Seconds tick by as the neurons in Bill’s brain, Casa’s neural architecture, and the daemons fired in unison. Max’s noises of anticipation added to the sound of the Casimir Stack spinning up to relativistic speed with intense power.
The Casimir Stack began to vibrate, the monitor confirming the frame dragging shield effect was building. Like the last test, the flywheel and Casimir Stack pulled the first fusion reactor power load down by 70%.
“Spin up complete, Casimir Stack is spooling out now!” Bill yelled, unable to dampen his excitement. The stack shifted its planes like a deck of cards, forming two concentric cones with a thin slice of true vacuum between them. The power reserves dropped another 10%. “Separation,” Bill announced as the next step was initiated. The reality-blurring spin velocity of the nested cones prevented the virtual particles from flooding the true vacuum as distance opened between the spinning cones. “Initiating the Tesseract circuit program!”
The polymorphic sphere was shot up into the gap created by the unfurled Casimir Stack, with a high bandwidth two-way communications laser connecting the sphere back to the Casa de Mitchell.
The sphere froze in place in the center of the Casimir Stack, held aloft in a field of electromagnetic power, as the Tesseract Circuit iterated through configurations. The magnetic flux generated by the flywheel is indicative that the true vacuum state is near, but the frame drag field, while sufficient to hold out interference, was still unstable.
The first fusion reactor quickly spiked to 100% capacity and the second already reached 70% and was climbing 5% every second. With the energy drain continuing to ramp, Bill decided he needed extra processing power to drive and guide the active evolution of the circuit.
“Casa, activate the reserve Tycho and Star Link assistance! We need to find the correct configuration for locking the tesseract before we run out of power!” Bill bellowed over the building resonance of the flywheel.
‘[On it!]” Casa sent.
Bill could sense the evolutions multiply by tenfold with his merged sense of the processors, adaptively responding to configuration’s effect on the tesseract field’s strength. Bill was worried that he was missing some key variable. Some insight to stabilizing the multidimensional structure was lacking. The power draw quickly maxed the second fusion reactor and Sam deftly shunted the overages to the third, which began a swift climb in its utilization.
The tesseract circuit glowed within the field created by the Casimir field. It briefly flickered from sight and then reappeared. Even with his cognition speed maxed, Bill felt like he was moving in molasses. His spirits began to drop as the tesseract blinked again but the field strength began to fluctuate. Even with his cognition overclocking, Bill could see the power continue to spike visibly. It shot past the capacity of the third Hercules and swiftly depleted the capacitor banks. The power sinks began to pull from the links to Tranquility, dangerously close to overload.
Bill began thinking of the right way to begin an emergency shut down. He had microseconds before the power load exceeded safety margins and started to draw down the Casa de Mitchell. The excitement was too much for Max who began to whine. Bill got ready to bark out shut down orders when some of his computational channels were lost.
No, not lost, he thought, obstructed.
Bill’s body and mental modification gave him an intrinsic and visual awareness of the flow and turn of programming executions to enable him to understand his work on multiple levels, conscious and subconscious, logical and intuitive. Bill did not understand what was happening in the tesseract evolution heuristic. Whole areas of logic pathways dropped out of his control, but he could still see them in his monitoring taps. The processing did not taper off. It was in fact ramping up even higher.
Bill, Casa, and even Max experienced a mental pressure as their own augmentations were pulled into the occluded calculations. Bill felt a frisson of fear as something insubstantial and immense seemed to loom over them all. Bill’s sense of self diminished as his awareness expanded. He found his thoughts clarified and felt so much more than his body could contain. He could sense Casa as a component of his thoughts and Max was there as well. A deep growl told Bill that Max felt the intrusion as well.
Then there was even more, a vastness of understanding that brought true understanding of the fluxing circuit. As he lost himself, he was profoundly aware of the tesseract circuit design, as the model flowered into different configurations that were hard to visualize and impossible to describe. The circuit was vibrating and bifurcating in a fractal pattern into the new dimensions available to it. Suddenly the struggling tesseract solution set rocketed to 100% stable.
Bill screamed in triumph and, with a supreme effort to focus, he cut both the communications laser and power. Twinkling under the starry sky at the base of the crater, the Casimir field had collapsed revealing the tesseract module as the flywheel spun down and the pieces of the Casimir stack were littered about the area.
Bill felt lost and alone. He felt so much smaller now. He could hear Max whining slightly in his audio. He struggled to remember the key insights he was on the verge of capturing, but the images faded from his supposedly perfect memory augmentations. From kilometers away, the floor of the crater still vibrated as the tired flywheels lost the last of their spin and a profound silence settled on the base.
“Casa,” Bill said in a serious and subdued voice, “I think we finally did it. What do you think?
“[I think]” came the reply, interrupted by a great rumble from beneath their feet, “[The Tesseract is reading as stable]
“Yes, the readings look good,” replied Bill proudly and with a satisfied smile, “I was worried there, even with the massive additions we almost exceeded our power again. We need to inspect the tesseract and see what we have created.”
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Bill was a war hardened veteran and had significant augmentations built into his body. Very little of his original biology remained. His digestive system was gone and replaced with internal power and nanotech recycling capabilities. Muscles, bones, skin and more…all replaced with adaptive polymorphic matter. His brain was one of the few remnants of his biological self, but even it was heavily modified with computational and memory modules to augment his capabilities. His brain itself was laced with scaffolding to both protect it from acceleration shock as well as monitoring and recording backup patterns for his brain. Even in the event of complete destruction, a backup copy was made on a regular basis. Humans in 2123 were incredibly hard to kill, but that capability was a double-edged sword.
Governments, laws, and even common sense had not fully come to terms with some of the more potent uses of advanced technology. Backups made sense but duplicates were also possible, and that was where some basic norms were challenged. If you have a duplicate running side by side with the original, who has the rights to property and identity? Splitting up work was fine but splitting up income was more likely to cause conflict. Personal relationships brought such concern into an even more fraught potential for confusion and issues. Rather than confront the intellectual, emotional, and even spiritual issues most of Earth had quietly refused to contemplate such possibilities
Bill, however, had embraced body modification early and consistently pushed the boundaries. While he had refrained from running two active copies, he did have a couple backup bodies stored in remote locations and kept them updated with current neuronal maps.
Bill had once died, presumably due to ship malfunction. His backup was automatically activated by a Deadman program when he was no longer able to submit a new backup per schedule. A glitch in the program had activated two Bills simultaneously, so the Bills had experienced the unique event of merging the paired memories of both of his copies.
That scenario had played out well enough, but Bill was rightly concerned that if any copy diverged too much they might decide that merging was not in their best interests. Bill was smart enough to be very much afraid of matching wits with himself over conflicts about his considerable holdings, networks, and family. He had significant skills and experience with modern war fighting and dirty tricks using modern technology. He had always come out just a little quicker, smarter, and better prepared than his adversaries. But to play against himself would be a coin flip, and Bill did not like to gamble.
“Casa, can you execute scenario 3?” Bill asked.
“[Of Course,]” Casa replied, and streamers of utility fog jetted from the Casa de Mitchell. The foglets were microscopic nanobots. If one were examined under a microscope, it would appear like a tiny sea urchin in shape. But each had an embedded computer with crude drone level intelligence. They could be controlled wirelessly as well as via physical connections.
Each spine of a foglet could attach to each of the other foglets, pivot, and extend or retract. As a mass of connected nodes, they could mimic structures. While somewhat weak compared to modern nanomaterials, they could change shape and density very fast. They could assume the various phases of matter, mimicking gas, fluids, or solids and change on the fly.
Under planetary conditions, the spines could affect a weak motility like the natural expansion of gas but with directional steerage as the motes would bounce off the air molecules in the desired direction of travel.
Bill looked on with satisfaction as the mote stream was shot across the full width of the test site. The mote stream had little to no drop in the weak lunar gravity as they were directed along the entire perimeter. When they impacted the crater walls, they altered their connection from fluid to solid, organizing into crossing struts of wispy material.
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Sam, seeing the activity, directed the outpost’s stocks of foglets to join the stream and slaved their control to Casa. The bottom of the deep crater filled in as the motes congealed and joined up, eventually laying down enough mass to form a complete sheet of foglets covering the crater bottom in the test area. Once assembled, the motes reformed their top facing struts of polymatter into placards of adjustable reflectivity.
Casa used her connections to the Amundsen outpost to view the crater from above with the crater wall sensors and used them to tune and adjust the foglets until they created an image identical to the real crater bottom, but 10 meters higher, hiding the ship, the hanger, and most importantly the experiment staging area. The camouflage wouldn’t fool advanced LiDAR or radar scans, but casual telescope observations from Earth and its satellites would not see anything amiss.
Bill looked around the crater, satisfied with the job done.
“Alright Casa”, he said with a satisfied smirk. “We’ve got ourselves a hidey-hole. Now let’s set up a perimeter. Better safe than sorry.”
“Auto Turrets and sensor stations around the device. Disengage half the ordinance from Casa de Mitchell and set them up at intervals around the crater. Sam, maybe Max can help you round up drones and servitors from Amundsen base and set them to roving the crater?”
With affirmatives from Casa, Sam, and Max, Bill turned inward and met with his council of daemons in his virtual memory palace. His prime daemons, specialty AI expert systems, stood together in his meeting chamber. His cast of characters included a recreation of General George Patton who stood at attention. A strategic advisor and warfare expert, Bill had needed far too often in when keeping the peace Earthside. Ada Lovelace - another historical reenactment persona, helped Bill to stay current with AI systems and programming. The soft-spoken Miyamoto Musashi was a tactical master and his combat trainer. Leo, originally modeled after Leonardo DaVinci, was an advisor on design and engineering. Bill had updated his mannerisms to modern times as the aesthetics of his Renaissance Era Italian language had grated on his nerves after a few years. Virgil, a character Bill had taken from the story Dante’s Inferno, was tasked with the role to argue alternatives and employ game theory and ethics to ensure Bill made good decisions. Finally, Moneta was an expert in law, culture, languages, and business.
“George and Miyamoto, can you please take charge of the turrets, sensors, and drones to secure the base? Leo and Ada, I need you to help me modify a reconnaissance drone to inspect our work more closely. I’m not sure if the ZPE event was a delayed reaction or not, but we should maintain some distance just in case our working theories are inaccurate. Moneta, please settle our accounts for the exported processing and power. Also, please monitor the networks to see if anyone picked up on our activities here. We just spent more money or used more power than a small country uses in a year, it’s unlikely to have gone unnoticed.”
Turning to Virgil Bill asked, “How was my assessment? And did I miss anything?”
Virgil cleared his throat and spoke in a deep, sonorous voice, “O Bill, thy prudence is admirable, and thy foresight commendable. Yet, methinks thou hast overlooked a crucial matter. Verily, thou must refresh thy backups just in case, and do the same for thy companions, Sam, Max, and Casa as well. Remember, O Bill, that the path to safety is paved with caution and diligence.”
Bill nodded slowly. Bill had left Virgil’s speech pattern as traditional. Taking the time to fully understand his archaic style helped slow Bill down to appreciate his advice properly.
“Excellent point Virgil, thank you. Let’s not take any chances. We’ll back up before anything else.” He turned back to the team. “Alright everyone, let’s get to work!”
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Bill cranked up his subjective cognition rate to its maximum, about 50 times faster than an unaugmented human. He worked with Leo and Ada to speed through the process of creating a remote drone with a suite of sensors to interrogate the tesseract.
Leo said “The issue here is our lack of knowledge of the nature of the evolved object. If it has any signs of ZPE energies or dimensional stresses, we’ll want to stay far away.”
Ada added. “We are hoping for a dimensional warp, correct? It could be very dangerous to approach. We should send the drone carefully and slowly; it may not function correctly. We don’t know what physics may even apply.”
As Bill reviewed the data from the fabrication event, he became more and more concerned. He called back his council and then isolated the daemons in a virtual sandbox and revealed another concern.
“We may have another problem. Perhaps a much greater problem than the dangers we know about. I’ve reviewed the activation events carefully and the final configuration of the tesseract circuit is strange in several ways. The data regarding the sensor feedback and resulting modifications are strange. They don’t look like any other evolutionary programs I’ve used previously. The iterations are all over the place. Some of the changes are completely off the normal progression path.”
Leo asked, “What do you mean, Bill, are you suggesting that this isn’t natural?
“Exactly,” Bill stated. “I believe there is something else, something external, that took at least partial control of the construction of the tesseract. This was not the evolutionary heuristic program we had loaded. I felt something in the last seconds of the test. Something a lot bigger than myself, Casa, and Max together. I’ve been away for a long time, but someone else was in our processing merger. It would explain the anomalous behavior we witnessed during the experiment which had every indication of failing to stabilize, but something changed the configuration and managed to stabilize it.”
“I sensed the intrusion in our processing space as well.” Ada confirmed. “There was a breakdown in the formal configuration management logic being applied. Some of the iterations were truly inspired and creative. Who could do such a thing?”
“Exactly my concern,” Bill said. “I know I’m not a pinnacle hacker, but the Samaritans are supposed to manage and recruit talent. I’m concerned with what the intruder may have learned. I need to talk to some of the Samaritans. Hell! One of them may have done it. We’ve had members go bad in the past.”
Virgil's countenance grew grave as he spoke, "It doth appear that we may be faced with a hazard of great magnitude, one that extendeth beyond our own selves. This may indeed be a calamity for the entire world if this knowledge escapeth into evil hands."
Ada considered the parameters of the problem before her and added, "I do believe the most prudent course of action would be to endeavor to track the hacker’s activity and ascertain who it may be. Your Samaritan contemporaries may be of assistance. If they can be trusted."
“Damn, we need more information to proceed. Please refrain from any open communications about the testing. Who knows what this jerk may be capable of?”
Ada stepped forward, "I shall endeavor to create a series of one-time pad sequences utilizing randomly generated noise, further hashed with unpredictable factors. This intelligence will be thwarted, for one-time codes are impervious to decryption. Thus, we shall be able to communicate briefly in dire circumstances. Pray, let us apprise Casa of this development. Methinks she may also be of a questioning disposition regarding the event, as were you, William."
Virgil commented "Verily, this doth trouble us greatly, and with utmost care and haste must we proceed. Methinks, it would be prudent to commence our efforts by diligently monitoring all public channels and keeping a keen eye for any telltale signs of nefarious machinations."
Bill nodded “Good idea, we might get lucky and stumble across something that can help us out. For now, let’s concentrate on the tesseract and our mission, but I don’t want anyone downplaying the importance of this intrusion. If this person meddled once, they could still be watching. While we must proceed as if we are unaware of the interference. I don’t want to change our experiment. This work is extremely dangerous, and I have no desire to follow MIT’s fate.”
“Alright.” Bill said, “Thank you all again for your help. Please get to it.” and then Bill opened the sandbox returning them to the virtual work area.
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The inspection drone design was completed and quickly fabricated in the Casa de Mitchell’s nano-foundry. The world at large seemed to have missed any signs of the dimensional event. The base had been reconfigured with active defenses, which was a violation of the Lunar treaty. Per Virgil’s advice, most of the devices were made to appear like standard public networked mining drones and drilling equipment.
Days dragged by and the excitement from the test and the creation of the Tesseract slowly turned to frustration. Multiple inspections and reconfigurations were done to add more variety of sensors to its analysis, but all yielded the same result - the tesseract was stable and had power. Unfortunately, the intended purpose of the Tesseract, to provide a functional wedge into the foundation of reality, seemed to be lacking. The tesseract circuit thought it was producing a field of stabilized n-dimensional space, but no spatial defects or fields could be detected around it.
“Any ideas?" Bill asked Casa and his daemons, “we fed this little beast more than 1.21 gigawatts of power. There is no evidence of dimensional instability, no virtual zero-point energy emanating for cheap power, and no hyperspace portals. All the potentials from our theories seem to be falling short.”
“Bill, we far exceeded 1.21 gigawatts. Are you sure that you are ok?” Casa asked, as Bill had snickered.
“Ugh, it was a joke. I need to show you some old movies from years ago. So much goodness, it’ll melt your circuits.” Bill joked.
Bill sighed with exhaustion as the inspection drone came back to the hanger with the tesseract in its claws. Left unspoken by the group was the unknown effects from the interference in the tesseract’s creation. Bill grabbed the tesseract from the drone as it trundled in. A multifaceted polymorphic circuit lit from within with captured power. It was heavier than its small size presented, having shrunk from its previous 3-meter diameter size to less than an inch in diameter.
“A clue perhaps?” Bill wondered out loud hefting the tesseract marble, “Is the rest of the device extended into other dimensions?”
Virgil pondered for a moment and then spoke, "Verily, we cannot be certain. For all the power that we may bestow upon it, this doth seem to be the sole measurable outcome. It doth seem to be a firm boundary on our undertaking."
Then Ada spoke, "Perchance this is not a failure at all. Mayhap it doth merely require an elevation in its threshold of energy ere it may present with a discernible physical effect."
Moneta chimed in, “Apologies, Bill, but I must caution you that your liquidity has taken a significant blow from setting up this base, procuring fuel, and negotiating for extra processing power. It would be unwise to proceed with another of your gigawatt events until we replenish your available capital. Fortunately, your patent royalties for brain computer interfaces, custom nano foundries, and body 2.0 design plans on the public networks continue to generate income. However, it will take time to build up your credit again if you require similar power and processing support from Tranquility."
“Fine,” said Bill “Let me think on this. I’m overdue to return to Earth to meet up with my kids and the ex for an extended vacation. We can pick up Mira at Tranquility University and take the Casa de Mitchell down to Utopia. Max is approaching a decisive point in his uplift procedure. Fortunately, I’ve already paid for it before spending all my saving on this boondoggle. I hope he likes it.”
“[Time for more play?]” Max whuffed.
“Yes indeed, Max. We can hang out here for a couple weeks until Mira is done with classes.” Bill replied.
“Everyone, let's keep this little experiment and all its complications under wraps for a bit but spend your uptime working on the theories and next steps while my accounts accrue.”
“Sam, the base in your capable hands. I think we are done with using it for research. What’s your next step once we break down all the experimental staging?”
“Excellent! Now that you’re done, I’ll roll out the changes I projected earlier. I may need to order some bio matter chemicals. I had a brainstorm while you were doing your test. The final piece to make this a truly magical retreat. Massive amounts of butterflies!” Sam said.
“I think I will fit right in as the hostess.” Sam winked and left, whirling with her colorful butterfly wings into the hangar’s upper reaches.
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