Tuesday, December 30, 2008

Mind Moves Mass

Twenty thousand ninety three.

Twelve and one quarter.

Seven hundred forty three point two zero four.

Randomized sequencing accomplished…Disengaging enumerator.


Odieth Maccar leaned back, his face wrapped up in a look of…satisfaction was not quite the right word, since he had not really done anything at all. But certainly gratification that the job had been completed. And completed well, the computer assured him. Ninety-eight point three percent confidence rating, were its exact words in the standard, cool female voice GravuSec consoles came equipped with. Model 09-QJ-G9 was built up to and beyond merely standard, however; its custom-manufactured Teldro Q-Processor was capable of speeds ten times those of a normal quantum computer, and the range of human interactions it was capable of simply dazzled Odieth.

For example, he had clambered into the console control chamber that morning, as he always did, expecting the normal “Good morning, Mister Maccar.” Instead, the thing had made a comment about his weight! “Your body mass index is approaching an unhealthy level, Mister Maccar. Suggestion: reduce caloric consumption and increase exercise levels so that the GravuSec Model 09-QJ-G9 can continue to serve you comfortably.”

Bloody astounding, Odieth had thought. It was the most advanced piece of equipment ever seen, and working at the New Massachusetts Technological Institute, that was saying quite a bit. Although this can hardly be called working. The thought skittered across his brain while he brushed his fingers across the touch screen and pressed his eyeballs up against the retinal scanner. My Masters degree is almost outdated!

A tiny bleep sounded to acknowledge his input had been processed, and then; “Thank you for working with this Model, Mister Maccar. Please enjoy the rest of your day, and consider the health suggestions provided by this unit.”

Climbing down out of the console, he nearly fell on his face. Even after three months and this morning’s incident, the thing never stopped surprising him. He felt like a child playing peek-a-boo. Sighing at his own absurdity, Odieth walked away from the six foot high construction. He did not need to look to envision its jet black surface, so incredibly smooth yet still reflecting no light; it absorbed all. That helped to keep the Q-Processor from freezing, the techies said, although he suspected they only built it that way so it ‘looked cool.’ Techies were weird like that.

The Console Operation Room he strolled across was fairly small, a concrete box just big enough to hold the computer and room for a person to stretch their legs, but the door into it stood wide open, giving it an illusion of space. Which was odd; protocol dictated that when in use all entrances to the COR should be locked tight. Security was getting lax, it seemed, letting the assistants wander around; they must have forgotten the Wyvern incident. Odieth’s lip curled as he remembered the bloody mess that had been. Yes, he would have a talk with Gregory about this.

Once he passed through however, the steel airlock slid shut behind him just as it should have. Odieth was now in a short corridor leading to a second, more pregnable door than the blast-resistant, dust-occluding one behind. This door slid open with a wave of hand over wall scanner, allowing entry into the cavern beyond. Console Operation Control was huge; it had to be. The power drain from five Consoles meant five huge reactors buried beneath New Massachusetts Tech, which meant banks of control panels and gauges and computer monitors to measure and observe anything and everything which could – and inevitably did – go wrong. On a full day of operation – which meant two consoles running simultaneously – there could be up to a hundred people in here, undergrads and faculty, all working to keep the big black monsters running smoothly. Right now there were maybe thirteen tired-looking young people, their faces tinged red or blue or green from their respective monitors; the run-down of a console was much less intensive than the start-up, requiring fewer personnel. Technically, protocol said that all COC staff on duty for a certain console were supposed to remain so until said console was fully shut down. But Odieth thought back on the security airlock and figured most of them were grabbing coffee. Or having sex in a broom closet; he was not very attuned to the habits of students nowadays, so one was just as likely as the other.

He quickly passed by the remaining assistants, avoiding their salutations. Odieth did not particularly want to talk to people who might have been consummating in a broom closet a few hours ago. Instead he hastened by the banks of computers – just ordinary computers running on pathetically outdated silicon chips – and headed to the sleekly oval elevator door. It slid diagonally open for him as he approached, and he was able to step inside the softly lit car without having to make eye contact with a single person.

The door slid back across the car, and he punched in the top flight for destination. Which was ground level, actually. There was no jerk, no hint of movement whatsoever, but the floor lights changed to indicate he was going upwards. One, two, three…there.

There were five levels to the Van Goeghner Building, as this place was named, but only two were accessible to someone without an access pass, and the fifth level was restricted to techies. The top floor that Odieth now stepped into, however, was open to everyone, even non-students. Which he thought was ridiculous. At least this lobby you had to pass security to get in, since the lift was easily accessible. But plush leather upholstery covered numerous chairs and couches scattered around the place, a few of which Odieth believed were occupied by the people supposedly supervising Model 09-QJ-G9’s run-down. It was hard to tell; he was bad with faces. In any event, letting students run amok in Van Goeghner was just as bad as letting tourists do it. Even worse; the students might know how to really break things, not just spill coffee everywhere.

Odieth sighed, before frowning at the shockingly plain woman who approached him. She was Grace Clarkson, and her bland appearance belied a PhD in Aesthetic Psychology. An obscure branch, even in the wake of recent advancements in that field, but Grace insisted Aesthetics were the most applicable for enviro-human interactions, more so than any other.

He wondered what she was doing here. The Psych Department got Model 08-QT-5I on Thursdays, but today was Tuesday, the day for Odieth’s own Physics Department. Masking his curiosity with what he hoped was a warm smile, he said, “Grace, what a pleasant surprise! How can I help you?”

Her response was curt; they always were when someone else spoke first. Odieth pondered whether or not she knew that, and decided on not. She would have altered her behavior if she had. “I’m here to tell you something, about the Consoles, Odieth.”

“You know that subject is highly classified,” he growled, although his smile never broke, “we can’t discuss that here.”

She shot him a glare. “I’m not stupid. I came to take you to my office, where we can talk.”

A few people were beginning to look over his way, and some of them looked as if they might try and approach. Odieth hated that; he had made some significant advances in his field – a Masters doing that rankled the PhDs and made everyone else chuckle, he knew – but now everyone seemingly wanted to congratulate him, or pick his brain. Even pipsqueak undergrads. And since he was also Faculty Liaison for the building – by virtue of being the only one who cared about the rules! – with full access to the place, even more wanted to get something from him. So he quickly acquiesced, even though he wanted to go home and rest. He figured whatever Grace had to say to him would not be good, but ignoring a rather senior member of the faculty like her was done at your own risk - whatever your department was.

She led him outside the building, past the huge blown-up statue of a Console next to a scaled-down model of its reactor, where moronic proletarians gawked at the lewd caricatures of science. History will remember it as an obscenity, he thought, to have ever allowed these people access to this building. They can’t possibly imagine the strides we’re making; all they see are big, complex toys. He piled onto the small hoverer Grace had borrowed from Administration – she had a bad back which kept her from walking much at all, apparently – managing to hide his agitation quite well, he thought.

“You oughtn’t hate them so,” said Grace, and Odieth nearly leapt straight out of his hide. “Without people like that, Earth would be a much more boring place.”

She always startled him like that; her astuteness was incredible. Odieth could recall a story he had read as a child, and although the intervening decades had blurred his memory, he remembered that Sherlock Holmes had been able to deduce things about dirt and such with nearly the alacrity Grace Clarkson read people. Well, it was no use denying. “Boring? Oh, I’d imagine so. We’d all probably be sitting under a perfect blue sky, sipping delicious drinks without any worries about missile shields or radiation dampers.” With that last he pointed above their heads. The New Massachusetts Technological Institute had originally been built as an open-air campus, but eventually the huge gray domes covering most of New England had extended to envelop the school. Gigantic fluorescent lights attempted to simulate the sun’s illumination, but the world was still a starker, darker place than Odieth remembered from forty years ago.

Grace smirked and eyed him sideways. “If it was just you and me, we’d still be a mile down below trying to crack the universe’s mysteries. Me through the brain, you through the particles.”

“True enough,” agreed Odieth. Although if it were just they two, he might never give her the chance.

The last few minutes of the trip passed by without further conversation, which suited him fine, until they pulled up to the sky-scraping heptagon that was Higgins Hall, evil lair of the Psych Department. She giggled slightly when he told her that one, and Odieth could not help but ask himself for the thousandth time what she actually thought of him. Knowing her, it might have even been close to the truth.

He had never been to Higgins Hall before, but they walked without incident. If he didn't count the building itself as an incident. The heptagon was incredibly strange on the inside, as they ambulated through elevators that moved sideways and hallways that at first glance appeared to stretch infinitely but were in fact six yards long, and every single wall was covered with strange and sometimes downright revolting pictures. One mural depicting a mass rape, execution and burial in gory detail nearly made Odieth heave, but Grace merely shrugged her shoulders and walked on. Perhaps evil lair is not so inaccurate, he mused, still tasting bile from that repellent scene.

At long last though, Grace stopped in front of a door which was shaped like a man kneeling – somehow it worked – and bade it open with a wave of her hand. His head nearly brushed the frame passing under, and he was not a tall man. The door shut silently behind them.

Grace motioned for him to sit at a strange padded chair shaped like a dog lifting its leg to urinate, and herself reclined behind a huge, ornately carved mahogany desk. The patterning in it twisted and twirled so intricately that Odeith could hardly follow the whorls, losing one particular sequence of wavy lines and trying to find his way out of an angular maze before finding the lines again. It was quite mesmerizing, and Odeith actually had to ask Grace to repeat her question.

“I said do you like my office?”

"Yes, it’s quite…” Odieth scrambled for adjectives that did not involve ‘unsettling’ or ‘disgusting, and alighted on “…artistic.” In truth, the bizarreness of it all served to accentuate her plainness.

Grace laughed. “Please; there is no such thing as art. Everything is a test.”

“Did I pass?” he asked bemusedly.

The smile wiped from her face so suddenly Odeith thought he might have said something wrong, but the way her fingers began to trace the carving on her desktop indicated something deeper. “Let’s get right to business. You’ve heard of the Red Tigers, yes?”

“You mean the organized student terrorists?” His brow crinkled. “Just a rumor, Administration says. And I can hardly imagine any faculty would be involved with them, even if it wasn’t a rumor.”

“Please,” said Grace, eyes rolling, “We all know Administration lies through their teeth about everything. Remember that one sophomore who got killed by an exploding transistor? They said he had been hit by a hoverer.” At his nearly imperceptible nod, she continued. “Anyway, the Red Tigers are plenty real. And I’ve got proof.”

“What does this have to do with the Consoles?” asked Odieth, his patience wearing thin. Students running around firebombing the bookstores and coffee shops did not bother him, even if it was true they were organized; security was too tight for a bunch of Social Science hoodlums to break past the lift in Van Goeghner.

“Well,” she began, clearly reluctant, before it all gushed out, “there appears to me…a breach in console protocol might have let some of their agents in. Somebody’s been sabotaging our console’s tests, and there’ve been several instances where security lapsed, but Gregory claims everything had been airtight when his men checked it; someone tampered, were his exact words.”

“Gregory would say anything,” was Odeith’s flat reply. “And you shouldn’t blame your own student’s failures in programming and procedure on nonexistent saboteurs. You said you had proof; do you? Anything solid?”

She gazed at him for a few minutes, clearly debating in her head. Then she reached beneath her desk, and he heard the click of what he supposed was a small safe. When she withdrew her hand, it held a tiny disk. She gave a voice command and a projector lowered from the ceiling for her to load the disk into, and then a video popped up on her wall. It showed a COR, plainly empty. The timestamp read last Wednesday at one in the morning. Odieth nearly jumped up from his chair, but settled for saying in a strangled voice, “Grace! You know you broke nearly fourteen regulations by putting a camera in a console room! Even the slightest polarity shift from that thing could potentially…”

She cut him off just as the COR airlock slid open in the video. A person, no skin showing through heavy clothes despite the climate-controlled atmosphere, entered, dragging a much smaller, rather limp individual behind them. Odeith squinted at the two figures as the one hauled the other up to the console and slid a small card into its slot. The black machine immediately opened the main control hatch, but also another secondary hatch attached to the base of the console – a subject testing chamber, Odieth knew, although the console he used was not equipped with one. The limp person was roughly shoved into it and the hatch closed, and the kidnapper – for Odeith suspected that this was not entirely voluntary labwork – slipped into the control seat. Grace paused the video and turned to look at him. “Did you recognize that person?”

“Not really,” he responded truthfully, “they were completely covered up. This is obviously grave business though, why haven’t you taken it to Gregory?”

But Grace was crying. Silently, but crying. That a woman like her, a schooled psychologist, would break down so shook Odieth, but he was by her side momentarily. “Come on now, what’s wrong? I know it’s a shock that we’ve been compromised, but…”

“The person t-they l-loaded into the sub-bject testing ch-chamber?” she stammered, “that w-was me!”

She nearly screamed the last part, and Odieth had to keep a tight grip on himself not to pull away. He began stroking her dull brown hair, murmuring to her like his mother had to him, many years ago. “There, there. That’s terrifying. How come you came to me? Security needs to be notified, immediately.”

“I think he’s one of them,” she whispered. There were no tears now, just bleak fear. “I think Gregory's working with the Red Tigers. How else could they have gotten past all the intruder countermeasures and alarms and...and all of that? It would have taken somebody with the highest level of security clearance, and that’s either Gregory or you. And I know it wasn’t you, Odieth. I know I can trust you.”

He smiled. They had been through all of their college years together here at NMTI, and all their careers, even when he had been forced to switch majors from Neural Psych to General Physics. His professors had described him as mentally unfit for the responsibility concomitant with a modern degree in Psychology. They were wrong. Ignorant, purblind fools.

“Grace, you’ve been abducted in the night; this is very serious. Serious indeed. But since you haven’t yet gone to Gregory, I can’t have you going to him now, which is what I would normally suggest even with your suspicions.” She looked up at him questioningly, but he was already speaking the command phrase. “Mens agitat molem.”

Grace shuddered, her entire body convulsing rhythmically for five seconds exactly. She had been attuned to those words, spoken by either Odieth or one other. With that, she was his. Leaning down to look her in the face, he was greeted by the sight of a woman purely enraptured by his presence. “Oh, it is you! I’ve been wanting to thank you so badly for days now, Odieth.”

“I’m sure you have, Grace,” he said, continuing to stroke her hair. She nuzzled to his hand like a fawning dog. He hated to destroy the Grace he had once known, but this was too important. He would be more careful with her, though. She was worth something even so controlled, unlike the others who were worthless both ways. “Do you want to do me a favor, Grace?”

“Yes. Please let me do you a favor!” The need in her voice was palpable; she wanted to satisfy him.

“Well, there is one student, a graduate student, in this very building. He failed me and let somebody get a video of him doing some very illegal things. Would you mind killing him for me?”
She beamed up at him. “Not a problem at all, Odieth. Anything to make you happy.”

He smiled at her again, eliciting a low moan of delight from the woman. “That would make me very happy, Grace. Just do the thing quietly; let no one know it was you. And don’t forget to destroy this video you showed me. After you’re all done, call me, and we can discuss some other things I have planned."

“That sounds so utterly fantastic. I simply cannot wait!”

And she could not, either. The world was going to be a better place, thanks to the work he was doing, and would now do with her. Everybody happy, always wanting to serve each other, and the maggots getting out of their betters' way. Odieth could not wait for that day to come, any more than Grace could wait to fulfill his merest suggestions.

3 comments:

  1. At long last though, Grace stopped in front of a door which was shaped like a man kneeling – somehow it worked

    I thought this hilarious

    ReplyDelete
  2. Seemed kind of hurried at the end.

    ReplyDelete
  3. "Seemed kind of hurried at the end."

    I wouldn't say so. There's only so much to say about the act, and I feel that if I'd gone on any longer than I did it would have been clumsy and overdone.

    "At long last though, Grace stopped in front of a door which was shaped like a man kneeling – somehow it worked

    I thought this hilarious"

    Well, many thanks for that. I aim to entertain, heh.

    ReplyDelete

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