Armen Gharabegian - Protocol 7

The men and woman who had given up their lives to be here, who had traveled literally halfway around the world to help Simon and his father, stared at the new arrival with a slowly dawning realization. This was actually going to happen. They were actually going into Antarctica-the most desolate continent on earth. And now, in addition to every other risk they had already taken, every other sacrifice they had already made…they would have to put their fates in the hands of a total stranger, or it would all be for nothing.

“Well,” Ryan said. “In for a penny, in for a pound, I always say.”

Samantha, who had regained at least some of her old warmth, stepped forward and put her hands on Nastasia’s. “I’m Samantha,” she said. “And quite frankly, it’s rather nice to have another woman along for the trip.”

“Thank you,” Nastasia said warmly.

“Calibrated and ready,” the holo-display said politely.

“Good,” Simon said. “Let’s take that tour you promised, then, shall we, Andrew?”

Simon looked to one side and then the other, taking them all in as he leaned forward and placed his hands on the table. “Ladies and gentlemen, the Spector VI, Hayden’s invention and our ticket to Antarctica.”

Andrew stroked a panel on the holo-display, and a three-dimensional model of the Spector blossomed on the tabletop, as big as a rain barrel and exquisitely detailed. Still standing off to one side, Hayden regarded his creation with an undisguised look of self-satisfaction.

At first sight, the Spector resembled a huge metal insect, studded with electronics and covered with multiple layers of glittering, electrically active skins, like a hybrid of a robotic armadillo and a praying mantis.

“Look here,” Hayden said. He approached the table and gently thrust his hands through the 3D hologram, manipulating the image, opening it to reveal various sections.

“Propulsion is here,” he said, “in the aft compartments. Engineering and environmental tech here, along the left sides. Living quarters for eight without squeezing-here, here, and here. A nice, big ready room between the sleeping quarters and the ops bridge. And this port on top opens to an airlock that links to the bridge-that’s the shielded blister here, forward and high on the beauty’s back. That’s where we’ll do the watching and steering.” He moved sections and layers as if he was peeling away the scales of a fish, showing them all what was hiding inside his remarkable vehicle. The amazement in everyone’s eyes was apparent as Hayden described the functions of each section. As he spoke his accent faded, his speech accelerated; he was entirely in his element, entirely absorbed by his amazing design for the first time in months.

Max concentrated on every word the inventor said, and knew almost immediately that he would have to spend hours more with the man just to get the slightest hint of what was to come. He pointed at the two long graceful blisters near the bottom of the Spector’s hull, one on each side. “What are those nacelles?” he asked.

“Ah,” Hayden said. “Those. Well, in point of fact, friends, we’ve been mis-labeling Spector from the beginning. It’s not really a submersible.”

“What?” Ryan said. “I thought-”

“It’s more than that,” Hayden said, plowing through. “Much more. It’s actually an amphibious vehicle. It can move almost as well on land as it can on water. And those-” He swept his fingertip down the length of the nacelles, left and right, “-those are its treads. They can be deployed any time there’s solid terrain under the hull-at the bottom of the ocean, at the shoreline, or anywhere else.”

The others goggled as he used his fingers to expand the bridge into fine detail: the status panels, the navigation station, and the command chair. He looked at Max and gave him a sidelong grin. “This,” he said, flicking a finger at the padded seat sitting in the middle of it all, “is the pilot’s seat.”

“And I presume that would be you?” Hayden said sarcastically, looking at Max with a smug grin.

Max ignored him and looked at Simon, as the others tried to comprehend the recent development, and the surprise inclusion of Max as their guide and pilot.

Simon had seen it all before of course, but once again he was amazed at how everything on the bridge looked bare, almost as if there was no serious instrumentation at all. He looked at Max with a confident stare. “You’re the man,” he said.

“It’s not enough,” Max said, arriving at the same conclusion. “Look at the complexity of this thing. The propulsion units alone require a three-man crew of nuclear engineers; environmental controls for a ship going this deep is a two-person job at minimum. And the sensor matrix, the attitudinal controls, the communications linkages-this is ridiculous. Where is everything?”

“Run almost completely by a cooperative team of AIs,” Hayden said proudly. “Dedicated to the ship and to following human guidance.”

“But we can’t use them,” Ryan said suddenly. They turned to look at him. He was pale as a ghost, bloodless with sudden realization.

“What?” Samantha said. This was making less and less sense to her.

“RAI,” he said looking from face to face. “Remote Access Intervention, remember? Whoever seized control of Hayden’s robot and destroyed the other two Spectors will sense their activation immediately and seize control again. Sink the ship. Kill us all.”

Simon frowned. “I know we’ll have to cut off some of the systems,” he said. “We’ve talked about that. The ones that link up to the satellites will have to be muted somehow-that’s your job, right-but others can surely stay in-”

“No,” Ryan said. “You don’t understand. All AIs talk to other AIs. That worldwide noospheric matrix is what makes them intelligent, and not just old-fashioned programmed response robots. Their judgment, their language skills, their fuzzy-logic reasoning abilities, those are all grouped effects. So all of them-all of them-have to go offline or we’re dead before we start. At best, they’ll be simple servomechanisms-programmable modules, like your home computer or pad.”

“I understand,” Simon said patiently. “But we can make it work. Max won’t be alone. We have you for sensor administration, Andrew. Ryan, you’re the data coordinator; you can query the AIs independently, without fully activating them-and Andrew’s scrambler won’t allow them to do it on their own. Hayden knows everything about the Spector; he’s an AI himself-”

“-without the ‘A’ part,” the inventor grumbled.

“-and Samantha can oversee the environmental and life support functions.”

“It’s not quite that simple,” Hayden said.

“No,” Simon allowed, “but it’s not impossible. We are not going to give up before we even try.”

“Even if we die in the attempt?” Ryan said.

No one had an answer to that.

“The biggest problem I see,” Max said, “is the sensor array, without the aid of the visual information that it provides and translates digitally, how am I supposed to see where the hell I’m going?”

Hayden leaned into his holo-display and frowned. “How so?” he said.

“Because there are no damn windows in this thing,” he said. “All of your sensor input- even visual-is digitized, channeled through and interpreted by fully functional AIs before it gets to whoever is piloting this monster.”

Hayden nodded. “We had to do it that way. The intelligent surface-the cloak of invisibility, so to speak-can’t be interrupted by windows or ports. We had a hell of time even working out the wiring shafts and hatches.”

“I have to be able to see,” Max said. “I trust my eyes; they have never failed me. But holo-displays and wireframes only? No. Can’t work.”