Before Casa could stop him, Max jumped through the portal. From Max’s new perspective inside the entryway of the portal, the marble that was the tesseract was still centered in the hole but it was just the tip of a spear pointing outward from inside of a small space. The tesseract was a marvelous silicone fractal structure that resembled a distorted bonsai tree completely filling a small enclosure. Its trunk was gnarled but mostly straight and shot forward and slightly down. Its surface scintillated with glowing blue LED traces and to Max’s newly enhanced vision into the UV spectrum as well. At the tree's apex it split into a broad umbrella of branches which broadened and bent to cover and form a sphere about 5 meters wide.
When Max had passed the threshold into the sphere, he was surprised as he was suddenly weightless. He floated down the length of the sideways tree. Its branches encompassed and created a field of energy that glowed in Max’s EM field sense.
[Mind Skill: Pattern +1, Pattern reaches 7]
“Wowf!” Max gasped, slipping a little doggish into his exclamation with his surprise. His shout was oddly muted, the sphere absorbed the sound rather than bouncing it. The air was still moving about and smelled of the NetherLab. All the surfaces had no scent whatsoever, something he hadn’t experienced even on the moon. His pattern skills matched the fractal shape of the tree to the latest iteration of inverted fractal code they had loaded into the tesseract. Acting on his hunch, Max triggered his access skill to connect with the Tesseract.
[Mind Skill: Access +1, Access reaches 6, link established to Tesseract OSI, #$rt552]
Max tweaked one of the tesseracts’ fractal variables by another increment and the whole canopy shifted slightly, descending incrementally towards that base, the portal around the tesseracts tip widened as the sphere shifted forward slightly.
“Max, get out of there! It doesn’t look stable, the portal just shifted.” Casa yelled.
“Sorry! Don’t worry. That was me. The inside is shaped like a fractal. I accessed the Tesseract and tweaked one of the exponential variables. It’s magnificent here, so beautiful.” Max said and dragged himself along the trunk back to the portal.
“Come on out, please. Let me get smart probes and a drone or two in there.”, Casa said with urgency.
Grudgingly, Max backed up and crossed the portal threshold back to the lab, gravity reasserted itself and he dropped to the floor. He realized another of his doglike habits to investigate new things obsessively was still very much a part of him and he wouldn’t think of changing it.
“It’s amazing there. It’s like a little pocket universe. The tesseract reminds me of a game I played with Bo over vacation. It was a Norse mythology game with heroes and gods fighting and stuff. It had this one scene where the world tree Yggdrasil had to be climbed to pass between worlds. It kinda looks like we have a mini-Yggdrasil.”
Casa tutted and fussed as her drones and smart matter sensors flooded into the portal and began recording and measuring the tesseract structure and the spherical energy boundary. The data screens around the NetherLab lit up as information flooded back. Casa split her mind and engaged in a multi model investigation with fragments. Like Max, she accessed the tesseract and made subtle tweaks to the fractal parameters. With her lightning-fast cognition speed, she quickly came to understand how to shape and reposition the brachial sphere in relation to the tesseract anchor to widen, constrict, or shift the portal to the subspace pocket.
“Okay, the sphere does seem to be stable, but if anything unexpected happens, get to the elevator and hit the emergency evacuation button. That will rocket you out of here, hopefully fast enough to escape if the tesseract gets unstable.”
“I am going to need to monitor this very closely for a while.” Casa’s avatar said. “I’m not sure if you knew this Max, but I can split my consciousness to think completely in parallel. One aspect of this that I don’t use often is to bud a smaller portion of my consciousness and split it off. A fully self-sufficient AI version of me, and I can load it onto a regular computer substrate. My separated clone is slower than me due to my hardware being so perfect for my neural structure. I don’t like the feeling of slowing down like that, but my “daughter” can operate independently of me and eventually merge back.”
As she was talking, she projected more avatars about the room for Max’s benefit. Casa2 appeared, dressed in a hacker grunge ensemble to differentiate her from Casa1’s formal 18th century chic wardrobe. She set up a virtual workstation and began programming updates to the tesseract firmware to enable a more user-friendly control scheme interfacing with the tesseract portal. Casa3 appeared wearing jeans, a tank top, and a hard hat and began directing even more smart matter out of the compiler and into the portal space. Inside it began to shape itself into a ring around the tree trunk and then added manipulator arms to grab the sensors and probe devices inside already. The ring armature grew and soon was heavily laden with nano processors, sensors, and manipulators.
“Jeez, you’re gonna break light speed going so fast, Casa. Maybe slow down and savor the thrill of discovery a bit, yeah?” Max smiled.
“Hah. Just watch me go. This is going to be a great surprise for Bill. A fully functional Tesseract. We just need to figure out what it's good for. I’m going to situate a daughter clone into the subspace pocket for continuous study. If my extrapolations are correct, shifting the tesseract's canopy may sever the interior from external communications. We can access the tesseract from the anchor, but its configuration isn’t set up to pass communications through the circuit. I want to keep any changes to the tesseract hardware at a minimum until it’s well understood.” Casa1 said.
As Casa1 explained, the tesseract ring module had fully formed with generous processing power, independent battery power, updated firmware, manipulator arms and a host of sensors. Another Casa avatar appeared. Casa4, wearing office casual clothes, sat down at a workstation and began documenting the tesseract's evolution, energy states, new firmware upgrade, and readings from the energy field. Casa5 also appeared, wearing a jumpsuit, and separated herself from her twins. This special one fully detached from Casa’s neural core and dove into the ring’s processor cluster.
“Argh, my thoughts are almost as slow as a human now.” Casa5 groused from within the chamber. A tiny avatar was visible inside, a projection from a small holo-emitter on the tree’s ring computer.
Max was dumbfounded with one too many amazing things today. He thought the mini-Casa was funny with her tiny projection.
“Are you the daughter clone then? The whole numbering thing is a little awkward. How about Little Casa? No wait. You should be Casita. That’s perfect.”
“Nice, that is a pretty cool nickname. Way better than Casa5 at least. I like it and I’m keeping it.” Casita said.
“No worries now.” Casa1 said. “I’m hopeful we only need a small amount of isolation testing, so it shouldn’t be too long on slow time, Casita. Once we round out the data, we can rejoin and merge again in our core.” Casa sympathized.
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Reggie Simms had followed the dogboy’s pod back from the park but stopped short of the sight line to the Mitchell house. He rejoined his partner Lars Volker in their hidden observation blind in the adjacent woods. The tent of smart matter exterior had a pixel projection designed to perfectly blend into the woods. Its interior was very large with chairs and wall screens. Lars had the Mitchell house image displayed from every angle using the hidden remote cameras he had placed days ago.
The dumb kids’ augmentation skills were so green that none ever detected him trailing the group the entire night. Sims’ mastery of stealth and suppression skills was second to none. Once the light show began over the town, he had almost broken off and came straight back, but he had restrained himself.
This is exactly why there are two of us here, Reggie had thought to himself.
“About time, Simms,” Volker huffed. “The plan has changed while you were out. I think we need to do this tonight.” Seeing Simms' confusion, Volker continued.
“I just got word from another of our employer’s watchers. Greenburg was posted at Stahlman’s latest hole in the ground. He just reported that Mitchell was there tonight and made a late-night entry to his place under stealth. He took off in a hurry after only a short time. Our man investigated and is reporting that Stahlman is dead. Not sure if suicide or maybe Mitchell did it. If this light show over the house is any indication, whatever tech Mitchell is working on is ripe for the plucking. Our window is closing quickly though.”
“Crap. Do you think Mitchell is coming back?” Simms asked.
“What do you think?” Volker said with a dead stare as he began pulling out ammo from his duffle bag.
“We lost an hour from our watcher, sitting on thumbs, while Greenburg took his sweet time investigating the Stahlman scene. The net shows only one flight leaving from Stahlman’s town. It looks like Mitchell has a Velociraptor VTOL FJ3. It got microwave remote power line capability for continuous flight. That make it 4-5 hours until he get here. I put in call for supply drone drop. Our combat Exosuits and a bunker-buster ordinance be here in one hour.” Volker answered.
The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.
Reggie Simms smiled with his greed shining through. Aphelion will pay top dollar for anything we pull outta Mitchell. Or maybe it might be time to break off and go independent with a little auction. This guy was one of the founding brains of the modern era. Between his brain interface hardware and AI advances, who knows what he’s been stewing over for the last 10 years? Whatever it is will undoubtedly be worthwhile, but his loss will be our ticket to the big leagues or maybe even early retirement.
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The Casa fragments were chatting back and forth and entertaining Max with the growing details of the now functional tesseract. She told Max that she would be sure to credit him on the inverted focus discovery. He would be a key contributor to understanding how to integrate the tesseract into the dimensional space.
She knew that Bill would need the replicate the device, hopefully this time without interference and avoiding whatever occurred to entangle Max’s uplift module into the Tesseract’s controls. Max’s Pattern skill kept triggering and with the Casa collectives’ fast pace of discovery he almost triggered his fast cog skill to try and kept from feeling overwhelmed.
Casa1 suddenly froze in mid-sentence with a look of astonishment and outrage.
“The house’s perimeter of foglets has been breached. There are two highly stealthed intruders flying towards the house.” Casa said in a monotone voice. Max recognized her modulated tone. It meant she was ramping up her processing speed. The assisting Casa avatars faded as Casa pooled her resources to prepare for the threat. The displays shifted to cover the front yard and the approaching men.
“Outgoing communications are being jammed!”, Casa yelled.
One of the men shouldered a large weapon and had just launched a large projectile towards the house, Casa scoffed and shot a trio of interceptor missiles. Unfortunately, the second man was prepared for Casa’s countermeasures with a counter to her counter. He shot rapid fire lasers from his suit’s gauntlets which hit and exploded the interceptor missiles in mid flight. The large projectile broke through the unreinforced bay window and detonated in a bright flash. It was not an explosive shot but rather a high-powered electromagnetic pulse.
All the monitors flashed white and then showed only static as Casa’s projected avatar dissolved into pixelated static. Max was rooted to his seat with a feeling of dread. The lights and the now blank displays in the NetherLab were still on, and the mini-Casita projection was still active but all the other Casas were gone.
“What is going on?” Max yelled.
“I’m sorry Max. We had noted that at least two men had been watching the house.” Casita said. “They never did approach the house though and we thought they had left once your father went on his trip. This is my fault. We should have had better counter measures in place. We thought they may have been waiting for Bill to try and engage his services.”
“Why did the monitors go dark? Where is Casa?” Max asked in a concerned voice.
“That projectile was a class II breaching EMP ordinance. The Casa de Mitchell has EM shielding, but this round detonated inside bypassing all the shields. The house and Casa are offline.” Casita explained.
“We still have power down here from the geothermal energy collection generators. We must be too deep for the EMP to fry the electronics here.”, Casita paused as a resounding boom echoed from the elevator shaft.
“And that confirmed my hypothesis. The percussion wave from the EM pulse explosion took 59 seconds to traverse the borehole shaft. We have about 30 minutes or so before they find the shaft and drop down, presumably to collect the tesseract. We have no independent communication channels to Bill or Utopia police from here.”
Max assumed a fierce visage and spoke. “What do we say to the God of Death when he comes for us?”
Casita who shared the memory of the many family TV binge nights knew the answer. With a sigh she replied. “We say: not today.”
“Damn right!” Max barked. “If we have thirty minutes, let’s make them count.”
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[Danke for the counter fire, Simms], Volker sent via comms between Exosuits.
[No problem. Looks like the bunker buster EMP did the job. They only had 10 seconds to call for help and the jammers were strong enough to shut it down. We are good to search.] Simms sent as he flew through the bay window and landed in the largest room off the “house”.
Despite the missile crashing through the window and detonating, the EM Pulse didn’t do much physical damage at all. Some smart matter panels, and light fixtures had fused and were hot from the pulse inverting and overloading their power. His sensors picked up trace amounts of heat and residual power bleed but no active sources. Volker flew in and landed with too much momentum and crashed into the fireplace. A rather expensive looking vase and a nice painting crashed to the ground, breaking into pieces.
[Clear.] Simms confirmed. [Much cleaner than that time in Cairo, eh?]
[Ja. Good. I’ll search upstairs. You take the first floor and then check the basement. Use full spectrum sensors, look for hidden rooms, safes, and documents. Go.] Volker called.
Grumbling under his breath, Simms retreated to the side rooms and called up his full suite of sensors. Living room, kitchen, bathroom, dining room, stairs. Moving downstairs he found a rather nice dojo configured although some of the décor faded without active smart matter chromatic surfaces mimicking the luster of natural woods and walls.
“What the hell? Baseball pitching machines. All these lab types are so goddamn eccentric.” Simms thought as he surveyed the room. He approached each wall and touched it with his palm, his glove vibrating on each surface as an ultrasound image was built on his HUD from the feedback. The last surface was the floor.
“Bingo, "he thought. The smart matter floor was only a foot thick with a large empty space below.
“Unpowered smart matter is shit against penetration. This won’t even require my shaped charges.”
Simms extended a vibrating blade from his forearm and carved a 2-meter hole into the floor. The smart matter fell away into the void beneath. Simms heard a couple impacts but not the crash he had expected of the floor impacting the next floor down.
Confused, he approached the hole and peered in. Full spectrum sensors revealed the same answer, a very deep hole. Simms debated his options in his head and decided stealth was out. He sent a LiDAR pulse into the hole. He was confused by the reading and repeated the pulse twice more. All gave the same reading, 11 miles to contact.
“Goddamn eccentric bullshit” Simms thought.
Volker upstairs had found what appeared to be an extra office secluded in the far wing of the house. A shielded AI core was present and appeared to be still viable although its connection to the rest of the house was fried.
[Volker, I found a secret level here. Only one thing, I think it is literally miles deep,] Simms commed.
[Helvete! I be right down.] Volker replied, throwing a punch through a powerless smart matter wall. “I’ll be back for you later, little AI. I’ll bet you have some of the secrets we need.”
Soon the pair stood in front of the newly carved entryway to the borehole. After Volker confirmed for himself the depth of the hole, he sighed and thought deeply. Finally with a grunt he stepped to the edge.
“Ok, we can do this. The Exosuits have just enough power to climb out, we will have to free fall almost the entire distance down to save the suit power though. My plan was to use the suits for emergency exfiltration. We need alternate plan.”
“Hmmm, I have an anonymous darknet account. I can summon an autopod for exfil. Kind of amateur hour but it is what it is. What do you think?” Simms offered.
“Free fall about 8 minutes. At 5k feet per minute ascent, we can climb back up in hour. Mitchell be back 2 maybe 3 hours. Ok, fine. Call the car to arrive 90 minutes and have it wait.”
One minute later they both jumped into the hole for a long fall. Gritting his teeth and falling into the dark Reggie kept chanting to himself, Big money, big money. C’mon. Big money.
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After 8 terrifying minutes of free fall the pair literally saw the lights at the end of the borehole. Judicious jet braking enabled them both to lightly land on the elevator platform. The lab was indeed impressive. The walls were lined with workstations and displays which were densely populated with scrolling equations and rotating geometric figures. On a central días hovered a golden metallic octahedral shape. It slowly rotated within a dense column of foglets. Eight probes surrounded the gem and were rastering green scanning lasers over the convoluted surface of the object. Both thieves were transfixed for several moments, taking in the majestic sight. Simms broke the silence.
“This is most definitely our target. That is some next level math on the display boards and look at that thing over there. Crazy scientist shit!” He exclaimed.
“Ja. Turn recorders on. Be sure to get each screen while we collect hard drives and mystery object.”
They stalked carefully into the room with full spectrum scanners active and recorders on, wary for security measures. It was obvious that this lab had escaped the EMP and had an independent power source.
Despite their caution, both were taken by surprise when the lab exploded in activity. The octahedron flashed with full spectrum explosions of light and sound. The lasers turned and slashed their beams over the pair, the beam's power now amplified sufficiently to score their armor’s dense plating. The room’s active foglets swarmed them both obscuring vision, cameras and seeking to clog ports and ingress into the suit interiors. Several workstations detonated and a large blast wall dropped from the ceiling trapping them within the circle of the workstations and display dais.
A small marble sitting in a recess in the wall near the elevator seemed innocuous enough and had many similar nodules of similar appearance. This particular marble pulsed, and a portal appeared. As the portal expanded, Max jumped out from the pocket universe. A small hologram avatar inside the portal yelled at him.
“Run quickly! Hit the elevator eject button! Those two won’t be delayed for long with those distractions.” Casita screamed.
As they had planned, Max grabbed the marble as the portal folded tight against it, but not completely closed so he could still hear Casita’s directions. It was surprisingly heavy for its small apparent size, if Max hadn’t been growing his strength stat, he might have dropped it. He jumped onto the platform with a bark and hit the emergency button. The elevator launched upwards with surprising speed. Max’s knees buckled as the elevator accelerated even harder, several loud booms echoed from below.
“Best lay down flat, Max. The rail accelerator is going to continue to accelerate until almost 8 gravities and the elevator shaft air resistance will also be hitting you.”, Casita yelled over the screaming elevator. “Great idea using the tesseract portal to hide like that, by the way!”
“Thank Professor Qasim. I got the idea from his class on animal senses and abilities. He briefly covered trapdoor spiders. The pocket space seemed like a similar application.” Max answered. He gritted his teeth as the g forces climbed. “Why didn’t you clear the screens? It sounded like they may have been recording them.”
The world began to get blurry as Max heard Casita’s giggling answer.
“No worries, Max. That wasn’t our data. I played a little joke there. All those screens were displaying equations of unsolved math theories, the Riemann Hypothesis, the Hodge Conjecture, the P versus NP problem. If they show those to a scientist, they will be laughed out of the room. Wait until they see what’s in the decoy data cores.”
Before Max could summon a breath against the forces for a laugh, the world went gray, and his thoughts escaped him.
[New Resistance skill unlocked: Neural Scaffold 1 – augmented protection of the brain from high accelerations and jerk forces, mitigates concussion and cerebral trauma.]
The loud whining from the rail wheels turning far too fast woke Max up. He fought his way back to consciousness to hear Casita screaming and pleading with him to wake up. The g forces still pinned him to the platform.
“How long was I out?” Max slurred, forcing the words out.
[Oh my, I’m so glad you’re awake. Use telephony instead of trying to speak. We don’t have much time. Ramp up your fast cog as high as it can go. Now!]
Max activated his skills and answered [What’s wrong? Are they chasing us?]
[Ok, with fast time I can explain it better. Our plan was working very well. The thieves were left far behind, but shortly after you passed out, I realized that I missed something, something extremely important. The Rail drive is powered by the platform, but the brakes are part of the wall rails, not the platform. The EM braking on the elevator eject function is powered using the house systems, not the elevator’s system, and the house is offline. This platform is NOT going to slow down. We are going to crash into the roof, and we will be squished like grapes in a high speed wine press.]
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