Anna walked towards a control panel next to the jetty and pressed a lever. Somewhere below her feet, something started to hum. Below the surface of the lake, a gate to the sea slid open, and the water began to glow as light from the bright water outside filtered upwards.
“Heel, Mutt!” Anna commanded. The little dog was programmed to follow her anyway, but she liked to sound as if she was in charge of him.
She ran down the jetty and opened the transparent hatch on top of the submarine’s roof. She lowered herself down into the cabin, and was just in time to catch Mutt as he tumbled in after her, barking furiously.
“Quiet, Mutt!” Anna commanded. “Sit!”
Mutt sat down on the seat next to her, his tail wagging and his rubber tongue drooping from his muzzle. Anna looked at him. She knew that Mutt was just a robot, but she loved him. She remembered the story of Pinocchio that her father had once read to her, and she often wondered what it would be like if Mutt turned into a real dog.
The controls of the small submarine were simple. A steering stick determined direction: left, right, up or down. A thumb-controlled button set the speed. The harder you pressed down, the faster you could go. (When Anna had first attempted to drive the Sub, she’d been nervous and so they’d shot through the water like a tuna fish.) There were many other buttons on the glowing dashboard. They controlled searchlights, cameras, electronic arms with drills, and buckets in which samples could be collected.
All of this was confusing, but Anna knew she could simply ask Max if she needed help with anything. Still, she felt nervous as she strapped herself into the driver’s seat. Maybe she should wait … It would be so much nicer if she were sitting next to her clever mother or the ingenious Ton.
But she had Mutt, perched on the seat beside her, his tail still wagging and his eye lenses glowing brightly.
Anna took the dagger out of her satchel and put it on her lap. Adventure versus a boring Saturday with everybody busy with their own stuff?
She pressed the “start” button.
Max’s voice immediately filled the small cabin.
“Good morning, Miss Anna! I did calculates the odds of a young human female staying at home when adventure is beckonings, and I knew you would comes!”
Anna smiled. “Morning, Max. Our mission today is to find the Chivonne, and uncover her treasures. I hope you are not too busy to help me?”
“Of course not, Miss Anna. I can multitasks! At this moment I is also helps Ton monitors Pip’s mumpskins, and helps your mother saves the world. But I has plenty of terabytes left to plays with Anna. No problem!”
“This is no game, Max!” Anna said, exasperated. Would anybody ever take her seriously? “You’re not going to tell anyone about our trip, right?”
“I has no instructions to do so. You wants me to tells Professor Sabatina?”
Artificial intelligence acts very differently from biological life forms, Anna remembered. As clever as Max was, he couldn’t really think for himself, and the complexities of human relationships were something he didn’t understand.
“No thanks, Max. I wouldn’t want to bother her while she’s busy saving the world. Let’s just go!”
Anna pressed the steering stick forward and down. Gliding smoothly, the little submarine pushed its nose into the dark water. When they were completely submerged, Anna made a slick turn towards the light streaming through the ocean gate.
Like a silver bubble, the Submarine Explorer gracefully escaped the confines of the cavern and cruised out into the open sea.
Chapter 17
SECTOR 16
The admiral was floating in front of a huge iron door. It was marked “Sector 16”.
He quickly learnt that the door was locked with a person identifier, a security device he had engineered himself. The person identifier recognised the characteristic brainwaves of whoever approached it, and would only open the door if the person was authorised to enter.
Clearly, this door had been programmed to keep the admiral out.
He knew there was no way to bypass this technology, as he himself had built it to be absolutely foolproof. The door looked thick and very solid. He contemplated the prospect of blowing it up. He had to find out what was hidden away in his own Space Ark!
There was only one person who could be behind this, he thought. But there never had been secrets between him and Uranus Drake – they’d been friends since their early school days. Back then, schooling on the islands had been limited and so the young Abraham Atom had been sent away to a boarding school, where he’d met the young Uranus. They’d shared a love of science and nature, and had quickly become firm friends. Together they’d hiked mountains and done crossword puzzles on lazy Saturday afternoons, and after school they’d elected to attend the same university. Abraham Atom had pursued his scientific career in the navy, and later they’d both been founding members of US.
Though Admiral Atom had to admit that his friend had been acting increasingly strange recently.
The admiral steered his weightless form towards the passage with the intention of going to the workshop to look for a tool that could penetrate Sector 16. As he moved away from the door, he heard a soft hissing sound. He looked back and saw that the seal around the door appeared wider and was bulging slightly.
The door was unlocked!
Swiftly he turned and moved towards the door. A firm metal click announced that the door had locked itself again. He repeated the experiment by moving away and towards the door a few times. The door locked and unlocked itself, as if unable to make up its mind.
The person identifier on this door had somehow been reversed. The door locked itself as he approached, and unlocked when he left. It therefore recognised his brainwaves, and instead of unlocking the door, the person identifier was locking it as soon as he approached!
The admiral was now more determined than ever to enter this sector. As U6 was clearly programmed to keep Sector 16 a secret, it was no use asking her for help. He’d have to figure this out by himself.
How was he to fool the person identifier?
The admiral suddenly thought of the device he’d been working on over the past weeks. It was something he called a “molecular scrambler”; an instrument that was meant to jumble up the molecules of a biological life form and piece them back together again in their exact formation after a short period in a sort of liquid state. Admiral Atom had conceived of the idea for the molecular scrambler while trying to solve the mystery of the fateful accident that had caused his own molecules to become so unsettled. Now he was developing it as a way to transport large and dangerous animals like crocodiles. The molecular scrambler, if it worked, would be able to reduce such an animal to a simple package that could be reconstructed when it arrived on the Space Ark.
It was still early days though, and he hadn’t yet successfully got the molecular scrambler to work. The
