The First Exoplanet

by T. J. Sedgwick

  “The field tests, first on scale models, then using the Pinta backup probe, were completed successfully. Santa Maria’s drive is identical in every way, so it should work as advertised; although Pinta will be ready to go at short notice if required. The tests consisted of some short transits within the Solar System. There was still some degree of inaccuracy with destination coordinates, but it’s good enough. That’s one of the reasons we have the chemical rockets. The probe will seek Avendano orbit and there’ll be more than enough propellant to get her there if we don't transit to the exact coordinates we would like. We also need to work on extending the life of the FTL-drive. Every jump puts an enormous amount of stress on the drive and we’ve found on scale models in the lab that the drive fails after a certain number of transits. We have some computer models predicting when this will occur, although it’s on-going research. But hey, it’s no different to any new technology—as we gain experience we improve performance and reliability. We’re confident we’ll get to Avendano and back and be able to send back messenger microprobes during the mission.”

  “Sure. I understand it’s important to get it back as these probes are not cheap.”

  “Indeed they are not and we’d like Santa Maria to transit safely back here so we can reuse her on future missions just replacing the parts we need to.”

  “Can you tell our viewers the significance of the launch date, September 6th?”

  “Ah, yes. We thought it fitting that the launch take place on September 6th as this will be 569 years to the day after Christopher Columbus set sail from San Sebastián de la Gomera for the New World. The probes are named after two of his three ships. We are following in his footsteps and exploring what we really believe is a new world of promise.”

  “What will be keeping you and the WGA Space team busy between now and launch?”

  “Well, there are a lot of last-minute checks to run. First a series of physical checks including inspection of specialised instruments: checking integrity, tolerances and that mechanical mechanisms are functioning correctly. I guess it’s a bit like kicking the tyres before a plane takes to the air. Then there are electrical and software tests. We need to check the computer systems including ensuring that AI responses to simulated inputs are as-designed…”

  “What sort of thing do you mean, Robert?”

  “Well, we’ll be hooking up the probe to an external computer and sending information to the sensors simulating arrival to the Avendano system. For example, in the tests the probe will use simulated passive means to ascertain its position in space: visual data of the planet and constellations and gravimetric inputs. What we’ll want to see is that the correct assessment is made and the chemical rockets and nozzles are set to navigate towards the target. They won't fire, obviously. That’s just one example. Hope it’s clear to your viewers.”

  “Yes, I think we got that. It’s a complex business, of course. Can you explain to us briefly what will happen when the probe gets to Avendano, what data we’ll be receiving and when?”

  “The probe will arrive within chemical rocket range of the planet. She’ll take passive readings and the AI will assess the situation and make a decision. The first of the messenger microprobes will be sent back to Sol, close to Earth. All going well Santa Maria will switch on chemical rockets and go into orbit around Avendano-185f and commence a survey of the planet from orbit using passive and active sensors. Once the orbital survey is done, she’ll make her entry into the planet’s atmosphere having selected the optimum landing site based on a whole bunch of parameters and findings from the orbital survey. Parachutes then airbags will open to break her fall. She’ll take further readings—things like atmospheric composition, visual and sound recording et cetera. She’ll also release three flying drones, which will explore the rest of the planet. These long-range persistent drones will be able to go on for a very long time as they use solar panels and are very efficient. They’ll follow their AI routines seeking out areas of interest. They can also take soil samples and send the analysis back to Santa Maria. The drones will keep on gathering data until they stop working, basically.”

  “Why is there a backup probe and are any further missions planned?”

  “Further missions will be on the cards, but the details and timing of these are being left until after we get something from the first mission. The backup probe is there for a whole number of reasons – perhaps Santa Maria malfunctions, maybe it fails to transit to Avendano, maybe we lose her somewhere – and for the follow-on missions, of course. Anything can happen, but we’re confident it won’t. As I said before though, the probes are designed to be reusable so we’d really like them back.”

  “Big question: what if we find a suitable planet for humans to settle on? Will there be a manned mission at some point in future? And, if so, when do you think that would be, Robert?”

  “The signs are the best we’ve found, we’ve got visual observations, spectroscopy and what look like broadcasts from the SETI research. This confidence is the whole reason for the project, of course. If it is suitable for human colonisation, well, I guess you just have to look at history on Earth. Anywhere people can go and start afresh they will. But who knows when that will be? There are concepts on the drawing board I know of, but, again, details and timing depend on what we find. It could all change, so we don't want to plough too much time and money into all that before going there.”

  “We have time for one more question before we go back to GNN Centre. What do you think we’ll find there, Robert? Aliens? A pristine second Earth?”

  “That is, as they say, the $64,000 dollar question! Listen, I’m an engineer and scientist at heart and I have to go with what the evidence tells us. The overwhelming view in the WGA Space teams is that we have found an Earth-like planet and that there is life of some kind there. On the question of intelligent life and a possible civilization, well that’s a bit more of an open question. There are the transmissions from SETI and the industrial pollutants that we detected from spectroscopy data. But there’s a lot of mystery over why the transmissions stopped. We have no idea what they say or what their significance is. So many unanswered questions that only going there can answer.”

  “Exciting times indeed! Robert Hartmann, thank you for talking to us today. And now back to GNN Centre in Atlanta. Jim and Dana…”

  Vanessa signed off and the world had only thirty-six hours to wait.

  ***

  September 4, 2061 Cougar Mountain Regional Wildland Park, WA

  Dasha Morozova, aka Jenna Perez, looked like any other hiker out for a late Sunday afternoon walk on the lush forested trails of Cougar Mountain Park, two hundred kilometres southeast of Seattle. That her boss, lover-of-necessity and mark, Dr Alan King didn’t like hiking made it the perfect excuse to get away. The SVR knew King’s likes and dislikes before she was planted into the WGA Research Centre over seven years ago. Dr King, who had moved into Dasha’s luxury waterfront apartment a year ago, had never been encouraged to change his mind. She had been a sleeper agent for the past five years with instructions to stay close to King and await further instructions. It was much longer than she would have liked and was delaying her comfortable early retirement from the spying game. She was now forty-seven and not getting any younger—although she still turned heads, even those of far younger men. Staying with a man who meant nothing to her was a long-term acting job that not many women could do. But Dasha was cold and lacked any real feeling for anyone. She liked things not people and the thrill of living a lie. She considered the spying game and concluded all undercover operatives must be pathological or, at least, well-practiced liars. Still, she masked her cynical worldview well and was thought of as warm, friendly, and a loving partner to King by their mutual friends and colleagues. At her core she was a highly intelligent psychopath. The thing that really kept her going was the regular payments to her hidden bank account, beyond the reach of the authorities—the SVR or anyone else. That small fortune would buy her a future w
here she could do as she pleased.

  The trail she was on was a dry dirt track surrounded by towering pine trees. The trail had grown quieter with less traffic as she’d made her way further from the access road where her car was parked. Most walkers and joggers were making their way out of the park in preparation for the first day of work the next day. Dasha was ready to make contact as her handler had instructed her. The message had come as a spam contact request on Skype using the name ‘Rasputin61’—a request she naturally blocked and reported as spam. That nametag was a code word and all she needed to initiate the reconnect protocol and get back in touch with her handler in Moscow. She didn't know her handler by name, although she was clued-up enough to work out that it was Sergei Bekov’s division that paid her salary.

  She’d hidden her EQP – Entangled Quantum Particle transceiver – in her backpack. The device allowed for secure, non-interceptable, messages to Moscow. Her SPETSNAZ standard issue tablet was also in her backpack and connected wirelessly to the hidden earpiece she wore which had a built-in mic. After contact protocols were completed, her handler gave her the instructions. A file was transmitted to her tablet. After eight minutes of listening she simply said, “Confirmed,” and clicked off. Dasha’s ability to memorise information had not dulled with age. It had been enhanced by an undetectable recording network of nano-chips, which had been implanted in her brain. This gave her a truly photographic memory, making written instructions unnecessary.

  Dasha about-turned on the deserted path and started back the way she had come—back towards her car some two kilometres away. She took the time to go through her instructions, analysing them and visualising them in her mind. Soon her mission would be over and she could start engineering her way out of life as Jenna Perez. Shame, she thought, that she could not terminate King. He wasn't a bad man and treated her well, but she was simply sick of the sight of him. Especially the way he assumed she enjoyed making love and thought he was satisfying her. This really tested her abilities of control. She would never have slept with that man in a million years if it wasn't for her job. But she wasn’t bothered by it enough to compromise the mission; she only regretted her inability to get revenge. One day maybe I’ll come back as someone else for fun and old time’s sake, she thought, smiling. A moment later, she disciplined herself to get back to her mental planning.

  The file sent to her was just referred to as the ‘package’ by her handler. He’d given no explanation of its function or purpose. Typical compartmentalisation of information, thought Dasha. She had been instructed to upload the file to the Santa Maria probe’s Fusion Reactor operating system. The reactor was the only major system that had been manufactured outside of the Western Global Alliance group of countries, in her homeland, Russia. There must have been something in the existing control system code that allowed this new file to do its work. It was obviously for nefarious purposes, or else the Russian software engineers would legitimately upload the file via means agreed with their WGA partners. What would Russia want from the probe mission that they were not already getting? The partnership agreement, which would share almost everything that’s discovered. The other major clue was from the timing of the upload—a twelve-hour window ending six hours before launch. Dasha considered this riddle as she neared her parked car, the warm late summer sunshine illuminating her face as she emerged from the woodland path. There was something she would need to check at the office tomorrow morning.

  September 5, 2061 Western Global Alliance Joint Research & Space Centre, Seattle

  Dasha Morozova, a.k.a. Jenna Perez, walked the short distance past the breakout suite, to the bathrooms and entered the stall, locking the door behind her. The bathroom was empty. She pulled down the toilet seat cover and sat down. She had a little over six hours until the opening of the upload window. Her orders were to copy the ‘package’ into the operating software of the probe’s fusion reactor. That window would start at 4pm and end twelve hours later at 4am the next morning on the day of the launch—tomorrow. She wanted to follow her hunch and find out what this was for. Even though she knew the SVR liked to keep its assets in the dark, she had operating protocols of her own. She’d decided long ago that her chances of evading detection if it all went pear-shaped were better if she knew as much as possible. For instance, the mission objectives would, in part, influence which agencies would be tracking her and how much resource was likely to be used. These were important factors in a possible evasion and escape plan. Or maybe that was all just a fabricated justification and the real reason was her innate desire for control. Whatever it was she needed to work out what this was about.

  She used her smart glasses to access the calendars of the software engineering team. She typed in the reference indicator code, which denoted their job function. Now all members of the team were shown in the composite Gantt chart. The horizontal blocks represented meetings and appointments that the team had. Their schedule was, unsurprisingly, pretty damned full with the launch due tomorrow. Although the bars were labelled, when she clicked on them no detail was revealed—it seemed she did not have permission to access this team’s calendar. The only activity of interest was a one hour meeting starting at 3pm involving the team leader and an engineer. The meeting label read, ‘Software Sign-off’.

  “That must be it,” she whispered, still not totally sure. “Okay, let’s look at something else.”

  Next she accessed the probe project scheduling software and found what she was looking for—‘Launch (Detailed Schedule)’. There was a milestone marker at 4am Pacific Time labelled ‘Computer System Isolation’. So these two events twelve hours apart marked exactly the start and end points of her window of opportunity for uploading the file. This confirmed to Dasha what it was she would soon carry out. The package she was going to upload to the probe was a virus. There would have been no way a virus could escape the scans of the software engineering team at WGA. The software running the probe’s systems was accessible from Seattle HQ and would have been updated and tweaked many times in the run up to the launch. The SVR were clearly unable to hack into the WGA network, which wasn’t surprising given the lengths they went to in order to secure it. But a breach from inside the network – to which Dasha had access – was a different matter. They would have completed the probe software anti-virus scans by the time the team leader had to approve the software, by 4pm that day. But the isolation of the probe’s computer systems would not take place until 4am the next day, twelve hours later and six hours before launch. There would be no way to get a virus on board once the probe had been isolated behind its powerful firewall. Besides, it wouldn't even be in the same star system for long. Satisfied she had finally worked out what she was doing, she flushed the toilet, unlocked the door, and started to concentrate on the ‘why’.

  The question of ‘why’ would need to be put on hold for the time being, thought Dasha. It was no good thinking about ‘why’ if the virus wasn’t actually uploaded. She sat down on her office chair behind her desk. It was approaching 4pm and she had to get away from King and her colleagues long enough to infect the probe with the virus without detection. She’d need to access it with level 1 authority. Her cover identity, Jenna Perez, was a lowly personal assistant, which only carried a level 4 authority. She needed to rectify this and her relationship with King would be the key. She already knew his password, having seen him type it in on a number of occasions, although once was enough given her photographic memory. As she sat at her workstation, she could see King several desks away in the corner reading something intently on his display. He probably wouldn't leave until well after 6pm and he’d be looking for her to share a ride back to their place together before leaving. She felt it would be prudent to wait until 4.30pm in case the sign-off and isolation of the probe computer systems was running late. That gave her, realistically, only a one and a half hour window.

  She clock-watched until 4.30pm came around, trying to look busy but continuing to try to figure out the objectives of the v
irus. All that sprung to mind was that the Russians did not trust the WGA to be transparent on their discoveries in Avendano, keeping the best information classified. Yes, that is why, thought Dasha, concluding that such information would give WGA countries a massive advantage when it came to settling Avendano. That, and the fact they had a monopoly on the FTL drive. Considering that point, it dawned on her that it wasn’t just strategic information on Avendano Russia wanted. It was the FTL drive and how to build one. Somehow the virus must be able to send data back to the Russians on the drive’s construction and operation. Being able to steal the FTL drive design would be a major technological coup for the Russians. It was a technology of unimaginable strategic importance, opening up whole star systems and the possibility of jumping to any point in space at any time. Just imagine the applications in warfare! thought Dasha. If they actually managed to make it transit accurately and not fail after a few jumps then it would be the killer tech of the age. Even in its current form, Russia desperately needed this tech or it would be forever beholden to the whims of the Westerners.

  The time had come. “It’s show time,” said Dasha under her breath, rising from her office chair and moving away from the open plan area as innocuously as possible. She made her way back down the corridor with the bathrooms on the left and continued through the set of sliding glass doors. Passing several closed doors on the left and right of the corridor, she continued another twenty metres. There it branched left and right, with a blank wall opposite the corridor she was on. She turned left and checked the coast was clear in front and behind then quickly ducked into the room directly to the left of the passageway junction. She quickly but quietly closed the door behind her. This was the time of danger, when her detection would spell failure.