“I must stress that this is volunteer work and is not without danger,” Cockburn added. “We will show you some of the unfortunates we’ve managed to capture before you make your final decision on this. You will be living in your own village in Anchor, but with full access to the void and full protection from others. Your families, of course, may accompany you, as this might well be a very long project indeed. Discuss it among yourselves, but not with anyone outside this room, even Security or Signals. Discuss it only within your own building here, which we have taken great pains to make secure. Anyone who backs out at this point we feel confident enough to let him or her return to their old occupation. You have all proven your ability to maintain security. However— once out, you will stay out. No second chances. Once in, you will stay in. Anyone who wants out after should know that you will have to pass our psychiatric team to do so, and those of you who do not know what that means should seek an explanation from us or from those who do. It means, at the very least, that you will never be quite who or what you were.”
It was a chilling statement, and it had its effect. All those in the room knew what could be done with the big machines to people, and all had no illusions about what might happen if someone else were at the controls and writing the program.
“Questions?” van Haas asked pleasantly.
Haller raised his hand. “Some of us in landscaping are working on the quadrant programs now, but while they are fairly well complete, they haven’t been fully tested as yet. Can we be spared from that?”
“All of you are working to some degree on future projects,” the director replied. “Hopefully, your staffs have capable and talented people to take over your places. If not, we will supply them. This project is to ensure that we have a future. There is no immediate timetable for the extension of the landscaping programs into quadrant or region size. The manufacturing and logistics for such a system is also monstrous and will require a concentrated worldwide effort. However, the bottom line is really that such programs are dependent on the computers and the amplifiers—huge numbers of remote interfaces and amps are required. Until we are certain that such a massive manipulation of Flux into matter won’t create more nightmares, and until we can be certain that the computer network can be trusted to do it, it’s all on the back burner, so to speak. To loose the force of four 7800’s along a vast network now—well, it’s just too dangerous. Whose other ideas might we get mixed in? It’s your job to show me that this is possible, safe, feasible, and right to do. Yes?”
“Who will head this project?” somebody asked.
“The immediate leadership will be selected in the next few days from among you here. We have already narrowed it down to a few, but we hardly wish to take the computer’s recommendations at face value in something like this. We, not the machines, will choose. The project director will report to a designated higher authority and to either the admiral or myself as needed.”
“It sounds like we’re going to be bottled up, maybe for years,” another noted. “Why in the world do you expect any of us to volunteer?”
“Because you’ll be first. You’ll know before anyone else,” van Haas said simply. “Because you are being offered work on the most challenging and mysterious research project in our history. The answers, if you can find them, might dwarf the discovery of the Flux universe or anything else we can imagine. You’re being offered the cutting edge of science. Your alternative is ignorance, perhaps for life. Ask yourself why you came here in the first place, and why you first got fascinated by science, and I think you will know the answer.”
“Remember, too, that you’re different, all of you,” Cockburn pointed out. “You can do something the masses, smart or dumb, cannot. You can somehow communicate with an artificial intelligence by mind alone and make it work like magic. You will always be feared and never trusted, even by those in high places, who can’t do it. This stuff cannot be kept under wraps forever. Sooner or later they are going to be scared witless of you. You better band together and find the answers if you know what’s good for you.”
“Do the Soviets, Chinese, Franco-Brazilians, and the rest with colonies have similar projects?” someone else asked.
“No.” Cockburn responded. “All our intelligence and exchange information seems to indicate that this phenomenon is unique to New Eden. Since some of the others have computers that are essentially the equal to the 7800’s, and since most used the same linked net, Anchor, and Flux system we did, we must assume that this is one of those accidents of science; some way we did something different in our master programs that caused it. It is the price, but also the excitement, of new technology, to accidentally discover something like this. It is the curse of our technology that such programs and operating systems have become of necessity so complex and so abstract that no human or group of humans can even understand them, only direct them, so late-developing bugs simply must be lived with. We simply can’t do what they could on Titan or Earth and shut the damned thing down and do it over.”
“In the next few days,” van Haas told them, “we will take you on tours and reveal all that we can without giving anything away, inside seventy-two hours we will have a decision on who will be what in this group. At that time you will have to make your decision.”
“But my husband has an important career of his own in Anchor Baker,” one woman protested. “He couldn’t come with me here either. I can’t make a decision without consulting him that would wreck his career or our marriage!”
“Those of you with such problems should see Chief Shindler in my offices today or tomorrow,” Cockburn told her. “We can help ease the way, and Shindler will be able to make calls via satellite to those who need them. Those spouses who lose careers will, I assure you, find equal or greater-responsibility positions with the project. Sensitives or not. Nor, I think, should you consider yourselves being consigned to some sort of high-tech prison. Security personnel responsible only to us will of course be monitoring you when away from home, but you will still be free to visit old friends, dine in the capital, that sort of thing.”
Well, that’s something, Haller thought dryly. You’re free to go anywhere and do anything you want—providing you understand that all your movements and conversations will be monitored, all your intimacies recorded, and everyone you talk to investigated. Still, he knew he’d sign up. As the man said, you don’t turn down a crack at the cutting edge of your field.
He couldn’t help but wonder if that was also the way Suzuki’s Special Project had started, and how they’d all rationalized their own actions to themselves and each other. Still, it was what he was and what he did. Nobel had thought that his invention of dynamite would end war. The atomic scientists thought the same. The first gene splicers and fabricators were just going to end hereditary diseases and grow new crops. Yeah. And all he was going to do was explain why some people on this little moon could be gods.
Rembrandt van Haas greeted Haller warmly, although he couldn’t possibly remember the engineer, and told him to take a seat.
“I wanted to talk to you personally,” the director told him, “because I want to explain exactly why some decisions were made. First, I must tell you that from a performance standpoint and from a psychological evaluations standpoint you are the most qualified of the group to be the project director. I must also tell you that the computers selected you for that position before anyone even arrived here.”
He felt a slight thrill. So maybe they were going to make him the boss! “That’s very ego-gratifying, sir.”
“Indeed, but I’ll deflate you fast. You are not going to be the director, primarily on my say-so.”
“Huh? What?”
“Haller, I started off as a committed scientist. My dream was first the establishment of the Titan Experimental Base, then the exploration program. New Eden was my wildest dream, but I never believed I’d actually live to see it. I dropped everything to work for it. I lied, cheated, stole, did all that I could do to get it. My punishment was to be made director of the entire project. Do you understand why I say that?”
What the hell—bluntness was called for here. He’d already had the prize snatched from him. “No, sir, I do not.”
Van Haas sighed. “I haven’t done a lot of research—hell, I haven’t done any research—in almost a quarter century now. I’ve been too busy playing politics and riding herd on a massive project and an even more massive budget. I’ve been drowned in approvals, disapprovals, reports, arguments—you name it. The politics of Heaven before the Fall pale before the politics of this organization. I’ve had to play ambition against ambition, power play against power play, ego against ego, and I’ve had to sacrifice a lot of good innocents to the most despicable sons of bitches Earth has sent us because the s.o.b.’s had one bit of genius, one useful or unique talent or ability essential to the project.”
Haller nodded absently, but he really didn’t see where this was going.
“If I make you chief of this,” the director went on, “you’ll have forty to fifty people under you with great power. Great power. And their job will be to make themselves more powerful. They are scientists, but they’re also human. They’ll fight, they’ll squabble, and if they master this thing, they will indeed be gods of a sort. Gods in power, but no less human in their hearts and souls and minds. Anyone who directs this project will spend most of his or her time doing among that group what I have to do for the whole project. Pacifying Lucifers, wondering if your Gabriels can really be trusted, and agonizing over decisions that may cost someone life or sanity. Research, and personal development, will be completely secondary. You have the mind-set, will, and sense of excitement to make this project bear fruit, but as an experimenter, not an administrator. I want you to lead the research, not become an administrator. Now do you understand?”
“Well, I think so, but I’m not sure I agree. However, I’ll do my best in the field.”
“I know you will, son. And I think we did pick the best administrative mind for the job out of the lot of you, and I think you’ll go along with it.”
The chief of Special Flux Projects, it turned out, was Lisa Wu.