Terminal Reset Omnibus: The Coming of The Wave

by A. E. Williams

  His sexual escapades became the stuff of myth, with the camp equally divided that he was a sex god and a demonic lunatic. He apparently had no concept of shame or decorum, and was known to swear in such novel ways that weeks later his victims were still surprised to discover they would flinch in shame when they would catch a glimpse of themselves in a mirror.

  Dr. Groenig would have been put out to pasture in many private organizations, or tossed unceremoniously out of military or government positions but for the fact that he really was the genuine article. No one was able to disregard his genius for finding the absolute correct answers to the thorniest problems imaginable. He did differential calculus for fun, and it was not uncommon to find him buried in reams of papers, legal pads and notebooks with all manner of arcane scribbling, which under closer scrutiny revealed itself to be of the highest kind of mathematics. Dr. Groenig had posited the existence of multiple universes, eleventh-dimensional tesseract structures, and event horizon collapse artifacts years before Hawking. His incarceration was the only reason he did not receive credit for the work.

  In point of fact, much of Dr. Hawking’s thinking had been revised following a particularly bitter and nasty exchange regarding singularities and time distortion between he and Dr. Groenig. That Groenig insisted on referring to Hawking as “Crippy Boy” in all of their prodigious correspondence did nothing at all to endear him to anyone in the scientific community. Dr. Hawking, driven to anger by the constant disrespectful tone of Dr. Groenig, recorded himself defecating and used this as his cellular phone ring tone assigned to Dr. Groenig.

  Regardless of the antics he undertook, Dr. Martin Groenig was always sought by the project managers of Fortune 100 companies, whose questions were sent to him anonymously, and then filtered into a more diplomatic response by underlings.

  Since he was one of the first to learn of the Martians, his initial attempts to disclose this evidence in the regular channels gained him some notoriety as a crank. But, eventually, enough disinformation was put out so that he was no longer considered a reliable source by the news media, and relegated to the journalistic fringes of tabloid fodder.

  In the ensuing years, pains were taken to assure that any accidental disclosures of these findings could be contained. Seasoned veterans of military secrecy put special protocols into play and assured that the information would be buried and only made available to trusted individuals.

  Another Dr. Groenig would not be allowed.

  Trusted people were given compartmentalized versions of the data, and allowed the freedom to conduct any manner of research that they wished, with the proviso that it would never see the light of day in any news or professional journal.

  The temptation and ability to conduct such unfettered research provided the correct amount of incentive, and appeals to personal vices and idiosyncrasies eventually yielded enough embarrassing and compromising video footage of the principals, that their complete cooperation was undeniable.

  In some cases, people were removed, with extreme prejudice. This was deemed necessary to national security. No sleep was lost.

  The categorization of the Martian life forms became a pocket project for SPARTACUS when the original budgets came under Congressional review. Ironically labeled ‘pet food’, and ‘animal husbandry supplies’, the funds were folded into the larger accounting spreadsheets of other black programs until indecipherable to almost everyone not actively involved in managing the ongoing experimentation.

  Exo- and xeno-biological experts were being cultivated at the highest levels of education, and they were given the sales pitch in couched terms. Very few people ended up finding out the true nature of the research they were being asked to perform, and none of them decided against this particular career path, once all the variables were known. Within closed doors, there were many brilliant scientists who knew and controlled the taxonomy and classification of the Martians.

  Deep in the halls of the Pentagon, men were eying the recent arrival of The Wave with some trepidation. They understood that this event was unavoidable, but the small amount of data being collated did nothing to resolve important questions about military posture and strategic reserve logistics and deployment. The rationale was that any cataclysmic event that was global in nature provided several opportunities for strategic improvement in the assets and resources of a given country.

  Every nation had its wants and needs, and every nation had schemes to improve its lot. But few had the intelligence assets and surveillance might of the United States of America.

  The key problem facing the men in the room was what actually was going to happen when The Wave impacted Earth, and how they would survive it.

  Many ideas were being tossed around, and some of them were reasonably sound. Anything that wiped out the life forms of an entire planet would prove a grave challenge, indeed. If the planet’s atmosphere became poisonous, or the oceans boiled away, this would also prove challenging. But, most of those assembled thought it would be survivable for them.

  The preparations that had been generations in the making, at the expense of the middle and working classes of the many countries, were prodigious. The men in the room were assured of at least several hundred years of supremacy, should an unthinkable event occur, so long as they could reach one of the several arks located at strategic areas around the globe.

  Other countries also had emergency shelters, but few matched the resourcefulness and ingenuity that had been designed into the ones created for these Elite. The ability for them and their heirs to survive almost total annihilation was a perquisite of their birthrights. The families that had founded and destroyed empires, enslaved entire peoples, subjugated their own citizens with unscrupulous laws, and guided their vision of civilization for generations would not go quickly into the night. They had worked tirelessly at organizing and managing the world’s affairs to gain the top of the mountain and were loath to relinquish any iota of that command. The coming of something unknowable such as The Wave was a risk, but one that could be mitigated. Short of the planet burning to a cinder from the impact, much of the way of life they had created could be extended, at least for the chosen. If The Wave had disintegrated Jupiter, there would have been some concerns, since manned interplanetary travel had not been deemed financially possible.

  There were experimental advances, but the state of the art still sat at the stage of using nuclear fission reaction engines, and their deployment would devastate the planet with radioactive fallout for thousands of years afterward. This would prove an inconvenience if The Wave were to prove more benign, and so was set as a last resort.

  It was hoped that observation of the effects on Mars life forms could provide another data point, and allow a more rational decision to be made. Curiosity and other experimental probes were sent to particular areas of the planet to best be able to send the data from the impact to powerful supercomputers. Limited by the physics of the speed of light, the transmission of the data from Mars would take approximately 13 minutes.

  In communicating with the Curiosity and other craft, technical considerations surrounded the ability to account for the Spacecraft Event Time (SCET) and Earth Received Time (ERT). The former was in regard to what was actually happening on the planet in real-time, and the latter was the time when the transmission would be received on Earth and interpreted.

  The delay between the two is usually called the One-Way Light Time (OWLT) and the time for a message to go to Mars and come back is the Two-Way Light Time (TWLT), or round-trip time.

  Even if something major occurred on Mars, accurate data analysis would not be made readily available for almost 25 minutes. That time could be useful to spacecraft attempting to exit Earth to meet at Lagrange Points or even the ISS. However, it was recognized that if The Wave was deleterious to life, then the question of shielding became more of a concern.

  Decisions needed to be made as to whether an early launch could be viable, or whether moving to the underground facilities would prov
e more valuable. It was imperative to find out what was going to happen to the Martian life so that the best option could be implemented.

  The men in the room waited and observed the incoming transmissions. Small creatures that looked much like elongated crabs moved on the monitors. They were crystalline in appearance, but moved quickly, with curious buzzing motions of their many appendages. But each also had a single, spiked protuberance that jutted out vertically at one end, although it rapidly could move to the other end of the creature in an instant. There were no orifices, as such. The creatures would dart around, and come together in groups, then move off for some distances. They would repeat these rendezvous, and could continue this behavior for days. They did not seem to rest, nor sleep. The creatures stayed in continuous motion, and when a given animal would stop, it was never seen moving again. After about five Earth days, it would just blow away in the thin atmosphere, a desiccated husk that eventually vanished. It was theorized that the creatures subsisted on discharges of static electricity. They were nicknamed “Teslas”, but one of the scientists insisted on calling them “Edisons,” much to the groans of his fellows.

  Another monitor showed the shlorg. The shlorg was a solitary animal and resembled nothing as much as a sea anemone made of vulcanized rubber. It even possessed patterns in its skin that resembled the treads on an automobile tire.

  Shlorgs usually were found near outcroppings of rock where they would sit quietly for months at a time. Other Martian life would crawl or walk on them, and there was no motion or even acknowledgment by the shlorg that it was even a living thing. But, when a sufficient number of other animals surrounded it, the shlorg erupted with a strange, webbed excretion, which would blanket almost ten square meters around it. Anything caught in the web was doomed. The next few days were a disgusting spectacle as the animals were digested and absorbed by the web. After a while, the shlorg would draw the web back into itself. Within a few days, there would be another eruption, of a pod-shaped spore. This would be propelled a significant distance from the original shlorg. Once it landed, it would remain unchanged for as long as six months.

  It was a little-known fact that the European Space Agency probe Beagle 2 was actually the victim of a shlorg feeding. In point of fact, of the 38 launch attempts to reach Mars, 19 had succumbed to adverse effects from contact with Martian life. Eleven of the probes were deactivated by shlorgs. It was a running joke amongst SPARTACUS personnel that shlorgs were nicknamed “Decepticons”.

  Another form of life on Mars was the drurgler. Drurglers were huge creatures, almost as large as a whale. They could be found drifting in packs above the surface of Mars, at an altitude between one and three kilometers. Usually mistaken for clouds, they were the natural enemy of another creature which had originally been thought to be a dust devil. This animal was called a sky-salp, after an aquatic creature found on Earth. Sky-salps ate drurglers, and the drurglers ate sky-salps. It was a strange symbiotic relationship, unlike any known to Earth biology.

  As The Wave approached Mars, all of these animals went about their distinctly Martian lives, oblivious to the imminent changes about to permanently alter their existence.

  Inside a specially outfitted apartment deep under the desert of New Mexico, Dr. Martin Groenig planned his next escape. He absently stroked what looked like a clear glass stirring rod, and traveled through his plan, step by step, in his mind. Silently, with no external indication of his intense thought processes, he reviewed the intricate procedures, looking for and finding no errors, or omissions that would jeopardize his plan. He knew that The Wave was coming, and he also thought he knew what happened when a solar body was hit by it. He only needed some collaborative evidence, and he also knew that the Martian impact was going to provide him with his best opportunity for escape. He knew that he would be approached to analyze the incoming data. He knew that his captors would whisk him away to wherever they were going. His mind and his capabilities were a tremendous asset to them, in spite of his sociopathic tendencies.

  They would come to him for answers, and he would give them to them. And God help the lot of them afterward, because he knew that, this time, he was going to kill every last one. He was going to exact his revenge upon them.

  Painfully. Decisively. Permanently. Dr. Martin Groenig knew that, within a few short hours, he was going to be a free man. He smiled pleasantly at that thought, and hummed a few bars of “Girl from Ipanema” while he played with the innocuous glass rod, fully aware that it was one of the most deadly weapons in the world.

  “It is a very sad thing that nowadays there is so little useless information. “

  -- Oscar Wilde

  "Why is it drug addicts and computer aficionados are both called users?"

  - Clifford Stoll

  "One would think that if you're anonymous, you'd do anything you want, but groups have their own sense of community and what we can do."

  - John Allen

  Chapter Seven

  MIAMI, FLORIDA

  Daniel was finishing up the final analysis of the Core Impact and Rapid 7 datastreams, confident that he was deep into the database. There were not the usual indications that anything odd had occurred, but he knew otherwise. He scanned the readouts on his monitor. NMAP scans had allowed him to identify an unusual port being used for data egress, so he had placed a sniffer on the outgoing data while he was performing his penetration.

  Over a six hour time period, he had managed to compromise 85% of the network at the bank that had contracted him to test their defenses. He obtained access to their critical financial systems without too many problems, downloaded evidence for forensic analysis later, and left three small empty text files as proof he had indeed been there. The files were fu_.txt, n00.tx and bs.txt and were 0 byte sized, with no identifying signatures.

  Now, he was watching the data on a Wireshark network scan, as it collected the traffic across several vlans. He noticed certain packets were coded with a flag that usually indicated a high-level encryption string was being used, but the data was plain text. He surmised that someone else had either misconfigured the AES appliances or that he was seeing evidence of a man-in-the-middle attack that was pretty sloppy, by his standards.

  He began to shut down his laptop, which he had named “Lucille”. He had enough to earn his paycheck, and was about to disconnect when he saw something that made him do a double-take. A notice had popped up on his screen, and it said:

  “You are trespassing. Prepare for interdiction. You were warned.”

  Daniel grabbed his laptop and snatched the USB drive from the server he had been using. Because he had not entered the proper key strings in a CMD shell, a pre-loaded script began erasing the contents of both the USB stick and the server hard disks. The program had been written by him for an especially delicate piece of business about three months prior. He had tested it to his satisfaction, but it was only the second time he had needed to actually use it.

  The hard disk was being forced to accelerate until it achieved total physical media fracture, and the amperage was increasing in the server power supplies, bypassing the usual safety features that would flip circuit breakers if temperature or power parameters were exceeded. The script disabled all the regular cut-outs. The practical outcome of this was that the data on the platters of the hard disk would be overwritten, fragmented, overwritten again with random characters, degaussed, and then melted into metal slag. The server would catch fire, and hopefully the fire suppression system would protect the building from being utterly destroyed, but Daniel really could care less at this point.

  Daniel ran out of the building, pushing Lucille into his backpack and quickly donning it. He ran two blocks, zig-zagged through a parking garage, and found his bike. Donning his helmet, he jumped onto the Buell 1125CR that he had purchased from another hacker. He enjoyed its power and controllable ergonomics and the fact that it was all black further added to the coolness factor in his mind. He pushed the starter button, twisted the throttle and a
ccelerated out of the Denny’s parking lot three blocks from the bank, in an entirely different direction than when he had left. As he drove, he used his Bluetooth headset in the helmet coupled to a modified Baofeng UV-5R to radio MIA ATIS on 133.675 to check the weather and to make sure runway 9 and 8R was still active. It would put a serious crimp in his departure if the wind had shifted and he had to waste 15 to 20 minutes taxiing to the other end of the airport to use runway 27. Fortunately, all was as expected and he noted that “information Charlie” was current. Clearance Delivery at 135.35 was next and Daniel requested his international clearance to Sangster Intl to assure he was cleared for departure on arrival at his aircraft.

  He ran through his escape route, and altered course on Brickell Avenue enough to pass between two semi-tractor trailers that were surprised into honking at him, but by then he was up to 150mph on I-95, headed northbound. He exited the freeway at 112th street and traveled towards the Western end of Miami International Airport. He turned at West 66th, headed for the cargo area, and drove up a loading ramp and into the large bay doors on building 708. Outside, on the tarmac, next to several large 747 Atlas Air cargo planes, was a sleek black jet, a ramp extending from the tail. He drove up the ramp, squealing to a stop inside the jet and killed the motor. Hydraulic clamps extended and tied down the Buell, and he jumped off. He took off his helmet and hung the backpack onto a wall bracket as he passed by it. He snagged Lucille and went forward.

  The ramp was already closing behind him automatically, and the engines on the jet were spooling up.

  He slid into the pilot’s seat in the cockpit, put on his headset, spoke to Ground Control on 121.8 for taxi instructions to Runway 08, and began going through the takeoff checklist. He placed Lucille in her unique docking carriage and activated the onboard AI. “Begin tactical scanning” he instructed, and Lucille’s AI started sweeping the area around MIA for hostiles. He throttled up, turned the nose wheel to steer onto the tarmac, and aimed for the taxiway. Within seconds, he was taxiing towards the runway. Two-thirds of the way down Taxiway “S”, he called the Tower on 118.3 for a rolling takeoff clearance, held his breath due to the late hour and was rewarded with the magic call “change to departure – cleared for takeoff”. He made the left turn onto runway 08, set the throttles, checked the flaps, and began his takeoff roll while courteously calling back to the tower “rolling” as soon as he was straightened out on the runway.