Readyworld

fiction by michael werneburg

"I tell you what, if you're interested in the Big Room, why don't you come join me? I'm taking some ultrasound measurements to map the depth of the surface material." I smiled at them. It was a task that was both manual and slow.

But a look of mild unease crossed his face, and he said, "I think we'll leave you to it." Turning to his companions, he said, "Ladies, shall we have another go along the beach-front settlement, then back to the shuttle for drinks?" He'd tired of the Big Room before he'd even seen it.

With agreements from those "ladies", he gave me a wink and smoothly spun the sled about to glide back up to the surface. I followed along at a walking speed. It amazed me that these people wouldn't miss an opportunity to exercise in their controlled gym environments, but wouldn't lift a finger out here in reality.

When we all emerged, I made a bee-line for the collection of sculpted, almost organic-looking buildings we'd taken to calling downtown. I needed to run my sample through an analyzer, and file a report as quickly as possible. If any cash reward were to come of this, I needed to be the original discoverer.

I got to my lab and entered the air lock. I held my breath as I was bathed in sterilizing plasma. The inner hatch opened, and I entered the lab and set to work.

My lab was a sunny place, with big windows and plenty of holo-padding on the walls showing scenes from around Readyworld. I'd inherited the design when I arrived for work, and had kept it. It was nice to have a bit of atmosphere on the job, for once; so much nicer than the gigs I'd had on orbitals and deep-space installations. In most respects, really, it was a pleasure to work here on Readyworld. Well, aside from the goons from the garrison and the snobby scientists and lack of amenities. And the barren landscape. You know what, on the whole I could live with it.

I got the sealed container into an analyzer, and set it to breaking down the make-up of the 'mud' I'd collected.

While the lab equipment was doing its thing, I checked on the database engine that was chewing over my data up in orbit. The software had already sorted out an appropriate data model, done the data cleaning, and was doing some preliminary sampling to determine the best algorithms for statistical analysis. I watched its progress for a few minutes, while I thought over what I'd discovered in the Big Room.

Clearly the aliens had designed the place for a specific function; something more intricate than simple storage or living quarters. And it was evolving. Could it be developing into a greenhouse of some sort? What a scientific—and monetary—coup such a report would be! I tried to work it out, by establishing what we knew about it... It had always had significant lighting, and now it was getting wet; muddy. And you could now almost see into the mud and there was something under the mud to see. Hmm. I was out of my field of expertise, and I knew it. Maybe I'd have to bring in a partner on this one. Well, half of a vast fortune was still better than 100% of nothing.

The analyzer alerted me that it was finished with an old-fashioned beep. It did so because while the machine itself was new, the design of this particular equipment was at least three hundred and fifty years old. It had been custom-fabricated back on the Inas Dorge a couple of years back when it was decided that more modern equipment—stuff that used modern communications subsystems and intelligent firmware—was too susceptible to Readyworld's mysterious instability. The analyser did its job quite adequately. It was just a pain having to transcribe its findings with a reader.

I retrieved the reader from my back-pack, and affixed it to the port inset at the my wrist. The slender rod was packed with sensory gear and electronics, and was designed for scanning characters from just about any source, be it ancient pictoglyphs on rock or somewhat less ancient '20-dpi' characters on an 'LCD' display like the one on this absurd design.

I paged through the results on the machine's old display, and the reader fed it back to me. It seemed that the matrix of my mud was made of mostly the same stuff as I was. Various carbon compounds, a fair bit of calcium, zinc, and magnesium, and traces of iron. Infused throughout the matrix, though, were some proteins and quite a bit of some other materials that I didn't recognize. I shut down the analyzer and returned to my work surface where I brought up the same break-down on the bigger screen.

I ran the unidentified materials through some of the more esoteric materials databases, but came back with nothing. So I did a search for the compounds I'd found on the greater scientific database back on the Inas Dorge. A response came back immediately—from a nutritional database. My compounds were similar to the kind of proteins found in animal eggs back on Terra!

I sat down hard, and stared at a holographic tree that was bowing under a stiff breeze by an arctic beach. Protein? The floor of the Big Room was made of minerals and food? Now I knew I was on to something, and quickly started a new report. I took a template, dumped in my findings, and let the document sort itself out. The AI software crafted the analysis and conclusions for me based on all the samples I'd fed it over the years—mine and those of many others. Then I dropped in something about the need for further study and a standard action-plan statement and a request for exclusive rights to the Big Room. Well, it was a demand, really, but I dressed it up nicely. Then I dragged a couple of pre-cooked paragraphs together for an executive summary, and threw in a bit of the hyperbolic speculation Administration seemed to like. As I watched, the software made some decisions about the content and added a couple of disclaimers about forward-looking statements. I looked the report over, and made a last change here or there to make it as simple as possible. Then I submitted it, and ensured that all of my work was safely stored on the Inas Dorge. Everything looked good.

Now I just had to sit back and watch for the statement of earnings and the go-ahead on the next phase. Lena would be thrilled; I'd be getting that last medical procedure sooner than later!