John Cramer - Einstein's Bridge

“Iris has told us about the race she calls the Hive and the danger they present. She thinks that we have perhaps a year to prepare.”

“Yes,” said Tunnel Maker. “There is a certain risk until we can train you to be fully prepared to deal with a Hive incursion. Fortunately, you probably have some time to prepare. You will need to construct a permanent network of sensors around the SSC ring to detect such an incursion. You must make preparations for capturing the Hive Bridgehead, for using the SSC to process it, also certain other backup preparations.

“But for the critical next few days, while these steps are in progress, you must make certain that no Hive Bridgehead is already here. You must begin a survey of all the beam intersection points around the ring, using handheld Bridge detectors. Iris can assist you in producing them. If you should detect another event like the one you call the Snark event, if another Bridge has been produced, it must be captured immediately.”

“That sounds okay,” said George. “I’ve been given a team of scientists assigned to work on the contact with you, and we can train them. What you describe can be taken on as a subsidiary task. But suppose we did detect a Bridgehead? What could we do about it?”

“First, isolate it as you did the Snark particle. Second, immerse the Bridgehead and its immediate surroundings in liquid helium. No incursions by the Hive would be possible in such a low temperature and inert gas environment. Iris can provide details.”

“If we do detect a new Bridge, how long would we have to deal with it?” asked George. “What you describe would certainly take some time.”

“From our past experience with the way the Hive operates, it takes some time before they have produced enough Workers, Soldiers, and Flyers to form a Hive Mind. We can be sure that you would have at least two of your rotations to deal with the problem. Perhaps longer, but it is important to detect their Bridgehead as quickly as possible. After the Hive Mind becomes conscious, their incursion cannot be contained.”

“And the consequences if we fail to contain it?” George asked.

“Your world, your universe, would be assimilated by the Hive. Or perhaps destroyed with a time vortex to prevent this.”

THE BRIDGE DETECTOR THAT IRIS HAD PROVIDED looked like a plain white bar of soap with a dark blue dot on one end. At some level, Alice could understand saving the universe while wielding some gleaming sword or high-tech laser bazooka, but a bar of soap? The whole idea seemed absurd. She had protested to Iris, but the child had not understood her objection.

This morning she, George, and Roger had each gone to one of the three SSC beam intersection points on the west campus to check for Hive incursions. They had found none, but it was good practice. Now they were doing the same thing for the east campus.

George was surveying LEM, she was doing the SDC, and Roger was surveying the east test area used primarily for beam diagnostics.

She adjusted her grip on the detector carefully. The thing, in addition to being a sensitive detector of Bridges, contained a cutting laser that could be useful or dangerous. Its control system was crafted to interface with her new Reading skills. Variable molecules on its surface fed information through the molecule-sensing areas of her fingers and into the new molecular pattern-recognition centers of her brain. She somehow perceived directly what the Bridge detector sensed. At present there was no real signal from the detector, but there was perhaps a faint sniff of something as she walked toward the SDC office building.

Inside, Alice located the reception office. “Hello,” she said to a secretary there, “I’m Alice Lang. I’m looking for Daniel Warren. I have an appointment.”

The secretary consulted a list before her. “Oh yes,” she said, “Dan said he would be waiting for you in the data analysis room. It’s just down the hall to your right.”

Alice found the room and entered. The inside was a mixture of conventional graphics workstations and VR-equipped recliner chairs, about half occupied by physicists wearing magic glasses and data cuffs. A tall thin man sitting at one workstation rose as she entered. “Alice?” he inquired.

She nodded.

“Hi,” he said, “I’m Dan. After you called, I looked through our collection of oddball SDC events. I found something that might interest you. Have you ever used our VR gear, Alice?”

Alice assured him she had. Soon she was seated in one of the recliners and wearing magic glasses and data cuffs. She lay back, went through the calibration ritual, blinked three times, and…

… found that she was slowly falling down a deep well, the sides of which were lined with cupboards and bookshelves, with maps and pictures hung on pegs.

“Don’t worry,” said Dan’s voice at her right ear.

She turned and could see Dan, now wearing a yellow wireframe body, falling with her.

“This is the Lewis Carroll positional interface that our SDC systems people developed,” he said. “Sometimes I wonder if they actually spend any of their time trying to write useful programs, rather than amusing themselves. Watch the things on the wall as they go by. Each item is different every time.”

Alice watched and wondered at the complexity of detail. Finally the fall stopped, accompanied by an appropriately loud crash from the sound system, and Alice looked around. She seemed to be standing in a heap of sticks and dry leaves. The figure of a white rabbit wearing a checkered vest was just disappearing down a passageway.

Dan’s wireframe hand gestured, and they moved down the same passageway and turned a corner. Alice could see now that they were in a long low hall lit by a row of lights hanging from above. The room contained several glass and wooden tables and a great many doors. “Just how far did your programmers go in following Lewis Carroll?” she asked.

“You don’t want to know,” said Dan. “Don’t touch anything labeled ‘Drink Me’ or ‘Eat me.’” There’s supposed to be a Mad Hatter, a March Hare, a Dormouse, a Caterpillar, a Cheshire Cat, a Walrus, a Carpenter, and a Mock Turtle down here somewhere. The SDC users seem to like it, but if these programmers were working directly for me I’d have packed them off to Walt Disney World long ago.”

They came to an elaborately carved round door that bore the words unusual events in elaborately serifed letters. Dan’s wireframe hand opened it, and they entered…

… and Alice found herself suspended in darkness.

“This is an event that we recorded three days ago,” Dan said. “It bears some similarity to your Snark event. Here it comes…”

The darkness filled with the wireframe outline of a massive barrel-shaped object that Alice recognized as the SDC detector. Multicolored curving tracks emanated from a point at its central region. One track, colored a deep blue, came straight from the vertex point with no evidence of curvature and passed in a nearly horizontal trajectory through the outlined wall of the detector.

“What have you learned about this event?” asked Alice, feeling some alarm. Three days ago! That’s too long. If this is the Hive’s Bridgehead, it may already be too late!

“We wouldn’t have paid much attention to it before we heard about your Snark,” said Dan. “The blue track is very highly charged, judging from its ionization, but doesn’t curve at all in our 2 Tesla magnetic field. The event’s energy and momentum balance only if we exclude it. It went right through the iron-stopping wall of our detector, leaving a track in the muon counter as it passed through, and probably went into the tunnel wall. It didn’t make any jets, though.”