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Itty Bitty Bigger World: Hardly Cover
Dec. 21st, 2014 04:00 am"Itty Bitty Bigger World: Hardly Cover"
Amy and I could have sat there for hours, holding hands and idly talking or not. But she needed to rest, I needed to take care of basic needs, and there were two Fedhobbyists in battlesuits standing in the middle of UC Stanford campus whose actions I was personally liable for.
None the less, we waited until a nurse (yes, an actual human nurse - this is UC Stanford) stuck her head in and said, "Captains..."
I winced and Amy unsmiled, squeezed my hands, deliberately smiled again and said warmly, "Go."
I trotted out the door and once again, right past the Director of Safety and the Dean of Medicine. Sorry, but when I gotta go, I gotta go.
It took about five seconds for my smartware to find me a toilet (which had once been euphemistically called a "rest room" - tourists still mix the two up frequently) and perhaps three to make use of it. Waving my hands past the hospital-grade scrubber, I stepped out to find the two august personages standing in my way this time.
"Captain Anderson, we need to talk to you."
My smartware helpfully labeled them this time -- or I actually bothered to read the label, further deponent sayeth not -- and I took a deep breath.
"Thank you both for your hospitality, so to speak. I suspect that my presence here, with the two battlesuits you're about to chastize me about, might have forestalled an attack on your premises. I'm sorry I did not speak with you sooner, but urgent personal matters took up my attention."
Yes, taking a leak was more important - to me - than any number of Deans or Directors.
The Director of Safety took up the ball, since I had forestalled about half his pitch.
"You brought aboard this campus two fusion reactors, thirty subcritical implosion devices, two smart rifles, six antimatter projectors and enough megajoules to flatten the campus!"
"And so I did, under the governing authority of the San San police, for reasons that will be tolerably obvious if your smartware has updated you on recent events. As for enough megajoules to flatten the campus, my understanding is that the typical fraternity beer bash does as much or more."
An unkind reference, to be sure, but it was really UC Stanford's fault for allowing an on-campus house to maintain a homebrew fusion reactor. Defense fields did limit the damage to most of Fraternity Row, and no human casualties since there had been time to evacuate.
The Director of Safety started to stammer about Memorandums of Understanding, so I tuned him out and paid attention to the Dean of Medicine.
"How many casualties can we expect to see from this biopathogen?" she asked, in all seriousness.
"I'm hoping only a few dozen. But we know that our opponent is attempting weaponization. One scenario discussed by the Fedhobbyists was world plague with a variety of post-infection triggers - especially electromagnetic, but possibly neural."
"We cannot hope to handle more than twenty such casualties. We simply don't have the resources."
That was scary. I mean, genuinely scary. Show UC Stanford the Black Death plague of the Middle Ages, and their biggest problem would be cooking enough of the various biochemical soups needed for the antibiotics. Call it ninety minutes with on-campus facilities. Then send out a horde of bots with injector guns, problem solved in a day or two. With biosuites and electronic updates, call it half an hour. Tops.
"What would you need to upgrade?"
"We have comprehensive disaster plans, which we are starting to initiate. But the biggest limiting factor is the nature of the biopathogen itself. Expert system based AIs can't do much with it at the cellular level. It's almost as though..."
Horrid thought. Turing test.
"... it was specially designed to be a CAPTCHA for the treatment provider. Puzzle too hard for computers; needs a human."
Horrid thought completed.
"We got the production facility. But do we have the mastermind?" I did a quick search. Apparently not. Declaring victory was a tad premature.
"Who could build such a thing?"
"I'm not a bioweapons specialist. Few people are. But preliminary analysis is someone skilled in biowar, network warfare generally, memetics _and_ physical conflict. That's a hard combination to find."
The Director of Safety's smartware said something - out loud, in audio - that interrupted our discussion. Calmly, firmly and in a voice that brooked no dispute. A metallic voice tone was required whenever someone else's smartware dared interrupt a human conversation, which took something massive.
"Take. Hard. Cover."
My smartware offered to stun him, then confided via tactical graphic that I was on the third story of a supersurface building, that effect ordinance was inbound with an time of impact measurable in seconds, and last but not least, that unless I could find some exoskeletal armor and instantaneously, magically don it, I should really think about finding a very high speed with which to RUN AWAY.
So I took both the Director and the Dean in my arms, hurled the three of us into an elevator, and subvocalized "ESCAPE GEE OH!"
The wall of the elevator slammed into us sideways and spread us out in a mixed array of limbs.
We still call them elevators, but they move in three dimensions and they can move quick. In this case, I'd authorized the elevator not only to take us out of danger, but to override normal gravitational force warnings. "G. O."
The elevator shook, changed direction and shot upward, jabbing my elbow into someone's soft spot and putting someone else's foot in my armpit. That puzzled me -- yes, it's a sixty story hospital but why would it possibly throw us _upward_? Then I wanted to screw my eyes shut and pray.
The elevator filled with quickfoam. The G force abruptly stopped. We were weightless. Actually we were in free fall. I didn't need an external view to realize that we were flying through the air, well clear of the hospital.
Then we were kicked _sideways_. HARD.
I passed out.
...
When I came to, a bot was peeling foam chunks off of the three of us. The bot read "UC Stanford Greens - Help Keep Our Campus Clean!" A lot of quickfoam surrounded us, and the tattered remnants of an elevator parachute made of smartcloth.
I immediately pulled up a tactical graphic.
A pair of Federal battlesuits were on air defense interdict in the center of UC Stanford campus, back to back on a rooftop. IR imagery showed that their weapons had seen use within the last minute. A couple burning columns showed where something had gotten itself shot down.
But a horde of CHP flier units and a Coast Guard hovercraft now controlled the airspace. The latter had just separated a bot to go check out one of the crash sites.
No immediate risk of being fried, baked or pasted. The hospital was still there, although it had a hole in the side to which bots were rushing.
The Director of Safety got to his knees, laid down again and started working his smartware. The Dean of Medicine didn't bother with the knees part, just rolled over and played dead - except that her neural implants were frantically busy.
I stood up and cursed the fate that had put me on the side of a hill overlooking UC Stanford without even a smartgun.
Then I pulled up the status update I'd been dreading.
Captain Amy, uninjured. Apparently she'd uncoupled herself from the machinery and thrown herself into a laundry chute. Aside from an instant sunburn from the UV sterilizer before it shut off (who expects a person down the laundry chute?), she was fine.
Good. I opened an audio link to the suits.
"Captain Anderson here, report."
"Corporal Young. Two space craft deorbited on hyperspeed attack profiles four minutes ago. They were heavily stealthed and only detected on launch. We immediately opened fire with laser-pumped antimatter and shot down ten of twelve rounds, and both craft. One round detonated at 2000 AGL, cause unknown, no apparent effect. One round detonated inside the hospital building, estimate 1 ton chemical explosive yield. Casualties confirmed. Your status?"
"Uninjured," I lied. "Current defense profile?"
"San San has autonomous orbital laser defenses up now. We are on watch for skimmers, as is CHP. Coast Guard is investigating."
"Place yourselves under tactical control of CHP until otherwise advised. Good work. Out."
I patched over to Threat Trackers with a CC to Stanford Safety, CHP and San San Tactical.
"Probable bioweapon dispersal bearing 252 mark 6A, 2000 AGL. Who can monitor?"
Almost immediately, a visible laser CRACKed from a corner of the Physical Plant building, into the sky apparently at random.
"Stanford Accident Control confirms. Orbital laser notices going out."
My ware lit with lots of hazard warnings, which I ignored. Nothing was beeping, so it wasn't going to impact me personally. Besides, I doubted that even UC Stanford would be incompetent enough to lase their own Safety Director.
Think of the worst lightning storm you've ever heard of. Then double it.
A barrage of orbital laser fire scythed through the air around where the stray round had detonated. What goes down must hit something, so a lot of UC Stanford shrubbery, landscaping and parking lot gave its life in defense of the campus. Despite careful control over energy, there is always leakage - especially when you're literally boiling the air.
So now we had a campus on fire, instead of a campus exposed to a complex and dangerous biopathogen. That was what firebots were for. The greens bot raced away, hooked itself up to a hydrant, and started watering a nearby acre of flaming grass.
The Dean of Medicine sat up.
"Amy Tsai is released from hospital on my authority. Not to be unnecessarily rude or anything, but would you two _kindly_ get Out Of MY HOSPITAL!" she finished in a shriek.
"Yes, ma'am. Sorry."
I walked about a hundred feet [33 meters] to a kiosk, stole a bicycle (which San San immediately paid the owner for) and pedaled it to the nearest capsule station. Two minutes later, Amy and I were in the same capsule. Thirty seconds after that, we were off Stanford campus and traveling at random somewhere in the vast San San capsule system, under local capsule control. The safest place we could be. Kind of hard to do much, but also kind of hard to lock a missile on, too.
Amy and I could have sat there for hours, holding hands and idly talking or not. But she needed to rest, I needed to take care of basic needs, and there were two Fedhobbyists in battlesuits standing in the middle of UC Stanford campus whose actions I was personally liable for.
None the less, we waited until a nurse (yes, an actual human nurse - this is UC Stanford) stuck her head in and said, "Captains..."
I winced and Amy unsmiled, squeezed my hands, deliberately smiled again and said warmly, "Go."
I trotted out the door and once again, right past the Director of Safety and the Dean of Medicine. Sorry, but when I gotta go, I gotta go.
It took about five seconds for my smartware to find me a toilet (which had once been euphemistically called a "rest room" - tourists still mix the two up frequently) and perhaps three to make use of it. Waving my hands past the hospital-grade scrubber, I stepped out to find the two august personages standing in my way this time.
"Captain Anderson, we need to talk to you."
My smartware helpfully labeled them this time -- or I actually bothered to read the label, further deponent sayeth not -- and I took a deep breath.
"Thank you both for your hospitality, so to speak. I suspect that my presence here, with the two battlesuits you're about to chastize me about, might have forestalled an attack on your premises. I'm sorry I did not speak with you sooner, but urgent personal matters took up my attention."
Yes, taking a leak was more important - to me - than any number of Deans or Directors.
The Director of Safety took up the ball, since I had forestalled about half his pitch.
"You brought aboard this campus two fusion reactors, thirty subcritical implosion devices, two smart rifles, six antimatter projectors and enough megajoules to flatten the campus!"
"And so I did, under the governing authority of the San San police, for reasons that will be tolerably obvious if your smartware has updated you on recent events. As for enough megajoules to flatten the campus, my understanding is that the typical fraternity beer bash does as much or more."
An unkind reference, to be sure, but it was really UC Stanford's fault for allowing an on-campus house to maintain a homebrew fusion reactor. Defense fields did limit the damage to most of Fraternity Row, and no human casualties since there had been time to evacuate.
The Director of Safety started to stammer about Memorandums of Understanding, so I tuned him out and paid attention to the Dean of Medicine.
"How many casualties can we expect to see from this biopathogen?" she asked, in all seriousness.
"I'm hoping only a few dozen. But we know that our opponent is attempting weaponization. One scenario discussed by the Fedhobbyists was world plague with a variety of post-infection triggers - especially electromagnetic, but possibly neural."
"We cannot hope to handle more than twenty such casualties. We simply don't have the resources."
That was scary. I mean, genuinely scary. Show UC Stanford the Black Death plague of the Middle Ages, and their biggest problem would be cooking enough of the various biochemical soups needed for the antibiotics. Call it ninety minutes with on-campus facilities. Then send out a horde of bots with injector guns, problem solved in a day or two. With biosuites and electronic updates, call it half an hour. Tops.
"What would you need to upgrade?"
"We have comprehensive disaster plans, which we are starting to initiate. But the biggest limiting factor is the nature of the biopathogen itself. Expert system based AIs can't do much with it at the cellular level. It's almost as though..."
Horrid thought. Turing test.
"... it was specially designed to be a CAPTCHA for the treatment provider. Puzzle too hard for computers; needs a human."
Horrid thought completed.
"We got the production facility. But do we have the mastermind?" I did a quick search. Apparently not. Declaring victory was a tad premature.
"Who could build such a thing?"
"I'm not a bioweapons specialist. Few people are. But preliminary analysis is someone skilled in biowar, network warfare generally, memetics _and_ physical conflict. That's a hard combination to find."
The Director of Safety's smartware said something - out loud, in audio - that interrupted our discussion. Calmly, firmly and in a voice that brooked no dispute. A metallic voice tone was required whenever someone else's smartware dared interrupt a human conversation, which took something massive.
"Take. Hard. Cover."
My smartware offered to stun him, then confided via tactical graphic that I was on the third story of a supersurface building, that effect ordinance was inbound with an time of impact measurable in seconds, and last but not least, that unless I could find some exoskeletal armor and instantaneously, magically don it, I should really think about finding a very high speed with which to RUN AWAY.
So I took both the Director and the Dean in my arms, hurled the three of us into an elevator, and subvocalized "ESCAPE GEE OH!"
The wall of the elevator slammed into us sideways and spread us out in a mixed array of limbs.
We still call them elevators, but they move in three dimensions and they can move quick. In this case, I'd authorized the elevator not only to take us out of danger, but to override normal gravitational force warnings. "G. O."
The elevator shook, changed direction and shot upward, jabbing my elbow into someone's soft spot and putting someone else's foot in my armpit. That puzzled me -- yes, it's a sixty story hospital but why would it possibly throw us _upward_? Then I wanted to screw my eyes shut and pray.
The elevator filled with quickfoam. The G force abruptly stopped. We were weightless. Actually we were in free fall. I didn't need an external view to realize that we were flying through the air, well clear of the hospital.
Then we were kicked _sideways_. HARD.
I passed out.
...
When I came to, a bot was peeling foam chunks off of the three of us. The bot read "UC Stanford Greens - Help Keep Our Campus Clean!" A lot of quickfoam surrounded us, and the tattered remnants of an elevator parachute made of smartcloth.
I immediately pulled up a tactical graphic.
A pair of Federal battlesuits were on air defense interdict in the center of UC Stanford campus, back to back on a rooftop. IR imagery showed that their weapons had seen use within the last minute. A couple burning columns showed where something had gotten itself shot down.
But a horde of CHP flier units and a Coast Guard hovercraft now controlled the airspace. The latter had just separated a bot to go check out one of the crash sites.
No immediate risk of being fried, baked or pasted. The hospital was still there, although it had a hole in the side to which bots were rushing.
The Director of Safety got to his knees, laid down again and started working his smartware. The Dean of Medicine didn't bother with the knees part, just rolled over and played dead - except that her neural implants were frantically busy.
I stood up and cursed the fate that had put me on the side of a hill overlooking UC Stanford without even a smartgun.
Then I pulled up the status update I'd been dreading.
Captain Amy, uninjured. Apparently she'd uncoupled herself from the machinery and thrown herself into a laundry chute. Aside from an instant sunburn from the UV sterilizer before it shut off (who expects a person down the laundry chute?), she was fine.
Good. I opened an audio link to the suits.
"Captain Anderson here, report."
"Corporal Young. Two space craft deorbited on hyperspeed attack profiles four minutes ago. They were heavily stealthed and only detected on launch. We immediately opened fire with laser-pumped antimatter and shot down ten of twelve rounds, and both craft. One round detonated at 2000 AGL, cause unknown, no apparent effect. One round detonated inside the hospital building, estimate 1 ton chemical explosive yield. Casualties confirmed. Your status?"
"Uninjured," I lied. "Current defense profile?"
"San San has autonomous orbital laser defenses up now. We are on watch for skimmers, as is CHP. Coast Guard is investigating."
"Place yourselves under tactical control of CHP until otherwise advised. Good work. Out."
I patched over to Threat Trackers with a CC to Stanford Safety, CHP and San San Tactical.
"Probable bioweapon dispersal bearing 252 mark 6A, 2000 AGL. Who can monitor?"
Almost immediately, a visible laser CRACKed from a corner of the Physical Plant building, into the sky apparently at random.
"Stanford Accident Control confirms. Orbital laser notices going out."
My ware lit with lots of hazard warnings, which I ignored. Nothing was beeping, so it wasn't going to impact me personally. Besides, I doubted that even UC Stanford would be incompetent enough to lase their own Safety Director.
Think of the worst lightning storm you've ever heard of. Then double it.
A barrage of orbital laser fire scythed through the air around where the stray round had detonated. What goes down must hit something, so a lot of UC Stanford shrubbery, landscaping and parking lot gave its life in defense of the campus. Despite careful control over energy, there is always leakage - especially when you're literally boiling the air.
So now we had a campus on fire, instead of a campus exposed to a complex and dangerous biopathogen. That was what firebots were for. The greens bot raced away, hooked itself up to a hydrant, and started watering a nearby acre of flaming grass.
The Dean of Medicine sat up.
"Amy Tsai is released from hospital on my authority. Not to be unnecessarily rude or anything, but would you two _kindly_ get Out Of MY HOSPITAL!" she finished in a shriek.
"Yes, ma'am. Sorry."
I walked about a hundred feet [33 meters] to a kiosk, stole a bicycle (which San San immediately paid the owner for) and pedaled it to the nearest capsule station. Two minutes later, Amy and I were in the same capsule. Thirty seconds after that, we were off Stanford campus and traveling at random somewhere in the vast San San capsule system, under local capsule control. The safest place we could be. Kind of hard to do much, but also kind of hard to lock a missile on, too.
