Travis S. Taylor - The Quantum Connection

The Quantum Connection

Travis S. Taylor

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are

fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

form.

A Baen Books Original

Baen Publishing Enterprises

P.O. Box 1403

Riverdale, NY 10471

www.baen.com

ISBN: 0-7434-9896-8

Cover art by David Mattingly

First printing, April 2005

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Taylor, Travis S.

The quantum connection / by Travis Taylor.

p. cm.

"A Baen Books original"— T.p. verso.

ISBN 0-7434-9896-8

1. Computer hackers—Fiction. 2. Alien abduction—Fiction. 3.

Meteors—Fiction.

I. Title.

PS3620.A98Q36 2005

813'.6—dc22 2004029932

Distributed by Simon & Schuster

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10020

Production & design by Windhaven Press, Auburn, NH (www.windhaven.com)

Printed in the United States of America

I would like to dedicate this book to my first professional mentor: the late Dr.

Thomas E. Honeycutt. Dr. Honeycutt devoted his career toward winning the

Cold War. He taught me the difference between wanting to do good science

and actually doing it. His memory will always be with me and I'm grateful for

having been able to fight the last few years of the Cold War by his side in our

lab in Huntsville.

We won, Dr. H.

Baen Books by TRAVIS S. TAYLOR

Warp Speed

CHAPTER 1

I just barely ducked the knife that was thrown at me by her, my nemesis, JackieZZ. I responded by

slipping left, crouching, and leaping at her with all my strength focused on taking out her helmet laser. I

was nowhere near quick enough, because she burned off my left hand with a full second to spare.

Although it vibrated and I could feel the light shock, I tried not to let it stop me from pressing the attack.

With the momentum in the fight that I had gained by the lunge, there was a chance, a good one I hoped,

that I could take her now. I managed to wrap my hands, erh, hand and stump, around her backpack

power supply and then I ripped it right off of her armor. Sparks flew everywhere and there was a

cool-looking array of secondary explosions as I rolled off her back to the side.

JackieZZ was too damned good. For a woman with such big breasts on such a small frame, damn,

and the powerful spritelike movement she had, she made it difficult to focus and I barely managed to roll

out of the way of her counterstrike. I did a back flip just in time to miss a venom-spiked boot crushing

through my face.

"Damnit, quit watchin' the scenery and fight!" I had to remind myself. I had been playing these

gladiatorial games for years now and was undefeated; I couldn't lose now! There was no way I could

lose!

I tried to deepen my concentration and my hand moved as fast as I could make it. JackieZZ and me,

StevieM09, had been at it for hours now, maybe longer, and we both were wearing down. My back was

killing me, my fingers hurt, and my right wrist ached all the way up to my shoulder. Then she made her

mistake; she stepped backward while throwing an x-block with her forearm quantum shields. I figured I

could get her the same way I defeated MarsKen44 last weekend. The quantum shields drain the power

level below my secret attack's power level, so I went for it. As fast as my fingers could move, I lunged

forward, then rolled to my left, then launched myself with my hydraulic jumper boots to more than eighty

feet above JackieZZ, then I turned down headfirst, hit my downward thrusters, and then came the secret

code. Left circle, right triangle, forward, forward, right right1, left circle, right x, right x, left x, left left1,

and then both left and right circles on both controllers. I turned myself into a pure energy being and was

propelled at JackieZZ faster than any reflexes or secret codes I had ever heard of, but something

different happened this time.

JackieZZ wasn't just throwing a quantum x-block, but instead was completing a secret code of her

own. The quantum force field amazingly shaped itself into a quantum singularity or mini black hole. There

she was in an awesome gung-fu-style fighting stance with her hands cupped upward holding a mini black

hole over her head. The tidal forces were so great that the hair protruding from beneath her helmet as

well as her mammoth CGI boobs pointed upward and toward the event horizon. Material from all around

The Realm was being sucked into the singularity—except for JackieZZ who stood there basically

unaffected.

Baffled, I tried everything I knew to steer my new energy form away from the black hole, but it was

far too late! I was sucked into the timeless abyss from which there was no known escape, forever. I

became a pencil-thin beam, and then a single, ray-thin beam of light and finally my visor blinked to totally

black. I flipped up the visor and looked at the big screen just in time to see her standing there,

triumphantly, and maniacally, laughing. The black hole had dissipated and the big screen now displayed in

gigantic font JACKIEZZ WINS!!!

"Shit!" I cursed my controllers, my puppy, and I kicked my forty-ounce beer bottle over. I stood up

and stretched for the few seconds I would have while the game logged off to the Waiting Room. I slipped

my visor and headphones off, rolled my neck left and then right, and then I realized, "Shew, puppy, either

you or I stink and one of us needs a bath!" It was probably both of us since I had been sweating

profusely while fighting JackieZZ for the past few hours and puppies always need a bath. I tugged on the

little fellow's ear and told him he was a good boy.

I had never been defeated at any of the Realm World Competitions, especially not at the Gladiator

Sequence, ever. And damnit, this JackieZZ that I met yesterday in The Realm's Tavern had beaten me at

everything.

I stumbled over a pile of empty cereal boxes on my way to the fridge and pulled out another forty

ounces. Unfortunately, I was out of cereal, so I had to settle for corn chips. The Waiting Room door

popped on the screen and a video square with JackieZZ's computer likeness standing there smiling back

at me opened.

"Gotcha again, but man that was the longest it has ever taken me to beat a Sequencer. You're good."

She put her hands on her hips and winked while that pleasantly, if not freakishly, disproportionate body

jiggled up and down.

"Where the hell . . ." I finished off a sip of beer and belched, "did that mini black hole thing come

from?" I was comfortable speaking to such an attractive image since I knew she was seeing my six foot

two, chiseled granite washboard abs and giant muscles image. After all, I am a Sequencer. Although,

come to think of it, that belch probably wasn't cool. And of course, my own personal appearance of six

foot one and two hundred forty pounds, all fat, was well hidden behind the video display.

"You liked that did you?" JackieZZ's boobs wiggled with every movement she made. It was

distracting, a good fighting strategy, especially since she undoubtedly knew that most of her opponents

would be single and male and hard up. "I call it ZZ's Hole!" Her video likeness laughed.

"Cute, but effective. Who wrote the code and have you sold it yet?"

"I wrote the code, StevieM09. You wanna buy a copy, that'll be seventy-six hundred euros." Her

CGI likeness held out its left hand palm up and then winked at me.

"Uh, uh . . . how much is that American?" I asked.

"Oh yeah, I've been in Ramstein so long I almost speak German now. That's about one point two

times in U.S. You want it?"

"Shit, I couldn't afford it. How did you get so good?" I stroked my belly and propped the corn chip

bowl on it with my left hand while reaching for my beer with my right hand. The picture in picture news

alert icon blinked on in the bottom left-hand corner of the screen. I ignored it for now.

JackieZZ chimed back in, "Oh that; my dad works for RealmSoft Europe. I write code for them in

the summer when school is out."

"I see, uh, no, I don't see. What'd you mean, when school's out? How old are you?" I had a bad

feeling about this.

"I'm fourteen."

"How did you get in to The Realm? It's for adults only!" I thought of some of the other more adult

Worlds within The Realm, like Orgy World and it spooked me a bit. Kids just shouldn't be in there.

"How do you think I can write the code for RealmSoft if I can't get in The Realm, stupid?" That last

was more of an insult than a question. Her video likeness stuck her tongue out at me and put her hands

on her hips. I felt bad about noticing the boob wiggles this time.

"But, you shouldn't be in here, JackieZZ," I pleaded.

"Oh pooh. You're a prude just like my mom. Don't worry, mother, I have a special access that just

lets me into the Gamer Level Worlds." Again the wiggles.

"JackieZZ, that is impossible. You know as well as I do that once you open the door to The Realm

there are no doors that can't be opened. You're in The Realm, for Christ's sake!" I shook my head then

stuffed a handful of chips in my mouth.

"Yeah I know, this is a new experimental access with a worm attached to it. If you go to certain

places the worm starts to eat you. I'm trying to figure out how to beat it for my dad. If I can't beat it, The

Realm will no longer be an adul—" She stopped talking and her likeness vanished from the screen.

"JackieZZ, are you there?" No response.

"JackieZZ, Jackie are you online?" Nothing.

Oh well, I thought, she must've somehow gotten disconnected, turned off or something. I had heard

of that happening but had never seen it. "How about that," I told Lazarus the Puppy, "kids in The Realm.

Bad enough they're in the Framework, but The Realm. Weird stuff, hunh? Yeah, that's right, you're a

good puppy." I tugged on Lazarus's left ear and scratched his neck. The little guy looked up at me with

sad little two-month-old puppy dog eyes. My mom and dad had given him to me recently as he was a

pup from the last litter of the family dog, Molly. They had kept a family dog from the same genetic line

since I was a kid; it was sort of a tradition.

The news alert icon had continued to blink since I lost contact with JackieZZ, but rather than worry

about it I decided that I was going to get another beer. Upon arrival at the fridge I realized that I only had

one forty left, the horror. "Oh God, Lazarus, we're out of beer! Go to the store and fetch some boy,

good boy!" Lazarus just lay there chewing on his squeaky toy and didn't respond other than his ears

propping up at the sound of his name.

Then I remembered where I had heard of the Framework connections being disrupted. It was a few

months ago when the meteor destroyed Colorado and part of Wyoming.

Oh my God, I thought. I frantically grabbed the remote and opened up the news alert icon on the

TV, afraid of what I might see. "Let's just see what the talking heads have to say!"

" . . . again, so far to our knowledge, there have been huge explosions or perhaps impacts, near Los

Angeles and off the coast of Cape Kennedy, Florida."

"Mom and Dad! Carly! No!"

" . . . We have no idea what has caused such explosions. It is possible that these are events,

which are similar to the one in Northern Florida and the catastrophic impact in Colorado a few

months ago when the meteor hit there, but we have no confirmation of that yet. Wait . . . just a

moment, my God, there has been another impact or explosion, or whatever it is, in Europe. It

seems to be centered near Ramstein, Germany . . ."

I watched television for the next fourteen days straight, only going out for food, puppy treats, and

beer but immediately returning home as quickly as possible. I was numbed by the total destruction and

loss of countless millions of lives around the world that evening. The meteors impacted all around the

globe, in China, Russia, North Korea, Germany, California, and Florida. I never heard from poor little

JackieZZ again. That broke my heart.

On top of that, I'm from Bakersfield, California, which is just about fifty miles north of Los Angeles.

My entire list of living relatives that I know about were all gone! Everybody I could connect with or could

count on as family, were vaporized in an instant. My high school was gone and probably most of my high

school chums. There would be little reason for a ten-year reunion.

My mom and dad and my little sister, Carly, were gone. The house that I had known as home all of

my life—gone. Sure I lived in Dayton now, but home was still Bakersfield, home was still where Mom

and Dad and Carly lived. Home was still where we had raised generations of our family dogs since I was

little. Home was still where I built the tree fort in the back yard with my buddies when I was nine. Home

was still where I went every holiday and vacation. But now, it was gone—all gone.

I missed work for two weeks straight and I sure as hell didn't make it to any of my college classes. In

fact, I wouldn't make it back to college for a long time and I got fired from that job. Oh well, who needs

it; the world just nearly got destroyed, man! And, and I was alone, just Lazarus and me.

CHAPTER 2

Things were okay for about two weeks after The Rain, which is what the day of meteors had

become known as on the Framework, but then came the horrible hypercanes, which as the guy on The

Weather Channel explained were super-duper hurricanes. The country-sized storms were spawned off

from the meteor impacts. One storm the size of Brazil pounded the south Pacific and stalled in the ocean,

churning it up and making it impassible by air or sea for more than a month. The mega storm eventually

turned and wreaked havoc on Australia and New Zealand. The other major hypercane system spun up

below the equator just above South America. It plowed through Buenos Aires and bounced along the

coastline moving southward. It churned across the Atlantic and cut a path across the Congo, then on to

India before it died out. That storm killed hundreds of thousands. A couple of large hurricanes and

hundreds of tornados had plagued North America and Russia since The Rain, but after about a month the

weather began to settle down.

It took about all of that month for me to get over my depressed funk or state of disrepair or whatever

it was. I would get so depressed that I would block out hours of time where I had just sat there and

cried. And sometimes, I didn't even remember the hours-at-a-time depression when it would pass. I

went to several different shrinks for help. They ran tests on me and did brain scans and everything came

out normal. It was odd to me that the rest of the world went on about its business and was only fazed

slightly by The Rain. After The Rain our society didn't fall apart at all, but for some reason I seemed to

have. People in general went on about their business while I fell down into a pit of something akin to

despair.

"Buy a bunch of these expensive drugs," the shrinks tell me. "They're the only cure." Damned

headshrinkers!

So I take the drugs, but the only way I seem to survive within my depression and get my mind into

some sort of useful mode is to replay the Sequence against JackieZZ and attempt to reverse engineer her

mini black hole. You see, the Internet II, or the Framework as Realm Citizens call it, enabled RealmSoft

to develop a virtual world with real laws of physics and nature and real ups and downs. Of course, the

developers of The Realm wouldn't tell anybody what the laws were, which is part of what makes it so

interesting. Part of the fun of The Realm adventure is to try and discover its laws. This is done by creating

a virtual persona, such as mine, StevieM09, and living and having adventures in the various worlds of The

Realm. As you learn more and more about The Realm you become more powerful and can manipulate

things within it more readily. The real wizards in there play the Gladiator Sequence and try to show off

their power. If you kill a Sequencer, you get the secrets of The Realm that that Sequencer has

discovered. If you are lucky enough, and you stumble across a Node, you can upload your own code

into the virtual reality and get a royalty for it any time it is used. I had done this with my code for the

EnergyBeingSM09 just as JackieZZ had obviously done with ZZ's Hole. These were two subroutines

that "were not of The Realm." The problem is that if you didn't know where the secret code was hidden,

and the secret button sequence to activate it, you couldn't use it. JackieZZ had died before ever selling

the button sequence to any other Sequencers. So I thought I could recreate it now that I had seen it.

Me, I am a code writer by choice and had been completing my bachelor's degree in computer

science at the University of Dayton in Ohio when the meteors fell. How'd I get to Ohio from California

you ask? Well, when I was in high school back in Bakersfield, before it was . . . destroyed . . . I wrote

my own operating system. I was trying to get my own game designs into the mainstream but thought that

the code requirements were clunky. So, I created an operating system that was much more stable and

more precisely efficient than any other codes I knew of at the time. At the request of my science teacher I

entered it into the school's science fair. I won at school level, then at state, and then won my division at

the International Science and Engineering Fair, or ISEF as we called it, plus I got an honorable mention

overall. I lost to a particle accelerator, an optical computer, some bioluminescence thing, and a wrong

solution to Fermat's Last Theorem.

As a special award I received a full tuition scholarship for both the University of Alabama in

Huntsville and the University of Dayton. Of course, as a California state citizen I could have gone to

school in California for free, but my parents were way overprotective and I was afraid if I stayed in-state

that they would continuously be checking in on me. What college kid wants that? So I didn't want to stay

home, and I sure didn't want to live in a hick town in Alabama, so I chose Dayton; at least they have cool

air shows there.

My freshman year I got a cooperative education job working for a local company that made wireless

data routers and switching hubs. I learned a lot about hardware, encryption, and code writing to drive

hardware back then. Then the Framework opened up and not long after that The Realm was invented.

Right off the bat I found a small Node and uploaded some tidbits that earned me a little extra cash to help

pay for my apartment, food, and beer, and when I didn't earn enough from my job, The Realm, and my

scholarship, I just took out a student loan. Oh, did I forget to explain that the harder to find a Node is,

the more bandwidth you are allowed to upload with? You can use a Node as often as you like once you

know how to find and access it, but it costs about fifteen bucks per second to upload data. I think this

was RealmSoft's way of encouraging code writers to write efficient code and to spend hours in there

looking for bigger Nodes. It's a great racket. A monthly subscription to The Realm costs about fifty

bucks for forty hours, or seventy-five for unlimited access.

What about viruses? There is rumored to be a World where all the viruses get stored and mutated,

but it makes no sense to me why they would keep them. My guess is they use some sort of anti-virus

Agent to take care of the problem.

So, anyway, I had tried to Sequence a few times since The Rain, but knowing I would never see

anyone I cared about took the real life out of me, and knowing that I would never get the chance to play

ZZ again just took the wind from my virtual sails. On the other hand, I did need money to live on, since I

dropped out of school, or I should say "took a break," lest the student loan collectors come calling, and

the money I make at the video game rental and repair store that I work at now just doesn't pay the bills.

My thinking was that if I spent all my time trying to reverse engineer ZZ's Hole, I could input it into The

Realm through the secret Node I found on Planet Xios and win a few Sequences with it. Then I could sell

it for big bucks to the other Sequencers. My EnergyBeingSM09 was bringing me about twenty-three

thousand dollars a year (after taxes) on royalties, so I figured ZZ's Hole would make much more than

that. Then, I could quit that damn video store.

I was having no luck at all with it. Two years passed, and I still was getting nowhere. I replayed the

recording of the video Sequence over and over and over to no avail. I tried testing in my own Test Realm

the mini black hole codes I developed but test pilot Sequencer StM987 had failed and StM988 was

about to give it a try, if I could figure out why StM987 didn't work that is. That JackieZZ, whoever she

was, must've been a coding genius. Either that or she had some insight from her father at RealmSoft

Europe. Make a short story long; I was having no luck and it was time to go to work.

"Lazarus, buddy," I stroked his chin. "I gotta go pay the bills," I told him. He had grown into quite the

companion. As a bonus, I didn't have to vacuum anymore—since Lazarus was a vacuum himself. If it

could be swallowed, he would eat it. I tossed him a smelly doggy bacon treat and made my way out the

door.

The weather was a bit crummy, even for summer in Dayton. The sky was hazy and grayer than blue

and the sun was very red, not yellowish orange like it used to be, and it was only about ninety degrees

and muggy as hell. We were supposed to have bad storms later, the kind that used to only occur in

tornado alley; now they happened everywhere. The word inside The Realm was that the dust and excess

thermal energy that was thrown into the atmosphere from The Rain was the culprit. Makes sense to me,

but I'm no atmospheric scientist.

Just as I pulled into the parking lot of VR's V.R. World it started raining, hard. "Good thing I didn't

bring an umbrella. Shit!" I told my 2011 Cutlass, which in just two weeks would have its tenth birthday.

The Cutlass didn't seem to care, although it choked and tried not to cease combustion when I turned off

the ignition switch. I rushed to the door of VR's, getting soaked from head to toe since rushing isn't really

my forte.

"You're right on time, Mr. Montana! Good for you," the eighteen-year-old blue-haired punk who

was my boss pointed out as he looked up from the television. He had threatened to fire me if I was late

one more time, but it was just a hollow threat, since he knew that nobody could repair the game systems

or draw the Sequencers into the shop like me. Besides he seemed enthralled by what was on the flat

screen.

"Hi, Robert." I cursed other things under my breath at him, but smiled on the surface. I was seven

years his senior for damn's sake. "Anything new this morning?" I settled in to my morning caffeine and

sugar fix and surveyed my workbench.

"Yeah, have you seen this yet?" he asked.

"Seen what?"

"A huge meteor has impacted Neptune and astronomers had no idea that it was coming." He pointed

to the screen and there was a James Webb Space Telescope image of the planet Neptune with a huge

impact plume flowing upward from the planet.

"Do they think we're in any danger?" I was beginning to feel nervous.

"Nah, don't worry about it. They're saying that it's way out of our orbit and we have nothing to fear."

Robert turned back to the television, "It looks neat though."

"I guess. Good thing we're safe. So, anything new with work stuff?"

"Oh, yeah, this guy came in last night just before closing with this ancient console game. He said it

wouldn't work and that he needed it fixed by three weeks from tomorrow, oh, I guess that would be

three weeks from today. He also said to call him if it was going to cost more than three hundred dollars."

Robert pointed at a box full of console, controllers, cables, and a few compact disks. "It's in that box.

I've never seen one of those things before, it must be thirty years old."

I looked into the box and saw a game system that they quit making in the late nineties. That's right,

last millennium. I whistled. "Man, they sure don't make 'em like this anymore." I swiped off a space on

Travis S. Taylor - The Quantum Connection

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