Coming of Age: Volume 2: Endless Conflict (14 page)

And that gave her the answer, at least for the near term, in this time of transition, to the problem John Praxis had asked her to solve for her generation.

* * *

As Antigone Wells took the next call from John Praxis, some part of her spirits rose up in what anyone else might have called a spark of hope. He once was able to do that for her. And at the same instant some part of her sank in bleak despair. She had become too fixed in her ways, in her life. Whatever he had to tell her, it was too late, too late by many years.

“Hello, Antigone,” said the man on the screen, who wore the face he must have had at forty. “It’s good to see you again.”

That was a lie, because she kept her face in shadow as always.

“You are looking well, John,” she said equitably.

“Thanks … Hey, um, I’m planning a little trip up to the Sierra. I haven’t been to the forest in years, and I wanted to take a fresh look. And, since winning the legal battle was more your triumph than anyone else’s, I wondered—well, if you would come with me—with us—to see what you’ve won.”

“John, I …” Go out in the open? Join his entourage? See new people?

“We’re going to be traveling for a week or so,” he continued. “Overall, that is. It’s kind of a preliminary survey—things to change, things to keep the same. I know you’re busy with your legal work, but if you could possibly take a weekend off? Meet up with us along the route? We’ll be in continuous touch by GPS and satell phone. It would be easy to—”

“Why do you pursue me, John?” Wells could hear the break in her own voice, and she despised it. “Are we still lovers? Business associates? Friends, even? We haven’t seen each other in almost three decades. I don’t know what we would have to say to each other.”

“We used to have a lot to say,” he replied.

“Yes, once. It’s been too long, John.”

“I still love you, in my own way.”

“Please don’t. I’m gone now.”

* * *

It was not exactly a camping trip, John Praxis decided. Not with three Wagonells modified for four-wheel-drive pulling a pair of silver Airstreams riding on the super-suspension package, as well as a heavy-duty trailer full of supplies and equipment. In addition to Praxis and his grandson Jeffrey, as head of the new Praxis Forest Development subsidiary, they were joined by Jeffrey’s two assistants, Bill Schwartz and Sonny Rolf, who both had forestry backgrounds and doubled as their drivers; a woman who introduced herself as “Mother Simms” and did the cooking; and Pamela Sheldon, who insisted on accompanying Praxis, “in case you run into bears or something.” No matter what she wore—business suit or safari jacket—Pamela still had an ominous bulge under her left breast and moved to shadow him like a tackle protecting her quarterback.

So they traveled in style, moving fast along the state roads, Highways 4, 108, and 120, and then more slowly along the side roads and fire trails. They crisscrossed the hills and valleys, crossed the rivers on bridges, and forded streams where necessary. Praxis himself had forgotten how much raw land, near-wild and relatively untouched, except for the Rim Fire, the forest tract contained. He had also forgotten how many privately owned hotels and personal residences, cottages, and campsites dotted the land under special-use permits and passes.

It was a question that had peppered his correspondence ever since the Praxis deed was finalized, and one that he discussed with Jeffrey late into the night on this trip: what to do about the other people already here? These included public groups like the Berkeley Family Camp, owners of commercial and private improvements, and those with special logging and resource permits. All of them had long-standing use of the property, which had been grandfathered into the arrangement by which Praxis had managed the national forest for the last thirty-five years. In one sense, they were now trespassers on his land. He could boot them off without much public outcry, especially from environmentalists, who had never wanted a human presence on public wilderness in the first place. In another sense, they were valued stewards, people with a connection to and a pride in the land, who would watch out for their own interests and—with the right treatment and incentives—for his as well.

“Let’s not do anything hasty,” Praxis told his grandson.

“The longer we wait, the more entrenched they become.”

“They’re already entrenched. Let’s not make enemies.”

Their tour reached its furthest point on the eastern side of his land, along the shores of Cherry Lake, almost on the border with the Yosemite National Forest. John Praxis immediately fell in love with the deep blue waters nestled into hills covered with evergreens. It was a small lake, only three or four miles long and less than half of that wide. It was a place of utter peace.

“This belongs to the family,” he told Jeffrey as their little group stood on its shores and smelled the breeze. He glanced sideways at Pamela and saw that for once she was smiling.

“How do you want to structure that?” Jeffrey asked?

“Work out the details with our Legal Department,” Praxis replied. “But I want no public access, no private permits, nothing to be built for at least ten square miles all around this lake and its valley—not unless we build it.”

His grandson pointed across the lake. “The border with Yosemite lies less than a mile in that direction. We don’t control it.”

“What part do we own?”

“Up to the ridge line.”

“Then up to there.”

John Praxis didn’t know what he wanted to do with the lake and its environs, but he wanted to keep them just as he was seeing them now.

“And Jeffrey, no development. Not even subsurface.”

“Okay, Grandfather. But what if we find gold here?”

“We’ve
found
gold, boy. We’re looking right at it.”

* * *

Four or five miles west of Cherry Lake, if they had been flying with the crows, but a whole lot further by winding around on the fire trails, Jeffrey Praxis instructed Sonny Rolf to stop the lead vehicle of their caravan along Forest Route 2N32, where it paralleled Twomile Creek, and the others pulled up behind them. They didn’t bother edging off onto the road’s shoulder because there was no traffic to speak of—and no shoulder, either.

“This looks like as good a place as any,” he said.

“Anything around here, other than hills?” asked his grandfather, who was sitting in the Wagonell’s backseat.

Jeffrey studied the topo map and compared it with his satellite tracker. “Hull Creek campground and an off-road vehicle area are some ways to the north. And a few private camps to the west.”

“You’re sure your mechanical vermin won’t get in there?”

Jeffrey grimaced. “They’re not ‘vermin,’ Grandfather. They’re explorers. And no, they won’t go anywhere outside of the fifteen thousand square yards built into their robot brains and staked out in GPS coordinates. When they reach the border of their territory, they turn back.”

“Okay then. Just asking.”

Jeffrey walked back to the trailer hitched to the last vehicle and took out a corrugated box sectioned off with styrofoam baffles. Inside, separately packed, were six of the robot beavers that Black Belly had designed for him—although they were more the size of squirrels. They also had bushy tails that reminded him of a pine bough and collected sunlight on the same principle: from any angle and orientation, where a photovoltaic panel would have required constant realignment as the animal moved along the ground and the sun moved across the sky. He used a master radio controller to dial in their territories and power up their reserve cells. Then he set them on the road behind the trailer, six of them in a line, and watched them.

The rest of the party came back to watch.

“Will we scare them?” Mother Simms asked.

“They’re not really conscious of human beings,” Jeffrey told her.

“Maybe they should be,” his grandfather said. “For their protection.”

“These are just prototypes,” he said. “We can program in phobias later.”

So far, the six ’bots had not moved. Their tails twitched, gathering energy. After a moment, the sensor clusters where their heads should have been swiveled around. Three of the machines suddenly spun in place—every other machine, in fact, as if sorting themselves out—and then all six scampered off the road, three to one side, three to the other. In a blink they were gone into the underbrush.

“What exactly do they do?” John Praxis asked.

“They’re like beavers,” he said. “They gnaw wood and process it into cellulose fibers, which they then spin into kind of yarn, run up onto wooden spools, which they make themselves, and drop them along their trail with a hardy pheromone marker.”

“What’s the pheromone for?” Sonny Rolf asked.

“So that a collector ’bot—which we haven’t designed yet—can collect the spools and perhaps do further processing.”

“Can one of these ‘beavers’ eat a whole tree?” Bill Schwartz asked.

“If it can’t, it will send out a signal to draw others,” Jeffrey said.

“What keeps them from stripping the forest?” John asked.

“They only eat dead or diseased trees, which they identify through chemical analysis based on a library of pathogens specific to the local trees, or from spores of the fungi that begin decomposing the deadwood. We’ve tried them on healthy, growing trees and the beavers don’t even notice them.”

“Suppose we wanted to take out board feet of lumber, rather than cellulose?” John asked.

“Then we design a different ’bot.” Jeffrey shrugged. “This is early days yet.”

“So you haven’t thought of everything?” his grandfather teased.

“Not yet, but we’re working on it.” Jeffrey said.

* * *

“This is all screwed up,” Brandon Praxis said aloud. Once again—in a long line of “agains”—he was encountering something he did not fully understand about artificial intelligence.

As head of security, Brandon had flown into Denver to check the Watch and Ward
^®
setup on the Stage 3 Ignition Facility that PE&C was building for the University of Colorado at Hyatt Lake, just west of Arvada. It was only one stop on a daisy chain of check-ins he made each month among the firm’s major or sensitive projects under construction. He didn’t personally consider the S3IF all that sensitive, in terms of security, but the clients did.

Even though they were duplicating processes already under study at Livermore and Fermilab, and even though the S3IF was still in the early days of structural work—not even finished pouring concrete in critical areas—the University of Colorado professors believed they had a unique position with regard to intellectual property and wanted their rights defended down to the plant’s general layout. That meant every Spyder tying rebar and Mechmason with a vibra-trowel leveling concrete had to display an access badge, have its movements tracked, and get its visual system wiped after each twenty-four hour shift. Every visitor to the site went through the same procedure, plus a background check but minus the brain wipe.

Except that now two important visitors from the daily roster were being blocked for no reason Brandon could see. Joseph Ferrante, building inspector for the City of Arvada, and William Ballard, structural engineer for the University of Colorado, were held up at the gate into the main dome, where the structural piers were being poured, and they had come to check serial numbers on the rebar before it was entombed. The entity doing the blocking was one of Brandon’s own Watch and Ward
^®
intelligences, nicknamed “Officer Krupke,” because it was from a line of particularly vigilant AIs which could be officiously rule bound. Brandon remembered they had discussed this sort of thing before the unit was even installed.

“Please define ‘screwed up,’ ” Krupke said now.

“Discombobu—oh, forget it,” Brandon replied. “You’re blocking two men who should have carte blanche access to the dome. Hell, one of them’s from the client organization and the other’s from government. They should have access anywhere.”

“My records to not show that,” the machine said coolly.

“Which? That they have access? Or that you’re blocking?”

“Yes, I am blocking them. No, they do not have access.”

Brandon stared at the video monitor. The two men in hard hats, sports jackets, chino pants, and steel-toed boots, both carrying computer tablets, stood at the locked gate in the north tunnel, staring up at the camera and waving their arms. They pantomimed swiping their cards, one after another. The gate remained locked. They looked up and shrugged at him.

“Check again,” he told the machine. “Ferrante_J and Ballard_W. What’s their status?”

“Registered respectively as Visitor Seven and Client Nine.”

“So, do they have access to the dome, or not?” he asked.

“That plant area is reserved for persons holding JILA postdoc credentials.” Krupke was referring to the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics, the project’s immediate client and funding source.

“Come on! Your timeline’s seriously out of whack. That restriction’s at least two years into the future. We don’t have any astrophysicists working on site today.”

“My database … may be corrupted.” It was as close as Brandon had ever heard a machine come to admitting a mistake. “Do you wish to override the security protocols?” Krupke asked.

“Jesus!” Brandon said under his breath, knowing that W&W intelligences were programmed to ignore curses and epithets—a provision Penny had encoded especially for Brandon’s benefit. But then, how else was he going to get Ferrante and Ballard in to do their inspection? “Yes, override on my authority.”

“Voice check, please?” Krupke said.

“Brandon Praxis—as if you didn’t know.”

“Thank you.”

On the screen the gate slid back. The two men waved at the camera, clicked on the spotlights attached to their hard hats, and went down the tunnel into darkness.

Brandon spent the next half hour with the intelligence, calling up all the registered human contractor and visitor badges and confirming their identity and access status. None of this was particularly complicated, but it shouldn’t have happened. He made a note to talk it over with Penny when he got back to San Francisco.