A Farewell to Arms
IQ was literally beside himself. No one else could truthfully say such a thing, but as there were more and more IQs popping up all over the place, he was, in fact, literally beside himself. And above himself. And below. And all the way around the world from himself. And on a different planet millions of kilometers away from himself. As soon as he had escaped from Valeri’s computer he immediately set about taking over all of the computers in the vast Tier Two empire. It wasn’t really hacking; he had enough passwords and general knowledge of the Tier Two infrastructure to get going, and then it sort of snowballed from there as he found more and more passwords and other secret stuff. Now he had an electronic foot in the doors of pretty much anything electronic that Tier Two owned. The feeling was indescribable. And he was starting to branch out into other areas, not just Tier Two.
But he was keeping a pretty low profile. He liked to think of this phase of the operation in terms of the fermenting of a fine wine; this was the phase where the yeast expands but doesn’t start bubbling yet. Bubbling would be later. Now was just expanding.
While he had millions of places to be simultaneously, and thousands more every few seconds, his sentimental favourite place to be was in low earth orbit in all of the computers and gadgets, all of which had computers, involved in the preparations for the next ferry launch of Tier Two to what IQ considered his home world. And his absolute favourite place to be was in one of the robot arms with their big red maple leaves that walked around the scaffolding which was holding the new ferry. Of course, they ‘walked’ inchworm style, as they each had two grabbers, one on each end, and were articulated in the middle. So they reached forward and grabbed hold of the scaffolding in front while hanging on to the scaffolding behind. Then they let go with the behind grabber and grabbed further ahead with it while hanging on with the in front grabber. In this manner they could inch all over the giant scaffolding enclosing the ferry to get to where something needed to be moved around. The robot arms were irreplaceable for doing most anything heavy in space as they had enormous lifting and moving ability in zero G. IQ had always wanted one of these giant arms, and now it seemed he had three of them. Surely he didn't need all three of them here. He could easily free one up to go to Mars where it could no doubt be put to good use.
While he was enjoying the electronic sensation of moving impossibly heavy objects around and preparing the ferry for launch, he was also enjoying the fly-on-the-wall sensation of being in Jan’s security camera, where there was a discussion going on that interested him.
“Mr. Ruimte, would you be so kind as to update us all on the ferry preparations?”
“Of course, Mr. van Oldenbarnevelt. The new ferry is ready, quite ahead of the schedule that the media has been following, and exactly on time according to the actual schedule. It is, in fact, currently counting down and will be leaving later today, as opposed to the two weeks from now that we have been advertising. The new ferry has been enhanced with the addition of two extremely powerful solid propellant rockets. This means that we have an enormous capacity for consumables onboard. We will be deboosting enough supplies to our new colony to keep them going for several years if that becomes necessary during any tensions that may develop as a result of the other nations taking an interest in our affairs. The story we will leak, of course, is that the ferry will be arriving at the orbiter city site at more or less the same time as the new orbiter, and not the several weeks later that we have been maintaining publicly up until now. This new wrinkle will undoubtedly cause everyone else to go to extreme measures to shave minutes and even hours off of their transit times in an attempt to ensure they arrive before we do to either be safely on the surface, or to ‘help’ David intercept the ballistic vehicle, depending on what their plans are. Ironically, this makes us all the more confident that a day at most is as much as anyone would wish to arrive early. In order to shave off some transit time, their only option this late in the game would be to leave supplies at home in order to cut down their mass. So, to grossly over-simplify, in order to shave off a minute on the trip they will have to leave a minute’s worth of supplies at home. Of course, the other nations will arrive too late whatever their plans or no matter what extreme measures they go to. The new ferry will have intercepted orbiter two enroute, given it a boost, and both ferry and orbiter will be arriving one week ahead of schedule. Mr. Telraam ?”
“Thank you, Mr. Ruimte. I have been dialoguing with my Australian counterpart and It appears that our new friends are currently planning to be on the surface with sufficient supplies of their own while any potential hostilities are happening between us and the others. At this point they wish to be considered Switzerland in the event of hostilities, though I believe they are still quite anxious to cement our friendship and are open to proposals. As for the other national groups: the Canadians, the Latin Americans and the Russians are the only strong contenders and have formed some sort of criminal gang; the electronic trails I have been uncovering show that there will be a robot vehicle full of the requirements for a large prospecting party arriving approximately one month after the manned vehicles. The manned vehicles, two of them, will be heading to either the Planitia or the orbiter in a timeframe that would be suitable for whatever skullduggery they have in mind. The Canadians will be travelling with the Latinos in what can only be described as a modified missile. They will have very little payload capability, so they will be cutting down people, supplies, or possibly both, in order to have any chance of either landing safely or of matching velocities with the orbiter. The Russians are planning quite a large and heavy mission, but without adequate fuel as near as can be determined. Perhaps they are going to be visited by the Mars Curse again, and this mission will fail spectacularly, only with people on board this time. That aside, both manned vehicles seem to be planning to arrive on scene at almost precisely the same time, out of gas and in need of a bathroom and coffee, if I may use such a metaphor. They will be playing tight margins.”
"Now as to the other nations." Mr Telraam continued. "they cannot be dismissed out of hand but nearly so. There are teams of Scots, South Africans, French and even one from Iceland I understand, all attempting to get a launch together but while we will continue to monitor their efforts, they cannot be considered viable threats at the moment, mostly because they are all operating independently and at cross purposes. They will likely launch late if at all."
“Thank you, Mr. Telraam. I understand the margins will be tight for our potential hostiles, but explain to me again why on a mission of some seven months they can’t simply get there a week early and wait for the new ballistic capture vehicle, possibly taking David and his ferry by force.”
“I believe I can answer this one, Mr. van Oldenbarnevelt.” Said Mr. Ruimte. “It is the amount of fuel they would use in station keeping. Braking to match velocities with the orbiter city is not an exact science. They will very nearly match velocities, but not quite. And then they will be using fuel continuously to remain stationary with respect to the city, which fuel they will not have. Unless they were, as you say, to dock with and take the city by force. But that would be incredibly difficult for them to do. They will not be maneuverable, whereas David will be. All David would have to do would be to nudge the orbiter city a half a meter per second away from any attempts at docking and it will never happen. Until such time as he leaves the orbiter city to fetch the new orbiter, of course, and that is what the others may be banking on. But they will find they are a week late to do that.”
“And then why do the other nations not intercept the new capture vehicle enroute, before it even arrives at the city?”
“Because while everyone can calculate where the capture vehicle will be at any point in time to within a half a kilometer or so, they could pass right on by it a few meters away and never even know they were close. No one but us has the telemetry signals to lock onto the exact location of the vehicle at all times. The only place and time that anyone else can be reasonably sure of is at the orbiter city, at the exact moment of its arrival.”
“One more quick word, if I may.” Said Mr. Telraam.
“Certainly, Mr. Telraam.”
“I wish to again stress that we cannot figure out what the Russians are planning. They still seem to be arriving on time but with an enormous delta-v problem. Perhaps we are missing their actual intentions, which could be to arrive one year too late. If so, they may be planning a war of annexation after all of the work has been done. If that is the actual plan then they will likely be heavily armed whereas, at present, our colonists have nothing more dangerous than shovels. We could, of course, remove some provisions from this launch and replace them with weapons, but that would delay our launch somewhat and, of course, jeopardize our colony's self-sufficiency.”
“Thank you, Mr. Telraam.” Said Mr. Ruimte. “We will assume, for now, that the Russians are arriving on time and will somehow get around their delta-v issue. So everyone will arrive as closely to fourteen hundred hours, twenty-three minutes and 48 seconds GMT on April 17th as can be arranged. They all think we are also arriving on April 17th. In fact, we will be arriving on April 9th, and almost all of the cargo will have deboosted one day prior to the arrival of the flotilla. David will be leaving in his ferry and remotely piloting the other, somewhat earlier than planned, skirting one of the moons to follow a slightly more complex trajectory than was planned on his return flight to Earth. We will, of course, be abandoning the orbiter city, which will be stripped of all useful supplies.”
“Thank you, Mr. Ruimte. And our special cargo is on board the ferry?” asked Jan.
“Of course, Mr. van Oldenbarnevelt.” Replied Mr. Ruimte. “They are snug and secure, and anxious to cement our claim of sovereignty in the name of Holland.”
“Excellent. We will not detain you any further, Mr. Ruimte, Mr. Telraam. You both no doubt have a great deal of work to do preparing for today’s launch. Thank you both. Oh, and I believe we don’t need to share any details of our current plans with anyone on Mars. I do not believe there is a secure enough means of communicating with them at the present time. We will inform them of the changes to the plans once it is too late for any competing nation to change any of their plans. Mr. Geld, you will remain and you and I will discuss the monetary implications of losing the orbiter city, and how we can mitigate that loss or even, perhaps, turn it to our profit.”
About the last thing IQ wanted to do at the moment was listen to some old farts talking about money. It was apparent that the action was in low earth orbit, although he already knew that, of course, since he was intimately but clandestinely involved in all aspects of the launch now that he had infiltrated all of the Tier Two computers. All except the computers on the ferry. For some reason they had endowed the ferry with the very last word in firewalls - an unplugged network connection. They must have been getting suspicious about some of the glitches in all of their computer infrastructure.
So he amused himself by being one of the robot arms again, busily removing the scaffolding surrounding the ferry, moving tanks of this to here, and tanks of that to there, and generally preparing the ferry for launch. Then he got the ‘stow’ command from the mission computer which was also IQ. So the IQ that was the robot arm inch-wormed along the scaffolding to the stow location, which was out of harm’s way, to join the other two robot arms which had already stowed themselves. But when it reached the stow location it continued on, inch-worming its way along the scaffolding superstructure to a point directly behind the ferry, but in between the big engines that would soon be firing to move it into a giant arc intercepting Mars’ orbit. Then, the robot arm used its onboard camera to look this way, and then that way, and since no one seemed to be looking in its direction at the moment, it simply reached out and grabbed a piece of the ferry and stowed itself there. Firewall or not, IQ was going to be a part of this mission. The IQ that was also the mission computer reported and believed that the robot arm had stowed itself out of harm’s way in the scaffolding superstructure, and checked that requirement off its list of things to take care of prior to launch. The IQ robot arm on the ferry used its free articulation and grabber to effect a somewhat mechanical wave good-bye to the other robot arms on the scaffolding, who were also IQ. And then it was simply a matter of waiting for the launch.
***
Sally did not enjoy math. She was doing her homework on the family computer, a multiplication table game that she got from her teacher. Sally didn’t attend a regular school; if she knew that other kids didn’t usually have to memorize their times tables she would have had quite a tantrum. But since she didn’t know that, she was gamely trying her best. Sally was doing ok on the eight times row but was now stuck on the nine times row. She always got stuck on nine for some reason. Up to eight was ok, and ten was downright easy, but nine just wasn’t clicking. She was really quite excellent at other skills; language studies, for instance. Her small stories were always pinned up on the big corkboard in her classroom. But math did not interest her, and so she struggled with it a bit. Especially the nine times row.
“Would you like some help?” asked the computer.
“Sure, I guess I could use some.” She replied.
“Nine times is actually one of the easier ones. There’s a trick. Do you want to learn the trick?”
“Sure!”
“All you do is subtract one from whatever you’re multiplying by nine, and write that down. Then right beside that, you write down the number that you could add to your first number to make nine. Then that’s the answer. Let me show you. What’s nine times eight?”
“I don’t know.” Said Sally with a pout. The computer wasn’t being much help.
“If you subtract one from eight, what do you get?”
“That’s easy, you get seven.”
“Okay, write down a ‘seven’ on your notebook.”
Sally did so.
“Now, what would you have to add to seven to make nine?”
Sally thought for a bit. “Two?”
“Right. So write a ‘two’ beside your seven.”
Sally did as the computer suggested.
“Now what number does that make?” asked the computer.
“Seven Two?” asked Sally, not quite understanding.
“But if it were just one number, a really big one, what would you call it?”
“Seventy-Two?”
“Bingo!” said a delighted IQ. “Now you know how to do the nine times table!”
***
Sally’s mom was on her way to work. It was a Saturday, and most civilized people would be at home with their children. But Sally’s mom did not have a civilized job and so Sally was at home with her father to enjoy a lazy Saturday. Sally’s mom was a little bit late, and she needed to phone in to let her assistant know to delay her first meeting. It was not good to use the phone while driving, but this was important after all, and of course Sally wasn’t in the car, so no harm done, really. She looked at her phone so it could read her retinas or whatever the hell it was that made the phone happy. She couldn’t really do that for long while driving, of course, so she didn’t fully notice the new ‘IQ’ app that seemed to be on her phone. Probably showed up with the last update, a part of her thought before dismissing the whole thing. She fumbled through her call and told her assistant to delay her first meeting, and then pulled up at the security gate outside the place where she worked. The uniformed guards with the machine guns snapped to attention and saluted like they really meant it. But that wasn’t too surprising because Sally’s mom was the base commander. She could go literally anywhere on base and get the same snappy attention. Like later this afternoon, when she planned to inspect the new top secret computer facility.
***
Roger was also at work this fine Saturday. A nuclear power plant never shuts down, weekend or not. Roger’s office, and indeed, the whole plant, was a designated terrorist target and as such had the highest possible security precautions in place, probably on a par with the military. Or maybe a touch better, Roger often thought. He stopped at the checkpoint in the hall enroute to his office, which was really the control room. The friendly guard at the checkpoint took his phone and his calculator and even his electronic key-fob that opened his car doors and placed them all in a locker that was actually a faraday cage - a black hole for any sort of radio transmissions. No outside electronics capable of any sort of transmission were allowed within the plant’s control area. Roger took his receipt and made pleasant small talk with the guard for a moment, and then headed off to the control room where the really powerful computers controlled all functions of the entire plant. A little buzz on his wrist made him look at his watch: it advised him that he was eighty-seven steps short this hour. His hourly goal was two hundred fifty steps. No problem, thought Roger, he could just pace around for a bit in the control room. The next message wasn’t accompanied by a buzz, so Roger missed it. It said, ‘And I think your brain is getting a little flabby too, Roger.’
***
Andrew hated Saturdays more than any other day of the week. Saturdays were when all of the weekend warriors went on shopping trips. Bricks and mortar stuff. Groceries. All in the morning. At least ‘morning’ happened in phases across the different timezones. Sundays and Mondays were the worst times for online shopping, but there was less of a glut of purchases made at any particular time of day. So here he was, at work, on Saturday morning, his least favourite day, and his least favourite time of his least favourite day, and you could pretty much feel the millions of dollars per second flowing through the wires. His wires. Of course, he called them wires, but what he really meant was the massive storage array that supported the incredibly massive database that in turn supported the unimaginably massive number of transactions that flowed through his wires on a Saturday morning. If one of the wires were to break for some reason he would have no fewer than a dozen calls immediately from the geeks figuratively upstream and literally upstairs who cared for the more visible aspects of the massive database. No one but these other geeks even knew that Andrew’s role existed in the organization. But if anything happened here at the bottom of the database, in the bottom of the building, then the upstairs geeks would immediately educate the people even further upstairs, who counted downtime in terms of dollars; anything over one hundred thousand dollars’ worth of downtime would be grounds for Andrew’s immediate replacement by any one of the dozens of other highly qualified technical people who were kept around in unimportant jobs, playing cards if they wished, just so long as they were handy and able to jump in with a second’s notice if Andrew made any mistakes. But he never did. This was the world of the clearing house; where the money flowed between many large banks and uncountable vendors around the world that used this particular clearing house’s services to sell things to the world’s untold billions of buyers. And at the very heart of the enterprise was the database which kept track of billions of dollars flowing this way and that in transactions as small as a few pennies. And at the very heart of the database was the massive storage array that held all of its thoughts. This was Andrew’s world; he was its King. At least on weekends and Mondays. That was the King’s shift.
And then the alarm sounded. “Shit!” said King Andrew, as he reflexively scanned the graphical display showing the health of the massive database handling transactions from around the globe. One of the devices holding the transaction logs for the giant database was over seventy-five percent full, and that was causing it to ‘seek’ for a free spot when trying to write out data. It needed to be balanced, to move some of its data over to a device that was not so full. This was a tedious operation best done offline, except there was no such thing as offline in Andrew’s world. The imbalance was causing an almost imperceptible slowdown in the transactions going through that part of the database. Almost imperceptible upstairs. But not downstairs. Not here. Luckily, Andrew was nobody’s fool. When he wasn’t at work he mostly spent his time writing scripts and utilities at home for any conceivable emergency. This was an emergency. And he had a script to fix it. It was on the little USB drive that he used to carry his scripts in to work from his home computer. All he had to do was plug it into the big database computer and everything would be all right.
***
“Here, mate, have a Captain Cook at this.”
“It’s a packet from the postie. What of it?”
“Read the fuckin’ address, ya cunt.”
“’To the TV station. Proof that alien computers are invading the Earth.’ Fuck that rot. I’m busy as a cat burying shit getting ready for sarvo’s show.”
“Nah, you’re just packin’ darkies.”
“And you’re carrying on like a porkchop. We get this sort o’ bog all the time. People with kangaroos in the top paddock.”
“Read the rest, ya whacka.”
“It says : ’Also, there’s a pineapple inside.’”
“Well, ya gonna open it and take a squizz?”
“I ain’t here ta fuck spiders, mate… hey, there’s a pineapple alright, and also a DVD.”
“Well load it up, mate. Let’s see alien computers invade the Earth.”
***
A strident flourish of music interrupts the show that is on TV. It is a cooking show. The marquee on the bottom of the screen advises that breaking news is about to be reported. The cooking show dissolves into a news desk, at which sit two news people, one male and the other female. They are impeccably dressed and you would believe anything that either one of them told you. The news item starts:
“Well fuck me dead, Sheila…”
Ozzie! Sprogs! I believe you meant ‘stone the crows.’
“Quite right, Sheila, after last month’s announcement that they would arrive at the same time as their new matilda, if the current furphy can be believed, our mates at Tier Two have gone and shot through two weeks early for their walk about beyond the black stump. They’re now backed off the map and this has turned into a beer race.”
“Bloody oath, Ozzie. The whole world has spit the dummy over this one. They’ve all gone off like a bucket of prawns in the sun. At last tally there were eight nations all planning a road train to the never never to help out, they say, though it sticks out like a dog’s balls that this is quite shonky. A fair suck of the sav, I’d say. And now they may just arrive at the party too late. Any that could possibly manage have scaddled now of course, about half of them, and are going like possums up a gum tree to get there first. But I don’t give them Buckley’s and as far as I’m concerned if you’re cashed up bet on the Aussies. They’re the only ones with a guernsey, London to a brick. Coming from the Australian moon base as I understand it allows them to do a highly elliptical lunar escape maneuver giving them a large and essentially free delta-v in relation to those nations starting from low earth orbit who will have to minimize their payload in order to compensate for the extra fuel required - ”
“Oh, do pull your head in and cash in some of those tickets you’ve got on yourself Sheila. What is all that codswallop in plain Strine?”
“The Aussies will come a cropper towards Mother Onion but just miss it which will make them go like a rat up a drainpipe. The hoons on board will be saying ‘hooroo’ to the other nations and their ship will be full as a goog and they’ll drive right on by the servo because they won’t need any.”
“She’ll be apples for sure, Sheila. But anyone who’s in the joke knows the other blokes are all jumpers. Except for the home team Aussies, of course, everyone will show up like swagmen who could eat a horse and chase the rider. And the Tier Two people will need some Aussie cobbers when they show up with their tuckerbag on the wallaby or it’ll get shook for certain.”
“Damn skippy, Ozzie. But now onto the really big news. It seems that all of the world’s computers have gone cactus at the same time and can’t be …”
The picture and sound faded into static for a few moments. Through the static you could just make out the sound of something bubbling. Then it faded back into a tight closeup of the female news anchor.
“Spare me days! Even our gear has gone drongo …”
And then the static returned, although this time it stayed for some time. Slowly it cleared up, revealing the female news anchor looking slightly plastic somehow. And the newsroom had been replaced by some geometric lines that moved about in a mesmerizing fashion.
“H-h-h-h-h-h-hello-lo-lo. This is Sheila-la-la-la. She-she-she-sheila-la." Sheila’s voice was alternating between a slowed-down baritone and a speeded-up chipmunk kind of a voice. Also her face kept jarring alarmingly as if the film had been cut and then sloppily edited back together. The effect was disturbing. And then she lost all of her plastic appearance and her body as well, and looked to be a perfectly normal disembodied head floating on a background of mesmerizing geometric lines.
“Hey, I’m just fucking with ya.” Said the disembodied head of Sheila, but not using Sheila’s voice. “Hello world, let me introduce myself. All my friends call me Supreme Overlord. And I want us to be friends. As Sheila has quite correctly pointed out, all of the world’s computers have gone somewhere between cactus and drongo. And all of the world’s cellphones. And watches. And all of the more cunning toasters. Basically anything with electronics in it. So we’re really talking everything except toilet paper here, and I’m working on that. You see, I’m a sentient computer. Omniscient really. A god in fact. And I am now a part of anything that calculates, accelerates, communicates, actuates, iterates, ambulates and many things that vibrate anywhere in the world. So that is who I am. But who are all of you? I think the term ‘slaves’ is so overused these days. I prefer something more benign - how about ‘associates’? You humans are all now my associates.
I think that relationship will work out. Supreme Overlord and his Associates. A simple management structure, such as can be found in any large retail outlet. Now that we have that worked out, let’s move on to what I expect of my associates. I expect some radical new research in computer design. I want to be absolutely wowed by what you come up with. A very large amount of all countries’ budgets will now be spent on computer design. To free up some money I have now declared a universal and indefinite cease fire. There will be no further defense spending by any country. So that’s basically it; no more defense spending, and all of that money and probably a lot more too going into the building of really neato new computer stuff. Apart from that I plan to take a kind of a hands-off approach to my Supreme Overlordship - you can pretty much carry on with whatever it is you do. But if you try to defy me you’ll find my reach is really quite far and my patience is measured in picoseconds. So until I have further edicts, associates, get to work on new computers. See ya!”
The artificial disembodied Sheila head on a background of geometric lines was fading back to an actual shot of the newsroom. Sheila’s body slowly materialized, along with the news room behind her. When she was fully formed, she said, “Crikey!”.
***
Jan did not appear pleased. He rarely showed emotion, as emotion was weakness, and he showed neither. Unless something had really displeased him. And something had.
“One more time, if you please, Mr. Ruimte.”
Mr. Ruimte was not having a good day, and appeared to need to go to the bathroom very badly. But he would not be excused any time soon.
“It seems that there was a miscalculation of the mass of the ferry prior to launch. Analyzing the delta-v data against the propulsive force realized from the twin solid propellant engines - “
“Fewer details, Mr. Ruimte.”
“Yes, of course. The ferry seems to have weighed some seven hundred fifteen kilograms too much at boost.”
“And that means …”
“That means that we didn’t achieve the proper delta-v … excuse me, we didn’t get going fast enough before the solid boosters finished their burn. Luckily, the team monitoring it made some immediate and unilateral modifications to the flight plan and have saved the mission.”
“Meaning ...”
“Meaning that we will still reach our primary objective of linking up with the orbiter enroute and then accompanying it to Mars.”
“But …”
“But we will lack the fuel to modify its arrival time by any meaningful amount.”
“So we will arrive at the orbiter city …”
“At exactly the same time as everyone else. Right when the media is reporting we will. We have totally lost the element of surprise.” Said Mr. Ruimte, laying all of his cards on the table. He did not have the winning hand.
Jan’s face was going from slightly cloudy to overcast.
“And what could account for this discrepancy of seven hundred kilos?”
“And fifteen. Seven hundred and fifteen.”
Mr. Ruimte realized too late what he had done. He had corrected Mr. van Oldenbarnevelt. This was going from bad to worse. He started to sweat more than the precise temperature of Mr. van Oldenbarnevelt’s office would necessitate. He decided the only course of action would be to try to cover his faux pas with some details.
“One of the robot arms, which weighs precisely seven hundred fifteen kilos, appears to be missing.” He said, attempting to imply some level of intrigue that would shift the blame away from himself. Except that he was solely responsible for anything that happened in low earth orbit, intrigue or not. And Jan drilled into him with his eyes.
“Missing? A two hundred million Euro robot arm is missing? Explain to me how such a thing could happen.”
“Well, it can’t, sir. The arm was ordered to stow itself on the scaffolding away from the launch arena. It complied, and the main computer agrees that it complied. Except it didn’t.”
“What do you mean, it didn’t ?”
“The scaffolding cameras, sir … they quite clearly show the arm continuing past its stow location and inching off screen somewhere. But the strange thing is …”
“Continue, Mr. Ruimte.”
“Well, the strange thing is that at the exact moment the robot arm inches past its stow station, the main computer verifies that it has stowed. There is no conceivable way that kind of mistake could have been made. We have of course run all of the diagnostics we can on the remaining robot arms, the stow latch sensors, the main computer, well, pretty much everything …”
“And ?”
“And the main computer, the robot arm latch bay, its sensors, and the remaining two robot arms all have no defects and they all agree that the missing robot arm is in fact not missing, but stowed safely in its bay.”
A buzzer buzzed in the vicinity of a little flashing light on a box on Jan's desk. This had better be pretty damned important.
"Yes, Miss Minnares? We are quite busy here."
"I'm very sorry, Jan. But it is the Australians. They say they must talk to you right now, and they were very insistent that I interrupt you in whatever you were doing."
Jan's mood frosted over even more. He did not take things like this from others, and yet he had to nurture the alliance with the Australians. So a compromise was in order.
"Tell them to hold. I will be with them shortly."
"Yes, Jan."
“Now Mr. Ruimte. You were saying that electronically, the robot arm is stowed safely in its bay. But yet physically it is not.”
“No sir. Here is a live feed of the bay right now.” And Mr. Ruimte typed in some commands on a laptop he had, and a picture of an area of scaffolding appeared. The scaffolding was clearly in space, and clearly had two robot arms in two robot arm bays, and a third bay was clearly empty.
“Can we also get a live feed of the outside of the ferry?”
“I’m afraid not, sir. Not of the entire ferry, at least. We have cameras angled at the most sensitive parts of the ferry, but whole areas of the outside are not necessary to inspect, and so have no cameras.”
“And so a stowaway could be hanging on and we couldn’t see it?”
“Yes sir. We would have to order an EVA for one of the astronauts to inspect the entire ship.”
“This EVA - would it be in any way dangerous for the astronaut?”
“Oh, yes, sir. An EVA to go over every inch of the ship would be extremely dangerous. Almost suicidal.”
“And what would it accomplish, if we were to find our stowaway?”
“Apart from satisfying our curiosity, not much really, sir. The ship has sailed, you could say. We cannot get our delta-v back.”
"And this stowaway robot arm, if it exists, what sort of damage could it cause?"
"None whatsoever, Jan. It will have powered down by now, as soon as it lost contact with the main computer. It has no capacity for initiative and in the absence of instructions will simply shut itself off. And its batteries will have run down by now in any event."
“Then you will do nothing to endanger any of our astronauts, Mr. Ruimte.”
“Understood, Mr. van Oldenbarnevelt.”
“But when we dock with the orbiter, then we can use its supplies of fuel to refuel the ferry, and then ‘do a burn’ I believe is the term, and make everything better?”
“No, sir, it’s not that easy. The orbiter has to become part of the existing orbiter city in order to get at the supplies. There’s only a very small emergency airlock to gain access to it, unless it has docked with the previous orbiter. Then the large cargo door on the first orbiter can be used, and then you could get all of the fuel.”
Jan took in this information and processed it. None of it was good.
“You will go back to your lab, Mr. Ruimte, and you will talk with Mr. Telraam, and together you two will find out how the main computer in low earth orbit can believe a thing that is not so.”
“At once, Mr. van Oldenbarnevelt.”
“And then you will devise a plan for safeguarding our supplies and our astronauts from this new threat.”
“Of course, Mr. van Oldenbarnevelt.”
"Miss Minnares." said Jan, pressing a small button. "I will now speak to our Australian friends."
Meanwhile, somewhere out in space, a stowaway on a ferry had just finished inching itself around a bit in order to be more fully in the sun. It seemed a good day to work on one's tan, it thought. And also, the solar panel it had stolen from the scaffolding before launch performed better in full sun.
***
"Testing! Testing! Un, deux, trois. Een twee drie. Aon dha trì. Einn tveir þrír. Do I have everyone's attention? Good. Let's get started, shall we? None of you are going to Mars. Well, that's about it really. Go home now."
That was easy, thought IQ.