Accidental Gods

by Andrew Busey

  Stephen glanced at Thomas. “Well, it’s always going to be slowing down as the universe expands and has to process and store—”

  “Yeah, I know that, but why now?”

  “We think there are two reasons,” Stephen said, still watching Thomas. “One is that we are spending a lot more time observing, and that puts substantial strain on the system.”

  “I buy that.”

  Stephen hesitated again. Thomas gave a slow, permissive nod.

  “Two is, we think the presence of living beings in the SU slows it down. A lot. Intelligent beings would likely slow it down even more.”

  Ross’s jaw dropped. His eyes were bugging out. He didn’t blink but looked uncertainly at Thomas, then Stephen, and then back at Thomas.

  Stephen assumed Thomas had “forgotten” to mention that part in the recruiting pitch. Thomas did, after all, prefer just to toss people into the fire. That didn’t strike Stephen as a wise way to manage, but the strategy seemed to work for Thomas, so he didn’t question it.

  “Intelligent beings,” Ross said. “Is that what I’m looking for?”

  “You got it,” Thomas said from the back of the room.

  Stephen figured Thomas had probably been sitting there this whole time just to see how Ross would react to that.

  “Anomalies.” Ross smirked and looked at Jenn, who had also played a large part in recruiting him. “I guess an intelligent being running around on the planet could be an anomaly.”

  “The truth, from a certain point of view,” Stephen said, mimicking Obi-Wan Kenobi from Star Wars, “young padawan.”

  Thomas smirked.

  “Sorry, Ross,” Jenn said, mockingly pleading with him. “The devil made me do it. And by ‘devil’ I really mean Thomas.”

  Thomas shrugged innocently.

  Everyone laughed.

  Chapter 21

  Week 3: Wednesday

  It soon became obvious that we were but on the threshold of the discovery.

  It was a sight surpassing all precedent, and one we never dreamed of seeing.

  —Howard Carter

  Ross waded through stacks of images with Jenn in the Galileo conference room, which they had coopted for this purpose. In many ways, it was similar to his previous job at NRO, except that he was looking at all new stuff. At NRO, sometimes they looked for tanks and troop movements, but for the last few years, they had looked mostly at buildings and other structures, analyzing specific shapes and sizes. He had gotten good at spotting anomalies, mostly bizarre traffic patterns—like lots of traffic into and out of remote locations with only one or two small buildings or large construction projects in remote locations. It was pretty basic stuff—you looked at images of the same area over an extended period of time trying to spot things that were out of the ordinary.

  Now, this was a lot more interesting because he didn’t know what he was looking for—well, not exactly, anyway. Obviously, if they found a village or city or some other huge manufactured thing, well, that would be a dead giveaway. But Ross expected he and Jenn were more likely to find migrant movement—packs of lions, small tribes, or some other form of evolved life forms—and more subtle, especially given the extensive foliage that draped much of the Alpha planet’s solid ground.

  They had been flipping through these glossy prints for two weeks. The images were amazing, better than the satellite images he was used to looking at, both in image quality and color. He now had a good feel for the geography of the planet: polar ice caps, four major landmasses, not so different from our own. Things were shaped differently, but the basic makeup was the same.

  In a Mercator projection, the top and bottom of the world looked much like Earth’s. It was unclear whether the north polar ice cap was a massive field of floating ice like the North Pole or whether it was a landmass covered by snow and ice like Antarctica—the only hint was a small chain of islands that reached out from one of the large continents toward the frozen northern pole. The southern pole had a clear landmass that stretched out beyond the grasp of the ice.

  Like on Earth, oceans covered most of the planet and wrapped the continents in their watery embrace. Alpha had three primary continents, two of which were loosely joined by a bridge of small islands—there was no complete land path connecting them.

  The upper continent had a mountainous spine that led from the north, where it began. The islands that touched the northern polar ice cap wove down, off center to the right. Ultimately, they became the islands connecting the upper and lower continents.

  A large inland sea, several lakes, and river systems punctuated the continent. But only one of the rivers met their “cradle of civilization” requirements.

  Below the connecting chain of islands, the southern continent reminded Ross of Australia, although this continent was much larger. Its most remarkable feature was a large inland lake near its center that was completely ringed by mountains. He suspected it was the location of an enormous collision and that this was a planet-changing crater. The continent was covered with several river systems, but most cut through tropical areas like Earth’s Amazon and Congo. Therefore, they were less likely to be locations where civilizations might develop.

  Strangest of all, the third continent vaguely resembled a dog, if you squinted at it just right—like those abstract posters that become sailboats, for most squinters, anyway. The continent’s tail was comprised of a peninsula, which was further extended by a string of islands. Its open mouth looked as though it might bite the upper continent. Peninsulas reached out forming paws along the western shore, while the eastern coast was a straight line—well, straight for a coast—drawn at a forty-five-degree angle from the base of the tail up to another set of outcroppings where the dog’s head would be. They looked strangely similar to ears. A large bay formed the dog continent’s mouth, and another formed to the north between the “ears.” A third major river system divided the dog’s back between an arid desert to the east and a more-hospitable savannah to the west and emptied into the bay formed by the dog’s upper legs.

  Ross had already identified three of the rivers, which he had not-so-cleverly named Uno, Dos, and Tres. These, which he had very cleverly guessed—admittedly, after interrogating Don on the criteria necessary for the development of animal life—were the most likely locations to become the cradles of civilization for this world. Time and resource constraints had forced him to focus the search this way. It was, he hoped, a very-well-educated guess.

  He hoped if civilizations, or even organizations of semi-intelligent creatures, were to arise, they would do so around these three rivers. He knew that in our world, the Nile, the Tigris-Euphrates, the Yangtze, and the Indus Rivers were prime focal points for the development of civilizations. But a river was not the only criterion. Other giant rivers like the Amazon did not act as anchors in the same way, perhaps because they were too fertile and foraging was so easy that there were few incentives for organization.

  The planet was well-developed now, and there was a lot of area to look at, even narrowing it down as much as they had. They still scanned other areas, although it was an almost futile exercise, since no one had time to look at all those scans. The process they developed was to look at images in intervals of five hundred years, focusing primarily on the three rivers. It took them three or four days to go through a new set of images, and this process allowed them to keep up with the edge of the SU’s time horizon. The system itself snapped images every year and stored them, but Ross and Jenn didn’t have the time to look at but the tiniest fraction of them.

  They were excited to find game trails and even a predator that looked very much like a panther, drinking at the Tres River in the last set of images. A lot of chance came into play in this process, just like back at the NRO when satellites could take only periodic pictures. To catch that panther drinking from the river, the image had to be snapped at just the right instant.

  Today, they had just gotten a new set of images. Ross supposed it was a little archai
c to be looking for this stuff on actual paper when they had all this computer equipment, but for some reason, he found it far easier to do it this way. They could pull anything they found up on the projector wall, even do a time lapse leading up to the current image, starting from five hundred years before it and including the system’s saved images from every year in between. The few times they had done that had been particularly fascinating. Turns out watching five hundred years in time-lapse motion in five minutes was pretty cool.

  Ross spotted an anomaly in one image, unnatural geometric clusters near the Tres River. He popped the Tres River view up on the computer, and the image was cast in intricate detail on the entire wall.

  He zoomed in on the clusters.

  “They look like huts!” Ross said excitedly.

  Jenn stood and looked at the screen. “I think they are.”

  Ross continually zoomed in, and the anomaly resolved into an aerial view of a small village. Ross and Jenn watched expectantly, as if someone might walk out of one of the huts at any moment.

  Then Jenn laughed. “This isn’t a video feed. It’s a static image.”

  “Duh.”

  She started typing. The image blinked briefly and then returned to the original high orbit view. She zoomed back in, and now it was a live video feed.

  There were people all right—or at least what looked very much like people. There were hundreds of them, obviously not technologically evolved yet, but they had certainly passed the hunter-gatherer stage.

  Ross asked, “They look really human. Just how much—what did you call it? Nudging? How much nudging have you guys been doing?”

  Jenn made a noncommittal half shrug. Ross couldn’t tell whether the shrug meant she didn’t know or that she wouldn’t answer.

  One building was larger than the others. Ross and Jenn zoomed right down next to it and pitched their view so that the ground was down and the sky up and went inside. It was a shrine or temple of some sort. On the wall directly across from the entrance was a large diamond, a dot in each of its corners and in its center.

  “Look beneath the diamond,” Jenn said. “Is that writing?”

  Below the diamond were symbols painted in different colors and laid out on an organized grid. It was not clear whether it flowed top to bottom or left to right or perhaps some other way.

  “Sure looks like it.” Ross’s mouth went dry. “Somewhere between hieroglyphics and Chinese.”

  They took several pictures of the writing and projected it on the other wall.

  “Wow, Thomas is going to flip.”

  Ross continued taking pictures while Jenn sent an instant message to Thomas.

  ***

  There was a stampede into the room. Thomas was first, and within two minutes, the room was packed with most of the IACP core team. The crowd continued to grow. Eyes darted between the aerial view of the small village projected on the north wall and the image with the prominent diamond figure with writing beneath it that was projected on the west wall.

  Thomas blurted out, “Wow! This is huge.”

  Murmurs of agreement came from the still-growing group, packed now to far beyond the conference room’s legal capacity.

  Stephen said, “That definitely looks like a language to me.”

  Ajay said enthusiastically, “Forget that. There are people walking around! People!”

  Thomas said, “Cracking this language has to be our number-one priority.” He began typing an e-mail into his phone. “I think,” he said, still typing, “I know someone who might be able to help us. Jenn?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can you make me a pdf of that image and e-mail it to me?”

  “Sure,” she said. “By the way, the last five hundred years processed dramatically slower than before.”

  “It’s the people!” Stephen and Ajay said in near unison.

  Ajay finished, “They are slowing it down.”

  “We thought this might happen,” Stephen added.

  Jenn hit her enter key. “There you go, Thomas.”

  “Got it,” he said. “OK, attaching now, and…Send.” Thomas closed his phone, looked up again, and asked, “What time is it in the SU?”

  “Five-oh-nine p.m.,” Jenn said.

  Thomas chuckled. “No, what year?”

  Jenn glanced at the screen and said, “It’s year 13,508,915,218.”

  “OK,” Thomas said, “to make tracking this civilization’s time easier, let’s call it PC.”

  “PC?” Jenn asked.

  “Post-civilization,” Thomas replied. “So PC will be time marked from when we first found this civilization.

  Chapter 22

  Week 3: Thursday

  Language is power, life and the instrument of culture, the instrument of domination and liberation.

  —Angela Carter

  Mike,

  I need your help with this. Please keep it quiet.

  Thomas

  ----

  Thomas Gray, PhD

  Executive Director

  Institute for Advanced Computational Physics

  “OK, then,” Mike mumbled. “Let’s see what’s so important I have to ‘keep it quiet.’” He opened the pdf attachment.

  “What the hell?” he asked himself.

  The document displayed a series of images that appeared to be a language but not one he could identify. It vaguely resembled pictographic languages, such as Egyptian hieroglyphs and cuneiform. It looked more evolved, but not in the way modern languages like Chinese and Japanese had developed from the formalization of pictographic languages.

  “What the hell is this?” he asked himself, getting more excited.

  It almost had the flair of an invented language, like one of J. R. R. Tolkien’s. The pdf file was only two pages, but those pages were covered edge-to-edge in writing. Mike was certain he’d never seen an alphabet like this before.

  He pressed reply but couldn’t be sure in doing so what he was getting himself into.

  Tom,

  What is this language? I don’t recognize it. What do you need?

  Mike

  -----

  Mike Wilson, PhD

  Department of Linguistics

  University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign

  He pressed send, and the message disappeared.

  Thirty seconds later, his phone rang.

  “Hello?”

  “Mike, it’s Thomas. Can you talk?”

  “You’re Thomas now?”

  Thomas laughed. “Yeah. No one has called me Tom since undergrad. But we can catch up on that later.”

  “Sure. So what’s with that language?”

  “It’s kind of sensitive. The real question is, do you think you could translate it?”

  “Well,” Mike said, “two written pages with no context is pretty much impossible to translate. Do you have any more, or could you tell me what the context is? If you can provide either of those—preferably both—it might be possible, but I can’t promise.”

  “Are you free this weekend?”

  “I just finished my last class for the term. I’m pretty free for the summer. Just working on a paper. You know the drill, publish or perish.”

  “Can you be ready for a flight in two hours?”

  “Um, I guess so.”

  “We’ll send a car to your house in two hours.”

  The line went dead.

  ***

  Two and one quarter hours later, he was at the airport, but in a section he had never seen before with his laptop case slung over his shoulder, banging against his opposite hip while he dragged a humongous suitcase on wheels behind him. Mike left the car and walked into the General Aviation Building at the University of Illinois Willard Airport and headed straight to what appeared to be the ticket counter—easy to find since there was only one.

  The counter attendant smiled when Mike approached.

  Mike told him, “I’m Mike Wilson. I was told to come here for my flight.”

  The attenda
nt studied his computer for a second, looked up at Mike, looked back down, and hit a key.

  “Yes, sir,” he said. “Your plane is ready. Please come with me. Let me get your luggage.”

  He grabbed Mike’s bigger bag, collapsed its long dragging handle, lifted the bag off the floor by its side handle, and led him out the back of the building.

  It took Mike a second to realize they were walking right onto the airport tarmac and toward a small private jet, a Citation V Ultra.

  “Holy shit,” Mike said to no one in particular, “I guess Tom’s been doing well.”

  A smiling woman in business attire appeared in the jet’s open door and climbed down the stairs.

  She smiled at Mike. “Hi, Dr. Wilson. I’m Jennifer. I’ll be your flight attendant today. It is very nice to meet you, sir.” She extended her hand.

  Mike shook it, still gawking at the plane.

  Jennifer took Mike’s bag from the counter attendant, said, “Follow me, sir,” and was on the third step back up the jet’s stairs before Mike could stop her.

  “Jennifer,” he said again. “Please, let me get that for you. I’ve packed a few reference books in there, and—”

  “I can get it, sir,” she said as she turned back toward the top of the stairs and went up them with Mike’s bag as if it were a half-empty attaché case.

  Mike stopped just inside the jet when he saw that there were no rows of seats. Instead, four large leather recliners loosely surrounded a low, well-polished, oval coffee table.

  Jennifer gestured Mike toward the chairs. She had already tucked his bag away somewhere.

  Mike chose one of the aftmost two chairs, laid his laptop case on the carpeted deck next to it, and perched tentatively on the chair’s edge. He blew out a long breath and allowed himself to slip back and sink into the chair. He rubbed his temples, wondering what could possibly warrant all the expense and attention.