The mechanical noise was dulled, but Jenna could feel vibrations rising through the floor and emanating from the walls. The transmitter was inside the building. Soter ushered them into a dimly lit room that reminded Jenna of the signal room in Cort’s safe house, but on a much larger scale. Computer servers lined the walls, along with a variety of other electronic devices and their blinking red and green LEDs. A few of these were no bigger, and looked no more sophisticated, than a citizen’s band radio, while others looked like the sound controls at a rock concert. Soter moved past these, his wet shoes squeaking on the black and white checkerboard tile floor. He led them to an area that had been partitioned into smaller workspaces. Each desktop held no less than four computer monitors, and each screen displayed incomprehensible graphical and textual data. A broad window, looking out at the metal-frame structure Jenna had glimpsed from the road, stretched across the wall beyond the workstations.
Soter approached one of the men working in the room and shook his hand. After a brief exchange, the man turned to his co-workers and said simply, “Lunch time.”
After the events of the last two days, Jenna didn’t trust her internal clock, but she was fairly certain that it was only about ten in the morning. That the men were ceding the room to Soter bore testimony to his influence, and made Jenna wonder again about the source of his funding. Cort’s assertion that the project had been run by the Soviet Union, and then later by the Russian government, seemed less likely here on American soil, but she couldn’t rule it out completely. Foreign or domestic, Soter would have had to cover his tracks very well, especially with the CIA gunning for him.
When they were alone, Soter gestured for Jenna to join him at a desk near the window. As she approached, she caught a glimpse of the panorama that lay beyond the glass.
“Whoa. Now I see what all the fuss is about.”
Soter grinned. “Quite impressive, isn’t it?”
Impressive was one word for it. Spread out before them, directly below the hanging structure, and hovering next to and above the surrounding treetops, was a vast bowl-shaped depression, silvery-gray like exposed concrete, stained a darker shade in some places, presumably from long years of exposure. Jenna knew there would be a satellite reflector dish of some kind, but nothing on this scale. “It looks like God dropped a contact lens.”
“An apt simile,” Soter said, “since it is a lens of a sort—our lens for gazing back into the heavens.”
There was something familiar about it, and Jenna recalled Soter’s comment about the observatory being featured in several movies. The dish, or something very nearly identical to it, had appeared in a James Bond movie, one of Noah’s favorites from the series, though as was his custom, he found plenty to complain about. Noah had been a real James Bond, after all.
“The reflector is a thousand feet across, and the antenna assembly is suspended four hundred and thirty feet above it. The dish itself comprises almost thirty-nine thousand aluminum panels, all perfectly machined to create a spherical reflector. The location was chosen because of a naturally occurring sinkhole crater, but the dish is suspended above it.”
Jenna looked at it more closely and could just make out the square lines where the individual panels were joined—not solid concrete like in the movie. They totally got that wrong, she thought, and then realized that it was exactly the sort of thing Noah would have said.
Soter clapped his hands together. “Enough about that. We can give you the full tour later, but for now let us focus on the task at hand.”
He leaned over one of the computers and inserted a flash drive into the USB port. After a few keystrokes, he stepped back and gestured for Jenna to sit.
As the screen began to fill up with data, ones and zeroes on one side, and an endless string of just four letters on the other, Jenna felt a growing apprehension. Those numbers and letters were the blueprint for creating her, transmitted across space by some unknown alien intelligence. She wanted to turn and run, but instead, as if compelled by an invisible force, she took a seat and began to read.
46
10:24 a.m.
The computer hard drive whirred as it struggled to download and open the enormous file. Jenna recalled learning that the entire human genome could be expressed in less than a gigabyte of drive space. That had probably seemed like a mountain of data in 1977, but by modern computing standards, it was the same size as a two hour movie. It was a little disconcerting to think that a person—and not just any person, but Jenna herself—could be reduced to bits and bytes of information. As she scanned the procession of letters—A,T,C and G—she found herself wondering which part had determined her hair color? The color of her eyes? Which parts made her into the unique entity that she was?
Only I’m not unique, am I? There are others out there, others like Kelli Foster and Jarrod Chu, and God only knows how many more.
No, not God. Soter knows.
“Ideally, I would ask you to read the entire message, but at over three billion characters, that would require weeks of reading, even with your extraordinary mental abilities.” Soter said the last bit as if speaking from experience.
So the others have read the message, Jenna thought, but Soter was still speaking. “Once the file finishes loading, you can skip to the end. That is where the ‘signature’ is located.”
Despite his admonition, Jenna found herself fascinated by the contents of the file. She scrolled down a page, reading every single number and letter on the screen, downloading it into her brain almost as fast as the computer could read it from the flash drive. As she read, she began to get the sense that, with just a little more information, she might be able to interpret what she was seeing.
As a young girl, she had once seen an advertisement written in Spanish. She had not learned how to speak that language—though she later would—but she remembered it, just as she remembered everything she saw and heard. When the opportunity arose to get a translation, she saw the sign again in her mind’s eye, perfectly comprehensible. That was how she felt now. Even though there was only an endless stream of letters, not divided by spaces, punctuation or any sort of pattern that would be recognizable to the average person, she felt sure that with just a little bit more knowledge, she would be able to read it from her memory like a book.
Page down.
Page down.
Page down.
She scanned faster and faster…two pages per second…three. Yet, as Soter had indicated, the file was enormous, and the scroll bar registered no visible movement with each click. The file was over three million pages long, and even if she had been able to read five pages per second, it would require seven days of non-stop reading to finish.
“There,” Soter announced. “It’s finished. You can skip to the end. It’s still in binary I’m afraid. We were never able to differentiate values. But I believe you will see the pattern.”
Almost reluctantly, as if scrolling to the end of the message would be like skipping to the last page in a mystery novel, Jenna did as Soter suggested. The computer lagged in protest at the size of the file, and another interminable wait followed before the screen filled up again. Here, there were no corresponding letters of the DNA sequence. Only ones and zeroes.
This new message was different somehow. With the genetic information, even in binary, she knew there was a purpose and pattern to it all, but there was no contextual framework for the last part of the message. Though she recognized the digits, their random arrangement left her feeling muddled. She struggled to read the numbers. When she was done, she discovered she could not recall them with any degree of confidence. They had slipped from her memory. It was a new experience for her. She tried reading it again.
00000011110000…
As she fought through the message a third time, the individual numbers fell out of her consciousness as quickly as they left her sight. She paused reading, but didn’t look away from the page as Cray approached Soter and whispered in his ear. From the corner of her eye, she
could see Soter’s look of alarm, but it wasn’t quite enough to draw her away from her task. She returned to reading. The numbers were almost hypnotic in their slippery resistance to assimilation. She kept looking, afraid to even blink, lest the message disappear or change.
Jenna had not truly appreciated how unique her gift of memory was until a classmate had challenged her to ‘prove it.’ She had always assumed that lots of people possessed eidetic memories, but later research had revealed that even among those who claimed to possess the gift, there were limits to the ability. No one truly possessed what was mistakenly termed ‘photographic memory’ or perfect recall. And yet, she always had. She could read something and remember it line by line, or recall startling details from images or places she had visited, without any effort.
Only now did she realize that she had taken the ability for granted. It wasn’t just that her memory was letting her down. Her brain seemed to be lagging, just as the computer had when loading the file.
000000111100001001000010100000…
Soter gave a low harrumph of displeasure, then followed Cray to a side door that opened onto a balcony just outside the control room. The rumble of the transmitter increased again, but was oddly muted by the rain.
“Stay where you are!” Jenna recognized the voice as Soter’s, though his strident shout was different than his soft conversational tone.
“I’m unarmed.” The answering voice was barely audible over the tumult of the transmitter, but there was something familiar about it. The magnetism of curiosity pulled at her, even as her eyes refused to let go of the strange numerical sequence.
000000111100001001000010100000111110001010001101000010100…
“What do you want?” Soter called.
Like a stubborn puzzle piece finally oriented correctly, the pattern emerged.
000000111100001001000010100000111110001010001101000010100100010101000111111001000100011110001000100010110100010011100010000001010100001010100001001100001100000000001000010001100100011101000110000001001000010000001101100010110000010111100011100000100011000000110100001000000001010001010000001111000011001000011001100000001011000100011010001101000111000001100000011010001000000001000000000111010001000100001000101000001000000001011000010000001011100010101000100001000010001000100110001011100011011000100010001000000001000000100101000101100000100101011111001110001100000001111000011100000110000010001000010011000111010001101000110010000111010000000011100001110100010000010000001101000101100010110000111100001000100001100010000001000000101000110000011010001010000110100011111000111001000110100010001111000011101000110100011100000100100000100011000100111000111111000000011110000100100001000000011000110110001011000010100100011000100010110000010010000111100010001111100011011000101000110110001001100001101000001111000001110010001010100010001011000111000011101000100100001111000110010001100010010100010001000011010000111100010000100000000101100001011000011010001100010001101110001010000111100001111000100001111000110100001011000010111000101100000100010000
The numbers locked themselves into Jenna’s consciousness, and with that realization, a door opened in her mind. Yet as she mentally stepped toward that door, she heard the distant voice answer Soter’s question.
The spell broken, she surged to her feet and crossed the room in three steps, heedless of Mercy’s cry, “Jenna, no!”
Some part of her wondered if Mercy had heard as well, and if the purpose for her warning was to safeguard Jenna’s emotional health as much as her physical. It was a fleeting thought. No force on Earth could have stopped her.
She burst out onto the balcony, right behind Soter. Cray saw her and made a half-hearted attempt to restrain her, but he was already too late. Jenna’s eyes met those of the man who had just a moment before shouted: “I want to talk to my daughter.”
Standing on the rain-soaked grass less than fifty feet away was Noah Flood.
47
10:27 a.m.
Jenna had not thought it possible for her world to be shaken any more than it already had, but Noah’s appearance was another roller coaster plunge into the impossible.
Rivulets of rain dripped from his hair and nose. His eyes found her and his craggy face broke into a relieved smile. His lips formed her name, but she couldn’t tell if he had said it aloud.
A dam broke inside her. Every emotion she had experienced in the last two days in connection with this man—admiration, grief, rage, acceptance—deluged her. She wanted to scream at him for taking away an existence that had never truly been hers. She wanted to rush down the fire stairs and hug him, and never let go.
My daughter.
That was what he had said, and she desperately wanted to believe he felt that way. And yet, the very fact that he was here, that he had tracked her down, told a different tale. He was working with Cort. It was the only explanation. And that meant he was trying to draw her out so that the government agents could finish their deadly assignment.
She searched his face, looking for some hint of what to believe, knowing even as she did that he was too skilled in the arts of deception to ever reveal the truth. A thousand questions ran through her mind, but all she could say was, “I thought you were dead.”
His smile became a grin. “I’m too ornery to die,” he called back.
Jenna realized now that her assumption about his fate had been made at the start of the nightmare, when all she knew about violence was what she had seen in Noah’s movies, where people dropped dead from a single gunshot, because that’s what the script called for. Her own experience had revealed just how much punishment a human body could actually take, yet at no time had it occurred to her that Noah’s wound might have been only superficial.
Soter turned on her. “Go back inside, Jenna. This man is not your father. He’s here to kill you.”
Noah spoke quickly. “Jenna, you have to listen to me. I know what you’re thinking, but remember what I taught you. Listen to your gut…”
“But make up my own damn mind,” she finished, repeating it like a mantra. Her guts were so twisted, she had no idea what they were trying to tell her.
“He hasn’t told you the whole truth,” Noah continued.
And just how would you know that? She didn’t say it aloud, and despite the fact that she did not want to trust this man who had lied to her about everything, she knew he was right. Soter was holding something back.
“He told you some story about aliens with a message of peace, right? There are no aliens, Jenna. He lied to you about that.”
Jenna shook her head. “He wasn’t lying.”
Noah inclined his head. “Okay, not lying. Maybe he believes that’s what happened, but it’s not the real story. That message didn’t originate from deep space. It was from Earth, bounced off a piece of orbiting space junk.”
“Preposterous,” snarled Soter. “Who’s trying to deceive you now, my child?”
“The Soviets created the whole thing as a disinformation campaign. They wanted us chasing our tails, wasting resources looking for aliens where there weren’t any. And it worked. He spent millions—the equivalent of billions today—on a hoax.”
“A hoax?” Soter was incredulous. “A hoax that contained the entire human genome more than a decade before geneticists were able to even begin unraveling the mysteries of DNA?”
“You saw what you wanted to see,” Noah countered, then turned his gaze back to Jenna. “But that’s only half of it. His clones—Jenna, it kills me to say it—they’re not stable. There’s something wrong with them.”
He kept speaking, talking over Soter’s protest, pushing past the unpleasantness of his revelation the way a parent tears off a Band-Aid in one quick jerk. “I know you know about this Jenna. About the SARS virus in China and the cyber-attack here in America. The DNA recipe he cooked up gave the clones extraordinary abilities, but it also took something from them, something that made them human.”
“You don’t think I’m human?” Jenna’s voice sounded very small, as if her breath could not quite get past the hurt and rage she now felt. She was
angry at Noah for saying such horrible things, but she was also very afraid because she knew he wasn’t lying.
“Oh, Jenna.” Noah’s pained look appeared genuine. “I love you more than I’ve ever loved anyone. You have to believe that. We can get through whatever comes. I believe that, and I want you to believe it, too. But you have to know the truth, and he’s not going to tell it to you.
“It’s something that happens to the clones when they reach adulthood. It’s like a switch gets thrown. I’ve seen the evidence, heard from the people who worked with Jarrod Chu and Kelli Foster. They changed.” He snapped his fingers. “It’s like something was hardwired into their DNA. It’s in you, too.”
Like a switch gets thrown.
The words slammed through her and brought to mind Soter’s reluctant explanation of his plan to show her the signature portion of the message.
Seeing the message for yourself might have a stimulating effect on that part of your brain where the genetic memory is stored.
It was important to allow your abilities to fully develop…to reach maturity.
She could not tell if Noah was being truthful, but Soter was an open book, and she saw the truth of the accusation in his eyes. He seemed on the verge of boiling over with righteous indignation, but his expression told a different tale.
He knows.
And I read the message.
Unbidden, the entire binary sequence flashed before her eyes, a siren song in ones and zeroes, irresistible. Look, it sang, all you have to do is look, and all will be revealed.
Flood Rising (A Jenna Flood Thriller) Page 23