Dyson had proposed the construct as the ultimate answer for the energy needs of an ever-expanding civilizations — a monstrous bubble that would catch everything the star emitted, wasting nothing. It would be useful for millions of years, and by the time the star went nova and burned out, a race sufficiently advanced to have built the sphere in the first place could probably figure out a way to move to a more hospitable neighborhood.
Such a sphere would necessarily be very, very large.
So he and Bretton had remapped the dataspace of all the known infected military computers as a Dyson sphere, locating themselves outside it, looking for the break in the wall that had let the virus inside. Their model wasn’t a long-time scan, that wasn’t possible with the machineries at their command. What they had built represented but two or three seconds that they had calculated when the virus must have been released into the system. They hoped.
The Chinese guy Chang would love this — too bad they couldn’t show it to him, but the military was a little touchy about allowing foreigners this deep into their heart and brain.
That’s just the way it goes…
Focus, Jay!
By checking the entire surface of the sphere during that period, they would examine every possible place their leak could be, and would therefore find it.
In theory, at least. Eventually.
The second part of developing the scenario was tailoring it to their strengths. Jay was an expert at looking for system weaknesses. If anyone could figure out where the break was, it was him. The only problem was that it could take years, even in an accelerated time frame, to search the sphere.
The solution, they figured, would require both of them.
Bretton, the military VR jock, was a master of AI programming. In his warfare simulations, he created large-scale interactions of software systems to represent the entire world at war. His complex systems interacted at both a macro and a micro level, representing a repeatable reality.
In this case, Bretton had created a huge army of robots. Each one was over a mile long, with thousands of magnetic millipedelike legs. Each was loaded with full spectrum sensors that could read every kind of radiation, chemical, sound, and texture that mankind had ever encountered. Millions and millions of these snakelike creations crawled across the sphere, sampling, testing, looking.
Bretton had made them, but the robots were under Jay’s control.
Jay’s normal VR sensors had been rerouted through the robots, each machine giving him data, millions of points of information combining into his senses.
He hung in space, an immense figure, the sphere appearing to him about the size of a large beach ball. He reached out and rotated it, running his hands over its surface, feeling for imperfections, looking for the place that wasn’t like the other places, the spot that was weaker.
As he did so, huge arrays of robots fanned out on the sphere covering every spot that his fingers touched, using their sensitive legs to send information to his tactile sensors. He felt a uniform pattern on the sphere, a pattern that fit with the geodesic nature of the construct.
Every location that his fingers passed changed color after it had been scanned, a bright red that seemed to seep from his nails like blood. The marker helped track his progress and would let him know when he’d completed this stage of the search.
He closed his eyes to focus on the tactile sensors — and for a moment he saw Mark in the hospital bed. He remembered standing there with Saji after the doctor had finally come. Mark had been asleep by this point, far more relaxed than his parents.
Oh, my God, Jay, I was so scared, he remembered Saji saying, and the squeeze of her hand.
He opened his eyes and saw that he had covered most of the globe in red. He carefully brushed his fingers over the rest.
Nothing.
He pulled his hands back, and traced a sign in the air.
The stars blanked out, leaving the sphere darker than before. The scene was almost black now, only a faint metallic gleam on the sphere, barely enough to still see it. His eyes shifted slightly, and the globe became blacker as the radiation sensors in the robots came on-line.
He reached for the sphere again, this time checking it for any light leaks. Such a leak would indicate the data hole he was searching for, whether it was in any part of the emittable spectrum or not.
It was larger now, about the size of a hot-air balloon, representing the scale change necessary for this test. He worked slowly, feeling the massiveness of the sphere as he turned it, carefully staring at each piece on the macro level while legions of robotic sensors scanned it at the micro.
His eyes had adjusted to the darker light, and now the segment of the sphere he looked at appeared brighter, almost silver…
Like the needle in Mark’s arm…
No. Focus.
Jay blinked twice to shake the image, and continued to turn the globe. He had to be sure to hold it in each position for three seconds so that he could see all of the surface within the three-second window that the sphere represented. A tiny turquoise bar-graph at the edge of his vision constantly counted off the time, filling up with gold and then reverting to blue at the end of each interval.
A wire-frame model below the bar showed his progress. Two segments left.
Jay completed the search.
Nothing.
He started his next check, a chemical examination of the sphere, using his olfactory sensors. The globe had shrunk now, to a basketball. He pulled it close to his face and started to sniff.
As he did this, the robot armies, now germ-sized on his scale, deployed spectral analyzers, checking the atomic makeup of the sphere, looking for variations that could not be explained. There was a slightly pinelike smell, almost antiseptic.
Like the hospital.
This wouldn’t do.
Jay activated a control and the smell shifted to a more pleasant cedar, taking him away from thoughts of Mark.
He turned the ball, sniffing, a bloodhound looking for something that didn’t smell right.
A bell chimed, and he realized that he’d completed the search.
Nothing.
Nothing at all.
He hadn’t found anything. But he should have. The interface had been tested, the robots’ AI performed flawlessly, and the metaphor was good. There was the tiniest chance that they’d gotten the time frame wrong for the sphere, but it seemed unlikely.
Which left him as the weak link.
It’s me.
Jay let out a long breath. He’d been distracted, thinking about Mark. He must have missed something, some factor.
He was going to have to try something else.
23
After they alighted from the cab, Thorn said, “See that lot over there?”
Marissa nodded.
“Holds two hundred cars, and it’s full. That’s the parking for Tials. See all those people at those outdoor tables, under those ratty umbrellas? That’s the dinner crowd.”
It looked like a busy evening at a country fair’s food plaza. Maybe three hundred people in the warm summer night, at long rows of wooden picnic tables set end to end. The diners were laughing, talking, eating.
“Come on.”
She followed him around the corner. There were three lines of people queued up in front of what looked like a market stall, a pole barn with counters and a dozen men and women inside it, no walls, just a roof. Fragrant smoke rose from the place in a thick cloud.