Critical Error: Book 3 of the Leaving Earth series Read online

  Critical Error

  (Book 3 of the Leaving Earth series)

  by Kaal Alexander Rosser

  Books by Kaal Alexander Rosser

  Leaving Earth

  1. Directed Energy

  2. Power Base

  3. Critical Error

  Cyborg

  1. Survivor

  Non-fiction (as Kaal Rosser)

  1. Avoiding Advertising... Like a Ninja

  2. How 2 Fact Check

  Dedication

  To my sisters, Jaime and Siân, for many years of patience.

  Praise for:

  The Leaving Earth series

  "The characters are believable and like-able, it has made me laugh out loud a few times on the train... Here's looking forward to the TV adaptation..." - Amazon Review

  "Characters seem so real that you feel like you are sharing in their experiences. Reading this I felt I was sat at the bar hearing their pub conversations, being part of their jokes... Bring on book two, which I shall enjoy, even on a Thursday." - Amazon Review

  Thank you for reading this book. I hope you enjoy it. If you want to know when more arrive, please sign up to my mailing list.

  Copyright © 2017 Kaal Alexander Rosser. All rights reserved.

  Contents

  Chapter 1 1

  Chapter 2 5

  Chapter 3 11

  Chapter 4 16

  Chapter 5 23

  Chapter 6 28

  Chapter 7 34

  Chapter 8 38

  Chapter 9 43

  Chapter 10 47

  Chapter 11 51

  Chapter 12 59

  Chapter 13 61

  Chapter 14 66

  Chapter 15 68

  Chapter 16 72

  Chapter 17 76

  Chapter 18 78

  Chapter 19 82

  Chapter 20 88

  Chapter 21 90

  Chapter 22 92

  Chapter 23 96

  Chapter 24 101

  Books by Kaal Alexander Rosser 103

  Author's Note 104

  Chapter 1

  GRUM was considering juggling live hand-grenades as a bit of light relief.

  Getting the agreement to build another four colliders at Nevada had been hard enough. Trying to explain to the Nevada state government that it was neither a munitions dump, nor an unregulated power station – which had taken quite a bit of doing – was finally done and dusted. Grum's biggest problem now was that he could not switch them all on.

  All four colliders were not quite ready, in any case, but the discussions with with the state government had started him thinking about how much power they were already consuming and how much more would be needed to run the site when the new colliders went online.

  They had inadvertently discovered the issue when two of the local substations had called to complain that they were reaching maximum capacity during the testing phase for collider E. Once D had reached the operational testing phase, it was running as if it were in full-time production with the expectation that it would remain in operation from then on. So the staff had started beam alignment testing on E.

  That very nearly caused a brown-out across the site, and had caused the phone calls. So, now, the staff were restricted to completing the entire test suite for each new collider, individually, which was slowing things down enormously.

  The latest estimates were that the whole site running at full capacity would require around twelve hundred megawatts continuous load compared to the current five hundred. In percentage terms that the facility would grow from two percent of the energy consumption of the state of Nevada to five percent.

  The trouble was that it was also nearly equal to the total renewable energy generation of the state, and nearly twenty five percent the total generation capacity. To avoid breaking climate agreements, the state could not just import more electricity easily. It was looking like USSMC might have to get into the electricity generation business on a utility scale, just not in the way the board had originally thought.

  The good news with that was that most of the other departments in Core Power — which Grum had to admit to himself had been somewhat left out in the cold the last few years — would finally get to take centre stage.

  If Grum were to put all the renewable technology resources — particularly solar photovoltaics, geothermal, and biomass — into working with the existing power companies in order to upgrade or expand their existing utility-level power generation, and even fund some new builds, that might just bring the needed intra-state capacity up to the level needed.

  He would have to talk to the state government about the option of nuclear generation as well. The Nuclear Fission department within Core Power had been coming up with some very promising research on fourth and fifth generation power station designs which might overcome some of the environmental objections — his own included, if he were honest about it.

  Grum would really prefer that the maximum usage was made of renewables before resorting to other methods as they were better in almost every way, and not only in terms of overall pollution reduction. With a state like Nevada, there were vast areas of unclaimed — and near-unclaimable — land available for either solar or geothermal energy generation. The dual problem of maintenance and proximity to population centres was nowhere near as pronounced for either of those technologies as it was for almost any other. Hydroelectric could probably claim that particular crown, Grum supposed, but most of that resource was already as far as it could go in the state. Wind was another candidate, and there might be some opportunities for combined generation sites.

  The last technically carbon-neutral option was using biomass. Operating efficiencies had risen sharply in the last few years, and they could be located relatively close to population centres. Combined heat and power installations, and heat-exchanging air conditioning could be powered that way — at least to a degree.

  Grum also favoured funding a state-wide micro-generation drive, again, to see if the demand could be reduced at source.

  All these options were faster and cheaper to build than nuclear power stations. They also all started with a carbon debt and running deficit — due to their construction and operation — far less then that of either fossil or nuclear power options. Although – he had to remind himself – the fourth generation nuclear power stations would come close if they managed to follow through with the promise of re-processing and reusing previously spent nuclear fuel.

  In terms of energy consumed, the Nevada Antimatter Power Facility was already in the top ten most hungry facilities in the world. With the new colliders it would certainly make itself felt in the top five most expensive science programmes in the world, and might even contend for the second highest price tag if the contenders were limited to those remaining on-planet.

  And yet.

  If Core Power wanted to meet the demand on the commercial market, supply all the Divisions within USSMC, and meet the — now constant — pressure from governmental agencies for generators and pods, they really needed to get all four new colliders up and running as quickly as possible.

  Talks had been tentative with the government at first. USSMC did not want to give away how it found out about the prying from the various agencies, and the Whitehouse — or more particularly, the Pentagon — had not wanted to give away just how interested they were. Grum did not even try to handle that situation. He had kicked protocol to the kerb and called a meeting directly with Kelvin Goldstein and Steve Branch, in Kelvin's office. Kelvin made part of the negotiation objectives to secure additional support and funding for the UMBRA expansion, and any other research pr
ogrammes they would buy in to.

  The upshot of that meeting was that Steve was reassigned for the foreseeable future as the governmental liaison. Things went more smoothly after that, and a framework for placing orders based on a heavily edited product catalogue was put in place. In the end the government had been a push-over. The extra support for UMBRA with the international community as well as getting funding to offset some of the Core Power and Space Division costs, was not as difficult to arrange as Grum might have thought.

  They only wanted two things in return for authorising the UMBRA plans. Access to all the current AM products, and advance notice of any future products. Kelvin Goldstein had agreed with alacrity and now Grum was getting orders from the military which would take years to fill.

  USSMC internal orders were nearly as bad.

  The Space Division wanted the next pod, please, "oh and since you're going to be building a huge anti-matter production site we'll need at least another sixteen". Plus a slew of orders for various size generators.

  There were orders coming in from the rest of USSMC for every size and type of generator, some trivial, some idiotic, most low priority by comparison to Space and the military.

  The commercial orders were a different kettle of fish. Grum was still waiting for the market to die off a bit, but it showed no signs of doing so. Whole new industries had sprung up in the last three years or so to take advantage of a guaranteed always-on, never-varying power source. From the tiniest generator all the way up to the mid-range there was constant demand. There had even been interest in the larger models from USSMC's space industry competitors who were looking to catch up on emergency power stakes. Grum had firmly told everyone who might have contact with these people that the waiting list was already several years long and not looking likely to shorten any time soon.

  With the government coming on board, that was true even if they managed to get the expansion completed at Nevada. The good thing about the commercial side of the business was that it was generating a positive cash-flow, still. Even with the enormous costs involved there was a chance of profitability.

  Chapter 2

  AMONG the technical and political grenades which Grum was juggling, was a moral one. Actually two moral ones.

  The first was simple, direct, and utterly frustrating. USSMC — no, he — was keeping scientific advances from the public. This went against everything in him as a scientist. Since Amy completed her doctorate at MIT, and the subsequent publication of that research, he had heard of other antimatter production attempts which had quite literally blown themselves out of existence. He was sure that they would not have been so fatal if the design features built in to the Nevada Antimatter Power Facility, or those on which the pods were based, were more widely known.

  He understood about entrepreneurship, enterprise and personal choice. He perfectly comprehended that a business had the right to protect its investments. He could even sympathise, somewhat, with the position of wanting to make some profit out of your own work. The safety and social costs worried him and nagged at his sense of well being.

  The other complication was less easily defined. It had to do with the sense that he was about to start strong-arming a state government into letting USSMC do exactly what it wanted to do for very little in return, except for those directly in power. His strong suspicion was that Kelvin was not as clean a player as he appeared to be. From his own perspective, the Kelvin which Grum had always encountered, acted like an enthusiastic mentor. Over the last few years, though, very difficult and obstinate people had moved aside to let Grum advance — in one way or another – and that had Grum wondering. Especially, when he had seen some of the communications between Kelvin and the Lieutenant Governor of Nevada. The language was not exactly colluding, but it had that tone to it. It made Grum nervous.

  Grum stood up and walked over to his coffee machine for a refill. He could not solve everything. He had enough to do just keeping his own Division in order. As well as those things which seemed to be involving him in some way.

  Building maintenance, for example, sent him everything even vaguely related to power. Getting the service reports on the not-a-pod — Grum could not bring himself to call it a pseudopod — in the sub-basement, was reasonable. No standard building service engineer could be expected to maintain that thing. However, Grum got all the building's departmental power consumption reports — down to the light fittings — and copies of the power bill. He had no idea why. If the manager in charge thought that Grum could wave a magic wand and increase the output from the generators downstairs to bring the power bill down, he was sadly mistaken.

  Seeing this batch reports, though, had reminded him of something he really did have to do. He took his coffee back round the desk and sat down to bring up the latest report on the not-a-pod itself. Grum had asked for some of Vann's time, again, to do a real service report on it.

  The governor system which Vann had designed and had bolted into the installation as a bodge-job to stop it exploding, seemed to be coping, but was perhaps reaching the end of its useful life. Replacing it would be tricky, but far less tricky than having it explode. Vann's recommendation was to have a trained engineer constantly monitor it and perform manual overrides on the distribution and safeguard systems if they went out of tolerance too often.

  It seemed that the governor system itself was reacting more frequently to readings which were out of tolerance, but nothing which actually raised red flags. The early generators and the pre-pod system put together specifically for this installation were not as bulletproof as the newer design by a long way, but they were still good.

  It was odd that Vann had specified a manual intervention, though. An automatic system trained to spot anomalies would be far better, in most circumstances, than any manual operator. Then he saw the reasoning.

  There was no other system to train a new governor on, and this one was already — apparently — too out of whack to train an limited AI. Human intelligence would have to do.

  In general, an automatic system was capable of modelling many more variables, and of assessing and dismissing many more options, than any human could. Self-drive cars had shown this. Despite the egotistical human need to be better than a machine. That frailty had led to far more fatalities in the change over than if people had just accepted that machines were better at this stuff. One of the fatal flaws in humanity was its tendency to trust its senses, and its judgement — and even its beliefs — in direct contradiction to both evidence and reason.

  In this case, however, no model could be worked up as there were no norms to draw upon. The AI would make the wrong decisions, almost inevitably, whereas a human could be given instruction — ironically due to the fatal flaw — that even though the machine said something was normal, it might not be.

  That was where humans had the edge over AIs. Humans could be taught to go mad, safely. It was utterly insane to believe that reality was not as it self-evidently was, and yet humans did it all the time without always breaking down.

  If we are ever to make a truly artificial intelligence capable of operating on our level, it will have to have the capacity to go utterly bonkers, thought Grum. As for me… I'm going to give this job to someone else. Because I can.

  He pinged Stew a message to come over. This one could go to him, directly, to deal with.

  Stew arrived within seconds of Grum sending the message.

  'Good timing!' said Stew.

  'Apparently!' Grum agreed.

  'I have a list. What have you got?' Stew had got a coffee mug for the previous christmas and had taken to wandering around with it everywhere. It was one of those which changed with the temperature of the liquid inside it.

  As Stew filled up his mug with hot coffee from the jug, Grum read, for the umpteenth time: "YOU MATTER! Unless you multiply yourself by the speed of light squared… Then, YOU ENERGY!", and groaned. 'Why do I do it to myself? Every time!'

  'Because you're a nerd, like me. So what did you wa
nt to see me about?'

  'I have a thing which you could deal with better than me.'

  'One thing?'

  'Yes.'

  'You go first, then.'

  Grum nodded and pulled up the folder with the service reports from the building manager, and caught Stew's wince of recognition.

  'If that whole folder is your one thing…'

  'No, don't be silly. Sit down. Look…' Grum also pulled up the service report from Vann. 'Most of the stuff in that folder is either dealt with, or nothing to do with us, but this bit is.'

  'Certainly Vann's report is…'

  'Yes. But it belongs in building services, only they can't deal with it, so…'

  'You want me to liaise with the BS-meister, and source a suitable person to implement Vann's recommendation.'

  'Yep.'

  'That it?'

  'Yep. We need to make sure that the right person is on the job, that the training programme is up to scratch, and that whatever procedures are necessary are approved by Vann.'

  'OK. I agree, that's better with me. My turn!'

  'Go on, then.' Grum sipped his coffee. Stew looked like he was mentally seeking take-off speed.

  'First thing, have you heard of the Richard Dean Anderson School in New Jersey?'

  'Can't say I have.'

  'It has a science-heavy programme, and USSMC funnels a chunk of money directly into it, in addition to the money earmarked for STEM activities in each state.'

  'Good for us.'

  'Well, yes. But I was looking at the school and its ratings are through the roof. Do you think we should check it out? For Ju and Clait, I mean. Oh, the extra money, isn't a worry, as far as I know. It gets used to fund the science fair prizes, and so on. We do have a disproportionate number of successful applicants from there, but I can't tell which came first, so I'm not worrying about it unless someone shows me some evidence of undue pressure.'