Stryker #5, At the End of Eternity – Chapter 12

“One of the first things we realized when we started exploring Tikal was that the entire city was networked. After a year of careful analysis we discovered that all of the wiring led to a secret data center that was buried deep beneath the city. It took us a while to repair the computer and get it operational, and there’s still a great deal of damage that we haven’t been able to fix. What we have seen, though, is quite impressive. The computer is actually some sort of highly advanced intelligence, and it has immensely aided the city’s reconstruction. It can give realtime status information on all buildings that are connected to it and can even pinpoint the exact areas that are in need of repair. It is the best troubleshooting tool that I have ever seen.”
–Noel Lawson
June 25, 7243
 

As soon as Amy left to return to Adrasta, the Sentinel left as well. Since the planet Tonina was not going to become part of the supercomputer the Sentinel decided to use it as his base of operations. From that central world he would design the new supercomputer and manage its construction.

When the Sentinel returned to Tonina he found it quiet and still. The massive cities on the planet were empty, devoid of even synthetic life. There was much wildlife and plant life but no human life. Alex had been the last inhabitant of the planet, and now that he had rejoined Amy the world was once again deserted. Before the Sparrow arrived the world had been vacant for millennia. Now it was vacant once more, and that would probably not change. When Amy finished her task on Earth she would not be coming back to live on Tonina.

The emptiness of the world gave the Sentinel an unsettled feeling. It was not that long ago when hope had burned bright. The Stryker family had taken up residence in La Venta and were eagerly discussing the future of the survivors on Xanthe. They all thought that it was just a matter of time before the city was filled with people going about their lives. Now the Sentinel wondered if anyone would ever live in the cities that his father had built. Even if the tribes were cured it would take centuries – perhaps many centuries – before they traveled this far out into the galaxy. The same could be said for the remnant on Mars. The worlds of the network were thousands of light-years away from where the Ranger colonies had once stood. The last time mankind tried to reach the stars they did not get very far before they destroyed themselves. Would this time be any different?

The Sentinel pushed those thoughts aside. He had a job to do; it was time to do it.

Over the next few days the Sentinel worked on the plans for the new galactic supercomputer. As a starting point he took Dr. Mazatl’s original designs for the Artilect and customized them in order to focus the computer on a single specific task. He hated using a design that old, but by the time he was created the Artilect had already morphed into a giant machine that spanned multiple planets. Attempting to scale that back to one world would simply take too much time. All he really needed was a giant calculator – not a sentient being who could monitor thousands of cubic light-years of space in realtime.

The design he settled on was fairly simple. Each world would represent a separate node in the machine, capable of processing work independently. In order to simplify the design each node would be identical. Since no two worlds in the network were alike, this would force the Stewards to perform a rather drastic overhaul of their planets. Each world would need to have the exact same mass and configuration so that they would all be identical. Since some worlds were closer to the right size than others, that would mean that some worlds would take much longer to convert. The Stewards did have the ability to alter the mass of the planet but it was a difficult process that took a fair amount of time. Still, it had to be done. The Sentinel was glad that all of the worlds could be converted at the same time. Without that it would have taken millennia to complete the construction.

Back when Elder Lane had destroyed the Artilect the Sentinel had built a new central hub so he could search the stars for Amy, who had disappeared. He now took that hub and reconfigured it so that it could send work requests to each of the hundreds of millions of nodes in the supercomputer, and then receive and process the results as they completed their tasks. That hub would be the Sentinel’s interface to the supercomputer; he would give it an assignment and the hub would distribute the work across the stars.

The processing power that the supercomputer would have when its construction was completed was truly staggering. The Sentinel himself was taken aback at its massive, unfathomable computational ability. It made the Artilect look like a child’s toy. He had no doubt that if there was a way to cure the disease, this galactic machine could find it. He also knew that it would be capable of a great deal more than that. The Artilect, acting alone, had achieved amazing scientific breakthroughs and taken science to new heights. Armed with this much computing power, Amy could go far beyond anything the Artilect ever hoped to accomplish. Her power, already tremendous, could be increased still more.

The Sentinel wondered if she was really going to throw away all that power once the tribes were cured. As he thought about it, he realized that she probably would. She had no interest in taking science to greater heights, or amassing more power, or establishing a dynasty for herself. She just wanted to finish her job and then go home to her family. The temptations of power, which had corrupted so many others, were simply not interesting to her. Her heart was elsewhere.

Once the Sentinel finished his design for the nodes and the new central hub, he temporarily shut down the network and disassembled the old hub. He then created a new one, using his new design, and brought everything back online. After making sure that everything was working he uploaded his plans to the new hub and had it distribute the commands to all of the Stewards.

After that was done he settled back and watched. He knew that the Stewards would take the plans and use them to reconfigure the planets that they controlled. They would take their worlds and convert them to programmable matter, and then take the design the Sentinel had given them and apply that to the matter. Some of the worlds could be reconfigured in a day or two, while other worlds – especially the smaller ones – would take a full week, as their mass had to be altered. Reducing the size of a large world was a lot easier than increasing the size of a small one.

The Sentinel was quite pleased as he watched the Stewards begin their work. If all went well the new galactic supercomputer would become fully operational on July 3. How long it would take to create a cure – or to determine whether a cure was even possible – was something he did not know. But at least they now had a fighting chance.