The Omega Project (10 page)

Below, the frozen white desert appeared as desolate as it seemed endless.

Roughly the size of France, the Ross Ice Shelf was the largest body of floating ice on the planet. Viewed from the Ross Sea, which formed its southern boundary, the shelf rose above the waterway like the cliffs of Dover, a sheer wall of ice two hundred feet high.

Wedged in clothing, I shifted my gaze back to the horizon where the aurora australis laced through the sky like a radiant green-and-white ribbon. High above, waves of nacreous clouds danced neon gold across a lead-blue stratosphere, the undulating formations reflecting the sunrise like an ethereal tide.

Major Gazen pointed ahead. Appearing on the stark white landscape was a caravan of electric vehicles and battery-powered trucks hitched to what our pilot explained were extreme weather trailers. At the center of the gathering, towering five stories over the ice sheet like a giant reflective globe was
Oceanus I.

Gazen slowed the chopper, hovering over a green
X
painted on the ice along the western periphery. Descending rapidly, the aircraft bounced twice before it settled, only to be rocked violently by a thirty-mile-an-hour wind gust that nearly toppled us over.

Gazen yelled, “Out!”

Having donned our parkas, the four of us hurriedly exited the helicopter. The intense cold blasted through my layers of clothing like a steel scythe as I attempted to negotiate the ice. Dr. Bruemmer took the lead, pointing to a double-wide trailer. An orange flag adorned with the Greek letter “
Ω
” set in white designated the structure as the command post.

Bruemmer wrenched open the door for Lara Saints and General Schall, waving for me to hurry.

I ignored him, my attention drawn to a dark figure lying motionless on the ice some sixty yards away. I pointed, then half jogged, half slid across the expanse, the steel teeth of my snow boots occasionally tearing holes into the frozen plain.

Bruemmer waved me off as hopeless and ducked inside the trailer.

As I moved closer, I wondered if I was hallucinating.

The woman was Asian, perhaps in her midthirties. She was lying on a rubber mat, wearing a neoprene black bodysuit and matching boots. Her face was serene, despite remaining fully exposed to the harsh elements; her waist-length tangle of hair whipped behind her like a dark brown flag. Her eyes were closed. She was not fighting the elements; as corny as it sounds, she appeared to be at one with them.

Most bizarre—a swirl of steam was rising from her body, the self-generated heat dispersed by the howling wind.

Unsure whether to leave or awaken her, I simply stared.

As I watched, her serenity bled into a dazed expression. The almond eyes snapped open, only to be blinded by the icy gusts. Whatever had been fueling her internal furnace appeared to have shut down, for she suddenly looked naked against the elements, her mind drowning in hypothermia.

Quickly unzipping my parka, I guided it over the woman’s frail upper torso. Forcing the hood over her head, I scooped her up in the coat and carried her to the trailer, exposing myself to a cold that threatened to paralyze my stiffening muscles.

The trailer door swung open and my uncle dragged us inside.

I laid the snow ninja down on a wool couch, her inert 120-pound form folding like a stringless puppet. She was shaking, her lips blue.

Lara covered her with a heated blanket while my uncle grabbed a walkie-talkie from a battery charger. “This is General Schall. We have a member of the crew in the command trailer, suffering from exposure. We are in need of medical assistance.”

Bruemmer scoffed. “Don’t fuss over her, General, she does this all the time. Crazy Buddhists, thinking they can defy the laws of thermodynamics.”

I sandwiched the woman’s near-frostbitten fingers in my hands, attempting to restore circulation. “Lara, who is she?”

“Her name’s Dharma Yuan. GOLEM assigned her to
Oceanus
as the team psychotherapist.”

“A waste of food and supplies, if you ask me.” Bruemmer fixed himself a cup of cocoa, heating it in the microwave. “Why the hell do we need a psychotherapist anyway?”

Lara glared at the older man. “Six years away from Earth, stuck inside a ten-thousand-square-foot habitat with eleven other people? I may need a psychotherapist just to keep from killing you.” Pushing past the grouchy scientist, she took the steaming cup from him, then pressed it to the Chinese-Indian woman’s lips. “Dharma, sip this, it’ll warm you.”

General Schall finished speaking to someone on the radio. “They’re sending a truck to take the four of you to
Oceanus
. Dharma will be treated on board.”

“You’re not coming?”

“No, Robbie.
Oceanus
’s engines are fueled and the countdown to immersion has already begun. I’ll remain at McMurdo until tomorrow, then I’m off to Australia for six weeks until you resurface.”

“Broads and beaches, huh?”

“Energy meetings. I get to explain to the United Nations why the world’s top engineers have been shuttled to the moon for an emergency fusion summit.”

A beeping truck horn demanded our presence outside. Two medical technicians entered the trailer, carrying a thermal medevac bag. Dharma was placed inside, then carried out to the transport vehicle, followed by Lara and Dr. Bruemmer.

Uncle David gripped my wrist. “Bruemmer gave you a taste of what to expect. Remember, most of the crew have been training together for more than a year. They’ll be suspicious of you—good! Step on a few toes. If one or more of them have sold us out to the coal industry, I want to know about it.”

We embraced. Then I put on my parka, left the trailer, and climbed into the backseat of the awaiting truck.

The battery-powered transport accelerated past several trailers and four fuel tanks on skids labeled
FLAMMABLE: ROCKET FUEL
. Up ahead,
Oceanus I
glistened like a giant crystal ball, its surface inverting reflections of its surroundings, its four double-jointed anchor legs giving the structure a “spider” effect. As we moved closer to one of these silo-size supports, I noticed both the top and bottom of each vertical appendage were charred.

The truck parked at a mobile gantry, its heated aluminum steps leading up to a portal situated in the habitat’s third level. Dharma was carried up the stairs by an EMT.

I waited, then followed the others up the gantry into
Oceanus
.

“Whoa.”

The 360-degree panoramic view was startling, like entering a giant fishbowl. Twelve leather lounge chairs, equipped with harnesses and adjustable tabletops were set in pairs facing the aero gel surface. Above, the heavens yielded to the aurora, running across the endless blue sky like a spearmint river. Below and all around us the camp had mobilized; trucks, trailers, and fuel tanks formed a convoy that I knew was en route to reconvene several miles to the east.

Tearing myself away from the view, I inspected the rest of the chamber. Rising up along the walls like latitude lines on a globe were six tubular support buttresses. These five-feet-in-diameter hollow acrylic beams continued up the curved ceiling where they met at a centrally located vertical shaft.

The vertical column was ten feet around. Composed of aero gel, the see-through plastic tube was filled with an orange-colored fluid, more oil than water.

As I watched, a round object floated up through the flooded shaft like a glob of wax in a lava lamp. An acrylic sphere, its interior was filled with a clear viscous liquid, but appeared to be of a thinner viscosity than what was in the shaft.

The object ascended to my eye level, revealing its internal workings, and thus its identity.

GOLEM …

While conventional computers were designed to implement one calculation very fast, their performance had always been limited to the number of transistors that could fit onto a single integrated-circuit silicon chip. Enter the biochemical supercomputer, an evolutionary leap up the technology ladder. Instead of using the binary system, which delineated either an
on
state assigned the value one or an
off
state assigned the value zero, a supercomputer used strands of encoded DNA that produced billions of potential solutions simultaneously, outperforming a trillion silicon chips combined.

The most sophisticated man-made creation ever conceived observed me from multiple angles—one camera within its sphere, the other cameras mounted along the domed ceiling.

My first impression of the machine I had designed and programmed, then deserted before its actual conception, was that GOLEM resembled a giant floating eyeball. At the center of its sphere was a black mass—a pupil-like object roughly the diameter of a basketball. Functioning like the nucleus of a cell, the porous gelatinous membrane was filled with adenosine-triphosphate (ATP), a substance used in human cells to transport chemical energy for metabolism.

There were no circuits in a biochemical supercomputer, no mechanical devices to plug in. Swirling inside the sphere’s enzyme elixir and occasionally through the porous surface of this eyeball-like object were tens of thousands of six-inch-long wire-thin strands. Composed of DNA, each of these twisted double-helix strands had the capacity to store billions of times more data than a silicon chip, all while using far less energy. Color-coded in unique combinations of bioluminescent lime green, phosphorescent orange, neon pink, and electric blue, these amino acid nucleotides continuously and would perpetually pass through the black mass’s semipermeable membrane. Each exit generated a tiny spark of electricity that powered tens of thousands of computations in a process that mimicked the chemical reactions which occur in human cells.

“So, the prodigal son returns to see his child.”

Monique DeFriend was dressed in a skintight royal-blue one-piece jumpsuit, the redhead’s physical attributes as clearly on display as the computer’s.

I turned to face my former supervisor, preparing myself for one of our usual verbal jousts. “GOLEM isn’t my child. I was one of thirty scientists who worked on it.”

“It was your design we selected for the DNA matrix, I’d say that makes you its father.”

“And I suppose you’re its mother?”

“Of course.”

“Did its birth leave stretch marks? I’m guessing yes.”

Monique’s hazel eyes danced, her smile frozen. “You’re here to ask me a question: Ask it and go.”

“Okay. Has GOLEM evolved to the point of independence?”

“Eisenbraun, you of all people should know that evolution involves long-term adaptations. GOLEM is learning, reorganizing its algorithmic solution strands, which grow microscopically longer each time they pass through its solution matrix. The greater the length of the strands, the more experience the computer acquires. I’d hardly call that evolving.”

She circled the vertical shaft like a proud parent. “What do you think? You must feel a certain sense of satisfaction, even though you did abandon the project.”

I ignored the barb. “It’s bigger than I designed. Why make GOLEM’s enzyme vessel so large? It would take a hundred years just for the computer to use ten percent of that solution space.”

“It’s all about memory, Eisenbraun. Take GOLEM’s voice recognition software. Comprehending the nuances of human speech such as varied dialects, inflection, and in some cases speech impediments requires vast storehouses of memory. Same for the computer’s optical software, which is rigged to thirty-two cameras on board this habitat alone. Then there’s its motion software and its robotic appendages … a virtual nightmare of programming. In the end, we discovered that the larger the vessel’s free solution space, the more fully a DNA solution strand would mature. It’s sort of like an aquarium, the bigger the tank, the larger nature will allow the fish to grow. That was the real reason GOLEM had to shut down lunar operations, not because the computer had suddenly gone ‘HAL
2001
,’ but because its DNA strands hadn’t evolved fast enough to run two autonomous systems concurrently. Of course, try explaining that to our vice president, whose expertise is in fusion, not computers.”

“Why even house GOLEM aboard
Oceanus
? Couldn’t it simply run operations remotely from Earth like it did on the moon?”

“The moon had Alpha Colony, with its relay satellites. Europa’s a lot farther away, lacking a communication outpost.”

“And this training mission—exactly what are the computer’s responsibilities over the next forty-five days?”

“GOLEM will monitor the crew during their work shifts, evaluate their performances, then oversee all life-support systems while the crew is held in cryogenic stasis. We want the computer’s DNA strands to continue to evolve, readying GOLEM for the Europa mission onboard
Oceanus II
. By the time our solar shuttle reaches Jupiter, the computer’s increased level of sophistication should allow it to gain full use of its robotic arms.”

“You equipped GOLEM with appendages? Why even send a human crew to Europa? Just let the computer handle the entire mining operation.”

“We could have sent GOLEM—if we had another four years to develop a series of robotic appendages capable of operating underwater at extreme depths and temperatures. Since we don’t have the time, the process of capping and siphoning helium-3 from Europa’s hydrothermal vents has to be performed by our crew. For that, we’ll use the two-man submersibles docked outside the lower deck.” Monique feigned a smile. “Andria’s been trained as one of the sub pilots; once we anchor along the bottom of the Ross Sea you should ask her to take you out for a ride.”

“She told you about us, but she never told me she was involved in this mission.”

“Lovers may keep secrets, but you’ll learn there are no secrets among
Oceanus
’s crew.”

“Warning: Six minutes until descent.”

We glanced up at the neon-blue sensory orb poised overhead.

“Six minutes, Eisenbraun. Six minutes, six weeks … six years. Six men and six women onboard … and you. GOLEM selected us as much for how our personalities mesh as for our skills. Which begs the question—where does that leave you? Assuming one of our crew really needs to be replaced, are you sure you’re the one who is best fit to replace them? Better think it through, you only have five and a half minutes before we submerge.”