Brane Child, Page 2

A petite young woman, sitting alone in a crowded room with only her inner demons for company, took another sip from her coffee cup, enjoying a well-deserved moment of downtime. The last few weeks had been rushed and confusing, if not exactly hectic.

  Lisa Chang enjoyed difficult questions. They were what made life interesting, and she enjoyed tackling them to find solutions, preferably one at a time. But she did not have the data she needed to solve those that plagued her now.

  Why her? She hadn't requested the job. She didn't particularly want it and was surprised when the Deputy Project Manager for the Brane Skip project offered it to her three weeks ago. There must be someone else better suited. She had only been with the project a few months.

  Sure, it was important, she admitted to herself, breathing in the rich, calming aroma from her cup. She held no doubt about that. And it was one hell of an opportunity, but the simple fact was she didn't feel qualified, and she could not imagine for a moment that her supervisors felt differently. She had always prided herself on being well prepared, and for this, she wasn't. She didn't understand the device well enough, and she certainly didn't trust the thing. The commander of a mission should have more confidence in it.

  The science and technology behind the Brane Skip weren't strong enough yet. She felt that corporate and political suit-wearers were rushing the effort, probably for money and for national pride. She recognized these as real considerations for those in charge, but from her perspective as an engineer, they should not be relevant factors at all.

  For career reasons, she really could not turn down the offer, so she didn't. Now she was responsible for making the test flight a success, and she always took her responsibilities seriously.

  "Would you like some more coffee, Miss Chang?" a mechanical voice asked.

  The robo-server waiting patiently by her table stood barely one hundred and twenty centimeters high from the top of its domed head to where its wheels touched the cafeteria floor—tall enough to perform its function, but not so tall as to be intimidating to patrons with robophobia. Some people simply were not comfortable around ambulatory robots. It was an affliction Lisa did not share. Unlike the Brane Skip device, robots were simple, understandable. They made sense. This one was not much more than a programmable coffee dispenser.

  She nodded, and the mechanical server refilled her cup from a retractable nozzle in its base.

  "May I get you something to eat?" it asked politely.

  "Not right now. Maybe later," she said without looking at it.

  "Very good, miss," it said with all the obsequious formality programmed into it before rolling away to see to the needs of other diners.

  Its voice and manner called to mind a Victorian English butler, which mildly irritated her. Living things could have personalities, but machines didn't. Simulating one was intentionally deceptive. It was a fantasy, a lie. Also, it should be 'very well', not 'very good', or better yet, 'acknowledged', because that's all it meant. The robot understood the instructions you gave it and would comply. It didn't mean it approved. It had no capacity for judging if a customer's choice was 'good'. If you ordered scrambled eggs with peanut butter and jalapeno peppers, it would say 'very good', even though the combination would trigger a gag reflex for anyone with functioning taste buds.

  She placed her steaming cup of caffeinated goodness on the table, where it rested just as it would have on Earth. The five-kilometer-long main level of the ring turned at over three hundred kilometers per hour, doing a complete rotation about once every minute to simulate Earth gravity. On this level of the station, one could almost imagine being in some mid-price hotel or office complex on Earth rather than floating in space one and a half million kilometers from it.

  Feynman Station, at the Sun-Earth L2 Lagrangian point, was a good place to work, with almost all the comforts of home, but she had not asked for the reassignment. Her transfer to the Brane Skip project four months ago came with a raise in pay and congratulations from her coworkers. Everyone seemed to regard it as an honor. At the time, so did she, although she had wondered why she was being honored. She felt pretty sure her former boss held some kind of grudge against her, and the unfairness of it still burned under a simmering pan of quiet resentment. She had only been doing her job, and apparently doing it better than some of the engineers who were above her in the company hierarchy.

  She had been one junior engineer on a team working on a contract for the U.S. Navy to design and build a low orbit defense platform. Since no two nations had gone to war with one another for over a century, she didn't know why they needed it, other than perhaps asteroid interception, for which far less expensive options existed. But the job offered good pay, and she did her best to earn it. The design flaw she had noticed in the plans for the air purification subsystem would have been costly to correct after construction and would have delayed the project by several months, if not more. She mentioned it to one of the engineers working for the Navy. He told his contract specialist, and the Navy ended up requesting a design change so early in the program that the government incurred no additional costs. Her boss had publicly praised her but had later called her into his office. She remembered his words exactly. "If you're on contract to find a solution, there is money to be made by prolonging the problem." He had said it with a smile and in such a way that someone might think he was joking, but she knew he was not. Apparently her primary job was not to get the engineering right, as she had naively believed. Her job was to support the team and help it make money for the corporation.

  Two months after that meeting, she received a transfer to the Brane Skip program. She suspected her boss had pulled some strings, called in some favors, and possibly even padded her personnel file in order to get her off his project before she did anything else that might adversely affect his year-end bonus. If his goal was to get rid of her, he could not have sent her farther.

  She did not know any more about the classified Brane Skip program at the time than did the general public. She knew more now, of course, enough to know she didn't know enough, and what she did know did not entirely make sense.

  She took another sip from her cup, idly watching the display-screens mounted high on the walls all around the dining hall. The name of the ship rolled by again on the one showing tomorrow's departures.

  Brane Child—Atmospheric Cargo Transport, Bruno Class (Modified), General Spaceworks. Where the other entries provided a destination, this one said, Test Flight.

  The line scrolled up to make way for more listings. Nothing special to see here. Move on.

  She shifted her attention to the screen showing station news headlines, watching for a few minutes until the loop began to repeat. There was no mention of the Brane Child in the news. Why should there be? Tomorrow's test would be the fourth for the ship, and it had returned safely from each of those. Another test was hardly newsworthy. But unlike the previous trials, this time the ship would have a crew, although this was a relatively last minute decision and not public knowledge. Whether that would make a difference, no one knew, just as no one knew where the ship went to or where it returned from when it skipped. That's why the corporation wanted people on board this time. They might notice something the automated systems did not.

  She had asked her supervisor about her selection as mission commander, of course, and he had provided her with inadequate and undoubtedly scripted answers that sounded good. She was already working on the project. She was single, smart, experienced, responsible, and someone who possessed demonstrated abilities for 'thinking outside the box.' Yeah, right. That was a phrase management often pulled out as being in favor of until someone not in management actually did it.

  A screen showing a live feed from one of the exterior cameras focused briefly on the weekly passenger liner from Earth making its final approach to the station. Tiny jets of flame from its thrusters flashed as it maneuvered to match speed and orientation with the rotating station. The silent technological ballet of the large ship against the black bac
kdrop of space held a certain surreal beauty. She never ceased to be amazed at what applied science could accomplish.

  'Why me?' she asked herself again. There were other engineers here on the station working on the project, and some of them were far more versed on it than she was. She wasn't even involved with the mysterious Brane Skip device. Her job supported the update and modification of the life support systems of the old cargo vessel being used as a test base. She wasn't in the inner circle of those with top-secret clearances and special access permission. She had no real idea how the thing worked.