| |
––––––––
Templemer, Planet Hoarfrost, Lupasha System, Coro Region, Tolo Arm
April 24nd, 2038
“Terry?” He turned to see Doc walking into the moon pool. They were the only two currently in the room. Terry was waiting for the machine to make enough milk for Pōkole and for the other seniors to arrive and help.
“What’s up, Doc?”
The older man stopped and laughed, making a funny gesture with his hand like he was holding up something in front of his mouth. “Ahhh, what’s up, Doc?” Terry’s brows knitted in confusion. “Never mind, I need to tell you how I got nicknamed Doc someday. You got a minute?”
“Yeah, the guys won’t be here for a few minutes. Junior’s starving.” He pointed out through the ruby dome to where Pōkole was swimming impatiently in a figure-eight pattern. Moloko was hovering a short distance away.
“Your mom asked me to talk to you.”
“Oh, for the love of—”
“Kiddo, it’s cool. I don’t really care if you play doctor with another kid your age, as long as they’re consenting.”
“I wasn’t...wait, ‘playing doctor?’”
“Old saying,” Doc said. “Examining each other’s bodies?” Terry felt his face turning hot. “Uh huh, that’s what I thought. In the hallway?”
“I was showing her my scar,” Terry said and pointed at his hip.
“You’re off by a few centimeters to the left.”
Terry looked down, tracked in the indicated direction, and the hot feeling in his cheeks turned to molten lead. His mouth opened and closed, but only a popping sound came out. It took him a full five seconds to respond coherently. “I was showing her my scar!”
“It’s cool,” Doc said. “I mostly believe you.” He shrugged. “Mostly. Now, how do you think it looked to your mom? Her son and a pretty blonde girl out in the hallway, you with your pants half off, and her touching your...scar?”
“I didn’t have my pants half off,” Terry said, realizing how lame it probably sounded as the words came out of his mouth. Doc put his hands on his hips and cocked his head. Terry looked down. “Well, I didn’t.”
Doc stared at him with a hard gaze for a long time, then slowly nodded. “But you do like her, don’t you?”
“Sure!” he said with a little too much exuberance.
“Okay, well, maybe don’t show her any more scars in front of your mom?” Terry laughed and nodded his head. Doc grabbed him around the shoulders and gave him a quick hug. “Good. Now, how’s the program coming?”
“I finished compiling it into language I understand; I’m just trying to piece together what it does and why.”
“You know how much longer?”
“Maybe a couple days. Hopefully by the time you let me go back out.”
“You aren’t delaying, are you?”
“No, sir,” Terry said seriously.
“Good, I didn’t think you would be. Well, we’re going to Extractor #4 today to see how much it has on board. The dolphins found it late last night. They’re treating it like a game with the orcas, and say they’re ahead 1-0.”
“Sounds like them, all right,” Terry agreed. “Good luck.”
Doc left, and Terry pulled out his slate to work on the program while he waited for his friends. A short time later he saw the big submarine and three of the new minisubs pass just within view. A squadron of several orcas and bottlenoses were in closer formation; the cetaceans now all had LED lights mounted on their rebreather harnesses, and they cast beams in the darkness as they swam with the submarines until they were swallowed by the sea.
The machine beeped, notifying him a bottle was full. He switched it for an empty one and went back to work on the slate to forget the fun he was missing out there. He was just changing another bottle five minutes later when Katrina came in.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey,” she said back and immediately came over to help him.
The only thing the leg made difficult was carrying heavy things. The full milk bottles weighed in at over 10 kilos. It was a little difficult. She leaned in to help him, and he noted just how blue her eyes were.
“I saw Doc leaving,” she said.
“He was in here talking to me before you got here,” Terry said.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah, my mom narced on us to him.”
Her cheeks grew red, and she stood up, smoothing her shirt back down. He enjoyed the effect. “What did he say?”
“Just that we shouldn’t do anything around mom.”
“We weren’t doing anything,” she said.
“I know,” he said, “I tried to tell him.”
“I mean, I don’t even know what you’d want to do.”
Terry didn’t know what to say in reply. What would he want to do? “What would you want to do?”
“I don’t know,” she said.
Katrina was so close, just a few centimeters away. She smelled like soap and mystery. “What would we do by ourselves if we wanted to?” It was a stupid question, he realized, when she took a step forward and their lips touched.
Colin, Dan, and Taiki came in talking loudly about a movie they’d watched recently. Terry was helping Katrina lift the last milk jug onto the table. They were both breathing hard and looked a little sweaty.
“You guys alright?” Dan asked.
“Yeah, why?” Terry asked.
“You look worn out,” Colin said.
Terry swallowed and began to panic.
“Of course we are,” Katrina said and he felt his heart leap into his throat. “You assholes are late and left us to do all the hard work!”
The three guys made rude sounds and waved it off. Terry breathed again and glanced at Katrina, who winked back at him. Terry sat down to let the new arrivals move the jugs onto the edge of the moon pool. It helped him wait until something went away.
The boys went into one of the two small changing rooms, Katrina into the other, and emerged a couple minutes later in drysuits carrying respirators and fins.
“We going swimming later?” Dan asked.
“I need to work on the program,” Terry said. He glanced at Katrina, who glanced back at him. Her eyes held something that was better than anything he’d ever experienced. Oh, boy.
The moon pool lock opened, and Pōkole raced in. Moloko followed, considerably slower and more careful. The five teenagers slid into the water and spent a few minutes playing with the excited calf as his mother floated around the pool lazily while keeping an eye on her exuberant offspring. They each took a turn being towed by Pōkole, an activity he particularly enjoyed, and then it was lunch time.
As always, Pōkole was voracious. Dr. Jaehnig discussed the option of increasing his feedings to a four-meal schedule instead of the current three. This would necessitate either automating the process, or having some staff handle the middle of the night. Regardless, there was no doubt the calf was thriving; he seemed to grow every day.
The other researchers were against automation, especially Dr. Orsage. Their only biologist specializing in cetacean psychology stated Pōkole got too much from the interaction between Terry and the other teenage volunteers. For the time being, they would continue on as before.
Terry hadn’t been lying, he did need to concentrate on the program. Only he’d also promised Katrina she could stay. After the brief and exciting moments of kissing, he’d found it impossible to tell her no. Once the other guys were gone, he and Katrina stayed in an unused room next to the moon pool. Outside, several orcas—including Pōkole and his mother—were chasing a local sea creature.
“It looks like they’re torturing it,” Katrina said, pointing. The animal was more like an eel than a fish, with a dozen flippers along its length, and a wide mouth meant to eat plant growth from the ocean floor. It was desperately trying to escape its tormentors, but suffering from a major deficiency without vision. The orcas bit at it from all sides, Moloko encouraging her calf to join in.
“They’re predators,” Terry explained, “called Killer Whales by most people.” He glanced at the drama playing out, the calf biting into one of the eel’s flippers and tearing a chunk out of it. “It’s natural for them.”
Katrina looked away as the orcas began to tear the creature to pieces and feast on it. Terry went back to his slate. The Selroth control program was projected via Tri-V in a series of icons, each representing an element of the program. She watched him quietly, perched on the edge of a table. It was really more comfortable than the Selroth-designed chairs anyway, which was why Terry stood.
“You’ve really gotten used to the leg they made for you,” she said.
“Umm hmm,” he grunted in agreement.
“It makes you look like a badass.”
Terry glanced up at her from the display. She was examining him in detail, her expression indecipherable. He spent a second examining her face, the curve of her chin, the shape of her lips. Her eyes came up and met his. He swallowed and went back to the program. It was just frustrating enough to take his mind away from how it felt to kiss her.
“What is it you’re trying to do?” she asked.
“The Selroth wrote a program on their extractors which controlled their actions after they left. Unfortunately, only part of the program was on the extractor. Part is missing.”
“So it only works if all the parts are there?” she asked.
“Yeah,” he said. “Pretty much.”
“It’s an algebra problem, then,” she said.
“No, programming.”
“But I learned programming is like algebra.” He looked at her curiously. “You know, based on the programming, only certain codes and processes could exist. Like a jigsaw puzzle.”
Terry was shaking his head, then he stopped. “Jigsaw puzzle,” he said. She nodded and smiled at him. A short time ago, the smile might have completely thrown him off his line of thought, but her comparison had socked him between the eyes more than her kiss had. “Union standard programming is made up of blocks,” he said.
“Right,” she agreed, “we learned that in school, but nobody really understands them.”
“I do.” He grinned. “Well, kinda. The program blocks are like you said, a jigsaw puzzle. Except a woven jigsaw puzzle, where pieces fit together with multiple other blocks as long as you line them up right. The original programmers must have thought in ways we don’t understand. It’s practically three dimensional. But you’re right, I think I can extrapolate the missing pieces.”
Katrina was grinning hugely as he set out all the programming blocks from the extractor to create a pallet. After just a minute, he was certain he didn’t have them all. However, he still had the files from the Tri-V simulation he’d sold to the Maki. He set out that pallet, too, and then compared the two.
“Holy shit, a match!” he said. There were three blocks in the Tri-V sim that hadn’t been in the extractor program. There must be hundreds of permutations. He set about figuring out which jigsaw piece set with each hole in the extractor’s programming. It took almost an hour for the first match, then 10 minutes for the second. The final piece snapped into place in just seconds to give him a completed program.
“You did it!” Katrina said.
“No, we did,” he replied. She was leaning over his shoulder. It was only a slight move to kiss her cheek. She turned her head strategically as he move in, and their lips met instead. His finger absently tapped the Initiate icon. He broke the kiss when his slate blanked and a new display came up.
“Oh no, what did I do?” he wondered and frantically tried to stop the process. He knew black programs could wipe out a slate, or even infect an entire network and wreak unbelievable carnage. He needn’t have worried. The coding wasn’t malicious, it was planning in nature.
The program instructed the extractor to operate until its storage tanks were full, then it would move to a specific location, at which point additional orders would be received. A command subroutine would then delete the parts of the program he’d just replaced, and the extractor would blithely return to its task. He looked at the results again. Coordinates were included.
“I know where the extracted minerals are,” he said. “Do you want to go for a swim?”
“Won’t we get in trouble?” she asked.
Terry glanced at the time, then shook his head no. “I don’t have to meet mom for three hours yet. More than time enough to go out, verify the location, and return.” She looked skeptical. “There are two minisubs still; one’s mine, and another that Doc’s people just finished. It hasn’t gone out yet, but I have mine in case anything goes wrong. What do you say?”
“Why not?” she said.
The two young people nearly ran out of the moon pool, heading for the lock where the submarines were kept. Terry had been in such a hurry he hadn’t noticed a tiny icon on his slate indicating it had reached out to Templemer’s communications array with instructions. He could only think of finding the mineral reserves and being named a hero once again. The slate was in his carrying pouch when it flashed the message Communication Successfully Sent, blanked itself, and ended.
* * * * *
