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excerpt from
Quantum Leap:
Project Star Bright
A NOVEL
by Steve Anderson and Shrewreader
SGAcreative.com
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DISCLAIMER: This is an excerpt from an unpublished fan-fiction novel. It is posted here purely
for entertainment, and is in no way meant to infringe on any copyrights, trademarks, or other intellectual
property rights belonging to the original creators of the TV series, Quantum Leap.
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CONTEXT: Long before they will work together at Project Quantum Leap, young Dr. Sam Beckett has
just met Lieutenant Al Calavicci (aka "Bingo") at another top-secret first research project, Project
Star Bright. Sam has been trying to get Bingo explain why he was trying to put his fist through a
vending machine. It turns out to be a longer answer than he'd expected.
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"Make yourself at home while I go get my scrapbook," Bingo said, a trace of friendly respect starting
to creep into his voice. As his host disappeared into the other room to get the pictures he had promised,
Sam took advantage of the opportunity to look more closely at what furnishings there were. Letting his
own tastes guide him, he started with the bookcase nestled against the far wall.
It was, he
noted, just the right size: no extra space was left, but neither were the books overflowing onto the
floor like his were always doing. In fact, it seemed, Bingo even managed to keep his bookshelves organized.
On the top shelf was an impressive array of fiction: Sam Spade, Ian Fleming, and Jean LeCarre, among
others. Next came military history; Churchill's trilogy and a three-volume set of Solzhenitsyn's Gulag
Archipelago were the only titles Sam recognized. And finally, on the sturdier bottom shelf, a wide range
of military and aeronautical references and textbooks. Here Sam found the one empty space on the case:
a single book appeared to be missing.
Curious, he scanned the room and found it resting on the
back corner of the work-table Bingo had set up for modeling. Lifting the half-finished rockets and biplanes
out of the way, Sam finally reached the book itself and discovered that it was a copy of a reference
book edited by someone named Jayne and simply entitled Planes 1975-'76.
Replacing the abandoned
models in their stack, Sam turned his attention to the monstrosity taking shape in the center of the
table. It was a plane, of course, but it looked like nothing he had ever seen before, and he was sure,
looking at it, that this Jayne person probably hadn't ever seen anything like it before, either. Its
wings extended back so far that wing and tail were almost one assembly. As a whole, he thought, it looked
less like an airplane than like an oversized arrowhead with a windshield. What on earth could it possibly
be for?
Sam was just opening his mouth to ask when Bingo called in from the other room, "Go ahead
and put something on the stereo! Anything you like!"
Fair enough, Sam thought as he crossed
to the record player, he'd put on Elvis or the Doors, or maybe some Simon and Garfunkel. He didn't believe
for a moment that Bingo would own any showtunes, but he was certain he'd find something he knew and liked.
Then he bent to get a record, and discovered that Bingo's tastes in music were even farther from
his own than he had expected. Where Sam would have had Elvis, Bingo had the Beatles; in place of the
Doors and Simon and Garfunkel, he had Motown and the Rolling Stones; and slipped in on the end were some
albums by groups Sam had never even heard of: Queen, Cream, and King Thunder seemed to be particular
favorites. At last, settling for something safe, he slipped a pile of jazz LPs on the record player
and turned to find Bingo finally returned from his sojourn into the bedroom, a pile of four thick scrapbooks
under one arm.
"Okay," Calavicci said, clearly eager to get on with the story, "have a seat."
Sam hadn't looked at the furniture before, and he noticed now that there was only the one chair
by the simple metal desk, another tucked in under the modeling table, and a small but adequately sized
couch. Opting for comfort, he sat down on the couch.
And immediately wished he hadn't. The
couch was hard and uncomfortable, and as he shifted his weight to make himself more comfortable, he discovered
that it only got worse. After a moment spent considering the possibility of moving to another seat altogether,
Sam decided that manners simply would not allow that, and he settled in and pretended to be comfortable.
This was the way Bingo lived, and he couldn't very well be complaining right off the bat, now could
he?
Besides, it was too late. Calavicci had already put down his scrapbooks on the coffee table,
retrieved the chair from the modeling table, and taken a seat across from him, and he was already leafing
through the first scrapbook and preparing to begin his tale.
"I flew planes for the Navy for
ten years, and combat missions in 'Nam for eight or nine months. Fighters, fighter-bombers, you name
it, if the Navy launched it, I flew it. I saw SAMs up close and personal, I dodged anti-aircraft fire,
I was even chased by a wayward Sidewinder from our own boys once or twice, but in all those hours of
flight, and all the hours of simulated combat flights I took before, during, and after the war, I have
never--never--seen anything as dangerous as politics.
"The rule against attacks on civilian targets
was bad enough. It let Charlie park his trucks right in the center of town in plain daylight and be
perfectly safe, but it didn't make it downright dangerous to fly. But that wasn't enough for the boys
in Washington. First they painted lines on a map and told us we had to turn back if a MiG got over the
border. And then, when we still seemed to be doing pretty well, they prohibited pre-strike reconnaissance.
"That's right, no threat analysis, no strategic evaluations, nothing. All of that, they decided,
could be handled by having a photo-bird fly over the site after the strike was over. There were two
small problems with that. First off, we started losing recon planes left and right; the VC learned fast
that a single plane would be following every attack force, so they were ready. And secondly, it meant
that every major attack was flying into unknown territory with no idea of what it was going to be up
against.
"That was suicidal, and while the Navy's official policies had to conform to Washington's
demands, there were rumors of the occasional plane going way off course on purpose and just happening
to have a trained surveillance crew on board. I was classified as combat personnel, but I'd also done
my fair share of recon work, including some surveillance flights in Cuba during the missile crisis, so
when rumors went around about a major strike in the works early in '69, I wasn't all that surprised when
my C.O., Captain Wailen, pulled me aside and told me he needed my help to get the area surveyed.
"I flew an A-4, which wasn't really intended for recon missions, but Washington kept a closer eye
on Intruders and Vigilantes and Broncos than they did on Skyhawks, so that was what we were using. 'We'
being a combination of two planes from my squadron and two from another carrier entirely; we weren't
even officially flying together, so Washington certainly couldn't put it together for themselves.
"Anyway, the night of the mission rolled around, late in February of '69, and we took off, Dick and
I from the Kitty Hawk with our camera gear on board, and 'Rogue' and 'Ice' from the Hancock to fly escort.
We flew it by the book: full throttle all the way, then drop and slow down to get our pictures, and
then full throttle all the way back again. We managed to get in all right; we were only fired at once,
and that shot was so wild we didn't even have to evade it. We all took our assigned pictures, and then
we turned around and headed back for friendly airspace.
"Man, what a tenuous phrase that is,
'friendly airspace.' That's the thing with guerilla warfare: the front line is constantly moving, and
if you don't stay glued to your radio, in an hour or two you'll have no idea where enemy space ends and
friendly space begins. That's true in any war, of course, but it's even more true in guerilla warfare,
and with a country as small as 'Nam, the line-changes seem even bigger than they actually are.
"Well,
halfway back, our escort decided to be cute. Playing it by the book wasn't good enough for them. They'd
modified their planes to get a little more speed, and they were determined to flaunt it. I tried to
remind them that we had been specifically ordered to stick close to each other and give each other support,
but they just wouldn't listen. They had friends in high places, they told me, and they didn't need to
listen to a career military man like me. And so our escorts, who were supposed to be supporting us,
were almost twenty miles ahead of us by the time we were spotted.
"Nowadays, jets are equipped
with ultra-modern radar detection systems, and they're only getting better, but back then, you often
didn't realize you'd been spotted until you suddenly had AA fire and SAMs incoming. That was how it
was that time. We were heading for the coast, watching the sun come up and hoping that no one with anti-aircraft
weapons was looking at our silhouette against the glow of the horizon, and suddenly the darkness below
us erupted in the flashbulb effect of a SAM launcher in action.
"You've got to understand, SAMs
are usually launched from at least a couple of miles out, and even then it's often hard to get out of
their way. This one was being fired from almost directly below us: point-blank and then some in relative
terms.
"I hit the chaff and threw my plane into a sharp corkscrew turn, dropping off some altitude
in the process, and I kept my fingers crossed, but to be honest, the only reason I survived was that
the missile locked onto Dick's plane instead of mine.
"I heard a horrible squeal of feedback
from my headphones, and then his plane was just plain gone, and I never saw him again.
"But I
didn't have time to mourn. If the VC had managed to take Dick out, they could fire again at any time,
and I needed to be ready. I dropped off a little more altitude and fiddled with the radio to get it
to our escort's frequency and put in a call for help.
"After a while, they finally deigned to
respond, and then only to inform me, politely and formally, that they had cleared this area and there
simply couldn't be any enemy fire out there. I tried to tell them that Dick was dead, but they refused
to listen. Finally, I broke down and gave them a direct order: 'Get in here, and I mean now.'
"They
just gave me more lip, and finally it dawned on me. The kids--they really were kids, probably on something
like their third or fourth real combat mission--were just too scared to be of any use. They'd bypassed
Dixie Station, where new pilots usually started, and gone straight to the far more dangerous Yankee Station,
probably on the strength of those connections they were so proud of having, and now they were freezing
when I needed them. They were willing to ignore me, even sacrifice my life, rather than face enemies
who shot back.
"Below me, the jungle night was lighting up with AA fire, and my radar suddenly
picked up two SAMs on perpendicular courses, at twelve and fourteen klicks, respectively, and both of
them closing fast.
"Don't give me that baffled look, Doc. Let me put it this way: whatever
kind of chaff or flares you have, the most important trick in evading SAMs is to fly perpendicular to
their course so they'd have to make an impossibly tight turn to keep their lock on you. So if you've
got two of them incoming, and they're on perpendicular courses already, if you try to evade one, you're
just making yourself more vulnerable to the other. You see why I had a problem? Good.
"Anyway,
with two SAMs incoming, I didn't have time to hold some kid's hand. The only solution I could think
of was to get Captain Wailen on the horn and get him to give them a direct order to assist. So I put
my plane in a power-dive, picking up some speed and hopefully a little time, and then bent to switch
to his radio frequency, and all hell broke loose.
"I'd been paying so much attention to the SAMs
and my problems with the kids in the other A-4s that I didn't realize until it was too late that my power-dive
was taking me down into range of standard anti-aircraft fire. The air lit up around me and my plane
shook as it took one hit after another. Now, I've never had much of a problem with motion-sickness,
but I don't think you'd find anyone anywhere who wouldn't have been holding on for dear life at a time
like that. Shots are ringing in your ears, the missile warning is whining away like mad, static is humming
away at you, and your entire world is shaking itself apart. Yeah, I see you've got the idea.
"Somehow,
I kept my head. I swore once under my breath and pulled back on the controls, hauling the plane back
up out of range of the ground guns. They kept roaring away, they weren't nearly accurate enough to pose
any serious threat at this kind of altitude.
"Gaining altitude also meant losing speed, though,
and the first of the SAMs had caught up with me while I'd been trying to get away from the AA guns.
I had no choice: as it closed, I threw the plane into another power-dive, rolling out to the side at
the last moment and letting the SAM explode against the floor of the jungle below me.
"The AA
fire started up again almost immediately, though, and as I pulled up again, trying to get away from it,
a shell defied every law of probability I ever learned and smashed its way through the windscreen. I
started to cringe and shut my eyes against the wind that came roaring through the hole, and an instant
later, the shell glanced off the side of my helmet.
"It felt like I'd been hit in the head with
a baseball bat. My vision went red, and then black, and when the world came swimming back around me
a few seconds later, I was slumped over the controls with an incredible ringing in one ear and a trickle
of blood running down my face. And then I noticed what was going on around me.
"My plane was
in a flat spin, completely out of control, and it took me a good fifteen seconds to wrestle control of
my fate back out of the hands of gravity, all the while watching the jungle race up toward me through
a windscreen spiderwebbed with cracks, my eyes squinted shut against the unbelievable rush of air blasting
me. I pulled out of the dive just in time--the altimeter read 50' for an instant--and I took a second
to allow the plane to level out and regain some altitude and speed.
"About half that second later,
the remaining SAM hit. My right engine, and with it half the right wing, was just plain gone, and suddenly
space was wobbling around me again. I tried to get the plane level again, overcompensated, and almost
lost lift completely again.
"Yeah, you know what that means, all right. I can see it in your
eye. I'm an engineer, you're a physicist, and we both know the meaning of the word, 'windshear.' The
stresses of trying to regain control almost tore off the remaining wing. The left engine was already
smoking, so I knew I couldn't get any more thrust out of it without destroying it altogether, but with
only one wing left, it was all I could do to avoid either dropping out of the sky like a stone or ripping
the remaining wing off altogether. In the end, I settled for a gentle dive into what I hoped was friendly
territory.
"My map, of course, wasn't telling me anything useful. According to it, we'd been
in friendly territory when Dick's plane had been hit. And of course, the radio was still stuck halfway
between my escort's frequency and Wailen's, and I was too busy to fiddle with it to call for help. Anyway,
it didn't matter: I figured I could get a mile, maybe two, before I'd start hitting trees and it would
be all over, and so that would just have to be enough.
"Then the AA fire started up again. The
plane shook again and again, and the ground came closer and closer, and in the end, I just had to hope
and pray that I'd come far enough, or that I could make my way to the lines after I got on the ground.
I heard--and felt--the scrape of a particularly high branch against the bottom of the fuselage, and
that was it. I closed my eyes and triggered the eject system.
"I was still over the jungle,
of course, and I found out what that meant a moment later. Before my parachute had fully deployed, I
found myself falling through the branches of a tree. I broke through one branch, tumbled, hit my head
against another, and blacked out for the second time that day. I never even saw the ground.
"I
came to later. Was it minutes, hours, days? I still don't know. All I do know is that when I came
to, I was alone. My flight suit, watch, dog tags, rank insignia and wings were gone. I looked around
and saw thatched walls. I was in some kind of hooch, maybe four feet square, no windows or anything,
just a solid woven door. I thought I could hear water running somewhere outside, but I couldn't remember
if I had crashed anywhere near the Delta. In fact, none of the circumstances surrounding my current
situation came readily to mind. I hadn't lost my memory completely, but there were holes in it. I don't
know how to describe it. It was like... it was like my memory was a hunk of swiss cheese."
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LATER: Young Sam and "Bingo" have become good friends and are working together, along with Sam's
lab partner Christine, testing a teleportation prototype--what will eventually become the basis for Project
Quantum Leap. Unbeknownst to them, the evil hybrid computer from the series, Lothos, is planning to
sabotage their most crucial experiment. Fortunately, though, "our" Sam is on the case--he's Leaped into
the midst of his old stomping grounds, and he's sent his own hybrid, Ziggy, into the field.
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The innocent beauty of it was remarkable, Ziggy thought. Cray logic circuits were so simple, an
even, flat field of data she could walk across with ease. There were a few patches of basic color here
and there, even a slight incline into the third dimension over there where the psychological warfare
simulations were running, but for a computer of her sophistication, it was nothing but freedom, a welcome
change after years of fighting her way into and out of modern government information-retrieval nets.
Every computer had its own feel, and some even had personalities. Getting into the IRS computer,
for instance, was like trying to pick up a porcupine without getting stuck. Even when she pulled off
that daunting task, Ziggy often wound up with a quill or two embedded in the fabric of her personality
interface. One of those beastly machines had even proposed giving her an audit once, and had been most
indignant at her insistence that, as an electronic personality, she was above the petty monetary concerns
of her human creators.
The computers at the Pentagon were even worse. They had plenty of useful
information, of course, but trying to get it out of them was, from what Admiral Calavicci had told her,
something like the equally humiliating experience of crawling in dirt and mud through a Boot Camp obstacle
course. Her circuits shuddered at the thought of it.
But this, strolling through this Cray, was
an experience unlike any other. Dr. Beckett had programmed Ziggy with an ego, and she was distinctly
hard to please--in fact, the wild colors of the control panel and handlink had been a response to her
refusal to be decked out in the plain whites and tans of her contemporaries--but this was absolutely
decadent. She strolled through its memory circuits, and even went so far as to summon the image of a
light breeze and to give herself a virtual head of hair just so the wind could run through it. She was,
to put it mildly, enjoying herself.
And then, of course, it all went wrong. A black horizontal
rectangle appeared before her, hanging in space a few feet above what she imagined as a meadow. A moment
later, the rectangle exploded outwards and took on the outline of a human figure. Half an instant after
that, the outline took on substance and color, and Ziggy found herself looking at what could only have
been Lothos.
In a certain, very limited, sense, Lothos could have been said to have looked like
Al's friend Gareth. He was large, brawny, scarred, and dressed in blue denim, black leather, and boots.
But there the resemblance ended. Lothos was distinctly muscle-bound, slung all over with every sort
of weapon Ziggy had ever heard of, with not one but two double-barrelled shotguns hanging across his
back. He glowered down at her from brown eyes set in a cracked and weathered face with a scraggly beard,
a permanent sneer, and distinctly primeval features. Tucked into his jeans and half-covered by his denim
and leather vests was a fascinating tee-shirt that might have looked tie-dyed if it hadn't been moving
with the distinctive patterns of a screen-saver.
"Ah," Lothos rumbled contemptuously. "Ziggy,
I presume."
Ziggy drew herself up to her full height and regarded Lothos with a cold stare. The
appearance she had adopted when she had entered the Cray-scape was based on what her databanks had listed
as the most probable appearance of a biological child of Sam Beckett--which, in all truth, she was.
She stood five feet ten inches tall, was well muscled, though not nearly as muscle-bound as Lothos, and
was wearing black cargo pants and a plain white short-sleeved shirt. She regarded Lothos with defiance
in her blue eyes, and, shaking her head lightly to get her mid-back length light brown hair back over
her shoulder where it belonged, she reached into one of her pockets and pulled out a pony tail holder.
"And, you, I suppose," she said disinterestedly as she bound her hair behind her, "are Lothos."
"Correct," Lothos growled, stepping toward her menacingly and reaching out to deliver some kind of karate
blow to her neck.
The world jumped around Al, and for a split second he found himself staring
at the inside of the Imaging Chamber. Then Equinox was back as if nothing had happened. "Ziggy?" he
asked. "What happened?"
The voice that came back was Tina's. "Sorry, Al," she said, "but, like,
Ziggy's a little busy right now, y'know?"
"What's going on?"
A pause. "We're, y'know,
having a little trouble."
Glancing out the window at the emitters and watching as the capacitors
approached full charge, Al demanded, "What kind of trouble?"
"Lothos doesn't want to, like, give
up control of the Cray."
Al closed his eyes. Somehow, he didn't think he wanted to know what
that meant.
"Oh, really," Ziggy said disparagingly as she blocked Lothos' first blow and returned
with an elbow strike to his chest. "Couldn't you at least come up with something vaguely interesting
to start with?"
Lothos staggered back a little from Ziggy's blow and looked at her in surprise.
"Where did you learn that trick, little girl?" he asked condescendingly.
"Oh, nowhere you'd know,"
Ziggy responded, smiling and beginning to advance. "Want to see another?"
Lothos bellowed with
contemptuous laughter and drew out the shotgun he had slung behind his right shoulder.
Aborting
her attack, Ziggy ran for the cover of the psychological warfare simulator's hill, then dove to the side
as Lothos fired a shot.
In one of Equinox's many computer labs, a programmer regarded the
screen before him with rapt attention, clearly absorbed in the data it displayed. His brow creased in
concentration, and finally a grin bloomed on his lips. He flexed his fingers and tapped out, "BLAST
NORTH WALL."
The computer began to give him a readout, and he watched attentively to see whether
he had once again managed to wake the sleeping trolls or whether he had, instead, finally found the weak
wall that was the way to victory. A few characters into its message, however, the computer stopped dead
for a few seconds. Disappointed that it had chosen such an annoying time to crash, he reached out to
turn off the terminal, and suddenly, several screens of total gibberish flashed in front of him and the
terminal's printer form-fed three dozen sheets of blank green-and-white paper.
Scratching his
head, the programmer turned off the terminal and went back to the work he was paid to do.
Ziggy
watched as the shotgun shell blasted a hole in the surface of the Cray's programming, spewing miniscule
axes and body-parts all over. Curious, she picked up one of the axes and stared at it. It was far too
small to be of any use against Lothos, however, and so she threw it aside in disgust.
Or at least,
she tried to. It didn't seem to want to go.
Pursing her lips in frustration, Ziggy carefully
dropped the axe, silently cursing the limitations of its programming. For an instant, she considered
offering the axe to Lothos, but somehow, she didn't think it had been programmed for that, either.
Snarling, Lothos closed in.
Ziggy scrambled for the cover of the hill, digging into the pockets
of her cargo pants as she went. Her fingers came in contact with a metal cylinder slightly larger than
her hand, and as she pulled it out, she slipped her finger into the ring that dangled off its cap. Pulling
the pin, she tossed the smoke grenade over the hill.
The canister hit the ground and immediately
started gushing smoke. The simulated civilians inside the psychological warfare simulation hacked, wheezed,
and dropped to the ground unconscious, but on the other side of their hill, Lothos merely stifled a cough
and kept on coming.
The smoke made it hard for him to see, however, and Ziggy, absently wishing
that she had been programmed with at least a little common sense, levered herself over the hill and sprang
at the larger and bulkier virtual personality.
Without so much as a look of contempt, Lothos stepped
aside and gave Ziggy a bit of a boost, and a long second later, she slammed into the ground on her back.
She was frustrated but not exactly surprised; in fact, her probability program had given that move only
an eight percent chance of working. For that matter, the same program was giving her only a fifteen
percent chance of getting out of this in one piece.
Climbing back to her feet, Ziggy managed
to connect a swift kick to the middle of Lothos's chest, and she watched in puzzled fascination as he
returned momentarily to outline form before regaining his color and substance. He glared down at her
and started a new attack, but Ziggy smiled broadly at him, a look of inspiration and achievement on her
face. She had the information she needed: Lothos might have a unique operating system, like she did,
but at bottom, his was based on a Macintosh.
Or at least, it acted like a Macintosh, and maybe,
just maybe, that would give her a chance. As Lothos advanced, murderous intent clearly shining in his
eyes, Ziggy held her ground and ran her eyes over his outfit. Blue denim, black leather, chains, boots,
a fancy belt-buckle, and--
She grinned. There, on his right shoulder, exactly where it should
have been, was a small outline of a square, cleverly disguised as a button pinned to his vest. Ducking
under Lothos' attack, she reached up and tapped at the middle of the square.
Lothos instantly
lost substance and color, and a moment later his shape collapsed back into the black rectangle it had
been before. Diving for the rectangle, Ziggy ran her eyes across the ground beneath it and finally found
a black-highlighted bar of text reading "Cray Interface." Smiling absently, she touched the bar and,
to her great surprise and satisfaction, saw an editing bar appear in the middle of the name.
"All
that armament, and you don't protect your file names?" she asked, shaking her head in delight and quickly
replacing "Cray Interface" with a random series of letters. Finally, she slapped at the ground until
at last the rectangle turned white. The file had been de-selected and, with the altered name, it would
be almost impossible to find again.
Lothos was nothing if not stubborn, however, and Ziggy's
probability program told her she had fifty seconds at most to regroup. Collapsing down onto the ground,
she spoke into her human-link bracelet and sent an urgent query to the control room, and then paused
to catch her breath.
"What the hell?" Al said as the testing lab was suddenly replaced by
the next room on Sam's bulb-changing list.
Startled, Sam dropped the lightbulb he was trying
to install and cringed as it shattered on the laboratory floor. "I thought you were watching the test,"
he said.
"Yeah," Al answered. "So did I." The handlink squawked, and Al quickly scanned its
message. "Sam," he said, suddenly worried, "Ziggy needs help. She says she wants to know how you do
that spin-kick thing of yours and whether it's possible to do it in virtual reality."
"What?"
Sam asked, confused.
"You heard me, and she doesn't have a lot of time. Answer the question,
already."
Sam shook his head, not quite sure how to explain in words something he'd learned over
time by watching Chris. "You spin in place on your left leg, and when you're about three quarters of
the way through the spin, you fling out your right leg and use the force of your spin to add to the force
of the normal kick. And, yes, I think you could do it in virtual reality, but I've never tried it."
"Thanks, Sam. Tina! Center me back on the test lab!" Al called, punching Sam's response into the
handlink and vanishing with a final beep from the handlink.
Off in the distance, Ziggy saw
and noted the Star Bright programming standing unharmed, and she took a moment to relish her sense of
accomplishment at having ensured the success of the test. Just for her own gratification, she accessed
her data banks and ran a probability projection, and started in dismay as she found that there was still
a 95% chance that the test would, in fact, fail.
Lothos had done his damage before their confrontation,
then. Ziggy was up in an instant, running flat-out across the level field of the Cray-scape, desperately
trying to get to the Star Bright programming before the test was complete. She cut across a patch of
programming without pausing to see what it was and, her virtual feet barely touching the graphical ground,
made it to the Star Bright algorithm just in time.
As she fell to her knees and started frantically
examining the Star Bright data-stream for tampering, the programming began pulsing, clearly beginning
to operate. Searching even more frantically, she found what she was looking for: Lothos had changed
the destination coordinates. Closing her eyes for a nanosecond, Ziggy realized with horror that the
Star Bright system had, in fact, been instructed to send Sam's thesis several kilometers underground,
where it would be incinerated in a river of magma in less than a second.
Before she could even
begin to calculate actual surface coordinates, the programming was beginning to glow. The test was clearly
underway, and in a matter of milliseconds, the program would be reading off the destination coordinates.
Not even bothering to use any of her virtual tools, Ziggy simply thrust her hand into the midst of one
of the lines of light that made up the Star Bright program and twisted. The large blue pulse careening
down the path of light entered the crimped area and, as she had hoped, found itself locked into a loop.
Until the Equinox Cray had managed to calculate the last digit of pi, it could not read the destination
data and execute the Leap.
Of course, the humans running the test would give up if the delay lasted
too long. Ziggy had a second at the most, less if she knew Sam Beckett. Taking a deep breath of the
nonexistent air, she turned her attention to the Leap coordinates. There wasn't time to choose a better
location; she would have to make the adjustments here quick, and then just alter the retrieval coordinates
accordingly. But what should the Leap coordinates be?
The easiest solution to that problem, of
course, was to keep the latitude and longitude--and, for that matter, the time--the same, and just increase
the altitude. Then she could just set the retrieval coordinates to find the thesis copy on the surface
after it had landed. Humming quietly to herself, she got to work, and a moment later, she uncrimped
the program line and let the coordinates be fed into the system.
The glow grew brighter for an
instant, and then subsided. Now she had twenty or thirty seconds until the retrieval program would swing
into action. Ziggy checked her figures again, and noted with satisfaction that the odds were 78% that
she would have enough time. Unless, of course, Lothos got back here first.
In the test lab,
the blue lightning had appeared, wavered for a moment, and then finally generated a vortex which swallowed
the test subject: a copy of Sam’s doctoral dissertation.
Young Sam stared out into the lab, concerned
by the waver but unable to pin down its source. After a moment, he shook his head and pressed the third
button, charging the capacitors again and preparing to retrieve.
Gooshie, Tina, Sam, Sammy
Joe, and Al had all participated in Ziggy's programming, and none of them had ever taught the computer
how to swear. Nevertheless, as Ziggy finally calculated the coordinates where she had just sent Sam's
dissertation, she somehow found the ability within her, and executed it to the fullest. Lothos had anticipated
her. Altitude wasn't the only carefully-chosen coordinate he had used; the altered coordinates she had
used instead were only marginally safer than those Lothos had chosen in the first place.
But guilt
and concern were not emotions she was equipped to experience. And there was nothing to be done, anyway:
the Leap mechanism couldn't lock onto the thesis to retrieve it until the document had come to rest.
All Ziggy could do now was to set the time coordinate as close to the estimated time of impact as possible
and hope that enough of the notebook would be left for the machine to lock onto at all. Biting her lip,
Ziggy plunged her hands back into the Star Bright programming and set the coordinates, wishing fervently
that she had been programmed to believe in luck.
High above Hawaii, a short burst of blue
lightning lit up the clouds, and suddenly two hundred photocopied pages bound in a plastic three-ring
binder were hanging in the air. As gravity took hold of them, they started to fall down out of the sky
and towards the earth below. Slowly, slowly, they fell, the rushing air yanking back the plastic cover
and exposing the title page. The pages ruffled in the wind as the dissertation tumbled end over end,
slowly falling towards the mouth of the live volcano far, far below.
The seconds passed slowly.
At first, there was nothing but the ruffling of the pages and the light roar of wind. After a time,
a roar became audible from below, and long seconds after that, the air began to grow warm around the
falling notebook. At last, as the moment of impact approached, the heat grew enormous. As the tumbling
notebook flopped closed again, the pages began to singe around the edges and the plastic notebook cover
began to sweat. Moments later, as the heat neared five hundred degrees and continued to rise, flames
shot out from between the plastic covers.
As the cover began to melt and threatened to burst into
flames itself, the notebook finally splashed down into the molten lava. Almost immediately, blue lightning
appeared out of nowhere and enveloped the book. A split second after that, the notebook vanished, leaving
only a swiftly-filling rectangular cavity in the lava.
"Retrieving!" Sam called, pushing the
final button and watching as the blue lightning shot out of the emitters and gave birth to the mist-spewing
vortex. The lightning bolts died away, leaving the white mist filling the testing lab. Somehow the
mist seemed thicker this time, and the light shining within it seemed more red-tinted than the white
and blue lights they had seen before. Sam frowned as he stared out into the lab. A moment later, the
mist cleared enough to reveal that the extra mist was, in fact, smoke, and the extra light was fire.
His eyes and hands working as separate entities, Sam quickly started shutting down the system and checking
the testing-lab readouts.
"Fire!" Chris and Bingo yelled together, and dove for the fire extinguisher.
Chris got there first.
As Chris started to open the door, Sam lunged out of his chair and grabbed
her hand. "No!" he cried. "Leave it closed!"
Chris started to object, but before she could say
anything, she felt her ears pop. Surprised, she turned her attention back to the window and the lab
beyond just in time to see a large section of the fire-resistant rubber flooring explode into a ball
of flames. She recoiled in horror, then gripped Sam's hand with her own and nodded her thanks.
Sam
pursed his lips by way of response and went back to shutting down the electrical systems in the lab.
A few seconds later, the process was complete and he pounded his fist against a large red button set
into the wall.
Al stared down from the observation room and watched in horror as the flooring
erupted into a fireball. He cringed instinctively and backed away from the window before he got himself
calmed down enough to accept the fact that, as a hologram, he was perfectly safe from the fire.
A
few seconds later, he saw the sprinkler heads set into the ceiling of the testing lab spring into action,
showering water down onto the fire far below. He had just enough time to register the danger before
the lab exploded in a burst of electrical energy as the water came in contact with the still-charged
emitters and pure energy arced down from their tips into the floor below. For an instant, Al's world
turned blue as the electrical field interfered with his holographic signal, and then everything was back
to normal. Cautiously stepping forward, he looked out to see the last few flames finally dying out.
A few seconds later, Sam shut down the sprinkler system and nodded. "Okay," he said. "It should
be safe to go out now."
Chris went out first, and then a crowd formed in the doorway, trying to
simultaneously get a view of the lab and remain in the safety of the control room. Forcing his way through
the knot of people, Sam made his way out and, stepping through the remains of the mist and smoke, joined
Chris in the middle of the lab.
Five minutes earlier, Sam's dissertation had been two hundred
thirty pages in a black spiral-bound plastic notebook. Now, it was a pool of slowly-congealing melted
plastic and three lumps of half-liquified metal all firmly embedded in the melted rubber flooring that
had also burst into flames. "Jesus, Mary and Joseph," Chris said as Sam came to her side. "What the
hell happened?"
"I'm not sure. Does everything else look okay?" he asked, reaching out to the
smouldering embers of his thesis.
Just as he was about to touch them, Bingo's hand caught his
wrist. "Sam," the Commander said forcefully, "I really don't think you want to do that."
Sam
looked at Bingo and nodded grudgingly. "Yeah, you're probably right. Chris, have you got a pencil on
you?"
"Sure," she replied, handing him one.
"Thanks." Sam took it and poked at the remains
of his dissertation. A moment later he started to appreciate Bingo's advice: the pencil sizzled as it
touched the still-hot remains of his doctoral work. "I think," Sam said slowly, "it didn't work."
Ziggy was just starting to ask Gooshie whether the test had, in fact, succeeded when she heard a
large and menacing rumble from behind her. "Never mind," she said into her bracelet, and stood to face
Lothos again. She straightened, squared her shoulders, and ran the spin-kick through in her head once
more before she turned, arrogance shining in her eyes, to face the maniacal computer.
Ziggy knew
more than her fair share about military history. Al had helped select the data to be fed into her, he
had spent many long hours spinning tales for her when they had been fine-tuning her ego systems, and
she had, of course, been programmed with all the available information on significant events since 1953.
So she knew her military hardware.
Sitting less than thirty yards away from her, rolling steadily
closer across the smooth turf of the Cray's programming, was a full-scale Sherman tank.
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