Spheria (36 page)

Chapter 49 - Projection

“We talk a lot about hope, helping, and teamwork. Our whole message is that we are more powerful together.” - Victoria Osteen

Dana entered the Experience Room looking disheveled. The rest of the team, minus Min and Max, was already seated around the table, ready to begin. The panoramic screens each showed the simple spinning logo for the Spheria Project.
 

Graham stood near a beverage cart that had been brought in for the meeting. “Tough night?” he asked.

“You could say that,” Dana replied. “Last minute preparations, etc. The typical stuff. We all were working extra hard.”

“Glad to hear that. I love the dedication. Here, have some coffee.”

Graham poured Dana a cup from the dispenser. “How do you take it?”

“Cream and one sugar, please.” This was odd, a billionaire serving her coffee.

“Sure thing.” Graham began dumping the requested additives into her cup. “Where’s Max?” he asked as he stirred.

“I’m not sure,” replied Dana. “I got a strange message from him this morning saying that he had some things to take care of. He told me to start without him.”

Graham frowned. “That’s unexpected. I hope he's okay. The future of this project depends on him.” He handed the cup to Dana.
 

“Yeah, I hope so too,” she said, taking the cup. She sipped the coffee and then cleared her throat. “But I’m sure we could keep it going without him. The team has its act together. It’s a great crew.”

“Even still. Sometimes a great team goes nowhere without a visionary leader. Look at Apple. Brilliant engineers couldn’t save them. It took one guy to lead them from the brink of irrelevance. That’s rare to find. Just look at me.” He smiled a sheepish grin, having just compared himself to Steve Jobs.

Dana nodded.

Graham took a seat at the table with the other staff. As he did this, Dana walked over to the wall panel and plugged in her flash drive. Three of the screens in the room showed her first slide: “Quarterly Report.” This was a convenient arrangement so that anyone sitting at the round table could see the materials.

A computer voice announced from the speakers: “Incoming event.” Frankie hit a button on the remote.

“What was that?” Graham asked.

“Oh,” said Frankie, “the computer is always monitoring Spheria. If something is happening that it detects would be of interest to observe, it’ll automatically play it on the screens here. That way we don’t miss anything. But it gets recorded anyway so we can check it out later.”

“Good to know,” said Graham. “I'd like to check out the recordings after this meeting.”

“We can definitely give you access,” said Dana. “But even if you just watch the most interesting ones, you’ll be watching for days. You're free to have at it if you wish.”

“I’m in no rush,” he said, countering Dana’s attempt to discourage him. He watched for a reaction.

Dana smoothed her blouse with her hands. Graham noticed her fingers were dirty, and this left a dark smudge on her shirt. Before he could comment, she began.

“This has been a record quarter for the Spheria Project. The team has made some valuable and insightful observations. Plus, Max and I have found several new sources of funding.”

“I like to hear that,” commented Graham.

Dana nodded to Frankie.

Frankie clicked the remote and the slide changed to “Agenda.” It listed the following items:

1) Quarterly Goals (Max Moreau)

2) Cultural Progress (Jean Evens)

3) Flora and Fauna (Abina Andam)

4) Subterranean Passages (Frankie Pompeo)

5) Financial Analysis (Dana Carter)

Dana continued. “These are the five topics we will cover in this meeting. I will talk more about the funding at the end. Max was supposed to discuss the first item. But since he’s not here yet, Jean, can you go first? We’ll circle back when he arrives.”

“Uh, sure,” Jean said. As Dana sat, Jean rose and walked over to one of the screens showing the slides. “Flip to slide 8, please.”

Frankie fumbled with the remote, skipping past a bunch of charts. He stopped when the screen showed “Cultural Progress.”

“So, for this quarter, our primary focus has been on the power shift of the Colony. The godhead, specifically.”

“The what?” asked Graham.

“The godhead. It means ‘the essence of being a god,’ and that’s what this Polyan is.”

The slide changed to show a close-up image of Fa∙ro. He stood on the dais in the center of the Colony, striking a statuesque pose.

“So this is Fa∙ro,” continued Jean, “the first seven-legged Polyan. At the end of the last quarter, just after our report to you, something unusual happened. The Polyans created him of their own volition. Whenever we materialize in their world, we always appear with seven legs. That’s because the most the Polyans could ever build was six, and we wanted to appear more powerful in some way. In hindsight, that may have been a mistake. They based their entire social class, as well as their mythology, on the number of legs. But I digress. Other than this, their social structure formed naturally into a well-run insect-like…”

The computer voice once again announced: “Incoming event.”

“Again!” blurted Frankie. He clicked the remote to suppress its playback.

“Hmm.” Jean frowned. “Should we check it out?”

“No,” said Dana. “Not until after this presentation.”

“Okay, then,” Jean continued. “I was just saying how the Polyan social structure resembled that of an insect colony.”

“Until now,” added Ravi.

The slide changed to show the eight Leaders in a circle in their chamber atop the tallest building.

Jean continued. “This was the Council. The members ran the Colony using a simple but equitable system of rule. They voted on actions, and the majority prevailed. At some point, they decided too many tie votes were happening. For an unknown reason, rather than making another six-legged member like themselves, they made one with seven.”

“Interesting. But how could we not know why?” asked Graham. “Isn’t that the point of this project, to learn these things?”

“Yes, it is,” answered Jean. “We’re still reviewing the logs and recordings to find out why. We will figure it out, but I suspect they wanted to see if they could do it, to see if they could touch divinity.”

“Makes sense.”

“So, anyway, the Leaders found a way to make a seven-legged Polyan. They did something we never expected. They used an additional contributor during the breeding ritual. This provided the excess energy required to jump-start seven legs. But that’s not the most significant thing that happened. In a relatively short period of time, this occurred.”

A video of the eight Leaders, being slaughtered one by one by Fa∙ro, played in its entirety.

“What the hell just happened?” asked Graham.

“Exactly what you think,” said Ravi. “Fa∙ro eliminated the Council and took ultimate control of the colony. He elevated himself to godhead and instantly changed their society into a dictatorship. He won over the Soldiers and used them to his advantage. With their larger numbers, he was unstoppable. The remainder of the Colony had no choice but to accept his rule.”

“Well, this isn’t unlike coups we’ve seen involving humans, right?” asked Graham. “Take Cuba for example.”

“It’s exactly the same, which is what makes this so interesting,” said Jean. “History repeats, even inside our little virtual world. It shows the realism that un-deterministic destiny can lead to and that societies go through inevitable stages of formation. It validates a few of our theories about human nature.”

“Impressive,” said Graham. But he wanted to gauge the weight of this discovery by the reaction of the project’s creator. “Where the hell is Max?” He pulled out his phone and checked it for texts. “Dana, do you have a message from him?”

She took out her phone and pretended to look through her emails and text messages. “None, sorry.”

“This isn't like him. There’s nothing he cares about more than this project.”

“Yeah, he’s never been late for a quarterly meeting,” said Frankie.

“I hate to proceed further without him,” said Graham. “But I guess we should. Jean, is there more?”

“I could go on and on, but that’s all I have in the report. If there is time at the end, I'd like to discuss what they’re building.”

“I'm intrigued,” said Graham.

“Next up,” announced Dana, “is Abina, who’ll cover flora and fauna.”

Abina took the remote from Frankie and stood. With her thick accent she began. “So the world is full of various plant-like and animal-like creatures now. It is starting to become a vibrant place. Even so, we created six new species this quarter, which averages two a month, a record for us.”

She clicked the remote, and the slide changed to a graph showing the number of new species created every month. It was a sharp upward trajectory, starting slowly and then taking off like a hockey stick.

“I think we are in our groove modeling and coding these now. I mean, we are performing as a team.”

She clicked the remote again, and the slide changed to a topographical map of Spheria. It was broken up into triangles, some connected to others, each showing a piece of landscape. “This is a modified Dymaxion map. It shows the entire inside surface of Spheria, preserving, for the most part, the relative sizes of each land area.”

She clicked the remote again and regions of color overlaid the triangles. “These areas show where we have placed the new species. The center is the location of the Colony.”

“Wait,” said Graham. “Can you go back a slide?”

“Sure.” She clicked the remote, and it returned to just the topological view.

Graham stood and walked over to study it up close. He pulled a pen from his pocket that had a laser pointer on the end. He attempted to shine it on a couple of triangles, but the red dot wouldn’t show up against the brightness of the screen. He frowned, looked around, then walked over to the rack behind the door and took one of the pool cues. Returning to the screen, he used the stick to point at the edge of a triangle that wasn't connected. “What should be here?” he asked.

Abina said, “Look carefully. There is a faint blue arrow that connects that side to the side of another triangle.”

Graham squinted. “Oh. I see it.” He traced the line with the tip of the pool cue, actually making it darker from the chalk. It was apparent that the topology at the two edges matched. “I get it now. It’s as if it’s unfolded into triangles. Go on.”

The slide advanced to the colored regions again. “To not make things too unstable, we have placed several of the new creatures a safe distance from the Colony. The yellow areas show where. They are far enough so that the Polyans will have to venture further before they encounter the new species. We have also placed several on the other side of the Rift, where the red areas are. The current set of Polyans will never encounter those. This will allow us to compare their evolution under the influence of intelligent beings to those without such influence.”

“So you put some of the same types of creatures on each side?” asked Graham. “And you'll see how they mature with and without encounters with the Polyans?” He touched the referenced regions with the stick as he spoke.

“Exactly. So you could say this is the first time we’re adding an observation of the ‘culture of non-sentient life forms’ as I like to call it. I’ll give an update of my findings next quarter.”

“Looking forward to it,” said Graham.

Abina continued, “Instead of talking about the new creatures I wanted to show a video of them. Some are the craziest and most creative we have ever made. I thought a visual representation would have more of an impact than descriptions.”

She advanced the slide. A video began playing on the screens. It was not, however, a video of the creatures.

Chapter 50 - Interruptions

“I don’t believe in the no-win scenario… I like to think there always are possibilities.” - James T. Kirk

The screens in the Experience Room began playing a video. It wasn't the video Abina had intended to play. Instead, Dana’s face filled the screen, and she started speaking.

“I'm truly sorry to have to do this, and sorry about Olivia also. I was convinced that it’d look like a suicide, but Captain Brennan wasn’t so sure. He investigated her death and almost discovered the truth. This time, I can’t have any bodies.”

“But why?” Max’s voice said from off camera.

“Isn’t it obvious?” said Dana on the screen. “You know we’re having funding issues. DARPA had its eye on your pet project since the Solvay Conference. But Graham’s contract preventing military investment was an issue for their administration. So they approached me, and we worked out a deal. Not only did we get enough funding to keep this going, but I also will receive a beautiful piece of land in Costa Rica for my retirement. I’ve worked for Graham a long time, and I’m not getting rich doing it. I'm sorry you got caught in the crossfire, Max. But I promise you, I’ll keep your project going as long as I can. Good stuff will come of this. I wish you luck in the afterlife.”

“I doubt we will meet there,” said Max, again from off camera.