Crow's Gambit, page 27
part #1 of Sylphan Revelations Series
Cassie hadn’t seen any other area of the building which called for this level of security, not even the Crow Works areas.
When the guard was satisfied, he pressed a button and the doors opened to admit them.
They entered a round cavern like structure. An octagonal catwalk ran around the circumference of the area. Workstations and interface terminals lined the catwalk. Each station was lit by spotlights from above, but otherwise the lighting was subdued. Underneath some of the catwalk she could see banks of computer servers, red lights blinking.
On the opposite side of the cavern the back wall was taken up by a display screen that was larger than most movie theatres. It was currently displaying a dashboard of information, much of which Cassie didn’t recognize.
There was a pit in the center of the cavern. Several pieces of equipment were installed there, and she could see power and data lines running across the floor to different electronic boxes. Workers in white lab coats roamed the floor checking readouts and connections. She recognized Andrew talking to several of them.
On the largest piece of equipment, someone had written on the side “M-5”.
“M-5?”
“The company that built it never gave it a name.” Walt answered as he approached. “Darrow decided to take a reference from classic Star Trek,”
“I thought M-5 was the computer that took over the ship and tried to kill everyone.” Cassie commented.
“Well, yes,” Walt answered with a surprised look on this face. “But so far Emmy hasn’t misbehaved. Of course, we don’t let her out much.”
“It doesn’t look like you let the programmers out much either.”
Cassie was surprised to see Senator Winthrop approaching. Tish.
“Senator, I’m glad you could make the time to stop by. We wanted you both to see this.” Walt gestured toward the computer at the center of the pit.
“Emmy is our pride and joy. The first fully functioning quantum supercomputer. It was a prototype of something being designed for the Department of Defense to simulate nuclear explosions before Net-Day.”
“Okay. So, it’s a second-hand supercomputer?” Cassie asked.
“Not at all,” Walt answered. “It’s actually more powerful than the production models they delivered to the DoD. They just couldn’t figure out how to write an operating system for it that would work.”
“And you did?” Cassie wondered where this was going.
“No, Darrow did. He’s actually quite clever when it comes to programming.”
“I assume it’s doing something important?” the senator asked.
“Yes, and it relates to the last secret we haven’t told Cassie. It’s about Merlin. When the probe launched, she was heralded in all the newscasts for the technological advances that were included in the design but one of them didn’t get much coverage. Merlin was equipped with an experimental neutrino detector.”
“Wait.” Cassie held up her hands in a stopping gesture. “They’re still running neutrino detection experiments in old mines up in northern Minnesota and the Arctic. No wait. Antarctica. The experiments are huge. Neutrinos hardly ever interact with matter so they’re next to impossible to detect.”
“The military has been working on that for years for communication with submarines.” The senator added.
“Yes, they are easier to detect if you use a high intensity focused beam,” Walt agree. “However, a couple decades ago there were some advances in quantum mechanics I don’t pretend to understand but Andrew seems to comprehend. The government physicists found a way to increase the probability of an interaction with the detector. The detector’s inclusion on Merlin wasn’t widely publicized. The military wanted to test high speed, long distance communication with it. Secretly. The astronomers were happy to keep quiet because they needed the funding help and they wanted it to measure cosmic neutrino emissions anyway.”
“Okay, and...?” Cassie wasn’t quite sure how this connected to anything.
“What no one has mentioned yet is that it turns out the Sylph spheres communicate with each other using neutrino beams.” Walt paused for effect. “And we’ve been listening to them talk to each other.”
Cassie was silent. Over the last couple of weeks there had been so many times when the tilt of her world seemed to suddenly shift. It was like she her whole life had become a barnstorming flight. She was constantly trying to predict what was coming, failing miserably, and then trusting her reflexes to spin out of danger.
“You can hear what the Sylph are saying? Why are they here? What are they doing up there?” The questions were flying out of her mouth. She took a deep breath and settled on the one important question to ask. “Why doesn’t anybody know about this?”
“Yes, I’m curious about that too.” Tish’s eyebrows had narrowed with interest.
“It’s not so simple,” Walt explained. “There’s a huge amount of noise present. Until last night, we couldn’t isolate the signals accurately enough to study them.”
“Last night...” Cassie’s eyes narrowed. “The cube-sats? That’s the real reason Darrow sent up the cube sats, to help listen to the Sylph?”
“No, not really. Darrow takes his public relations very seriously. He wanted a flashy demonstration for the world. However, he isn’t opposed to killing two birds with one stone. Which is why Neil and I gave the cube-sats a secondary mission. Andrew developed new neutrino detectors for use on them. They operated like a mini distributed sensing network. By comparing their readings with Merlin’s we’ve been able to filter out the noise. The resulting signal is being fed to Emmy for analysis.”
“So, the computer is a code breaker? It’s working on the Sylph encryption?” Tish asked.
“Not exactly.” Walt started walking around the catwalk again. “The data streams between the Sylph spheres aren’t encoded per se. They use multispectral overlapping transmissions. It’s not a digital, or even analog, transmission like we are used to. It’s more of an interference pattern.”
“You mean they aren’t talking in ones and zeros like our systems.” Cassie rubbed her head. “They talking in, what? Holograms? Quantum wave functions?”
“Yes, exactly.” Walt beamed at her, impressed. “Emmy may not have been good at straight number crunching, but it turns out she is a wiz at recognizing something like a wave function.” When he saw Cassie start to open her mouth, he raised his hand to stop her. “Do not ask me to explain how Emmy does this. The term quantum wave function is the extent of my knowledge on the subject.”
“But you’re able to understand what they are saying?” Tish asked.
“Good heavens no. Give us a little time. It’s only been a few hours since we’ve had clean data. However, I can tell you the spheres appear to work as one large distributed network. It’s like each one is a neuron in the larger Sylph brain.”
“So, they all communicate with each other simultaneously?” Cassie was having trouble processing the sudden information.
“Most of them, yes.”
Walt nodded at a technician nearby. He activated a holographic display that projected above Emmy. It showed the same image of Earth and all the circling Sylph spheres she had seen before. However, now colored ripples started spreading from each sphere to the others. Some would fade as others strengthened. The colors shifted constantly. The resulting interference of all the patterns resulted in a large blob of colors. It pulsated as Cassie watched. The changes in it seemed random at first, but the longer she watched she could pick out repeated patterns emerging.
“It’s beautiful and horrible. When you see it like this, it’s like a giant alien cloud has swallowed us whole. It makes me feel...”
“Insignificant?” Walt asked.
Cassie just nodded.
After a moment, she spoke again. “What do we do now?”
Dale stepped up. “Most believe you’re the one who knows how to overcome the Sylph flight exclusion now. Every government on the planet will be after you for that secret. I imagine there are also a few groups like the Church of the Sylphan Revolution who want a word with you as well.”
“And let’s not forget the Vice President and Admiral Forrest,” Tish added.
Dale placed a hand on Cassie’s shoulder. “For now, we get you some place safe and out of sight. We hide you. And then we wait to see what happens.”
THE STORY WILL CONTINUE in...CROW’S HAVEN, Book 2 of the Sylphan Revelations series.
THE END
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P.A. TEBBE IS A SCIENCE fiction author hiding in plain sight as an engineer and professor. With degrees in mechanical and nuclear engineering he has conducted research ranging from materials processing in space to renewable energy. He brings this knowledge, a desire to push the bounds of technology, and a healthy dose of sarcasm to his stories. When not writing or teaching he can probably be found questioning his own sanity while running an insanely long ultramarathon, where he uses the time to plot out his next story.
P A Tebbe, Crow's Gambit
