The Blunt End of the Service Page 4

  Like everything else on Phoenix, the flight control center was at the very cutting edge of technology, employing the most advanced, reliable and user friendly systems available. Two controllers sat at consoles facing a huge, panoramic screen which displayed all traffic moving within the airspace controlled by Phoenix Station.

  The controlling and vectoring was decided by Ulysses, the latest generation of Comtec computer cores and the most advanced artificial intelligence in existence. Ulysses communicated with the navigational arrays present on all space craft and then made recommendations to the flight controllers which they in turn passed on to the vessels. By the time the info was passed on, the mainframes on each vessel already knew, but in turn waited for their own pilots to give the final authorization. It was a thoroughly sensible system.

  Malik DeSouza, the senior controller, watched as a freighter entered Phoenix airspace. Ulysses immediately initiated contact with the freighter and noted its designation CX35, an inbound refrigerated transport.

  “Good morning, CX35. Welcome to Phoenix airspace,” said DeSouza.

  “Good morning, Phoenix control. Requesting approach vector for Phoenix Station.”

  “Roger, CX35,” replied DeSouza. A second later the optimum approach vector appeared on his display. “CX35, this is Phoenix control. Turn to course 240 and reduce velocity to 500kph. You are cleared to enter flight corridor 2-6 at position Alpha 9-5. Please advise upon entering corridor.”

  “Copy, Phoenix control. Turning to port now.”

  DeSouza noted another craft entering Phoenix airspace from a slightly different direction and watched as his colleague Karl Johns handed out the directions.

  It was a quiet morning. By now you’d expect half the flight corridors to be occupied, but there were just the two ships on approach. Make that three, he thought as another icon appeared on the main screen.

  “Morning, Phoenix control. WB27 requesting approach.” WB27 was the water barge which arrived daily, Lt. Sam Carter at the helm.

  “Morning Sam,” said DeSouza. He read off the data and relayed the instructions. “Continue on present heading and join flight corridor 2-6.”

  “Cheers, Malik.”

  Just a minute, thought DeSouza. Corridor 2-6? Hadn’t he just sent that freighter along the same corridor? A glance up at the main display showed both of his charges heading for the same point in space. And a third ship was changing course to intercept.

  “Karl! What directions did you give to your contact?”

  “Corridor 2-6, entering at Alpha … Oh… good grief,” said Karl, looking up at the display.

  “CX35! Execute emergency turn to port! WB27! Maximum up angle. Execute!”

  Meanwhile, Karl Johns was barking out instructions to his own contact, a tubby little freighter full of fresh vegetables. Like two cooks in a kitchen, two controllers in the same emergency spelled disaster with a capital ‘D’. Karl Johns ordered his freighter to make full power turn to starboard, right across the water barge’s adjusted course. The only reason that it didn’t end in tears and twisted metal was the fact that the freighter had the acceleration of a lawn mower and turning circle of a small moon.

  Aboard the water barge, Sam Carter stared goggle eyed as the large transport disappeared under his nose at a considerable rate of knots. He was about to let out a sigh of relief when another ship loomed in front of him, growing bigger and bigger until it filled the whole of his screen. He braced himself for the inevitable impact but at the last moment it seemed to veer off slightly to port and it flashed past his cockpit window, missing by a hairsbreadth.

  “Phoenix control! What the hell’s going on down there?” screamed Sam.

  “Sorry about that, Sam. We appear to be experiencing a glitch with our control system.”

  “A glitch, Malik? You call that a sodding glitch?” yelled Sam. “We’ve just had a damned close encounter. Any closer and we’d have been floating home, and between you and me it’s a long bloody float without a pressure suit!”

  “Copy that, Sam.” DeSouza turned to his colleague. “I’m taking Ulysses out of the loop and switching to back up.” He tapped away at his console.

  “Back-up systems are off-line,” droned the computer.

  “Great,” said DeSouza. “Guess we’ll have to do this the old fashioned way. Switching to manual.”

  “Are we allowed to do that?” asked Johns.

  “No other choice, is there? Time to start earning our pay for real.”

  “I can’t,” said Johns.

  “Can’t what?”

  “I’m not a qualified air traffic controller.”

  DeSouza just looked at him. “What do you mean? Not a qualified air traffic controller? How’d you manage to get the job?”

  “I’m a GSO. General Systems Operative. I just go where they tell me.”

  “You go where they tell you? Did they give you any training?” asked DeSouza.

  “A month’s on the job training. That’s all. They said to do what Ulysses said.”

  “Oh, well… that’s alright then,” said DeSouza, rolling his eyes. “And did they happen to mention what to do in an emergency?”

  “They said to ask the supervisor.”

  “I see. Well, supervisor says to get your arse up to Ops and inform them of the situation. Tell them to get a tech team to look at the air traffic systems and get a qualified controller down here pronto. And Karl…”

  “Yes?”

  “At the double!”

  “Yes, sir,” said Karl, trotting to the exit. Five minutes later Karl was recounting the tale to the senior operations officer, who frowned, frowned again and then punched a button his intercom.

  “Flight control, this is Ops. Please confirm situation.”

  “Ops,” said DeSouza, “Auto-flight control is off-line, repeat, off line. Request the immediate assistance of a fully qualified air traffic controller with another two on stand-by.”

  “Please clarify the problem with the auto control systems,” continued the operations officer.

  “It’s a critical malfunction. The system is directing all traffic to the same point in space at the same time. In plain language, it’s busted, broken, screwed up.”

  “Have you tried re-booting the system?” asked the ops officer.

  “Say again?”

  “Try a re-boot and see what happens. Maybe it will clear the problem.”

  A re-boot? What was the fool thinking, wondered DeSouza. “See what happens? And what if it doesn’t clear the problem, Ops? How about if I send a couple of space-liners crashing head-on into each other? In any case, it’s strictly against regulations. In the event of a near miss incident the auto systems must be taken offline and investigated by a tech team before re-start,” said DeSouza.

  “Understood, flight control. We’ll get another controller down there as soon as possible,” said the ops officer, conceding defeat. His name was Mike Pederson and he was under pressure. Ever since his shift had begun there had been one problem after another.

  At first, it hadn’t been so serious. It began with the elevators on D-wing developing a mind of their own, delivering passengers to any floor except the one they wanted. Then up on the promenade, half the automatic doors had begun playing up. They remained open until someone approached, at which point they swished shut and stayed shut until whoever it was gave up and moved away, whence they swished open again. One enterprising young man had made a dart for the opening before it closed. According to the last report, a team of mechanics was still trying to free his left leg from the pincer grip of the doors, a med-team in attendance.

  Soon after that, emergency alarms had started going off. A quick response team reacting to a fire alarm in Hangar 3 found no smoke and no fire, just a group of surprised looking technicians. Another team responding to a decompression alarm inside Airlock 54 found two even more surprised technicians having a quiet game of cards. Further panic ensued when the computer reported a critical overload in Fission Reactor 7
, at least until someone pointed out that there was no Fission Reactor 7. Phoenix only had six.

  Until this morning, Pederson had never encountered the slightest problem during his tour on Phoenix – not the tiniest glitch. Phoenix had run smoothly, quietly and efficiently, like the extremely well oiled machine it was supposed to be. The problems with the elevators and doors had been annoying but not exactly life threatening; he felt it safe to assume that the gentleman whose leg was stuck in the doors would survive the ordeal. The alarms were more worrying to be sure. That kind of thing wasn’t supposed to happen at all, but again, it was inconvenient more than anything else. The problem in air traffic control however, was another matter altogether and could well have got a whole lot of people killed.

  Something very strange and very, very wrong was happening, and worse, it was happening on his watch. He knew that he was supposed to be able to handle these situations, but until today the most serious problem he had been faced with was how to wipe greasy finger-marks from his touch screen. He scrambled every tech team on duty and even called in a few more that were presently stood down. They wouldn’t be happy about it but if his day was going to be ruined, so would theirs. Satisfied that he could do no more, he put an urgent call through to the administrator’s office.

  San Francisco, Earth.

  Spencer Benedict sat at the desk in his apartment, slowly sifting through the contents of a manuscript that had most likely been cobbled together from random papers found in someone’s garbage. As an advisor to the United Space Agency, Benedict was often called upon to assess data that came the agency’s way. In this case, his evaluation was that whoever supplied this particular item had best return it to the garbage can from whence it came. He tossed it aside and then glanced at his watch. It was almost time. He switched on his terminal and logged onto a secure communications channel. A few minutes later, at exactly 9 p.m. his expected call arrived. The caller dispensed with the normal pleasantries and came straight to the point.

  “How did Arrowhead perform?”

  “Exactly as predicted,” said Benedict. “One critical and three non-critical systems were infiltrated.”

  “Casualties?”

  “It seems one person suffered a cracked fibula.”

  “I hear that there was almost a mid air collision. It would be better if there was no loss of life.”

  “You did specify that the attack on the critical system should be potentially life threatening,” said Benedict. “It’s difficult to arrange a life threatening situation without putting actual lives in jeopardy, though in order to minimize risks, the program was designed to initiate a failure at a time when the air traffic control system was under a low workload. The near miss incident was entirely due to human error on the part of the controllers.” On that point, Benedict’s conscience was clear.

  A nod. “That is my conclusion also. I trust there is no possibility of the program being detected?”

  “None. As you know, Ulysses does not function in the same manner as conventional computers so scanning for a virus or rogue sub-routine will prove inconclusive at best. Having said that, unless they are completely stupid they will suspect some kind of incursion and with a little effort and ingenuity they might be able to trace the code to its original location in Server 6, but that’s as far as they will get.”

  “And if they manage to exceed your expectations?”

  “The original program no longer exists. It has… disappeared. I suppose evaporated would be the closest analogy. It cannot be reconstructed. Several copies of Arrowhead now reside in various locations but are, to use the same analogy, in a nebulous form and cannot be detected.”

  “You are certain of that?”

  “As certain as anyone can be. After all, Ulysses is to a great extent my own creation.”

  “Very well. We will to proceed to stage two in three days. I trust there will be no problems?”

  “No, everything has been prepared.”

  “Good. The next installment of your fee will be transferred on completion of stage two, after which I will contact you again.”

  The caller signed off and the screen went blank. The fee in question was a very generous one but Benedict wasn’t in this for the money, for though few realized it, he already possessed as much as a man could reasonably expect to spend during a lifetime. His motives were different. They were to do with recognition, or rather the lack of it, coupled with a lack of gratitude and a lack of respect. They were also about retribution.

  Ulysses had been his brain child. Half his life had been devoted to the project; year upon year of research, trial, error, failure and finally, at long last, success. But his employers, Comtec Corporation, had snatched it away from him. No sooner had he demonstrated the potential of his research than the schematics and designs for his revolutionary core architecture had been swiftly whisked away by his superiors. Even more speedily he found himself very firmly elbowed aside by the corporate chiefs, the shareholders and all the other useless functionaries who smoothly took the credit for his accomplishments. It was their smiling faces that were plastered over the covers of magazines everywhere, not his. It was not fair!

  Soon thereafter, he confided in his deputy, voicing his dissatisfaction and suggesting that if this was the way things were going to be, he might just consider taking his talents elsewhere, somewhere where he might receive a little more appreciation for his endeavors. Unfortunately, his deputy had his own ideas about being appreciated and immediately reported the conversation to his superiors who wasted no time in protecting what they regarded as their own intellectual property.

  When Benedict arrived at work the next morning he was met and detained by two burly security guards who informed him that his security clearance had been revoked. From there he was taken to a dingy office within the security center where he was given formal notice that his employment had been terminated in accordance with section 5, paragraph C of his contract. He was presented with a couple of boxes containing his personal possessions and escorted from the premises.

  He drove home in a daze, arriving at his door to find a small army of police officers and Comtec technicians, all in the company of his former deputy and bearing a warrant to remove the hard drives from his computer along with any other items that could possibly contain data relating to his research and therefore be regarded as the property of the Comtec Corporation. They were extremely thorough and by the time they had finished, the only media that was left in Benedict’s home was the morning newspaper. Nothing else remained, from hard drives down to the smallest memo scribbled on a post-it stuck to his refrigerator.

  The final insult was a gagging order prohibiting him from discussing or revealing any part of his research, coupled with another court order forbidding any further research which utilized or otherwise relied upon technology gleaned from his work at Comtec. Hamstrung and gutted with one slash of the knife.

  His brain, however, was one source of data that Comtec couldn’t touch, though it had probably crossed someone’s mind to attempt to have him lobotomized. He still had the knowledge and the knowhow, though exactly what he could do with it was something he would have to think about. Two years later he had still been thinking about it and hadn’t come up with a single decent idea.

  Then one day he was approached by the IT bureau of the United Space Agency who wondered if he might perhaps be interested in joining a team of experts looking into security protocols. R. J. Millington, as he introduced himself, informed Benedict that the agency was searching for a particular kind of person, someone who could tackle unconventional problems in an unconventional way, and he guaranteed that the work would be both challenging and rewarding.

  At an informal interview held in an anonymous hotel room, Benedict confessed that it was the most interesting offer he had received since his days at Comtec. In reality, they were both aware that it was the only offer he had received. At least, the only one worthy of his not inconsiderable talents. There had been that offer f
rom Microbox, but the thought of churning out the latest in an endless series of mind numbing ‘Attack of the Flesh Eating Zombies’ vid-games had been too much to stomach. Of course, Comtec’s rivals everywhere would have been delighted to have him on the payroll, but with all the law suits and everything, Benedict’s baggage was just a mite too heavy.

  “You know, of course,” said Benedict, “That I’m not supposed to discuss my work at Comtec?”

  “Well, yes, we are quite aware of the legal constraints that have been imposed on you, Mr. Benedict. Our problem however, is that Comtec has begun the manufacture of multiple units based on your core architecture and once completed, they will no doubt be installed in various major facilities. The prototype on board O1 has in fact been in operation for some time.”

  “I’m not entirely sure that I see your problem,” said Benedict.

  “It’s quite simple,” said Millington. “Except for yourself, no-one outside Comtec has any real idea how the core functions, and the concern is that the system could be attacked or breached in some way. We have approached Comtec but they are being less that cooperative, which from our point of view is an entirely unsatisfactory situation. Comtec cores will be overseeing transport, commerce, immigration, security, defense and who knows what else. The central government is unwilling to allow too much faith to be placed in a system that it doesn’t fully understand and neither does it wish to be placed in a situation where it could possibly be pressured or dictated to by a manufacturer.

  “So why doesn’t the government subpoena Comtec to disclose the necessary information?” asked Benedict.

  “I’m sure they would if they could. Unfortunately, the present legal system simply does not allow for it and with the political influence that Comtec enjoys, it is unlikely that any new legislation will make it past the first reading. So that, Mr. Benedict, leaves us with you.”

  “And the gagging order?”

  “Let me put it this way, we don’t expect you to violate the law… well, actually we do, but not openly, at least. We would simply be asking you to consider how the core might be attacked and how we could defend against it, all in complete confidence and off the record, of course. And in the event that your previous employers find out what you are doing and decide to be awkward about it, all of our work is covered by the Official Secrets Act and while we might be answerable to the Ministry of Defense, we certainly aren’t answerable to Comtec, even in a court of law. So effectively, you’ll have the luxury of being able to break the law and be protected by it all at the same time. In any case, it seems likely that Comtec may have lost interest in you as I’m informed they stopped tailing you several months ago.”