The New Guy in Moon Base Twelve

Chapter Eight

As a professor and leader of men, Rayburn Willis had a way with students, especially young male students, whom he impressed as being the sort of man they should all like to become some day. This pattern had carried him through his years in the service, academia, the commercial world and straight on through to the Moon Base Project. He was already on his third such young man at the Base, a physicist and programmer named Barley MacDunhill. Barley was the most youthful of the whole crew. At a mere twenty two years old, it was a close call for the commission, but they'd decided his attributes outweighed any possible age-related concerns.

His main qualification was software wizardry. Even as a tween he'd pioneered mind-numbingly obvious (in retrospect) algorithms for interpersonal search, using published lifestyle patterns to detect and predict behavioral patterns with results so startling they had previously been seen only on every crime scene detective TV show. The proofs he offered were so complete it made a person's daily life hardly seem worth living at all, as predictable and trivial as he could easily demonstrate it all to be. Your opinion of your neighbor's new haircut was intimately related to the next brand of shampoo you would purchase. Your remark at a certain moment after dinner was tied directly to the next beverage you'd select. There was no effect for which Barley could not reasonably presume the cause. It was a relief to many of his colleagues to see him blasted off into space. They all immediately felt slightly less superfluous.

MacDunhill had no evil intentions. He didn't even use his programs. He was a shy, pimply young man who still smelled of his mother's bath salts, who still wore the same red wool sweaters his grandmother gave him every Christmas. He was perpetually in a bit of a sweat, even though his stress levels on Rolanda's tran-fi measured lower than a sleeping possum. He lived in a virtual world of infinite ifs and else-ifs, and would usually look right past the person talking to him as if they had pointed at something interesting off to one side. When he spoke it was with polite hesitation, as if he expected to be always interrupting someone far more interesting than himself. He saw Willis as a sort of God, a man who had been everywhere and done everything and washed his hands and started all over again from scratch. He jumped at the chance to do any favor Willis asked of him.

This favor especially - to track down the real story of one New Guy named Martin. From the image scans Willis had taken, Barley MacDunhill immediately began several parallel global queries, not just a mere visual search. He pounded out scripts heretofore unimagined and unimaginable, based on combinations of left eyebrow and bottom right molar, on pupil dilation in combination with cheekbone inflation, on individual hair strand swirls, on the universally unique identifiable markers of bi-facial arrangements of freckles and pores. There would be no chance this Martin could escape the ultimate resolution, and within minutes, the target was in his sights. Targets, actually. Martin was a hybrid, according to Barley MacDunhill's results. He was part-Albert Gwynn of International Falls, Minnesota, part-Palash Kapoor of Anaheim, California, part-Derek Lee of Hoboken, New Jersey and part-Chura Kliwvasha of Spangle, Washington. Barley handed the printout to Rayburn Willis, who glanced at it skeptically.

"There can be no doubt," Barley told him. "Martin is these men, precisely."

"How can one man be four men?" Willis growled. He had a lot of respect for Barley's programming skills, but he recognized nonsense when he saw it, a skill MacDunhill apparently lacked.

"The program doesn't lie," Barley shrugged. It was clear to him, in any case. A properly formulated question produces a single and proper answer every time. He had submitted the evidence, and received an absolute verdict. Martin was these men, these men only and no others. Willis wasn't satisfied.

"Try it again," he insisted, handing the paper back to Barley, who widened his eyes in the most condescending manner possible, and returned his attention to the computer. He would plug in a few more variables, but was certain the response would be the same. Willis shook his head and walked away. He not only recognized nonsense, but also knew a dead end when he came to one. There would be no outlet there.