by Simon Toyne
The two techs swooped into the room, one shaking open various-sized evidence bags, the other scoping every surface with a high-end camera that took both stills and video. Franklin joined Shepherd and Pierce back in the corridor. ‘Looks like someone left in a hell of a hurry.’
Pierce nodded. ‘When I first saw it I thought it was a break-in.’
‘You still think so?’
He shook his head. ‘Not when I saw that.’ He pointed to a small book lying open next to the terminal keyboard. It was photographed and handed out to Franklin. It was a standard appointments diary, a double page to a week, every blank space crammed with small, precise handwriting. ‘I was trying to find out where Dr Kinderman might be, but as you can see it wasn’t much help.’
Franklin flicked through the pages until he arrived at the current week where the writing just stopped. The last entry was in today’s date:
T
end of days
The rest of the diary was blank, as if nothing was going to happen ever again.
Franklin looked up. ‘You said no one has been in this room apart from you and the person who found it like this.’
‘That’s right, just me and Merriweather.’
Franklin handed the diary over to one of the techs for processing. ‘Why don’t we go and say hello to Merriweather.’
11
The Space Telescope Operations Control Centre was roughly half the size of a tennis court and smelt of warm circuitry and ozone. There were no windows in the room and therefore no daylight. The only illumination came from the occasional desk lamp and the combined glow of a few dozen flat-screen monitors facing a larger central screen. All of them were displaying the same message:
MANKIND MUST LOOK NO FURTHER
A man stood as they entered, his clothes and horn-rimmed glasses making him look like he had beamed in from the fifties.
‘Merriweather, these are Special Agents Franklin and Shepherd from the FBI.’
They shook hands. Franklin nodded at the big screen. ‘That the same message you found on Kinderman’s computer?’
‘Yes, sir –’ He cleared his throat and stared up at the screen rather than anyone in particular. ‘Well, I mean it was part of the program that did it – I think. Or rather – this message was the last thing that uploaded and now it’s everywhere and we can’t take it down. The whole system’s locked.’
‘Any idea what it might refer to?’
Merriweather blew out a breath and raised his eyebrows. ‘Hubble’s a telescope, all it does is look at stuff – it could refer to anything.’
‘It’s not looking at anything any more though is it?’
Merriweather shook his head and Shepherd felt for him. He knew how attached people got to the projects they were working on, how they often became the most meaningful relationships you had. Hubble had just been attacked, possibly put out of action for months, and Franklin was talking about it like someone had dented a car.
‘Talk us through the sequence,’ Shepherd said, trying to steer the conversation back to the investigation. ‘What was the first physical manifestation of the virus?’
‘It hit the guidance system first. That was when I knew it was serious and went looking for Dr Kinderman. I found his office in a mess and this message on the screen. Actually no, first there was a command box with what looked like a decaying googolplex in it, then the message popped up.’
‘Tell me about the googolplex.’
‘Wait a second,’ Franklin jumped in, ‘would you mind translating for those of us who flunked Physics.’
‘A googolplex is a mathematical term for a particularly long number,’ Shepherd said, his eyes staying on Merriweather. ‘It’s where we get the word “Google” from. All those zeros you get when a search comes back refer to the googolplex. And the fact that it was decaying simply means it was getting smaller.’
Franklin nodded. ‘OK, got it.’ He turned to Merriweather again. ‘So a big number flashed up on the screen followed by this message?’
‘Yes, sir. I think the googolplex was probably something to do with the initialization of the malware and I just happened to be there to see it.’
‘And you were alone in the control room when all this happened?’
‘Yes.’
‘Is that standard practice?’
‘No. I mean usually there are at least … everyone else was at the party.’ He looked at Pierce for support.
‘Merriweather volunteered to man the graveyard shift,’ Pierce said. ‘I checked on the staff rota. He was the only one here.’
‘Mighty public spirited of you, staying back here to watch the store while everyone else gets to go off and party. Not so great that that’s when the store got knocked off though, huh?’ Franklin stared hard at Merriweather for a long few seconds then smiled in the way Shepherd was fast getting used to. ‘Don’t worry, son. I reckon you’re too smart to hang yourself out to dry by throwing a spanner in the works on your own watch. Tell me about Dr Kinderman, when was the last time you saw him?’
Shepherd recognized the interview method Franklin was using. He was moving the questions around, rapidly changing topic and tone to give the subject no time to think and shake away any subterfuge they might be clinging to. It was a technique you used on someone you thought might be lying.
‘He was still in his office at around five thirty. I walked past on my way to get a snack before everyone else left.’
‘Did you speak to him?’
‘No. He was at his desk, working.’
‘Did he seem anxious to you?’
‘Not that I could tell.’
‘Did you notice him acting strangely at all in the past few days?’
Merriweather shrugged. ‘I can’t really say. Dr Kinderman doesn’t exactly conform to conventional notions of behaviour.’
Franklin took a deep breath and seemed to double in size. ‘Listen, son, you can either choose to help us or you can choose to be obstructive, and one of those options is a Federal offence and comes with jail time. Just answer the question.’
Merriweather’s face went blank, like a shutter had just come down and Shepherd realized Franklin had taken a seriously wrong turn. Threats wouldn’t work with someone like Merriweather. His loyalty to the project would be fierce and would far outweigh any personal agenda or self-regard. NASA was like a religion, and the faithful did not abandon their beliefs just because someone threatened them.
‘Listen,’ Shepherd said, cutting across Franklin to try and rescue the situation. ‘I know what you’re thinking: there’s no way Dr Kinderman would do this, am I right?’ Merriweather looked at him blankly, the shutters still down. Shepherd was aware of Franklin glaring at him, furious that he had broken rank and taken over the questioning. ‘I know exactly what you mean about him being unconventional. I crunched some data here on one of the last Explorer missions, remember that?’
Merriweather nodded. ‘They shut it down a while back.’ His voice sounded hollow, like he was talking about someone who had died. In that moment Shepherd knew exactly where all his nervousness was coming from and it wasn’t guilt: it was fear for what would happen next. ‘Tell me what happens if you can’t re-establish contact with Hubble?’
Merriweather looked up, locking eyes with Shepherd for the first time. ‘The only way to reboot it would be to manually restore the system.’
‘So you’d have to launch a mission. Someone would have to physically go into orbit to fix it?’
Merriweather nodded.
‘And is that likely?’
Merriweather took a deep breath and let it out slowly. ‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because of James Webb.’
‘Anyone mind telling me who the hell James Webb is and what he’s got to do with any of this?’ Franklin said, directing the question to the room.
Merriweather took off his glasses and rubbed at the indentations they’d left on the bridge of his nose. ‘James Webb was the architect of
the Apollo programme, the one who put a man on the moon. But in this case it’s not a who it’s a what.’ He sank down at the laptop he’d been working on and typed something. The screen filled with an image of what looked like a wide flat coffin with a golden satellite array on top like a sail. ‘Say hello to Hubble’s successor, the James Webb telescope. It’s bigger, will have a much higher orbit and will see much, much further. They’re building it right now. My guess is if we can’t fix Hubble from down here then they won’t bother fixing it at all. They’ll just shut us down and wait for James Webb to come online.’
‘And you’ll most likely be out of a job?’ Shepherd said, knowing exactly how painful that felt.
Merriweather nodded.
‘Is that why you think Dr Kinderman couldn’t be involved,’ Franklin said, picking up the line of questioning, ‘because he wouldn’t sabotage his own project and betray his colleagues?’
Merriweather shrugged. ‘Why would he do it? Why turn his back on his life’s work, all of our work? It doesn’t make any sense.’
Franklin pulled out a chair and sat next to Merriweather, bringing his eye level down to his. ‘People do all sorts of things for all sorts of reasons, son.’ His tone had softened considerably. ‘But if Dr Kinderman was coerced in some way, if someone put him in a situation that forced his hand in this then we can help him. If he’s in danger we can bring him to safety. So anything you can give us, anything at all that might help us understand what has happened here will be a great benefit. And you won’t be being disloyal, you’ll be doing him a favour.’
Shepherd had to hand it to the old bastard. He might have pitched it wrong at the start of the interview but he was playing it pitch-perfect now.
Merriweather balanced his glasses back on his nose and ran his thumb along the line of his lower lip. ‘OK,’ he said, punching a new command into the laptop. The image of the James Webb telescope was replaced with streams of code. ‘I’ve been trying to pin down the virus ever since it was uploaded but whoever designed it knew what they were doing and covered their tracks unbelievably well. The only way I can see anyone getting a program big enough to do what it did past the network security would be by junk streaming it.’
Franklin glanced at Shepherd, one eyebrow raised in a question mark. ‘Junk streaming is when you attach tiny bits of code to genuine traffic. They’re too small to be picked up by the firewalls so they pass through it and then activate and clump together when they’re on the other side. It’s a bit like sending component parts of a bomb onto a plane one piece at a time then building it on board. But in the same way, if one piece doesn’t get through or gets corrupted in transit then the whole thing won’t work.’
Merriweather continued to tap commands into the keyboard. ‘But uploading the virus is only part of the story,’ he said. ‘What it then managed to do was very sophisticated and precise. It didn’t just knock out the comms and send Hubble spinning off into space. It actually reprogrammed the guidance systems causing the onboard rockets to fire and carefully move Hubble out of position.’
‘Dangerously so?’
Merriweather glanced up at him. ‘Sir?’
‘I mean has it been effectively weaponized? Is it currently hurtling towards Manhattan or Washington?’
‘No, no – nothing like that.’ He turned back to the laptop, finished his sequence of commands and hit Return.
High on the wall next to the main screen four rows of red LED numbers flickered into life.
‘See that top figure – 569, that shows the telescope’s current altitude in kilometres. As long as the number doesn’t start getting smaller there’s no danger of Hubble crashing back to Earth. So far it hasn’t changed. The next two readings are the relative long and latitudinal positions and the fact that they are changing shows that Hubble is drifting, but in a very controlled way. But it’s the last reading that’s the most interesting and seems most relevant to the message. That shows us where Hubble is pointing. Before the attack it was in the 270-degree range, locked onto a piece of thin space in the constellation of Taurus. But now it’s shifted round to dead zero where it’s remained ever since. Zero degrees is the home position. It means Hubble is now pointing directly at Earth.’
Shepherd glanced at the message shining out from every screen – MANKIND MUST LOOK NO FURTHER – its meaning more resonant and emphatic now the instrument of man’s furthest gaze had been turned inward.
‘You think this could be some kind of cover up?’ Franklin asked. ‘Maybe Hubble saw something out there and Kinderman didn’t want anyone else to know about it, so he put up this warning and turned the telescope around so no one else could see it?’
‘Maybe. Hubble’s not like a conventional telescope where you look through an eye-piece and see stars, it builds up images from the data it collects. People like me work on specific batches of gathered information and just see a tiny part of the puzzle. Dr Kinderman’s the only one who gets to see the whole picture.’
Franklin turned to Pierce. ‘Any chance we can take a look at the archives?’
‘No,’ Merriweather replied, hunching over the laptop and rattling in new commands. ‘After the crash I initialized a system check to isolate any infected files. That’s when I discovered this.’
A new directory opened listing dates running back for weeks. Merriweather clicked today’s date and a new window opened.
It was empty.
He clicked another, then another, working his way back through the week, each file as empty as the one before. ‘All the recent data has been wiped. I checked the backups too. There’s no trace of anything Hubble has been looking at for the last eight months. It’s all gone.’
Franklin nodded. ‘So maybe Kinderman did see something – the only question is what?’
Shepherd’s eyes flicked between the telemetry and the biblical message shining out of the screens. ‘You said Hubble was investigating a piece of thin space before the attack.’
‘In Taurus, yes.’
‘Were you looking for something specific?’
‘Not that I was aware of, I was just looking at edge radiation – Heaven data.’
Franklin turned to Shepherd. ‘Could you kindly translate?’
‘Sorry. The known Universe was created by a single event, the so-called Big Bang, which happened around fourteen billion years ago. Since then everything has been constantly expanding outwards. Thin space is where the edge of the Universe is closest to Earth. Beyond it lies whatever was there before everything else came into being. Some think this is where God resides.’ He frowned as a new thought struck him.
‘When the Hubble project was launched wasn’t there a lot of noise and protests from various religious groups?’
‘Yes,’ Pierce answered. He stepped forward out of the shadows and into the light. ‘I’d just started working here, had to run through protest lines to get to work sometimes: people waving doom and judgement placards in your face, calling it all a heresy, daring to gaze so far into heaven.’ He stared hard at the message on the screen, his mind ticking behind his eyes. ‘I didn’t really connect all that with this until just now, but –’
He snapped to attention. ‘Come with me gentlemen, there’s something I need to show you.’
12
Cold neon tubes tinked into life in the visitors’ centre as Pierce held the door and Franklin and Shepherd hustled in out of the weather. It was a big, rectangular space large enough to accommodate the busloads of school kids who came here every day to look at the old rockets and dream of riding them to the moon. Shepherd had been one of them once.
‘In here, gentlemen,’ Pierce said, shrugging out of his rain slicker and punching a code into a door next to the ticket desk.
His office had none of the romance of the public areas. There were no pictures on the walls of man’s extraordinary exploration in here, no forming galaxies or wonders of creation, just a framed photograph of Pierce in his State Trooper days wearing a dress uniform and looking a li
ttle more lean and a lot more mean than he did now. A coffee pot sat in the corner. The heating plate was turned off but the smell of burnt coffee still filled the room with a smoky aroma that twisted Shepherd’s gut. He hadn’t had time to eat before leaving Quantico and they hadn’t stopped anywhere on the way. Franklin didn’t seem to need food.
Pierce fitted a small key into a large filing cabinet and heaved open the bottom drawer. ‘We get crank mail here all the time, mostly reports of UFO sightings and/or conspiracy theorists and moon-landing deniers who think Hubble is NASA’s latest hoax and all the images are done in Photoshop. Most of it comes in as email but we still get some the old-fashioned way.’ He lifted a well-stuffed hanging divider out of the drawer and started sorting through it. ‘This past year it’s gone nuts. I don’t know if it’s all this weird weather we’re having, or the business in Rome that knocked the Church on its ass or what it is but something sure got the doom and damnation crowd all worked up. ’Bout eight months ago we started getting these.’ He took a clear plastic wallet out of the divider and handed it to Franklin. It was full of postcards, all variations on the same theme – old-master style paintings showing a monumental tower under construction. ‘They’re all pictures of the Tower of Babel. We got the first one in May, then a new one on the first day of every month since. We date stamp everything when it comes in so you can see what order they arrived.’
Franklin snapped his Nitrile gloves back on and carefully tipped the cards out onto the desktop. He picked one up, stared at the strange painting for a second, one stone coil inside another corkscrewing up into the clouds, then flipped it over to read the handwritten message on the back:
And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower,
which the children had builded.