Mount Lago Complex: Subterranean Level 8
Mount Lago, Pasayten Wilderness, Oregon
Monday, April 8th, 10:15 AM
Sam Katsuyama barely remembered her godmother Nariko promising to keep her safe, and pressing her tear-stained face against hers, on the day her mother died.
Sam had a much clearer memory of the day she kissed her first boy, under the metal frame bleachers in the gym her father had bought for her high school.
That same day, she came home to find Nariko crying again.
The moment was seared in Sam’s brain. When your mother is dead and your father visits you twice a month, it leaves an impression when the woman who raised you holds you and sobs uncontrollably.
Her godmother had told teenage Samantha she was okay, that her tears were joyful, but that didn’t calm the girl’s fear. It was only when Nariko stopped crying and starting gushing about tethering quanta and creating a subatomic bridge that Sam could finally go back to thinking how nice Tomatsu’s lips had felt on hers.
Back in the present, Sam hoped she would not see her godmother cry today.
Sam stood at the base of a metal staircase twenty feet behind three rows of 1960’s-era, NASA style computer workstations complete with screens glowing with green type. They filled the center of the room, split down the middle by a wide aisle. The cavernous subterranean space looked even more out of time lit by a dozen-plus crisp, bright laptop screens open along the length of the multi-seat steel workstations.
Sam leaned to her left, towards the man standing beside her. “Are you sure we’re ready?” she murmured.
Dr. Daniel Polter took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “We can do it.”
“Give me one technical reason to stop the clock-”
“There isn’t one,” Polter said. “Everything’s ready. We’ve done every test. Believe me, I looked. So has Dr. Yoshida, so has everyone on the team. We can do this.”
“Fine,” Sam growled. “So long as you’re sure.”
She still didn’t know why their hosts had demanded the test be moved up four days. Everyone she asked, every way she asked, resulted in the same vague answer: National Security.
Let it go, she told herself. Focus on what you can control. Which, at the moment, she had to admit wasn’t much.
“It still feels like a movie set,” she whispered, staring up at the monochrome video screen taking up the entire far wall of the gymnasium sized room.
“Yeah,” Daniel Polter whispered back. “Like we’re extras filming ‘The Right Stuff’.”
“Or War Games,” Sam countered.
Polter stared at her in shock. “You did not just-”
“Hush, you two,” Dr. Nariko Yoshida warned, not bothering to whisper at all as she paced in front of her laptop, set up just to the left of the aisle on the closest row of workstations.
Since their arrival at Mount Lago six days ago, the entire Katsuyama corporation team had followed Dr. Yoshida’s lead and claimed the left side of the room. By unspoken agreement their US government counterparts had taken over the right side of the room and it had stayed that way ever since.
Daniel made a face and chuckled. “Busted by the boss,” he said and walked over to his project chief.
“Hey, I’m the boss!” Samantha stage-whispered after him. He waved dismissively over his shoulder and kept walking.
Since before they’d arrived in the US, Sam and Daniel had been name-dropping movie titles. The contest was inspired as much by the super-secret, super-antique facility that Project Tanjō now called home as it was by the next-level Artificial Intelligence experiment it had been retooled to house.
Polter had started the contest back when Uncle Sam, invoking National Security, had forced Sam to pick an alternate location for the project. The first title he riffed on -‘Dr. Strangelove’- played on Mount Lago’s cold war vibes, but they weren’t here to destroy the world, just to boot up a computer.
Samantha watched Polter lean in to whisper to Dr. Yoshida. He scratched nervously at the sun-burnt and peeling bald spot on the top of his head. She knew how the fifty-something scientist felt. Everyone on the left of the aisle felt the same.
Across the aisle, Dr. Leandro Morales clapped his hands theatrically. “Okay people, five minutes on the clock! Prepare your final systems check!” The five members of oDNI’s geek squad settled in front of their own laptops.
Up on the dusty old jumbo- tron, the line of white text on black background at the top changed to read:
Project Tanjō
Test 1
00:04:59
“I knew this breakthrough would happen since I read you’re early papers on heuristics in double-blind dataset modeling,” Dr. Morales said to Nariko. A huge, awkward grin was plastered to his face. “And here I am, at your side, on the day you change the world.”
Sam rolled his eyes. Morales. What a blowhard. Nari said the chief scientist for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence was actually quite brilliant, but all Sam saw was a butt-kissing royal pain in an italian shirt and suit vest.
“Thank you, Doctor,” Dr. Yoshida said, nodding coolly in return. “but I believe it is customary to complete the test before praising the results.”
“Fatality!” muttered a new voice in Sam’s ear, in a deep bass. She turned to see the project’s lawyer, Suyao Zhang, standing on the step above her–bringing her up to Sam’s eye-level. “Dear Leader put him down!”
“I’m your dear leader,” Sam retorted automatically. “Why do I have to keep reminding people today?”
“Yeah, okay,” Suyao said dismissively.
Sam fought to keep the grin off her face. The five-foot-four Chinese lawyer conveyed the perfect image of professionalism in public, but under her poker face she was anything but.
Morale’s face had frozen in polite mode at Nariko’s low-key rebuke. “O-of course,” he agreed. “I just wanted to say–to wish you good luck.” He turned back to his laptop, then immediately about-faced. “But you don’t need luck. I’ve read everything you’ve published, and I’m cleared for the classified stuff too. I’m the guy Washington sends to explain your work to the joint chiefs and President, that’s how I know that this is! Uh. Going to work,” he clarified.
“Did he just humble-brag his way through a compliment?” Suyao asked Sam.
Sam elbowed the lawyer and fought valiantly to keep the smile from turning into a laugh.
“Thank you, Dr. Morales,” Dr. Yoshida replied coolly again, then turned and called to her team. “Prepare to begin.”
Polter cleared his throat. “Four minutes to initialization,” he announced, and bent to his laptop to the left of Nariko. The researchers working under them did the same in the second row.
Here we go, Sam thought, feeling a little thrill race up and down her spine. She reminded herself they were just turning on a computer.
The most expensive computer system ever built.
The only computer ever designed to crunch numbers across multiple realities.
Multiple realities. That still made Sam’s head hurt, no matter how often Nariko tried to explain it. To her, the whole ‘multiverse’ idea was sci-fi movie territory.
The wall-screen was broken up like a checker-board, but into different sized squares. The biggest square, perhaps a quarter of the entire screen, showed a washed-out, realtime camera view of the floor directly below them.
Sub-level 9 had once been filled with antique machines, a miracle of outdated tech. Diesel generators to power the subterranean complex for months in the event of a surface power interruption. Custom-built filtration systems to scrub the air of the poisonous diesel fumes, if the base ever had to be sealed. Massive water purification tanks designed to keep hundreds of humans alive for months in the event of invasion, or nuclear attack.
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All of that stuff was gone, now. In their place, the entire floor’s six-hundred square meters was now filled with servers.
Well, not just servers, Sam thought, reflecting on the minor miracle she had pulled off: the server farm had also been plumbed with water-cooling pipes, quadruple-redundant power systems, fibre-optic trunk lines chunky enough to satisfy much of the internet-addicted population of the Eastern seabord of the United States… and two metal and plastic monstrosities, one the size of a luxury SUV, the other the size of a small school bus.
Polter called them ‘the footballs’.
“Three minutes,” shouted Morales. “Everbody, look sharp!” As if every eye in the room wasn’t already watching the numbers ticking down on the monitor above their heads.
Sam was watching too, although physics wasn’t her thing, and neither was computer science, really.
No, Sam’s ‘thing’ was logistics. That was the reason she was a senior VP at a fortune 500 corporation. Business deals lived or died by fulfilling contracts, and making legendary business deals had made her something of a legend in Japan. She had made those legendary business deals because she understood, better than any other exec at the company, that it didn’t matter how great your product was if you couldn’t get it to the customer on time, and under budget.
Getting things done -and making a profit doing it- was also a big part of the reason Sam Katsuyama was eight stories underground at the moment.
It sure wasn’t nepostism, she thought bitterly: ‘dear old dad’ would have given away her corner office in a heartbeat if she stopped making things happen fas ter and better than all the other sharks in business suits that lusted after her compensation package and her top-floor office with the wall-to-ceiling view of Tokyo.
The other reason she had spent the last month feng-shui-ing the hell out of a mothballed cold-war bunker in Oregon? Her super-genius, artificial-intelligence pioneering godmother.
Unlike Tohiro Katsuyama, Nariko would never fire her, not even if she had failed to make the impossible deadline Uncle Sam demanded in exchange for funding this project…but Sam would sooner bankrupt her father’s corporation than let Nari down.
Luckily, she’d always been able to please her godmother and her CEO daddy-dearest.
The Katsuyama team and the oDNI scientists -even Morales- were quiet now, focused. Sam felt that thrill build as the minutes ticked away. Some people got bored watching geeks push keyboards, but Sam knew just enough about what was going on to be nervous and excited.
Polter would have his watchful eye on the operating temperature in the core servers of the exa-scale array beneath them: only eighty of the one thousand and sixty-four supercomputers installed below would be activated in today’s test, but if Test 1 was a success Nariko would start the twenty-four hour countdown to a launch of the full array.
Heat was the arch-enemy of server farms, which was why Sam had acquired three patents for climate control in large scale computing and one for immersion-cooled processor sheathing.
While Polter babied his servers Nariko and Morales would be focused on telemetry from the footballs. Which was where Sam’s understanding -along with, oh, ninety nine percent of the world- got a little fuzzy.
The footballs generated an ‘overlap of realities across which subatomic data could be encoded, transmitted, received and translated’.
Her godmother had tried to explain how the layers of magnetism, vacuum separation and radiation shielding kept her little miracle from breaking down, but Sam’s brain always got lost somewhere in hour two of ‘the simple version’.
Or three, sometimes.
It didn’t matter: Sam knew her strengths. She might not understand how it all worked, but she was happy to settle for finding the raw material, creating or buying the breakthroughs and hiring the geniuses Nariko’s research required to maintain her little cross-dimensional miracle.
“Two minutes to initialization,” Dr. Polter croaked, his voice thick with excitement.
Sam noticed Dr. Morales wasn’t looking at the jumbo-tron, but over her head, through the windows leading out into the hallway at the top of the stairs behind her.
She didn’t bother turning and looking. She knew what she would see if she did: oDNI Chief of Operations Arthur Kale, leaning against one of the hall windows, the arms of his ill-fitting suit crossed and wearing either a Washington-issue plastic smile or an unreadable blank expression.
Arthur Kale, who, with the blessings of his State Department, had signed the contract to fund Project Tanjō.
Arthur Kale, the jerk who had moved the project from a public office building in SIlicon Valley to this hole in the ground at the last possible moment.
Arthur Kale, the asshole who had moved the launch up ninety-six hours and wouldn’t tell her why.
No, Sam didn’t look up to see the face of her opposite number for this project. The man had been a hard negotiator, and a joyless business partner. She had held her own in the negotiations –thanks in part to a team of lawyers led by Suyao, and a team of experts led by Polter– but since the moment they had arrived in Mount Lago the man acted more like the landlord than their business partner.
Instead, Sam watched her godmother, standing absolutely still, as she always did once she committed to a course of action.
Sam felt emotion well in her chest. Pride. Awe. Fierce protectiveness mingled with plain old fear.
This was not a test they could run again. This was one and done.
“One minute,” Nariko called out, her sure voice ringing with faith and certainty.
Twenty-plus years of Nariko’s life -and billions in private research and development- hinged on the outcome of this test. Either Nariko’s team succeeded in sent data into that bridge between realities, and collected more data coming out of it, or they didn’t.
If they didn’t succeed, it could be the end of a great many careers on both sides of the aisle… but if the footballs did what they had been designed to do, then careers would be made.
A successful phase one test would see the server array transmit millions of operations into the smaller of the footballs, and receive exponentially more operations back from it.
It sounded like the basis for every pyramid scheme ever -something for nothing- but Nari’s theory couldn’t be refuted.
On paper.
Everone in this room was gambling that the electrical impulses sent into the football would be calculated in countless realities at once.
Nari had perfected the technology to store the nexus point of multiple realities decades ago. The hard part had been building an outer sensor net that could reliably transfer electrical impulses in a way that computers could use for their calculations. That had taken most of Nari’s waking hours in the years and decades since.
Well, except for the time she had spent raising Sam.
Tomorrow’s test would bring all the servers online and engage the second football and, theoretically, exceed the processing power of every server on the planet combined.
Yeah, Sam thought, I’d call that making history.
If it worked.
If it didn’t work? If the footballs couldn’t work together to send electrical information reliably and consistently to other dimensions and receive them back, there were no more footballs to test. Katsuyama Corporation had run twice-yearly attempts to capture and stabilize additional quantum entanglements, but these were the only two systems that ever worked.
Which meant, Sam had two days to make the scientist’s life’s work come alive.
Literally.
Tanjō did mean ‘birth’, after all.
Nariko Yoshida wasn’t ever going to be satisfied by creating a faster computer. Since before she’d become a scientist, this had been her goal: to create a real thinking machine.
Truly sentient artificial life.
When the countdown overhead reached its final ten seconds, humans did what they always did, and the room rang out with human voices counting down to zero, manifesting their desire to the universe with every tick of the clock.
When the clock struck zero the automated boot sequence commenced. The room went silent as a new rectangle appeared on the jumbo-tron. A moment later, a stream of code began to fill the screen: line after line of startup commands and responses.
Then the screen went black, save for a tiny, flashing rectangle of light.
As one, the room held its breath.
Then, a graph appeared, displaying the operations being performed by the servers in the room below.
It took three seconds for the utilization to hit 100%.
The numbers stayed at 100% for another second… then, the graph jumped to 210%.
The room erupted in cheers.
Sam raced forward to wrap Nariko in a bear hug. Ignoring the prim scientist’s every protestation she lifted her godmother off her feet and whooped in joy.
“You did it!” Sam screamed in her godmother’s ear.
“We did,” Nari corrected her. “And a lot of it, you did,” she murmured, her voice warm, for just a second full of love. Nari hugged Sam back, then slapped her back lightly. “Now put me down, I can’t see the screen!”
Sam saw Nari’s eyes were wet when she set her back down–and then her eyes were wet, and suddenly Sam had to fight back a rush tears.
Blinking, she punched Polter on the shoulder, then turned to see Morales staring up at the screen.
Sam saw real joy on the scientist’s face as he peered up at the graph. The pure joy of discovery. His face lost its shield of arrogance and looked almost kind. “I can buy an island now!” Morales said. He saw her watching him and his smile grew even wider. “I bought ten percent of Katsuyama last week,” he told her.
Bouncing and squealing, Suyao wrapped her hands around Sam’s neck, and Sam couldn’t help but return the unrestrained joy, bouncing and screaming herself.
When Suyaou moved to hug the researchers in the next aisle, Sam found herself standing alone. She caught her breath after the dizzying excitement, and let herself enjoy the pure satisfaction on her teams’ faces.
Even the oDNI scientists looked excited, trading hugs of their own or burying their faces in readouts from the football and the array.
But not all of them. Sam noticed the scientist behind Morales holding his finger up to his laptop, tracking a column of numbers, was frowning. Sam saw the man reach out and grab Morales’ arm.
Morales turned, seeming annoyed at being touched, but then he followed the other scientist’s gaze. He knelt beside the man, then pushed him out of the way and began tapping commands.
One by one, the government side of the aisle went silent. A moment later, the Katsuyama side joined them.
Sam looked around at a sea of concerned, confused faces.
Beside her, Nari was bent almost in half, lost in her own command line. Sam saw the woman’s drawn face and knelt silently beside her, waiting.
A sudden movement behind her drew her eye. Morales had jerked to his feet. He was looking back and up, into the hall, and he was nodding gravely.
Sam followed his gaze in time to see Chief Kale turn and move quickly out of sight down the hall.
Sam bent to whisper in her godmother’s ear. “What is it?” Her godmother ignored her, engrossed in a screen displaying several new graphs.
Sam understood enough to read the aggregate processor utilization for the array was holding steady, now at 286%. Didn’t that mean the experiment was a success? If so, why had everybody gotten so intense?
“Nari,” she asked again,in a tone that cut through Nariko’s freeze.
Her godmother looked up at her, pale. “It’s not possible.”
Polter returned and whispered urgently. “I’ve double-checked the raw data. The reading’s accurate.”
“What’s wrong?” Sam asked.
Polter tried to answer. “The football’s working as expected, but the processors aren’t just calculating the data we fed them…” His words failed him.
“The–the hard drives,” Morales stammered behind Sam.
Polter nodded. “There’s far too much data being stored in the drives, even given multiple quanta and exponential return.”
“Too much data?” Sam asked. Why was that a problem? she wondered.
“We didn’t program the servers to generate that data,” Nari said, her gaze still locked on her laptop. “There’s years worth of data being written and we didn’t ask for any of it.”
Sam looked down at the computer. An animation showing disk storage was spiking so high it pushed all the other statistics into a flat line at the bottom of the screen.
“If we didn’t tell the array to cook that data, then…” Sam understood.
Nariko’s voice was a whisper. “Someone, somewhere, is sending it to us.”