Konrad

The Reich, Konrad thought, massaging his temples, is not paying me enough.

He sat in a pitiful pool of light at his desk, the single bare bulb of his lamp glowing dully over his head. The lamp had a shade at one when he’d first arrived, but he’d taken it down one day to replace the bulb and never bothered to put it back up. Now he had no idea where it might be, lost in the accumulated detritus of his office. He fought the urge to go look for it; he had work to do.

Or maybe they’re paying me far too much, he thought with a tinge of bitter misery. After the morning’s excitement with the engine, he’d set to the task of figuring out how to build something like Reel’s implant. So far, all he’d managed to accomplish was to transform a pile of blank paper into a pile of paper filled with useless scribbles, and a handful of confetti for seasoning. His eyes ached as he stared at the page in front of him, trying to make sense of the words he’d written just a few minutes earlier.

He returned to the design requirements for what felt like the hundredth time. Large storage capacity. Ability to integrate directly with the user’s brain. Capable of rapidly recalling and passing specific information to the user. Augment user’s ability to process information.

Trying to grasp it all at once was too much. He pulled a fresh sheet of paper off the stack and wrote “Large Storage Capacity” across the top of it in large, blocky letters. Below that, he set to scratching out his thoughts. He had a pretty good idea how to solve this part of the problem; close examination of the computers on Reel’s ship had revealed tiny circuits, microscopic chips, and endless arrays of resistors, capacitors, and a baffling array of electrical structures that Konrad didn’t even have names for.

Reel couldn’t tell them what most of it was either. “It’s not my area of expertise.” She’d said with a shrug, and Konrad had thought she’d looked a little uncomfortable at all the questions. Sometimes when they’d prod her for clues, she’d grimace and touch the implant; Konrad took it as a nervous gesture. But she had been able to explain one particular area of the flight computer.

“Those are memory banks,” she’d said, pointing out a rack of identical wafers. “If the computer needs more, we just plug them right in to the row.” She’d sacrificed one of the extras to the station’s technicians, and they’d pulled it apart under a microscope, mapping out everything they saw as they went.

We can do that. He thought to himself, tapping the pencil on the page. Once they crack how those things work and go together, we can just build the memory for these…brain computers…the same way. They could do it, it just wouldn’t be quick. The scale of the things was tiny. He’d heard one of the technicians complaining that he’d seen bigger bacteria.

Fundamentally, the memory sticks seemed to work much like the monstrosity he’d half-built down in the basement, albeit smaller. A circuit could be charged or uncharged, on or off. Use charged as a stand in for the number 1 and uncharged as a stand in for the number 0, and if you had enough of them you could write anything you wanted to. And there were a God-awful lot of them in those chips she had. So he wrote, “Use the same design as Reel’s computer memory wafers” under the title, and slid the paper to the side. He knew it was pitiful, but it was better than leaving the page blank.

That left him staring at the second item on his list. “Ability to integrate with user’s brain.” He tapped his pen furiously on the blank space beneath.

How in the hell do they do that anyway? Hadn’t he read something a while back about the brain running on electricity? Some doctor had even managed to measure it…Berger, wasn’t it? He scribbled the name down and put a question mark next to it. Maybe they could bring him in to help. If not…well, he’d have to think of something. Von Braun was counting on him, after all, to make this deal work…though in truth, he felt completely inadequate to the task.

A yawn forced its way through his lips; he needed to sleep. He didn’t even bother to try again on the remaining design criteria; he wasn’t going to crack it tonight. If it was even still night…It was hard to tell, with the blackout curtains on the windows. He pushed back from the desk, stretching in his chair until his back clicked. He stood, rubbing at the spot with a grimace. There was a time when that made me feel better. Not so anymore. He shrugged his grimy lab coat over his shoulders, turned off the lamp with a twitch of the cord, and started for the door.

The full moon shone brightly overhead outside, illuminating the grass of the common with its pale light. It was bright enough that the rocket standing in the center cast a distinct shadow across the ground, spearing out towards the launch pad. An alien figure stood alongside it, staring up at the sky. The heavy shoulders, thick curving shell, and wide head stood out in profile against the rocket’s checkered paint.

Reel heard him coming across the grass and turned to smile at him. “Konrad! Look, the moon is different than it was when I landed.” She pointed at the pale orb with a heavy claw, beaming.

He blinked at her, a little puzzled. “Different? How so?”

“When I landed, half of it was in darkness,” she explained, turning back to look at it. “Now it’s more bright, more lit up. Why does it do that?”

He peered at her through the dark, trying to decide if she was making a joke. How would you even know if she was? Who knows what an alien would find funny. Better to assume she’s sincere. “The moon orbits the earth, about once a month,” he said, tapping the grass with a foot. “As it makes its rotation, the amount of light that we see it being exposed to changes.” He held up one finger towards the moon, and circled his other hand around it to demonstrate. “Pretend the moon is the sun for a moment, and that my hand is the moon; the light comes from one direction, hitting the surface. Half of it is always in the light, but it’s not the half that we always see.”

She seemed to mull that over for a minute, rubbing at the back of her skull. “Everything’s different down here from how it is out in the black,” she said after a minute. “You can always see the stars, out there.”

Konrad craned his own head back to look at the wide sky. With the moon so bright, there weren’t as many stars visible as there might be, but those he could see gleamed brightly in the heavens. “What do they look like from space?” he asked. He’d never really considered it, but he supposed they must be different.

“There’s more of them, to start.” She waved a three-fingered hand from one end of the horizon to other, tracing an arc through the sky. “Everywhere I’ve been they stretch as far as you can see. This galaxy is kind of flat, you know? Like a big disc, with a bulge in the middle where most of the stars are. That bulge is always visible; it’s so bright, you see it even if you’re on the sunward side of the ship.”

Her voice warmed as she spoke, and Konrad glanced over at her. Her black eyes sparkled with excitement, uncannily human in her scaly face. “We can go take a look, if you want. It would be a quick trip up and down in the lander, if we can tear it away from your technicians for a few hours.”

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Konrad shuddered. “No, thank you.” The idea of all that empty void between him and solid ground made him shiver in the warm night air. “I don’t like flying very much. I’m sure Von Braun would take you up on it, though.” Plus, Lusser would murder me if we took off with the ship.

She nodded. “I’ll ask him. He’s so busy though…He reminds me of Captain Arcturus, always working.”

He tilted his head for a better look at her. “That’s your Captain on board the ship?”

“Yes.” The smile faded from her face. “He’s…He’s amazing, but he’s been hard lately. Hard to get along with, I mean. He’s under a lot of pressure.” She lapsed into silence.

Konrad fished for something to say to that, and came up empty. She had told them a little of her crewmates in passing, but never much detail. Whenever the topic came up, she went quiet like this. It was hard to be sure, but he thought she looked sad. Weary, even.

“Would you like to see the progress I’ve made on building a computer?” he said to distract her.

She brightened at that, her smile turning back on like a lamp. “Absolutely!”

Why did I say that? The only thing he had to show her was a table full of telephone relays, but he couldn’t retract the offer without being rude–and he’d feel terrible, letting her down. So he forced himself to return her smile and turned back the way he’d come. He led her into the office building, holding the door as she wedged her heavy shell sideways through it. Together they walked past his desk to the stairs.

He showed her the way down the basement steps, built wide enough that they accommodated her easily. Despite himself, he felt a little thrill of excitement; this was the first time he’d shown anyone his project since Lusser had come down to yell at him.

He flicked the switch on the wall, bringing the dingy fluorescent lights to flickering life. Blowing out a breath he didn’t realize he’d been holding, he peered down at the table full of telephone relays; it was all still there. Some of the relays lay tumbled over, but no one had come through and cleared it out since he’d been down here last.

Reel stepped over to it, her eyes wide and curious. “What’s all this?”

“It’s a calculating machine, or the beginnings of one. A simple version of the thing in your head.” He came up alongside her and reached out, setting fallen relays upright. “We’ll have to work on getting it smaller, of course; you can’t be lugging a table around with you everywhere,” he joked weakly. She didn’t laugh, but she did nod seriously, as if that were the most sensible statement in the world. I’ll chalk that one up to an alien sense of humor.

“There are so many parts…” she marveled, reaching out to pick up one of the relays. “What do all these little bits do?”

“Those are telephone relay switches,” he explained. The one she held was identical to all its cousins on the table, a single simple circuit in a can shaped case, with a cutaway for accessing the mechanical rotor within. “They’re wired together as logic gates, so based on the electrical input they receive, they work together to send another signal further down the chain.” He pointed to the second relay of the pair that Reel was holding. “This is an ‘and’ gate. It will only send a signal if both of the relays are charged.”

She reached back to rub at her skull again with her free hand, her forehead creasing. “But what good does that do?”

He blinked at her. Wasn’t that obvious? She had said that this wasn’t her speciality…“Well…We can use it do mathematical computations and make logical decisions at the same time.”

“Oh!” She exclaimed. “Like how I use my implant to get calculations when we’re putting things together.”

“Uh…Yes.” That seemed a rather mundane application for the near miraculous computer in her head, but at least she got it. “And much more besides, of course.” He prodded one of the relays that he’d already wired in previously. “Of course, this one isn’t working yet…I haven’t wired it all together, and the switches are huge…” He trailed off, glancing over at her. “I don’t suppose you know what kind of mechanisms your implant uses for logic gates? We’ll need something much smaller…”

She frowned, rubbing the relay between a thick, clawed thumb and forefinger. “No. None of us have any training on repairing implants, and I don’t think I’d dare try to take it apart…” She winced. “Let’s talk about something else, please.”

“Sure, of course. Where do you get them, anyway? The implants, I mean.”

“I got mine from my grandmother.”

He stared at her. “What, like as a gift?”

“No, when she died. It was hers before it was mine.” She tapped the round dome of it with a blunt claw, making it ring dully.

“Oh.” What on earth was he supposed to say to that? “I’m…sorry to hear of her passing,” he offered, clutching for the familiar ground of rote sympathy.

Reel shrugged. “Everyone dies. At least I got to keep a bit of her.” She shuffled her feet, turning away from him towards the table full of relays. “So, how do these ‘logic gates’ make calculations?”

That felt like safer territory, so he turned to it gratefully. “Well, let’s say we wanted to add two numbers…Like 8 and 7, for example.”

“Fifteen,” she said, immediately.

“Right. But we can make this machine give us an answer to that question. It all starts with these relays as gates.” He picked one up. “This relay can either be charged, or uncharged. Correct?”

She nodded. “Sure. If it has power, it will be charged.”

“Right. So we can think of this as an ‘and’ gate. It’s hooked to two input relays, and if it doesn’t get a charge from both of them it won’t activate.” He set it down and glanced around, hunting for a piece of scratch paper and a pen. “Visually it looks something like this.” Grabbing a scrap from the table by the door and a pen from his pocket, he drew three columns and labeled them “A”, “B”, and “Output.” He hesitated with the pen over the first column. “Can you read this now?”

“Yes,” she confirmed, leaning down over his shoulder. He was struck again by just how big she was. He forgot that sometimes, since she wasn’t much taller than he was, but she had to weigh four times what he did. Her arms and legs were thick with muscle. “My implant got the update from the book we scanned in.”

“Excellent. So there’s four possible input combinations we can have, you see?” He sketched zeros and ones to fill the “A” and “B” columns. “If we take “0” to mean that the input isn’t passing a charge and “1” to mean that it is, and if the “And” gate needs both charges to activate, which combinations will it activate on?”

She scrunched up her face, peering at the table he’d drawn. “Well, not this one. Or these other two.” She prodded at the first three rows, where he’d written zeros, with a claw. “So only the last one of the four…Oh.”

There was something in that “oh” that made him glance up. A look of profound realization passed across her face, followed by a flash of fear. A second later, something slammed into his chest. He spun through the air like a rag doll, landing on the floor a half a dozen steps away.

His head rang and his chest hurt. She hit me, he thought in dazed confusion. Why did she hit me?

He fought to sit up, his hands clumsy and his vision spinning. She’d thrown him across the room and into the wall, well clear of her. As his eyes cleared, he saw her laying on the ground flat on her back, an absurd parody of an earthly turtle. Her limbs flailed spasmodically, crashing into the table legs, the nearby wall. Choked gasping sounds heaved from her, in time with her convulsions. Weak sounds, and horrible. Animal sounds, pained sounds. She kicked out wildly, spinning on her shell, and tore the leg nearest to her from the table, spilling wires and relays across the ground and over her head. The whole thing came crashing down onto her, showering her with parts. If she noticed, she gave no sign, her eyes unfocused and staring at the ceiling. She just kept thrashing, the sickly gulps of air coming weaker and weaker.

Konrad stumbled to his feet, staggering for the door. “Medic!” he screamed, dragging himself up the stairs and clutching at his ribs. “We need a medic down here!”