The Geneva Factor Read online

  Scanning the room, Luke identified a vacant workstation along the east wall of the room with a clear view of both entrances. He’d used the time over the last three days to generate a false computer identity he could use to access the system without triggering any kind of flag that might have been issued for his credentials. It wouldn’t stand up to scrutiny, but it should be all he needed for a one-time hack.

  Sitting down at the station he ported to a machine on the far side, logged in using the false ID and began to open a variety of portlets—data links back to earth, video downloads, random keyword searches—all to keep the system busy while he did the real work. Tracking back through one of the video downloads he exploited a vulnerability that was usually benign, but allowed him to link into an Earth-based company archive.

  The revelation that Julia was Dyne’s replacement allowed him to bypass the issue of motive and focus on how Hooper had accessed the station and the SciLab. Every evening the base sent a burst transmission to the Earth archive dumping the contents of the system as part of the business continuity and disaster recovery plan. Most people assumed that the backup was a complete transfer of all data in the network. Luke knew that the reality was that, to minimize bandwidth and cost, the system was really a progressive transfer of only those sectors that had changed since the previous burst transmission. Once a quarter, a full core dump was transferred physically back to Earth. Restoring the backup was a matter of compiling the successive daily backups on top of the most recent quarterly core dump.

  Hooper had transferred to the base about a month after the most recent quarterly dump. Luke’s plan was to triangulate the data in the core dump with the most recent data burst and the data lock freeze he had initiated from the science lab. If he was right—and he configured his search parameters correctly—the system should provide a map of the changes in the data that would trace back to whomever had granted Hooper’s access. Theoretically it would work, the difficult part was specifying the right parameters.

  Struggling with the final configuration, he began to panic as Blankenship and a squad of his personal goons burst into the center. They moved to cover both exits and began scanning the room. Typing furiously, Luke opened a new session at his physical workstation and began closing portlets on the virtual one he had established across the way. He entered the last parameter and issued a command to send the results to a dummy tablink just as Blankenship walked up.

  “I wouldn’t have expected to find you here Morris.”

  Luke stared at his screen for a second. The dummy connections were closed and he was staring at a random article that must have been cached from a previous user’s session. He scrambled for some sort of coherent response, “Uh, yeah…just catching up on some reading.”

  Blankenship leaned over, peering at the screen. “I didn’t realize you were so interested in fly-fishing techniques?”

  Fly-fishing? He blinked and looked back at the screen, realizing that the article was about an expedition the author had taken in the Montana preserve. “I have lots of interests. If you’ll excuse me…” he got up and, brushing past Blankenship, started strolling towards the nearest exit.

  “In a hurry? You might want to log off first.”

  Crap. He turned around and logged out of the machine. A bit of sweat pooling on his forehead. He just wanted out of this room. How had they traced him so quickly? He took solace in the fact that they had come into the center at all and hadn’t just waited to grab him after he left. That meant they didn’t know for sure that Luke was the one running the search.

  Walking back towards the door, he forced himself to breathe. “I hope you haven’t forgotten our last conversation.” The door closed on that veiled threat from Blankenship and it was all Luke could do to keep from running down the hall.

  Moments later, his tablink beeped, signaling an incoming message. It was his subroutine. The system was fast, but he still expected the results to take longer to process. Pulling up the messaging app, he access the dummy tablink account. Two words stared at him from the screen.

  Julia Walker.

  Chapter 9

  According to base legend, the docking station was located a mere 30 yards from the original site where the Eagle had landed and Neil Armstrong first set foot on the moon. The evidence of the landing had been obliterated because no one nation had jurisdiction to designate the area as an historic landmark. This was the next frontier of human expansion and Sooners like the company responsible for Tranquility Base had little regard for niceties like preserving historical landmarks.

  All of that was lost on Luke. Bouncing on his toes he couldn’t decide if he was more anxious to see Julia because of the way he felt about her or because he was getting one step closer to finding answers to the questions that were boiling around in his head. After his close encounter with Blankenship in the hoteling center he had laid low. Way low. It was just two days, but he hadn’t wanted to draw any further attention to himself.

  In a different world, Tranquility Base’s docking stati0on would have been a sumptuously decorated welcome to the moon. In this world, it was a utilitarian space that functioned solely to process new workers into the station. It had less appeal than Customs at any international airport back on earth. At least those had carpet! This area reminded Luke of the inside of a submarine with its abundance of pipes and grey metal.

  Looking through one of the viewing portals, Luke watched Julia’s shuttle touch down just outside the docking station. He imagined that the surface outside was much as it had been when Armstrong had taken those first steps so many years before. There had been no need to pave the area or create any sort of landing pad, and each time a shuttle set down it compacted the surface a little more. No need for a foreign object walkdown here!

  He didn’t think Julia had seen him as she queued up for processing and intake. Even after all that time cooped up in a transfer shuttle, she looked as good as ever…maybe better. Once finished, she moved past the workstation and stopped, staring at the holomap projected on the screen of her newly issued wristlink. Looking up and down the corridor, as if trying to figure out which direction would take her home in this metal dungeon she finally saw him.

  How did you greet your ex-fiancé more than a year after she kicked you out, you fled the planet, and she helped smuggle an apparent murderer onto the moon? A hug? A handshake? Put her in handcuffs?

  He settled on standing there awkwardly. Not his coolest move, but it was all he had in the moment. She swooped over to him and embraced him, holding on for a long moment. Julia was much better at this than he was. “I’m glad you’re here, Luke. Really glad. Is there somewhere we can talk?”

  “Business or pleasure?”

  “Funny.” She paused as some of the other new arrivals squeezed past them in the narrow passageway. “Look, you’re the one person on this base I can trust and there are some things you need to know. I can trust you, can’t I?”

  “I think the question is, ‘Can I trust you?’ You’re right about one thing though, we can’t talk here. Follow me.”

  Silently, he led her back to the entertainment hub, the space between them feeling like a gulf as wide as the one that separated the Earth from the moon. Taking a seat back in a corner of the dark pub, he keyed up the main menu. “You still drink Stella?”

  She blinked. “You have Stella Artois on the moon?”

  “We have lots of things on the moon. I wouldn’t say it’s exactly the same as what you get Earth-side, but it’s a fair approximation. And I’ll take that as a yes.” Moments later their beers arrived via pneumatic tube in the customary plastic pouches.

  “Ugh. I see what you mean. Tell me the coffee at least comes in a real mug?”

  He couldn’t take it anymore. “What the hell is going on, Jules?”

  She took a deep breath. “How much do you know?”

  “I know that James Hooper came to my base and killed a scientist. I know you’re here to replace that scientist. And I know that you’re the one who manipulated company files to grant Hooper access to a restricted lab, giving him the ability to carry out that murder. I also know that whatever was going on in that lab, the company is very interested in protecting it. Now you tell me, why shouldn’t I haul your ass right down to my lockup?”

  Halfway through, she set her beer down. “I should have known you’d figure out that I was the one who arranged access.”

  “Not even going to bother denying it?”

  “There’s no point. Look, I asked you earlier if I could trust you, and you asked me the same. Whatever our problems were, trust was never one of them. All I’m asking now is that you hear me out. I can’t stop you from arresting me, and if it were anyone else I’m sure they would have done that already. I don’t know why you haven’t after what I did.”

  “I’d like to say that’s all water under the bridge, but it’s not. What it is, is a conversation for another day. I haven’t thrown you in jail because I love…loved you. If I wanted you locked up you never would have made it to the moon. All I want is some answers.”

  “Answers…I can give you that, about Hooper at least.”

  “Great. Why don’t you start at the beginning?”

  “The beginning. That would be about seven months ago. I was hired on by the company into their R&D department. It was the craziest job I’d ever been offered, but it was just too good to pass up. It was like being a college professor, but I didn’t have to teach any classes. All I had to do was continue my research, in a state-of-the-art lab, and publish. They even let me retain rights to a lot of the research, they just wanted intellectual property rights to any practical applications.

  “I was OK with that because there aren’t supposed to BE any practical applications in my field. I was going to have carte blanche to pursue all these really bizarre avenues without any pressure or interference. It sounded almost too good to be true. Turns out, it was.

  “Fast forward four months and I was having the time of my life. My research was taking off and I was able to collaborate with some of the top minds in the industry. From a theoretical standpoint, we were making breakthroughs in a fraction of the time as at the university.

  “Then one day I was contacted by a colleague from my post-doc days. He had evidence that the company was trying to create a space-bridge between the Earth and the moon and that the research was being headed by Milton Dyne here on Tranquility Base.

  “The theory was, if they could create a space-bridge, it would allow for instantaneous travel saving the company billions of dollars annually in shipping costs. Since the technology is highly illegal they would continue to maintain a façade that goods were being transported the ‘old fashioned’ way, meaning they would still charge buyers that way. Even more profit.”

  “So, why didn’t this whistleblower just go to the authorities on Earth? You said he had the evidence.”

  “He was going to, but he needed a real witness. Everything he had was circumstantial, and most of it required a Ph.D. in theoretical particle physics to understand. He had worked with Dyne for years at University and thought that if he could just talk to Milton he could convince him to go to the authorities with him.”

  “Hooper was your contact.”

  “Exactly. Except his real name is Howard Duncan. I sent him here and I need to find out what happened to him. The last contact I had from him was right after he was supposed to go see Dyne. He was hysterical, saying that Dyne was dead and something about the project and that he was going to be accused of murder. Luke, I need to see him.”

  “He’s not here.”

  “He’s not here? Where is he? I assumed you had him in custody.”

  “I do…or rather, I did. The company spirited him away to one of the penal satellites.”

  “Damn.”

  “Jules, what the hell are you doing here? It can’t be just to find Hooper…Duncan…whatever his name was.”

  “I’m here to stop them. Remember that whole trust thing? I’m going to destroy the program and expose it. As soon as Dyne died, they contacted me, asking if I wanted the job. I didn’t hesitate for a moment. I needed to finish what Duncan had started and thought I’d be able to help him. If they took him to one of the satellites, I probably can’t do that now. I can, however, see this through. Will you help me Luke?”

  Maybe. Yes. Probably. “I don’t know. That’s a lot to ask Jules. I need to know one thing first. How did Milton Dyne die?”

  She sighed. “All I could gather from Duncan was that they had an argument and Dyne tried to activate the space-bridge. A moment later he had aged thirty years and was dead. My theory is that it was the space-bridge. Somehow, it dilated time instead of space.”

  “Again, in English?”

  “In English. I’ll try. You remember we talked about Einstein’s Theory of Relativity?”

  “Sure. Twins. One takes a trip in a spaceship and ages slower. Acceleration. Lots of math.”

  “Space and time are just two different dimensions and mathematically are basically the same continuum. When you accelerate something to near the speed of light, time outside that object’s frame of reference begins to slow. Theoretically, if you could accelerate to the speed of light time would stop. Similarly, space begins to compress and bend. By decoupling the Higgs field we eliminate the object’s mass and allow it to reach light speed. If we do it right we can either instantaneously travel between two points or travel through time. I think that Dyne’s bridge traveled him through time rather than space.”

  “But if he traveled through time, why did he age?”

  “Because time itself is a constant. That was the one thing Einstein didn’t account for in his thought experiments. He treated the speed of light as a constant when he should have included time as the constant. From our frame of reference, Milton jumped forward 30 years. In his reference, he lived those 30 years watching the world around him move at an incredibly slow pace.”

  “Like the penal satellites?”

  “More like the reverse. His consciousness and body experienced an actual 30 years, but they were trapped in, essentially, a bubble of time. The bubble would have adhered so tightly to his body that he wouldn’t have been able to move. He really did age to death in moments from our reference frame. He was in a living hell for thirty years and couldn’t do a thing about it.”

  “That’s horrible.”

  “That’s why we outlawed experimental applications of these theories.”

  “OK. I’m in…what do we need to do to shut this thing down.”

  Their beers sat on the faux-wooden table—untouched—as Julia laid out her plan.

  Chapter 10

  Leaving the bar, Luke and Julia made their way directly to the Science Lab. It was unanimous, their best bet to stop the space-bridge research was to act quickly. At the door to the lab, Luke activated his tablink to release the Security Hold. “I’m guessing that Corradi is going to know about it as soon as I open this door. We’ll only have a few minutes to pull this off before they get here. Do you really think you can reprogram Dyne’s system that quickly?”

  “Not by myself, I can’t. That’s why you’re going to build the recursive algorithm while I work on the mass-energy ratio computation.”

  This would be a neat trick if they could pull it off. Without Dyne, they wouldn’t have any direct evidence of what the company was up to, and there was enough political power invested with the Board of Directors that any attempt to use the legal system would get them crushed, assuming they could get off the moon. Destroying the SciLab would put too many lives at risk, and would leave the company in possession of the computer archives; enabling them to simply continue the research.

  In a way, it was what happened to Dyne that gave Julia the idea. They wouldn’t destroy the data, or even try to remove it from the base. Instead, they were going to use Dyne’s system to lock the program into a continuous time-loop. Effectively, the entire experiment would be hidden away in a bubble of space-time, presumably forever. Accessing the research would require replicating everything from the beginning. Ultimately, the company might be able to reproduce Dyne’s work—assuming they could find another scientist willing to conduct the studies. At the very least they would be delayed years, maybe decades, and that should be enough time to stop the development politically. The tricky part would be to prevent the rest of the lab from becoming trapped within the time-bubble, and the two of them with it.

  Once the door to the SciLab opened, they made their way quickly to the primary and secondary control stations. “Emergency bootup sequence. Security Classification Override Level Blue. Morris, Luke. Badge ID 53-zed-291-alpha.”

  “Accessing...security override verified. Commencing emergency boot protocol.” The computer’s semi-metallic voice simulation had flawless syntax, yet it always sounded in-human to Luke. He connected his tablink to the processing station and began working on the algorithm that would place the system in a perpetual loop. His part was comparatively simple, the challenge would be Julia’s computation of the exact amount of energy needed to create the bubble. He didn’t fully understand the physics behind the time-dilation effect, but Julia had assured him this would work.

  Glancing over, he caught himself distracted by the look of concentration and focus on Julia’s face. It entranced him to see the light dancing in her eyes. She had cut her hair short since he had seen her last and the brown locks fell just below her chin. Maybe when this was all over and they got back to Earth she would have that drink with him again, for real this time.

  “Step away from those terminals.” Corradi’s voice rang like a scimitar in the air, ice cold and steely sharp, interrupting his reverie. Hands flying over the terminal, he looked up to see the Director and Blankenship spreading out and moving toward the two of them.

  “Julia!?”

  “Almost there…”