Trinity's Legacy

by P A Vasey

  Baker was staring at the screen, an unreadable look on his face. Power was wide-eyed. There were muted mutterings and low voices around the room as people looked at each other in what I assumed was disbelief. Holland snapped a finger at a technician, and the screen changed to reveal a photograph of stars, in the centre of which were the hazy spiral arms of a galaxy. The technician moved some cursors around and the image zoomed in on a starless area in the middle of a torus of orange and yellow gas clouds. Holland waved a laser pointer at the centre of the void.

  “This is from NASA’s WISE space telescope. It’s a false-colour mid-infrared image. Enhance, please. This is an optically dark point in space, an infrared bright galaxy that is seemingly bereft of stars. However, using computer algorithms designed to predict and detect the thermodynamic consequences of galactic-scale colonisation, we think this is what an massive cluster of Dyson spheres would look like.”

  Again with the rocket-scientist speak.

  “Dyson spheres?” I asked, “like the vacuum cleaners?”

  “Different Dyson,” said Holland, sounding irritated that he had to explain things. “An idea from the ’60s. A concept really, one which posits that an expanding, technologically advanced culture would ultimately be limited by access to energy and would be driven to harvest all the available light from their stars. Dismantling a planet or two in each solar system would give them the raw material to build star-enveloping sheets of solar energy collectors.”

  Hubert was ashen-faced. “How much more technologically advanced would such a culture be, compared to our own?”

  “There’s a formula devised by Carl Sagan at NASA,” said Holland. “He postulated that a civilisation capable of building a Dyson sphere would be approximately one thousand years more advanced than us. To build enough spheres to encase most of the galaxy’s stars - well, that would take another millennium, or more.” Holland took a deep breath. “Speculation, of course.”

  “But, that’s what you think we’re seeing?” I said, in a softer voice.

  Holland nodded, his lips tight. There was a shuffling and murmuring around the table, predominantly between the military contingents; the scientists had already been briefed by Holland and were less animated. He changed the picture again, and an image of a nuclear bomb test in the Nevada desert appeared, magnificent and frightening at the same time.

  “This is a fifty megaton atomic weapon going off in the late 1950’s, just a few miles from here. It was part of a series of tests designed to produce small, mobile atomic weapons from novel elements. The project, termed ‘Trinity Deus’ was canned after a disastrous failure that occurred right where we’re standing. Disastrous, because it punched a hole in space-time and generated a wormhole. A tunnel through space-time. A tunnel connecting us to an alien galaxy at the furthest resolution of our most powerful telescopes. We’re talking deep space and vast distances. Light takes millions of years to get there.”

  “So why haven’t more aliens come through?” said Baker.

  Holland smiled grimly. “The wormhole ain’t tethered over there. I think it opens at completely random locations in their galaxy. They’ve no way of knowing where it’s going to be.”

  I raised a hand. “So here - in our own backyard – the wormhole appears for a few minutes, once a day, as the earth turns.”

  “That’s correct.”

  “Trinity’s legacy,” I murmured. “Welcome to Earth.”

  Holland and Baker looked at me with annoyance. Holland puffed up his chest and affected a look of confidence, which I was sure he didn’t feel.

  “We’ve obtained the exact design and components of the nuclear device and my team are analysing it as we speak. The plan is to reverse-engineer the formula, and then, close the wormhole in this galaxy. End of problem.”

  He put down the laser pointer, leaned back against the wall, looked at me and gave an oily smirk. My hackles started to rise.

  “Well you’d better get started then,” I said. “You’re on the clock.”

  He shot me a thundery glance and looked around the room. “Dr Morgan here, is certain that the alien is already in possession of these data. She believes it’ll try to transmit the formula to the other galaxy via the SETI transmitter thus enabling the other aliens to stabilise the wormhole and forge a permanent connection between our galaxies.” He curled his lips and threw the laser pointer on the table. “I’ve told Dr Morgan that there’s no way any signal from SETI could reach their galaxy. Not in a million years.”

  Baker held up a hand. “Seems pretty straightforward to me. We need to close down the wormhole, or destroy it.”

  I glanced at them both, incredulous. “Shouldn’t you be figuring out how to communicate with Adam Benedict, and the alien inside his head? I mean, shouldn’t that be the priority?”

  Holland gave a little laugh, and asked the technician to change the picture again. The CT scans of Adam Benedict appeared.

  “Adam Benedict? He’s just a machine. All machines can be turned off. Shorted out. Unplugged.”

  I was pissed, so I stood up and grabbed the laser pointer from the table in front of him. I strode up to the screen and pointed it at the silhouette of Adam’s body.

  “This ‘machine’ has been shot at point blank range by a shotgun with little or no obvious damage. It can move very fast and is far stronger than it looks.” I directed the red dot at the edges of the body outline. “There’s a thin integument here which looks skin-like on the surface, but isn’t. It’s some form of artificial covering to make it look human. This covering heals itself - or maybe ‘repairs’ itself is a better description. Underneath this outer layer is a carapace or shell, which looks to be about half an inch thick and transparent to x-rays. The whole body weighs less than ninety pounds.”

  Baker looked up from his phone. “I’m no engineer, doctor, but this thing doesn’t sound very robust at all. Shouldn’t be difficult to put down.”

  I used the laser pointer to highlight the prickly-looking sphere in the chest cavity. “Maybe this has something to do with it. If only we knew what it was. And that other structure in the head area - my working theory is that the mind of Adam Benedict, and that of the alien, is housed in that structure. The sphere in the chest seems to be linked to everything else, so I think that’s some sort of power source. But I could be wrong, guilty of anthropomorphic error, because on the outside it looks human-shaped. But then, so do you Dr Holland.”

  I put down the laser pointer and sat back in my seat, biting my lip. I tried to slow my breathing, and regain some control before I said something I might regret.

  Holland was again on his feet and started pacing in front of the screen. “Human-shaped, but not human. Not anymore. We need to de-humanise this creature.”

  “You couldn’t be more wrong.” I said. “Adam – the human being inside this machine - I don’t think we’ve seen the full extent of what he can do. I heard the alien talking to him, telling him that there were ‘no limits’. That should worry us. I’ve seen him control electronic devices. He can access the energy-carrying waves of the electromagnetic spectrum. When I was linked to his mind, I could ‘see’ across the whole range of the EM spectrum - from infrared through visible light but also ultraviolet, x-rays and possibly even gamma rays.”

  The room was quiet, and even Baker had put down his phone and was looking at me. Holland had stopped pacing and looked flushed. Hubert had his hands steepled again. I appraised them all, fixing each and every one with a stare before moving on.

  “Whatever you’re planning to do – know this - he can get inside your head and read your thoughts. What you are calling a machine can project both Adam Benedict’s thoughts and those of the alien to us. We’re dealing with a telepathic entity.”

  “Sounds like mind control,” Baker laughed suddenly. “Like one of those ‘B’ movies from the 50’s.”

  I gave him a dispassionate stare. “General, you might want to think about what I’m saying here. I’ve had him inside
my head. He gets inside yours – you won’t be laughing.”

  Baker snorted and returned to his cell phone. Hubert stood up and put a hand on my shoulder, gradually guiding me back into my seat. He picked up the laser, and flicked the monitor over to another image. I recognised the burning husk of an F-16 being hosed down by a couple of fire trucks and in the background was the Jet Ranger I’d been flying in.

  “Dr Morgan’s right, “ he said, addressing the room. “Adam Benedict brought down two fighter jets by taking control of their electronic systems at a distance of a mile or more. He made two sidewinder missiles explode by remotely arming their proximity fuses as they were approaching at supersonic velocity.”

  One of the scientists, a young man with a blonde wispy goatee and an eyebrow piercing put up a hand. “So there’s a human in there. This Adam Benedict person. Why aren’t we trying to communicate with him? And through him, with the alien?”

  Baker straightened his shoulders, and his lips curled downwards. “Seems to me we have a duty of self-protection first and foremost.”

  Holland nodded vigorously. “Indeed. Also, I don’t understand how we can even communicate with them? They’re alien, after all, evolving in a completely different way to us. We need a linguistics specialist brought in.”

  “They understand us perfectly well,” I said. “It took them a matter of seconds to decode our neural pathways and learn our speech, our ways of thinking. We need to understand their behaviour. Their intentions. We need to change their perceptions of us.”

  Goatee became animated. “You said that Adam repeatedly stated ‘you are all in danger’? They can’t just want to wipe us out, just like that? Surely, with all that evolution comes a higher morality?”

  “Same way you take into account the rights and feelings of ants when you wipe out a nest in your back yard?” I said.

  “Finally something we agree about, doctor,” said Baker. “We’re now the ants. But even ants can overwhelm and defeat a much more powerful insect by sheer weight of numbers and co-operation. We need to put in place pro-active strategies and some offensive options.” He looked across the table, “Major Powers, show these nice folks what we’ve been doing while they’ve been sleeping.”

  I looked across at the young Major who nervously stood up and pulled out a clipboard. It looked incongruous in the room of tablet computers and high definition screens. He consulted his notes and cleared his throat.

  “The MAARS platform has been modified to be as impregnable to electronic incursion or sabotage as we can make it. Buffered with counter-jamming active EMR, it should be able to withstand any attempt to override its control functions. The same way Lindstrom’s panic room seemed to work, for a time at least.”

  “Could you just explain for the rest of us non-military types what the MAARS is?” I asked, somewhat testily.

  “Modular Advanced Armed Robotic System,” said Powers. “The most advanced mobile weapons platform we have. It’s fully loaded with sensors, and is armed with an M240B machine gun and four M203 grenade launcher tubes on a 360-degree rotating turret. It carries 450 rounds of machine gun ammo and four grenade rounds. We’ve situated ten of these around the site, driven wirelessly by offsite controllers.”

  I frowned. “What’s to stop him just knocking out the controllers?”

  “Distance,” said Baker, smugly. “The controllers are a hundred miles away at Creech, hopefully way outside his range of influence.”

  “So if we can jam his ability to shut the MAARS down,” continued Powers, “we can unload a lot of ordinance at him. In addition, we’ll have a couple of Predators above the theatre of operations armed with non-smart munitions.”

  I looked at Hubert, horrified, but he stood up and did that shuffling of papers that newsreaders do at the end of their bulletin. “Well, let’s hope it doesn’t come to that. The next predicted opening of the wormhole is in four and a half hours. Let’s get to work.”

  Baker and Powers nodded assent and there was a general scraping of chairs as people stood and made their way to the doors. Holland moved to the rear of the room, and out of the corner of my eye I saw him wave to the Goatee who wandered over, a puzzled look on his face. Holland put an arm around his shoulders and steered him over to a console. I had a funny feeling, and started to walk over to them but then Hubert stepped right in front of me.

  “You’re correct of course,” he said, “about needing to talk with the alien. Although all the information we’ve gathered to date suggests hostility, we haven’t attempted direct communication.”

  I thought about that. “You know, Adam always suppressed the alien when he could. He never let me talk with it. Said it was to protect me.”

  Hubert looked grim. “I wish we could get into his head.”

  I was about to reply but then saw that Holland and Goatee were leaving together, heads down and deep in conversation. Holland was still guiding him with an arm around his shoulder.

  “Kate,” said Hubert, interrupting my reverie, “we’ll leave for SETI in about sixty minutes. Be ready.”

  I nodded.

  Then I took off after Holland.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Ground Zero, Nevada Test Site

  Holland and Goatee hadn’t gone far.

  As I exited the building I saw Holland slide his passkey onto the lock of the adjacent office, which I remembered was the air-conditioned lab with all the computers and monitors. I wondered whether I should sneak a look through the window first, but they were all blacked out. There was no guard on the door and I remembered that I now had a pass, and access to all areas, being a ‘civilian consultant’ or something. I sidled up to the door and looked around. No one was taking any notice of me; the soldiers and FBI agents were continuing to shore up the fences and barriers and reinforcing the armaments around the site. I took the lanyard from my neck and pressed the card against the door. The light turned from red to green and there was a quiet click as it unlocked. I took a deep breath, pushed the door open and slipped inside. The room was as noisy as I remembered from the hum of generators and computer fans. It was dark, lit only by a strip of sunlight coming through the window blind and the twinkling light from the monitors and electronic switches. Once again my nose was assailed with ozone and my breath started to frost over.

  The only occupants of the room, as far as I could see, were Holland and the Goatee, huddled together in front of a bank of video screens showing computer-generated graphs and digitalised representations of the wormhole when it had last opened. On the biggest screen was a blown up and enhanced image paused at the moment the sphere of light had contracted and the stars became visible. There was a coffee maker on the table next to them just out of their peripheral vision, and I edged over so that I could make out their conversation. Goatee was pointing at the screen and shaking his head.

  “So, your theory is that while this is a kind of wormhole, the mechanism is some form of quantum teleportation?”

  Holland nodded vigorously and put his pen behind his ear. “Has to be. That’s the only explanation from these data.”

  Goatee sat back from the screen, rubbing his eyes. The chronometer read 07:05AM. He pushed back from the table, stood up and yawned. “So in your scenario, physical objects aren’t actually transferred between here and that other galaxy, but data or information are?”

  “Yes, what we call ‘quantum objects’. Transferred from one location to another, again without physically moving.”

  They still hadn’t registered my presence, so I decided to noisily grab a cup and pour myself some stewed coffee from the pot. They both jumped, looking like naughty schoolboys. I smiled at their discomfiture. “Very interesting, but how do you explain the fact that Adam Benedict did actually go through? I mean, he was taken in and came back, physically changed.”

  Holland was trying not to act annoyed at my intrusion, and peered at my lanyard as if to check I had appropriate clearance to be there. “You following us, Dr Morgan?”

>   “Absolutely,” I replied. “But please, continue. We’re all on the same side, aren’t we?” I sat on the edge of the table, and crossed my legs. Goatee looked me up and down, but quickly averted his vision when I caught him doing it.

  Holland sat back in his chair and folded his arms. “Well, Adam Benedict wasn’t actually seen to go through the wormhole, was he Dr Morgan? I mean, according to the only eyewitness, Gabriel Connor, Adam was there one second, gone the next. We don’t really know exactly what happened. The mechanism of such a passage to another galaxy is … unknown.”

  I pursed my lips. “But what came back wasn’t Adam any more - it was some kind of machine, right? So there’s your evidence of an actual physical journey.”

  “Can’t argue with that,” said Goatee.

  Holland’s eyes were unsettlingly wide and he looked to be sweating despite the chill of the room. A film of moisture coated his upper lip and his armpits looked dark and damp.

  “Adam’s a good man,” I continued. “He didn’t ask for this. It wasn’t exactly his choice to be humanity’s ‘representative’.”

  “Maybe not,” said Holland. “But doesn’t it worry you that he’s got the alien’s ear? I mean, he’s not a scientist nor is he a diplomat, and he’s certainly not trained in first contact.”

  I wasn’t sure how to respond to that, so I climbed off the table and went to look out of the window. It was clear that the military preparations and fixed fortifications had been augmented throughout the night. An army Chinook was banking away from the site, having deposited another two dozen or so soldiers and their equipment on the one open lip of the crater. The rest of the structure was enclosed by scaffolding and topped off by the canopy. Aluminium ladders leading down into the cavern floor were guarded by MPs. Goatee joined me at the window as I watched all the activity with a feeling of foreboding. I got the distinct impression he was feeling the same disquiet.