Seeker, p.13
Seeker, page 13
See there, he thought at the reptile, hoping it could sense telepathic intentions, I’m leaving. No need for alarm. If you don’t bite me, I won’t bite you.
Kagan continued easing back, one small, careful, non-threatening step at a time.
“You’re clear,” announced Ory an instant later, although this announcement seemed to take forever. “Beyond its striking range. But it wouldn’t hurt to back up farther.”
“Yeah, no kidding!” he replied subvocally.
Now that he was safe, he focused on the text, images, and graphics that appeared beside the snake he was still watching, annotations that were faint and unobtrusive, but vivid if he chose to attend to them.
Apparently, his green friend was a two-striped forest pit-viper—or more properly, Bothriopsis bilineata—a venomous snake that was considered one of the most dangerous in the Amazon. Most snakes in the rainforest were ground dwellers, but not this one. A nocturnal hunter—or ambusher would be a better description—it liked to hang out in trees, literally, and would strike if disturbed, day or night.
Something Kagan had been in the process of doing. And rubber boots wouldn’t have saved him from this beauty.
“What’s going on?” said Ella anxiously.
Kagan pointed to the snake, now eight feet away but continuing to face in their direction. It blended in with the tree, but when her eyes widened in horror, he knew that she had managed to see it.
“It’s a two-striped forest pit-viper,” he told her. “Very dangerous.”
“So you know all about the wildlife here too?”
He nodded.
“So let me get this right,” she said. “First, you’re a magician. And also a CIA consultant. Who turns out to be a human compass. And now you’re also an expert on the rainforest?”
Kagan couldn’t help but grin. “Don’t forget pilot,” he added.
She shook her head and blew out a relieved breath. “I don’t care what you are, it’s a miracle you saw that thing before we hit it headfirst.”
Kagan began moving forward once again, giving the pit-viper a wide berth. He had to admit, Ella was handling herself reasonably well here. In his college days, he had dated a woman who would panic over the most harmless spider or wasp, pretending to be terrified until he could defend her from these seemingly insurmountable menaces.
He had never been sure if her terror was real or faked. Perhaps she thought it would be endearing to him, playing frightened so he could play heroic. But he had always found this behavior anything but endearing. Instead, he found it annoying, irrational, and childish.
The way Cynthia had handled insect and rodent pests was one of the things that he loved about her. If a large spider emerged from a corner of a room, one large enough to worry even Kagan, she would either capture it and set it free outside, or kill it, depending on what tools she had available. She didn’t cower, freak out, or insist that he rescue her. She handled the situation with calm and a complete absence of drama.
So while Ella had her share of issues, at least she seemed to have a backbone when it came to dealing with this sort of thing. Thank God. The Amazon represented the greatest density of large, scary-looking creepy crawly insects, scorpions, and the like on Earth, so a woman who would run screaming from a room because of a harmless spider would be a nightmare to travel with here.
Not only that, but the climate was blistering hot, and as humid as a sauna, and they were sweaty and muddy and grimy. Yet Ella had barely complained.
As difficult as she could be to take, he was better off with her than with a companion who was brilliant, but terrified of bugs and prone to constant complaining.
“So let me finally answer the question you asked before we were . . . interrupted,” said Kagan. “Why am I here?” He paused for effect. “Turns out the CIA called in the wee hours of the morning.”
Had it really been earlier that morning when this had all begun? It seemed like ages ago.
“They told me an important, top-secret American satellite had been struck by fast-moving space debris. It lost altitude, and eventually landed very near these coordinates. They asked me to drop everything and retrieve it. I was relatively close by, so I got the call. That’s about the size of it.”
“And the Iranians?”
“Other governments would like a peek at this satellite themselves,” he said, satisfied that this was close enough to the truth that it would serve to explain their situation nicely, without him having to delve into the alien technology aspect. “It’s pretty advanced. So the Iranians aren’t the only bad actors likely to be in the jungle right now.”
“Bad actors?” she said. “What do you mean? The Iranians weren’t putting on any kind of act as far as I could tell.”
“Not actors, like in a movie. You know, bad actors. Meaning, uh . . . troublemakers. People acting badly. You’ve never heard that expression?”
She shook her head no.
“Well, no matter,” he said. “The point is that I’m here to get this satellite and leave.”
“So this thing managed to land?” she said skeptically. “Wouldn’t something that fell from space, you know . . . crash?”
Kagan sighed. “No. It landed.”
“How do you plan to carry something so big?”
“It’s very small,” he said as a toucan squawked in the distance, the fabled loudest bird in the Amazon living up to its billing. “So I’ll be able to carry it.”
She appeared to be deep in thought as they continued working their way through the jungle. “But now your helicopter is, ah . . . broken,” she pointed out. “So how are we going to get out of here?”
Kagan frowned, annoyed that she had suddenly started to ask good questions. “I’ll cross that bridge once I find the satellite,” he replied. “But I need to be honest with you,” he added, knowing that this was a speech he needed to give, anyway, and taking advantage of the opening she had just given him.
He blew out a long breath and stopped his movement near an array of bright flowers that he suspected were larger, brighter cousins of the birds-of-paradise plants he had seen in The States. “It’s doubtful we’ll be leaving here anytime soon.”
He paused to let this sink in. “I don’t have the exact coordinates of this satellite, and it could be anywhere within an area of over two hundred miles.”
“So how are you ever going to find it?” asked Ella. “You could be here a hundred years and not find it.”
“I’ll find it,” he said forcefully, trying to convince himself of this as much as her. “Don’t worry about that. But the point is that it might take a while. And this mission is critical to America’s national security, so it takes precedence over everything else. I shouldn’t be wasting time with you at all, let alone making sure you have boots. So let me lay out the ground rules for you.”
His eyes locked on hers, and his expression turned grim. “First, you do what I tell you. Immediately. Without argument or complaint. Understood?”
She opened her mouth to protest, but decided against it, nodding meekly instead.
“Good. I’ll share the rations I brought with you, but it won’t be long before we’ll have to live off the land. This being said, we should be able to manage just fine. I have a device that produces purified water. I also have plenty of water purification tablets, just in case. And there are more than three thousand edible fruits here. We only eat about two hundred in the West. But I know which are edible, and which are poisonous.”
Ella rolled her eyes. “Of course you do,” she mumbled under her breath.
“Second,” continued Kagan, “I’m going to have to invoke the law of the jungle—literally. I can’t let you slow me down, or interfere. Remember, I didn’t invite you on this little outing. You stowed away. I’m sorry that it’s come to this, but you shouldn’t be here. So if you can’t keep up, I’ll have to leave you behind.”
Her face fell. “You know I wouldn’t last a day by myself,” she said. “You’re the expert. I don’t know the first thing about surviving here.”
He nodded. “I know that. And again, I’m sorry. But there is more at stake here than just you and me. Not to mention dangerous people from multiple countries who might want to kill me. And this doesn’t include the hundreds of indigenous tribes that live here, including about fifty that are believed to have never had contact with the outside world. To this day.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“Believe what you want. I’m telling you the facts. I’d have thought after living in Brazil for this long, you’d have heard about these tribes.”
She shook her head. “Not so much,” she replied.
“Back to my point,” said Kagan. “I can’t afford to be compassionate. So do what I tell you, don’t complain, and keep up. Stay very close to me and you’ll be okay. If not, if you fall behind, or we get separated . . .” He winced. “I won’t be able to waste time retrieving you. Are we clear?”
She swallowed hard. “I thought you valued all life.”
“I do. And I hope like hell you’ll be able to keep up and we both get out of here alive. But I have to do what I have to do. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
She glared at him, hurt as much as she was scared. “I’ll keep up,” she said, a determined look in her eye.
Kagan nodded and began moving forward, pulling out his machete, as the jungle had become too dense for easy movement once again.
Maybe she would be able to keep up. She seemed remarkably fit. And while he was exerting himself to clear the path ahead of them, and carrying a heavy backpack, she had the easier job of following. Despite his externally enhanced muscles, he was dripping with sweat, while she seemed fresh as a daisy—or whichever flower was the jungle equivalent. Given the muggy conditions here, her present condition would be remarkable, even if she were only lounging by a pool.
Her body appeared quite toned, and this wasn’t by accident. She had probably done a lot of Pilates and jazzercising over the years.
For someone who had long used her looks to get ahead, this made sense.
“Ory,” he said subvocally, “What is Ella’s heart rate now?”
“Still at about fifty-one beats a minute.”
Kagan considered this. “I meant to ask you before, but forgot. Isn’t a heart rate this low dangerous?”
“Not at all,” said Ory. “It’s an indication of exceptional fitness. She has the kind of pulse you’d find in endurance athletes. Steady as a metronome. I think the word you’re looking for is impressive.”
Kagan nodded to himself. Good. Maybe she really would be able to keep up. He hoped so. But only time would tell.
And he had been deadly serious about the consequences for her if she fell behind.
PART 4
20
The interstellar probe, which called itself Seeker, had abruptly slowed its massive speed to a crawl as it descended through Earth’s atmosphere, finally breaking through the rainforest canopy at turtle-like speed to gently come to a rest on a bed of thick, aboveground tree roots.
All objects moved through space-time at the exact same rate. The probe had been moving through space at such a high velocity, it had barely moved through time at all. Now the reverse was true. Since it was no longer moving through space, its movement through time was occurring at the highest possible rate.
With respect to time, at least, it and the inhabitants of this planet were now in perfect synchronicity, and Seeker had kept itself quite busy in the hours since it had landed.
The softball-sized probe, constructed from an insanely resilient reflective material unknown to human science, contained an internal computer brain the size of a golf ball. But what a brain it was. Only a hundred-billion-fold less efficient than the theoretical maximum.
Even a single pound of inert granite was a wonder of complexity, containing roughly a trillion trillion atoms that were each a cauldron of activity, with numerous spins, electromagnetic fields, and electrons. All in all, the theoretical computational capability of this pound of granite, provided it could harness all of these atoms and all of these differing properties as computational nodes, was a million trillion trillion trillion calculations per second. Since this theoretical maximum was roughly a trillion times more powerful than the combined minds of every human who had ever lived, Seeker’s ability to attain even a hundred billionth of this capability was truly extraordinary.
After coming to a rest, Seeker had released millions of microscopic nanites into the rainforest, which immediately went to work, burrowing into the soil and vegetation and scavenging for the molecular building blocks they would need to carry out the first part of their instructions, which Seeker had programmed into them upon landing.
Each nanite was a complex nanofabricator, capable of tapping into the quantum foam, just as Seeker’s star drive had done, to unleash all the energy it would need for its task.
First, the nanites had been instructed to make additional copies of themselves. Many additional copies. Each nanite converted rocks, and dirt, and roots, and the complex array of elements within the biological organisms it invaded into the raw materials it needed to reproduce, chewing through matter at the molecular level with effortless ease.
And each copy that was completed immediately went to work making more copies.
In only a matter of hours, the millions of microscopic nanites Seeker had released had grown into a thick carpet of silver moss, clearly visible to the naked eye, many hundreds of trillions of members strong.
These nanofabricators, also called micro-assemblers, were nothing less than a long-held dream of scientists and science fiction enthusiasts come to life. A dream that had been in the human imagination since Richard Feynman’s talk in 1959 entitled, “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom.”
During this groundbreaking lecture, Feynman had speculated about a technology capable of moving individual atoms about, manipulating them like so many Legos to build any item imaginable out of its constituent atoms—from the bottom up.
And since the turn of the millennia, Nanotechnologists had made great strides creating ever-tinier machines, and advances in 3D printing had demonstrated the power and versatility of this approach at the macro level.
But being able to perform this function at the elemental level was another thing entirely, requiring a microscopic machine that could carve up complex molecules to get to raw materials in their most basic state. And such a machine would not only need this capability, but also the wherewithal to reconfigure these materials precisely as needed.
The level of engineering sophistication this would require was almost inconceivable.
How could such a fabricator find the materials it needed so unerringly? How could it know how to build a copy of itself so precisely? Or how to build anything else, for that matter? How could it do this reproducibly, and with the extraordinary efficiency required?
Such a capability was absurd. Ludicrous. Impossible.
Except that this is exactly what biological machinery had managed to do on Earth for billions of years.
When a human sperm and egg came together to form a single cell, this cell possessed the programming and technical capabilities needed to self-assemble an entire human, the perfect example of nanofabrication in practice. This single cell used raw materials found in its environment to quickly produce an identical cell, which then became four, which then became eight—eventually multiplying into the trillions.
And each duplication event along the way required a cell to find the molecular constituents of its DNA and assemble a perfect copy, three-billion letters long, something it did with astonishing fidelity.
Then, as if having a single cell direct the manufacture of trillions of others wasn’t impressive enough, these identical cells would begin to specialize along the way. Following the dictates of a complex set of instructions, some miraculously transformed into eye cells, some into brain cells, some into heart cells, some into muscle cells, and so on.
The automated self-construction of a human being from a single cell, including a working brain hundreds of billions of neurons strong, was a staggering, mind-boggling feat of engineering. But since nature made this look relatively easy, it was largely taken for granted.
Those who celebrated mankind’s engineering genius as being incomparable, raving about the magic of a 3D printer capable of creating tiny plastic action figures, almost never considered the miracle of complexity and precision that allowed hundreds of thousands of 3D human babies to arrive in hospitals each day, factory fresh.
And this process didn’t stop once a newborn baby was deposited into the world. As this infant grew from an eight-pound bundle of helplessness into a two-hundred-pound wrestler, it converted breast milk—and later, pizza, beer, and potato chips—into the raw material needed to produce such dramatic growth.
Seeker’s nanites had taken several pages from this biological playbook. After replicating to sufficient numbers, which had taken about four hours, they began to follow a supplemental set of instructions, quickly finding raw materials they needed to build the sophisticated equipment Seeker had specified.
All Seeker had to do was release these nanofabricating dynamos into the environment, and then sit back and wait for them to do the rest. This was the equivalent of a human planting a single giant sequoia seed into the ground, no bigger than a flake of oatmeal, and then waiting for what would become the heaviest living organism on Earth to emerge from the seed and self-assemble.
Unlike the construction of a sequoia tree, however, the atom-by-atom assembly of the equipment Seeker needed took place in hours rather than years, as the hundreds of trillions of nanites worked in perfect concert to complete their task.
One of the first instruments completed allowed the small alien craft to tap into the Internet and download content at unimaginable speed. Seeker had tasted Internet content while still in space, but this had been a relatively slow process, and it had only scratched the surface.
