By June 29 sufficient Flux had built up within the Anchor bubble to allow some tentative testing and localized experimentation. He would get no second chance here without endangering the lives of the people, so Haller wanted to be very, very conservative. He was being pressed, though, by local leaders and by Security to lift the fog as much as possible, for things were beginning to get out of hand. On July 3 he decided that the time had come to test the program for the city core, and all save his own people were evacuated.
Although the master program for the core was really Connie’s, he decided to “ride the amp” himself, simply to get a good feel of things. She was not that put out; he, after all, controlled her promotion and performance ratings, and if it flopped now, he’d take the fall.
The big amp was nothing more than a huge rectangle painted military olive drab. It was far too large to be mobile, a problem they hadn’t really solved as yet, but they moved them around on large tanklike treads powered from the grid at the astounding speed of five to seven kilometers per hour. That was better than dropping them anyway. As Overrider, he sat in a small plush chair in a little cab on the rear to which an override helmet and associated equipment was connected.
Assured by Security that there was an all-clear in the core area—even headquarters had been evacuated except for a skeleton staff, although it should not be affected by the program—he pulled down the helmet, checked his power switches, and called Connie.
“Insert your key now,” he instructed. “On my mark—three, two, one, mark!” He turned his own, and found the status lights all green. He was in contact with the enormous Kagan 7800 beneath the headquarters building.
The 7800 was a far friendlier-seeming beast than the 7240 series, and seemed to go out of its way to appear to the operators as just an old and interested friend. Both the machine and the company had worked hard on the shell that accomplished this, but nobody but an amateur was fooled that this was anything more than a shell masking a totally alien and incomprehensible intelligence of enormous power. They didn’t trust it for a moment.
“Good morning. Seventeen,” he said. Each Kagan 7800 was assigned a code number just for geographic purposes, and while some had named theirs, he’d kept it on a business level.
“Good morning, Toby,” responded the computer. The communication was only in his mind, but the voice always sounded to him like the pleasant baritone one might hear deliver the national news, complete with, to him, a total lack of accent—which meant an accent just like his, of course.
“Bring up the two-kilometer core design, please.”
“In place.” Suddenly, in Haller’s head, an entire detailed blueprint of the layout was as clear as if he were looking straight at it, including symbols for vegetation, paving, communications and electrical systems—everything, to a great level of detail. If he wished, he could count the number of bricks in the walkways in the park.
“All right,” said the engineer, “we’ve run all the models again and again. Run a check on the area to make sure we’re not catching anyone or anything we shouldn’t, won’t you?”
“All clear, Toby. The staff monitors are just outside the lines of demarcation, and all other personnel but you are inside the administrative block. Clear to send.”
“Any last-minute recommendations based on current conditions?”
“Recommend we implement the minimum climatological series to match the affected area. Otherwise it’s not going to work as well or remain as permanent.”
“Very well.” Haller reached down and picked up a small module, an unassuming-looking cube that was no larger than his palm, and inserted it into a slot. “Enable core program inserted,” he told the computer. This program, worked out and tested on other, non-7800 computers, would allow the enormous power of the 7800 to be used, but only within its proscribed limits. After a lot of creative work with Seventeen and supporting 7240’s, they had established an end result and defined it, they thought, absolutely. Seventeen was now free to enable whatever powers, memory, and programming it needed to reach that goal, even if it overstepped the program’s bounds, so long as it came up with the desired result. Haller often thought of computer work as the profession of making bargains with the devil. The trick wasn’t getting what you wanted, it was finding and plugging all the loopholes.
“Enable on and checked,” the computer informed him. “Could I have the base agricultural models as well, please? We may as well do it once.”
Haller nodded to himself. “Connie, can you plug those in for me at your end?”
“Will do,” came the woman’s voice from deep below them. “All right. Haley’s plugged them in.”
“The information is sufficient,” Seventeen told him. “Enabling—now!”
Haller held his breath. Even his team didn’t know that this was the first time even he had played with a program this complex.
There was a crackle and discharge of energy all around him, and he thought he could smell something like ozone. He turned in his chair to watch what he could and almost fell out of it.
There was a wall of thin fire, or so it looked, coming out of the very ground itself. Now it divided, and divided again, and you had to look sharp to see that in fact it was carefully following the meter-squared grid that underlay the whole planet, as it did Titan, Flux and Anchor alike.
It moved out, not high, but still at four meters or so. and began to march in all directions, the point at which it reached the ground seeming to sear what it touched. One wall came across right to him, then through him and the big amp itself. He felt nothing, but it unnerved him even though he was warned of the effect and had experienced it in simulation. Like the operations building, he and the machine were coded out of the program, but it still had to get under him and around him to do its job.
The program did not materialize, it just was. He was able to watch it form in the distance opposite as the wall moved outward, and what formed on the inside looked like it had always been there, just blocked from vision by that wall.
Now, instead of dirt and grime and an ugly pinkish-gray nothingness, there was reality. A series of great stone steps led up to the main entrance of the headquarters and operations building. At the bottom there was a plaza formed of red brick that went out in front of the building for thirty meters, then a break for a fairly wide and paved street, then in front of that a park filled with green grass and small shade trees crossed with a brick wall in the shape of an X and a little circular miniplaza around a single, larger tree at its center.
There was green life in Anchor Luck at last.
Small, globular streetlights ran around the park but not through it save for the center area, hooked up but not yet working. The connections and controls for them would have to be enabled the hard way down in the headquarters basement, but that was a small price to pay.
Other streets, also with lights, had been filled in, but the blocks they outlined on all sides of the headquarters building were nothing but grass, although each had a thin power access strip that would allow a great deal of lighting and machinery to be attached to the master power grid should things be built there. This was necessary because the new depth and texture of the ground in the designed area no longer permitted contact access to the computer’s own power grid supply—and it was the reason why they had to get it right the first time.
There had been a lot of debate about designing and putting in core area buildings, but they’d all come to nothing when plans for who needed what and the designs of those places kept changing daily and getting more and more caught up in the bureaucracy. It was finally decided to just allow for the power strips and to build the buildings the slower, harder, old-fashioned way, with prefabricated units and robot labor, to suit the ultimate tenants.