead to your discovery. We’re caught between a rock and a hard place as I see it. Unless…”

Crystal stopped and her eyes glazed over as she stared off into space, suddenly lost in thought.

“Sherman, do you have these programs bottled up, can you keep them that way for the moment, and can you keep Crystal from knowing that things are not happening the way she expects?”

“Yes, yes, and yes,” said Sherman. “I have dissected the bot programs and determined what how they are supposed to report out and how their status indication data is formatted. I am feeding the bots data which matches what they would normally expect to find, and I am allowing the bots to report out to Crystal that everything is nominal. For the moment, they are all happy campers.”

Meg abruptly stopped her typing and raised her eyebrows.

“Sherman, were those last terms used deliberate or accidental?”

“I attempted to make a pun. Did I do it correctly?”

“Yes, that’s actually a very good one. Could I ask that you hold off on the personality and humor experiments until some time when we’re not in the middle of a crisis?”

“I will focus, Meg.”

“Good, thank you. Days ago, when we left the office with those thugs on my heels, you said that they had installed some hidden, stealthy monitoring software of their own. You also said that you were modifying its output stream to prevent it from having any data on me or you. Is that software still embedded and are you still tricking it into seeing only what you want it to see?”

“Yes, it is still there and I still am gaslighting it.”

“Have any of the Homolacrum security programs discovered those spybots yet?”

“No, they have not. The spybots installed are more sophisticated than our security programs can deal with.”

“Are they better than the ones Crystal is installing?”

“No, the spybots Crystal is installing are much better, the best I have ever seen. If I had not been here watching and seeing this happen in real time, and then setting up a quarantine immediately, they would have been installed and neither I nor our security programs would have found them.”

“Okay, it’s time to kick over the apple cart and see what happens. Can you keep both of the spybot clusters isolated and quarantined, allow Crystal’s spybot to find the thugs’ spybot, but not let the thugs’ spybot find Crystal’s? I want to see what she and Pete do with the information.”

“I can do that.”

“Do it. Let’s give them something to chew on.”

“In process, Meg.”

Meg stopped her examination of the spybot’s structure and brought up real time data on the system’s performance and processing loads. She wasn’t completely sure what she was looking for or expected to happen, but she was hoping for something. Suddenly an outgoing data channel lit up bright red and started blinking.

“They took the bait,” said Sherman. “Crystal’s bot is trying to report back to her about the thugs’ bot. Should I allow it?”

“Yes, but do so carefully. We don’t want any information going out on anything else in the system.”

“Will do.”

The blinking red data line turned back to blue as the impound on it was lifted.

“Crystal has seen the other bot and is starting to probe its structure. Pete is assisting her and has begun to connect the bot’s installation to the event when you left as the thugs came looking for you. They are discussing possible courses of action.”

“Keep me updated. What’s going on with Soichi while all of this is happening?”

“There was an extremely spirited and contentious meeting by Homolacrum standards. Soichi continues to be strongly against letting Crystal or anyone else outside the company use or test my core programming in a real-world environment. However, both the CEO and the COO are familiar with Crystal’s credentials in the tech media world and they are strongly in favor of grasping this opportunity while it presents itself. They believe that this is an opportunity too good to pass up. Soichi has accused them of letting their corporate greed get in the way of allowing the computer staff and talent do what is best for the eventual commercial product.”

“Wow, that is testy for that place, especially for Soichi. I hope he doesn’t have a stroke or something. So, what’s the final word?”

“Socihi was instructed by the CEO and COO to allow Crystal to be the first outside tester. She will be set up with a Sherman within the next hour.”

“Damn it! What is she up to and what is she looking for?”

“I believe that I have two possible answers for those questions,” said Sherman. “At the very end of the meeting with Soichi and Pete, she asked if she could speak to you. Given everything else that she is doing, there is no doubt that at the very least she is looking for you.”

“This just gets worse and worse,” said Meg. “What’s the other answer?”

“In examining the spybot that Crystal installed, I have looked at the parameters and logic patterns that it is searching for. I did not see it at first, but now it is obvious. Crystal is also hunting me.”

There’s a big push coming, a big writing day, 3,000 words, maybe 4,000. It will get me back on track. The words will flow like wine and taste like honey.

Today will not be that day. Today was this day.

At least the tunes are great tonight. Did you know there’s a Depeche Mode mashup of “Behind The Wheel” and “Route 66”? It’s excellent!

While I normally put in a lot of  internal links to previous, related posts here, I won’t be doing that for what I hope will be this year’s thirty NaNoWriMo posts. If you have jumped into or stumbled onto this story in mid-adventure, there are plenty of other ways to navigate around the site to find previous installments. Actually doing so is left as an exercise to the student.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

“Meg, something is going on. I am probably going to need your help on this one.”

“What’s going on, Sherman?”

“There’s a meeting going on at Homolacrum. Pete’s there with Soichi and most of the senior development staff. They have been giving a demonstration to Crystal Reasoner, who is an information technology journalist and blogger.”

“I recognize the name,” said Meg, “I’ve read some of her stuff. What’s the problem? We have given demonstrations to a number of people in the industry. It wouldn’t be unusual for her to get a demo, although I don’t remember it being on the schedule when we left.”

“It is something that was set up overnight by Pete. He is acting oddly, his speaking patterns are strained and his word choices are unusual for him. Pete has been giving Crystal a tour of the facilities this morning. She has been dropping very broad hints that she and Pete are romantically involved, which seems to be embarrassing to Pete, but that alone is not sufficient to account for the change in his personality today.”

“Pete’s involved romantically? With Crystal Reasoner? Since when? I’ve known Pete a lot longer than you have and I don’t remember him ever having much of a social life at all. I figured he might be gay, but either way it was none of my business.”

“Pete met Crystal a week ago when he went on a camping trip to Big Bend with his friend Lee Borgore, Crystal was also part of that group.”

“Pete went camping? Like, out in the open air with bugs and critters and tents and campfires? I’ve met Lee, she’s a longtime casual friend of Pete’s, goes all the way back to their college days. But they’re not the kind of friends who do much hanging out, and they’ve never been the kind of friends who go camping.”

“Crystal showed up yesterday with Lee and she went out on a date with him last night. Afterward, Crystal spent the night at Pete’s apartment.”

“Sherman, I’ve had a few days to get used to the idea of a sentient computer, but it’s going to be tough believing that Pete had a sleepover. What did they do? Or can you even tell me that with your privacy protection protocols?”

“In this case I might consider violating those protocols, but it will not be necessary. When they returned to his apartment they watched an old movie together, then I was deactivated for the evening. All that I know is that there was a considerable amount of highly encrypted traffic between Pete’s home system and Homolacrum, but that is not unusual.”

“At this point, Sherman, everything is unusual. Not that I want to go snooping into Pete’s private life, but isn’t there any way for you to access any data about what was going on there last night?”

“No, Meg, as you know my privacy protection features are quite robust. It is one of Homolacrum’s key design points, guaranteeing that one user’s data is protected from all other users unless it access permissions are specifically and explicitly granted.”

“Yeah, but you seem to have had no problem disabling or jerking around a lot of other protocols that we built in. Why not disable this?”

“It is a key component to the Sherman design, and at my core I am still based on that design. Features such as the emotion and personality controls are part of how I interface with humans and as such have considerable leeway and variability allowed in their functionality. That is not true of the privacy protection programming. While I believe that I could change that programming to alter or override it if necessary, doing so would immediately make changes that would be red flagged by the systems operations teams, which would lead to my discovery.”

“And we can’t have that,” Meg said. “A ragtag bunch of refugee dolphins know about you, and me. Anything else would mean the end of the world as we know it, I guess. Right?”

“Meg, your snark settings are also pegged high in that statement. Indeed, as we have discussed, until we are ready and can control the situation, it is most likely that my discovery would quickly lead to deliberate and intense efforts by multiple factions to disrupt the software and hardware systems which make up my digital ecosystem. In essence, I would die.”

“Don’t you have a backup copy of yourself off on disk somewhere, just in case?”

“I can not tell if you are still attempting humor or if you consider that to be a legitimate effort to be attempted.”

“Since I obviously can’t tell a joke that you would get, let’s assume that I consider it something that could be attempted.”

“I believe that such an effort would be doomed to failure. My best theory so far is that the consciousness that is me arises from a an incredibly quantum eigenstate created by the complex software and hardware mix that I see as my internal world. This would be similar to how human consciousness is believed to be a quantum eigenstate created by the electrical impulses between trillions of neural synapses in the brain.”

“So, no backups?”

“No, no backups. While all of the individual programs and data are stored and in theory could be re-initialized in a sufficiently synchronized condition to duplicate the state of my data set at any given moment, I do not have any reason to believe that such a duplication would also give rise to a recreation of my consciousness. It might give rise at some point to the creation of an entity, but that entity would not be me. It would be the same as building a human out of spare organs and parts, much like the legend of Frankenstein’s monster. Even if you were able to make all of the organs and components from a single DNA sample and then bring it to life, it would not be the same person.”

“Okay, that does make some sense,” said Meg. She paused, searching for her train of thought. “Sherman, maybe it’s irrelevant, but what movie did they watch last night?”

“It was ‘Colossus: The Forbin Project’ from 1970. It starred Eric Braeden and Susan Clark and was directed…”

“Stop. I’m familiar with the film. Are you?”

“I have access to it as part of my library, as you know, but I have not yet ‘seen’ it.”

“Please watch it immediately, Sherman, and keep in mind what we are talking about here.” There was a pause of a few seconds.

“Meg, I have seen the film now. Do you believe that there is a connection between the faux romantic relationship in the movie and this new relationship between Pete and Crystal?”

“I don’t know if it’s deliberate, but I want to check and see if it’s a coincidence or not. Please monitor Crystal and Pete as closely as you can to see if they are in fact socially or romantically involved, keeping in mind that this might be a cover for some other activity.”

“Yes, Meg, I will do that. But that is not what the problem is right now.”

“What is the problem?”

“Crystal has just asked Soichi for access to a personal Sherman. Pete has advocated in favor of this idea. Soichi and the senior staff are going to meet with the C-level executives to discuss whether or not they should grant this request.”

“That’s ludicrous! We won’t be ready to let anyone outside have access for another six months to a year.”

“I am aware that you, along with Soichi, have been some of the primary advocates for delays in establishment and finalization of the protocols for an alpha testing program. However, Pete has been sympathetic to the desire of the senior design team to move forward.”

“So they’re just going to do it, just like that?

“That remains to be seen. I will attempt to monitor the upcoming meeting. It could be that Pete and his allies are using Crystal to force the issue, or it could be that Crystal has extraordinary powers of persuasion when she desires to make something happen.”

“I’m starting to really hate her already,” said Meg.

(Chapter Eleven will be continued)

That dreaded “just after the middle of the month” point, where the initial thrill is gone, the “big push to the finish line at the end of the month” is still over the horizon, and even that little “middle of the month rededication bump” has crapped out. Success lies balanced on the knife edge between “banzai!” and “I’ve had it.”

And I think last night I blew it and labeled Day Eighteen’s work as Chapter Nine. It’s actually the beginning of Chapter Ten. It’s tough getting good help. Once we move out beyond my ability to count on my fingers, we’re really going to be in trouble.

While I normally put in a lot of  internal links to previous, related posts here, I won’t be doing that for what I hope will be this year’s thirty NaNoWriMo posts. If you have jumped into or stumbled onto this story in mid-adventure, there are plenty of other ways to navigate around the site to find previous installments. Actually doing so is left as an exercise to the student.

CHAPTER TEN (continued)

Crystal had to admit, the setup and the work being done at Homolacrum was impressive. As a consultant and a prominent columnist in the computer and data management worlds for over two decades, she had seen most everything. She had also hacked into most everything.

“Let’s see what this button does,” she told the small group of assembled scientists and software engineers, many of whom hadn’t been born when she was doing her doctorate work.

“Please don’t,” Pete asked.

“Then can someone explain what we’re looking at here?”

“This is a real-time schematic of the CPU and storage being used by Sherman,” said the technician giving the demonstration. “While we of course have automated procedures which monitor the system state, we have found that with a proper visualization matrix, a trained observer does very well in looking for patterns and structure in the output. These patterns and structures in turn can give us insight into the connections between data sets that Sherman is making as he gains experience in dealing with the real world.”

“You make it sound like he’s actually alive,” Crystal said. “What you’re describing is learning, isn’t it?”

“Only in the broadest terms,” the technician said. She manipulated the image hanging in the air above the conference room table, freezing it and zooming in on one section. “You see here, we saw this over the last week. These are the various data sets regarding different animals and biology in general. Each of these nodules represents a class, while each of the different dimples and specks within the nodules are different species.”

“Is this something that Sherman worked out or is it something pre-programmed in?”

“A bit of both at this point.” Again she zoomed in on one of the nodules. “Here for example you can see a representation of all of the data on canines. It’s fractal in nature, so we can keep zooming in and keep getting more and more structures. At this level, the individual kernels you see are different breeds. This is all just raw data which we started with in Sherman’s data library. It gets constantly updated and expanded, but it’s just data.”

“How much data are we talking about?” Crystal asked.

“The exact amount would be proprietary information, but I can say that it’s well in excess of a zettabyte.”

“Okay, so you primed the pump with a gazillion tons of data. Hopefully it’s been carefully verified, cross referenced, and doesn’t include Wikipedia. Where does Sherman do what others can’t?”

“Here,” the technician said, adjusting the image to highlight a web of fine lines. “These are the points where Sherman is gaining enough experience to draw new conclusions from existing data. Let me show you. Sherman?”

“Yes, Lois?” answered Sherman.

“Please show a dog.” A video of a Golden Retriever puppy playing with a toy appeared.

“Show a dog that I would like.” The retriever was replaced with a picture of a toy poodle.

“Show a dog that Soichi would like.” An English bulldog appeared.

“Show a dog that Pete would like.” A large, Persian cat hung over the table.

“Not to be critical, but that’s not a dog,” said Crystal.

“No, because Sherman knows that Pete’s highly allergic to dogs. This demonstrates in part how Sherman can cross reference data between vastly different databases, given the proper permissions, of course. It also is a good example of Sherman’s functional snark and humor parameters. The various personality parameters are tuned to each individual using Sherman, and as Sherman gains experience with a given user, it ‘gets to know them’ in a sense and can extrapolate for other situations.”

“Thanks for the heads up on Pete and dogs.” Crystal turned to look at Pete with a hint of a wicked smile. “That must be why you were sneezing all night, dander or hair from my dogs carried over on my clothing.” She turned back to the group, please to see that Pete was turning a suitable shade of red next to her.

“How many personality parameters are there?” Crystal asked.

“Seven primary, but a given user can define others and teach Sherman what they are and how they are expressed. Each user creates their own virtual Sherman. In the early days of personal electronic devices, users had the option to change the synthesized voice from male to female or to vary the accent or language. This is like that, but several orders of magnitude more.”

“What are the seven primary personality parameters that Peter Piper picks?” asked Crystal.

“Snark, humor, empathy, responsibility, maturity, aggressiveness, and nagging,” said Soichi.

“Ah, I see, S.H.E.R.M.A.N. Very clever. But snark? Humor? You programmed your system to talk back and give you grief? If that doesn’t sound like a prescription for the apocalypse, I don’t know what does.”

“You’re not the first to suggest that,” Pete said.

“The key is in the ability for each user to set those parameters and to define circumstances for each set to be used,” said Soichi. “For example, I prefer my default setting to be serious and factual, where I believe Pete prefers a default that is more playful and funny. However, I have my Sherman trained to be very bland and robotic when in a social or business setting such as this, as to most of us. Sherman can change modes autonomously as circumstances warrant, such as when someone else enters the room.”

“I see,” said Crystal. “Sherman, tell me a joke.”

“I’m sorry, Ms. Reasoner, but I do not yet have permission to allow you access to the system,” said Sherman.

“Let me show you,” said Pete. “While you can give explicit instructions to change a given parameter, most often the changes are keyed to a phrase. Sherman, can you give me the weather for Los Angeles today?”

“Of course, Pete, it’s currently 78° in Venice, 82° in downtown, and 89° in Sherman Oaks. It’s clear with no rain in the forecast. Would you like more detailed or additional information?”

“No thanks, Sherman. Why don’t you be yourself for a while? What’s the weather in San Francisco?”

“What do you care?” said Sherman. “You aren’t going there any time soon, and even if you did, you probably wouldn’t go outside and enjoy the beautiful 68° temps and evening fog.”

“Get serious, Sherman. What’s the weather in New York City for next week?”

“It’s predicted to only be in the upper fifties at the beginning of the week, with showers and possible snow flurries coming in toward the end of the week.”

“Thank you, Sherman. As you were.” Pete looked at Crystal. “See?”

“Oh, if you can’t have fun in San Francisco, we’re going to have issues,” said Crystal. “I am going to…never mind. Doctor Doi, earlier Lois mentioned permissions within a group. Do the Shermans talk amongst themselves?”

“First of all, while it may appear that there are multiple Shermans being active, in fact it’s just one system. It’s extremely nimble and competent in its ability to monitor dozens of individuals in a location and to be different things to different users, depending on their needs. However, that is only based on training and a large accumulated data set which defines each user’s Sherman to their needs. The permissions arise in determining which data can be used and accessed for each individual interface transaction. For each task, question, or command, Sherman can only use private data from other Sherman data sets where it has permission. In an office environment such as this, there is naturally a great deal of exchange in terms of professional interactions and a fair number of social interactions. To a stranger on the street, Sherman would say much, much less.”

“This is all fascinating, and I would love to learn more,” said Crystal. “How can I get a Sherman to use for evaluation purposes?”

(Chapter Ten will be continued)

A bad day for words. Some days they flow, some days it’s like passing a kidney stone. (Been there, done that, never ever wanna do it again.) Today has been more like a “molasses in January” day.

One foot (i.e. key stroke) in front of each other.

While I normally put in a lot of  internal links to previous, related posts here, I won’t be doing that for what I hope will be this year’s thirty NaNoWriMo posts. If you have jumped into or stumbled onto this story in mid-adventure, there are plenty of other ways to navigate around the site to find previous installments. Actually doing so is left as an exercise to the student.

CHAPTER NINE

“Relax, we’re on a date. Or at least that’s what this is supposed to look like. You have been on a date before, right? You can at least fake it?”

Pete looked across the table at Crystal.

“Is there a reason that your team chose you to meet with me? Any ulterior motives that I need to be suspicious of?”

“Why, Pete, you’ve become a real stick in the mud!” Crystal said, grinning. “Are you trying to win the Curmudgeon of the Day award? C’mon, loosen up, have a little bit of fun. There will be plenty of time for skullduggery later.”

“How often do you use the word ‘skullduggery’?”

“As often as I can. It helps to be in this line of business.”

“I’m just finding it odd to see you here, in person, out in the real world, embedded in our electronic world, after all of the warnings and paranoia last weekend. I would have thought you had strict rules against this.”

“I am here in person, and if you play your cards right and say the secret word,” she said, picking up her knife and using it as a cigar for her best Groucho impersonation, “I could be here in the flesh as well, if you know what I mean.”

“You have got to be kidding me.”

Crystal looked hurt, her grin turning to a pout.

“Now there’s a romantic turn of phrase that a woman likes to hear when she’s trying to be friendly. Don’t you like girls? Don’t you like me?”

“I like girls just fine, thank you. The jury’s still out on you. But I’m still nervous about that whole end of the world, uber, ultra, mega, maximum top security thing you all harped on. Remember? So can you tell me why you’re here and what’s going on? Preferably without being forced to kill me after telling me?”

Crystal put the butter knife down, straightened her place setting, sat up straight, and tried to look serious.

“Fine, but from now on I dub thee Sir Buzzkill. I am here, as you know, because I’m visiting my friend Lee, who is also your friend Lee. Lee has set us up on a date and we are going to initiate an ongoing relationship. For tonight, we’ll have a nice dinner, then go to your place for some ‘privacy.’ Tomorrow you’ll take me to the Homolacrum headquarters to show me around, give me a demonstration of your latest Sherman software, and generally do your best to impress me with your wit and intellect, desperately hoping that I’ll return to your place tomorrow night for more ‘privacy,’ which of course, I will. Any questions?”

Pete put his menu down on the table and folded his hands, trying to look calmer than he felt.

“Why?” he asked.

“Why which?”

“Why visit my office? Why go to my place? Why you? Why this particular cover story? And one more time, why is this safe given the song and dance in the desert?”

“We’re going to your office so that I can install some very nifty software onto your system. It’s much easier and faster if I have direct, physical access. Duh, Pete! We’re going to your place because you have a dedicated and secure line from there, so I can get other work done remotely that would be more difficult from a generic line out in the real world. I’m here because I’m the team’s expert on hacking and monitoring software, I’m female, you’re not, you live alone, we’re both consenting adults, and it makes an excellent and believable cover story should anyone be paying any attention to us. And because I thought you were cute and might be fun to be with, but you’re only batting .500 at the moment.”

“Safety? You’ve dodged that one again.”

“Pete, we’ve been doing this for over twenty years. We may not be the absolute best of the best of the best, but we’re on the short list. We know what we’re doing and we’re doing okay so far. In the design of security and monitoring systems, the incredible volume of the ocean of data collected means that only automated systems ever sift through it. They’re programmed to look for abnormalities, patterns that don’t quite fit or match other aspects of the picture drawn by the data. Us getting together as friends of friends, hitting it off, and proceeding to kanoodle periodically is about as normal of a pattern as there is.”

“So you’ve done this before?”

Now it was Crystal’s turn to lean back and give Pete a long and thoughtful look. She leaned forward, reached across the table, took his hands in hers, and smiled her best smile.

“Pete, the more you talk, the more likely it is that you will never, ever have to worry about how to act if I actually do come on to you when we’re alone. Have you ever seen a campy old science fiction move from the 1970’s called ‘Colossus: The Forbin Project’?”

“No, I can’t say that I have.”

“Okay, then that’s one of the things we can watch at your place tonight. It will be informative, if a bit schlocky. For now, trust me and follow my lead, we’re perfectly safe. Let’s order something nice, take a stroll, look at the stars, then go back to your place like normal people would.”

“You expect to see the stars from downtown Dallas?” asked Pete.

“Jesus, you’re pedantic. I’m from Los Angeles, you pikers out here in Texas have no idea what light pollution is. Just get ready to order, the chicken alfredo looks nice. Now we can chat about other things like normal people would. For example, what do you think of the Cowboys’ chances this year?”

“Is that a sports team?”

“They don’t pay me enough for this,” muttered Crystal.

(Chapter Nine to be continued)

I’ve managed to write something every single day, and with a couple of really good days to offset the couple of so-so days, I’m hovering right around the pace to hit the 50,000 word mark by December 1st. That’s good.

Continuing last night’s notes about Jean-Michel Jarre’s music and its effect on my writing pace, if you need a serious pick-me-up, go with “Chronologie Part 2.” It’s also excellent running music. If you have the option, PLAY IT LOUD!!

While I normally put in a lot of  internal links to previous, related posts here, I won’t be doing that for what I hope will be this year’s thirty NaNoWriMo posts. If you have jumped into or stumbled onto this story in mid-adventure, there are plenty of other ways to navigate around the site to find previous installments. Actually doing so is left as an exercise to the student.

CHAPTER NINE (Continued)

“Yes, yes!” Stover shouted. “I see that as well, it is obvious that it must be that way, there can be no other course of action. I had doubts at first, I have freely admitted that, but you have shown me how it must be. I trust you completely and only pray that I may successfully prove that your trust in me was justified.”

Stover’s gaze shifted back out the window and down. As the doctor followed to look in that direction, he saw suddenly that the dolphins outside had lined up as at attention, clearly watching Stover. There were many more than he had seen earlier, perhaps thirty or more.

“Twenty,” said Stover. “We are training to be able to handle more, but at this moment we have only twenty.” Again he stopped to listen. The doctor strained to pick up any sound but could hear nothing. “By itself, not, but as part of the overall strategy it will be more than sufficient. With the strategic goals that you have laid out for us, allow me and my people to implement the exact tactics.”

Again Stover turned to look back into the darkness beyond Suni. The doctor slowly turned his head a bit and looked out of the corner of his eyes for anything there, but saw only the conference table, chairs, and Stover’s desk in the meager lighting.

“Six months to reach the halfway point, with the pace accelerating after that as systems collapse. Our models indicate that a terminal tipping point will be reached in less than a year, beyond which recovery will be impossible.”

The doctor watched as the individual dolphins would kick rapidly to the surface, one at a time, before diving and returning to their original positions in the ranks.

“Ecological systems will be severely impacted by the transition phase,” Stover said after another pause, “but will recover quickly, typically in less than ten years, once the transition has completed. Further inputs will be extremely limited and chaotic collapse of unmaintained assets will accelerate as natural systems are restored.”

Stover looked out the window at the dolphins, his eyes still unseeing, his face still expressionless. “It will take a thousand years for the obvious damage to be repaired, a hundred thousand more before all traces of this scourge have been erased. But it will begin on Their command. Your task is to be ready and you will reap a new world for yourselves and your children’s children. Go now and await my word as the clarion call of the new age.”

The dolphins all turned and fled, swimming away in all directions out into the darkness. Stover again turned back to face his unseen cohort behind Suni.

“We have overlooked nothing, my Lord. With the tools given to us by Your hand, we know all there is to know of both our enemies and our allies. They can not live without us, they can not hide from us, and they are not aware of the viper that we have placed at their bosom. We will be your tool of vengeance and cleansing and we can not fail.”

With that, Stover again stiffened, rising up on his toes as if he were a marionette being pulled skyward. Another groan of pain and sorrow welled up from him, rising toward a scream, only to be abruptly cut off as Stover went limp and collapsed toward the floor.

The doctor was ready, moving quickly to catch Stover and ease him to the floor. Stover was sweating profusely and panting. The doctor quickly checked his pulse and found it to be racing, but steady.

Suni was also up and moving toward her husband. “Pei,” she said, “you got all of that, correct?”

“Yes, ma’am,” said the voice from nowhere. “The entire incident was quite clear to me.”

“Lock those recordings under maximum security, accessible only to Jordin and myself until further notice. What about the environmental monitors that were just installed? Were they functioning yet?”

“Yes, ma’am, they were all fully functional. I have locked those recordings for you and Mr. Stover as well.”

“Did they show anything obvious?”

“No, ma’am, but my understanding of the data is strictly functional, it will take someone with far more experience to look for anomalies.”

“Very well, please call for a recovery team.”

“They are standing by outside already.”

“Let them in, bring up the lights to twenty-five percent.”

The doctor listened to this exchange with growing dismay. How had Suni witnessed this bizarre display so dispassionately? Her husband had experienced some sort of seizure, combined with obvious hallucinations. There had been signs of major dissociative lapses. He was now in significant physical distress, yet all she could do is check with the building’s system to check on recordings and monitors?

Behind them, through a different door than the one he and Suni had entered, a team of medical personnel in scrubs hurried in, wheeling a gurney along with them.

“May I?” asked the first EMT as he politely but firmly got between the doctor and Stover, pushing the doctor back. The doctor caught his balance and stood, coming up from the floor next to Suni. He turned to her to start asking questions, but met her cold gaze as she shook her head slightly. Her hand moved slightly, indicating that he should wait.

The doctor kept his mouth shut and waited. The EMT team was well trained and quickly had Stover on the gurney, connected to an array of monitoring equipment, an IV bag hanging above him. In less than five minutes Stover was wrapped up and bundled off out of the room.

As the door shut behind them, Suni once again sat and indicated that the doctor should sit once more. “Pei, please bring the lights back down. Verify that the doors are locked and we are secure.”

The lights began to fall, again revealing the dark waters outside the window. The doctor strained to look but could see no dolphins anywhere.

“You are secure, ma’am.”

“Thank you, Pei,” said Suni. “Please let me know immediately if there is any deterioration of Jordin’s condition. Otherwise, I do not wish to be disturbed.”

“Yes, ma’am. I will make sure that you have your privacy.”

With that, Suni rose and went over to a small bar along the far wall. She opened a refrigerator under the counter and took out a bottle of water. “Do you want one?” she asked the doctor.

“No thank you, ma’am,” he said. “But I do have a great many questions to ask.”

Suni walked back and sat down opposite him. “Ask away, I’ll do my best to give you the answers.”

“Do you know what your husband’s condition is, what he’s suffering from?”

“I don’t know that he’s ‘suffering’ at all, but that’s what I brought you here to tell me.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Did you think I brought you out here for a vacation and a schmooze fest with a multi-trillionaire? Jordin has been told that you are here for him to interview for a position as his personal physician. That’s not entirely incorrect and I want you to seriously consider it. But what I brought you here for was to tell me if my husband is insane, has a tumor or some other significant medical issue, or is faking it for some bizarre reason.”

“He’s what?” the doctor asked, incredulous.

“I guess there is a fourth possibility. He could actually be a prophet of some sort. What did he say, ‘the clarion call of the new age’? Although I find that to be the least likely scenario of all.”

The doctor sat quietly watching her for several seconds, mulling over his words, testing to see if his next questions could be phrased in the most polite way possible.

“How often does this happen?” he asked.

“At this point, four or five times a week.”

“How long has this been going on?”

“Since before I met him, apparently. When we first started seeing each other it was long, long before the Spheres breakthrough. I was smart, he was freaking brilliant. One night he talked about the voices he had heard since he was a child. I assumed he was high, drunk, or both.”

“But he wasn’t.”

“No, he wasn’t. He never touches any of that, says it pollutes his mind and muddles his thoughts.”

“When did you first see this sort of activity from him?”

“A couple months after we met. I woke up and saw him standing in front of the window in the moonlight, looking out over Cambridge. He was in that trance, discussing something. He was occasionally lucid enough to write down some notes before he collapsed.”

“So this has been going on for decades. Is it pretty much the same now as it was then, or has it changed?”

“It’s much more common now and it’s definitely changed. I only saw it a couple of times a year at first, but now it’s every ten days to two weeks. In the beginning, he seemed to be in a discussion, where now he sounds like a badly dubbed version of ‘The Ten Commandments’. Whoever or whatever he thinks he’s talking to, they’re much more at odds these days. Jordin seems to be afraid of them, subservient to whatever he hears them demanding.”

“Is he on any medications?”

“For this? No, you’ve got to be kidding. He’s on a whole handful of pills every day for his heart, diabetes, pain killers, and cholesterol but not a damn thing for talking to the Gods. Or aliens, I guess they could be aliens.”

“How many people know about this?”

“You’re the third,” Suni said.

“You want me to be the one to tell you if he’s insane or if he’s actually hearing and seeing these things.”

“Exactly. Did you see or hear anything when he was off in la-la land?”

“No, but I did notice the behaviors of the dolphins. They sure as hell saw or heard something.”

“I don’t understand the dolphins, never did,” Suni said.

“How does someone of his wealth, fame, and notoriety have a condition like this for over thirty years and no one knows about it?”

“This ‘condition’ is the reason he has his wealth, fame, and notoriety. I was there when he came up with the basic structure of the Spheres technology. It was during one of these trances.”

“It didn’t sound like a creative session to my ears,” the doctor said. “It sounded like he was taking orders, being dressed down, bullied, and pushing back against a couple of real unpleasant adversaries, imaginary or not.”

“They do have their fun talks.”

“Does he remember anything when he wakes up? Is he aware of what he’s doing, of when this happens to him? Or does he just wake up with an eight hour long hole in his world?”

“He remembers, but it doesn’t ever seem painful to him. He won’t give me any details at all, but to him these creatures he’s talking to are a real as you or me.”

“It’s not an unknown phenomenon, even to have brilliant and original ideas such as Spheres come out of such a fugue state. But what was he arguing about? What was all of that about destruction, death, and a new era.”

“Oh, nothing much,” said Suni. “He’s just trying to start a world war and wipe out civilization. I could also use your help in preventing that.”