Winny Swink stood in the back of Harvey Rogers’ Aberdeen lab, her butt propped against a counter, her arms crossed. Karla Raven had adopted the same pose within spitting distance to her left. The room looked like some electronics freak’s psycho dreams: floor-to-ceiling shelving; carefully labeled drawers; neatly stacked piles of computer guts; testing meters of various kinds; microscopes; and machines the purpose of which Winny could barely comprehend.
True to General Grazier’s word, a van had been waiting for them when Winny set the Bell Kiowa they’d been “loaned” down at Aberdeen Proving Ground’s heliport. In the van had been Harvey Rogers.
The guy could have been a walking stereotype: Thick wire-frame glasses held bottle-bottom lenses that exaggerated his washed-out blue eyes. Either Rogers was growing a beard, or he’d forgotten to shave for the last week. A white lab coat covered worn jeans and scuffed brown tassel-top loafers.
“How ya been, Savage?” he’d announced as they climbed into the van. Then he’d chattered on as the van’s driver wound them through the intricacies of Aberdeen’s warren-like maze of buildings. In the end, it had deposited them here, at Rogers’ lab.
“So that’s your bad boy?” Rogers asked as Sam Savage unlatched the carry case and laid the box on the workbench.
“You understand that this is highly classified?” Savage asked as Rogers bent over the black box and studied it through his thick glasses.
Winny turned to Karla, whispering, “You’d think it was a golden chalice the way he’s gawking. What’s he seeing? It’s a damn black box with some little lights on it.”
“Fascinating,” Rogers declared as he carefully turned the box with long and knobby-jointed fingers. “Solid one-piece construction of the case. A single port for a cable, but the design is like nothing I’ve seen. Definitely proprietary.”
He lifted it, hefting the weight. “Let’s see what’s inside, shall we?”
He walked over to a rubber-matted counter, laid the black box down, and retrieved what looked like a lensless flashlight. This he touched to the case, and then peered at a computer monitor to one side. “This little gadget works like an ultrasound. Allows me to look inside.”
Winny peered at the image on the color screen, making nothing out of it except the peculiar notion she was seeing a pink-tinted, semitranslucent, cotton-candy haze.
“Oh, come on,” Rogers murmured. Then he laid a finger on a cordless mouse and said, “Magnify and increase resolution.”
The effect on the screen was like diving an F-16 through a pink cloud until it began to vibrate. Winny made a face. She hated nothing on earth more than pink.
“Hold,” Rogers ordered. With quick fingers, he mounted the sensor on a mechanical arm, and carefully screwed the articulating members tight. Then he repositioned it over the black box, and repeated, “Magnify and increase resolution.”
Within moments the cloud began to solidify, and the image began to jiggle irregularly, then froze.
“I’ll be damned,” Rogers muttered.
“What are we seeing here,” Ryan asked.
Rogers fingered his furry jaw. “I don’t know.”
Savage chided, “Come on, Harvey. It looks like pink fog, right? That’s got to mean something.”
“The reason it’s pink? That’s the composition and density. A solid block of resin would almost give you that consistency of color, but in yellow. Bloodred would tell you that you were dealing with copper. Normally, I get the usual crimson geometric patterns common to circuitry with orange highlights from solder and silver.” He tapped the computer monitor. “I can’t create or detect sound waves beyond this resolution. The irregular jiggles you see in the image? Despite the fact that this bench is suspended, those are coming through the earth and the building. Some are micro seismic events, some might even be heavy truck traffic, or the guys in the warehouse dropping pallets of canned food.”
His expression narrowed as he stared at the pink image. “White and red, silicone and copper, but mixed with something else. And it’s uniform down to a molecular level? Who even makes this stuff? Once you do, how do you program it, let alone retrieve data?”
“Harvey, you’re talking Martian,” an exasperated Savage told him.
Rogers pulled his glasses far enough down his nose to peer at Savage over the tops. “Not Martian. I’ll go ahead and guess for your benefit, but it’s only a guess. The only thing I can figure—assuming this thing isn’t a prank—is that it’s part of a three-dimensional prototype quantum computer.” He shook his head as if crazed. “But it can’t be! We’re talking so damned theoretical that it’s impossible. Assuming you could solve life expectancy for qubits, and heat management, it would take years and unlimited funding just to develop the technology to develop the technology to build the damn thing!”
Rogers turned back to the image on his screen. “Which is the problem with this being a hoax. Look at the uniformity. How do you get that kind of uniformity? How do you control the environment? At that level, a single random atom of nitrogen, oxygen, or carbon, let alone a water molecule or carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, anything that might stray into the matrix . . . ?”
Winny watched him narrow an eye as he spun back to Savage. “Wait a minute! You and Grazier set this up, didn’t you? You sneaked into my lab last night. Somehow you bypassed my security, got in here, and programmed this into my computer.” He laughed maniacally, crying out, “You assholes! What did I ever do to you?”
Then his expression crashed. “But how, damn it, did you ever bypass my security? I designed it.” He rushed to a device that looked like an oscilloscope and pressed a button, frowning as a series of waves began to reverse and play back.
“Harvey.” Savage placed a hand on the man’s shoulder. “No one has breached your security. It’s not a joke. That box is real. Someone made it, but we’re not at liberty to disclose who. Now tell me: you’re sure it’s a quantum three-dimensional computer?”
Harvey Rogers blinked, almost in confusion. “Damn it, I told you. I’m guessing until I can really get a look at that thing. Hell, I’ve got to figure how to get a look at it. Do you understand? If that’s a Q3D device, I’m in the same position a Neanderthal would be in if you asked him to inspect, and then explain, an iPad. Let alone program it.” He looked flustered. “So come clean. Where’d you get this? Because if it isn’t ours, we’re in a shitload of trouble.”
“What do you mean, trouble?” Ryan asked from where he’d been watching from the side.
“Dr. Ryan, imagine if you could somehow connect the cloud, every single personal computer, supercomputer, smartphone, automobile, and aircraft ECU, every single computing device on the planet into one whole? You with me so far? You comprehending the magnitude here? Well, if that little box is a Q3D computer, you have just exceeded this entire planet’s computational capacity by a factor of about a thousand. And that’s assuming it’s a crude first-generation device.”
“Which means?” Winny asked from the side.
Rogers gave her a sharp-eyed look. “Which means that a cyberattack launched through a Q3D computer of this potential could bring down the world banking system, Wall Street, the Federal Reserve, neuter every branch of government, DOD, FAA, IRS, the White House, Justice Department, and every state and local government. It would crash the Internet and overwhelm every personal computer in the world that’s tied to the net. Cell towers, hydroelectric plants, satellites, every system on the planet that’s controlled by computers would stop cold.” He swallowed hard. “You getting this?”
“Assuming you knew how to program it,” Savage added.
“Yeah.” Rogers scratched his almost-beard. “’Cause if that’s what that thing is, Sam, you’ve just turned me into a Neanderthal. Now, tell me, where’d you get this thing?”
“It’s classified, Harvey. Just tell us if that thing’s real.”
“I’d better call Grazier. Explain why—”
“He knows. He’s briefing the president as we speak.”
“Oh . . . shit.” The look in Rogers’ washed-out blue eyes sobered. “It better be a hoax, or the world as we know it just ended.”
Winny suddenly thought of her two boys. The esoteric implications of Gray just “appearing” in their world had made no sense. But a complete collapse of society? The boys lived in a high-rise in Boston. What would happen when all those millions of people suddenly found themselves in the dark, running out of food and water? A cold sensation ran down her spine.
“Come on, people,” she said. “We need to get home, get this operation put together, and take out Gray and her lab.” And if Team Psi couldn’t, in her mind’s eye she was already banking over the Rio Grande Valley, locking a missile on the Los Alamos lab that hid Gray and her infernal machine.