Bill was getting irritated as the raptor circled yet another small Alaskan town. Stahlman had proven to be very elusive and hard to find. Two weeks of hunting had slowed Bill down to a crawl as he painstakingly uncovered Stahlman’s frequent moves from each of his last known residences. The man was very skittish, moving often and keeping a low profile.
Fortunately for Bill, his attempts at hiding his trail were no match for Bill’s daemons. If Sherlock couldn’t deduce his next path, Ada was able to find clues in the wireless records. Once even Moneta had discovered a local check casher with details on Mr. Stallman via a forwarding address. Today, Bill had hopes that he had finally caught up to the missing researcher.
“Well, if this is the right place, we will find him. Moneta, please arrange to top up the fuel of the raptor. Also, get us an autopod. Ada, please secure the local network, and what little there is of it. Sherlock, George, and Miyamoto; let’s make this as gentle a start as we can. Judging from his movements, our Mr. Stahlman is extremely skittish.”
Bill landed the raptor at the local airfield and debarked as Moneta engaged with the local air tower AI. Still mindful of staying off the grid himself, Bill donned the guise of a portly fisherman that he had talked to briefly, weeks ago in Anchorage. Bill and his team soon found a few locals willing to talk to them at a local diner. Eventually, they had an address to a seedy cottage shopfront that was owned and run by the elusive Mr. Stahlman. The researcher was running a small matter compiler service, providing the capability and service of pulling Makerspace files and fabrication of the smart matter devices for the town.
Bill opened the door to the shop and saw a disheveled man slumped behind a counter, appearing to be communing with his augs. He was barely awake, unkempt, and appeared to be suffering from a hangover. Bingo! Bill thought, looking a little older and more worn, but definitely Richard Stahlman without a doubt. Did he stop his anti-aging treatments?
“Hol’ on. Hol’ on. Ok. Ok. Whadaya want?”, Richard said with unfocused and gummy eyes. Bill blinked back tears as the strong smell of alcohol on the man mixed with too many days without a shower.
“Um, Mr. Stahlman, I have been looking for you for a terribly long while and hoped to ask you some questions?”, Bill asked, trying on a British accent. Sherlock jeered his farcical attempt in the back of his head. “My name is Glen Pikeman, and I am investigating the MIT research you were involved with some years back.”
Stahlman’s face froze in fear, he said, “Please, no. I’ve been through enough. I don’t know what you want to talk about, but I don’t want any part of it.”
Bill let Sherlock take the lead. Holmes took control of Bill’s body and stepped forward, “Please sir, we just want to know what went wrong. We have begun research at the Imperial College along a similar path and need to understand what happened. Our insurance underwriter is bleeding us dry and won’t review our policy. They insist that the tests are dangerous, but I think perhaps we just need to begin our testing to put their fears to rest. ”
Bill appreciated Sherlock's approach, trying to appeal to Mr. Stahlman's sense of duty to prevent another disaster. “I’d like to spend more time to satisfy them, but unless I can bring credible evidence of safety, I may be required to show them.”
Stahlman’s eye regained some focus and his face contorted in anger, “Then yur a damn fool! Yur all gonna die. Everyone’s gonna die. There ain't nuthin to learn from MIT except that you don’t fuck around with dimensional physics. We fucked around and we found out the hard way. Go home! There ain't nuthin’ here for ya. Don’t dig any deeper or you’ll ruin everthin’ same as those poor bastards learned.”
His anger roused, Richard spit at Bill's feet and pushed him back out of the front door. With an angry snarl, Stahlman slammed the door in Bill’s face and threw the locking bolt home. He turned the “Open” sign over to read “Closed” and the shades were swiftly yanked down. Judging by the crashing inside, Stahlman was still quite angry and was taking it out on the furniture and walls.
Bill ground his teeth as his daemons argued in his head. He was so close to learning the truth, only to be rebuked. It had been a long time since he had dealt with such open hostility. He slowly turned around and made his way back to the autopod. Bill directed the AI driver to search for a suitable motel for the night.
Bill was sure that Stahlman must have a deeper insight into what had happened in Boston. He would have been remotely attending as the team’s chief experimentalist. Bill was determined to find out what he knew from that day. Sherlock assured him that a midnight reconnaissance might gain them what they needed without direct conflict. While Bill disliked the approach, Stahlman didn’t seem open to reason. Tonight then, he would get his answers.
----------------------------------------
Max was ready. The living room was reconfigured back into its mathematical memento style that their guest Miss Montoya had enjoyed so much. It was growing on Max as well as his math and pattern skills kept engaging with the decor.
“Casa, I think it's time for the final kintsugi challenge. No class today and both Leah and Charlie are busy. The last one took hours and I'm sure this one will be no different.” Max said.
“Are you sure you want to, Max? The amphora looks so gorgeous now,” asked Casa.
“I know, Casa. I hate to do it, but I feel like this one might provide something more of a challenge. The rewards are always bigger to match the difficulty, and this will be rough.” Max declared.
“Can you walk me through accessing the smart matter so I can set up the repair table? I can't depend on you forever. I need to use my skills and learn.”
Casa agreed readily. She showed him how to access the house data net connections and to go to the many Maker indexes where public designs were stored. She warned him about going to dark sites for designs. Malware designs coming out of the matter computer could literally explode in his face. All designs on public sites are vetted for authenticity and safety. Then she showed him how to access and assign the correct quantities of smart matter to the design. Sometimes advanced designs might require dedicated processors, batteries, or rare materials for strength, intelligence, or power. The table had no special requirements, so it was extremely easy to set up and fabricate.
Per tradition, Max hefted the large urn and hurled it at the base of the fireplace with all his augmented strength. The pot bounced across the room and settled into the corner without a chip in it.
“Ok, I guess I need a different approach,” Max said with slight irritation. He pulled a long poker from the stand beside the fireplace and swung it at the pot. The poker rebounded flying from his grip.
Miyamoto tisked his actions, as he had been running in the background of Max’s augmentations and had observed the earlier strike.
“Come, Max. I have shown you how to strike. Set yourself. Grip your improvised blade as I have taught you. Set your intentions, fire may not make an impression upon the pot so perhaps the solid presence of the earth and the mountains might be more appropriate. You need to push your spirit into the strike. A Kia shout will help to focus your power.”
Max set his stance and his grip. He had been shown how to do a proper Kia at the Wuxia dojo and had overcome his initial embarrassment at shouting at someone or something while attacking. Gathering his power and will, he struck with his strike skill and a loud Kia. Max was astonished at the smooth speed and power of the strike and with the result. The pot detonated into a cloud of exploding chips.
[ New Body Skill unlocked: Stun 1 – utilize augmentations to amplify and focus a shout into a disabling resonant blast.]
Seeing the multitude of micro shards distributed across the large room, Max sighed. “I think I now have some regrets. Unfortunately, it's too late. The only way to go now is forward!”
Max painstakingly gathered all the chips and slowly built up the pot again with the gold paste glue. The detailed work required him to match the subtle variations of the pot's surface colors both inside and out to ensure the chips slotted into the right spot. Max worked all through the day and deep into the night.
“Would you like some coffee, Max?” she asked,” Bill swears by it.”
“You know what? Yes. I would love some coffee. Can you load it up with cream and sugar, though? Black coffee tastes like a moldy sneaker, and I should know.” Max joked.
After hours more work, and multiple stat boosts from the hard work, he was almost done. Max was tired and wired from drinking too much coffee.
[Intelligence +3, Perception +2, Will +4]
[Mental skill: Pattern +3, Pattern reaches level 4]
Max growled with frustration. With only two small chips remaining to be placed, Max tore at his fur. The chips were nowhere to be found. He was on his knees scouring the ground looking for the errant shards and tired as hell. Unfortunately, there was no sign of them. He had started to ask Casa, and his trainer AI immediately warned him that outside assistance would void the quest. Growling low again, he sat down on the floor holding his head in his hands.
Think, Max! he subvocalized to himself. He slowed his breathing, trying to calm his frustration as he could feel the caffeine driving a headache. He tried to visualize the pot, he was now intimately familiar with every defect and shard. His head pounded as he tried to remember the explosion, and then finally it happened. Like a damn giving way, his memory replayed in his mind.
The vision of the pot, right before he struck it, formed with photographic clarity in his mind. His overlay and pattern skills joined and merged with his thoughts showing him the newly repaired amphora’s pattern overlapping the unbroken one. As his memory replayed the explosive strike, his fast cog skill auto triggered and slowed down the cloud of debris as it expanded from his strike. His ballistics skill and pattern skill worked together to track each shard and chip from its origin, tracing their trajectories in his mind.
The two missing pieces lit up in his mental view showing him where they went. With Max’s expanded understanding it soon became obvious. The first piece had landed in the candle holder on the mantel, hidden from his view. The other had gone almost straight up. With a grimace, he went to the mirror and plucked the final piece from the top of his head. Max placed the last pieces as his system notices came.
[New mental skill unlocked: Memory 1- augmentation assisted memory enables improved and active recollection. Never lose your keys again.]
[New body skill unlocked: Gland 1 - artificial organoids produce chemicals, proteins, and hormones on command. Caffeine unlocked. Progress the skill for more.]
[Mental Skill: Pattern +1, Pattern reaches level 5]
[Mental Skill: Fast Cog +1, Fast Cog reaches level 4]
[Mental Skill: OverLayer +1, OverLayer reaches level 4]
If you encounter this narrative on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.
[Body Skill: Ballistic +1, Ballistic reaches level 4]
[Quest Kintsugi III completed, 100 XP awarded]
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A stealthy phantom crept unseen down the alley approaching the “Bethel Digi-Mart and Trade Goods” under the dark and cloudy northern night sky. The streets were deserted with a chill in the air. Bill’s daemon Miyamoto guided his feet for perfect silence. During the day Ada had hacked all the local surveillance. She set them into a looped recording of the previous minutes.
Bill's form was shrouded in a cloud of motes and nanites that absorbed the light and helped him to feel the surroundings. Should any sensors have actually been able to pierce his veil and discern his appearance, he had molded his body to resemble Stahlman. Stahlman had not left the business according to Ada and Sherlock's review of the street cameras, and the group expected he lived on the second floor of the business.
Bill stopped at the back door and inspected the old fashion key lock accompanied by an old electronic security system. They provided the only obstacles to gaining access to the building. Ada accessed and bypassed the electronic sensor while Bill flooded the lock with smart motes. The motes provided him with a mental image of the lock’s internal mechanisms. He modeled the appropriate key shape in his mind. With a thought, his index finger was reshaped into the form of a key. Without breaking stride, Bill silently unlocked the door and entered, closing it quickly and quietly behind him.
Bill’s senses were far beyond normal human capabilities and the dark room appeared to him as bright as day. The only activity was a few inconsequential electronic signals of a wireless thermostat and an idling holoprojector. Their signal’s flickered in his OverLayer display, but there were no telltale silent alarm signals evident. Bill's sight shifted to thermal, but the house was cold. A smell of corruption told Bill the reason why Stahlman hadn’t left for the day.
Stahlman lay stretched on the floor in the next room, a vibrating blade lodged in what was left of his skull. It had penetrated under his jawline and had pierced his brainstem and his augmentation’s neocortex. The ceiling was painted in blood and viscera. Bill identified the weapon, a nasty piece used in some of the less civilized countries in South America. A Vorpal-grade combat knife capable of slicing through almost any armor.
[Self-inflicted judging the position of the body and the angle of entry.] Sherlock judged.
Scanning for the blade’s wireless signal, Bill accessed it and queried the device’s systems. It came with a single payload of injectable nano-exploders and EMP pulse. Stahlman had good augmentations which would have made his body durable and recoverable from extreme damage like this, but this blade's two-step annihilation mode exceeded his body’s abilities. The localized EMP pulse had fried his aug and the nano-exploders had riddled his brain and shredded it from the inside out.
Moneta advised that Stahlman likely had severe survivor’s guilt from the MIT disaster. He must have finally broken. Bill cursed himself and then Stahlman, too. He may have triggered Stahlman, but the man had been a ticking time bomb. The room was in complete disarray with broken furniture, liquor bottles, and food wrappers everywhere.
Bill carefully dropped to one knee and searched for any clues, mindful of the gore. As he did, he noticed the wall behind Stahlman was covered with equations, calculations, and geometric schematics. The writing was smeared and had holes punched into it.
Bill's high-resolution multispectral vision could see the traces, which enabled him to see what had been there and bridge the missing gaps. He recorded the images with his mental notes. It was too late to help Richard Stahlman but maybe it was just in time to prevent his fate from following the path of the unlucky MIT team. Sherlock interrupted as he searched further.
“Sir, I would like to access the matter compiler and recycler. Even the most technically savvy humans tend to forget that the compiler holds about ten files in its cache to reverse accidental recycling. If the late Mr. Stahlman had disposed of any evidence, we may be able to retrieve it.”
“Excellent advice, Sherlock. Please, see if you can recover anything.”
Soon enough, a diary, a phone, and a hard drive were reconstituted in the matter compiler from its memory cache. Bill found a satchel and bagged the evidence.
“Sherlock, can you clear the compiler cache?” Bill suggested as he sent a small army of motes to clear any evidence that he had visited that night. Once done, Bill exited and made his way back to the airfield and his raptor with deep sadness and uneasiness. He thought he had left this type of life behind, but his old habits and attitudes from his Samaritan days settled upon him like a familiar coat.
Bill and his team convened in his virtual workspace with his cognition speed maxed while the raptor engines warmed up to take off. Tanaka’s files which had provided all the technical details of the MIT team's apparatus, now floated side by side with Bill’s. Leo and Bill had already thoroughly dissected the blueprints of the two devices, noting the similarities and where they diverged. The Casimir stack and high-velocity flywheel were very similar, but Bill’s evolved Tesseract circuit was noticeably different from the MIT probe. Bill was trying to understand how the different approaches would react using his 11-dimensional theory.
Ada led the others in decrypting Stahlman’s phone and hard drive while Sherlock reviewed the diary. The story it revealed was both enlightening and terrifying. Stahlman had been haunted by his knowledge of what had happened and had been running from it and himself ever since. The most disturbing revelation was found in a video from the MIT test run.
A screen opened in the shared virtual space and played the video of the experiment as the test activated. Sherlock, ever attentive to detail, noted that the time log at activation was 16 minutes before the documented explosive event that had destroyed Boston. The whole team stopped as the decrypted video started to play and paid attention.
The video showed a scene disturbingly similar to Bill's experiment with a Casimir stack and flywheel energizing and spinning up. The MIT team’s flywheel had a more sturdy frame and took much longer to spin up. MIT didn’t launch a probe into the true vacuum but rather extended a smart matter probe to try to penetrate the weakened dimensional area. The MIT probe and Bill’s tesseract seemed to have some fundamental differences that Bill even with his boosted mental capabilities and Leo and Ada’s help couldn't resolve yet without detailed simulations.
The team of scientists were all very excited. There were twelve people in the room. Bill noted both Dr. Sota Tanaka, the CIRO spy, and Dr. Anika Sharma, the former Samaritan and close friend of Miriam in the middle of the mixed crew. The primary lab leader was Professor Michael Higgins. Bill remembered him from his visits to the campus. A rival with incredible insights and a jovial outlook.
Commands, queries, and jokes passed through the group. Stahlman’s presence via remote link was notable as he barked at the interns and technicians on the flywheel and probe systems. In contrast, Anika performed all adjustments and operations of the power draw and containment by herself. Bill knew she had a cadre of daemons likely assisting her, gifts from Miriam, and likely very talented experts. The whole team had tensed as the ZPE collectors finally began funneling away excess power once the Casimir stack attained full spin.
The team began to celebrate passing the milestone of power generation exceeding draw when a new development occurred. The MIT probe had breached the weakened dimension wall without the huge energy draw that Bill's design had required. The portal started as a pinprick, noticeable from the energies cascaded from its edges. It suddenly surged open, and the power systems fluctuated. The MIT probe quickly grounded and drew away the surplus power as the pinprick of light expanded in a dark hole within the spinning frame.
Then the tense group paused as the system stabilized, humming with more power than ever. The view beyond the portal was dark but one of Stahlman’s men accessed the room's lighting array and focused several spotlights on it. The video systems showed a roiling mass of dark shapes in a large cavern that could be seen beyond the portal frame. Occasional flashes of light burst from the seething scene of dark shapes but were quickly absorbed by the dark moving shapes. The distances and sizes were hard to understand without references.
The MIT team broke into cheers and had begun to congratulate each other. Professor Higgin was beaming in elation. Dr. Tanaka quipped about recognizing his help when the man inevitably won the Nobel prize. Their elation quickly turned to fear as a dark pulsing serpentine shape darted through the portal and slammed into a terminal.
The team stood transfixed as the snake-like object wrapped about the terminal. After tentatively probing the hardware, the dark membrane expanded and engulfed the entire workstation. One of the technicians broke free from the room’s stupor, yelling in terror. Soon everyone began shouting. Anika began furiously shouting commands into the air, the power systems were fluctuating dangerously again. Professor Higgins was yelling for everyone to remain calm while Dr. Tanaka was screaming for Stahlman to pull the probe and close the breach. Stahlman froze, terrified, and fascinated by the dark tentacle. One end had wrapped around a terminal and the other pulsing with capillary motions from the breach.
The pulsing tube formed a growing bulbous dark mass around the terminal. Tanaka’s screaming at Stahlman redoubled, laced with swears. Anika succeeded in diverting the power draw, but the portal was arcing with extra energy along its edges. Bill saw that her smart suit was shifting into her Samaritan combat armor, its material hardening into protective layers.
The dark mass exploded, sending a branching tentacle towards the ceiling where it impacted the light array, knocking its frame and sending the powered light beam careening and spinning about the lab. Professor Higgins howled in alarm and an intern close to the terminal panicked and ran screaming towards the exit.
As if attracted by the motion another tentacle launched from the terminal mass and struck the running technician in the back. His pained screaming was quickly silenced as black fluid flowed over and engulfed him. As smaller tendrils began to grow from the pulsating mass and another large serpentine shape lurched through the portal breach, rearing up like a cobra.
Tanaka reached into his lab coat and pulled a large cylinder of smart matter out. It quickly morphed into a sword with energy crackling along its extending razor edge. With a last curse at the frozen video of Stahlman, Tanaka plunged his katana through the main control module, hoping to close the breach. Bill grimaced at the video; Tanaka had inadvertently just disabled the very system they needed to reverse the breach. If Bill understood Higgin’s modified portal theory, the portal was now self-energized and stable without external modifications.
The room was in chaos. Higgins was cornered against a table unable to get around the looming cobralike mass. More dark shapes, no two alike and resembling a variety of deadly organisms from Earth, spilled into the room from the base of the portal like a cresting wave. Dark beetles, scorpions, ants, worms, hoppers, and more analog forms swarmed along the ground. Anika's transformation was complete, and she bolted forward in her battledress with her energized gauntlets.
She fired a focused EM pulse at the portal. The massed creatures must have had more in common with smart matter than biological as many of them dropped to the ground dead. The large cobra shape emitted a shrill whine reminiscent of an archaic dentist drill. It tore free from its tether to the portal and lunged at Higgin, smashing him through the counter into the aisle of workstations behind it.
The spinning Casimir stack frame broke from its mount and shattered, sending shrapnel flying about the room. Tanaka’s headless body was momentarily in the frame as the camera viewing the scene fell to the ground.
Everyone in the lab was screaming and loud crashing could be heard. What could still be seen of the lab quickly became a web of cross-linked shooting tendrils encompassing the team, the equipment, and the room until a swarm of black motes and winged insect-like shapes filled the room. Soon nothing more could be seen, the video feed turned to static then blanked and stopped.
“My god, it’s more horrible than I could have imagined. Those things are like a mixture of HM Geiger and Lovecraft’s stories. Those things' behavior seemed to be directed, maybe even intelligent.” Bill exclaimed in horror.
Bill looked shaken and afraid while the daemons who lacked deeper human emotions showed a variety of other expressions. Sherlock was shrewd, Virgil was concerned but stern, Miyamoto and George were calculating, Leo and Ada were fascinated, and Moneta was stunned.
“…ah. There is unfortunately a little more, sir.” Sherlock said with a slight hesitation. And then another video started. “It appears to be some unedited footage from a weather satellite.”
The display changes to show a scene from high above. A satellite image focusing down on the Boston metro area. A rainstorm was slowly spiraling in from the south. The Cambridge area below began to slowly darken with a growing stain resembling a fractal pattern. The darkness extended in tendrils to the surroundings, spreading quickly. Less than 10 minutes had passed as the stain grew and grew. Soon it covered miles of the city surrounding the campus.
Suddenly a white light flashed, and a white dome formed over the entire area. As the light faded, there was nothing left behind. A great gouge was taken out of the earth as if an ice cream scoop had removed the city and its surroundings. Air and water rushed in to fill the void left behind, and great gouts of steam erupted from the deep depression.
Bill was confused, the portal was stable. The energy at the end was immense and sudden. He didn’t understand exactly what had happened at the end, but the explosion had wiped the growing infestation off the map. Bill had thought this search would give him answers, but now his questions had multiplied tenfold.
“How on Earth is none of this in the public data sphere? Hell, I have access to most government and military data nets. I haven’t seen anything, not even the slightest hint about any of this.” Bill voiced to his team.
Sherlock was the first to answer in his usual imperious manner. “I suspect that perhaps this absence of evidence may be as big a mystery as the event itself. I’m not sure even Gabriel could perform such a feat. Such an all-encompassing erasure would surpass current human and AI capabilities. Your hacker seemed quite prepared in his interference in your test, Bill. So much so, that I suspect he may have been aware of some of this. His motives remain far from certain.”
The rest of the team discussed the implications of the MIT event and the current experiment. Bill had them refocus on the differences between the MIT event and his experimental results. All that could be concluded for the moment was that they ensured that they weren’t recreating the MIT experiment. This represented an even greater danger than Bill had first suspected.
The Raptor roared away into the night as the team discussed what their next steps would be. One thing was certain, bringing the tesseract to Earth had been a mistake. He needed to get back to Utopia as soon as possible. His approach differed significantly from MIT, but this new data showed that his protections against the unknown were far from perfect.
Bill knew that this technology was like the proverbial genie in its bottle, the technology was ready to be found. If he didn’t solve the tesseract issue, someone else would eventually arrive at the same juncture and whatever had occurred at MIT could happen again. The clock was ticking, and Bill was realizing just how late he was in solving this dangerous puzzle. Bill initiated a call to Casa and hoped everything was ok in Utopia.