The hardest hack was getting access to the source code. This being intellectual property, people had made some efforts securing them from unauthorized eyes. When he finally found the version control system containing the latest live version of the source code, Ramesh made a mad dash to copy the entire branch. Folders, sub folders all on his machine.
He had noticed that the sessions were time limited and expired continuously. If you have legally logged in, then your log in program on your access device will invisibly renew your session by logging in again, without bothering you.
However for a hacker it presented a problem. If a hacked session expired, he would have to go through the whole rigmarole again, and would certainly lose any copy or read transaction in progress. Worse it just increased the chance of intrusion alerts being raised, which might bring the cyber police after him.
After the entire source code had been copied without anything eventful happening, Ramesh heaved a sigh of relief and put on a bravado of coolness for the benefit of Jorge. “Ok baby, everything copied and no one left none the wiser. I am just too good. Now the hard work begins for both of us.
I am going to send you lots of mathematical formula to your screen. You don’t need to know what the exact formulae are. All you need to do is tag if they are one of the algorithms that you are searching for or not. While you do that I will search for the answer to your first question. Why the hell is it showing anomaly after 3 years of dicking around with this celestial body? Why not earlier?”
Ramesh was true to his word and within a few minutes, Jorge’s terminal started scrolling formulae that were starting to give him a headache. He knew he needed something a lot stronger than coffee, but that was all he had, so he poured himself another mug.
For the first time he envied his friend Ramesh, he needed no stimulants except an intriguing challenge. Not even coffee! He silently resolved that if he gets through this mess, he is going to take a break in the Himalayas and learn for those Hindu ascetics, how you can live on nothing but fresh air.
Jorge was good at Astronomy, but he was just starting off in his field, and he did not know most of the intricate formulae he was being bombarded with, he just knew the basics. He had to painstakingly toil through the internet referencing each formula and identifying it.
The saving grace was that he did not have to understand them, all he had to do was identify them and check if they were the Parallax algorithm, or the blue shift or some of the related relativistic algorithms. If yes flag it, otherwise move on.
He had been toiling and staring at the screen continuously for almost 4 hours and his eyes felt cross eyed, when he got a start as Ramesh made a triumphant screech over the link. “Got it my friend. It was not easy, but I moved heaven and earth only for you my friend!”
Jorge rolled his eyes. “Stop being melodramatic Ramesh, you are not in some cheap Bollywood flick. What the hell did you get?”
“Well I got the answer for you. Why this stupid program threw up this flag today and not before!” Ramesh replied smugly.
“And the answer is…” Jorge said testily.
“You see all real life data is subject to some sampling error. I would imagine Astronomical data would be more so than others. The algorithms are tried and tested for millions if not billions of data points. That is why we have a lot of confidence on the algorithms.
So when you encounter a piece of data which doesn’t agree with the well-established algorithms and formulae, one can safely assume that it is most probably a sampling error, not an error in the formulae. Usually as you add more data points, the random sampling errors in the data cancel each other out and the overall data starts matching the formulae.” Ramesh seemed to be in a lecturing mood and Jorge cut him off.
“So you are saying that this program does not highlight an anomaly when it encounters one?” He asked genuinely puzzled.
“If the program started flagging pictures on encountering the first piece of data that didn’t agree with the formulae, then you my friend would be manually looking at all of those millions of images every day instead of a thousand. That is because most real life data is not exact, it has sampling error.
The program waits patiently and collects more data points over a period of time. The random sampling errors usually start cancelling each other out, and starts matching the formulae, thus removing the anomalies.” Ramesh replied.
“Ok. Got it. So the program collects data over a period of time, and if the anomalies don’t resolve itself with more data, then it flags the pictures. Right?” asked Jorge.
“That is what it should have ideally done, but the programmers seems to have screwed up. They have put a very high threshold for the number of errors and the amount of time to pile up before the anomaly is flagged for the kind of anomaly you are facing, probably because they never expected this type of anomaly to ever occur. Today you got lucky and the anomaly count reached the threshold.” Ramesh relied.
“I must grudgingly admit Ramesh that you are an absolute genius. Although you are also a conceited pain in the ass.” Jorge smiled mischievously. “Could you please put this issue in a note? Heidi needs to know about this flaw in our software.”
Ramesh looked horrified. “Are you crazy man?! I hacked into the system. I am not even supposed to look at this code, let alone analyze it. Heidi will make sure that the dean expels me from the university, even before she finishes reading the note. Find some other way to tell her.”
Jorge raised his hands in a placatory gesture. “Ok cool man. Will tell her in some other way. She is cool by the way. Never seen her being a bitch.”
“Easy for you to say that. You are not the one on third strike for hacking”. Ramesh grumbled. Jorge smiled at the picture of this slight statured man. Ramesh’s hacking exploits were legendary. In real life he may be diminutive, but in the cyber world Ramesh was a tiger.
Jorge had finally finished tagging all the formulae thrown at him by Ramesh. He did not even have to ask Ramesh about the answer. It was obvious that neither parallax nor any form of blue shift formulae had been used for analysis.
Now that Jorge had all his answers, he was getting ambitious. What if he could run all these frames of the last 3 years through the parallax and blue shift algorithms? What would he see? Getting Ramesh to work on this was another issue. He had fulfilled his end of the deal, how would Jorge convince him to do more?
This time he decided to use reverse psychology on Ramesh. Cyber genius he might be, but he was really a simple guy, Jorge had really started liking him in the last few hours they had been working together. But he decided to try to manipulate him anyway to get the job done.
“How I wish we had the skills and resources to run these two algorithms on this data.” Jorge sighed. “But I guess that is way above our heads, it would require some of those big whiz kids in the CS department working on our Astrophysics programs to do that, way above our capabilities.”
This hit Ramesh exactly where Jorge intended to, he looked really hurt. “Have you seen the kind of sloppy code those morons have created! They can’t tell the difference between their ass and their face. If you know the formulae, I could code them into algorithms in a jiffy. I have already copied the source code, I could modify it and add those algorithms, compile and debug them.
My computer is not in the same league as your department’s mainframe class servers, but we do not need to run a million set of frames, just this one, it should be able to manage.”
Jorge forced himself to give an incredulous and awestruck look, while secretly smiling to himself. “You could do that! Wow… I would have never expected it!”
Jorge already had the two formulae on his screen which he had been using as reference for tagging. He quickly pushed them to Ramesh’s window. “Here… this is from our department’s reference library. It conveniently has some sample data with expected results. This is used to teach students to hand calculate, so you can be sure you have got the algorithms right if you feed the sa
mple data and get the expected result.
While you are doing that why don’t I drop over to Denny’s and get some chow for the both of us. It’s nearly 6 am and god knows I am hungry. I will get the food and come over to your place. How does that sound?”
Ramesh gave a suspicious look. “You are acting too considerate. You even chose a place with good vegetarian selection. What gives Jorge? Aah… I see it now, you want me to work on your little project here. Don’t worry my friend, I am too intrigued now to leave this half way. Besides I want my piece of the pie when you discover whatever this weird thing is, may be even get a Nobel Prize!” Ramesh grinned. “Yeah you go ahead, I will get busy on this, and you are right, I am starving.”
When Jorge entered Ramesh’s apartment nearly an hour later to the smell of vermillion sticks wafting out, he found the geek finishing off coding on the second of the algorithms. He was really amazed. He had expected to be waiting hours for him to get anywhere.
As he put down the food on a very neat and tidy desk, in sharp contrast to how Jorge kept his own workspace, Ramesh muttered over his keyboard. “Good you are here just in time, you can also validate that the formulae have been properly converted into algorithms. It looks good to me, how does it look the Astronomer?”
Jorge gave it a good glance. They looked good, he winced when he saw the elegant coding to algorithm of the red shift formula. That particular task had bumped his grade down to B in a course in grad school. He could have really used Ramesh’s friendship then.
“Great! Now that these two algorithms also meet the approval of the learned astronomer, I shall integrate it with the core program we hacke… I mean downloaded. May be borrowed is a better word…” Ramesh had a naughty twinkle in his eyes.
“We shall call this a borrowed program then.” Ramesh said with a distracted look, thinking perhaps of how the dean would term it if he ever got caught. Obviously semantics meant a lot to him. Jorge decided then and there, that if it came to that, he will protect his friend even at the cost of his own PhD.
“Compilation and systems integration tests will take a few minutes after which I will start the run. I will join you for breakfast, in the meanwhile why don’t you lay the table? Kitchen is the door on the left.” Ramesh pointed by nodding his head in that direction.
Jorge was confused for a moment before he realized what Ramesh meant, and blushed a bit in embarrassment. He was about to sit down next to Ramesh on the work desk, tear open his quarter pounder and just start wolfing it down, the way he always ate ever since leaving home for the dorm as an under grad. He took a better look around the well organized and tidy apartment and realized how different they both are.
This man would set a table for a take-out meal of burgers for breakfast. He just hoped that he was not expected to say grace or whatever its Indian equivalent may be before his meal, because he had never said or heard it said in his house. He decided to do his bit, since the geek was doing all the work right now, and started setting the table as assiduously as he knew.
He was still setting up the table after raiding the (as expected) well organized and well stocked fridge for goodies like milk & cheese, when Ramesh came to the table. “All set and running. I don’t know how long it will take to run. I did not take the time and effort to add an estimation & progress bar module to the program, but I will be surprised if it takes more than an hour.”
Ramesh went to the sink and washed his hands while Jorge was taking his first bite. This forced Jorge to feel a bit embarrassed again, since he had not thought of washing his own hands. Damn, this guy makes his mamma proud; hell, he would make my mother proud. If this guy is going to be around, Jorge will have to get used to feeling under mannered.
As they were finishing their meal, Ramesh said quietly. “Listen… about that deal we made… don’t sweat over it, I was just trying to give you a hard time as payback for all those times you had fun at my expense. I enjoyed working on this challenge. You don’t have to go through with setting up with Fluentez. It’s no big deal really.”
“It’s a big deal to me Ramesh.” Jorge started. “I know Fluentez means something to you, but you didn’t have the courage to approach her. Look, I know I have been making fun of your shyness for a long time, and I have been a real asshole. Really I mean it.” Jorge emphasized as Ramesh was starting to wave his head in denial about the asshole part, trying to make Jorge comfortable.
“I mean to go through with my end of the deal, and it is not you whom I am doing a favor but Fluentez. Any girl should feel lucky to get a man who cares about her more than just trying to get a piece of ass. If she has half a brain, she would realize what I have today, that you are really a decent man and that counts for more than anything.”
Ramesh’s cheeks were blushing with the praise, which was amazing for a man with such a dark tan skin, so he changed the focus to Jorge. “The sensitive man! This is a new Jorge I am seeing, which side of the bed did you wake up? Oh wait, you did not go to bed today! Anyway, let’s not get mushy on each other. Let’s go check out if the program has finished running.”
The program had not finished and they had to wait another 15 minutes before it did. Ramesh could not make out the significance of what they saw on the screen, but Jorge could. His jaw dropped and his heart was beating faster.
Sector:
BDW 93.37, 86.78, 172.05
Frames:
1093
Frequency:
24 hrs.
Flag Type:
--
Highlight coordinates:
22.69x, 45.91y
Tentative designation:
XRT 7356550132
Estimated mass:
min 108 Kg., max 109 Kg.
Estimated speed:
min 2 x 106 m/s, max 2.1 x 106 m/s
Estimated distance:
min 1,000 AU, max 1,200 AU
Estimated density:
min 1,000 Kg/m3, max 5,000 Kg/m3
Estimated volume:
min 103 m3, max 106 m3
Apparent Magnitude:
15.6
Composition:
4He 100%
Prognosis:
--
Ramesh saw Jorge’s reaction to the data and said. “Obviously the data is significant, from the amount of drool I see over my floor. I am sure astronomers can read this very easily, but could you please explain to us mere mortals in plain English?”
“Significant! This is mind blowing man. This is big.” Jorge jumped from his chair facing Ramesh. “Let me start from the beginning. About 3 years ago, a point of light appears on a part of the sky. This part of the sky is not significant in any way, just another point in the sky, slightly above the plane around which all the planets rotate around the sun.
It is not a star, that much is confirmed. It is an object in the Kuiper belt. It is between 10 thousand tons and 100 thousand tons in mass, which makes it a very small asteroid. It is however giving off light brighter than many of the stars visible with an ordinary telescope. Such a small object, so far away obviously cannot reflect so much light from the sun, even if it was made out of a perfect mirror.
That much sunlight does not even reach at the place where the object is. We are talking about 30 to 40 times further away than Neptune. This means that it must be emitting its own light. The only objects in space we know that generate their own light are the stars. We don’t know of any other object that emits its own light. Certainly not something so small.
Now here is the kicker that comes from the spectral analysis. The light coming out of this object is Helium ion plasma. The interesting thing about this plasma is that it consists of 100% of the isotope 4He, or commonly known as Helium-4. This in itself is surprising, because in space 99% of the helium is of the isotope 3He or commonly known as Helium-3.
So in space naturally occurring helium is always found in the proportion of 1% 4He and 99% 3He. Always, without exception. There is only one phenomenon that creates 100% 4He… Nuclear Fusion.
This helium ion plasma is the product of nuclear fusion! Do you realize the implication of this Ramesh?”
Jorge answered his own rhetorical question. “What we are observing is the discharge of an ion plasma rocket engine, powered by a fusion reactor! This is science fiction man, but that is what the data says.
That is not even half of it. When this thing lit up 3 years ago, it most probably went into a deceleration burn to slow down and presumably come to a stop somewhere in our solar system. At that point it was traveling at close to 1% of the speed of light. Now that does not sound like a lot till you remember how fast light travels. We are talking about this object traveling at 30,000 kilometers per second! That is thousands of times faster than any object that humans have ever sent to space.
And last but not the least, it is aimed directly at the solar system. It is too far to make out which planet or if the sun it is directed at, but it is coming here to our solar system without doubt!”
Sometimes laymen ask questions which experts forget to ask. So Ramesh asked something that Jorge should have. “Where the hell is it coming from?” That stunned Jorge enough for him to get momentarily speechless. “I dunno man, the data is not configured to find that out, but we should.”
They hunted for many hours in the line of approach of the assumed space ship, but there was not a single star known anywhere close to that line. Jorge decided that this was one question for which they were not going to get an answer from the existing data, they will have to observe along the line of travel of the ship to come to any conclusion, which means new and specific telescopic observation on a wide spectrum of the electromagnetic waves. This was a task for the future. They had come to an end of what they could glean from the data available.
Now they had to decide how to proceed. Whom do they show it to, who will believe such incredible conclusions? They would sound like UFO nuts rather than scientists. In the end they decided that the person best likely to understand the significance of the data was the person who had written many of the algorithms… Heidi.
The Battle of Titan Page 4