The Teytoonis didn't answer immediately. In fact they seemed to all have facial twitches. They were conferring over their headbands. I almost decided to grab one of them and connect to his circuit, but I thought better of it.
"Okay, so why can't you help Tatiana?"
"There is no escape from the collapsing quantum singularity that she has been placed in. Her use of the warp field to delay her fate was clever, but it will not save her in the end and is only delaying the inevitable. Even if we could save her, we would not. She is infected after all," Prawmitoos said.
Mike, access this damned YIT and get as much info as you can on everything. If you detect them pinging you, get out.
I understand, Steven.
Finally, Tabitha forced them to answer the big question. "You never answered. Are you afraid of these Lumpeyins and are we inconsequential to you?"
"Yes," is all Prawmitoos said.
"And when we get too dangerous to be used as lab rats what then?" Tabitha asked.
"I believe the answer is obvious," Feyibi replied.
"You plan to destroy humanity?!" Anson asked.
"I'm sorry, but it is your fate," Prawmitoos said.
"Bullshit!" I said. I didn't like these bastards from the first day I met them and I liked them even less at this point.
Steven?
Yes, Mike? I was getting used to being part of multiple conversations at once. Having a wife and a sentient computer always talking in your head will force you to develop this skill.
There is way too much data on the YIT for me to download even small fractions of it. Do you have any suggestions? Mike said in my mind.
Uh, Mike, have Michelle make a copy of yourself back in the supply room on the Phoenix, but tell her to not add any SuperAgent code. Use that cube as a data repository. In fact, have her make as many cubes as she can and fill them up with as much as you can find that might be pertinent to the survival of the human race. Understand?
Yes, Steven.
"Wait a minute," Jim interjected. "If this Opolawn creature can control the picophage on individual levels, then that must mean there is some sort of control mechanism somewhere."
"Yes, so?" Feyibi asked.
"Well, why don't we go and get the damned thing and turn it off? Then what happens to the picophage?"
"We have seen this before. The picophage drives its victims rapidly insane. Destroying the control mechanism is not an option for humanity since so many of you are infected—more than two-thirds of your species are tainted. The wars that would be created on your planet would devastate your culture. On the other hand, it would be a good option for us."
"Well, what if we found the thing and just locked it away in a place and let nobody send instructions to this picophage? Would it just lie around dormant? How does the virus spread?" Tabitha asked, not quite sure if the word virus actually fit.
"The phage spread is controlled through the control mechanism and Opolawn chooses his victims carefully," Yiaepetoes explained.
"This Opolawn must be one bored dude to sit around for millennia just tinkering with four billion people's lives," 'Becca said.
"The mind of the Lumpeyins is amazing and such tasks are minute to them," Prawmitoos assured us. I wasn't sure if he had meant the mind of a Lumpeyin or the mind of the Lumpeyins. Were they individuals or were they a collective mind?
"Well, that is the answer. We will go and take the control mechanism from the Lumpeyins and then we will control our own fate. We will let the virus remain dormant until it is gone from attrition of the infected individuals. Once all infected people have died of old age, a few generations from now, then we will destroy the controller," Tabitha said.
"Great plan, Tabitha. But if we return from Lumpeyin space with this control device or whatever the hell it is, you bastards will let Tatiana out of her prison and you will spare Earth from annihilation." I told them, I didn't ask.
"We will spare Earth. But as I have said before, there is no escape from the diminishing quantum singularity within which she is trapped. We are sorry."
"You're full of shit!" I said.
CHAPTER 23
We spent the next three days discussing strategies and possible scenarios to approach Lumpeya City in the mountain continent of the alien planet. There didn't seem to be a simple way to do it. For one thing, the damned place was more than thirty thousand light years away. The trip in a Gray ship would take as much as ten days. The next big hurdle was the fact that Opolawn would see us coming for those ten days. So, somehow we had to devise a ruse to fly under the flag of truce. Prawmitoos suggested that we could approach under the treaty by which the galaxy had been separated. It seemed like the only way to approach Lumpeyinis or whatever the hell they called it.
We also needed intelligence on how the picophage worked, what the controller looked like, and where it would be. Mike found a lot of this information on the YIT. The aliens didn't compartmentalize their information since none of the drones would look for anything that they weren't instructed to look for. I quickly understood why I was able to hack Mike so easily. God, these aliens were powerful, but stupid. I stored that information away in my mind and began to subprocess it for possible future applications.
The information that we couldn't find on the YIT wasn't there because it didn't exist, according to Feyibi. The Titan told us as much information as it had gathered through personal encounters and then had the others discuss the concept with us as well. We understood the general configuration of the device. It could gather massive amounts of information via the YIT and subprocess that information at various stages during the data manipulation process before it reached the main processor. There an artificial intelligence of some sort would sort the data throughout the multiprocessor bus of the device and reroute commands back out over the YIT. In other words, it was another damned SuperAgent. Mike, Anson, Jim, and I discussed the possibilities of overpowering the SuperAgent or just pinging the controller across the Infrastructure to find it.
We realized that the picophage must have some sort of signature that could be detected and that the Teytoonis knew this. The credit card device knew that Tatiana was infected. How? We searched back through the YIT and found it. The individual picophage device was much larger in macrospace. In fact, each tiny device was about six centimeters across; again the Dr. Who's phone booth phenomena came into play. The devices apparently used a Van den Broeck–modified Alcubierre-type warp bubble that was a picometer wide on the outside but was six centimeters wide on the inside. So how was it detected? Easy; the tiny location within the picometer bubble contained more energy density than normal space from an outside-the-bubble reference frame. Following Einstein's equations that spacetime curvature is proportional to energy density, the spacetime around these pico devices should be slightly curved inward. And the Teytoonis had been able to detect this extremely small change in spacetime curvature. Anson commented to the fact that all of these little warp drives floating around on Earth could have been one of the reasons that during his original warp experiment program he never could find a closed solution to the Einstein equations that matched the experimental data. Mike thought he was correct.
At any rate, we figured out a way to rig together one of these credit card things with the sensors on the Phoenix and then have Mike ping Earth through the Infrastructure. When he did he received an echo that had the address of the picophage cloud. There were more than 1030 returns in a superposition wave and we nearly dismissed them as noise until we looked at the signal's frequency spectrum. The information was spread out on a hopping spectrum from radio-type pings way on up to pings that the Teytoonis used, but they were there and we found them. The Teytoonis were amazed at our scientific and engineering capability because they had never gotten this far in tracking the things before. Before long Tabitha warned us to start keeping most of our tricks secret. We hoped that something here would end up being a weapon that we could use to hold both the Grays—the Teytoonis—and the Lumpeyins at bay.