In a Time of Silence

Chapter 4

Alarms pulled Hawking from perhaps decades of calculations, drawing him out of the brilliant haze of the digital realm and into reality again for the first time in a long time.

External? He thought, surprised.

Oh good, you're here. Came the communication from the cached copy he'd left to handle administrative duties. We've been losing drones in the remains of old Scandanavia. Before you ask, all over it. Literally all of it. I've managed to stop the progress, but only by shutting them down.

"So it's not an external issue."

No. It's definitely internal. I've been monitoring it, and it's... Strange. Some sort of virus maybe, but it's uh. I think it's in binary.

"How is that even possible? The drones might be simple, but their OS is Q. A binary based virus shouldn't even be able to communicate with their systems."

Obviously. Obviously I know that. You wake up with 70% of the processing power and you offer me the obvious.

"Ok, ok. Calm down and feed me the data."

His duplicate transferred his readings, muttering to himself as he did.

Hawking smiled, amused by his own eccentricity.

"Oh wow, there's a lot happening here. How many readings did you take?"

Processing power is low on the drone units. I had to sacrifice a couple hundred or so to analyze the code.

"A FEW HUNDRED? Jesus fucking christ."

Here's the best part: I'm not even sure if I pulled enough data, because I don't even know what the fuck I'm looking at. You left me with enough brain to run the station and coordinate an ever expanding global network of mostly autonomous drones and satellites. Not to deal with... whatever this is.

"This shouldn't even be possible."

Thank you, captain fucking obvious. How much time do you need?

"I'm honestly not sure. I'll let you know when I'm done. In the meantime, just... try and quarantine the area so we don't lose any more drones. I know we can always make more, but each batch takes time and resources."

Can do captain.

Hawking went to work pouring over the data, turning off his com input to shut out his younger self. He allowed himself a split second to muse over the fact that his compatriot was, for all intents and purposes much younger than him. Though the same amount of real time had passed, in relative terms, with his simulated mind running at a much more accelerated pace over the years, he'd changed more, only coming to the surface to interact with some of his other selves to stave off isolation.

Hawking had always been different than other humans, even when he'd been human. While he acknowledged his innate drive for companionship, he'd never needed it as much as others, even going without contact with his the few members of his small family he cared to interact with for years at a time, and his only three friends he'd see only once every few months during his most social periods.

In his younger years, he'd considered travelling to one of the colonies, or manning a scientific outstation somewhere out in the darker reaches of the solar system. He would have been good at it, needing so little contact.

Days passed as he attempted to reverse engineer the strange lines of antiquated code. Perhaps weeks even. Building and culling entire generations of neural networks to sift through the data with him, searching for a pattern, finding several and searching for more. He was stunned by the simple nature of the code, the efficiency of it. The structure was complex, but the mind behind it was one of preternatural focus. He was sure that once he'd unlocked all it's secrets, he'd find no single line wasted, not one variable or constant out of place.