A Slight Miscalculation, Episode 1: New Science Fiction by Mark Laporta

Deep in the Sumatri pine forest, on Helica 3, sat a high-tech dwelling whose surface was completely obscured by a complex array of light-canceling panels. Just as the array denied visual detection from every angle, a complementary array of noise-canceling baffles ensured no revealing sound could escape.

Inside this extraordinary abode, purposely hidden on a sparsely populated human colony planet, was Crawford Caldera. Now a retired exogeologist, he’d spent most of his professional career exploring the surface of remote asteroids. Despite his far-flung life, anyone who imagined an exotic interior space loaded with souvenirs of alien worlds would be disappointed.

Crawford’s taste ran more to the homey end of the spectrum with rich browns and bright yellows complemented by stainless steel track lighting. His furniture, spare, ergonomic and functional had been selected for comfort first. Crawford’s only concession to style was to ensure that every piece fit within the same design school. The one exception was the room off his spacious bedroom devoted to his extensive collection of crystalline rock formations from across settled space. There, no expense had been spared to allow three-dimensional radiographs of every stone in his collection to envelop the interior and immerse the viewer in a world of pure geometry.

Unknown to Crawford, his former employers, whom he’d always thought of as “the Firm,” had been trying to breach his defenses for weeks. But even getting a message through had posed a challenge. In fact, to reach Crawford’s private comlink, the Firm’s comsignal was forced to navigate an encryption maze as intricate as the mammalian neural network it was patterned after. Over the past ten years since Crawford’s retirement at age fifty-five, the maze had blocked comsignals from an expansive roster of grasping relatives, fawning sales reps, down-at-heel ex-lovers and former colleagues looking to reminisce about The Old Days.

It was the blissful isolation he’d dreamed about his entire adult life.

Why else had he used a sizable chunk of his retirement bonus to build the perfect hideaway? By all appearances, the expense had been worth it, because the Firm’s Head Office had only discovered Crawford’s hideout by virtue of top-of-the-line sensors, including a Boustrian mass detector.

Though that kind of tech was normally off-limits to all but upper-echelon military operatives, to Crawford’s chagrin, the Firm in question was the Interstellar Mining Commission. It was the largest government agency devoted to asteroid cultivation in the Tau Ceti sector. Given how much of interstellar life depended on the huge cache of mineral deposits it had uncovered and developed over the past thousand years, IMC always got its way.

As a consequence, when it came time to break through Crawford’s encryption logjam, the IMC had the full cooperation of GalaxyPol’s top cyber team. They also gained access to the retired geologist’s full psychological profile. Not, that is, a sketchy list of personality traits but a complete breakdown including, as it were, a character map of Crawford’s “buttons.”

This is how, one Thursday afternoon, while Crawford was deeply preoccupied with doing precisely nothing, a soft-spoken woman of astonishing grace came to appear on his doorstep and knock insistently on a door that ought to have been invisible. Startled, Crawford paused long enough to pull on a baggy pair of khakis, run a comb through his graying hair and try in vain to fluff up his scraggly, salt-and-pepper beard. Only then did he tap into his onscreen door monitor and bark out a question.

“You wouldn’t happen to be with the IMC, would you?” he asked.

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The woman in her early thirties, who stared into his security camera, stood about five-eight. Her high-collared, olive-green jacket gave her a sporty look, as did her black canvas pants, tucked into calf-length, chocolate brown boots. And yet, she was all business.

“You obviously received our call, Mr. Caldera,” said the intruder. “No need to be cute about it.”

Crawford took a deep breath, reached for a clean T-shirt and entered a command string into a digital panel embedded in the wall of his spacious living room. The door swung open and in walked his unexpected guest, accompanied by a small, lemon-yellow android that stalked in on four nimble black legs. Its deep, resonant voice unnerved Crawford almost as much as the woman herself.

“No apparent threat, Agent Chaplin,” it said.

The woman extended her right hand as the door swung shut behind her without so much as a whisper.

“Arielle Chaplin,” she said. “Nice to meet you, Mr. Caldera. Don’t mind 6N7. It doesn’t mince words”

“Me neither,” said Crawford. “I’m not interested.”

Arielle walked past him and sat down on his plush, brown suede couch with the grace of a dancer — or perhaps a karateka.

“Practiced saying that in front if a mirror, did you?” she asked. “Know that your level of interest is irrelevant. So why not invite me for lunch and make the best of it?”

Crawford rolled his eyes.

“No meal service on government flights?” he asked.

“Make it easy on yourself, Mr. Caldera,” said Agent Chaplin. “Right now, I’m from the IMC. Send me away and I’ll come back later — only from GalaxyPol.”

“Your robot already gave you away,” said Crawford. “And your attitude. So you can forget about lunch. Get to the point.”

Her face a mask of indifference, Agent Chaplin gave Crawford a stark choice. He could either take a new assignment or lose his pension. His vague memory of a “right to consultation” clause made his throat go dry.

“You know this makes no sense,” he said. “Look at me. Am I in any shape to strut out onto an asteroid?”

A glance at Crawford’s flabby physique told the story of a once-fit operative who’d taken no further interest in his appearance after taking early retirement. As a confirmed hermit, he had no one to look sharp for and no interest in climbing back onto the wheel of love and desire.

Agent Chaplin smiled.

“Not yet,” she said. “You’re about three nanobot therapies away from fitness. So come on, get dressed for the real world and let’s go. I’ll send a team to pick up your essentials this afternoon.”

“Not until you explain what the rush is,” said Crawford.

The startlingly beautiful woman reached into her jacket, retrieved a dull, black lase pistol and aimed it at his chest.

“I believe this is explanation enough,” she said.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Crawford. “If you were sent here to kill me, I’d be dead already. Besides, didn’t GalaxyPol train you to recognize a hologram?”

Crawford’s image disappeared like so much steam. All it had taken was a flick of his finger on a miniaturized holoprojector attached to his belt.

“All right Mr. Crawford,” said Agent Chaplin. “My mistake. I should’ve known you’d pick up some tricks from the Skelanese.”

Arielle was referring to Crawford’s last, eight-year mission in the asteroid belt at the outer edge of the Skeena system. The Skelanese, a species of sinewy, catlike creatures, had earned a reputation for developing the most intricate chip architectures in settled space. Their command of stealth tech was several decades ahead of the times. In fact, every way Crawford had made his home invisible and impenetrable was with tech that his former employers had considered “off the shelf.”

“Though I’m not legally bound to justify my arrival,” said Agent Chaplin, “I see you’re determined to waste my time until I do. So get in here and I’ll give you the run down … Oh, come on!”

Arielle’s exasperated expression had been triggered by the entrance of not one, but twenty-four “Crawfords,” identically clad in baggy, off-white khakis, a pair of bright red running shoes and a blue T-shirt with the words “USSF Relentless” emblazoned in lavender.

 “One of us is real,” they all said. “Tell me the truth and find out which.”

The GalaxyPol operative tilted her ovoid head to the right.

“How will you know if I’m telling the truth?” she asked. “I’m just curious.”

“By whether it matches the reconnaissance reports I read on COSNET last night,” said the holoclones in unison. “I still have security clearance, you know.”

“Kind of degrades the honor, if you ask me,” said Arielle. “But here goes.”

Crawford’s holograms appeared to listen intently as she outlined the mission the retired operative had been roped into. According to a report filed by a geological team in a relatively uncharted region of the Phaeton galaxy, an entirely new substance had turned up in the substrata of asteroids within a narrow belt at the farthest extreme of the Skelana system.

“You don’t need me,” he said. “A little laser ablation will reveal everything you need to know. I’ll bet even 6N7 could handle that for you, can’t you, Boy?”

At the mention of its name, Arielle’s lemon-yellow android raised itself on its back legs.

“The nominally demeaning appellation, ‘Boy,’ is inaccurate,” it said. “In any case, my laser capability extends only so far as defending Agent Chaplin from perceived threats.”

“And?” asked the Crawford clones.

“My analysis shows,” said the android, “that the Agent is merely in danger of acute aggravation.”

“As it turns out, lasers are the last thing we need. Mr. Caldera,” said Arielle. “Our quarry emits so much light that we’ve already lost two servicebots.”

The Crawfords chuckled.

“Come on,” they said. “You make it sound like your team dug up a small star from the soil of an asteroid.”

But that, apparently, was the same conclusion that GalaxyPol’s astronomy team had come to.

“It makes no sense,” said Arielle, “but nobody said it had to. We found a jagged metaversal rift right in our backyard, and it looks like it leads right to a duplicate version of the cosmos as we know it.”

The Crawford’s stared at her, wide-eyed, slapped their foreheads and collapsed into a solitary version of what Agent Chaplin fervently hoped was the flesh-and-blood organic original.

“I see I convinced you,” she said. “Can we get moving now?”

Crawford folded his arms across his chest.

 “You parroted the report on COSNET,” he said. “Good job. But the more truth there is to this story, the less you need me. I’m a geologist, not a cosmic midwife.”

“Mr. Caldera, I have no idea what you’re talking about,” said Arielle. “Nor do I have time to listen to the explanation. So I’ll tell you what I know instead. You’re the one person in the human sphere who has had extensive contact with the Skelanese. You spent eight years in their employ, presumably to help them find the perfect natural, space-based platform for a mysterious experiment. All this time, we’ve wondered why, as advanced as they are, they couldn’t have produced a platform of their own. But thanks to this discovery, we now have a pretty good idea. They were looking for the perfect interface for this bizarre experiment in controlled metaversal interaction — and needed a scapegoat if the project went south.”

“You think the Skelanese opened this … rift … of yours?” asked Crawford. “They wouldn’t do that. They worship Nature, just the way it is. Besides, I still don’t see….”

For a second time that morning, Agent Chaplin’s lase pistol peeked out of her jacket.

“I’m setting this on stun,” she said. “Nothing the nanobots can’t repair. Now, Mr. Crawford, did you or did you not receive a johlantra encounter suit from your hosts on your last day of active duty?”

“Sure, yeah,” said Crawford. “They gave me this weird ceremonial outfit. You want to see it? But hold on. If you think the Skelanese are behind this tiny sun, or whatever, why don’t you just ask them?”

Arielle lowered her weapon.

“That’s why I’m here,” she said. “We can’t. The Skelanese — all of them — are gone.”

To be continued…. Read Episode 2 here.

A new Episode of A Slight Miscalculation will appear every other Monday. See all episodes here.

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Mark Laporta is the author of Probability Shadow and Entropy Refraction, the first two novels in the science fiction series, Against the Glare of Darkness, which are available at a bookstore near you, on Amazon and at Barnes & Noble. He is also the author of Orbitals: Journeys to Future Worlds, a collection of short science fiction, which is available as an ebook.

Image by Spirit111 / Pixabay