McIntyre nodded. “So if it’s a real thinking enemy, or even a medium-good artificial intelligence, it won’t target our big transmitter—it’ll hit something with more value, or hold its fire.”
“Exactly,” Arnie said. “But if it’s just a machine, no smarter than a bug, as we think it is—well, then it’ll go for the brightest light on the porch. And if it’s just a machine, with no enemy in control of it anymore, then basically there’s no war and we’re just dealing with a leftover mine. No war.”
Graham nodded. “Thankyou for yourclarity. So if yourexperiment works, we’re facing a system artifact, not an enemy nation or organization—”
“Well, the experiment works either way. The result will either be consistent with a system artifact or with enemy action—”
Allie said, “We already know it’s a system artifact, Arnie, your research on that was brilliant and you did it back when you had real computers to work with. What we need is an experiment that proves it.”
“Proving it is impossible,” Arnie said. “All we can do is marshall more and better evidence. Even if results are completely consistent with a system artifact, it could be an enemy laying low by pretending to be a system artifact. And for that matter something that looks like conscious enemy action might be a system artifact getting lucky. So—”
“And you want to launch a project this big, and involve the illegal junta in it, when it doesn’t prove anything?” Allie asked. She was sitting very close to Graham, who was looking down at the table. Heather thought, I hope that means he’s at least a little ashamed.
Heather had tried to steer Graham into approving it without seeing the politics behind it, but that wasn’t going to happen, so she waded in. “What Arnie is proposing is that we try an experiment, predict the results, and see what happens—and because the EMP will happen where we’ll be watching, we’ll see more. It’s not expensive, it mostly uses resources that were just going to crumble in the next few years anyway, and besides if the government in Athens goes in on it with us, and sends observers and scientists, then whether or not we get anything scientifically out of it, it ought to kind of get the ball rolling toward reconciliation.”
“There’s already been too many gestures of reconciliation,” Allie put in. “If you ask me. Especially with Manckiewicz publishing that so-called Pale Bluff Address that—”
“That you and I both heard Graham actually say,” Heather said. “Don’t forget that detail. Are you going to put me in jail for remembering it? Whether you approve of it or not, he said it, and it was a door to reconciliation, which—”
“Door to surrender,” Allie said, looking at McIntyre.
Weisbrod made a tent with his hands and stared into space. God, I hope that means you’re actually thinking and not trying to impress your aggressive little minion with what a thinker you are, Heather thought, and I wish I didn’t have to worry about that. It just seems so unfair. I never had to worry about that before.
“Well,” he said, “if you could float the idea past Cameron Nguyen-Peters, through a back channel, then I’d say we wouldn’t want to be the side that said no.”
“But we’re not quite saying we’re going to do it, for sure.”
“No, I guess we’re not.”
“Then what if they say the same thing?”
Weisbrod shrugged. “We’ll consider that situation if it comes up. Right now we can just probe each other about it. My guess is that they won’t want to run the risk of an experiment that is apt to bolster the system-artifact hypothesis.” He smiled at her, and it was a moment where she saw the old Graham. “So I’m saying go ahead because I think we’ll get some cheap propaganda points, and if they agree, we’ll get some slightly more expensive propaganda points. Either way, we come out ahead, and I don’t really think there’s any risk of our being embarrassed.” He glanced around the room and said, “Any dissent?”
He’s not including Allie’s pouting expression as dissent, Heather thought, that’s something.
SIX DAYS LATER. OLYMPIA. NEW DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA. (OLYMPIA. WASHINGTON.) 7:15 P.M. PST. TUESDAY. FEBRUARY 4.
Because they did not dare use radio anymore, the fastest secure communication these days was via the Bubble Drop: letters written in pencil and wetted with disinfectant were sealed in a glass jar with a nail tied to a piece of copper wire. The jar was degaussed in the Big Ripper, as the Evergreen State physicist who had devised it had dubbed it—a generator-magnet-coil system, driven by a weight descending on a line from a six-story building. Whatever was inside the coil received enough strong, shifting electric and magnetic fields to kill most nanoswarm, and if any of them survived, the field and current surges were enough to cause them to start breeding at the junction of copper and iron. So if an hour after degaussing, no white fuzz was growing where the nail joined the wire, the bottle was pronounced sterile.
Then Bambi Castro, taking the Stearman on the down-coast mail run to the nine Castles that were aligned with Olympia, would fly the jar a hundred miles or so out into the Pacific, loft a brightly colored paper kite on a five-hundred-foot cotton kite string, and work downward until the plane was just skimming the waves. At that point, she’d toss the jar, tied to the kite string, over the side, where it would drop into the water and act as a sea-anchor to the kite.
The Stearman would head for land, and a Pacific Fleet Navy helicopter, which had been watching from a safe distance upwind, would swing in at low speed and, using a grapnel on a long rope, grab the kite and begin hauling up, eventually bringing the jar to within a hundred feet of the helicopter, where it would hang until it could be set down on a ship’s deck—not one of the precious nuclear vessels, of course, but one of their still-functioning oil-fueled escorts.
On shipboard, they’d dip the jar in boiling water and pass it to the carrier in a zipline package. From the carrier it went into a parachute package in an F-35, to be dropped on the golf course at Athens; the F-35 would go on to land on a carrier with the Atlantic Fleet. The whole process was awkward, but it emitted no radio waves, included a reconnaissance of the country, and posed relatively little risk of contaminating the Navy’s precious few remaining ships, planes, and helicopters.
The return process involved a jar launched on a hot-air balloon from the Georgia coast, snagged by a helicopter, and walked through the same process, with one package of mail eventually being dropped by parachute onto Gray Field at Fort Lewis.
“And that’s what’s amazing about this,” Arnie explained. “Cam must have written back within an hour or two of getting the message, which means he must have put everything together in that time. He’s gotta be pretty serious about this.”
Hello, everyone,
After discussion with the scientific staff, we’ve agreed that the experimental attempt to attract and study an EMP weapon (which we believe to be directed enemy fire, and you believe to be a sort of massive leftover Daybreak booby trap) would be thoroughly worthwhile. Given the damage certain to be sustained by remaining electrical systems in any location where this happens, we propose the former NREL experimental wind turbine development area at Mota Eliptica, about 150 miles east of Lubbock, would be a relatively harmless site that has adequate power generation and high-tension-line capacity; the construction and observation could be supervised from a main office in Pueblo, Colorado, where, as you note, there is already appropriate Federal office space, and it can be another joint activity under the Federal Reconstruction Information Service (or whatever we end up calling it) that we have already agreed to share.