Déjà Vu: A Technothriller by Hocking, Ian (ebook reader that looks like a book .TXT) 📗

you must be evaluated every six months. It is all part of the Assurance of Quality Exercise. We’re stepping in at the last moment for the team who were going to evaluate you.”

“Quality Exercise?” asked the man.

“He hasn’t heard of it,” Saskia exclaimed. Jennifer and David exchanged a look of disbelief.

“Well, he has now,” David continued. “And there will be no prejudice to the evaluation if you let us continue without further delay. If we have to go the trouble of getting these cards activated for your lab, we’ll lose valuable time. And time is money…” David couldn’t remember the welder’s name “…isn’t it?”

The man shrugged. “But it would only take a few seconds to get them activated –”

David pushed past him. “It’s that kind of attitude that’ll get you a low mark in your review.”

The laboratory was startlingly similar to David’s old workshop in the West Lothian Centre. It had the same Spartan scheme.

There were computer terminals around the periphery and connecting doors in each wall. The ceiling was low and the lighting muted. To his right was a machine David did not recognise, undoubtedly because its guts were strewn over nearly a quarter of the floor. It was some kind of supercomputer. It smouldered.

Groove stepped over to the machine, slapped down his visor, and continued. He was unwilling to actively participate in their review.

In the centre of the room, where the white tiles sloped gently down, was the LSD: Liquid Storage Device, and David’s twenty-year-old pun was certainly intended. The great tank swirled. Colours rolled into one another, reached the exterior, touched the transparent plastic, and sank back. David watched the tank and he watched Jennifer and Saskia. They were both slightly hypnotised. They were looking at a distributed processing computer. It was constructed of microscopic computing devices that did nothing but receive chemical activation from their counterparts. They were a legion of stupid little devices. But when they acted in unison, they formed a powerful storage and processing unit: a general computer. The colours arose from sweeping patterns of activation: at one end of spectrum, red, were inhibited cells; at the other were blue, excited cells.

This device was a larger copy of its predecessor at the West Lothian Centre. That device had run New World, the artificial universe in which Bruce had seen and Caroline had died. David wondered at the purpose of this newer device. It would not necessarily perform the same job.

He snapped out of his thoughts. They had a role to play or Groove would become suspicious.

“So,” he announced. “Where shall we start?”

“In here,” Jennifer said quietly. She checked to see that Groove was absorbed in his work. Then she opened one of the connecting doors. The new room was much smaller. It had the same white-tiled floor. On the right-hand wall were four cubicles with closed, transparent doors.

“What’s this?” asked Saskia.

Jennifer opened her mouth but David answered. “These are virtual reality cubicles. They’re closed because they’re designed for microbots. However, I’d say that the microbots are malfunctioning.” He pointed to one of cubicles. There was the ghost of a red stain on its door.

“What’s a microbot?”

Jennifer continued in her father’s tone of voice, “It’s a very small robot, too small to see. They hover in the air while you’re inside the computer. When there are millions of them, they join up to form surfaces.”

“OK, what’s going on?” Saskia asked wearily. She massaged her temples. “What do you mean by ‘inside the computer’? And why should they form surfaces?”

“The device in the laboratory contains and runs a whole universe,” Jennifer said.

“Oh really,” Saskia replied. She became weak.

“More or less,” David said. He had given this speech a thousand times to VIPs in the West Lothian Centre. The intervening years fell away. “You can describe a square with only one value: the length of any given side. Using the same kind of economy, you can describe complicated shapes and systems too. The information content of the whole universe – everything you would need to describe the galaxies, the systems, the planets, all the way down to the leaves on a given tree – is not the same size as the universe itself. Oh yes, it’s a mind-bogglingly large amount of information. But there are ways to cut down the bulk. For example, I expect this computer has a single planet. Correct?”

“Correct,” Jennifer said. She was standing by her father’s side now. Saskia took a small step back.

“Our universe, of course, is detailed all the way down to the quantum level. But it isn’t really necessary. As long as some kind of supervising agent – the computer itself – ensures that mechanical actions work according to the simplest laws of physics, everything is fine.”

Saskia opened one of the cubicles. “David, please understand that I have had little sleep. My boredom threshold is therefore much lower.”

David raised his palms defensively. “I just want you to be informed, that’s all.”

“Right,” she said. It looked no different from a shower cubicle. “I put on the headset, we play a computer game. A fair summary?”

Jennifer said, “We should get going.”

Each of them stepped into a cubicle and put on a headset. David jiggled his until it fit over Ego’s earpiece. Jennifer said, “Computer, activate all cubicles. Safe mode. Confirm microbots deactivated?”

“Confirmed,” said a voice in David’s ear. It was the computer.

Then Jennifer: “Computer, run Project Asgard.”

Jennifer heard a click as an audio channel opened. Before her was perfect blackness. Then a blue grid. Overwriting it were the words: “You are: Supervisor”. The display faded to nothing.

“Nothing’s happening,” said a voice in her ear. It was the German policewoman.

“You must picture the planet,” Jennifer said. “The computer picks up your thought processes and scans them for images.”

Her father whistled. “Nifty.”

“Fine,” Brandt said. “But I haven’t seen the planet yet. How do I know what it looks like?”

“Saskia, just imagine any planet,” her father said tersely.

Jennifer closed her eyes. The blackness became deeper. She pictured the planet, opened her eyes, and