Chapter 1.4

The message ended, and Marc turned to get busy with going through the file that was sent.  Almost immediately, however, we received another call from Earth.  Again, it was President Freeman.

Hello again, N21.  This is Freeman.  We have found something very disturbing.  For the last fifty years, our people have been sifting through the damaged palace of Wallace.  250 years after the the broadcast from your ship, the decaying structure collapsed.  Our people had to pull the remaining shell down.

Apparently, there is a ‘special surprise’ for you.  According to records, it is supposed to make any and all other pale in comparison.  The others, we were able to dig to find out what was supposed to happen, but this one is only referred to as the ‘Total Fun’. Fun for Wallace. I doubt anyone else will see it that way. What it is, we cannot tell, nor do we know how it is started.

I’m sorry we don’t know.  We are going to continue to search.

The message ended, and Marc began his reading.  Halfway through, he put his fist through the monitor in front of him.  Rather than give voice to his feelings, he simply stood and walked out of the command center.

John watched him go, then moved the destroyed monitor away and put another in it’s place.  I stood beside him as he read the report.  Some of the plans included deactivation of nanites in everyone with a certain trait.  There were several that were designed to happen at the same time.  Eye color, hair color, blood type.  It would keep us guessing what the cause was.  It’s no wonder our doctors weren’t with us.

Another was to make every electrify every wall, so that if you touched the walls and floor simultaneously, you’d die. All we could say was, thank God they had sent us the information.  We had some knowledge, but how to get into the programming.  It was buried in the memory and protected by several algorithms to protect them.  We had NO idea where to look.

“Horrible, isn’t it?” Marc said from behind us.  I turned and just nodded.  He walked to the comm station we had watched the message from President Freeman on.  He keyed the mic and said.  “This is Marc Dodson on board N21.  What are the chances you could send us the original computer OS from the station.  Before it was turned into Caesar’s playground?”  

While the mic was keyed, John asked, “Will that be able to control the entire station?”

“I’ve no idea, but it’s got to be better than unleashing all of these things.”  He pushed the send button and we prepared to wait.

Less than a minute later, however, a transmission came in.  President Freeman was once more on the screen. He looked very different now.  He was wearing a completely different style of dress, and had a different, longer hairstyle.  “That was a good idea, Marc.  It took us several years to find them.  They were archived in a scientific museum, and we had to negotiate to be able to copy them.  It took awhile, but we believe we got them intact. They’re appended to this message, obviously.

“Oh, I’m no longer the president.  I retired from that job about a hundred years ago.  I’ll be your liason for as long as we can maintain communication, however.

“I’ve arranged for news and library files to be sent to you as well.  Also, if anyone wants to take courses in medicine, we’ve sent an entire course, complete with access to whoever the best doctor is on Earth at the time anyone has questions.

“Later, I’ll arrange for collaboration with your scientists and artists with ours.  We are aware that time is moving much slower for you, but we would love to collaborate.  As Marc demonstrated, your insights are valuable.  We never thought of finding the original operating system for your computers.

I’m going to sign off now.  I’m looking forward to your next communication.

As soon as the message was done, I ran to the intercom.  “Gerry Carter, Winston Reese, and Perl Grey, to the command center, Now!”

“What are you doing?” John asked.

Rather than explain to John, I flipped the comm on.  “This is N21 to Earth.  I am going to have three people rotate in 8 hour increments.  Their only job for now will be to converse with you.  We don’t desire any lag in the communication on our end.  Eventually we will lose contact with you, but until then, we will have someone in constant contact.  Is this acceptable?”

“Very much so, N21.  That’s an excellent idea.”

“Can we piggyback two messages together?” I asked Marc.

“Sure.  We should be able to do more than that.  Something I would like to do as well.  Ask them for information on how to build better memory storage systems.  We’re going to need it if every moment we’re getting centuries worth of information.

“At least I’ll have things to read from here to eternity.”

“No doubt,” I said with a chuckle.  It felt good to laugh even if only a small amount.  I hadn’t laughed in several days.

I relayed the request to Freeman, and he called back that it would work fine.  He also sent the information to us regarding computer storage.  Marc glanced through it, and a huge grin appeared on his face.  “This is ingenious,” he said as he left the room, presumably to talk to some of his people.

At that moment, Gerry Carter entered the command center at a dead run.  He skidded to a stop and breathless asked, “Yeah?” before I could answer the other two entered.  Perl ran headlong into Gerry, who was barely able to reach out in time to hold her upright.  Winston was moving a bit slower, so was able to stop before adding to the bruises collected by the first two.

Laughing, I told them about the contact with Earth and asked if they were interested in 8 hour shifts talking to Earth.

“Hell yeah!” Perl said.  Before either of the others could react, she sat down at the comm station.  “How do I key this thing?” she asked, then apparently saw the control. “N21 calling Earth,” she stated into the microphone.

“Okay,” I said to the guys.  “I guess this is Perl’s shift.  Who wants to do the next one?”

It was determined that Carter would do the next, and Reese would take the last one.  Technically, Freeman was immortal, but a long time would pass for him for the guys.  I wondered if the job would be handed off to someone else by the end of Perl’s shift.

---

It didn’t take long for the operating system to be loaded onto the permanent memory for the computers.  Dodson had them loaded and ready to go in a couple of hours.  Caesar had apparently not protected it, so there was no problem.  I suppose he figured if we decided to clear the memory, so be it.  

When alarms went off, however, we were concerned.  

OH, KIDS. YOU’VE BEEN BAD. I SUPPOSE I’M GOING TO HAVE TO PUNISH YOU NOW.  IT WILL BE FUN FOR ME.  TOTALLY FUN.

It was Caesar’s voice.  He was long dead, but we had awakened his ghost.  Apparently, we had triggered ‘total fun’.

“Computers are out of control!” Marc’s voice came over the intercom.  We can trigger the intercom, but that’s about it.  Everything else has us locked out.  I didn’t even get a chance to shut them down.  The moment I finished loading them, the computer added a few subroutines.  I’m not sure what they do, but…”

His voice went dead at the exact moment the lights went out.  Ventilation stopped as well.  For several minutes, the only sound was of other people.  Then, all at once the machinery started running again.

Cautiously, we touched the controls.  Nothing seemed to be broken or unresponsive.  Perl contacted Freeman, and he responded immediately.  She explained what happened, and that we had apparently triggered ‘total fun’.  “Have you got any idea what it is?” she asked.

“I’m sorry.  Any reference seems to have been lost when Caesar died.  Something we did turn up, however, was how he came to power.  If only we had known then.  He was a genius programmer and  had his hands in both computers and genetics.  It seemed as though he wrote a computer virus that was incredibly complex.  It gave him political power throughout the world.  He also had a hand in the production of the nanites used to repair our bodies.  That was long before he showed any interest in computers however.

“I’m very sorry I can’t tell you any more, Perl,” Freeman said.  

“You’ve given us an idea where the problems may lie, Sir,” she responded. “Give me a few minutes.  I’ll be right back.”

“How do you figure?” Marc asked.  He had entered while she was talking to Earth.

“Remember that injection each of us received when were exiled?”

I watched as Marc’s face went white.  “Dear God!” he exclaimed.

I turned to John.  “We’d better tell everyone.”

“It could start a panic,” he replied.

“Yes, it could, but they have a right to be warned.”

Apparently, John agreed, because he went to the intercom and flipped it to station wide. He explained what we knew very quickly.  We didn’t know how long we had before Caesar’s ghost started playing with our minds -- or bodies -- or both.

---

I wasn’t able to sleep well that night.  I tossed and turned for several hours, and finally I got out of bed, and angrily changed back into clothes. The elevator was something that was added long after the original OS had been made, so it didn’t work right now, and I now lived on the top, or fifth floor in a different bay.  I stomped down the stairs to ground level and found hundreds of people milling around in the street.

“What do you think will happen?” It was the main question I was asked, and of course, I had no idea.  

“You know as much as I do,” I told them.

To their credit, there was no panicking.  I guess we had been through so much that we couldn’t conceive of anything worse.

We had morals.  Caesar had none.

I arrived at the command center and saw that I wasn’t the only one who had been unable to sleep.  I checked the time and saw that Reese was halfway through his shift with Freeman.  It was still Freeman he was talking to.

Perl was still present, as was Carter.  I don’t think Marc had ever left his position at the computers.  There were three more IT people working on other computers, and John was sitting in a chair in the corner.  It didn’t look like he’d left either.  I felt guilty, as I was apparently the only one who had tried to sleep.

No, I wasn’t.  John was gently snoring.

“He hasn’t left, but he’s been like that for a couple hours now,” Perl told me when she saw me looking at him. “I think he’s waiting for some news.”

“I think I’ve got something!” It was from an IT guy.

Instantly, John was awake.  “What?” He was on his feet, but he stopped for a moment.  He swayed for a moment.  “Stood up too fast,” he said.  I had reached out to stabilize him.

We finished moving to the IT’s location.  Everyone else was there.

The man pointed to his screen.  There was a jumble of code that I couldn’t make heads or tails of but Marc exclaimed, “Oh, shit!“

I looked at him expectantly, as did John.  “What are you seeing?” I asked.  

“This code is designed specifically to modify the basic programming of our nanites.  What’s strange is that it’s just one bit.  It’s like a switch that it will turn on.”

I felt like melting into the floor.  Suddenly everything made sense.  The injection we’d all received.  The disappearance of our doctors.  Everything made a warped, perfect sense.

“But you have no way of knowing what that switch will do,” said Marc.

“Not any way.”

For a moment, my vision blurred then it seemed as though I pushed my fists into my eyes, as all I could see was multiple colors swirling around.  There was a disconnect between before the blurring and after.  It took a moment for me to realize I could see fine again, but then I noticed Perl standing right beside me.  I jumped away from her, terrified, and she looked at me wide eyed.  

“STAY AWAY FROM ME!” she screamed.  There was no need to scream at us, because every one of us seemed scared spitless of her.  We were all as far away as we could get.  

She kept her gaze jumping from one of us to another.  Anytime any of us moved, she flinched. She kept bringing her gaze back to me.  No, not me.  The open door behind me.  I started to inch to the right, where Carter stood.  Interestingly none of the others bothered me in the least.  Just her.

As soon as I was far enough away, she bolted.  Each of us seemed to lose our tension.  Whatever it was, it seemed to make us scared of certain others.  ‘Total Fun’ was upon us.  

Like it or not, Caesar’s Ghost had raised his ugly head again.