Early tuesday morning found me back in front of the equipment that effectively duplicated my own, looking at a stack of my own notes and shifting back and forth between three profile configurations, with another hooded and silent guard watching everything.
The concrete-walled and -ceilinged room still smelled of ancient oil and dusty concrete and of heated synthetics being cured in the new difference engine before me.
One stack of notes blurred into another, and I massaged my stiff neck.
When I’d tried to create the first replica of Carolynne, the whole profile had collapsed. I never did really create her ghost doppelgänger from scratch—if doppelgänger were the term for a copy of a ghost of a singer who’d been killed a century earlier. I’d actually ended up making a duplicate of the real ghost of Carolynne. The ghost of justice and mercy had never been more than a caricature—enough to still give me shivers when he/it surfaced inside my soul, but a caricature. Now I had to create a “real” complete ghost, when I’d never accomplished that before, while pretending that I was only “finding” an existing ghost. And I had to get it done in a way in which I could walk away from the results.
Would three separate profile configurations be enough? I shook my head. Not for what I had in mind. My eyes went to the gray screen and the pointer poised there.
Finally, I called up what I’d been working on and took a deep breath, looking at the smeared mirror surface of the two-way glass across the top of the difference engine from me. All I saw was the reflection of a stubbled professor, once again in over his head.
The guard remained silent.
I started to set up the sketchy profile files for loading, but when I did try the loading, the machine locked.
The guard leaned forward. I reset the difference engine and waited. The same thing happened again. So I took out the empty auxiliary disk and studied it.
I could tell, as usual, nothing was going quite as planned, either for my captors or for me. They hadn’t bothered to get SII auxiliary disks, or the generic equivalent, and I needed the auxiliaries because the equipment was designed to use both the fixed disk and the auxiliary simultaneously or actually in rapid switch succession. That wouldn’t have been a problem in Columbia, but Deseret used the New French standards, with a different balance and spin rate.
Purists would say that you can vary the auxiliary disk spin rate and it makes no difference. In fact, some claim you can get better performance that way. Maybe … but my system—or the clone set up by the Revealed Twelve—wouldn’t take standard Deseret disks. I was finding that out early on.
I reset the difference engine, cleared the screen, and tried a disk format.
“Not reading auxiliary drive” scripted out on the screen.
For a moment, I sat there looking at the machine. Finally, I turned to the guard behind the shield.
“I need standard Colombian auxiliary disks. These don’t work, and I can’t reformat them, and they’ll only foul up the system.”
“Keep working.”
“I’ll do what I can, but I can’t finish the project without at least one auxiliary disk.” I rubbed my stubbly chin. The shower, such as it was, kept me clean, but my clothes weren’t getting any fresher, and I hadn’t brought even spare underwear—another one of those stupid oversights. I was making entirely too many of those.
The guard mumbled or grunted.
I touched the cover of the difference engine.
“You don’t need to do that,” he snapped.
So … they didn’t want me monkeying with the equipment. That also triggered my suspicious mind.
I played around with Bruce’s calculator and diddled some figures, then put it back in my pocket and wrote out some more code lines to build up the profile that I’d eventually have to transfer to the disks I didn’t have.
Another guard stepped into the room, and the two mumbled for a moment, low enough that I couldn’t hear, before the second disappeared and the lock clicked.
I spent another hour or so building up the quote files, selectively speaking, and trying to design a structure to create parallel interlocking files that the antennae could project in close to real-time simultaneity.
Just about the time I thought I had something, the door to my small section of the blockhouse opened and a tall figure stepped inside. He didn’t move far from the booth/shield.
“You said you needed more disks. Why? Why do you need them to recall a ghost that already exists?”
I managed to keep my jaw shut while my thoughts whirled. He really meant it.
“It’s hard to explain,” I temporized. “Let me put it this way. In our world,
which is a temporal world and not primarily a spiritual one, we rely on physical structure to hold us together—our skeletons, for example. A ghost is held together by an energy structure, an energy profile. When the profile loses energy, it collapses.” I cleared my throat. “I have to re-create the profile, and that means a lot of storage capacity. Once the profile is re-created and energized, the ghost reappears, but the profile has to be as accurate as possible, in order to ensure that the reenergized ghost is the correct one.” I felt proud of myself—momentarily—until I realized the rest of the implications.
After a moment of silence, I pointed to the notes and The Book of Mormon. “You can see. I’m using verified statements of the prophet as keys to the profile.”
After a long silence, the tall man spoke. “How many disks do you need?” He seemed to be the same one who had led me into the blockhouse—that’s what it felt like—and who seemed to be in charge of the group.
“I might be able to get by with one, but three, in case of problems—”
“Problems?”
I did sigh, turning in the chair to face him. “I don’t know what anyone told you, but this is a new and fairly experimental procedure. This is something where some government research laboratories have failed for years. You want me to duplicate that kind of work with minimal equipment.” I didn’t tell him that I wouldn’t have been able to do it at all without the years of work from one of those laboratories—or the genius of the late Professor Branston-Hay.
“Why aren’t you using the antennae?”
I frowned at the change of subject. “Because that’s the last stage, when you project the profiles and the fields.”
“How much delay will this cause?” he asked.
“Very little if you can get the disks within the next day. I would have liked to load them incrementally, but that’s not absolutely necessary.”
I had another thought. “If you can get an image scanner and a likeness of the prophet that you think is the most representative, those would also help.”
Another period of silence, and then the mesh hood nodded and the door opened and he departed.
As the hours went by, I tended to lose track of time until I checked my watch and found that when I was thinking time sped and when I was wool-gathering, trying to puzzle out vague conceptualizations for the refinements I knew I needed, it dragged.
Every four hours or so, I got something to eat—basically a slab of meat, some bread, a piece of fruit, and some powdered chocolate in a mug. Another guard delivered it. That is, he set it on the floor, and I got it and had to put it back there when I was done.
It was close enough to the booth that I probably could have disabled the guard—but why? I still couldn’t have gotten out of the place.
Someone always watched me from the booth, but seldom the same person for
more than a few hours, although each wore a gray jumpsuit with no markings and one of the fine loose mesh hoods.
In working out the code lines, I made a point of apparently using one of the pens Bruce had provided and the calculator. I wanted both to be familiar to all the Revealed Twelve people.
I tried not to think about Llysette or much of anything else except what I wanted and needed to do, and that was to create the most powerful ghost image possible—the stronger and more imposing the better. That had been one reason I’d wanted to check the hardware early.
The graphics images would be the hardest, because all the Saints had an ingrained visual concept of Joseph Smith and I’d never really done that much with that side of ghost file creation. In my previous efforts I’d let the internal substance create the image, and that wouldn’t be enough for a really strong ghost image of the prophet. I hoped that they’d come up with a scanner, but … that remained to be seen.
I took a deep breath and looked at the third—or fourth—guard. The eyes behind the veiled or mesh hood could have been open, closed, or glaring. I wouldn’t have known.
After standing and stretching, I sat down again and looked at some of the quotations I had to incorporate into what I would have called the dialogue profile:
All things unto me are spiritual, and not at any time have I given unto you a law which is temporal… .
Behold, verily, I say unto you that there are many spirits which are false spirits, which have gone forth in the earth, deceiving the world. And also Satan hath sought to deceive you, that he might overthrow you… .
Wherefore, for this cause I gave unto you … and I will give unto you my law, and there you shall be endowed with power from on high… .
Then there were those that I’d modified, that I hoped would be close enough to the structure and yet would reinforce the current “regime” and its efforts. Neither I nor Columbia wanted a government in Deseret controlled by religious fanatics basing their actions on a century-and-a-half-old code that hadn’t been that workable then. Like it or not, I had to support First Speaker Cannon, and I wasn’t thrilled about it. I was just less thrilled about the alternatives.
As the angel Moroni said, do not anger so exceedingly that you have lost thy love, one towards another. Do not thirst after blood and revenge continually… .
How can a people delight in abomination—and in killing our neighbors and those who have not lifted a hand against us—how can we expect that God will stay his hand in judgment against us? …
For behold, a bitter fountain cannot bring forth good water; neither can a bitter man bring forth good works… .
Condemn not your brother because of his imperfections, neither his father, because of his imperfection, neither them who have written before him, but rather give thanks unto God that he hath made manifest unto you those imperfections that ye may learn to be more wise than we have been… .
Cursed is he who puts his trust in man. More cursed is he that puts his trust in a man’s false interpretation of what I have said. Trust rather the Revelations of thy Father in heaven than the man who twists my words… .
Unto each generation cometh the Revelations of God; harken unto them, for the Lord will provide, both counsel and providence for those who listen… .
I had to hope that no one was going to go through thousands of lines of code, but I had this feeling that they wouldn’t, that any image of the prophet would serve the purposes of the Revealed Twelve.
I swallowed and looked at the difference engine screen. It was going to be a long day, with at least several more to come.