The Garden of Intuit

Acknowledgments

I would like to express my appreciation for the support focused on this work from my friends and family, who had to endure my unending monologues whenever aspects of the story occurred. As a new science fiction author, I wanted people to share in the experience of this world I had discovered and these were the people who soldiered forth, acquiring the initial release. There were many who offered their impressions and comments which were so important in the completion. In particular, thank you to Trevor Shamas for proofing an early version, Gordon Mawdsley for pointing out some improvements to the story, Eleanor Poon for her artistic talents in producing the cover and Cassie Tyson for her editorial and creative input. I hope the efforts, of all of us, give you an enjoyable experience in ‘The Garden of Intuit’.

Prologue

I was feeling peace a moment ago. The glorious sunset must have inspired me. Sitting on a rounded rock beside a moss bordered little stream wandering across the high plateau, I watched for a long time as the patterns were reflected from the distant ocean. Wisps of cloud at high altitudes were crossing each other, slowly navigating the sky in different directions. One layer was more intensely red than the other golden layer, likely catching more light from the redder of twin suns in this world’s sky. It produced the most amazingly unexpected weave of colour and form that slowly changed as I watched, suggesting repetitions and dependencies that were never quite realized. Taking some pictures would have been nice. Willow would have appreciated them.

It appears I could be stuck here for a long time. Despite my best efforts and those of my friends, so far, I have not been successful. I have not been able to convince Bradley that what has happened is real. He either cannot or does not want to believe it. I have tried so many times now, I am forced to add a new approach. With a bit of luck, we will be able to put it all behind us. Nothing has been said publicly regarding Inbiots, but now I guess I need to spill the beans to you for a chance to secure your help. After the shock of the change subsided, and I realized my friends were still in reach, a lot of time was spent wondering about a means of escape. It could be just like it was before, except better. We might be going home again!

If you are reading this, then the first part of my idea might work. I will be your guide, but you must be patient. Please do not give up. The adjustment to this new aspect of reality is taking more time than I thought. I promise you will not be disappointed. Echo Zah may be able to help. She was a friend to Willow and she is very good at visualization. Willow gave her a great deal and she knows she owes her big time.

I need you to look for Echo Zah. Trust her and no one else with our messages. Explanations will have to wait. You might need to enquire through Inbiots. Try to understand what is happening, then it is more likely you will be able to find her. To that end, I am sending you the first part of the most complete story that I have been able to reconstruct from the journals. Show it to no one and if you are discovered, destroy it completely. Please help, because I really think you could save all our lives!

Fire!

It was nine in the morning and already a busy day. The tea was getting cold on her desk as Echo Zah sat with her back very straight and her hair cascading down the back of her charcoal business suit. She focused her attention on her caller. Thank you for waiting, Dr Donager, Echo beamed her big smile into the telephone. Her employer had found quite early how useful she was as a communicator. She knew intuitively how to read behind the words and how to craft her own to gently lead callers to where she wanted them to go. She continued, I am so glad you called. Dr Barry Hunter, our CIO, the Chief Information Officer, is expecting your visit and has been asking if we had set it up. Usually his schedule is quite full, but fortunately for us there is time tomorrow. He would be happy to meet with you anytime. Does that sound good to you? What time would you like? She paused, listening closely. How about three o’clock? Sounds good. I’d like to arrange a nice coffee break to kick off the meeting. Caffeine is wonderful at getting the conversation moving, she thought. Checking her notes again, she added Are there any dietary restrictions I should know about? She typed a few lines into her calendar entry. So, no strawberries then. She frowned slightly. Yes, I expect no disturbances to your meeting. Thank you again Dr Donager. I will notify the gate you are expected. Looking forward to meeting you. Right, bye. She completed the calendar entry including notifications to security and catering.

Looking into the small mirror she kept in her desk drawer, she checked her lipstick, critiquing herself. She had her Navajo grandmother’s good looks, which some people mistook for Asian: lustrous black hair, dark eyes, modest nose, full lips, high cheekbones and nicely tanned skin that never needed the sun. She straightened her suit. The gym was helping, but she had inherited her large frame from her father and it was not going to get smaller from that, she lamented.

At that moment klaxon alarms cut through the air, and she leaped vertically, toppling the phone from her desk. Grabbing it up, she swore silently. A fire alarm. Echo had very recently been made the fire officer for the lab and had just finished training last week. Phone replaced and starting the shutdown of her computer, she grabbed her red fire hat, coat and radio, symbolizing her authority (if questionable) over the facility and headed outside. She saw a tech in a spottily stained white lab coat coming out of the west fire door into the parking lot area. He looked annoyed. Please proceed to the west side of the parking lot. Take note of any lab group members who are missing, she announced as she reached the door. Group leaders take attendance. People were filing slowly out of the fire door now. She jogged around to the east side door to make the same announcement and was surprised to see some smoke and people hurrying out the door. A real fire! Not a false alarm. The flow of people was subsiding now. Please proceed to the east side of the parking lot!, she called repeating the little speech.

Echo! She turned to see Dr Bill Omer, one of the senior scientists. Have you seen Tom, on the west side? He should be in our group, but I don’t see him here and I think he was talking to Jim Turner over in sequencing before the alarm sounded.

Echo glanced back toward the door. There was just a bit of smoke eking out near the top as it opened and closed with the last few people exiting. Ok, thanks! I’ll take a look, Echo decided. She started toward the door.

Don’t be a hero! Bill cautioned as he turned back toward the lot.

Echo had no intention of being a hero. Her recent fire safety training, if brief, had focused on that. No need to add additional victims. Just get everyone out, turn everything off and close all the fire doors. Darn! She didn’t hear any sirens yet! She approached the now closed doors and lightly touched the handle. Cold. She noticed how nervous she felt. She was tall and felt the need to duck in proceeding inside, to keep her head below some sparse but nasty smelling smoke. Was this a good idea? But didn’t she need to check? The klaxon was piercing and the ceiling strobes flashed as she made her way down the red coloured corridor, lit now by the battery powered emergency spotlights. The light itself seemed red in the red hall and somehow the colour made it more difficult to see the usual details. Since the building was evacuated, there should be no one in this main hallway. For a moment, she thought she saw movement near the end of the hall, where it joined the other main corridors, but looking again there was nothing evident. It must have been a trick in the reflections from the polished floor.

She approached a door to the left which entered BioTechnology, but the automatic mechanism had been disabled with the alarm and she had to use some muscle to push the door open. There were many lab rooms off this hallway. She checked each in turn and firmly closed the door after. Inside one, she turned off a tissue fixing machine and in another a desktop computer with a silicon cover over its keyboard. At the end, the corridor turned right at a pair of fire doors, which also tested cold. These doors she knew, partitioned off the extraction labs, a good place for a fire to start, as there were always flammables involved. As she opened the doors a thick bank of smoke greeted her which extended partway to the floor. She quickly closed them. Realizing she had forgotten to turn on the two-way 5 Watt FM radio, she flicked it on. In the resulting crackle, someone was calling her name.

Echo here.

A pause, then Echo, this is security. Is there a problem? We were not able to raise you.

Sorry, I didn’t have the radio on. There was a pause again. She didn’t want to think about the comments she was getting. Listen, I’m outside the biotech extraction lab area. There is quite a bit of smoke behind the fire doors.

Echo, did you check if the xylene recovery distiller has been shut down? We have a message that it might not have been.

Where exactly is that from here? It’s not that easy to navigate. So far, I have seen just a lot of smoke. No fire yet.

Echo, you need to get to the distiller and shut it down. It is just inside the doors where you are now, the first door on your right side. There is enough volatile material there for a large explosion, were it to get into the rest of the building. If you can do it safely, please proceed.

OK, Echo responded. I’ll try. But if I see any fire, I’m out of here. She opened the door and looked down the hall. Smoke lazed about the ceiling a meter deep. Echo ducked down, slipped around the fire doors and into the distiller room. The display lights of the machine were bright in the dimness. She pushed a large red emergency shutdown button and whirled back out, looking toward the end of the hall before exiting back outside the fire doors again.

Wait! Was that a shoe with a leg in it down the hall? She thought of Dr Omer looking for Tom. Was that him? She knew she needed to leave, but maybe she could get Tom out too.

Dispatch, I think I see Tom’s leg. Looks like he is down and out. I’m going to drag him.

Echo, do so only if there is no risk. You are not a fire fighter.

She reopened the door, discovering the smoke had swirled closer to the floor. It poured out past her. She peered below it and down the hall beyond, looking for the shoes she thought she had seen. A white emergency spot cast a small pool of brighter illumination way down the hall. There they were, clearly visible in the light! Reflective white sneakers; toes up at the ends of pant-legs. She bent like a jack-knife and scuttled down the hall below the smoke toward the legs. The distance was farther than she had thought and the posture made it exhausting. A second set of fire doors appeared, open to each side. The hall expanded into a larger lab area. There was an odd humming sound coming from a setup she went past, but she could not see what it was. The smoke was getting nearer the floor here as she reached the shoes. She touched a leg. What?! It was hard and light, made of plastic. Part of a dummy! She grimaced. I’m the dummy! Time to go!

Grabbing the radio, she sent, Echo here. The leg I saw was prosthetic. She coughed as the smoke reached her. Starting back, a distant flickering light was visible through the smoke. Real fire! There was a loud metallic bang from somewhere ahead that made her jump and the light was gone. Now she was having trouble seeing in the smoke. A surge of fear froze her like a rabbit in headlights. A single imperative flashed in her mind. Get back to the door! She sprinted forward and ran headlong into the second set of fire doors which were now closed. The force knocked her back on her rear and she collapsed there dazed, half conscious for some unknown time. Was she dreaming? A spasmodic cough brought her around. Something trickled down her face. With a clearer head, she reached out and touched the door handles and they seemed warm. Was the fire on the other side, with the distiller? That pushed her back to a panic as she remembered the risk of explosion. Should she try a different way out? She staggered back up to a crouch. Beside her, the strange humming suddenly intensified and with a pop a ball of fire a metre across rolled up from a lab bench. The darkness after the ball extinguished seemed near total. Now she was glad of the heavy fireman’s coat. The smoke was getting bad now and it was hard to breath. There was a hissing sound from where the fireball appeared. She would have to go the other way and she started back toward the dummy feet. As she reached them, she suddenly noticed movement further ahead. She called out Is that you Tom? Thank god, I found you! (cough) This way is blocked. We need to get out of here fast. (cough) I can’t believe I thought you were this dummy on the floor! She reached to move the legs out of the way in the corridor, but suddenly her head began to swim horribly. Vision started to black out as the floor came up to hit her hard. Incredible pain lanced across her face and discontinuity swallowed her … a blackness without time.

A glint of metal showed in the gloom and a machine walked smoothly toward her on eight hydraulic legs. It was the watcher drone from the Physical Sciences section, a small but sturdy autonomous unit for remote monitoring. Three small video sensors regarded Echo from different angles. It paused in communication with something else. Then hydraulic manipulator arms gripped her tightly by her clothing. Lifting her easily onto its back, the watcher left the way it had come. It turned right passing down a blue hallway, picked its way carefully across a space of coffee tables and chairs and continued forward down a yellow passage, which was smoke free. It lowered Echo slowly to the floor and used an arm to open another inert door marked Physical Sciences, before carrying her inside, closing the door behind.

Back in the smoke-filled hall, Echo’s radio lay on the floor where it had dislodged when she fell. Echo! Echo, respond! … We found Tom. He is outside already … Echo, respond! … Echo, get back out here! There’s too much smoke. It’s not safe anymore! … Echo, respond! …, it squeaked, but there was no one to listen.

First Impressions

Discontinuity … and Echo remembered a spring three years ago.

It was a bright and cheerful day, fortunately enough. Echo’s stomach had been queasy last night and this morning. It was the stress, she figured. The truck bounced along the frost heaved road on its hard leaf springs. Yesterday, the drive to Kanata had been enjoyable. Her classmate, Norm, (he was always overly concerned, poor dear) had wanted her to take the train, or at least the bus. But there wasn’t a good way to get to Kanata by transit and she had been looking forward to the drive.

Good old Norm, she thought fondly of his tousled red hair, piercing blue eyes and perpetual long stubble on his chin. He was always telling her stories about his notions of logical neighbourhoods generated by axioms in the world of arithmetic. But he was barely as tall as her shoulder and when he kissed her at the end of their one date, it was like kissing a cactus, she remembered. Although the date hadn’t gone well, he was still a very good friend and she suspected he still harboured feelings for her.

She regretted that Norm could not drive her to Kanata. His electric car simply did not have the range. Norm and his friend David had converted an old nondescript subcompact from the wrecking yard, but it used a conventional DC motor and lead acid batteries, much as had been done in Switzerland for decades. Her battered old pickup truck was not the message she was trying to send for her job interview, but it was free. It was also so old that everything likely to go wrong had already been fixed. Her father had always been a bit proud of the fact that it was originally built as a propane powdered vehicle.

Just look at that spark-plug! he would exclaim, holding out the bit of ceramic and metal. It still looks like new, and the engine oil is the same. The propane just burns so clean!

That was a long time ago. Dad was gone. Just finally wore out. But the truck still trundled along. The poor old thing is old enough to be a historic vehicle, she thought. She had half a dozen offers to buy it. DIYers like this kind of vehicle, Dad had said. There is so much empty space under the hood you could crawl right in. Ha ha. So, with the old truck in mind, she had taken the less travelled route, eschewing the 401 (boredom trail) and going through the southern portion of the Canadian Shield by way of the venerated highway 7. The truck’s over-sized propane tank provided a range of over 1,000 km, which persuaded her not to divert onto the shorter 7A, but to keep to the original old route and had bounced the next 5 hours through beautiful countryside.

Being the middle of the week, traffic had been light, with little evidence of the infamous cottage weekend delays. As she had approached Kanata, density had increased in the presence of Ottawa a bit further east. She had exited near Black’s Corners and roughly paralleled the highway across country, through Goulbourn until she reached the hotel, up regional road 59. It was the kind of hotel she always booked; a quick check-out and complimentary breakfast.

She was wondering if breakfast had been a good idea today, as she drove along Terry Fox Drive and past the well named Innovation Drive, where corporate giants like Blackberry and Cisco Systems could be found, housed in gleaming glass office towers. On Old Second Line Road, she realized the city was behind her; housing on one side and woods on the other. It might be very nice living in this area, she thought, noting the road sign South March Highlands Conservation Forest, Brady Trail-head. The road she was looking for came up next. As she turned left onto Old Carp Road, there was now woods on both sides. Soon, a high frost fence appeared at her right and after about a kilometre she reached a modest but solid looking dark grey sign with white lettering Intuitionistic Biotechnology Security Inc at the head of a narrow newly asphalted lane. As the lane curved away into the woods, there was nothing to be seen from the road, which was strange since the underbrush had been mostly cut as if a flock of sheep had passed by. This was not how Echo had imagined her destination would appear. It was already 0947 and her interview was scheduled for 1000. She paused for a moment uncertainly, but decided this had to be the place and wheeled the truck up the lane. Best to get going.

Dr Allen McCarthy, Chief Technology Officer (CTO), stood in the ground floor lobby and searched the mostly empty parking lot for an unfamiliar vehicle. He liked being organized and ready, which was why he was now waiting in front of the windows at 0947 for a 10 o’clock meeting. Of all the myriad tasks he must deal with on a typical day, appointments and meetings were his least favourite. It was hard to know what would happen in one. How could he anticipate all the ways things could turn out and be prepared for that? There was nothing to be done, but his mind could not stop whirring through scenario after imagined scenario. It was intolerable and kept him awake