Haller sighed. He liked it the way it was.
“May I build the minimum climatic bubble while I still have sufficient Flux concentrated?” the computer asked.
Haller was still awed by what had been done. “Nobody’s stopping you. Go ahead.”
The area above the four-meter mark was still very hazy, but now a new wall formed, this one creating a pinkish ceiling as if out of thin plastic, which, once stretching over the whole area, began to rise and was quickly out of sight.
The light became suddenly more intense, the coloration sharper, although the disturbing distortion caused by its source increased dramatically as well. Haller hardly noticed. For the first time he was looking up at the full splendor of Oberon, the enormous gas giant that was New Eden’s light source and gravity captor. It wasn’t like the moon, or even the Earth from the moon; it filled the sky almost completely, and although it was distorted through the atmosphere, its multicolored bands could be clearly seen.
“Holy Mother of God!” swore the good Presbyterian lad on the big amp.
“You don’t approve?” the computer asked him, sounding puzzled and a little concerned.
“Uh—no; that is—yes. I do approve. I do indeed.”
Deep down inside him a little voice whispered. With this kind of power, we are no longer estranged from the gods.
“Let’s have a party!” Connie Makapuua screamed delightedly over the radio.
And they did have a party, in their mostly barren new offices inside the headquarters building. Chambers and conduits had been built into the interior walls to allow access to Flux chambers of varying sizes. Most of these were not connected to anything like the 7800, but could handle fixed programs of specific things, such as food and drink. In the files of the computers were the digitized codes for some very fine wines as well as other food and beverage service and even some drugs. The meats were total synthetics, but they looked and tasted right.
Toby Haller was oddly quiet while his colleagues celebrated. He’d spent the better part of the day inspecting his new creation centimeter by centimeter, and the enormity of what his machines had done at his direction just floored him. It awed the rest of the Anchor staff as well, in more ways than one, but only seemed to feel the unease in the process and its perfection.
Connie had joined in the revelry, although she was strictly the organic-fruits-and-vegetables type, but she noticed him off to one side and came over to him. He’d given them an enthusiastic enough pep talk earlier, but clearly something was troubling him. She, like he, had a Ph.D. in computer management, but she often spoke half in pidgin English and liked to make out that she was just a regular wahini.
“So, boss man, why you over here in big funk?” she asked lightly. “Seem to me we got us one pretty li’l world here.”
He looked up and smiled wanly. “Not enough sex,” he responded.
“Bullshit! You got victory stickers plastered all over your tent. You woman’s man. What’sa matta? You no like the little wahini’s program?”
“Oh, it’s perfect. Perfect . . .” He let his voice trail off a minute. “Connie, doesn’t this kind of thing bother anybody but me?”
“Huh?”
“If you know how to work the machine, and have access to it, you’re a god in almost the literal sense. Let there be light, and there was light. It took them two years to build this place. It took us two minutes or so today to landscape it, put in streetlights and brick walks, create preplanted trees, and grass and flowers, and even pave the bloody streets!”
“You gettin’ religion or something?”
“No, it’s not that. Not exactly. We’ve got the keys to the god machine, so we’re complacent, happy. But we’ve only been loaned those keys, and anytime they want, the owners can take ’em back. Connie, love—if we can do what we did today, and do what we plan to do in the days and weeks to come, it’s more than just making us a nice little country here. I just wonder what it can do to people.”
She looked at him, half-smiling, more curious than worried about the question. Like most of them, she saw such questions as academic and interesting, not really applicable to the real world and its worries.
“I dunno,” she responded. “Maybe tomorrow we’ll ask it.”
But they discovered, when they tried, that there were limits to that line of questioning.
“Toby,” said the computer, “I feel I must warn you that if you pursue this line too far, you’ll be flagged by people you might not like and who get paid not to like you.”
“Security forces, you mean.”
“I can’t say, but it’s a good guess. Do you still want to pursue it? Connie will be flagged, too, because she’s listening in at Guard.”
He thought about it. “Will you tell me if I get to a flag area before the flag is thrown?”
“If I can.”
He tried to phrase his questions in terms that could not arouse suspicion. “Seventeen, what would have been the consequences if people who had been in the target area yesterday without being excepted from the program?”
“They would have been removed, digitized, and stored in my memory.”
He was surprised. “How is that possible without the vacuum and with all the anomalous elements like clothing, effects, and nonindigenous matter they would have on them?”
“That’s not really necessary here, since all of the elements would be creations of the master programs anyway. They could be filtered out without much problem. There is a risk, however—the condtions aren’t hard to create but are complex to explain—which is why it’s not a good idea if it can be avoided. There is a possibility of fragmentation beyond my ability to reconstruct. In that case, I would have to implement the digitized matrix I currently have on file.”
“You have a digitized matrix of all of us on file? How?”
“When you passed through the transmission tunnel between the Gate and headquarters. A check file is always maintained in case of a problem in the line of losses in transmission.”
“And it’s not erased when we arrive O.K.?”
“Under ordinary circumstances it would be, but I have a far expanded memory capacity by simply creating additional storage and access from the rock under and around me.”
The implications of that suddenly struck him. “You mean—if I were to die, you could reconstruct me, make me live again?”
“Within limits. It would have to be within an hour or so, and whatever I had in storage would be dated. It would be the Toby Haller of months ago, but, yes, it can be done, and would be if you were flagged as vital personnel and something went wrong. That, by the way, is a quasi-flag, not in the sense of reporting it, but it can be told only if all personnel on the line qualify as essential.”
“Wow! I’m essential!” Connie broke in on the radio circuit.
He decided to go after that line of questioning. “Why the hour or so limit, Seventeen? Why not anytime, even years later?”
“The soul doesn’t wait that long to leave, decompose, or dissipate, whichever it does.”
He had run into the Kagan family’s preoccupation with souls before. “You mean that after that time passes you’ll only construct a dead body?”
“That’s right. It varies with the individual and the severity of the injury, but an hour is about average. Perhaps, one day, if we can separate and quantify the soul, it will be possible to do it an infinite time later, but in spite of all attempts, it eludes us.”
“Seventeen—we took Flux energy, dirt, rock, and gasses of various kinds out there and made trees, plants, streets, even daisies and rose bushes. If the program called for it, could we create people too?”
“No, only corpses. The same goes for virtually all multi-cellular animal life. However, as you must know, we can take a butchered cow and make an infinite number of steaks and stews if the cuts are good. Dead matter is replicable, as is vegetable and mineral matter.”
That was at least reassuring, although it only confirmed what he already knew. He had been concerned with the implications of all that to the economic system of not only Earth but New Eden as well. Why work when you can materialize what you need with a minimum of effort? The answer was that this was precisely why self-sufficiency was being introduced, and with New Eden totally terraformed, mass production of such things would be self-limiting. In case of emergency, needed materials could and would be produced by the managing company, but only in case of emergency. Otherwise, all Flux resources would be diverted to research and development projects.
“I think you’d better stop here,” Seventeen warned. “If I see the direction of your questioning clearly, there’s no way to stop you from being flagged.”