Part 9 (1/2)

Jindriss's expression weakened, and he seemed to age more by the minute as Sarvik related his findings. Even before he had finished speaking, Sarvik could tell he was not making any great revelations. Jindriss had known, but he had buried the knowledge deep inside his mind somewhere, out of sight of consciousness, persuading himself that Farworlds might come up with something. This was probably the first time he had faced the truth honestly and squarely.

”Yes, yes, you're right. Of course most of it is based on speculation,” Jindriss admitted tiredly.”Where could anyone possibly get the hard data? As you say, there have been no expeditions. There hasn't been time to even know what the right questions are, never mind be sure of the answers.”

Sarvik was aghast. ”And that's acknowledged generally? The other scientists here at ASH who are part of it-they know that at best the whole thing is a gamble against all the odds?”

”It's not a simple matter of being objective about facts, as you make it sound,” Jindriss said.

”Self-defense reactions set in. The mind protects itself in situations like this. People immerse themselves totally in the only answer they've got. They shut everything else out.”

”What about the engineers at Farworlds?” Sarvik objected. ”The ones who are supposed to be implementing the solutions. They have to preserve a measure of realism, surely.”

”Most of them believe the cover story for Breakout-that it's time to get out of the Kovar System.

They think the time pressure is for political reasons, to exploit Farworlds' edge over the compet.i.tion. In other words, to them the urgency isn't 'real,' and the problems will all get fixed eventually.” Jindriss made a resigned gesture. ”Of course, the senior executives who are tagged to go know the truth. But in their case we have protective psychology at work again. A collective unreason close to panic has taken hold.

Keeping busy and at least doing something provides a day-to-day a.n.a.lgesic that's better than the despair that would come with doing nothing. The rest just go along with the pressure without knowing the reason for it.”

All of which was understandable, Sarvik could see. It was the only choice any of them had. But it was not the only choicehe had.

The next day he took the flymobile over to Pygal and kept an appointment he had made to see Alifrenz and Greel. It was time to renew their relations.h.i.+p.

Through them, he still had access to things that were going on in Replimaticon and certain other places Replimaticon was involved with, such as Universal Robocon. For Sarvik's previous work on his immortality project had suggested a different solution to the whole problem of escaping from Turle. It would need Replimaticon, and it would need access to the computers that planned and programmed the Searcher missions, which his privileged position at Farworlds already gave him. But apart from that, he no longer cared particularly whether the ASH-Farworlds plans for interstellar colonies were feasible, or if a single generation s.h.i.+p ever managed to lift itself out from its a.s.sembly orbit.

For the solution to it all that Sarvik had in mind didn't involve fragile, perishable biological Borijan bodies-and all the attendant complications of sustaining, nurturing, and reproducing them-at all.

20.

Sarvik sat back in the padded leather chair in the director's office overlooking the main lab and surveyed his domain high in the Farworlds Tower. Around him, arrays of panels flashed their lights self-importantly and beeped updates onto variously colored screens.

”Simulation run seven complete and checked through all phases,” an irritatingly smooth synthetic female voice announced. ”Results pending. Require preferred preview mode.”

”Vertical section at x equal to pi, correlate with z-transform,” Sarvik instructed absently.

Outside the variview window, which was switched to maximum transparency, programmers and a.n.a.lysts sat working at rows of consoles and terminals. In a darkened bay at one end of the room a holographic presentation of an atmospheric modeling exercise glowed silently as a sphere of swirling light patterns six feet in diameter. In a part.i.tioned conference area on the far side of the lab, a working party was arguing decision criteria for extracting metals from dissolved salts versus going to nuclear trans.m.u.tation. If the circ.u.mstances had been otherwise, Sarvik would have had good reason for feeling satisfied.

He had been with Farworlds three-quarters of a year now. It was a shame the rest of life couldn'thave been as untroubled and rea.s.suring as the daily pretense he saw acted out here in the tower. There had been a lot of suicides among scientists, which the health experts and sociologists had been unable to explain. Others had abandoned their lifetime's work, disappeared without trace, or taken to drink, drugs, debauchery, or all of them. It was now public knowledge that Farworlds Manufacturing was mounting an all-out program to build generation stars.h.i.+ps from modified Searcher designs, and fears that some kind of catastrophe was imminent abounded. The stories going the rounds and getting their share of attention in the media ranged from Turle's being about to collide with an asteroid or to be swallowed by a black hole, through a whole repertoire of climatic disruptions, to explosion of the planet's core or the subterranean fusion plants. Public accusations of official cover-ups were being made and denied, and investigations were being demanded almost daily, while the expert and not-so-expert in every science argued and proffered figures to support or refute, attack or defend just about every plausible scenario or crackpot theory imaginable. Even the truth had surfaced amid it all more than once, only to be swept away unrecognized in the general flood of confusion.

Naturally, Farworlds dismissed all of it as ma.s.s hysteria and insisted that the generation-s.h.i.+p program meant no more than what it had always said: that the time had come for the Borijan civilization to expand beyond the Kovar System. Why all the hurry, then? the skeptics asked. To exploit their compet.i.tive edge over their rivals, Farworlds' public relations flacks replied. They were the biggest in the business and intended to stay that way. To show that everything was business as usual, Farworlds was continuing its regular Searcher launches as scheduled.

But Sarvik didn't think it could hold together for very much longer. From his inside vantage point he was more certain than ever that Breakout could never be made to work in the remaining time available.

Every day he saw evidence that others were ceasing to delude themselves, too. Eventually the disillusionment would reach critical ma.s.s and set off a chain reaction of dashed hopes, at which point the effort would collapse. After that, there would be no more Searchers going out. All the pieces of his own escape plan were in place. The time to move with it was now.

A blank screen in front of him came to life to show a pair of Borijan ears and a question mark.

Sarvik shook aside his reflections. ”It's all right. You can speak,” he said.

”I just heard an interesting conversation between Lequasha and Othenitan,” GENIUS informed him. It had turned out that Lequasha was among the inner group who knew the real reason for Breakout.

Othenitan was another. The most sensitive records were still being held off-line from the net, where GENIUS couldn't get to them. However, it had found that by modifying the diagnostics the maintenance programs used for remote-checking hardware, it could surrept.i.tiously activate the regular voice pickups on terminals in the executive suites.

”Go on,” Sarvik directed.

”The story that's being given out to the public is cracking,” GENIUS said. ”So a whole new group of PR people are being brought into the secret to help hold things together. In return, they get slots in the lifeboats.”

”Which will mean deallocating someone else's,” Sarvik concluded. There was no surprise in his voice. He had been waiting for something like this for a while.

”Do you want the conversation verbatim, or shall I summarize?” GENIUS asked.

”No. Just give me the gist.”

”Essentially, you're out, along with the other slots they a.s.signed you. They figure that your usefulness was concentrated up front, with the conceptual stages. The specs will be frozen on final encoding, which means that when the s.h.i.+ps fly, your job's over.”

Sarvik stared through the screens, beyond the walls of the building. Although he had been prepared for this, it still took him a moment to come to terms with hearing it said in cold words.Now, he told himself again. His preparations would never be more complete. Further delay could only increase the risk of exposure or disaster through a sudden cancellation of the Searcher program. The time was now.

After a while a cartoon depiction of fingers tapping impatiently appeared on GENIUS's screen.response? it prompted.

Sarvik drew in a long, unsteady breath. Uploading a personality was a one-way process-once he was transformed into machine-resident code, there could be no coming back. ”We get our own show rolling,” he finally p.r.o.nounced. ”Are the archive allocation groupings still good?”

”No change.”

”Reactivation sequence?”

”Implanted successfully and tested. Untraceable from system level.”

Sarvik had identified Indrigon early on as having little real confidence in the Breakout program, and had revealed to him his own scheme. He had needed somebody in Indrigon's position to arrange unrestricted access to the Searcher mission-control software. This had enabled Sarvik to engineer a whole region of ”invisible” storage s.p.a.ce, undetectable by the regular test procedures, inside the archives section of the Searcher database. There, he and the companions he had selected to take with him would stow away indefinitely as patterns of electronic molecular-bond encryptions able to survive virtually indefinitely, even with a loss of power. They would reactivate in response to a trigger code issued by the supervising processor when the right conditions were met. Indrigon would be one of those going with Sarvik, of course, along with two of his closer a.s.sociates from Farworlds: a female director named Dorn, and Gulaw, one of the engineering chiefs. They had nothing to gain from giving Sarvik's plan away and everything to lose if it was blocked.

”AMS status?” Sarvik checked.

”Final link structure fixed. Simulator returns all positive,” GENIUS reported.

When the Searcher found a planet meeting all the environmental and other conditions and the first general-purpose factory had been built, the Supervisor would switch to an alternative manufacturing schedule of products for it to make-very different from the standard remote-manufacturing list. Key among these would be the new bodies that Greel and Alifrenz's contacts at Universal Robocon had designed for the machine-transported personalities to be copied into. Two prototypes had been built at UR and delivered to Replimaticon for trials. In return, a UR director called Kalazin, along with two of his senior designers, a male named Creesh and Meyad, a female, would be included in the deal. Greel and Alifrenz had also organized the completion of the upgraded molecular-circuit brain for the UR body, and its two designers at Replimaticon would also be coming. Leradil and Palomec Jindriss had already earned their places, bringing the total thus far to eleven.

”And the two prototypes have remained stable?” Sarvik said. ”No indications of regression or breakdown?”

In reply, GENIUS activated another screen to show a recorded image of one of the strangest robotic constructions that had ever crossed a laboratory floor. ”This came in this morning on the progress of the second subject,” it announced. ”Integration appears to be going smoothly, without adverse effects. Just like the first one.”

Finally, there was Dr. Queezt, who had persuaded two of the terminal patients under his care to volunteer as experimental subjects to be written into artificial hosts. Later, when Sarvik had divulged to him why cerebral prosthetics didn't matter anymore, Queezt had moved to Replimaticon, where the brain developed by Greel and Alifrenz's group, the prototype bodies from UR, and the two sets of extracted code from Queezt's patients were integrated into a complete package. It would have been unfortunate indeed if the first full test wasn't tried until it all came together in a Searcher-built factory out at some distant star and it failed to work. But so far the results looked promising.

Animals that were formed roughly like a stick, such as worms or snails, were unable to manipulate objects or even to move around very well. Animals with legs-a stick with smaller, movable sticks attached-moved themselves better but were still awkward at manipulation. Animals with fingers-sticks on the ends of sticks on a stick-became amazingly dexterous.