The Apocalypse Contract

CHAPTER 24 - SYDNEY

For a week after the successful first test of the master control dongle, Sydney was riding high. Tea was a thing again, she was gaining more and more control over her virtual existence, and she had a challenging software project to occupy her time. Then everything came crashing down.

Developing the master control dongle had led her to all sorts of odd corners of the ship's control interface, including some the aliens probably hadn't intended she poke around in. She could usually recognize these areas by the lack of built-in English language descriptions that explained what a component did. She found herself trying to intuit the purpose of these parts by how they connected to the other parts around them.

She wasn't sure why she had access to these dark recesses of the system, but she suspected it related to her ability to modify her virtual environment. She had pushed for that as a last minute addition to the contract, and everything about how they implemented that feature made it seem like a rushed job. The interface was kludgey and poorly documented. In giving her access to those features, the aliens had accidentally opened up other parts of the system.

Thus it was she found herself poking around in some undocumented internal sensor diagnostics. They seemed related to the cargo area, and they looked similar to the diagnostic from the exterior particle shield. The exterior shield generated a magnetic field to deflect particles away from the ship. This became more important as the ship's speed approached the speed of light. Even scattered hydrogen atoms became deadly when enough of them were impacting at high speed.

But why would she need magnetic shields inside the cargo area? It made even less sense when she found a notation indicating the cargo was just a tank of hydrogen.

And then after looking at her notes regarding the alien chemical notation, she noticed something weird. She was staring at an indicator that she assumed described the contents of the cargo area. It had the alien notation for hydrogen, but a tiny squiggle on the symbol was flipped to the other side. Based on the symbols for electrons and protons and other fundamental particles, she had determined the squiggle indicated polarity. That would mean it wasn't hydrogen in the cargo area, it was antihydrogen, a form of antimatter.

Antimatter. Those magnetic field diagnostics made sense now. The cargo area was a magnetic bottle for containing antimatter. Without it, the ship would explode.

Sydney jumped up from the control table and ran back to the apartment. She began pacing a figure eight along her usual thinking path.

"The ship is carrying around a bunch of antimatter. Maybe that's normal. Spaceships need energy. Antimatter is easily converted to energy."

Zoe looked up from where she sprawled on the coffee table, using the ship's user manual as a lumpy bed. She kept any opinions regarding antimatter to herself.

"But the antimatter is in the cargo area," Sydney continued, "not a fuel tank. The fuel is stored somewhere else completely, and I don't think it's antimatter."

Zoe found this also unworthy of comment but continued to watch Sydney's dizzying journey.

"So the antimatter is cargo. I'm delivering it to Ross one four nine. No big deal. Maybe aliens send antimatter to their friends like humans send flowers. I just need to fly there, unload the cargo and..."

Sydney stopped pacing. How was she supposed to unload a magnetically shielded tank of antimatter? She didn't remember seeing anything relevant in the ship control systems or in the user manual. She extricated Zoe from the manual and began flipping through it. There were some vague references to delivery of cargo in a section titled 'Final Approach Procedures' but nothing of any substance. Basically she was just expected to tap a couple icons on the control table and let the ship do the rest.

Carrying the manual with her, Sydney traipsed into the star room. She navigated her way through the menus as described in Final Approach Procedures. The icons related to cargo delivery were gray, meaning they were disabled. Presumably they would become active when she was closer to her destination.

She navigated to a different part of the control interface, the screens that allowed viewing and editing of raw object data in the simulation that was her world. She sifted through object records until locating the one that represented the control table itself. This was a trick she had learned while developing the master control dongle. The control table was itself a simulated object. When the aliens had granted her access to modify her simulated world, they had opened up a vulnerability she could use to peek under the hood and see how the system worked.

She traced the logic behind the Final Approach screens, followed a strand of alien code attached to the Cargo Delivery icon and traced it to the actual ship systems it controlled. She couldn't be sure of everything the code snippet did, but one instruction jumped out at her. It was a power shutdown command. A horrifying suspicion was growing within her. She matched the subsystem ID code from the shutdown command against ID codes she had scraped from the internal diagnostics system.

It was shutting down the antimatter containment system.

She continued digging through the code, looking for some indication that the antimatter would be offloaded before the magnetic shields were disabled. She found none. It was only doing a proximity check, making sure the destination had actually been reached before 'delivering' the cargo.

She did a broad search for all occurrences of the antimatter containment system ID code and located three other subsystems that could send it a shutdown code. She had not yet reverse engineered the purpose of those systems, but the implication was clear; even if she decided to never press the Cargo Delivery button, some part of the ship was going to see the mission completed.

Sydney swiped her hand across the control console, closing the open windows. Feeling numb, she staggered back to the apartment and dropped onto the sofa. Zoe climbed up into her lap, and Sydney held her tight as she let the reality of the situation sink in.

The aliens had lied about the true nature of this consulting job. It wasn't a simple cargo delivery run, it was a suicide mission. She was riding in a giant antimatter bomb. If she didn't figure out how to defuse it in the next fifteen years, her payday was going to be her own personal apocalypse.