by Lee Baldwin
A few minutes later the deputy and a paramedic come outside, talk by the cars. She can’t hear much over the radio blare, then things are quiet for a second and she hears clearly the paramedic say the words, help us cut him down.
Her heart thuds, the ugly words brings back too much, the night homicide detectives and a trauma intervention specialist came knocking at her door, saying to her sleepy brain, your mother is dead. Nothing we could do. She is dead.
She is dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead.
Both hands trying to muffle screams that want to come, Tharcia turns back, whipped by branches. Runs, asking over and over in her mind what it means to be dead, what it is like to die, what is left after, asking why. She imagines what if God disappeared and took everything in the universe away. Just finish everything too painful too painful. In her mind sees the inward fall of stars, planets, galaxies atoms and beings, a blurred reversal of creation, all matter time and space flooding down small to an intense bright dot that flares into blackness.
She stops. Alone among peaceful trees her astonished mind forms a question.
What?
Blackness is there. Not blackness, a pregnant void. Watches it follow inward to a blinding flare. Still sees blackness, something must be there, a fabric of possibilities. It collapses with a brilliant flash. A depth of potentialities remains, it too falls into blinding light, and again, and again, until unnumbered infinities of all matter things possibilities and ideas that could ever exist accelerate inward, a dot of light expanding in brilliance to fill the entire universe with white light.
Tharcia comes to her senses standing by her car, her mind peaceful. Occasional traffic on the road. In vision haze her mother’s face shines on her a loving expression. Stab of remorse for all the mother-hatred. Her mom deserves something else from her, something more. Something better, from an infinity of possible Tharcias. But what?
Sitting in her car, breathing slow. Picks up the rumpled sheets of paper Porterfield left. Reads through it again, stops at the physician’s signature. A lab in Los Gatos, a doctor’s name. Munoz. She takes out her phone.
Creation Myth
“Know what I think, Boss?” Sami leans back to stretch as she stares at her laptop. Her dark eyes glint, fierce telltale she’s onto something.
The team has reconvened in Next History’s Alexandria offices. Along with Sami and Strand are Carl Vogt, Gary Charlebois, and Jerry Schumacher. The team returned several hours ago, held still for a rigid security sweep through the offices, and waited as with terse ceremony a U.S. Navy Commander with armed guard handed over a pouch marked Sensitive Compartmented Information, five DVD storage devices containing the complete record of the whale procession numeric sequences. Everyone on the team was photographed, signed clearance forms on a tablet, had their ID scanned. A plainclothes guard detail quietly took positions around the entire city block.
Next History’s network of information scientists is completely off-grid for this. The only company employees with knowledge of Solberg’s F2F project are the five in this room. The team’s computers are disconnected from the Internet, sharing data only via the military’s SIPRNet on General Solberg’s clearance. Nothing is ever perfectly secure, but with Next History’s own encryption, routing and packet sequences, extremely hard to track or crack.
“Alright, let’s have it,” says Strand, stretching the kinks from his lower back as he heads for the coffee pot in the kitchen.
“I think it’s a Gödel number,” Sami says.
“With what encoding?”
“No idea. My proposal is to assume it’s a Gödelized code, and if we can unpack one of them, we’ll run customary ciphers on the result. I think the whales made it easy on purpose.”
“Why do you think that?”
“If I’m right, which is 99 percent assured, the threshold is formally a technology barrier. Specifically, having a computer fast enough for brute-force prime number extraction. I think the message will be in clear a layer or two down.”
“So what do you propose?”
“Already doing it. Wrote a primitive recursive function to extract primes. It’s working message one now. Maybe someone would like to try it on another message.”
The linguist, Jerry, looks puzzled. “What is this about Gödel numbers?”
“It’s the fundamental theorem of arithmetic,” Strand tells him. “Every integer is either a prime number itself or is the product of prime numbers.”
“Each natural number has a unique factorization into primes,” Gary says immediately.
“Except the integer one,” Sami puts in.
“Oh picky, picky,” Strand smiles at her. “But it’s an encoding algorithm that could represent a sequence of written characters as a single large number. A coded message.”
“There are one hundred and seven breaks in the sequence,” Carl points out. “Why did the whales leave breaks? One hundred and seven whales in the parade showed up with no markings.”
“I think that was to reduce the possibility of data loss,” Jerry says.
“Could be. With a single long series, any shuffled or missing whales would render the entire message indecipherable.”
“Hah. Or, you’d get a completely different message,” Sami points out. “Thing I can’t get over, Boss, is seven thousand whales wanting to tell us something.” Her dark eyes have a wondering expression.
“Seven thousand and sixty-nine,” Carl supplies.
“Yah yah. I’m curious though about the end of days searches and tweets,” Gary says. “People all over the world are coming up with individual reasons to be worried. Twelve percent of all web searches, trending up.”
“How about that singer? How about the Pentagon dude? Boss, you swore you’d tell us about him, now you’re all debriefed.” Sami gives her employer an insistent look.
Strand leans against the kitchen counter, makes a thoughtful face. “Sure. When we get our first break in the code, we can spend ten minutes on it.”
Sami frowns. “It’s a monumental shift in thinking, Boss. I’m scared to my toes, and I have more info than most people. People are going to be very afraid very soon.”
“If not already,” Jerry whispers.
Gary pipes in. “There are so many devices on the Internet now, it’s inherently leaky. Everybody with a smartphone is an actor, almost anyone can start a tweet mob, just by striking a chord with a single piece of information.”
“Or disinformation.”
Sami nods. “Exactly that. Boss, what do whales think about?”
“Erg?”
“How do they know this and why are they telling us?”
“My first guess is, something compelled them to do it.”
“Which doesn’t give them much credit. I think whales are spiritual.” Sami’s voice carries a tone of utter conviction. “They are conscious, like we are.”
“My second guess is, they are trying to protect themselves from us,” Carl adds.
“Now that I’ll buy,” Strand says, nodding agreement.
“What a trusting act. For half the world’s blues to show up next to warships. We have killed so many of them.”
“Hey, seven thousand sixty-nine is prime, guys,” Carl exclaims in an awed tone. I think it’s about more than the whales.”
“The number of whales is prime?”
“What if it’s about the safety of the planet? A warning,” Gary suggests. “The whales know we can interpret the information. There’s a reason we’re being shown this right now, something we can do about it, that they can’t.”
“Alright. Sami’s unpacking will either work or it won’t,” Strand tells them. “If so, we have a working approach. We need to decode these whale songs as quickly as we can. There are one hundred and eight songs. They could average four million words each. Anybody with other ideas either bring them up or start trying them.”
“Boss you said songs. Whalesongs.”
“Sounds like a lot of info,” Gary remarks, “but it’
s only a couple dozen novels. Times one hundred eight, say, twenty-five hundred books.”
“Happiness is a hot transistor,” Jerry laughs.
“Guys!” Sami’s eyes lock on her screen. “My unpacking recursion got something. We have a message. This is Whalesong one. It decrypted against the 26-letter Arabic alphabet with numerals. Give me a min to read this.” She’s silent as she speed-reads the first decoded part of the whale sequence.
The rest get busy launching Sami’s algorithm against the Whalesong sequences in their work units. Strand heads out the door, is searched for electronic devices by three military enforcers at the exit, and walks a couple blocks down the street to where his car is parked.
He checks his personal phone for messages, one from his wife, essentially saying, throw me a line now and then, several from friends, racquetball partners. He looks at personal emails, two of which point him to rising tweet storms. There are spreading laughter epidemics in California that shut down shopping malls and a soccer stadium. No details, but authorities took it seriously and blockaded those areas. Another epidemic, of sudden fainting, at a North Carolina girl’s school, cause yet to be determined, 150 affected, one injury. And somewhere in Humboldt County, California, there is a bloom of Tourette outbursts on the street, which is leaking over into an expanding text and tweet mob. People catching Tourette’s by Twitter?
Strand has to laugh. The thought of thousands of people typing random profanity at each other. No more bizarre than the Fish Jump. When he gets back to the office, Sami is summarizing her first decode to the group.
“Glad you made it Boss, here’s what I see in Whalesong one. It sounds a lot like the Babylonian creation myth, but with significant variations. The two first gods were Apsu and Tiamat. The Whalesong, unlike traditional legend, clearly describes Apsu and Tiamat as clouds of gas and clouds of dust, not earthly bodies of water and not human forms. It describes Apsu and Tiamat as part of the solar accretion disk, gas clouds. There’s even some chemical formulas. There is a numeric description of what the sky looked like, constellations that correspond to star maps before the solar system formed. I am making it into a sky map.”
“Wait a minute,” Strand says. “How would an emerging human culture come up with a creation myth that begins before the birth of the solar system? Before science. That was five billion years before the cultures of ancient Sumer. Would require the telescope, the radio telescope, deep-sky satellite surveys to know that.”
“Hold tight, Boss, it gets better. This is only a quick summary. When those two seas supposedly mingled and created children, it was the gods Lahmu and Lahamu, male and female. Again not human, it was the Sun and the Earth. After that things are more as we know them and the Whalesong corresponds directly to familiar versions of the Babylonian creation myth. But there’s one more significant difference. In this telling, there’s a story about two beings who were created from one.”
“You’re saying Adam and Eve?”
Sami shakes her head. “I’m not. This is before the solar system, before Eden. In this myth, one of them, a male, imagined the other one, and gave his substance to be split in two so the other one could be created, making two beings.”
“What? Like human beings designing their own pattern?”
“Sounds like someone wanted to get laid,” Jerry cracks.
Sami throws Jerry the stink-eye. “Let me read you what it says. This uses a word that means invisible helper, or Defender. This Defender, named Lian, was enchanted by the birth of Earth from the Sun, and the Moon from the Earth. He dreamed what a Defender feminine should be like. The Creator agreed to make this new being, and Lian’s body was split into equal parts to make her. Lian also gave half his soul for the new female. The female, called Lylit, had breasts, female organs, smaller facial features, less body hair.”
“Predating Adam and Eve?”
“Sounds like before the Earth had oceans,” Carl ventures. “Before every known living thing.”
“But listen to this,” Sami goes on.” Lylit and Lian were super beings. Lian was the first living thing made by the Creator. This means that Lylit, who was designed by Lian as his female counterpart, was present on Earth before time, before language, before human cultures. Before Sumerian and Hebraic societies arose, Lylit was honored for her courage, playfulness, wisdom and freedom. Later, about 2500 BCE, the Levite priests cast her as a demon. Because they feared her passion and sexuality? Hmm. Sounds like the beginning of the patriarchy.”
“The patriarchy didn’t start that,” Carl says reasonably. “Dominant behavior comes from men more easily. It’s a gender differentiator.”
“Well and good,” Sami says, “but women have completely different approaches to problem-solving.”
“Testosterone,” Jerry says.
“Testosterone is necessary but not sufficient to explain dominance,” says Gary.
“Women even dislike other females as bosses,” Carl points out.
“Okay okay,” Sami says. “We got that. Let me read you this next part. In prehistory, tribal women were honored and respected for their ability to create human life. Before the Levites, women were honored for fully expressing their personal freedom. Not to mention sexual passion. But after, there’s a negative image of Lylit. Guys, it’s a warning to any woman who defies male authority. Lesbians understand how to live without a man. A woman who lives her life without a man is the greatest insult to any male.”
Sami looks around. The four men are looking at her, saying nothing.
“Hello, I got completion on the fourth sequence.” Everyone turns to Carl, who stares perplexed at his screen.
“What is it?” Strand asks.
Carl reads silently. Finally he’s seen enough. “It’s the Fermi hypothesis for discovery of advanced civilizations in the universe.”
“Fermi,” Jerry muses. “As in, the nuclear physicist?”
Carl nods, scanning his screen. “Enrico, yah. This says that our belief in advanced civilizations through the cosmos contradicts the lack of evidence. Either intelligent life is less prevalent than we thought, or we’re not searching for the right signals. I need to read through this.”
“ET didn’t phone home,” Jerry adds.
Looking around at the silent group, Carl voices the question that’s occurred to all of them. “Why is this even here?”
“Hey,” Strand sits up straight. “I got completion on Whalesong three. Let me read you…”
As the team continues to unpack messages from the whale code, Sami still ponders the Babylonian myth. Lian and Lylit. Super beings? Why are they in the whale messages? And why is their story the very first one?
DNA Denial
Doctor Gracielda Munoz looks at her screen, turns toward the young Anglo woman perched nervously on the edge of the tissue-covered exam table. Grins as she reads the words on Tharcia’s shirt.
“Goddess Culture. The old white guys will come after you for that.”
“Why? Because they can’t read it from a normal distance?”
The doctor in her light blue lab coat looks at her tablet. “What blood type did you put down on the intake form?”
“I am A-positive.”
“You are sure?”
“Always have been.”
“This test finds you as AB-negative.”
“Musta missed with that needle.”
Munoz nods. “Oddly enough, Ms. Harrison, that discrepancy fits with something else your case suggests.”
Tharcia looks at the doctor quizzically. She didn’t come here to find out something weird about herself. She means to disprove any connection between her and that Porterfield ass, who came barging in with photos of her stolen hairbrush and some girlfriend’s underwear. Tharcia knows deep down they cannot be related, is angry enough to want to prove it.
“We re-tested you against Mr. Porterfield’s earlier samples, using the samples you gave us recently. We got 99% hits from some markers, 0% hits from others.”
“Wh
at! How can that even work?” Tharcia is immediately sorry she came. He’s even partway my father? Ewwwww. He wants something.
“The DNA testing we do shows whether two individuals have a biological parent-child relationship. A paternity test establishes genetic proof of whether a man is the biological father of an individual, in this case, you. In a DNA parentage test, the result is a probability. It is 99.99% when the alleged parent is biologically related to the child. Because your blood sample and your buccal swab do not show the same hits with Mr. Porterfield, you could have two or more completely different sets of genes.”
“Why two?”
“Or more. Usually, people have a single set of genes. But occasionally, a person can have two or more different sets. In a single body.”
“So I’m a freak show now?”
“Not so much. As I said it’s rare. Such individuals are known as chimeras.”
“A chimera.” Tharcia thinks the word has a nice sound.
“Correct. A chimera is a single organism composed of two or more different populations of genetically distinct cells originating from different zygotes.”
“I started out as two zygotes?”
“A chimera can form when two or more early zygotes fuse together. Each population of cells keeps its own character and the resulting organism is a mixture of tissues.”
“So I’m twins.”
Doctor Munoz grins. “If true, you would have started out as fraternal twins. Some of the markers hit positive for Mr. Porterfield, some did not.”
Tharcia’s expression darkens. “So, my mom was having sex with more than one guy?” Her heart flops at the idea Porterfield could be related to her in the teensiest way.
“We need to test the other father for a match. And yes, but the intercourse can be days apart. At least two of your mom’s eggs had to be present, which is how fraternal twins are created. Two eggs ripen and release instead of one. Not necessarily on the same day.”