Attack of the Hive
THE BRIDGE detector that Iris had provided looked like a plain white bar of soap with a dark blue dot on one end. At some level Alice could understand saving the universe while wielding some gleaming sword or high-tech laser bazooka, but a bar of soap? The whole idea seemed absurd. She had protested to Iris, but the child had not understood her objection.
This morning she, George, and Roger had each gone to one of the three SSC beam intersection points on the West Campus to check for Hive incursions. They had found none, but it was good practice. Now they were doing the same thing for the East Campus. George was surveying LEM, she was doing the SDC, and Roger was surveying the West Test Area used primarily for beam diagnostics.
She adjusted her grip on the detector carefully. The thing, in addition to being a sensitive detector of Bridges, contained a cutting laser that could be useful or dangerous. Its control system was crafted to interface with her new READING skills. Variable molecules on its surface fed information through the molecule-sensing areas of her fingers and into the new molecular pattern-recognition centers of her brain. She somehow perceived directly what the Bridge detector sensed. At present there was no real signal from the detector, but there was perhaps a faint sniff of something as she walked toward the SDC office building.
Inside, Alice located the reception office. “Hello,” she said to a secretary there, “I’m Alice Lang. I’m looking for Daniel Warren. I have an appointment.”
The secretary consulted a list before her. “Oh, yes,” she said, “Dan said he would be waiting for you in the Data Analysis Room. It’s just down the hall to your right.”
Alice found the room and entered. The inside was a mixture of conventional graphics workstations and VR-equipped recliner chairs, about half occupied by physicists wearing magic glasses and data cuffs. A tall thin man sitting at one workstation rose as she entered. “Alice?” he inquired.
She nodded.
“Hi,” he said, “I’m Dan. After you called, I looked through our collection of oddball SDC events. I found something that might interest you. Have you ever used our VR gear, Alice?”
Alice assured him she had. Soon she was seated in one of the recliners and wearing magic glasses and data cuffs. She lay back, went through the calibration ritual, blinked three times, and ...
... found that she was slowly falling down a deep well, the sides of which were lined with cupboards and bookshelves, with maps and pictures hung on pegs.
“Don’t worry,” said Dan voice at her right ear.
She turned and could see Dan, now wearing a yellow wireframe body, failing with her.
“This is the Lewis Carroll positional interface that our SDC systems people developed,” he said. “Sometimes I wonder if they actually spend any of their time trying to write useful programs, rather than amusing themselves. Watch the things on the wall as they go by. Each item is different every time.”
Alice watched and wondered at the complexity of detail. Finally the fall stopped, accompanied by an appropriately loud crash from the sound system, and Alice looked around. She seemed to be standing in a heap of sticks and dry leaves. The figure of a white rabbit wearing a checkered vest was just disappearing down a passageway.
She stood. Dan’s wireframe hand gestured, and they moved down the same passageway and turned a corner. Alice could see now that they were in a long, low hall lit by a row of lights hanging from above. The room contained several glass and wooden tables and a great many doors. “Just how far did your programmers go in following Lewis Carroll?” she asked.
“You don’t want to know,” said Dan. “Don’t touch anything labeled ‘Drink Me’ or ‘Eat Me’. There’s supposed to be a Mad Hatter, a March Hare, a Dormouse, a Caterpillar, a Cheshire Cat, a Walrus, a Carpenter, and a Mock Turtle down here somewhere. The SDC users seem to like it, but if these programmers were working directly for me I’d have packed them off to Disney World long ago.”
They came to an elaborately carved round door that bore the words “Unusual Events” in elaborately serifed letters. Dan’s wireframe hand opened it, and they entered ...
... and Alice found herself suspended in darkness.
“This is an event that we recorded three days ago,” Dan said. “It bears some similarity to your Snark event. Here it comes ...”
The darkness filled with the wireframe outline of a massive barrel-shaped object which Alice recognized as the SDC detector. Multicolored curving tracks emanated from a point at its central region. One track, colored a deep blue, came straight from the vertex point with no evidence of curvature and passed in a nearly horizontal trajectory through the outlined wall of the detector.
“What have you learned about this event?” asked Alice, feeling some alarm. Three days ago! That’s too long. If this is the Hive’s Bridgehead, it may already be too late!
“We wouldn’t have paid much attention to it before we heard about your Snark,” said Dan. “The blue track is very highly charged, judging from it’s ionization, but doesn’t curve at all in our 2 Tesla magnetic field. The event’s energy and momentum balance only if we exclude it. It went right through the iron stopping wall of our detector, leaving a track in the muon counter as it passed through, and probably went into the tunnel wall. It didn’t make any jets, though.”
“The SSC beam is still off, right?” Alice asked. She was trying to remain calm. She remembered Iris’ assurance that they would have a year before the Hive attempted a Bridge.
“Yeah,” said Dan. “At last report, they’re almost finished fixing the dipole in the north segment of the ring that quenched last night. They should be starting another ramp-up cycle soon.”
“Could we go down to the SDC detector, then. I need to have a look at the place on the wall where that track would have hit.”
“Sure,” said Dan. “I can assure you there’s nothing to see on that wall, but you might as well have a look at the detector itself while you have the chance. When they get the dipole fixed they’ll turn on the beam again, and there’ll be no access for many days.”
Alice tried to call George, setting the urgency level to maximum, but got no answer. He was probably down in the tunnel at the LEM detector, where his cellphone wouldn’t work. She recorded a message telling him where she was going and suggesting that he link to an SDC remote and join her.
Ten minutes later, Alice stood with Dan in the vast SDC experiment cave. Beside them was a tall remote. George had received her message, finally, and linked to an SDC remote. He said that Roger and Iris were with him, watching. His bearded face was visible on the remote’s headscreen.
Dan consulted a printout and reached up to touch a spot on the wall of the concrete-lined cave wall. “As nearly as I can tell,” he said, “that blue track should have hit the wall about here.” He took a felt-tip pen from his pocket and drew a red “X” on the wall.
Alice had been getting weak positive signals from the Bridge detector ever since she had stepped out of the elevator. Now she stood on tip-toes and held the soap-bar device up to the spot. It produced a remarkable sensation. As it moved it closer to the mark, she could “see” that there was indeed a Bridgehead behind the wall. “It’s here,” she said, turning to the remote, “about five meters in. It must have been here for several days. What should we do now?”
The image of George on the headscreen frowned. “Hell, I guess we’ll have to bore into the concrete and limestone. That won’t be easy. It will interfere with accelerator operation and make a big mess next to delicate equipment. Hold on a minute. Let me ask Iris.”
“I wonder if ...,” said Alice. She walked to a nearby tool board and returned with a medium size ball-peen hammer. She began to tap the wall, starting well away from the spot of interest and working her way toward it. As she approached the red “X,” the tapping sound changed from a dull “thunk” to a more resonant hollow sound.
Dan looked surprised. “Let me try,” he said. He took the hammer from her hand. She was too startled to protest.
“Dan, wait! ...” said George, looking up to realize what was happening.
Dan struck the “X” a solid blow, and the wall crumbled like a broken eggshell, falling away to leave a jagged hole about sixteen inches across. Behind the hole was darkness.
Alice realized that Dan had never heard of the Hive. He had no idea that there was any danger.
Dan pulled a small flashlight from his pocket and shined it into the hole. He leaned forward, inserting his head in the opening. “I don’t see anyth ...” he began, and then screamed. His whole body lurched forward, and he was pulled through.
The mechanical arms of George’s remote reached for Dan’s feet, but missed. The remote, it’s work lights beaming forward, its tractor treads spinning, thrust itself into the hole after Dan. A shiny gray cylindrical pseudopod snaked out of the hole, wrapped around the remote, and pulled it inside.
“Dan! George!” Alice shouted, stepping back. It had all happened so fast. She looked around for help. There was a red alarm button on the wall nearby, and she pressed it. In the distance, an alarm signal began a slow whooping sound.
She heard a loud electric-motor noise and turned. Behind her another remote was driving in her direction on an electric vehicle containing a large cylindrical gray tank. As the vehicle stopped before the hole, she recognized the face of George on the headscreen.
“I switched to another remote,” he said. “Dan is dead. Cut to pieces and dissolved into the floor, along with my remote.” The remote rolled around the tank and uncoiled a long steel-mesh covered hose. “Liquid nitrogen,” he said. He rolled to the hole and began to direct a stream of the clear cryogenic liquid inside. Alice had a feeling of deja vu.
Clouds of steam-like condensed water vapor poured out of the opening, obscuring Alice’s view. She held out the Bridge detector. The Bridgehead was still in the place where she had first detected it. “George,” she said, “can you tell me what’s going on.”
“The Hive sent a Bridge through the SDC and planted it behind the cave wall. By manipulating through the Bridge, they’ve put together nanomachine assemblers, and they’ve had several days to build Hive workers. Iris thinks there’s a good chance that there hasn’t been enough time for the Hive Mind to become conscious. Something grabbed Dan and my remote and disassembled us for molecular spare parts, but perhaps that was an automatic response of the nanomachines. I didn’t get much of a look before the remote link broke, but there are structures in there and what look like folded-up dormant insects.”
“Perhaps those are the workers,” said Alice.
“I’m hoping this liquid nitrogen will lower the temperature enough to immobilize the nanomachines,” George said. “It’s our only hope of stopping this. Alice, you’ll have to help. I can’t use a Bridge detector through a remote. I want you to go down the cave about fifty meters to the left. When you come to a sign on the wall that says ‘Cryogenics’, there should be a cabinet with some cryo-protection suits and respirators. Put on a cryo-suit and come back here as quickly as you can.”
Alice raced down the cave. She returned wearing a silvery cryo-suit. The remote, the headscreen now dim, was frozen in a fixed position, still hosing liquid nitrogen into the hole. Another remote bearing George’s image on the headscreen stood near a smaller cryogenic dewar. It was swinging a sledge hammer to enlarge the opening, which now looked like a tunnel.
“Now,” said George’s voice from the remote, “We’re ready to try. I’ll go in first. However, you’ll have to use your Bridge detector. What you have to do is find the Hive’s Bridgehead and tell me where it is, so I can put it into this liquid helium dewar. If we can do that, everything will be OK.”
“OK,” Alice said doubtfully. The remote turned off the flow of nitrogen, approached the tunnel, and rolled inside, carrying the small liquid helium dewar with it. Alice followed, crawling carefully through the rough opening, her one ungloved hand holding the Bridge detector before her. Once inside she was able to stand. It was hard to see much because of the mist of condensed water vapor left by the liquid nitrogen, and her ungloved hand felt very cold. There was a huge rounded area behind the wall lined with strange organic-looking structures. Along one side Alice could see the huge dormant insect-like creatures George had mentioned. They seemed to be frozen in place. The floor felt yielding, jelly-like. Alice touched the floor and Read. She realized that the surface was lined with tiny molecular machines programmed to disassemble whatever they met and reconstruct it into something else. They had been shut down by the low temperature. These things had killed and dissolved Dan. She felt sick at the thought.
Alice crawled forward to a rough stone extrusion that extended up from the floor like a stalagmite. Scanning it with her detector, she sensed the Bridgehead just within its tip. “It’s here,” she said, pointing. “Now what?”
“OK,” said George, “lock the laser cutting beam in the ‘on’ state and hand me the Bridge detector. Then move back.”
She activated the cutting laser in the Bridge detector, carefully pointing the intense blue beam down the tunnel, and held it out. George’s remote took the device from her and extended its jointed arm to the stalagmite, using its other arm to hold the mouth of the liquid helium-filled dewar just below the point that she had indicated. The bright blue beam began to slice into the limestone, making white sparks. Suddenly, a blinding green flash overwhelmed the blue of the laser. Alice was flung back by the shock wave.
“Shit,” said George’s voice. “The thing was booby trapped.” As her eyes readjusted, she could see that both of the remote’s arms had been burned off, the detector was gone, and the dewar lay broken and steaming some distance away.. “It’s a trap!” said George. “The Hive Mind is conscious. Get out, Alice! Run!”
As she backed out of the tunnel, she could see the insectoid forms along the wall were beginning to move. Outside the opening she grabbed the hose of the liquid nitrogen tank and shoved it into the hole, cranked the valve to full open, then tore off her respirator hood. Should she shed the rest of the suit? Her eyes caught movement from the tunnel. She glanced around for another possible weapon, but saw none. George’s last word finally connected with her legs and she began to run for the elevator.
Halfway there, she turned for a quick look. The scene evoked images from a Hieronomyous Bosch painting she’d once seen in Madrid. Emerging from the tunnel were a hellish variety of shapes and forms that walked, flowed, squirmed, flew, rolled, and slithered from the opening. Prominent among them were large black insectoid forms with sharply spiked bodies and large cruel pincer jaws. Somehow she knew that these were Hive soldiers. They ran toward her on six legs, with two smaller legs extended forward, grasping strange tessellated objects. Another remote with George’s image on the headscreen darted out from a charger bay and tried to intercept them. One insect grasped the machine in its jaws and tossed it sideways. The remote hit the wall with a loud crash and was still.
I can’t believe this, she said to herself. This isn’t happening. She kicked off the clumsy boots of the cryo-suit and ran barefoot across the painted concrete floor.
She had almost reached the sanctuary of the open elevator door when the Hive soldiers caught her.