Eric Flint: Boundary

After Rich finished, A.J. went back to scrutinizing the object. The item in question rested in a case that, from the looks of it, had at one time also been sealed in inert gases. Here, though, the passage of millions of years had taken its toll. However it had happened, one corner of the case had cracked. The crack wasn't much, but it was enough for whatever gas had filled the case to have leaked out long since.

Of course, the case itself had still been in the inert atmosphere that had filled the entire Vault. But the simple fact that the Bemmies had taken the trouble to seal it separately indicated how critical they'd apparently considered the item it contained.

The item itself was a little more than a third of a meter across, composed apparently of mostly manufactured diamond plated over a substrate of their composite with maybe platinum as a coating, since it was shiny like a mirror. A circular mirror with a polychromatic reflective surface; A.J. thought it looked rather like a giant DVD surfaced with faceted crystals.

After studying the thing carefully for a few minutes, A.J. turned back to Rich. "Okay, I'm pretty sure your guess is right. If so, what we have here is something like a digital data disc. They took advantage of refractive tricks to allow them several layers to write on with different wavelengths. They're probably using a binary encoding- that's at least reasonable-but their coding table I'm going to have to figure out… hmmm… "

He looked back at the item he'd tentatively labeled a data disc. "Looks like it's all here, though. The problem is that we haven't got a reader for it. And whatever readers they might have had-which we haven't found yet, and may never-they wouldn't work by now, anyway. Bemmie super construction notwithstanding, nothing that relies in any way on moving parts is still going to be functional after sixty-five million years. At least, nothing on that level of precision; the door mechanism worked, but that's several orders of magnitude cruder and works on what amounts to brute force. So the question becomes, are we smart enough to build a gadget that will substitute?"

"Are you?"

A.J. frowned. "Of course I'm smart enough. Well. I think. But here I don't have the stuff I'd need. I need emitters in just the right wavelengths-tunable, mind you-I need control circuitry, I need a way to spin the sucker and get the timing right, yada yada yada. And you can bet I'll have to experiment with it a lot, because we're bound to stumble across some obvious, critical, need-to-know information that we don't know, like: 'well, of course the files are all encoded with three primes.' If I was on Earth I could whip together some kind of test-bed, but here I'd have to cannibalize something, especially for the moving parts."

"So you can't do it?" Jane said in a disappointed tone. She was following the discussion from the Nike, using relays established by the bread crumbs that A.J. now had scattered throughout the Vault.

"Stop jumping on me! I know you're excited about this, both of you, but hell, you're asking me… Well, it'd be like going back to the 1970s and handing someone a DVD. Even if you told them about it, they might not have the gadgets to read it with, and they'd sure need to think about it. Especially if you left out something about how, oh, MPEG encoding worked. I have to assume these guys gave me all the critical info, but they could have dropped the ball anywhere along the line." A.J. frowned. "I'll think about it for a bit."

He left the inner area and went back, musing on the problem. He found Helen carefully going over the scaly hide of a velociraptor of some kind. A Deinonychus, he thought, although he wasn't sure.

"What's up, sweetheart?"

She jumped. "Don't startle me like that." She pointed to the raptor mummy. "Look close."

He did so, studying the hide in the area she indicated with his usual eye to detail. "Oh, those little depressed markings?"

"Yes. I think those are marks of some kind of parasite-a louse or something. I'm hoping I can find one intact, or at least some pieces left in the scales. The problem with these being preserved is that someone cleaned them up which eliminates all that kind of thing."

"Listen to you! You're complaining about someone having left you perfectly preserved dinosaurs to work on!"

Helen laughed and hugged him suddenly. The spacesuits eliminated the sensuousness of the embrace, but A.J. still found the gesture heartwarming.

"Yeah, pretty ungrateful, aren't I?" She looked back at the dinosaur. "And that's what brought us together, too."

He grinned. "I remember. I came out there to give you a look at your dinosaurs through the rock, and then you guys almost killed me for faking the scan."

"Well, you can't blame us. You were showing off. Mr. 'Look, I have a halo!'"

"Okay, I'm no angel, but-"

He froze.

Eric Flint Ryk E. Spoor

Boundary

After a while, he became aware that Helen was poking him.

"A.J.? Answer me! You just cut off there and-"

He made a sharp gesture with his hand and she went quiet; he was glad she could recognize the signs. The idea was there and it was a hell of an idea. It seemed like it could work…

"It would work," he muttered to himself, "if I can pull it off. Not easy… cross talk… network topology… emitters, yeah, but how much will I need? Power supply for the whole thing, higher constant use than design… but with Nike to help…"

He suddenly gave a whoop, picked Helen up and spun her around. In Mars' gravity, this caused them to spin out of control- fortunately for continued harmony, not into the raptor mummy- and over in what might have been an embarrassing position if they hadn't both been wearing spacesuits.

"Yes! Thank you, thank you, you are gorgeous and brilliant and just plain always say the right thing at the right time!"

She was laughing. "You nut. What is this all about?"

A.J. rose, giving a hand to Helen at the same time. "You and old fangface there and a few reminiscences. I can do it, Helen!"

He felt the grin just about splitting his face from ear to ear. "I know how to decode that damn disc! Screw Earth, I don't even need to go back to Nike, I just need her bandwidth and some design work that we can do right here!"

"Joe! Hey, Joe, you and me have got some detective work to do." As A.J. and the Tayler Corporation had programmed, the smart suit recognized when the wearer spoke a name in such a way as to indicate "connect me with this person" and opened an appropriate channel. Not waiting for Joe's response, A.J. continued marshaling his resources. "Yo, Jackie!"

"Ms. Secord is sleeping at the moment," came an automated reply. "If this is an emergency-"

"Not really, no. Is Dr. Gupta there?"

The unmistakable sonorous voice answered in a moment. "Yes, I am here. A.J.? What is it that you need? No emergency, I hope?"

"No, just a hell of a job. I'm going to need a lot of the processing capacity of Nike dedicated to running an ad-hoc network with, um… a few billion individual nodes."

To his credit, Dr. Gupta's reaction was only slightly delayed. "That is indeed a formidable task, especially if as I suspect you will be passing data through the network for analysis. You will have the protocols for us and the specifications on what functions you will need? And when exactly this will be needed?"

"Oh, you can bet on my having the exact code for you. When? Ah.. . let's say the day after tomorrow. I've got some engineering work to do down here with Joe. I just want you guys to make sure that I'll have the system clear for me then."

"It shall be done, assuming that the captain approves. What is the reason for this interesting task?"

"Getting that disc Rich found a couple of days ago to spill its guts so Rich and Jane can really go to town."