“Anyway, wasn’t long before I found a diary she kept and pieced it all together. Turns out she met Ike at a state fair and the two had something of a whirlwind romance that night in the back of his Buick. But Ike wasn’t a nine-to-fiver. He was an impatient man, eager to make a buck the fast way, the easy way. That his business plans were distinctly illegal didn’t matter much to him. By the time my mother realized the future with Ike was bound to be a bleak one, she was already six months pregnant. And in those days, unwed mothers weren’t nearly as fashionable as they are today. Not long after I was born, she happened upon the article about Kip Greer’s death. The last name was the same and the space race was well underway. In her mind, she had finally found the perfect role model for her little Jack, even if it was all built on a foundation of BS.”
Grant and Dag stood in stunned silence.
Jack stared back. “You wanted the truth, didn’t you?”
They both nodded, digesting everything he’d said.
“Is Ike still alive?” Dag asked, uncertain whether he should.
“Unfortunately, he is.”
“Any plans to visit him?”
“Probably not,” Jack replied. “What for? To find out how to cheat insurance companies? No, thanks.”
The three men continued in silence, hugging the outer bulkhead, descending yet another level.
“Dr. Greer,” a female voice said, chiming into their private radio channel.
“What is it, Anna?”
“I thought you should be made aware. I was in the process of cataloguing the extraterrestrial symbology here on the bridge when a new string of images appeared.”
“Can you show me?” he asked.
“Please hold.”
A moment later, Anna patched a video feed from the bridge into each of their OHMD glasses. The visual showed a console with a short row of constantly shifting holographic symbols.
“I don’t recall seeing that earlier,” Grant admitted.
Dag agreed. “Maybe Anna touched something.”
“I can assure you I did no such thing,” the robot replied with a touch of sass.
“At this time I suggest you continue your cataloguing procedures,” Jack advised her. “Unless you have an idea what they’re saying.”
“Unlike the others I have seen on the bridge, these new symbols are alternating at a predictable rate. I have observed the changes over the last sixty-four minutes and thirty-five seconds. Based on that limited sample, I am prepared to offer an initial hypothesis.”
“It’s called a guess,” Jack offered. “Go ahead, I’m all ears.”
There was silence on the other end. Then, “It appears to be a timer,” Anna said.
The three men exchanged glances. “Can you tell whether it’s counting up or down?” Jack asked.
“Not with complete certainty. Although I could… guess.”
“Go ahead.”
“The clock is counting down.”
Jack felt the temperature of the blood in his veins drop by ten degrees. Scanning from Grant to Dag, he could see the same question on all of their lips.
What would happen when the clock reached zero?
As if in response, Jack felt a low vibration, followed by a rumbling. The platform beneath his feet began to shudder.
Grant’s eyes flashed a look of intense fear.
The hell’s going on? those eyes were asking. But Jack didn’t know any more than he did.
The trembling grew more intense and with it came an electrical hum that pounded against his eardrums in successive blows. It seemed to continue for a minute, maybe more. Then all at once it was over.
Dag clung to a horizontal duct running along the bulkhead. Grant struggled to catch his breath.
Jack flipped to channel one and ordered a roll call. A rather frazzled Gabby, Eugene and Hart replied at once.
“The countdown?” he asked Anna. “Is it still up?”
“Negative, Dr. Greer.”
Chapter 30
After Armoni inputted the new binary parameters into the BreakerAlt algorithm, she ran it again. Up came the progress bar as the computer began crunching through the data.
Ollie yawned. “Coffee, anyone?”
“I’ll take you up on that offer,” Mia said.
He looked at Armoni.
“Grab me a Soylent, would you?” Armoni asked.
Ollie shook his head. “Is that all you ever have? I’ve known you for a few hours and I’m already worried about your health.”
“Thanks, Dad,” Armoni joked, turning back to the safety of her computer screens.
“So what’s your deal?” Mia asked as soon as Ollie left the room.
The hacker shrugged her shoulders. Never one to be brushed off, Mia pressed her again.
“Look, Mia, you’re nice and all, but I’m not exactly looking to make new friends.”
“I can respect that. But what are you interested in? I mean, how does a runaway become a world-famous hacker?”
“I never said I was a runaway.”
“You didn’t need to.”
Armoni fiddled with the mouse, minimizing the GeneMark program and pretending to sort through open folders. “I did what I needed to survive.”
“How’s that?”
“Your old man ever sneak into your room at night and when you tell your mom she accuses you of lying?” Armoni asked, pain and anger flaring in her eyes. Her lips had become a thin line of tension.
Mia felt the emotion in Armoni’s voice surge through her. “No, I can’t say that they did. My parents hated one another, but there was no abuse, not of the physical variety at least. They did what was expected in those days—they stayed together. They didn’t want to set a bad example for me and my sister. Till death do us part. That’s what they believed.”
“So I take it you’re married then?”
Mia let out a humorless little laugh. “I was once.” She tried shooing away the pain. She had hoped that working for the WHO would put her on a track toward stability and a life that included Zoey once again. But ever since leaving the States, things had only gone from bad to worse. She came back to the little girl trapped inside of her. “I suppose after watching my parents verbally peck away at each other all those years, the lesson I took away had nothing to do with commitment or thick and thin. The real lesson I learned was that marriages aren’t supposed to be happy.”
Armoni’s expression didn’t change. “That sounds rather hopeless, don’t you think?” the hacker asked her in a soft voice.
“I’m not saying that’s what I consciously believe. If I took a psych test I’m sure you’d find I’m as optimistic as the next person. But then take a look at the men in my life and you’ll find something far different.”
“I guess on some level we’re all a little messed in the head.”
“The human mind is a tremendous learning machine, unmatched by any computer we’ve ever made or ever will make. What we try to teach people, however, and what they come away with are often two different things.”
Ollie returned juggling two steaming mugs of coffee and a bottle of Soylent. He set them down right as the computer let out a loud beep.
“Perfect timing,” he said, clearly proud of himself.
Armoni pulled up the results. The DNA letters from the genetic code had now been replaced with reams of zeroes and ones. “Well, at least it’s in binary this time.”
“So how do we make sense of it?” Mia asked, feeling suddenly out of her depth.
But Armoni was already ahead of her, whizzing across the screen. “First things first, we need to convert it to ASCII.”
“Pardon me?” Mia asked.
Ollie sipped at his coffee and said, “I think she’s speaking Mandarin.”
ASCII stood for American Standard Code for Information Interchange, by far the most ubiquitous format used for text files and web pages. Each letter, number or special character was often represented by a string of eight zeroes and ones (a byte). Th
erefore, the letter A was represented by the following binary string: 01000001.
A few minutes later, as the progress bar reached one hundred percent, the digits on the screen were replaced by letters. Even with the eight-to-one reduction, the amount of information was massive. All three of them took a closer look. They had pages and pages of random letters, numbers and symbols arranged into walls of solid text. How would they ever sort through all of this? It was worse than looking for a needle in a haystack. It was like looking for a needle in a field of haystacks.
“I’ve got one more trick up my sleeve to separate the wheat from the chaff,” Armoni said.
“Oh, thank goodness,” Mia replied, feeling a momentary burst of optimism. “I was afraid if I looked through all those pages my eyes would pop out of my skull.”
Armoni brought up another program and imported the millions of characters from GeneMark. ASCII consisted of one hundred and twenty-eight characters, many of which were commands and symbols. She told them this new program would remove everything except for the twenty-six letters from the English alphabet and cut the number of pages they needed to search through by four-fifths. In only a matter of minutes, it was done. Once again, the process had cut down the pages of text. Now instead of nearly a thousand pages, they were left with one hundred and fifty.
“Let’s get this printed out,” Mia suggested. “Then each of us can scan through a stack of pages and see what we find.”
Just then, a blinding flash struck each of them. Mia blinked and rubbed at her eyes. This wasn’t like the first time it had happened. It was stronger.
Chapter 31
“Olsen, are you there?” Jack called out over the radio. Ever since the event, mission control on the Orb had been silent.
Hart came on. “I’m already on my way to check on him. It might be his radio is out.”
Jack hoped the commander was right, since their attempts to reach topside had also failed.
“Gabby and Eugene?” Jack asked. “What’s your status?”
“We’ll be staying here,” she answered for both of them. “We seem to be in some kind of repair shop. You should see this stuff.”
“Show us,” Jack said, delicately reminding her about the glasses she was wearing.
She giggled. “Duh. Okay, here it comes.”
The feed from Gabby’s camera was relayed to their visors. The frame shifted from a series of wide tables where strange-looking tools were laid out. Next to them was a metallic cone of some kind. It measured three feet wide and three feet high, with what looked like fiberoptic cables running out the bottom edges.
“I dare say that almost looks like the tip of a missile,” Grant exclaimed. He was joking, of course. What need would an advanced race have for such primitive weapons?
Gabby tracked the camera across the room.
“Whoa,” Jack called out. “Scroll back to the left, would you?”
She did so, revealing a large prolate spheroid, which was to say a machine of some sort shaped like a three-meter-high football.
“Back up a few paces.”
The image came into focus. The object bore a transparent membrane—either glass or an epoxy resin. Behind the membrane was an interior chamber.
“Looks to me like a probe of some kind,” Dag wondered out loud.
Jack stared intently. “Or something else.”
“Like an escape pod,” Grant added.
Hart came through a moment later. “Hey, Doc, I’ve reached the Orb and I found Olsen.”
Jack felt a lump rise in his throat. “Found? Is he all right?”
“He’s alive, but he must have gotten knocked out during the blast. Spotted him on the floor next to the communications equipment. He’s laid out now on a mattress I grabbed from Eugene’s bunk.”
A half-hearted protest rose up from the theoretical physicist.
“Yeah, well, you can bite me,” Hart fired back. “Anyway, it was a bitch and a half trying to lug that thing down two flights of narrow stairs. The Orb sure isn’t as spacious as the ship. Anyway, for now I’ll stay here and take over his duties.”
“Any word from topside?” Gabby asked.
“I’m trying them now,” he said, static hissing in the background as if to underscore his point.
Jack spun to find Grant sitting on the metal floor.
“You know, in spite of its size, there isn’t an ounce of comfort in this place,” Grant observed. “Have you noticed that?”
Jack had. It was difficult to miss. Everything about this ship was cold, industrial and rather pragmatic. If you were to tour an aircraft carrier or even the International Space Station, you would be hard-pressed not to find a few hints at missed loved ones or pictures of gorgeous natural vistas taped to the walls. Either the beings who operated this craft were consummate professionals, or they were a bunch of cold-hearted S.O.B.s. Of course, it was easy to project human feelings onto a thoroughly non-human entity. But apart from the biologist’s keen observations, there was something else Jack had noticed about the man. Since the most recent blast wave, Grant’s peeling skin had gotten a lot worse.
“You don’t look so great, my friend,” Jack told him. “I think you should consider heading back to the Orb.”
Grant scoffed at the idea. “And miss out on the opportunity of a lifetime? Are you mad?” He raised his hand and Dag helped him to his feet. “I’ll have plenty of time to rest when I’m dead.”
A terrible thought formed in Jack’s mind:
Death might come sooner than you think.
He quickly waved it away.
A burst of static through their earpieces made them wince.
“My apologies,” Admiral Stark said. “But we’ve been having a hell of a time up here. Commander Hart has apprised me of your situation and I felt I should let you know about our own. Since the most recent blast wave, thirty percent of our sailors have been put out of action. Not to mention we nearly lost the USS Grapple when a vortex tried to swallow it whole. We are repositioning her at this time. But in the process, several of our sailors have suffered bumps and bruises while others are displaying a range of symptoms, the kind that have become all too common these last few days. I’m not here to give you a sob story. I’m here to inform you that the mouth of the fissure has opened considerably. In fact, a chunk of rock the size of the USS Eisenhower broke off and narrowly missed striking the Orb. I’m sure I don’t have to tell all of you what that would have meant.”
He didn’t, because Jack knew perfectly well if the Orb was knocked away, so too would be the pressurized seals holding back millions of gallons of water. For anyone left on this ship, it would mean a certain and terrifying death.
“And there’s another problem,” Stark went on. “We’ve detected a magma chamber a few hundred meters beneath your position. That wouldn’t normally pose a problem but these blast waves haven’t only weakened the rocks above you. They’ve made the limestone foundation the USO is sitting on incredibly unstable. And by incredibly, I mean just one more of these things hits and you may all be dropped in the worst kind of frying pan. Since you’re the ones in the greatest danger, I figured it was only right, given the monumental scale of your mission, that you have some small say in the matter.”
Jack was growing more and more convinced that Stark wasn’t nearly the asshole he pretended to be. “I can’t speak for anyone else,” he said. “But I’m staying for as long as we can.”
“I was afraid you’d say that,” Gabby replied. “Show Jack a cliff and he’ll be the first to leap off it.”
“That may be so, but never without a parachute,” he countered.
“Or a really large umbrella,” Grant said, eager to get in a Mary Poppins reference whenever he could.
One by one, each gave their consent, including Eugene, who stammered through his own reluctant approval.
Jack regarded a beleaguered Grant and an uneasy-looking Dag. “Tick, tock,” he told them, before pushing on ahead.
Chapter
32
Mia was trying to do two things at once and failing badly at both. One part of her was hunting for recognizable words through pages and pages filled with blocks of random letters.
Meanwhile, another part of her was scrolling through a source of informational chaff. In this case, it was coming from the talking heads on TV who were working themselves into a frenzy. More than once she wondered why she didn’t just turn the damn thing off, which in turn revealed a salient reality most of us faced at one time or another in today’s age of information overload—turning it off meant disconnecting yourself from the outside world.
Based on what the major cable news channels were saying, social media had been inundated by a veritable cesspool of unfounded information and conspiracy theories. So many voices were speculating about the alien craft, who had built it and for what purpose that it made drawing any logical conclusions nearly impossible.
If the reports of an alien object were true, it was no doubt the most important story in human history, a discovery that only served to highlight several of humankind’s most enduring questions. And not simply the old chestnut about whether or not we were alone in the universe. For Mia, it got to the heart of something far deeper. Namely, who were we? How had we gotten here? And what was our purpose, assuming there was one?
For thousands of years—maybe hundreds of thousands—humans had not only pondered these questions, but attempted to fill in the answers as best they could. To our ancestors, lightning was seen as the anger of the gods, or a punishment for perceived sins. During the Enlightenment, with God removed from the equation entirely, Zeus’ lightning bolts had been reduced to the discharge of electrons which superheated the air.
As we continued our inevitable march into the future, our understanding would no doubt evolve. The point was, for a long, long time, we used artistic license to fill in the blank spots in our knowledge in order to fend off the delicious sense of fear that always accompanied the unknown. But the next part of what she saw on TV was where Mia had really been surprised. Although small pockets of the social media world were doing their best to spread fear, the bulk of humanity not only seemed open to the idea of alien contact, they eagerly awaited meeting beings from another world.
Extinction Code Page 14