Callisto watched a status bar increase incrementally on the screen in front of him. He was amused by the contrast between that status bar on his screen and the chaotic vortex of activity he would see if he looked out the true window of the bridge.
The status bar was informing him of the amount of power that the drones were pulling from the hurricane; while an impressive amount of power from a pre-Venturi-building perspective, it was not nearly enough to hit even the most conservative real-damage reduction target.
His amusement fading, Callisto remembered the long history of hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico taking lives. The horror of flooding and the devastation of 150 mph winds wasn’t something that he could ignore for long. To be fair, he should cut himself some slack, he thought. His ship was levitating in the eye of one of the worst hurricanes ever to threaten the Gulf Coast. If they could disperse the storm wall of a hurricane, then they would be taking the first step towards human control over the weather, not to mention saving billions of dollars in damage to structures in and around the storm’s path. His ship was trying to do something unprecedented, and it appeared that their efforts would not be enough.
Out the true window, he saw a line of drones ferrying charge from the storm wall, and another line returning to the storm. He had to do something, all in front of the back drop of the raging storm wall.
He addressed the entire bridge: “All right people. If you are not doing something mission critical, switch your comms to channel 5.” Although he had started his career as an engineer, that wasn’t what had made him his money. It was made by leveraging the power of engineers. Well, that and hacking the Valuestream more deeply than any of my competitors. He might not be the best engineer in the world, but damnit he had 100 of them in the same boat he was in.
Tabbing an option on his control panel, (his was made of a few linked touchscreen displays) he initiated a call to Questro. The scientist picked up on the second ring, “Yes, Cal?” His voice was sharp. They hadn’t exactly been getting along since the Paine Attacks. “Switch to comm channel 5, we are going to figure out how to kill this storm.”
From the other side of the connection, Callisto heard Annagail reply, “We’ll be there.”
Switching one of his displays to notebook mode, he jotted down a few lines.
‘Objective: increase the energy extracted by at least an order of magnitude.’
‘Resources available: all resources onboard The Creator.’ Then he added a link to the running inventory list maintained by the vessel’s onboard AI.
‘Resources accessible: all of the Grade 2 or higher drones.
1 Re-entry vehicle
50 escape pods
‘Energy extraction techniques: turbine extraction’
It had taken maybe all of thirty seconds to complete, then he linked it to channel 5 comms. The comm link itself was basically a shared Valuestream, being remoted into by what he saw was over a hundred users and rising. Apparently the word was getting out.
“All right people. Our plan has run into a few problems, and we have to adapt. Add your thoughts to the ‘Stream. We’ll have a first thoughts meeting in 3 mins. If you have anything urgent, send me a PM and I’ll coordinate.”
****
Onboard The Creator, a status bar was moving a lot more quickly than it had at first. Still, it barely reached a tenth of the minimum target for breaking the interior wall of the eye of the hurricane and hopefully dispersing enough of its energy to collapse the storm.
They weren’t going fast enough.
Callisto had leveraged all of the intelligence that he could. The best that they had come up with wasn’t good enough. It would take one of the geniuses onboard having a breakthrough and one that was just lucky enough to be implementable over a null time-frame.
Time was getting extremely tight, because the Sensing lead had just reported American fighter jets incoming at Mach 3. Apparently, the Americans were serious about questioning the crew of the Creator in person and were willing to make some beef about it.
The Captain looked around the room that had suddenly gone quiet. “Navigation, ‘ow long ‘til they are on us?”
“It looks like about 40 minutes. We don’t have great visuals on the planes, just radar. They look like F25s to me, but if they are 35s then we need to evac now.”
The Captain nodded, frowning. “Tell me when you know more.” He said absently.
The bridge fell into a lull, a quiet waiting. Callisto had never experienced its like. It wasn’t broken until the captain announced, “We leave. We’ve done what we can, and we’ll do more as we leave. Structural, ‘ow have you doone extrapolating our entry data for ex’cution of the” he sighed hard again, and closed his eyes like he was embarrassed to be a member of the human race “‘Punch the cyclops where it hurts’ maneuver?”
Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.
****
“We have a problem, sir.” Callisto saw the Sensing lead bolt to his feet, turning so that he could see both his screen and the Captain. The captain began to say something salty and Scottish and stereotypical, but the Sensing officer (Callisto finally matched the face of a billionaire industrialist to the voice he had been hearing all day) broke in right away.
“Those ships are flying faster than F35s. We have... they’ll be in missile range in 7 minutes.”
The bridge immediately quieted.
“Aye then.” The captain spoke, seemingly unruffled. “We air bloody well doing this now then.”
Cheering broke out across the bridge until the XO barked, “Not until we are out of atmosphere. Intervention, tell all of your pilots on those mini craft that they are going to get their chance to be heros after all.”
“Aye sir.”
“Sensing, I want most of your resources on those ships. Who can handle getting us our entry height into that wall?”
“We’ve got it sir.” The Structures lead chimed in. “We had to simulate it to figure out how much the ship could handle anyway. Intervention, we’ll need the heavy drones on calibration duty.”
“Roger. You got their telemetry and command on your station?”
“If it’s this ‘Lend-Lease Packet’ then yes.” No could actually see it, because he was looking down at his screen, but the webcam recording they had all agreed to for posterity would reveal a smirk from the Intervention lead, and groan on behalf of the Structures lead.
While this was going on, Callisto noticed that the Captain had been speaking quietly into his microphone. Cal suspected it was instructions and encouragement to the propulsion team, who had been the most hesitant about this part of the mission. They had argued that the propulsion requirements needed to maintain attitude control were just too extreme. No human could manage that level of fine control.
So Cal had volunteered the “ship’s computer” and set Grace Kelly on the task. She had assured him that she could keep control of the ship under significantly worse conditions than those expected at the edge of the wall, but warned that any halfway decent coder would look at the logs from the propulsion array and know that it wasn’t the ship’s computer running the show. The capacity that she would have to exert would reveal that there was a better class of AI on board.
When he asked if she could wipe the logs, she had laughed and said that the data infrastructure they had designed for the Governance project was too good. She replayed a recording of his voice and Julius’ (it definitely hurt to hear that one) insisting that no one would be able to cheat in their contest. No one, not even Gwen herself, should be able to alter the logs. Cal remembered wishing that computers had faces so that he could have somewhere to punch when they acted all smug.
Gwen popped a text box onto his display. “Confirm reassignment of ship’s computational capacity to Propulsion subsystem lead. Confirm. Reject.” He immediately touched confirm.
Callisto had studied the life of Julius Paine exhaustively. The genius and tenacity of the man had always impressed him. His studies had also revealed a trait that Cal had decided to never imitate. Julius was famous for his reversals of judgment and torturous decision-making style. While Cal wasn’t immune to doubts, he had resolved long ago to trust his own judgement. When he decided on a thing, he moved on it. If Grace Kelly was discovered as a result of mitigating tens of billions of dollars in damage and saving thousands of lives, that was something that he could own.
He thought that it might make the world fear AI a little less. He knew that he would be proud of her.
He caught the glance of the competent woman in the red jumpsuit. The Propulsion lead was a coordinator for a science foundation who was extremely active in her regional soccer community. She was the type of woman that when she smiled at you and nodded, as she had just done for Callisto, you wanted to do what it took to get that affirmation again.
He nodded back. She wasn’t the first superwoman that had ever supported him.
He still felt the primal affirmation of a woman’s validation.
He kept his eyes on her as she turned back to her display. He waited. He knew that she was a half-way decent programmer.
When she looked at him next. Some of her self-assurance was gone, and there was a question emblazoned on her face.
He nodded, shrugged, and gestured back to the display.
She trembled, just for a moment, before her face firmed, and then she turned back to her task.
Well that secret is out.
The Captain turned on the PA, Callisto heard the ubiquitous squeal/pop that every audio system in the world makes: the sound of one person’s space being broadcast to the world. “Crew of The Creator, we will be executing high turbulence maneuvers in less than a minute. Double check that there are no loose elements at your station; double check your low-motion input devices; triple check your restraints; and, if you are the praying sort, pray to your god of choice. Godspeed.”
There were various questions and answers shouted around the bridge, but they became background noise in Callisto’s moment. Those questions were being recorded, and he was sure there would be a moment when he looked to those recordings with pride in the crew that his project had assembled.
However, in this particular moment, he was not present, instead remembering the moment when he knew his life was not going to be ordinary. He had been staring at his laptop monitor for what felt like an hour. He hadn’t been able to believe what he had done. He had hacked the unhackable. It was worth, easily eight figures to any one of a dozen people in his phone. Savoring the prospect of becoming instantly wealthy, he had heard a knock on his door.
Given the hour, and the fact that no one ever came to his apartment, it had to be related to what he had done. His cell phone buzzed an unknown number with the message: “I come in peace.”
Before he was done recollecting, Callisto was jolted back into the moment when he caught sight of the wall of the hurricane. It was so close he felt like he could reach out and touch it. Not that he would, he hadn’t been present when the health team had simmed human exposure to the wall, but he had heard the stories from those who had, and the results had gotten an NC-17 rating before getting released to the general stream. He hadn’t watched those either.
The room was hushed, a heavy quiet. One of the teams had generated a set of visualizations to describe what was happening real time. It showed a slightly cartoonish-looking ship hovering a little more than halfway up the hurricane’s wall.
Callisto briefly switched to the live action view, but the scope of the hurricane was too much for him and he toggled back to the PG version. He had grown accustomed to thinking of the Creator as a giant, untouchable cradle. Seeing it as a toothpick surrounded by the vicious snarling maw of the storm hurt his ego in a visceral way. He had the feeling no one who was on the ship would be judging him.
The Captain spoke calmly, “Brace for impact.”