One Is the Loneliest Number Read online

  One Is the Loneliest Number

  We’d like to thank the following people, without whom this book would have not been possible: Diane Duane, for help in rounding out the manuscript; Martin H. Greenberg, Larry Se-griff, Denise Little, and John Heifers at Tekno Books; Mitchell Rubenstein and Laurie Silvers at BIG Entertainment; Tom Colgan of Penguin Putnam Inc.; Robert Youdelman, Esquire; and Tom Mallon, Esquire; and Robert Gottlieb of the William Monis Agency, agent and friend. We much appreciated the help.

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  I

  It was five-thirty a.m. and still dark on the tarmac at Muroc. In a sky beginning to shade from black to indigo, the brightest stars still shone with that particular hasty flicker that betrays very cold air above. When you stepped on them, the weeds at the edge of the tarmac crunched, just faintly, with a thin bloom of high-desert frost. Away beyond the runway, somewhere out in the shadowy half-seen wilderness of Joshua trees and scrub and tumbleweed, a mockingbird involved in an intense territorial dispute with another of his kind was singing, one after another, the songs of every bird he knew—an impossible collection, winter songs and summer ones together, along with catcalls and wolf whistles and the occasional bad imitation of someone starting up a jet engine. Madeline Green, or Maj as she was called by her numerous friends, stood there in the dark. She smiled briefly at the mostly melodious racket the bird was making at this godawful hour, and then turned toward the reason she had come.

  It stood silhouetted against the brightening crimson line of dawn, a shadow that could as yet cast no shadow of its own. At 189 feet long, thirty feet high, and 105 feet from wing tip to wing tip, the long sleek shape stood there dead quiet in the predawn glow, beginning, as she walked closer to it, to look silvery-ashen in the light of the late full moon just setting in the farthest west. Maj’s sneakers made only the slightest sound on the tarmac as she approached. This was just as it should have been, since the ground crew had covered this stretch of ground first thing yesterday, removing every pebble and speck of gravel, or anything else, on the long ‘ ‘grooming” walk that finally saw them, at day’s end, some fourteen thousand feet down the runway laid out on the dry salt lake bed. They would drive it and “fine groom” it again once this morning, just to be sure. No one wanted anything small and preventable to go wrong in a program in which so much had gone wrong already… .

  Maj stopped by the huge right wing tip and looked up at it. It hung out over her like the roof of an oversized carport, some twenty feet above her head, a hint of the rose and gold of the morning at the edge of the world now beginning to sheen underneath it and show her faint shadows of the delicate brazing lines that had made its construction possible. Buried inside that wing was a vertical honeycomb of steel so thin that it could easily be mistaken for foil; a whole battery of new techniques had had to be devised to ■ ‘weld” the steel together into a structure strong enough to be a wing, but light enough (despite the wing’s huge size) to let the plane lift off the ground.

  When it did, the plane would ride her own compression wave; the shock wave generated by the passage through the air of that long, pointed nose would be trapped under the broad triangular wing behind, producing more lift than any other flight configuration known. For all her half-million pounds’ weight, she flew light… and fast. She would cruise at Mach 2 and “dash” to Mach 3, or better… no one was sure how much better. No one had yet pushed her to the outside of her huge envelope.

  Except Maj … and she was going to do it again today. She hoped… .

  In the early morning cold, she shivered. And laughed again, for the cold was virtual, as virtual as the sky, or the ship herself. Maj was simming.

  She walked under the huge body of the plane, went slowly over to the landing gear, and rested her hand on one of the three-foot-high tires on the starboard bogie. The tire was not real, but it thought it was. Maj had spent nearly a day writing just the portion of code that ran the physical characteristics of the tires in this simulation. If she got into the plane and put it through a duplicate of its very first flight, the brakes would dutifully fail on landing, and the wheel would lock up, and when it did, the tire would catch fire just as enthusiastically as the original had, on that long-ago sunny morning in 1964.

  The whole plane, in fact, would act exactly as it had on its initial flight… though she would try to stop it from doing so in all regards. That was the challenge of this particular simulation. She had been working on it, on and off, for nearly a year now. Naturally she hadn’t written every line of the code herself—the simulation composition software was there to help her with the repetitive parts of the work—but it was all Maj’s brainchild. She had researched every aspect of the materials used to build the plane, the motivations of the people who had designed it (as far as they could be worked out at this distance in time), the engineering quirks, the hiccups in the weather during testing … everything. Maj figured that she now knew this plane better than the people who had designed it. This was hard to be completely sure about—the people in question were almost all dead. But she thought they would have been pleased with her anyway. Through her efforts, the North American XB-70 Valkyrie supersonic bomber lived again … and flew.

  “Ho-yo-to-ho, babydoll,” Maj said softly under her breath; it was Wagner’s transcription, in his operas, of the Valkyries’ battle cry. She scraped absently at the rubber of the massive tire with one fingernail, looking toward the brightening east. Away out in the desert, the mockingbird sang on in harmonies that had more to do with Schoenberg than Wagner, and some other, smaller bird started an unconscious and insolent counterpoint.

  The others would be coming along soon. Maj was not at all alone in her love of simming—the art of building, and using, the perfect virtual simulation of an object or event inside one’s own ‘ ‘playroom,” a personal space like the old-fashioned “web pages,” though much more fully interactive than even the best of those static pages had ever been. Maj was a little more mechanically minded about simming, maybe, than some of the informal group she worked with. Some of them were more interested in simming in the historical mode.

  Bob, for example, had been working on a reproduction of the Battle of Gettysburg for nearly two years now. Maj had spent more time than she cared to consider in places that stank abominably of black powder, where she couldn’t see a thing farther than a foot away from her because of the smoke of cannon fire, and where she kept jumping when the archaic shrapnel of “canister” went through her—without doing her any harm, of course. The shrapnel was deadly only to the equally virtual soldiers in the reproduction.

  That was another problem with Bob’s simulation, from Maj’s point of view. He was a stickler for getting the gore right, and after yet another run-through of one or another portion of his version of Gettysburg, Maj would come back into the real world and find she had no appetite for dinner. The others teased him, telling him he should be as fanatical about the characters’ uniforms as he was about the shape and color of their fallen-out insides. Bob would respond that he was getting the important stuff right first. Some of the others thought that explanation sort of made sense, but mostly it made Maj wonder about the state of some of Bob’s interior organs, specifically his brains.

  Other simulations were more benign, at least from her point of view. Fergal was into “classic”-period wheeled automobiles, from the beginning of the last century to about the mid-1930’s, and kept reproducing cars that ran on steam or had strange names like Humber.

  Sander had the hots for the peculiar and hybrid aircraft that had been somewhat frantical
ly designed by Germany toward the end of World War II, the so-called “Secret Project” planes—a bizarre assortment of fledgling flying saucers and VTOL (or vertical-takeoff-and-landing) tail-sitters powered by ramjets mounted at the ends of helicopter rotors, and heaven only knows what else. It was one of these that had been the last sim that the whole group had attended, a week ago, and Maj had to admit she’d laughed as hard as the rest when the Triebflugers simulation program had failed and the engines had flown off the ends of the rotors, destroying half the buildings that Sander had scattered around his virtual airfield and killing most of his virtual ground crew.

  Kelly was fascinated by submarines, and was reconstructing one by one the weird steam-powered subs with which the British fleet had been experimenting around the end of the First World War, the “K boats”—submarines so hurried in their building and so flawed in their design that Maj couldn’t understand how Kelly got them to function. But function they did, provoking even the least interested of the simming group to admit that they were impressed by what Kelly had done.

  It wasn’t just the simulation that was designed to impress, of course. No sim was complete unless it was set against the proper background. The goal was to mock-up a given moment in time as completely and accurately as possible—“recreation” in the purest sense of the word. Little things counted. Maj looked over at the massive main strut of the landing gear she stood by, and ran a finger slowly down the cold metal. The thinnest bloom of frost came away where she touched. She lifted her finger to squint at it very closely, and watched the individual crystals of frost melt. She had programmed every one of them. Well, not individually. Some of this was “fractal” programming, in which you introduced a set of patterns for a given physical behavior and instructed the program to apply that set of rules across the environment, though uniquely in each new occurrence, or (since you could too heavily burden the computer’s processing power that way) at least on the close order of “uniquely.” Maj was glad that the records confirmed the temperature had dropped below freezing on this particular night. Frost was easier to code than rain, and prettier.

  Maj paused for a moment and glanced idly up . .. then suddenly realized that she was looking at a spot on the belly of the plane, to the left of the bomb-bay doors, where the paint was peeling again. This was not a genuine problem, at least as far as the simulation went. It had been a problem for the original XB-70 early in its career, and the cause for a lot of confusion until the techs had worked out the source of the problem. The guys at the hangar had kept giving the Valkyrie fresh coats of paint each time she went up for one or another of the Air Force VIPs, and as a result the flexion of her skin caused by the high temperatures during flight had made her crack the paint and “shed” it raggedly away. But Maj could have sworn she’d instructed the master simulation manager to do away with the peeling for this run. For one thing, the techs had eventually realized that one thin coat of white anti-flash paint was all she needed, so this was a “legal” intervention on her part. For another, there were some of Maj’s group who would see the peeling paint and start making fun of it, refusing despite the evidence to believe that it was a genuine “design feature” and not a bug.

  Maj breathed out. Roddy …

  “Code,” Maj said to the simulation.

  “Authorization,” said the composition software.

  “Five eighteen fifty-two,” she said. It was her grandmother’s birthday.

  “Authorized. Action?”

  “Show me the paint subroutines,” Maj said.

  The space around her briefly subdivided itself, so that she was looking both at the Valkyrie and at line after line of bright text hovering in the air. Not all the code was in text form. Some of it was object-oriented. A group of six paint “chips” about a foot square appeared in the air before her. Each of them was tagged with a small glowing spot, the hyperlink to its other physical characteristics.

  “Selection routine,” Maj said.

  “Listening.”

  “Set paint chip selection zero three.”

  “Done.”

  “Remove all paint on object.”

  “Done,” said the composition software, and as it did, the plane flushed the palest possible silver-rose, dawn on bare metal.

  “Apply one coat of zero three.”

  “Done.” And the plane was white again, still catching that pale sheen from the setting moon on this side, reflecting the eastern light pinkly on her belly and her roof and her high “twin” tail.

  “Store paint subroutines; save this change to the prototype,” Maj said to the computer.

  “Done.”

  “Finished. Save out.”

  “Saved,” said the computer, and fell silent.

  Maj sighed and looked up at the Valkyrie again, then slowly started her walk-round, looking to see that she hadn’t forgotten anything as obvious as the paint. Are both the wings here? Yup. Both the tails? Yup. Anything leaking that shouldn’t be leaking? Nope. Any cracks? Any holes besides the ones the designers put in?

  It was something more than the usual walk-round that a pilot might have done, for Maj was also checking for differences in the plane that had no right to be there: details from later versions or different versions of the model. On some long-lived aircraft, like the Spitfire or its rival, the Messerschmitt Bf 109, you could get into a bewildering number of variants, and heaven help you if one of your eagle-eyed simming buddies caught something in your plane that shouldn’t have been there. Your only hope was that they hadn’t read your code completely enough, or your background material. .. or that they hadn’t done further research of their own on your project. Knowing this bunch, though, some of whom appeared to have no lives beyond simming, Maj figured this was a pretty faint hope.

  The rules under which they operated this “game” were tough, and meant to be so. The Group of Seven—even though there were nine of them now, the name had stuck—had originally gathered together from various parts of the worldwide virtual Net to help each other with the stickier parts of simming by being what a simmer most needed: ruthless but friendly analysts of what was being simulated, and of the art of simming itself. You submitted the parameters of your present playroom to the group on a regular basis, and again whenever there were major changes: a shift in the version of your software, a change of computer platform, or of your implant or other means of access to the virtual world. When you were ready to have the others look at the simulation you were building in that playroom, you submitted your code to the group, or at least the relevant parts of the code, about ten days before a scheduled meet.

  Then, when they’d all read it, everyone got together and watched you run your simulation. Afterwards, there was a bull session where they “graded” you—not quite the formal holding-numbers-up of a sports competition, but effective enough, and sometimes fairly scathing. It was taken with good enough grace by the members of the group, by and large, since the purpose really was to help each other get better at this business.

  Some of the Group of Seven thought that simulation was something they wanted to do professionally when they were old enough to get into the job market. Some of them were intent on getting at the job market whether they were old enough or not—the simulations business could admittedly use all the talent it could find. There were some fourteen- and fifteen-year-old millionaires out there who had come up with one innovation or another that the market had to have at any price.

  A couple of the group members, Fergal and Sander, Maj thought were particularly likely to succeed in this way. Fergal was so driven that the others were sure she had no life outside simming, and Sander, though almost exactly the opposite type from Fergal—he gave the impression that he thought it was all a big game—was nonetheless one of those brilliant types who suddenly, out of nowhere, stumbles across the Big Idea, possibly because he’s already so completely prepared for it.

  Maj doubted that she could ever go this route. She had too many other things she was interested i
n as well as simming, particularly her music and her own growing interest in systems design. But it was, as her mom would say, “one more string to her bow,” and there was no harm in getting good at something which, if she persevered, could at least supply her with a job on the way to something else more interesting.

  Maj rested her hand on the metalwork again. It was flushing more rose-colored in the growing dawn. “Okay, Rosweisse” she said under her breath, “let’s go do the deed….”

  She went around the far side of the plane.

  “Ladder,” she said, and it appeared. Slowly and carefully, because the frost could make you slip, Maj climbed up the ladder to the cockpit.

  “Canopy,” she said. Obediently it lifted up and away in front of her.

  There was already someone sitting in the right-hand seat. Brown hair, brown eyes, not too tall—which had always been a relief to Maj, at least since her older brother had started his growth spurt and begun banging his head into the tops of doorways—fairly slender, not a raving beauty but not bad-looking either, with eyes set wide so that she wore a sort of permanently surprised look. It was interesting the way your looks didn’t really make an impression on you when you saw them every morning in the mirror—but this way, they did.

  “Morning,” she said.

  “Theoretically,” said Maj Two.

  Maj had given a lot of thought to who would make a good copilot. She could have constructed one of the original pilots to help, but she was afraid her simulation might turn out too well, and start to make the same mistakes as the original. However, if you want a job done right, Maj’s father seemed to say about every five seconds, do it yourself, and finally she had decided that that was just what she would do. Her copilot was a virtual copy of herself, carefully programmed with everything she and the XB-70’s designers knew about the plane— but with her own preferences most carefully emphasized.