For Every Action - The Quantum Mechanic Series Book I

“Everyone out except the family and senior staff.“, Barnes barely whispered, and without a word, the techs, medical staff, and security guards filed out. Then he turned back to the group and for a moment Tammy saw a very different man. Gone was the slick, polished, and perfectly controlled exterior... and in its place was the look of a man who had seen too much, and carried terrible burdens for far too long. His eyes were tired, his shoulders slumped, and overall he just looked... aged.

“You should all sit, and before I start I should tell you that I could be incarcerated for life for telling you what you’re about to hear. You could also be detained or worse if you ever repeat any of it. So if anyone wants to leave now, I understand.” But no one moved, and so Barnes shut the door and keyed a code into the control panel. There was a dull thud as the door locked, and then a barely audible click as all of the cameras and microphones switched off. He nodded to himself once he knew they weren’t being recorded anymore and took one of the large cushioned seats. Then after a long pause, he gestured to the holographic display, “What you’re looking at was, or I guess... is, ArcLight.”

The others exchanged glances for a moment before Eddie spoke. “I’m sorry, but we don’t know what that means”

“Of course you don’t. There are very few people left alive who do, except me. So I guess I’ll have to explain it. But before I can, I think I need to know what’s happened here. Eddie?”

The gangly scientist did his best to detail the events that had occurred over the last twenty-four hours. Occasionally Tammy, Sallinger, or Liao would interject to fill in details. For his part, Barnes stayed silent; and only interrupted to ask a few questions at critical points. After close to an hour the story had been told and Barnes sat back in his chair and looked thoughtful. Then he stood and walked to the holographic display to watch it for a moment.

“Mr. Saylor, you are correct. It is Syllabic Sumerian for the most part. But if you look closer now, you’ll see new composite symbols emerging as the system expands its cognitive alphabet. That’s what happened the last time as well.”

“What last time?“, Jacob asked sternly.

Barnes turned to face them all again, “Ah, well I guess it’s straight to it then. I’m sure you all remember the soldiers at Volgograd.”

Everyone nodded. It had been a pivotal point in modern global history; ranking with the Kennedy assassination, the first man on the moon, and 9/11. But it was Liao who said what they were all thinking.

“The super soldiers. The ones who took out the Kiborg.”

“Yes.“, Barnes confirmed. “But, did you ever wonder why you never saw them again? Wasn’t it odd that the government would reveal something that powerful, but then never let anyone see them?”

After a second’s pause Eddie replied, “Yeah, it was weird. But I always figured it was like the old Cold War standoff. No one was actually going to use a nuke. The threat was enough to keep everybody in line.”

“Maybe”, Barnes conceded. “But what about the soldiers? What happened to them?”

“Well”, Eddie mused, “They were obviously biotech enhanced, but in a way I’ve never seen before... or since for that matter. I know I didn’t have anything to do with them, and not to brag, but if it wasn’t me then I’m not sure who could have done it.”

“Well you’re right about that - nobody did it to them.“, Barnes pointed to the holographic rings. “That did. That’s the result of Project ArcLight. It’s fully virtual biological circuitry... Basically, it slowly builds itself into a completely realized organism, down to the molecular level. But as software.”

“But, that’s not possible.” Eddie exclaimed. “The level of complexity is too high. There’s no way to regulate it with the technology we have now. It’s the same problem I was up against with the Assailant tech. Sooner or later there’s mutation in the code and the whole thing collapses.”

“True. That might be why we had to shut it down. It had unbelievable promise, but in the end it was just too dangerous. All the soldiers died.”

Janelle gasped, “The ones we saw on TV?”

“Yes”

“I don’t understand”, Eddie replied, “How is a virtual organism related to those soldiers?”

“Simple. The entire purpose of the program was to create a system powerful enough to bind with a human being and regulate nanite enhancements on a cellular level. The soldiers you saw at Volgograd were the first subjects... and the last. We couldn’t figure out what went wrong. The simulations worked perfectly, the animal test subjects thrived, everything just worked. The results were astounding, boosts in mitochondrial efficiency, increased speed and reflexes, impenetrable skin, enhanced senses. The list went on.”

“Then one day, during her regular run on the exercise track, Lieutenant McArthur started sweating. That wouldn’t be a big deal for anyone else, but Poppie hadn’t broken a sweat since she was bonded. None of them had. I was there to see how they were holding up after Volgograd, and I went down to the track to talk to their trainer, Sergeant Zielesky. When she ran by us I noticed that she looked tired. A minute later she slowed down and bent over like she needed to catch her breath. So we got a little worried, and started walking over to check on her. That was when she vomited, and we knew something was wrong. So we started running, and we were about fifty yards away when she started clutching her stomach and screaming. I called out to her, and when she looked up I could see she looked scared... I didn’t realize it then, but she was scared for us, not just herself.”

“Poppie put her hand up to tell us to keep away, but we kept going. We’d all known each other for years, trained together, fought together. We weren’t going to let her keep us from helping her, and I guess she knew it, because she backed away from us as fast as she could. She kept going until she hit the fence that ran around the track, and then she stood up again. All of a sudden she looked fine and she sorta smiled like she was embarrassed that she threw up. So we dropped back to walking. I think that saved our lives really. But Zielesky still got second degree burns all over him. Dumbass jumped in front to protect me.”

Barnes fell silent, and the room remained respectfully quiet until Tammy asked gently, “What happened?”

He smiled at her; but it was a wane, sickly thing, “Like I said. All of a sudden she seemed OK again. She looked up at me and coughed, and then she... exploded.”

A communal gasp ran through the room before Janelle exclaimed, “Exploded? Like... to pieces?”

Barnes chuckled. It was a dry, bitter sound that made the hair on Tammy’s arms stand up. “No”, he answered flatly, “There were no pieces. Not even hair. I had to write a letter to her parents, telling them that I couldn’t even send enough of their daughter home to bury. You see... when I said she exploded, I didn’t mean it was like a bomb went off inside of her - I meant SHE was the bomb. The mitochondria inside of every cell in her body went critical like tiny little nuclear reactors. Her entire body just went from ninety-eight point six degrees to about four thousand in the space of a half second or so.”

“Jesus”, Eddie whispered, “That’s why they looked so healthy, why they were so fast. You maxed out their mitochondrial efficiency.”

“Way beyond the max actually”, Barnes replied, “They all registered at close to one hundred and sixty percent efficiency the last time we checked.”

“But how’s that possible?“, Liao interjected, “Biological systems don’t work like that. You can’t overclock them.”

“We never figured it out. We didn’t have time. Two days later Captain Ayles had a massive seizure and then fossilized so fast we didn’t even know what was happening until it was over. He looked like a statue, but when the medic touched him he just fell apart into dust. A week later Captain Davenport dissolved into some sort of goo in her shower and ran down the drain. All that was left behind were her bones, and that left Nanuk... Sorry, I meant Major Yazzie. He lasted another month or so. No one could figure out why he kept going, but that was just Nanuk if you ask me. Nothing ever ruffled him, even before he was enhanced. Damn Cherokee just kept going on about how his ancestors were protecting him from evil spirits, but he died too. Although... certainly not how we expected.”

“Did he... explode like McArthur?“, Tammy asked quietly.

“No one knows.“, Barnes replied, “Since he seemed stable, we decided to fly him back to the lab in the US where ArcLight was developed. I was hoping the developers could figure out how to re-establish communications with the OS, but I didn’t want to risk anyone else’s life. I was already responsible for killing three of my best friends, so I volunteered to take him back myself with a skeleton crew on a C130. The crew and I wore parachutes and they had instructions to bail out if I called it. When we boarded Nanuk asked where his parachute was and then he laughed, but none of us were laughing.”

“We sat in the back by the loading ramp and everything was fine for the first five or six hours. I can’t tell you where we were based, but we had to go across the Pacific to get home. Nanuk just sat there staring straight ahead like he always did and I was trying to pass the time with a crossword puzzle. When he got up I didn’t think anything of it. I figured he was going to hit the head, but he didn’t. He just casually walked over to the rear side hatch, ripped it out, set it down, and stepped out. He didn’t so much as glance over at me. We were at about thirty thousand feet, so the inside of the plane was like a tornado, but I was strapped in. The masks popped, and I grabbed one until the pilot got us back down under ten thousand. I made them circle back, but I knew we’d never find him. We were in the middle of nowhere over the Pacific Ocean. I think that’s why he did it then. The whole time I thought he was just doing his wooden Indian impression, but he was waiting. He was counting down to the moment when we were over the deepest part of the basin.”

“Do you think he could have survived?“, Janelle asked gently.

“It’s possible. But I think he realized something was going wrong, and he jumped so no one would get hurt when he died. He was always a lot more powerful than the others, and if he went nuclear like Poppie there’s no telling how big it could have been. We’ll never know, because he was long gone before we could go back and look. So in the end, I lost him too, and couldn’t do a thing about it.”

“OK so... what killed them?“, Eddie asked.

“The techs said they never figured it out, but I knew. We all did.”

Sallinger finally spoke up, “Knew what?”

“They didn’t malfunction at all. The code had bonded and integrated into them so far we couldn’t even talk to it anymore. The control chips dissolved after a few weeks and the system transitioned to running inside their biology. Nerves became circuits, blood became coolant, and the brain became its CPU. It was an absolutely perfectly symbiotic system. Even the nanites ran flawlessly until they died. The software had taken over managing their systems down to a cellular level, and they just kept improving until their bodies couldn’t keep up. ArcLight wasn’t a cognitive system because we didn’t have those at the time. So it couldn’t see what it was doing and regulate itself. It just had a mandate to improve them. So it did. But their bodies weren’t designed for that much power. It was like running high voltage through an extension cord, and they just burned out.”

Jacob had walked over to the hologram as Barnes was speaking, and was watching it closely. When Barnes finished, he turned to ask, “But this is different, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know. I have no idea what’s going on here...“, Barnes replied, “I don’t even know how the code could be in there. The only copy left is archived away on the server and I triple encrypted it. I know I was supposed to destroy it all, but I kept a copy. I felt like I owed it to them to fix it someday, maybe get it right.”

“Oh... Shit”, Eddie sighed.

Tammy turned on Eddie with her hands on her hips, “Damn it Eddie, I’m getting pretty sick of hearing you say that. What the hell did you do now?”

Eddie’ face flushed in a combination of shame and regret, “I uhhh, well... I made a copy of the database and hooked it into the controller as a replacement for the blueprints it used to use. It’s the most comprehensive medical resource in the world, and I just... figured Jessica deserved the best, you know? I didn’t realize Elena had hardwired the Q-SLAM right into the controller’s hardware too. I guess it used it to crack the encryption on Barnes’ file.”

“The Q can do that?“, Barnes asked, looking surprised.

“What algorithms did you use?“, Liao responded.

“Fifth gen Rijndael on top of Double Twist Serpent, and then scrambled with Titan Conifer Bailey. All with eighty-one ninety-two bit keys.”

Liao snorted, “Half a second for the Q - tops. You have to break the Yottabyte barrier to make it sweat. Anything less can be instantiated in real-time with a light based quantum system. It can just guess all of the possible keys at once.”

“Jesus”, Eddie whistled.

“That still doesn’t explain this”, Jacob interrupted, gesturing to the rings, “From what you said the controller’s just a program. There’s no reason it would integrate the ArcLight code. Ordinary programs don’t take initiative like that. Unless this...“, he gestured to the reddish glyph at the center of the rings, “is not a program.”

Liao stood up and walked over, “You’re right. Shēngmìng zhī shù... The Tree of Life. Immortality. Resurrection... That’s why parts of the assailants kept reactivating until we froze them. You can’t make major systemic repairs with a rote program. It has to be an AI of some kind. It must kick in when the injuries are severe enough.”

Eddie joined them at the console, “That makes sense. It showed up when the buffers ran too high. Probably because her injuries ran a lot deeper, they were more traumatic, and she’s younger. That must have been what triggered it. We never got it in testing because the lab animals were simpler organisms. When it did me, I didn’t have as many injuries, and somehow it could tell they were surgically induced. It knew we needed to be repaired, but none of us were ever really in trouble.”

“But it’s been months.”, Janelle interjected, rising from her seat, “She’s all healed up! She’s been doing so well in therapy. She’s not in trouble anymore!”

“But she was.“, Jacob answered, and gestured to his hair, “and real trauma leaves a mark.”

Tammy couldn’t help but notice how that affected Janelle. Whatever Jacob had just referred to hit the woman as if she’d been slapped. What the hell was going on in that family?

Sallinger had been keeping his counsel during all of this, but when the discussion turned to trauma he spoke, “He’s right. It’s in the brain, and it’s worse because of her age. Extreme stress in children can cause long term changes in several neurological structures. It also increases the amount of cortisol and norepinephrine her brain will produce whenever she experiences stress afterwards. It’s a survival mechanism. Increased fight or flight response, and therapy can only do so much. She can sit and talk with Ginney forever, but some of it will never go away. Just ask Tammy. I’m sure she’s seen enough of it in her patients, and she’s going through it herself.”

Everyone turned to her, and Tammy felt a moment of panic. How could she explain everything without revealing classified information to the Saylors? For all they knew, this facility was an experimental medical research lab, and nothing more. She tried to think quickly, but Barnes beat her to the punch.

“Relax Bowlin. I’ll tell them. Jacob, Janelle... sit for a minute. If we’re going to deal with this together, then I think you deserve to know everything.”

The Saylors sat, and as the rest of the staff joined them Tammy looked around. For the first time she realized that the others must have been wrestling with the same guilt as her. They all knew they should have told the Saylors the truth, and now the inevitable reckoning had come. The lies surrounding them were coming unglued, and deep down they had always known they would.

Over the next hour, the team did its best to detail everything that led to the creation of the facility and explain its true mission. Although it was painful for her, Tammy retold the events from Corsica. She related how she came to be at RAMBUS, how Eddie had healed her, and what they had originally used Lab Seven for. That led to Eddie explaining how the assailants had continued to try to resurrect, the technology they found inside of them, and how he re-purposed it to help Jessica.

Finally, Barnes filled in the politics of what they were trying to accomplish, and why they had really been interested in Jessica, “My first thought was that Jessica’s rescuer had stolen the ArcLight technology, and somehow solved the problem. Then when he teleported...”

“Tesseracted”, Eddie corrected.

“Yes, Tesseracted”, Barnes continued, “I couldn’t believe it; but the more I thought about it, the more it made sense. If someone figured out how to keep from overloading the underlying biology, then sooner or later all physical improvement would be maxed out. The next logical frontier is mental, and we have no idea where that would take us. I guess telepor... err, tesseracting is not outside the realm of possibilities.”

“But you realized later that it wasn’t ArcLight?“, Liao ventured.

Barnes gave her a slightly chagrined look, “Yes. When Eddie told me there was no residual energy signature on Jessica, I knew. One of the issues we had with the ArcLight team was that they bled bioelectrical energy constantly. It made them ridiculously easy to track. We had to line that A380 with lead foil just to keep them from showing up on satellite scans.”

“So if he isn’t using ArcLight, what is he?“, Tammy asked.

“I have no idea, and I have to admit I was disappointed.“, he replied, “If someone had solved the ArcLight overload issues... Well, I didn’t care if they had stolen the technology. I just wanted to know how they did it, and not just for my own personal reasons. I just spent the last three days in front of Senate committees. I’ve been explaining why this program hasn’t produced anything yet that would help the military respond to the Corsican Assailant threat. The fact that we finally backtracked all of this to the Chinese is the only thing that kept them from pulling the plug. Aside from that, all we’ve really learned about is that the assailants are even tougher than we thought, and that we only saw the tip of the iceberg in Sinai.”

Tammy blanched, “What do you mean?”

Barnes gave her an understanding look, “I’m sorry Tammy, but we recently found indications that the Assailants were just one of several types of biomechanical creatures being produced. We found molecular level blueprints for them inside of a memory module that Eddie extracted from Jessica’s controller a few months ago. Eddie, can you explain?”

Eddie looked a little green. Tammy knew he wasn’t comfortable being put on the spot, and this was a particularly awkward instance. She had no idea what Barnes was talking about, so whatever it was that Eddie found, he had kept it from her for a reason. So she nodded at him for assurance, even though she was terrified of what he might say.

Eddie swallowed dryly and cleared his throat, “Well, crystalline memory is layered in three dimensions. So you can erase something or overwrite it, but it’s never completely gone. We had originally used some big iron to hack into the assailant repair controller, and after I pulled out the module with the assailant blueprints on it I had a hunch. So I hooked the memory up to the big iron again and did a deep recursive scan. When it finished a couple of hours later I found pieces of plans for other assailant types in the results.”

Tammy leaned over and put her head between her knees to breathe, “Oh Fuck. Jesus... There are other kinds? Is this nightmare ever going to end?”

Eddie waited until she composed herself enough to sit back up, “Well, I only got pieces, but they were enough for us to know that the biotech we saw at Corsica was just the infantry. I saw plans for assailants meant to be tanks, assault vehicles, helicopters, fighter jets, battleships, and submarines. We’re talking stuff smart enough, and tough enough to laugh at smart bombs, outmaneuver and outgun our best drones, cut battleships in half, and tunnel under our cities. It was terrifying. I mean, if these things are being built in sufficient numbers...”

“Armageddon” Jacob said, finishing the thought for him. “‘They were given power over a fourth of the earth to kill by sword, famine and plague, and by the wild beasts of the earth.’ - Revelation six, verse eight... and right now there are seven point one billion people in China, almost exactly one fourth of the world’s population.”

Tammy groaned and put her head back down. It felt like the room was spinning and she couldn’t stop her brain from replaying the worst parts of Corsica in a continuous loop.

“Well, Biblical or not”, she heard Barnes sigh; “We are talking about an unmatchable military advantage even if they just deployed their infantry. A small force of those things could annihilate the population of an entire city in a matter of hours. Now our military still has a few aces up their sleeves, even without ArcLight. But hell... even with ArcLight I’m not sure we could counter a force like that. So we have to do something to put a stop to it before it gets off the ground, or else billions could die. That’s why we built this place.”

“And how long ago did you encounter these creatures?“, Jacob asked, and Tammy answered before she could stop herself.

“Six years and nine days ago.”

Jacob turned to lock eyes with her, and she suddenly understood why the director had once withered under this man’s gaze. She had always believed it had been some weight of intimidation, or a powerful sense of judgment that did it, but now she knew it was neither. What she found there was a naked, piercing, and painfully honest kind of questioning, one that brooked no equivocation or attempts to evade responsibility. It was a look that commanded an honest response, and had an unstoppable power to extract it from you.

“So Jessica’s not here because of Aaron’s service, or any sort of altruism towards her because she was the only one who survived?”

Tammy swallowed, “No. At least not at first... It had been long enough for them to have worked out the problems with the Corsican drones and we were no closer to finding a way to stop them. So we were going to send her back to UC for the remainder of her treatments, but she changed all of that when she yelled at the Director.”

“Why?”

Eddie cut Tammy off before she could answer, “Because Jessica, and you made me realize that I’d betrayed my mom, and she was why I went into medicine in the first place. To help people, not to develop weapons.”

“And I realized that, as much as I cared about her, I’d been treating her like she was just another puzzle piece.” Tammy added, “I would’ve done anything to figure out how we could stop those things.”

Before Jacob could ask anything else, Barnes broke in, “Stop... If you want to blame someone, Mr. Saylor, then blame me. I could have made them all keep the lies going, whether they liked it or not.” Jacob broke eye contact with Tammy when Barnes said this, and she shuddered. For someone who prided herself on her control, having felt the paralysis and... compulsion in his gaze had been the most unnerving experience of her life. How was he able to do that? Who the hell... no, WHAT the hell was he?

She knew one thing for sure; he wasn’t just a mechanic from some hick town in the hills of Kentucky. In the last year she’d seen him face down the Director with nothing but the power of his reproach. Then he’d outgunned Eddie in post-doctorate level math. Now they find out he’s also a Biblical scholar, with years of archeological experience, and an expert in ancient languages to boot?

Whatever the hell this man was; he was hiding something, and it had to do with his hair. No one goes completely white like that in their early thirties and the mere reminder of it had impacted Janelle so profoundly that she hadn’t spoken a word in the last hour. That in and of itself was incredible. Tammy had never seen anyone care about a child the way Janelle cared about Jessica unless they were a parent. That little girl was the light of Janelle’s life, but now she was just sitting there. From what Tammy could see, it looked like she was... praying, while the child was hung upside down in a cocoon spun by an out of control AI!

This just didn’t add up anymore, and she couldn’t understand why no one else saw it. Eddie was the smartest person she’d ever met, and he’d been driving himself nuts for months just trying to figure out how Ginney always managed to find extra-large coffee cups when no one else could. Yet the bizarreness of this flannel-clad savant, who had schooled him in his own area of expertise, had never even occurred to him?

Then there was Barnes. The man was an intelligence legend, with years of experience in the field, but he never even gave Jacob a second thought? How was that possible? Tammy was baffled, and she knew she had to get to the bottom of it, but she also knew that now wasn’t the time. She’d just have to keep a closer eye on Jacob for a while, and then she’d circle back to the mystery once this was all over.

Right now she could see that Jacob and Barnes were locked in another staring contest. Impressively, Barnes wasn’t withering this time and the iron-willed exterior he usually wore had returned, but he certainly wasn’t enjoying the experience. Fortunately, Salinger’s characteristic practicality brought both men back to focus on the situation at hand when he spoke.

“Alright, it’s lovely that you’ve all had the chance to bare your souls and air your grievances, but can we get back to what matters here?... Mainly my patient down there? You’re all playing patty-cake with your feelings while she might desperately need our help. So if it’s not too inconvenient for you all, I’d like to start figuring out what we’re going to do.”

More than one face in the room reddened as they all realized what they had been doing. They needed to focus on Jessica and work out their personal issues later. So they all turned back to the console, but Tammy could tell from the look on Jacob’s face that his conversation with Barnes was far from over.

Meanwhile, Eddie had stood and made his way back over to the holographic display, “Director, I think your answer might be right in front of you, and if I’m right it explains almost everything. If this ‘Tree of Life’ is an AI that was designed to repair and regenerate the assailants, then it stands to reason that it would need to be able to do so under battlefield conditions. That means only a little omni-construct gel to use, and resources could be scarce. So making the ‘crabs’ down there, and sending them out to scrap the workstations for materials makes sense. So does the cocoon if you think about it. It got her up off of the ground, away from where predators or scavengers could harm her. It’s just following protocol. It’s protecting her, and gathering resources so it can fix her properly.”

Liao joined him in the blue-green glow of the holographic rings. “Do you think that protocol could extend to information? Could it be designed to gather data too?”

“Stands to reason.“, Eddie replied, “I’m sure they received updates over their network, but it would make sense to try to obtain as much information as possible.”

Liao crossed her arms, thinking. “So... in almost all computer systems a typical boot up sequence has the kernel catalog the hardware first, checking to see what’s there. Then drivers are selected to give the kernel control over the hardware, data resources like hard drives are mounted, the operating system is loaded and the information users have written to the drive is brought online last. If the AI followed that sequence then it found the Q-SLAM hardware first and figured out how to use it. Then it loaded its OS, found the database and ran into Barnes’ encrypted data. But since it already knew that the Q could instantiate large volume calculations it used it to crack the file open.” Eddie finished the thought for her, “and since it’s a sort of ‘guerilla’ medical AI, what it found in that file would have been like the Holy Grail, but it was written in a language that wasn’t compatible with its existing codebase.”

“Exactly”, Liao agreed, “but Arclight’s ability to run as biological software and evolve as it did so, had to represent an almost irresistible upgrade... Director, what was in that file besides a working version of the code?”

“Everything”, Barnes replied as he joined the group clustered around the hologram. Only Janelle remained sitting on the other side of the room, her eyes closed and her hands clasped in prayer. “The research data, documentation, source code, all of it.”

Liao’s brow furrowed, “Was there a compiler? Something to turn source code into running software?”

“Sure. There was a converter too. There was so much medical data, and so many programs to integrate, that the developers wrote one to bring the source code of other programs into ArcLight. It saved us years of having to re-code it all by hand.“, Barnes replied.

“Sweet Jesus”, Eddie exclaimed, and this provoked an unexpected response from Jacob.

“Eddie, I normally try not to preach to people unsolicited. But out of simple respect, I’d appreciate it if you refrained from taking the Lord’s name in vain around Janelle and I. It’s been happening a lot, and it does still matter to some people.”

Tammy watched as Eddie’s face flushed with embarrassment. “Oh God... I mean, sorry. Yeah, sorry.”

“It’s OK”, Jacob replied.

“Well, I just realized that it must have discovered that if it became ArcLight code, then it could become far more effective at its job. If its mandate is to be the best at medical repair, reconstruction, and healing... it wouldn’t be able to resist recompiling itself. It became ArcLight.”

Behind them, Barnes blanched. For a second Tammy thought he was going to faint, but then he straightened up and regained his composure before speaking, “There’s only one way to know for sure.”

When everyone turned to him he used one of his typical dramatic pauses to lend weight to his words, “We can ask it.”

“Wait... What? Liao stammered.

“We can ask it.” Barnes repeated levelly, “ArcLight is completely interactive until it’s finished bonding into an organism. There’s a pretty sophisticated terminal, and it even uses natural language responses. So if the AI is operating as ArcLight’s kernel, then the terminal should be a direct line.”

At that point Janelle startled them all by speaking again, “Then do it now. If that thing has my baby, then I wanna talk to it. I wanna talk to it. Right. Now.”

Then she rose from her seat, and strode through the group until she was just inches from the director, but despite her frail form and the difference in their height, there was no mistaking who was in charge. She wasn’t asking. It was an order.

Tammy could see Barnes debating how to deal with this challenge to his authority, when out of the corner of her eye, she saw Jacob shift slightly. Barnes must have noticed it as well, because his eyes flicked quickly from Janelle to the white haired man and back. Some careful calculation took place, and he reached out into the hologram. With a deft flick, he touched a large symbol within the outer ring and a complex circuit pattern of lines formed over the display. Then a window appeared with a blinking blue cursor in the upper left that flickering several times before turning red. Then it tracked rapidly to the right, trailing words behind it as they were spoken from the console speakers.

“Greetings, I am called Shēngmìng Zhī Shù, or in your language ‘The Tree of Immortality’.

How may I assist you?”