Extinction Code

by James D. Prescott

  “What makes you so certain it was one of us?” Jack asked, stating what others in the room were probably also wondering. “We’ve been down here for a while now.”

  “Yes,” Stark said. “But that fat fiberoptic cable running down to the Orb gives you access to the outside world. Someone sent out ten emails with nearly the exact same picture and video files attached to each one. They did everything but lay a trail of breadcrumbs to the structure.”

  “Ship,” Grant corrected him.

  “Excuse me?” Stark snapped.

  “We’ve discovered that it’s a ship,” he went on, folding his sunburnt hands under his armpits. The flesh on his face was peeling, giving him the distinct appearance of a charbroiled chicken. “Landed here approx―”

  “Crashed,” Dag corrected him.

  “Yes, of course.” Grant leaned forward. “It crashed quite a while ago, ending life for a good seventy-five percent of the species on earth.”

  “So they attacked us?” Stark asked, his jaw tightening.

  “Hmm, not exactly.” Jack jumped in, rocking forward in his chair. “Homo sapiens, heck, homo anything, wasn’t around sixty-five million years ago. So they weren’t exactly attacking us.”

  “So what are we looking at here?” Stark asked. “A joy ride through space?”

  Jack smiled and planted his feet. “That’s what we’re trying to figure out. I have a feeling if we can decrypt their language we might answer that question.”

  “Well, that little stunt you people pulled will likely spell the end of this research project. I just got off the phone with the president. Due to its sensitive nature, Secretary of Defense Myers is being flown in to oversee the operation. Not to mention Naval Intelligence has plans to deploy sooner than expected. And let me assure you, when they arrive, their only mission will be to extract as much foreign technology as they can get their hands on. So whatever you need to do, do it quickly.”

  The screen went black.

  “From now on,” Olsen informed them, “all digital access to topside is restricted.”

  Rajesh raised his hand. “What about Anna’s servers on the rig? She must be able to access them.”

  Olsen didn’t look hopeful. “I’ll see what I can do, but to everyone else it’s off limits.” He flicked through screens on his tablet and floated them over to the big screen. “It isn’t all bad news, thank goodness. Information on the hull composition has just come in. It appears to be eighty-six percent magnesium and fourteen percent silicon carbide particles. The technicians up top are calling it a nanocomposite metal and say whoever manufactured it needed to disperse and stabilize nanoparticles in molten metals, a process they suspect was performed in a zero-G environment.” Olsen raised his eyebrows. “That mean anything to you?”

  “Sure does,” Gabby said, rubbing her neck.

  “Humans have only just become aware of this sort of thing,” Grant said.

  “What he’s saying is that whoever crashed that ship into the Yucatán Peninsula was only a few hundred years more advanced than we are today.”

  “At least a few hundred years,” Eugene added. “But no more than a thousand. And who knows where they are now, sixty-five million years after the fact.”

  “For all we know,” Jack said, “they’ve blown themselves to smithereens.”

  Gabby grimaced. “The more we get to know them, the more they sound just like us.”

  Chapter 28

  Mia and Ollie stood hunched over Armoni’s shoulder as she opened the now-decrypted USB.

  “Whoever scrambled this thing really didn’t want anyone getting inside,” the hacker said, enlarging the window.

  Frowning, Mia remarked, “Alan was always ultra-protective of his work.” She recalled how scientists working in the lab were prohibited from bringing home research data they’d collected. Banning samples and biological material made perfect sense, but even laptops had to stay behind. That meant long hours at the lab. Back then, Mia had assumed this was Alan’s twisted way of keeping her close to him.

  “Uptight about security,” Armoni replied. “There’s an understatement if ever I heard one. You wouldn’t believe the hoops I had to jump through to crack this little sucker. I’ve only ever seen anything like this once before.”

  The thought crossed Mia’s mind that Armoni’s supposed hardships could very well be part of a ploy to extract more money from them.

  With the window now enlarged, three folders became visible: BreakerAlt, GenMark and SS Genome.

  “Click on ‘SS Genome,’” Mia suggested, rushing back to grab Alan’s notebook from her red knapsack. Much of what he’d written there was a jumble of ideas that had occurred to him throughout his research on Salzburg.

  Armoni did so. “It’s asking to install a program called GeneMark-ET v.4.29,” she said a moment later when a window popped up requiring her confirmation.

  “Do it,” Mia said. “I can’t imagine Alan would have entrusted this to me only so he could infect your system with a virus.”

  Armoni ran a protective scan on the program anyway. When it turned up negative for viruses or malicious software, she unpacked and installed it. Once finished, GeneMark opened up, filling the majority of the program window with a series of letters. GATC. Scrolling down with her mouse, Armoni whistled. “There sure is a lot of this stuff.”

  They were looking at pages and pages of genetic information containing the Salzburg genome.

  Ollie snickered. “What do you call half a chromosome again?”

  “A chromatid,” Mia replied. “That is, one side of it, but holding all the DNA information for that chromosome.”

  “Yeah, that’s right. Who woulda thought such a small chromatid could pack so much punch?”

  What neither Ollie nor Armoni realized was that some ninety-seven percent of what made up Salzburg contained non-coding DNA, a number that was also true for the other twenty-three chromosomes in the human body. Some liked to call it junk DNA, since it was part of the genome not related to a specific gene, or, put another way, sections of DNA that did not code for proteins. But recent discoveries had demonstrated that the disparaging nickname was far from accurate. Instead of being useless, scientists were only beginning to understand that non-coding DNA helped to regulate how our genes expressed themselves. And that was just the tip of the iceberg. Mia was confident that in the coming years we would begin to truly appreciate the full role non-coding DNA played in our daily lives as well as our genetic evolution.

  Mia leafed through Alan’s notebook, searching for clues about how he had discovered any kind of message in all this. Technical terms jumped out at her from every page. Information theory, cryptography, statistical analysis. Ten pages in, she found ‘Breaker1’ underlined three times. They had a folder named ‘BreakerAlt’. She knew about Breaker1 from her work as a researcher. It was an algorithm designed to help locate genes by signaling their most likely location in a genetic sequence. But Mia had never heard of BreakerAlt before. She suggested they start there.

  Armoni ran the BreakerAlt algorithm on the genetic material for Salzburg. The process took close to half an hour and Mia’s legs were starting to buckle. Ollie fetched a plastic folding chair from the kitchen and offered it to her.

  Smiling, she thanked him, and then returned her attention to the screen. After the algorithm had run its course, a new stream of data emerged. It had somehow taken the four letters of the genetic code and simply jumbled them further.

  Mia sighed, tapping her pant leg to an invisible beat. “We’re missing something.” She went back to the notebook for any other clues.

  “If you ask me,” Ollie offered, growing more annoyed by the second, “this Alan guy was batshit crazy.”

  “I’ll be the first to attest that Alan was a lot of things,” Mia admitted, shocked to be defending him. “But crazy he was not.”

  Armoni swiveled in her chair. “Looking at all these letters gives me a headache.” Her eyes turned to the heavens, her arms splayed,
bellyaching to God or whatever deity she happened to believe in. “Oh, great Creator, what on earth was wrong with using zeros and ones? I’ll take binary any day of the week.”

  Mia smiled and was about to turn back to the notebook when something struck her. “What did you just say?” she asked Armoni.

  The hacker regarded her with a look of uncertainty. “Uh, these letters give me a headache?”

  “No, after that,” Mia said with renewed intensity.

  “I’ll take binary…”

  “That may be why this isn’t working,” she shouted.

  “Ladies, for the record, I have no idea what you’re on about,” Ollie interjected. “How about I put some coffee on?”

  “Hold the coffee,” Mia said, staring at the jumble of letters on the screen. “The genetic code consists of two base pairs formed from the letters GATC—guanine, adenine, thymine and cytosine. The structure of DNA forms a double helix—uh, think of a long winding ladder with each rung representing a base pair. In simple terms, that means that on a given rung of our imaginary ladder A is always paired with T and G is always paired with C. And it doesn’t matter what order they’re in. You can have AT or TA. The next rung might show GC or CG. But here’s the important part, A never goes with C or G, only with T.”

  “So you’re saying I shouldn’t have dropped out of school,” Ollie quipped.

  Mia, took Armoni by the hands. “I’m saying, just like computer code, DNA is also written in a binary format. If the message is in there, that’s how we’ll find it.”

  Chapter 29

  After Admiral Stark’s scathing rebuke and assessment that time was running out—and fast—the scientists agreed it was best to head back into the ship as soon as possible. Before donning his biosuit, Jack descended to the lab, where he found Grant running some last-minute tests on the substance from the translucent pouches. The mass spectrometer was nearly finished. It operated by creating a beam of ionized atoms from the sample. A magnetic field then diverted those atoms into sensors, called Faraday cups, that measured the isotopic signature and helped to identify the sample.

  A shrill beep sounded as a trio of pages emerged from the nearby printer. Grant went over and picked them up. Surprise emanated from the back of his throat.

  “Feel like sharing?” Jack asked, stepping closer to peek at the results.

  Grant cleared his throat. “Yes, of course. Um, hexadecanoic acid ethyl ester. Gallocatechin. Beta-tocopherol―”

  “You’re losing me,” Jack said, frowning.

  “It’s a consumable,” Grant replied, taking a final look before he let the paper drop to his side.

  “Food?”

  Grant nodded enthusiastically.

  “Can you tell what kind?”

  Grant glanced at the paper again. “My best guess is some sort of fruit. Something with compounds similar to a banana peel.”

  “Hmm, crates of banana peel mush,” Jack said, as though relishing the idea. “Doesn’t exactly sound appetizing. Most of the stuff we found was little more than a coarse powder.”

  “But it tells us this was a manned mission with a crew that was expecting to stick around for a while.”

  Jack swallowed down the taste of banana in his mouth. “So where did they go?”

  •••

  Thirty minutes later, they were back on the ship. Anna headed to the bridge where she would attempt to decipher the alien language. It was a long shot, but Jack had seen mysterious hieroglyphs cycling across the display screens. It wasn’t much, but at least it was a start. Perhaps if they found a library somewhere on board, they could redeploy her.

  This time, Jack teamed up with Grant and Dag to form team one, while Hart, Gabby and Eugene would stick together to form team two. Team one’s mission was to see if they could reach the bottom floor. Perhaps there they might get a glimpse of the ship’s propulsion and any damage that might have been caused by the impact. Meanwhile, team two would descend one level at a time, taking care to investigate any notable rooms or areas of interest.

  The three men maneuvered down the ramp, chasing away the darkness with their powerful lights.

  “I should be used to this,” Grant said, his reddened face a mask of nostalgia. “My father worked as a coal miner all his life. Left at dawn, came home after dark. He went days on end without seeing a single ray of sunlight. My overriding memory of the man was his skin stained with coal dust and his bulging eyes. Once he took me along, deep into the guts of the earth. The smell, the chill in the air. I’ll never forget it.”

  “Sounds like he wasn’t around much,” Dag said, adjusting the light on his helmet, which was flickering on and off.

  “What child ever sees their parents enough?” Grant threw back. “Maybe nowadays things are somewhat different with fathers staying home. But back in my day, you were grateful for what little time you got. I loved the old man and looked up to him. Wanted to be a coal miner myself, until I realized I’d never really gotten over my fear of the dark.”

  Jack caught his eye and motioned to the inky blackness before them. “I suppose this time, the coal mine found you.”

  The other two laughed.

  “Don’t worry, Jack. I won’t go and wet myself. My antipathy for the dark is nowhere near your fear of flying.”

  “That may be so, but I still fly when I need to,” Jack replied, challenging the biologist. “Sure, I grit my teeth and knock back a drink or two when I can, but I fly.”

  Dag piped in. “I heard about your fear of flying the first time we worked together.”

  “The Popigai diamond mine,” Jack said.

  “Yes, quite a find,” Dag said. “Helped to cement your reputation as the diamond whisperer. And it was only on the next job we worked that I found out you ran a zoo.”

  Jack flashed his teeth in a hearty laugh. “It’s a rescue farm.”

  “Oh, that’s right. So what fun fact will I learn about the great Jack Greer this time around?”

  “Maybe that I’m no good at giving interviews.”

  Dag’s eyes narrowed in amusement. “I doubt that very much. Your pitch to DiCore seemed to do the trick, although I’m sure they’re beginning to realize finding any lucrative gems at the impact site isn’t gonna happen.”

  Jack agreed. “Well, at least they can take some solace knowing their company name will forever be attached to the story of man’s greatest discovery, namely that we are not alone in the universe. But to answer your question, you’ve probably heard everything about me worth knowing.”

  They reached another ramp and continued even deeper.

  “There is that rumor about your father,” Grant said. “Although I understand if you don’t feel like discussing it.”

  Jack felt his teeth click shut. “What’s to say? Your dad was a coal miner, mine was… well, something else.”

  “I heard he was a famous geologist at NASA,” Dag replied in awe. “That he studied the moon rocks and died in a plane crash at twenty-three. Of course, that would have made you―”

  “Six months old,” Jack said, not sure he was interested in heading down memory lane. It was a path filled with webs of shadows and lies, a little like the journey they were on right now. “I distinctly remember hearing the name Kip Greer a half dozen times a day growing up. My mother seemed determined to keep his memory alive any way she could.

  “It was true, my old man was a scientist and, growing up in Houston, something of a local hero. I guess it’s one of the reasons I eventually became a geophysicist. But the road I took to get there wasn’t a straight one. I’d just become a teenager when my mother met a man named Roy Bradley. An insurance salesman. He was a moose of a man with a booming voice and a fondness for hard liquor. The sorta guy who made you feel like you were his bud. Unless, that is, you didn’t quite see the world the way he did. Then all that charm melted away like ice on a hot summer’s day.

  “For some reason, Roy was determined to prove he was better than me. Quite frankly, I’m not sure why
, but by my senior year of high school I’d had enough and ran away. Worked on oil rigs in the Gulf for a while before I found my way back to school and to a degree. By then, Roy had drunk himself into a coffin from cirrhosis. My mother soon followed.

  “All I had left was a father I’d never known, Kip Greer. So I did what any son should have a long time ago. Once a month I started visiting the cemetery, laying a bouquet of flowers by his grave. But I wasn’t the only one. Seemed like whenever I showed up, I found a bundle of white tulips resting up against his headstone.

  “It got me curious. I mean, was NASA laying these down for my dad on account of him being a hero struck down in his prime? Slowly that kernel of curiosity grew into a full-blown obsession and I began staking out his grave. I needed to know who it was who kept showing up.”

  Jack stopped at the base of the ramp. “Then one day I see her. A tall woman in a trenchcoat. She’s attractive, about my age. I get out of the car and go up and ask her if she knew my father and her face goes as white as the bouquet of tulips in her hand. She tells me Kip was her uncle. That he never married and, as far as she knew, never had any children. You can imagine I had to stabilize myself. Here we were, two strangers standing eye to eye and both of us just about ready to topple over. I wasn’t sure what to believe and didn’t have anyone left alive who could clear things up.

  “When I got home I went through my mother’s possessions and that’s when I found it. An article she’d clipped from the Houston Chronicle announcing the plane crash that killed a young NASA scientist named Kip Greer. I dug a little longer before I came upon a visitor’s pass in her name to the Texas State Penitentiary. She’d gone to meet a prisoner there by the name of Ike Greer. A guy in prison for petty larceny and insurance fraud. Guess my mom had a fetish for insurance men.