The First Exoplanet

by T. J. Sedgwick

  “Waypoint three reached. Termination of chemical rocket engine…” announced Townsley.

  Their last probe was about to disappear, with no guarantee of return and no replacement in the works. It was a gamble, which, if lost, could result in a setback of years with the world needing answers but having none.

  The chemical rocket exhaust flames could be seen to die down on the close-up view from the space station cameras.

  “...Initiation of the FTL drive and transit to the Avendano star systems in five, four, three, two, one...”

  It was Pinta’s turn to tunnel through space-time and emerge fifteen light years away near Gaia. Quicker than the eye could register, she was gone. There was just a momentary blackout of the star field as the only tangible evidence of the jump.

  “Ladies and Gentlemen, we have a successful jump. I can confirm we have pre-jump diagnostic assessment of a good transit,” said Townsley. She was relieved but without the sense of elation that had greeted her after the Santa Maria jump.

  Now they would have to wait for news. There was nothing more to do except examine the data they did get from Santa Maria’s first twenty-four hours in Avendano. That, and to plan scenarios. The world’s remaining experimental FTL drives were few in number and neither large enough nor powerful enough to send anything to Avendano. Everything now depended on Pinta finding out what went wrong and returning safely to Earth herself. First, she’d need to track down Santa Maria while staying as hidden as possible. This was not an easy task given Pinta would likely need to transmit coded signals to locate and recall Santa Maria. Recall was a mission that had already failed after the Gemstone Ruby had gone and not come back. Pinta, though, was a fully operational probe with formidable AI and if anything had happened to Santa Maria then she represented the best chance of finding out what. That was assuming the aliens had not found her first. If a malfunction had compromised the cloaking field in any way then the chance of alien capture could be very real.

  Pinta may find a Gemstone before finding Santa Maria. There was a failsafe mechanism built into the probes that, under certain circumstances, would initiate the release of one or more of the Gemstones. The idea was that these would act as distress beacons and monitoring stations. They would try to keep contact with the main probe if it was out of control or had somehow crashed. The Gemstones were not capable of hiding themselves—they were not designed to do so and had no stealth capability. They were small and naturally hard to detect, but Pinta was programmed to know what to look for. If they were there, Pinta would find any released Gemstones from Santa Maria.

  September 13, 2061 SVR Headquarters, Yasenevo District, Moscow, Russia

  Sergei Bekov, Director of Cyberwarfare, stepped into the drab, utilitarian interview room in the basement of SVR headquarters in Moscow. The term ‘interview room’ was a euphemistic description of the bare concrete surfaces, harsh fluorescent lights and bolted-down metal furniture. ‘Interrogation room’ would’ve been more appropriate. Virtually invisible pinhole CCTV cameras were embedded liberally in the walls and ceiling. They gave a wide range of views for the observers sitting in the monitoring suite behind the far wall. Here, analysts could examine speech, body language, and eye movement and, if the subject was hooked up, brain waves, to divine the truth or the lie being spoken. It was rare that they needed to resort to physical violence these days, but discomfort, disorientation and keeping the subject off-balance were still bread-and-butter tactics in this cold, bleak space.

  Sitting in the stainless steel chair behind the stainless steel desk was an overweight, baby-faced man in his early thirties. He looked like he’d had better days than this. His stubble, greasy unkempt hair and bloodshot eyes betrayed the night of hell he’d gone through waiting for Director Bekov to make an appearance. The lead hacker who’d headed the probe-virus programming had been summoned in the early hours of the morning. He had sat waiting in that chair for seven hours with only a plastic bottle of water for refreshment. Yuri Rusnak now sat there bursting for the toilet, but he’d been told to stay and not make any requests until Director Bekov arrived. Rusnak knew better than to disobey. He’d thought many times about using the now-empty bottle to pee in, but ruled that out too. He was being watched and wanted to do nothing to provoke the watchers’ ire.

  ***

  “Yuri!” said Bekov, standing over the desk from Rusnak, smiling down at him. “Thank you for waiting so patiently! You know, even with the wonder that is the modern car there is still traffic in the morning!” Bekov chuckled and Rusnak forced a smile, hoping to keep Bekov in the good mood he appeared to be in. Rusnak, like the rest of the director’s subordinates, feared him so much that even in his hatred for the man he could not conceive of betraying or even challenging him.

  “You’re probably wondering why you’re here, Yuri,” said Bekov. Rusnak nodded, still looking up at his boss’ boss.

  “Well, let me enlighten you on our problem, Mr Rusnak,” continued Bekov, taking one of the two seats opposite him.

  “Only one Gemstone – that is the Westerners’ name for the messenger microprobes – came back. That one was codenamed Emerald. We got all the data. Your virus had done its work in manipulating the software on-board Emerald to transmit to our ground station in addition to the Westerners in America. But since then nothing! We know this through official and back channels, Yuri, they are being truthful with us for once,” said Bekov.

  “So why am I here being interviewed, sir?” asked Rusnak nervously.

  “Ha. Why are you here he asks me!” Bekov’s smile instantly transformed into a cold, emotionless expression. “The Westerners think your virus has fucked up their probe!” Bekov shouted, his face halfway across the desk as Rusnak leaned back to escape the fury of his outburst. “They know about the virus, Yuri. The FBI has evidence that we planted it and now this fucking thing is coming back to me and to my boss. He is not a happy man!”

  Bekov sat back and took a breath. Rusnak hoped the storm had passed, but wasn't counting on it.

  “You need to explain to me right now how this could have happened. Don't leave anything out. I want to know every possibility and every scenario of how the virus could have affected that probe. I advise you strongly not to gloss over any weaknesses. If I find out later you've been economical with the truth, well, let’s say that would not be a wise policy on your part, Yuri. I’ve cleared my calendar so take your time. I also need to know that when, or if, this Santa Maria probe returns, we’ll still be able to commandeer her. It’s vital for our country’s strategy in space. We must get a working FTL drive or Russia will be left behind on this overcrowded, stinking planet while our enemies reap the spoils in other star systems,” said Bekov, now calmer but still fired up and demanding answers—answers he would understand technically and the watchers in the monitoring room would relay to other experts to check out. They would later interview other members of Rusnak’s team. They didn’t know for sure if the virus had derailed Santa Maria, but they needed to be prepared—prepared for their next move and prepared for the blowback if the Westerners decided to make a big deal out of it. This thing could plunge relations with the West back into the bad old days of the Cold War.

  There were several ways that the virus may have interfered with the AI. Ultimately, it had to have the ability to override the probe’s flight controls. Anything that did that had the potential to crash the probe or make it deviate from a sensible trajectory. The fact the AI was so complex – in some ways exceeding that of the human brain – made it impossible to completely eliminate such risks. As AI became more complex, programmers and scientists had realised that it also became unavoidably temperamental and unpredictable in certain circumstances. This was especially true in situations that its neural networks had not experienced before. Just like a human brain. Activate a virus with its instructions the AI had never seen before and it would be like asking someone who’d never left the Sahara to ice skate.

  Bekov left the room long after Rusnak ha
d wet himself. The director of cyberwarfare’s judgement was that the virus had the potential to have caused a probe malfunction. Confirming that and confirming what the virus had done was still impossible, but he had the feeling he’d find out one way or another. For now, he had the unenviable task of explaining this mess to the heavy-hitters on the National Security Council. There was no point in killing Rusnak—he was too valuable, and, besides, if the probe did come back Bekov would need him for the probe heist.

  ***

  September 18, 2061 Western Global Alliance Mission Control, Seattle

  Six days had passed and the team and the world waited. Then it came. The return of the messenger microprobe sent back by Pinta—the Gemstone named Topaz. The team in the Mission Control Room, languishing in uncertainty, sprang instantly to action at the injection of news that Topaz was to bring. The privileged viewers, VR headsets at the ready, settled down for the ‘movie’ as they’d come to be known—the composite, annotated video and sensor footage transmitted from the mother ship. Except this mother ship was not Pinta as expected. The gemstone Topaz belonged to Santa Maria—the one that got away. Now she’d spoken from the dead and had a story to tell that would shake the team and shake the world. Santa Maria had left Earth’s orbit with five Gemstones on-board and had sent back just one – Emerald – a week and a half ago. There was a failsafe mechanism built into the probe’s operation, which could release the remaining gemstones should it get in trouble. Like seeds being released into the wind, the Gemstones would act as distress and communications nodes monitoring the main probe. They’d also have received data from her for as long as they were able to do so. It was unclear to the team why only one had been sent back; although it could have been that Pinta had simply been unable to track down the other three, or perhaps they were picked up by the aliens or got lost or destroyed some other way. What mattered was that they now had Topaz in hand and its many terabytes of data that had been downloaded to the ground station.

  Mission control’s William Trantham and Sarah Townsley, Professor Kenneth Hawkins - Astrobiologist, Adam Chesters - probe designer, Robert Hartmann - probe construction lead, Lukas Majewski - AI expert and Christina Frewer, King’s delegate from the Science discipline, were all online for this viewing along with dozens of their colleagues. It could take all day, into the night, as long as they needed to decipher, assess and guide decisions on what had become a tangled and complex mission. They were about to hear the story that would dispel them of a few illusions they’d held over the true gravity of the situation.

  Trantham was driving the movie and fast-forwarded much of the early part of the video footage. There’d be time to analyse it in minute detail later. For now they needed to understand what had happened to Santa Maria and, more crucially, to understand if the aliens were aware or involved. He was also now aware, from the FBI, that there was another possibility explaining Santa Maria’s deviation—that the Russians had uploaded a computer virus. Trantham could make neither head nor tail of the Russians’ reasoning. But then again, he thought to himself, they were a paranoid police state who guarded information and wholeheartedly believed the old mantra that information is power.

  Playing at real-time speed again, the view from Santa Maria’s cameras showed her still cloaked and now in orbit around Gaia. It now looked likely that Gaia was the home world of the as-yet unseen aliens. She was looking down, zooming in now, on the dark side of the planet. Evidence of city lights could be seen in various places around the otherwise dark view, but not like the view of Earth’s cities. They were very dim in comparison to those emanating from Earth. There was also a distinct lack of patterns—no linear paths of lights following transit routes or natural features; no consistent clusters showing centres or better lit areas of a settlement. There was a variance in the brightness of the largely monochromatic honey-coloured light—just no pattern or apparent logic to it. The AI had compared the coordinates of the patches of lights and overlaid areas of vegetation seen in the daylight and the heat islands detected on its IR sensors. The AI concluded that the vegetation was obscuring the lights of the settlements. The AI had decided that these were cities under the canopies of forests.

  The alien sun rose in space as Santa Maria orbited into the daylight side of Gaia. This was closer than they’d ever seen it before and better surface details were now coming into view. Much of the land surface was forested and it was a dense forest with little else visible beneath it. Mountainous areas seemed to be bereft of civilization, although there was a fleeting glimpse of a fast moving, snake-like creature. The probe’s powerful zoom had honed in on it as it detected movement from beneath a rock. Just as quickly, it had darted into a crevice. Then the camera switched to another feed, this time from a vegetation-covered region, but not forest—more like a sea of long grass. The terrain was very flat in this region of the temperate latitude being viewed. As the camera zoomed in, it looked as if the grass was caught in a steady, strong breeze. Interspersed were outcrops of red-brown rock, wind-blown and smooth. Around them huddled some hardy-looking bushes, shrub-like in appearance but larger.

  The camera switched again. A city built in the grasslands, not veiled under the forests, for there were none here. The buildings were blocky and geometrical. They appeared utilitarian to human eyes, just a collection of reddish-grey cuboids. The smallest of them was ten metres high, the largest about the height of a ten story building in human terms. The buildings were laid out in a strict grid-style with a conformity Earth’s most ardent advocates would have been proud of. Between the buildings were sand-coloured roads with snakes of pod-like vehicles following their lines. Sometimes pods seemed to peel off from the rear or middle of the train following a different route. One could be seen disappearing into the base of a small building. Trantham sat there open-mouthed, enthralled by what he was witnessing. Then abruptly the view seemed to lighten slightly and a red status warning light came on in the HUD: ‘Cloaking Field Failure’. Trantham felt his stomach lurch as if he himself was now exposed to the aliens’ view. The view seemed to wobble before settling into a gyroscopic precession.

  Another warning message flashed in alarming red letters on the HUD, ‘Skin Temperature > 800 degC’. The flicker of orange flame could be seen on the unsteady camera view now, growing steadily from what began as a faint tail in the bottom left corner of the view.

  Another warning: ‘Atmospheric Drag Limited Exceeded - initiating entry sequence’.

  Trantham knew what this meant—somehow, before completing a full survey from orbit in stealth mode, the probe had started entering the Gaian atmosphere.

  ‘Sending messenger probe 1 of 4…’ came the next message on the head-up display, followed by a blackout lasting no more than a second. The view returned and the status on the HUD read ‘Messenger probe Topaz sent successfully’. The data stream from Santa Maria was now being relayed to Topaz; the momentary blackout due to Topaz being transmitted to a standoff location by Santa Maria’s FTL drive.

  ‘Sending messenger probe 2 of 4…’ came next. But this time the message read, ‘Abort sending messenger probe,’ with no explanation as to why. As Santa Maria hurtled towards Gaia, she would have sent Topaz hundreds of kilometres away, but still close enough to maintain comms with Topaz.

  In the back of Trantham’s mind, he acknowledged that they’d now solved the mystery of why only Topaz had returned. Santa Maria had only been able to send Topaz before malfunctioning during her untimely descent to Gaia. His focus reverted wholly to what happened next…

  The viewscreen was filled with the fire of entry into the Gaian atmosphere. Nothing from the downward-facing cameras could be seen properly through the orange glare. Only the HUD status updates gave a picture of what was happening during the descent. The fireball of entry receded, giving way to the view below from an altitude of forty-four kilometres. What Trantham and his colleagues could see was the white of clouds and the blue of ocean. Freefall at terminal velocity continued for a few minutes until
a status message informed, ‘Retro-thrusters activated.’ The probe decelerated rapidly to a velocity of 50 m/s then, ‘Parachutes Deployed,’ was displayed on the viewscreen of Trantham’s VR headset. By this point, altitude was eighteen kilometres and the irregular rocking of the downward-facing camera feed on the parachute-supported probe was starting to induce motion sickness in Trantham. The probe had clearly been buffeted severely by high winds on its way down, but it was intact and operational. Why Santa Maria had dived into the alien planet’s atmosphere prematurely was the current big, unanswered question among big, unanswered questions. What if a Russian virus interfered with the probe? thought Trantham, taking in the passing wisps of cloud as the probe descended towards an expanse of blue sea on an alien world. Even as a space engineer with little interest in geopolitics, Trantham knew that the ramifications of Russian espionage derailing this pioneering mission could be severe. Thankfully, his queasiness abated as the rocking motion of the probe died down with the gentler winds at lower altitude. The peaks of what Trantham interpreted as enormous waves could now be seen, white spray being whipped off them by the breeze. It was difficult to tell they were enormous in the absence of any familiar objects to lend them scale—something to do with the shape of them and the way they seemed to move. The probe helpfully informed that the ocean that Santa Maria would soon splashdown in was indeed water.