NISSY
Page 22
They smiled back and Jen answered, “No, honey. We think you already do.”
As they neared the creek’s watershed, a thicket of tall pines growing denser with each mile, their minds began to focus on the task ahead. All conversation paused as they faced internal fears laced with vivid imaginations of what they would soon experience.
“Chase 3, move to the front,” a gruff voice crackled from the radio, breaking the silence, “turn left and follow the road to the bull’s eye then stop between the buses as you enter the clearing. Can’t miss them. Chase 2, fall in behind. We’ll bring up the rear and seal it off. Ruggers, out.”
Slowly Seth edged to the side of the road and waved the trailing APC to pass him, as did the leader. As they turned onto the deeply shadowed tree-lined road, their heartbeats raced in anticipation of the impending event now only minutes away.
Again, the radio blared as the convoy halted at the clearing. “Cut your engines and take your positions. Chase 2, stay in your vehicle and await further instructions.”
While the crew of Special Forces in full combat gear rushed past shouting, heading for the buses, Seth turned the key, sighed loudly, and looked back at his passengers.
“Well, we’re here. Wherever here is. Anybody nervous?”
Necks craning, scanning what they could see of the improvised target ahead, no one spoke for seconds.
“Hell yeah we’re nervous, Seth, aren’t you?” Jason finally admitted, rolling down his window then lifting his binoculars to his eyes. As it lowered, the aroma of fresh pines flooded the cabin reminding them it was Christmas Eve. And, although a rather surrealistic background for such a defining moment in earth’s history, it seemed strangely appropriate.
“Yes. So anybody mind if I turn on some music? I’m sure there’s a radio somewhere in here.”
After a brief search of the dash, seeing no radio other than the military transceiver, he pulled out his cell and swiped his finger over the display. Within seconds, the opening strains to David Bowie’s Space Oddity played through its tinny speaker: Ground control to Major Tom…
“Really?” Amy scoffed, “that’s so tri---”
“Attention Chase team,” the APC’s radio squawked, “The ARRS has been spotted directly overhead, currently a tiny almost stationary dot in the sky. Shooters, maintain your position and load and range your weapons. Chase 2, you may exit your vehicle for a brief view but return when you hear the exhaust roar. Then remain there until I give an ‘All clear.’ Ruggers, out.”
Moving stiffly they opened the doors, stood, and stretched.
“Wow, it’s up there and dropping fast,” Seth said, shielding his eyes from the midday sun.
“Just think,” Amy commented, squinting up, “in a few minutes we’ll know for sure that earth has been visited by an alien. No more guessing.”
Jason glanced at Lipinski and winked. “Yeah, but don’t forget that we made it remotely from earth with our genius technologies. Officially though, according to birthright laws, it is an alien, a resident of Mars. Let that sink in.”
“I’m getting a headache,” said Jen, “and there’s the exhaust roar. Everyone back in the van.”
While the large, fat rocket as tall as the surrounding pines eased slowly down in front of them, they sat frozen in awe of its power. Riding a wide cone of orange and yellow fury, it shook the APC violently forcing them to cover their ears. Overhead and all around them pines were twisting, bending, and breaking in the hurricane force winds from the ground-deflected exhaust. From a tree towering above them, a large limb broke free and smashed down onto the APC with a long scratching thud. Unsuspecting, they could hardly hear their own screams when it hit.
“We have contact!” announced Ruggers, distorting the radio but still barely audible over the deafening roar. “Remain as you are until my ‘All clear.’
The retro-engines quickly flamed-out and the forest around them echoed back pops and crackles for seconds. Then as an eerie silence enveloped it, their eyes moved to the exit door panel about fifteen feet above the red spot, now blackened by the tremendous heat of the landing. Small pine limbs, still aflame, scattered across the target ring were quickly attacked by suited figures from the buses carrying fire extinguishers. When done, they returned as quickly as they appeared.
“All clear. I repeat, all clear,” called Ruggers through a megaphone, standing at the front of convoy of APCs. “All but the troops in the buses join me here in front of Chase 3. The ARRS door will open and stairs will drop down in ten minutes.”
“Why the wait?” asked Amy, tapping her foot nervously on the floorboard. Staring out impatiently, she repeated her question. “Why are we waiting?”
Jen smiled and calmly answered her question. “Don’t be so impetuous, Amy. Think about it. On Mars you’d set your suit afire if you stepped out onto the surface directly after an upright landing.”
Embarrassed at her misjudgement, she blushed. “Oh yeah. The old hotfoot joke on the searing landing pad. Sometimes my intelligence clouds my common sense. Stupid me.”
“Sometimes?” she scoffed, chuckling at her words. “C’mon, let’s go join Colonel Ruggers. He’s expecting us.”
John Ruggers, a space veteran with eight ISS tours and over a year in orbit under his belt, was a trim straight-laced sort of a fellow in his fifties. He was chosen for the task because he was unflappable under every imaginable situation NASA had thrown at him. They had proven it in testing and jokingly called him the man with nerves of steel, the man without emotions.
Today his mettle was about to be tested again as he welcomed and contained a potentially dangerous alien life form.
Checking his holstered sidearm, he clicked off the safety and led the greeting team to within a hundred feet of the ARRS.
“We stop here. The door will soon open. Line up and try not to show fear when it exits and descends the stairs. Remember there’s only one first impression and it lasts forever.”
They nervously milled around trying to decide the order of standing, then after seconds of confusion with egos interfering, they decided to wing it with Amy at the forefront since she had been its primary contact.
He checked his watch just as the hatch door swung back.
“There it is. Now for the steps. Come on baby, show yourself.”
Amy seldom felt fear but now she was visibly trembling. She repeated in her mind; Expect the worst, hope for the best as a long platform extended out from under the door, then tilted down to rest on the ground. A distant high-pitched whine accompanied the next motion as the long flat ramp sectioned and rotated into individual steps.
For what seemed like hours, there was no activity at the top of the stairs, but then a strange shape appeared about four feet above the stairway landing and peered out from the right edge of the door.
“Give me your binoculars, Dad; I see something moving up there.” Holding them to her eyes with her right hand, she waved and motioned with her left for the passenger to come forward.
“N2, come down here. I‘m Amy. We will not harm you. Welcome to earth,” she screamed out, trying to be heard.
Suddenly a wide face on a snakelike neck coiled through the air to the center of the doorway and looked down on her with two gigantic blue eyes. Then it tilted its head and with slender fingers on a long spindly arm waved back.
“Amy? Wait for us,” it called, but not loud enough to be heard at the distance.
She gasped so deeply at the vision she choked momentarily, then sputtered and coughed. Suddenly she began to laugh, almost hysterically, with tears fogging her vision.
“What is it, Amy? What could be so funny? This is serious business, girl,” her dad said sternly. Moving beside her, he reached for the glasses.
“Here. Seriously, Dad, tell me what you see. I can’t be imagining it,” she said, handing them off with a sniffle.
He put them to his eyes and then his mouth dropped. “Oh my God, Blake. You’ll never believe what Nissy made for itself. That
scoundrel. Here, take a look.” He reached back and passed them to Lipinski.
“Well, I’ll be damned. Such creativity and raw imagination. I wouldn’t have expected that could be done with the LTS. But I guess it could. There’s living proof.”
“Hey guys, chopped liver here,” Jen interrupted, “Mind if I have a look at this creature that terrorized the world with fear.”
Lipinski passed her the glasses.
“Oh! Oh! It’s real---and now there’s a tiny one standing beside it,” Jen laughed, totally absorbed in the scene. “Did you guy’s see that? Here, Director Jameson, take a look, but remember it’s another MOE breakthrough.”
“Oh my God,” he said, his mouth agape. “We’ll never live this one down. But there is astonishing science there. We can use it. Good work, team.”
The last of the greeting group, Seth, bumped him for a look.
“Oh boy,” he sighed, spellbound, frozen to the glasses. “The guys back at the dish are never going to believe this one. That soap opera’s ending just turned into their favorite movie.”
Ruggers standing behind them reached his hand out to Seth.
“Mind if I look? This is all sounding rather unbelievable. Almost like a case of mass hyster---.” He stopped mid-sentence as he peered up at the stairway.
“Oh wow, I see now. They’re hopping down the stairs and the bigger one’s holding the baby’s hand with those long fingers, keeping it from falling. I guess those stairs are just too big for their short stubby little legs. Oh my God. I’ve never seen anything so cute and heart warming in my life. Makes a grown man cry as I did during the movie. It’s a real life E.T.” He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his eyes.
After a lengthy in-processing, N2 and N3 soon joined the Chase crew in a joyful homecoming in Dome 5 back at MOE, surrounded by hundreds of NASA employees welcoming them to earth. And eerily, everyone already knew and loved them, thanks to filmmaker Steven Spielberg.
* * *
So, as the story goes, N2, the synthetic-life monster that once terrorized the world with fear of domination, came to earth bearing N3 to meet their creator and take over the world. But N2 had changed during the trip with the added knowledge of a supreme being and the creation of N3; the first place they wanted to go was to meet their maker, Nissy, in the new expanded Quaid Lab of Q-God, Inc. So they lived and understood the concept of religion first hand, without doubt. They stayed there out of sight for over two months with Papa N, their pet name for Nissy, but then as N2 started missing home, it jumped at the chance to return to Mars when Amy asked it to be a part of the MTS-1 crew. In addition to providing continuous entertainment, it would serve as a living, immortal LTS for future colonists, replacing the one it had broken years ago. N3 would grow older with other plans but it would always remember Nissy and N2, its grand-creator and creator. Life had come full circle and the universe was once again in harmony with itself, but with time, it would laugh and cry a lot more.
APPENDIX
DNA FASTA FILE TRANSLATION TABLE
Second triad letter
F
i
r
s
t
t
r
i
a
d
l
t
r
T
C
A
G
T
C
0
7
;
T
T
h
i
r
d
t
r
i
a
d
l
t
r
#
U
G
N
C
Q
H
E
T
A
V
@
A
Z
G
C
1
+
Y
O
T
-
/
8
C
R
+
M
.
A
I
)
:
<
G
A
D
2
3
B
T
$
&
L
>
C
space
P
{
4
A
*
[
}
]
G
G
J
S
%
X
T
W
6
(
F
C
9
K
‘
“
A
,
5
!
nu-line
G
Examples:
C=TTT (a triad or codon)
A=TAG
AM=TAGCAA
AMY=TAG CAA CAT
NISSY= TGC CTG GCT GCT CAT
Now assemble the four DNA nucleotide chemicals Thymine, Cytosine, Adenine, and Guanine into a DNA strand in those sequences and you have created a DNA watermark, a tiny inert piece of a DNA double helix.
You can also decode the DNA strands in this book with this table. Have fun and learn something about genetic labeling!
About the Author
John Paul Cater, twenty-four years a retired engineer and space scientist, has authored many works under the name John P. Cater. Dating back to 1983, his first books published were non-fiction instructional works on computer speech technology.
These paperback books are listed below:
Electronically Speaking: Computer Speech Generation
HW Sams & Co. Inc, 1983, ISBN 0-672-21947-6
Electronically Hearing: Computer Speech Recognition
HW Sams & Co. Inc, 1984, ISBN 0-672-22173-X
Many years later, after working with the Apollo and Shuttle astronauts at Johnson Space Center's Astronaut Office, he changed his preferred genre to speculative fiction and began writing hard science fiction in 2002. Published works since then are listed below:
The Endlight Event
Authorhouse, 2004, ISBN 1-4184-9830-0
The Endlight Event: A New Ice Age is Coming...Tomorrow
Daily Swan Publishing, Inc, 2008, ISBN 978-0- 9815845-0-8
Endlight Dawning 2012: The Maya Knew
Daily Swan Publishing, Inc, 2012, ISBN 978-0- 9829769-5-1
Satellite Lost
(Introducing Matthew Cross and the Canyon Glider DSV)
eBook:
Kindle Direct Publishing, 2015,
ISBN 978-1-4951-6146-9
Paperback:
CreateSpace Publishing, 2016, ISBN 978-1-5350-5967-1
Pi Day Doomsday
(Another Matt “Marker” Cross Thriller)
eBook:
Kindle Direct Publishing, 2015,
ASIN B013Y5DTOG
Paperback:
CreateSpace Publishing, 2016, ISBN 978-1-5333-1552-6
Sea Station Umbra
(Matt “Marker” Cross at his best)
eBook:
Kindle Direct Publishing, 2016,
ASIN B01D3U6AIY
Paperback:
CreateSpace Publishing, 2016,
ISBN 978-1-5332-4323-2
Near-Earth Orbit 2017AP: Destination Earth
Paperback:
CreateSpace Publishing, 2016,
ISBN 978-1-5368-7101-2
Nissy: The Artificial Intelligence Experiment We Feared
Paperback:
Cre
ateSpace Publishing, 2018,
ISBN 978-1-9781-9613-1
ISBN-10: 197819613X
In this new adventure, combining the search for pure artificial intelligence with the creation of synthetic life, he continues writing in paperback and e-book formats to supply his readers with thrilling and entertaining reading experiences. Do not miss any one of them.