Orders of Magnitude (The Genie and the Engineer Series Book 2) (16 page)

• • • •

And then, not far in front of Capie, a portal opened up and
two Oni emerged. She came to an abrupt halt, hovering in midair, grinning
smugly.

Finally!

She turned, speeding off, casting more spells. She had to
time this carefully, lest she be trapped here.

There! A glimpse of two more Oni, flying down a side street,
on an intercept course with her. She veered again, now toward the Congresso
Nacional, a 302 foot tall building at the end of the boulevard. At the last
moment, she altered course, now skimming upwards along one side of the towering
edifice until she reached the roof.

And portaling away, straight to Rio de Janeiro, freely
expending all the magical energy that she could muster. She didn’t want her
pursuers to miss her trail.

• • • •

Paul was wracked with despair, pain, and hopelessness.
Nothing he had tried had worked. The C-130 was now over the middle of the Cunha
channel and less than a minute from the stadium. Already the pilot had slowed
the craft, dropping it to a lower altitude on an approach run. The rear cargo
hold ramp was coming down too, allowing Paul a brief look into the lighted
interior.

He could see a cargo pallet sitting in readiness.

Two more plasma bolts hit his personal shields, as he
attempted to dive out of the path of the Oni again.

In desperation, he reached down with his powers into the
water of the channel below the plane, forming a ball of fusion.

The explosion echoed through the bay, a geyser of black
water reaching upward for plane—

But the blast was diverted by the Oni, never reaching the
aircraft.

A sudden bright blast of light to the north caused Paul to
spin around.

What was
that
all about?

• • • •

Despite the darkness, high above the bay, Capie took in the
situation almost immediately and she dove for the plane, cast a spell to form a
solid magical shield in front of her.

Behind her, Olivos and a dozen Oni emerged from another
portal, tracking her effortlessly and rocketing after her.

• • • •

Paul saw a dark shape shooting for the opposite side of the plane,
effectively outflanking the Oni in front of him. Could that be Capie?

And then he saw a second portal open up and another dozen
Oni emerge and fly towards the plane.

His heart sank and he cried out in total anguish, his body
shivering uncontrollably in rage.

More Oni? There was absolutely
no
chance of stopping
the attack
now
! 80,000 people were about to die horribly and he couldn’t
stop it. There were too many Oni!

And then the dark shape rocketing through the gloom of the night
sky plowed through the outer skin of the plane, shredding a hole in the
aluminum sheeting as it plunged into the interior. But it did not come out the
other side.

As Paul watched, he saw a very curious thing. One of the
arriving group of Oni stopped in midair, pointing at the Oni protecting the
plane. This second group of Oni then veered slightly, heading toward the first
group. Paul never found out that the one leading the attacking Oni was the
Brazilian wizard.

They opened fire with a torrent of plasma bolts on the first
group.

Mouth falling open in total astonishment, Paul watched for a
few seconds as the first group responded in kind. In less than ten seconds, the
two factions merged into a real fur-ball of a dogfight.

Idiot
, he screamed at himself. This was his chance to
do something while the first group of Oni were distracted!
MOVE IT!

He flung himself forward, aiming for the rear cargo door of
the C-130.

The plane was already over the eastern section of the city.
In seconds, it would be over the target.

• • • •

Capie broke through the side of the Hercules aircraft,
knocking two Quds Force troopers to the cargo deck. She spun, using a spell to
push back two more soldiers.

A plasma bolt hit her in the side, throwing her against the
wall. Raising one arm, she fired back at the Oni that had hit her, one who was disguised
as an Iranian soldier. Her plasma bolt burst against its chest and knocked it
to the ground.

Another bolt hit her and she suddenly found herself lying on
her back on the deck staring up into the face of a middle-eastern man.

“A woman!” Omar shouted over the thunder of noise inside the
plane. He turned and moved off, yelling some words in Arabic, which Capie was
too dazed to understand. She followed him with her eyes, a corner of her mind
noting the two huge cigar shaped cylinders sitting on pallets. Two bombs. And
three soldiers were gathered by one of them, at the end of the plane,
manhandling it towards the open cargo ramp.

The man who had leaned over her was now standing behind
them, one arm raised high. He screamed at the soldiers and dropped his hand.

They shoved hard on the bomb, and it teetered on the edge of
the ramp.

• • • •

As Paul shot forward, dodging past the swirling combat and
carnage of the battling Oni, he was able to see far enough into the plane to
note the soldiers pushing on the bomb.

“
NO
!” he screamed, diving into opening, just as the
bomb started sliding down the ramp.

He tried casting a spell to push it back, but the bomb was
too heavy and its inertia already more than he could handle.

So instead, he straddled the casing near the end and cast a
spell to hold on as tightly as he could. The bomb popped out of the rear of the
plane, into the night air, falling fast in a downward arc.

The iconic image of Slim Pickens in the film
Dr.
Strangelove
popped into his mind and Paul screwed his eyes shut, screaming at
the top of his lungs, “Yeeeee Hawwwww!”

A drogue chute popped out of the tail and he flung his eyes
open again as the bomb jerked hard enough to make him slide all the way down the
bomb’s length to its nose. He barely managed to hold on, where now he was in an
upside down position.

He noted that the bomb was rapidly approaching the opening
in the roof of the stadium, not far from dead center, in fact. He had only
seconds to do
something
, since the first stage of the detonator would
likely go off just as soon as the bomb passed through that hole.

The detonator. He glanced at the front edge of the bomb,
noticing a small hatch built into the casing. That would be where the detonator
was installed and where it had been armed, prior to being dropped. Placing one
hand on the hatch, he closed his eyes again and muttered a chant.

“In the name of Peace on Earth, let the value of vacuum
permittivity inside this bomb be cut in
half
!”

Inside the bomb, at the detonator, the battery circuit
feeding the timer to the two detonators suddenly lost most of its voltage.
Moreover, the electric charge for the exploding-bridgewire detonators was also
severely diminished. In effect, the detonator was stunned into an unconscious
state. No longer armed, the bomb fell through the circular hole in the stadium
roof line without exploding.

Paul jumped clear, using a spell to come to a halt in midair
as he watched the bomb half bury itself in the grass of the stadium’s open
field, just missing the Israeli team captain by twenty feet.

The crowds in the stadium’s seats fell quiet at the sudden
and unexpected appearance of what looked, for the all the world, to be a bomb plunging
into and now sticking out of the ground. Paul lowered himself and landed next
to the now inactive explosive device. Facing the stands and raising his hands
high in the air, he then bowed.

At first, no one seemed to know how to respond to this. Then
a lone elderly man in the crowds stood and began to clap. Others soon joined
and within seconds, the place was thundering with applause. Paul bowed again,
noting out of the corner of one eye the onslaught of hundreds of police and
security officers scrambling pell-mell across the field from all points of the
compass, in his direction, guns waving frantically. With a wave of his hand, he
rose into the air, accelerating back out of the hole in the stadium’s roof.

Scanning the city skyline, he quickly found both the plane
and the still raging Oni battle. The dogfight however, seemed smaller than
before, no doubt due to causalities on both sides. It was the plane, though,
that Paul was interested in. It was in a steep right-hand bank, heading back
out over Guanabara Bay. Perhaps it was making another attempt at a bomb run using
the second bomb that he had caught a brief sight of inside the cargo bay.

He briefly considered destroying the plane, now that there
weren’t any Oni to stop him. But that figure who had flown into the plane might
very well have been his wife. Okay, so maybe he couldn’t destroy it outright,
but he sure could prevent it from making another run.

Gathering all his power, he fired two huge blasts of plasma,
both of them racing across the night sky, the first exploding engine number
four and destroying the last several feet of the starboard wing tip. The second
spell did the same thing with engine number one and the left wing tip.

The plane’s nose dropped and the pilot suddenly had a fight
on his hands, keeping the aircraft in the air. Shooting forward, Paul raced
across the intervening distance and angled in toward the C-130’s side and the
gaping hole there. As he approached, Paul got a good look at the lighted
interior.

And saw his wife on the cargo deck, badly hurt and bleeding.
An Oni also lay on the deck, its chest charred black. Another Oni was talking
to an Iranian soldier. Reaching out with his powers, Paul lowered the vacuum
permittivity around the Oni still standing and had the satisfaction of seeing
it suddenly jerk several times before collapsing to the deck. Then he pulled
himself through the hole.

Omar saw Paul immediately and shouted at the soldiers
pushing the bomb. Two of those men drew pistols, P226s, but Paul froze all of
the men with another spell.

With as much care as he could manage, he levitated Capie off
the deck and into his waiting arms.

“Stay with me, now, love of my life!” he managed to say soothingly
to her through a suddenly too dry throat. “I’ll get you to safety and take good
care of you. Just don’t leave me now, CB!”

Walking forward, he maneuvered around the frozen figures in
the plane and then floated out the cargo ramp, into the night.

Outside, holding an unconscious Capie in his arms, he turned
in midair and watched the plane speed away.

“Considering what they nearly accomplished,” he snarled
angrily, “I should just let everyone on that plane die in a fiery plane crash.
But I did promise not to kill anyone. So, may those fires be extinguished
forthwith!”

Obediently, the flames instantly disappeared from view and
the pilot appeared to regain control, stabilizing the craft into level flight
once more.

And thus no one was more surprised than Paul when the
Inboard Main #3 fuel tank exploded suddenly, shredding the right wing and
destroying Engine #3. Mortally wounded, the plane entered a spin to the right,
practically falling from the sky and nose diving towards the warm waters of Guanabara
Bay.

“Oops,” Paul noted grimly but with little regret. “I guess I
was a little late putting out that fire after all. Sorry about that. I really
did try.”

The thermobaric bomb in the cargo hold had already been
fully armed. Upon detecting the rapid decrease in altitude, its circuitry fired
the drogue chute, hitting Omar in the chest, breaking three of his ribs and
propelling him halfway down the length of the cargo hold. Then, at the right
altitude, the first detonator blew, disbursing ethylene oxide throughout the
cargo hold and some of it out the rear of the plane. A few hundred milliseconds
after that, the second detonator blew. The resulting thunderous explosion
disintegrated the plane into several million tiny pieces and shattered windows
all around the bay of the city.

No one outside the plane was hurt.

• • • •

Olivos saw the plane explode and in such a spectacular
fashion too. In as much as all of the enemy Oni had been dealt with, he took
the time to search the area but did not find any further sign of the wizard
that had attacked Brasilia. Since he had personally seen that wizard enter the
airplane, he assumed him to be dead.

Good riddance! Feeling a lot better about the event, he sent
his remaining Oni back to Brasilia. He himself returned to the Games.

Rental House

Magdalena Rd

Los Altos Hills, CA

August

Tuesday 7:16 a.m. PDT

“B
ut
really, I’m not that badly hurt,” Capie protested as she lay in the large king-sized
bed in the master bedroom. The bright California sun was shining through both
windows into the room.

“No broken bones, no major organ damage. Just a little blood
loss, a few nasty bruises and some burned skin,” she added. “No big deal, not
really. So, please, let me get up and fix myself an honest breakfast. Something
better than chicken bouillon, for goodness sake!”

Paul clucked, shaking his head. For two days after their
return, he had nursed her closely, calling upon a plethora of fictional doctors
to examine and proscribe treatment for her. She was vastly understating her
injuries, especially the more than two pints of blood she had lost before he
could stem the bleeding. And the burn she had suffered had been more than ten
percent of her body. His best guess was that she had no shield up when the
blast from the Oni had caught her in the left side. And she had nearly paid for
that mistake with her life.

“The doctors want you to get another day or two of rest,” he
said with an apologetic smile. “Yes, I know that you are using magic to heal
yourself at a fast rate and that transfusion of blood I gave you didn’t hurt
either. But please, humor me, CB! I nearly lost you. By the by, let me say
again, that was a pretty neat stunt you pulled, going to Brasilia and tricking
the Oni there to follow you to Rio. I wasn’t making any headway taking out the
plane, protected as it was by a dozen Oni.”

“It just seemed the right thing to do,” she modestly
admitted. “Even with the two of us, we would have had a hard time getting past
a dozen Oni and stopping the plane. We were over-matched, especially
considering how little time we had. I just figured that the
Errabêlu
in
Brazil might be as upset as ourselves at having the Olympic ceremony, the Maracanã
Stadium and 80,000 Brazilians killed by that horrible bomb.”

“Absolutely brilliant on your part,” Paul said, with a
single nod of his head. “And now, as rewards for your labor, you can take it
easy in bed and rest up. Sleep, read, watch TV or whatever. Relax. Doctor’s
orders.”

She gave him a sour expression. “You can be so stubborn.”

“Now, I have good news for you. For lunch, you can have
chicken noodle soup with real noodles. I have a special family recipe which you
will absolutely love!”

Later in the afternoon while Capie was fast asleep, Paul
headed out to the garage. As he stared at the latest qubit processor only half
assembled on the workbench, he put his hands together, cracking his knuckles.

“Now!” he crowed. “To get back to what I was doing before I
was so rudely interrupted!”

• • • •

On Monday evening, Paul completed testing the first 1,024
qubit processor.

“Just how high do you plan to go, dear?” Capie asked him Tuesday
morning at breakfast. “A million qubits? Ten million?”

Paul paused as he buttered his toast, thinking about her
question. “We could do that, but I don’t see the need. We’ve successfully
established all the basic processes involved in building any size qubit
processor that we want. The problem now is how we use the new style of
processor to build the brain for our first Scottie.”

Capie cocked her head at him and raised one eyebrow.

With a glance at her expression, Paul shrugged his shoulders
and nodded. “Okay, that was a pretty cryptic remark on my part, wasn’t it,
honey?” With a wave of his hand, a holographic display appeared in mid-air
above the breakfast nook table. In it could be seen a block diagram of a
computer system.

“The problem with the quantum computer approach is that all
we have right now is the hardware involved. No one has developed the software
for quantum computers—at least, nothing like what we need. Now, I have no doubt
that we could do it—given sufficient time.”

But Capie’s puzzled expression told Paul that there was
something that she didn’t understand.

“Problem?” he asked, eyebrows raised, head cocked to one
side.

“I thought you already had the software issue solved. All
that work you did in Chicago, copying your mental processes, I think you said.”

“Ah, I see your point. I admit that the intricacies of
computer programming leave me more than a bit confused as well. Like most
engineers, I’ve dabbled in software programming, but I am not a software
engineer. The Microsoft models—well, in my opinion, they were developed by
Machiavelli. But I digress. For the Scottie, I’m shooting for a straight
forward three tier approach. The top tier will have the applications programs
which will host the Scottie’s mental processes and intelligence. That’s where
the subroutines I worked out in Chicago will run. The second tier, underlying
the first, is the operating system. In our case, a lightly modified version of
Linux. The third and most basic tier is the one I’m talking about right now,
something most engineers refer to as embedded software or machine code. It’s
the lowest level of any system, moving blocks of data from point A to B, doing
byte to byte comparisons, integer addition and so on. Standard stuff for binary
computers, highly exotic for quantum computers.”

“But you have another idea, I take it,” Capie prodded him
along.

Paul grinned mysteriously. “You know me too well. Yes. I
have an idea.” And he pointed at the display. “I propose we use a standard
Intel sixteen core CPU, running Linux as the operating system, as I said. It
will act as the system central server, loading data to and from a sizeable
array of qubit processors. We can tailor the qubit CPUs to handle specific tasks
such as vision, hearing, speech and so forth. Each core of the Intel processor
will shuffle the data back and forth to the qubits while the real processing
and data crunching will be performed by the qubit processors.” Paul glanced
back at Capie with a hopeful look. “It’s not optimum, of course. But since the
qubit processors are nearly instantaneous, this configuration should give us
the speed we need, and we can use standard software for the Intel processor—and
yes, use the software that I developed back in Chicago. Think of it as a hybrid
system, integrated with the best of both worlds. It will save us a huge amount
of development time and a ton of work.”

She half bowed at him. “Bravo. We like the ‘saving time’
thing. Where do we start? What can I do?”

“You can build the qubit processors,” he said, taking a bite
of his toast. “Clear off a spot on the workbench out in the garage and copy the
1,024 qubit design. I need sixteen of them to start with. In the meantime, I’m
going to take a standard motherboard design and figure out how to adapt the bus
structure to interface with the qubit processors.”

Capie adopted a more serious look, as she began moving items
on the workbench. “Paul. Is this really going to work? Can we really make an
intelligent computer? The Plan depends heavily on making it work,” she firmly reminded
him.

“It’s a big gamble,” he reluctantly admitted. “I need to do
this on Earth before we commit ourselves to a trip to Mars. It would make life a
lot simpler just in case I discover later something critical that I missed,
something that is only available on Earth, or worse, not available at all anywhere.
And it needs to be
totally
successful, not just show a degree of
promise.”

“‘Do, or do not. There is no try,’” she quoted Yoda, with a smug
grin.

“Yes, Master Yoda,” he politely responded, smiling as he got
to his feet, leaned over giving her a tight hug, and taking his empty plate to
the kitchen.

• • • •

With the use of the workstation, Paul was able to open an internet
link with other mainframes around the valley, hacking through firewalls into
supercomputers at Apple, NASA, Google, Microsoft, and a dozen other places.

During the course of the next few days, using the
supercomputer access, he was finally able to put together a theoretical design
of the new Scottie hardware architecture.

“Let me summarize what we have so far,” Paul explained to
Capie at the end of another long day of pounding the keyboard at the IBM workstation.
“I started with an existing design of a motherboard from a manufacturer in the
Far East, to cut down on design time, but I did quite a bit of tweaking on the
known bottlenecks. Also, utilizing a new theoretical three atom transistor
design, I was able to shrink the scale of several of the more critical
components. In fact, I was able to segment and expand the onboard RAM by a
factor of two, up to 512 gigabytes and to locate them adjacent to all of the
processors, providing each with a local cache.”

“I’ve finished all of the qubit processors that you asked me
to make,” Capie informed him with a tired smile, handing him a small glass tray
stacked with integrated circuits. “I never thought I would finish that task.
Um, we’ve been working pretty hard lately, dear.”

“Ah, I know that tone, CB.” Paul put the tray on the
workbench, stood and stepped up to her, taking her hands and looking into her
eyes. “What’s up? What are you thinking?”

She glanced down and then back up shyly. “Ever been to
DragonCon, Dom?”

“No, I have not! I’ve heard of it, of course. One of the
largest science fiction and fantasy conventions in the United States. Where is
that? Atlanta?”

“I’ve never been there either. It’s, ah, this coming
weekend…”

“Perfect! Have you ever been to Atlanta, Georgia?”

“Yep,” she replied. “The Southeast in August? Hot, muggy.
Just like a sauna.”

“Oh, so you have been there!”

“So, we can go, please?”

“I wouldn’t miss it.” He looked back at the workstation,
using a small spell to save his work files. “It’s time to stop and go get some
dinner. I’m starved.”

Capie took Paul’s arm and squeezed it, guiding him through
the garage door and into the kitchen. “I thought you would never stop for the
evening. I must say, I am really impressed with everything you accomplished these
last few days.”

Paul grinned in amusement. “Yes, well, my mind works just
like lightning. One brilliant flash and it is gone.”

She chuckled. “Who said that?”

Shrugging, Paul replied, “I don’t have the foggiest idea.”

Squeezing his arm tighter, she asked him, “Are you having
fun?”

Paul smiled wickedly as the two of them passed through the
dining room. “For the last month, I have been doing
real
engineering. Boy,
am I having
fun
!”

• • • •

“Paul? Where are you?”

“In the garage, dear,” he answered as he modified the
settings on the o’scope lying on the workbench.

Capie stepped through the garage doorway, arms crossed and a
frown on her face. “I thought we were leaving for Atlanta this morning.”

“We are, we are,” he answered quickly, as he terminated two
wires from the motherboard to two other printed circuit boards on the bench in
front of him. The hodgepodge of boards and wiring in front of him looked
remarkably like a rats nest. “I just finished wiring everything up for an
initial power-on test, and all I need is just fifteen minutes or so to confirm
that it’s working. Please?” he implored Capie with an innocent smile.

She rolled her eyes. “Go ahead, dear. You won’t be happy
until you know if it works.”

“It won’t take long,” Paul muttered again as he resumed his
seat on the stool, craning his neck this way and that, running another visual
check of his connections and adjusting a couple of more wires.

“Uh, huh. Sure thing,” was Capie’s only comment.

Paul seemed not to notice her skepticism. One more look over
the jury-rigged assembly and he rubbed his hands together in excitement. “I’m
ready, CB.” And he reached over to snap on a series of small switches.

When he flipped the fourth such switch, a puff of smoke
exploded out of the center of the assembly followed by a small flame burning
quite energetically. A whole host of sparks shot forth in all directions.

“Fire!” Paul yelled, casting a fast spell, opening a three
inch portal to the Pacific Ocean, the water dousing the flame—which, instead of
putting it out, actually increased the amount of smoke produced. He immediately
enlarged the portal, practically drowning the entire work bench in water and himself
as well.

After that, the board was no longer smoking.

Capie coughed, waving a hand at all the smoke in the air.

“Does that mean that we won’t be going to the DragonCon
after all?” she asked, uncertainly.

Crestfallen, Paul stood, arms crossed over his chest,
staring at the burnt and waterlogged printed circuit boards. Then he sighed.
“It didn’t even pass the smoke test.”

“And, pray tell, what is a smoke test?” Capie asked.

“Oh, you don’t know that one? It’s the very first test that
is done on all new electronic equipment. You see, all of these components
contain smoke inside. They all run on smoke—”

Capie knew when she was being teased. “Uh, huh. Right. On
smoke.”

“Yep, on smoke,” Paul answered, casting a portal spell to
sweep the air clear of remaining smoke and then another one to dry his wet
clothing. “When you turn on a piece of equipment for the first time, if the
smoke comes out, that’s bad. It means it failed the smoke test ’cause it can’t
run without it.”

“I admit, I never knew that, dear,” Capie responded with
heavy sarcasm. “But you haven’t answered my question yet. Does this change our
plans for this weekend?”

“Not on your life. This? Only a minor setback is all, I
assure you. Hardly worth mentioning.” But Capie could clearly see the pain
written in his face. “And I needed to make a few changes anyway. I’ll build a
new motherboard when we get back. Oh, and I’ll need another set of qubit
processors.”