Third Transmission by Jack Heath Read Free Book Online

that space, 60 cubic metres are occupied by a 2.1 petabyte supercomputer, which runs at 14 megawatts – more than twice as much as a high-speed train. The rooms themselves need to be built with molecular precision out of polyolefin materials. The whole setup takes months.
    â€˜In short, we don’t need to worry about ChaoSonic smuggling a port into the basement of the Deck and then transmitting in a platoon of soldier bots to kill us. They could only use the machine to send cargo to places they could freely go already.’
    Six paused. King and the QS waited.
    â€˜Second,’ he continued, ‘it doesn’t actually transmit matter. Port A scans the cargo, then sends the data to Port B.
Duplicate
cargo is created from banks of chemicals and elements at Port B.’
    â€˜Like a fax machine,’ the QS said.
    Six frowned. ‘A what?’
    â€˜Yes,’ King told her. ‘But after the transmission, Port A destroys the original object by stripping it into its individual molecules and storing them in its banks. So it’s like a fax machine and a paper-shredder combined.’
    â€˜Anyway,’ Six said, ignoring their archaic terms, ‘at the time of the mission, Allich had only built one port.In each of her experiments, she scanned the cargo, dematerialised it, and then tried to duplicate it in the same location. She probably thought transmitting the information was the simplest part of the process, so there was no point building a second port until the scanning, dematerialising and duplicating stages were perfected. Which, at the time, they weren’t.’
    â€˜What were the flaws?’ the QS asked.
    â€˜You’d have to ask the Diamonds for a complete list,’ Six said, ‘but most notably, the machine consumed too much matter and energy duplicating the cargo. There would be no point transmitting guns, for instance, or food – it’d be easier to make them from scratch at the other end. Plus, the machine couldn’t transmit anything with significant iron content. An exposed MRI is used in the scanning, and the magnetic field would rip the object apart. You can’t send anything over 500 kilograms, which rules out most vehicles. Another problem is, the machine can’t transmit people. The pain of getting assembled at Port B sends them into shock 68 per cent of the time, immediate cardiac arrest 31 per cent. None of her test subjects survived.’
    The QS looked disappointed. ‘So essentially, Allich almost invented a useless piece of technology.’
    â€˜No,’ Six said. ‘There’s a difference between “not a threat” and “useless”. If she ever got it working – which she may have done since my recon mission – one-of-a-kind objects could be instantly transmitted from one end of the City to the other. Signed contracts, valuablepaintings, human remains, plant life …’ He shrugged. ‘The machine has applications. Just none we need to worry about.’
    â€˜Enough about Allich, for now,’ King said. ‘Tell us about Straje Sammers.’ He pronounced it
Strah-yay.
    Six felt a chill wriggle up his spine.
Straje Sammers
. A name he hadn’t heard for a long time – and would be glad never to hear again.
    â€˜I don’t see the connection,’ he faltered.
    â€˜Just tell us what you remember,’ King said.
    Six nodded grimly. ‘Two years, four months and nineteen days ago,’ he began, ‘Sammers and a twelve-man squadron of soldiers broke into a top-secret ChaoSonic facility and killed everyone inside. They cracked the vault, and they stole …’ he hesitated, not wanting to relive the nightmare, ‘… its contents.’
    â€˜Which were?’ the QS demanded.
    â€˜The last nuclear warhead in existence,’ Six said softly.
    Her eyes widened. ‘Impossible. They were all dismantled and destroyed before Takeover.’
    â€˜Officially,