Mirrors of infinity, p.25
Mirrors of Infinity, page 25
“OK, so back to bed, as everyone keeps insisting. Be careful out here.” And she turned and went back into the cottage and straight to her bedroom.
She immediately assumed a cross-legged position on her bed, to work through her usual pre-bedtime mental workout. Chidwi jumped down behind her and rested her little hands on Jenny’s shoulders. Jenny wasn’t sure why, but recently, the feel of Chidwi’s hands on her shoulders almost instantly induced a deep meditative state. Her breathing instantly slowed to the point that someone observing her would have wondered if she was breathing at all.
In this state she got out the little jeweled box and touched the jewel in the lid that never opened. At once scenes began to pass by on a kind of transparent screen before her mind’s eye. She saw scenes of devastation on her home planet, a squadron of dragons flying over a wide valley she didn’t recognize, surrounded by jagged cliffs. She saw each of the Earth guardians in turn, each working on their part of their team assignments, often more than one head bent over a tablet, which she assumed had orders from Alliance headquarters. She saw a crystal pool near a river, the wide rock next to it deserted. And finally, she saw the face of her mother. She was crying!
At this she put the little box away and drifted into communication mode. She dropped in on her parents as she wished she had time to do more often and saw that they were both alive and hopefully well. Her dad had his arms around her mom, snuggled up on the overstuffed couch in their living room. It was light outside. Mom was speaking to her Dad.
“I don’t understand why she hasn’t answered. I’ve sent three letters and nothing. And now this blackout or whatever it is.” As she said that, the lamp on the end table next to the couch sprung into light.
“Oh! How amazing! They got the power back on! I wonder if we have cell service. I can call her!”
Her mom reached for her cell, but it was dead and needed to be charged. Jenny doubted that even with the power back online that internet or cellphones would be functional for a while. However, assuming the Alliance network was back up, she could text her mom and let her know she was alright.
She didn’t drop in on them very often, which made her feel a little guilty. Although she had automated messages going out to various people in her family, it just wasn’t the same as a live conversation, but she also didn’t want to give away too much. Her drop-ins were strictly one way, which felt a lot like eavesdropping to her.
Having done this, she came out of her deep state and laid down, Chidwi by her side. She fell into a dreamless sleep. The rest would have to wait until tomorrow.
Chapter 31: Tinkering
Bob and Ignatius were whistling “Oh Susannah” together. Bob often whistled as he was working on something, and Ignatius had picked up the habit early on in their relationship. He had somehow figured out how to add a harmony line instead of just whistling the melody and he was actually pretty accurate, so, in Bob’s opinion, they sounded pretty nice together.
He was working on the new drone design for the TTAP that would soon be put into production by one of the Alliance supporting dimensions. He loved having complete access to production facilities without having to go through tons of paperwork and having to come up with the funding on his own.
Adelle had provided him with a private work area, unlike the ones in the main lab, for his “tinkering”. This was not so much because of the promise he had made to the Alliance about not passing on “dastardly alien tech” to Earthlings, as everyone working in this lab was an Alliance agent of one level or another and all of them were completely clued in on what he was working on, but Bob had needed some thinking and working space without any distractions if he was going to carry this off.
She happily complied, giving him a place on the second floor, where no one was working at the time. The space was generally used for Adelle’s computer science projects, which meant it was a “clean room”, limiting things like airborne particles that could interfere with delicate operations.
He really didn’t need that kind of precision for his project, but the place was also soundproof which meant drilling, shaping parts and his and Ignatius’ whistling wouldn’t bother any of the others who were working on equally important, but not as noisy, components of the Alliance’s offense tactics against the Insenium.
Fidget was busy reshaping a tool he was going to use for the next stage of the program. He had equipped Fidget from the beginning with interchangeable tools that sprouted from his arms. Fidget was incredibly precise as long as he had a visual pattern to go by. With this specific project, preciseness was going to be key.
The prototype had to be exact, and every step of the process was being visually documented from more than one angle. The number of graphic files associated with the project was astounding, but he was leaving nothing to chance. He hoped to finish in a day or so and the factory would create a prototype and send it back to him within a few days from then.
At that point he would test the drone and, assuming it worked according to his specifications, he could give the go ahead. They had told him they were capable of producing thousands of drones in a matter of days as their factory had no human workers other than those who programmed the factory robotics and did quality control. His part of the plan would require a few thousand of the drones.
He already had the Nanoites working on improving the Nanobots he had programmed. Right now, there were over 20,000 Nanobots waiting to be deployed.
He was grateful for the experience he had gained both in the Earth military and in their recent excursions into the Louisiana swamp and the Amazon basin. He had gotten the opportunity to test some of his ideas under real battle conditions, and being the tinkerer he was, he had taken copious notes about the outcomes and performance of his drones and Burt’s little bug friends. The result was that when it came time to brainstorm with Gariel when he had come to visit the Science and Technology Team, he had plenty of potential suggestions for tactics and improvements that would make the tech more useful.
Gariel had been excited to finally talk to a scientist with some real battle experience and they had continued to speak with one another several times a week via the Alliance communication network. Thus, Gariel had gotten the chance to give lots of input into the project. He had consulted with the other scientists as well. He had been very intrigued with a little nuance Xao Ting was working on that surprisingly had little to do with his usual herbs and tinctures.
Adelle and the rest had been given various assignments in regard to the MDP research Bob had been conducting and the Mookookie had shown up with a trooper carrying them in an MDP created especially for their use. They were willing helpers, and the other scientists had delighted in working with them. A few of them had bonded with some of the little “buddies”, with the injunction that there was to be no new budding and that they were never to appear in the presence of a non-Alliance Earthling.
About the time Bob finished with the part he was working on he heard from the intercom: “Bob! You’ve got to see this! Come here. We need you!”
Bob carefully set down his tools, changed out of his clean room clothing and took Ignatius’s clean room suit off of him, then perched him on the shoulder pad Bob wore to protect himself from Ignatius’s claws. They could be painful when he became upset, excited, or over-balanced.
Outside of the quiet lab he could now hear excited voices all talking at once. They quietened the moment he entered the main lab area. He was afraid he might witness the phenomena of their faces splitting in two, their grins were so big.
“We did it! You’ve got to see this!” Dhakira exclaimed, her dark eyes showing more white than iris. She pointed urgently at the screen floating above her head. The spreadsheet displayed on the screen was toting up locations and coordinates, and they were being added to the spreadsheet so fast that the words and numbers were softly blurred.
“It’s the Mookookies, those clever little buddies! They’re doing it, exactly as you said. The insides of the MDPs are actual locations and we can track them. How did you ever figure that out?”
Bob shook his head. Asking a scientist where they got their ideas was no different than asking an artist or writer where they got their inspiration. It was such a combination of past experience, theory, observation, instinct and putting it all together. In this case, however, it was fairly simple, at least to his mind.
“I had the advantage of communication with the Nanoites. If their story was true and there was no reason to doubt that it wasn’t, then it stood to reason that they were in a trackable dimension. We discovered when the Daringi and the Mookookie were working together that the Mookookie, like the Daringi, are able to determine the coordinates of any place they can have physical access to. We also know that, even without adjusting the atmosphere of the interior of an MDP, Mookookies can handle the atmosphere there.
Burt found that out by accident, as BaaGah had discovered the food cache he kept in his MDP storage. So, if we wanted to have access to the MDPs as a potential troop, supplies and equipment transport device in places where we don’t have a gate network in place, we needed to map them. You’ll notice, once the numbers slow down, that the owner of each MDP is also listed as well. This means that we can get whatever we need to a specific person without even using the gate network. Now that we can do this, I think we can have some pretty amazing surprises for our Inseni friends.
Thank you, one and all for working on this. This may well be the lynchpin of our battle strategy. I’m betting on the idea that the Norgoths don’t have anything like this. When we add Xao Ting’s little project...” and he winked at Xao Ting, who laughed and bowed, “we should be able to create the chaos and destruction that is necessary to bring this situation under control.
I know we still will have years of clean up to come, but for now, if we can accomplish what we set out to do with a limited number of casualties, we will have done our part and should create a safety buffer that should give us the time we need to eventually stamp out this problem once and for all.”
They applauded. If Adelle would have allowed such a thing in her spotless lab, he thought they might have been throwing confetti.
“I’ll get this out to Gariel to distribute the list to the Daringi captains. I’ve created a subroutine for the spreadsheet to make it easily searchable for any who need access. It is highly encrypted and will require a small DNA sample of skin cells to activate. Any DNA pattern not recognized as belonging to a Dimensional Alliance member species will shut down the program and destroy the file,” Dhakira reported.
Bob was so impressed with her skills in computational combinatorics, which she had vastly under-stated in her original introduction to him. She was a genius when it came to taking a theoretical problem and discovering flaws and possibilities based on logic, math, and sometimes pure horse sense. She could make a computer turn cartwheels, and he loved long involved conversations with her about various scientific theories, especially where it applied to gate network science.
He had become so used to working on his own up until he became an Alliance Agent. But here were minds he could relate to in his own bailiwick.
“How’s your project coming, Xao Ting?” He asked when the noise quieted down a bit. Several of them had gone to the break room to celebrate further with some food and maybe a video game challenge or so.
Xao Ting looked up at Bob. Bob was not a tall man, actually quite average in that department, but Xao Ting was definitely deceptively small. Bob had seen him take on much larger opponents during their martial arts workouts almost as if fighting in his sleep.
He leaned closer, blinking a few times. “I think we are near completion. I think our military colleagues have little respect for a weapon that doesn’t make big noises and lots of flash and bang,” he confided. “But we have underestimated our foe in the past, to our detriment. It’s one of the reasons I wanted to take a different approach. I know it isn’t considered an offensive weapon, but I believe it will do more good and make a bigger difference than the bomb they originally requested of us.”
“I agree. I’m learning to look at all of this with new eyes myself. I’m learning that the element of surprise is going to be vital if we have any chance to pull this off. I don’t know what the Alliance scientists have made of the analysis they did of that moon dust they sampled, but I have real doubts that the Earth blackout was a natural phenomenon, and I can’t see that any of the Earth scientists we are aware of could have pulled this off. After all, if they did, why didn’t they shield their own people from it?”
“I believe you are right,” Xao Ting said, holding up a bird treat for Ignatius, who took it daintily in one claw, balancing effortlessly on the other foot. They totally spoiled the smart aleck bird who took it only as his due.
“So, will we be able to deploy it the way we planned? I’ve never seen anything quite like it and I was wondering if it required more delicacy than our current deployment mechanism will provide.”
“No, I have built-in stabilizers and individual shields to prevent premature initiation. I believe we will be able to deploy as soon as we have the rest of the infrastructure in place.”
Bob slapped him none too gently on the back which didn’t even phase the tiny man. “I love it when a plan comes together. Let’s go get some of that cheesecake before it’s gone. Arvid made it, you know.”
Nothing more needed to be said.
Chapter 32: Digging Out and Digging In
Ed Japhet was glad his wife was at home. Inside their quiet little neighborhood, you couldn’t see any of the damage that had been caused just outside of town. They’d gotten a text from Jenny that morning telling them she was alright, but the non-disclosure agreement she had signed with the company she now worked for wouldn’t allow her to say where she was.
He almost wished she was ghost-writing again. She couldn’t talk about her writing, but it didn’t take her all over heck and its half-acre so that she was almost never home. Her little house in the foothills of Los Angeles was nice enough, but it seemed a shame she couldn’t just stay home and enjoy it more often than she did.
He had stopped listening to the radio in the car. The news was all just too sad. And it wasn’t just in the states, but everyone was struggling all over the world. Their government had ruled out the possibility it was an attack from a foreign power, as there wasn’t a single country that didn’t get blacked out.
Several smaller countries were still struggling to get the power back on, as their power plants weren’t as automated as most of the power plants worldwide. Organizations like the Red Cross had been inundated with pleas for help. The United States Army Engineers had been deployed to help with the power situation, and the National Guards and Reserves of every state had been called out to help with the crisis within the states.
Based on nuclear science, there should have been a few nuclear power plants melt down, or in the process of a meltdown. Since even battery power had ceased to work, the backup generators in the power plants shouldn’t have been able to keep the nuclear fuel cool enough to prevent it.
But for some reason none of their scientists could explain, all of the nuclear reactor fuel in every reactor on the planet had been at optimum temperature.
That didn’t prevent trains from going off the rails or the many injuries when every automobile on the planet just stopped. It was particularly ugly on the freeways of the world, where speed limits could be up to 80 miles per hour. An instantaneous stop, even if no one hit anyone else, at high speeds caused many injuries and fatalities, even when people were wearing seatbelts. In the cases of the kind of drivers who typically tailgated the injuries and deaths were multiplied.
He shook his head. He knew his two oldest still moaned when remembering riding with him when he was in rant mode about following distance, directional signaling and paying attention while in a car. By the time Jenny had come along, he had mellowed out somewhat, but she still got the same advice when he was teaching her to drive.
He missed his kids. For forty years he had hauled his family all over the world with him, when he wasn’t stationed in a war zone. The times apart were always hard on his family, but they had all been “good little soldiers” and learned quickly how to make new friends and get engaged right away in community resources and events.
He had once asked them if they had resented all of the moving and constant readjustments they had been required to make as a family. Without exception, all three of them, and his wife had adamantly assured him that few families had the opportunities for new adventures and seeing the world the way they had done.
Driving to the armory, the road was cluttered, but quiet. Broken and stalled vehicles were all over the place, but there was no traffic. One of the first things the United States government had done was to shut down all road traffic other than rescue or clean up vehicles. The moment the power had come back on, radios had started broadcasting stay at home orders to everyone who could hear it and the word had gotten out quickly. The people had been so shaken that most had adhered to the orders.
The news reports, although sporadic so far, were saying that in many larger cities and towns there were those who were either taking advantage of the situation by looting and robbing or just going out because they could. People who had not been on the road when it had happened still had operating vehicles, and his had been parked happily in his driveway at the time.
He had been surprised when the emergency broadcast system had announced that batteries were now working again. Most home computers were still nonfunctional due to data loss, as they hadn’t had any shielding, but large corporations and government agencies still had working computers due to earlier shielding protocols based on the worry about EMP warfare.
One of the mysteries in all of this was how cell phones continued to work, as they were just small portable computers that happened to provide communication. Most apps on phones still weren’t working, but for reasons no one could explain the basic operations of phone calls and texting still seemed to be functioning.
