Daniel’s phone rang and he quickly picked up. “You okay?”
“Just fine,” Marie replied. “I understand why you’re worried, but really, it’s okay.”
He could feel his heart rate calming just from hearing her voice. “Marie, we sent the yin into 4-D, and just like I thought, there was more. That oranges and blueberries diagram? It now has tables of characters. They’re numbers, I’m sure of it, and they match the photo you sent of the yang.”
Her voice was steady. “Yeah, I came to the same conclusion, just from a different perspective. I’ve watched the pattern long enough now to see how it’s repeating. The bottom character changes every two and a half minutes. The middle character changes about every twenty minutes. The top character hasn’t done anything at all yet, but based on the pattern, I can predict it will change in less than an hour, and I even know what the next character will be. There are eight characters and they’re flipping in a specific order.”
“Marie, it’s a clock.”
“I agree. And you think it’s counting down?”
Daniel pressed a few keys. “I’ve just sent you the screen shot of the tables. There’s a column on the right side, and I’m sure it represents zero through seven. Compare those to what you’re seeing on the yang. It shouldn’t be hard to figure out where it stands.”
“Got it.” There was a pause. “Yeah… definitely. Those are the same characters I’m seeing. If that one on top is zero, then yes, it’s counting down. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Counting down is not necessarily a bad thing.”
She was right, but we’re all preconditioned by the cultural references in our world—the climactic movie scene with a clock counting backwards to an impending catastrophe. Even with a rocket launch, the countdown was a warning to be ready and keep your distance. Human bias? Sure. But there were still a lot of unknowns.
He recognized the right course of action. “You might want to report this to Colonel McGinn. The safety of the area is his responsibility.”
Another pause. “Yeah, you’re right. For now, we’ll keep our distance. Let me calculate when this thing hits zero. I’ll call you back… and thanks for the heads-up.”
Daniel hung up. Whether his concern was sensible or irrational, he couldn’t help the feeling of relief that Marie was out of the capsule.
“You did the right thing,” Nala said. She leaned close to the computer screen. “While you were talking, I’ve been studying these tables. If these are digits, zero through seven, then the tables are coordinates, and we should be able to translate them to our numbering.”
Daniel looked at the screen again. “Possibly, but there’s more to a numbering system than just digits. Order, fractional amounts, negatives, even the concept of a digit representing a power of the base. Our current Arabic numbering system has all those concepts, but people have used other systems that didn’t—Roman numerals, for example.”
He studied the tables next to the oranges and blueberries. “But what if they do have those concepts? Every table uses vertical columns. Except…” He paused and traced a finger down one of the columns. “There’s a distinct offset from the character at the top. The ones below it are shifted slightly to the right.”
“I see that,” she said. “And what’s the squiggle?”
He studied the detail. Each column used a combination of the eight characters, except for a curvy line that sometimes appeared on the top row, but not always. The curve was unique among the characters. “What if the offset represents a decimal point? And the squiggle represents a negative? If so, then our numbering systems are similar in concept, if not format.”
She shrugged. “Why not? Okay, so, translating… the first column in the first table is one… point seven… two… three… two.”
“Yeah, exactly. Then the second column would be one… point six… five… four… five.”
“And the third is negative two… point five… seven… two… two.” She lifted her hands in the air. “Hey, we can read Vulcan!” She punched him in the shoulder. “And you didn’t think the breathing exercise did you any good.”
Daniel laughed. “Maybe we can read Vulcan. It’s only a guess. It would help if we had some way to validate. Otherwise, this interpretation could be way off.” He looked back at the screen. “But wait… they did give us a way.”
She shook her head and smiled. “The genius is pouring out now. Lay it on me.”
He enlarged the image on his screen. “So, what are we looking at? A 3-D map and a bunch of numbers we think are coordinates. But to validate, we need a coordinate system. An origin, a unit of measure, and three axes.” He pointed to the center orange where all lines connected. “Voilà, I give you an origin. And three axes radiating from it, the thicker lines. See? Even in this flat-screen shot, they certainly look perpendicular.”
“Nice.”
“They may also be giving us the unit of measure. The thick line between the two oranges. It has boxes on either end, which are labeled with their zero and one. One unit of distance? Like the parsec that astronomers use.”
“One unit,” she echoed. “That could mean anything. How are we going to translate it to our measurements?”
“We’ll have to overlay this map onto a chart of known stars—digitally, of course. It takes the right software and a good star database, but backyard telescopes do something similar every time they initialize. If we can match the oranges to real stars, we’ll know exactly what one unit means.”
She grabbed a piece of paper and wrote 1.7232. She looked at the other columns and wrote 1.6545 and −2.5722. “Let’s see if your guess about the decimal point is right. Does this look like a valid coordinate for the top orange?”
Daniel compared the numbers to the presumed axes. With only a flat-screen shot, the z dimension was impossible to determine, but the x and y coordinates matched well. He looked up at Nala and broke into a smile. “Madame, I’m somewhat astonished, but I think we may have broken the code.” She held up a hand and he slapped it.
Daniel leaned back in the chair and looked around the room. His mind surfaced from the math problem and he took a moment to absorb the accomplishment. In this small room, with nothing more than a pen and paper, two people were decoding a message from the stars. Communicating with another species? No flying saucer had landed in Washington, D.C., to mark this momentous event. There was no invasion of sleek metal ships, blasting our buildings with unknown energy. Communication had begun with a simple message of science and math.
“My subconscious is on overdrive,” he stated grandly.
She hit him in the shoulder again. “Nobody likes a snarky scientist.”
He winced at her punch, though mostly fake. “Hey, we’ve done well, don’t you think?”
She nodded, her smile sincere. “Yeah, amazing stuff. Who would have dreamed we’d be here?”
Daniel shrugged. “Well, I did. Ever since my first astronomy class in college. It was built into my plan. Biology and astrophysics, the two degrees I figured would put me here. It’s crazy but it feels like this day was meant to be—a hand that was dealt years ago. And now I’m living it.”
“That’s nice. Really nice.” She patted his semi-sore shoulder. “Sorry.”
He looked at the clock on the computer, 10:40 p.m. “Let’s get the other coordinates into our math format. I’ll decode, you write.” Daniel looked again at the three tables of alien numbers on the left. But he stopped at the fourth table, the one on right side. “Wait a second…” He compared the tables left and right. “This one is different. It has four columns.”
Nala squeezed her eyebrows together and moved her face close to the screen. “It does.”
Daniel spoke softly, almost to himself. “It’s the coordinate for the hand grenade. Four columns, not three.” He turned to Nala and they both smiled together. “This focal point, this thing we call the hand grenade. I think it’s a place they want us to know about.” He brushed the hair back from his forehead.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The message on his phone was from Marie.
Yang now reads 215, base eight. Decrementing every 146 sec. Will hit zero in 5.7 hours, at 3:20 AM MDT. McGinn went ballistic and is clearing the base of nonessential personnel. So far he’s letting me stay, but no guarantees. Apparently, the base has an old fallout shelter we can use! Would be helpful to know what’s going to happen
Less than six hours to figure this out. The military reaction was predictable: assume the worst in the face of the unknown. Daniel couldn’t fault them. He’d done the same thing.
41 Giants
Daniel did his best to wrap his mind around the disturbing sight. A coaxial cable, one end connected to a radio transceiver on the shelf, the other end disappearing into nothing.
He pieced together a mental image of the electronic components, most of which were now somewhere off in that mysterious kata direction. The radio he held in his hand transmitted to the receiver on the shelf, which connected via the cable to a signal repeater. The repeater, which Nala said was only a few feet away at the other end of the coax cable, then transmitted his voice to a second receiver that was floating who knew where in a void of darkness, along with two cameras and the yin.
It was a lot of equipment just to test voice commands to 4-D space. Normally, he’d set the yin down and speak. But as soon as a fourth dimension was added to the mix, this was the only way to “uplink,” as Nala had described it. A way to control any device sent into quantum space, no matter how far. He dearly wished this radio setup had been available to NASA ground controllers when Soyuz was still lost.
Identifying how the electronics worked didn’t normalize the bizarre visual. The coaxial cable hung in midair, cleanly sliced at the point it entered the top of the Plexiglas box. Everything else in the box had vanished in a pop.
Nala didn’t seem disturbed in the slightest. “Our design engineer thought we’d need this capability for phase two. He was right, just wrong about the timing. Turn the yin on again.”
Daniel picked up the handheld radio and spoke the magic Russian phrase. The chain of radio components worked as planned, and the view on Nala’s computer screen instantly changed. With two webcams in the box this time, the yin’s projection could be seen both from behind and from the side. She reached to a small joystick and pushed it to the right. The webcam view swung along with her motion. “It’s not just voice, this setup is great for controlling the camera view, too.” She panned up and down. The camera view tracked as smoothly as if it were attached by USB.
She beamed. “Right now, compression is negligible. The camera’s only a meter away in the kata direction. But, once we go big-time, I’ll still have the same camera control even if we’re looking at something a million miles away.”
Daniel looked at the clock. “Past midnight now. Are we okay on the accelerator?”
“We can have it all night if we need it. I convinced Tony to extend his shift. He understands how important this is.”
“I have no idea when Bradley arrives,” Daniel said. “But we’ve got about four hours before the yang countdown finishes and it does whatever it’s going to do.” He pulled his hair back. “I’d sure like to have some options when he gets here, but we’re still missing one key to this puzzle.”
“The origin?”
“Right. We’ve got a map, or at least we think it’s a map. We understand the coordinate system. We can see they’re pointing us to a special place… the hand grenade, the focus point, the hub, whatever you want to call it. But to get there, we need a starting point.”
“And software changes. Don’t forget about that.”
“Sorry, I know you’re working on it, I just have no idea what you’re actually doing.”
“Neutrino oscillation amplitude. It’s not hard to control, but it will require testing. A few baby steps would be helpful before we jump off to a star.”
Daniel tapped his finger on the desk. Baby steps, indeed. She was being glib, of course. At the moment, this was a two-person operation, and one of them was doing little more than pouring coffee. Using cobbled-together equipment and a particle physics test bench, they might soon have controllable cameras positioned a long way from Earth. He imagined what an equivalent deep space mission at NASA would look like. He wasn’t sure which emotion was winning, his nervousness or his curiosity.
Bradley would be there soon, and Daniel wanted viable options to give him. “Let’s line up all the dominoes. You work on the software, I’ll check with Marie again on those star charts.”
Daniel assembled the pieces in his mind. The yin, a device that informs. The yang, a separate device that counts toward some unknown event. The easily solved number system was not just good fortune. They wanted us to know. Their clock is ticking for all to see.
He fired off another in a series of messages to Marie. Ten minutes later, his phone rang. “Marie, good evening, or morning, or whatever it is.”
She laughed. “You sound tired too. How are things going?”
“You know… we have a surprisingly useful electronics setup. You’d love it. Now all we need is some idea where we’re going.”
“I think I can help,” Marie said. There was some background noise on the phone. “Sorry for the noise, I’m in the communications building now and they’re moving a lot of people in here.”
“Keeping your distance from Soyuz?”
“Right. I think they’re just being cautious. The hangar is already isolated from the rest of the base. But there are a few strange ideas floating around here. Their base security guy asked me if I thought a portal was going to open. He was deciding what kind of weapons he might need to kill the Klingons that would be pouring out.”
Daniel knew what he’d tell the guy, but Marie had probably been more diplomatic. “What’d you say?”
“I asked him to give me the first two minutes before he pulled any triggers. In truth, it is a bit nerve-wracking, but we still have hours to go in the countdown. While it’s still ticking, I’m going to try to get back into Soyuz for another check.”
“Be careful, will you?”
“Yeah, I get it. Hey, I found the stars you needed. Ever heard of VY Canis Majoris?”
“Not really, but I’m guessing it’s in the constellation Canis Major.”
“Yup. A red hypergiant, one of the biggest stars in the galaxy. That’s your origin. Hang on, I’ll send you the full list.”
His phone vibrated and a message popped in. He opened it and looked at a list of names. A few he recognized: Antares, KY Cygni, Betelgeuse. Big stars, giants compared to our own sun. Several others he knew only by their constellation names: AH Scorpii, UY Scuti, V354 Cephei. “How did you come up with the list?”
“An astronomer at UC Berkeley,” Marie answered. “I’ve worked with him in the past. He’s remotely operating one of the telescopes at Mauna Kea right now. Pretty handy for us that astronomers work at night, huh? I gave him the image and he had it figured out within an hour. Turns out you were half right. The oranges aren’t just red giants—they’re supergiants and hypergiants, the very largest stars in the Milky Way.”
“That’s fantastic, Marie. Glad you got to the right person. How sure is he about the origin?”
“Very sure. He said that having multiple stars made the difference, especially the blue-white stars. Comparing four or five might give a match, but with low confidence. Matching all twenty-eight stars could produce only one possible solution. The origin is certainly VY Canis Majoris.”
The last puzzle piece fell into place—a map of stars. He called out to Nala, “We’ve got it. A star named VY Canis Majoris.”
Nala looked up from her computer. “How far away?”
Daniel put the phone on speaker. “Marie, Nala’s right here, too. We’re both pretty excited about this.”
“Nala, good to meet you. Sorry I couldn’t be ther
e in person.”
Nala rolled her chair closer to the phone. “I hear you’re taking care of yang, who seems to be deaf, but ticking.”
“Yeah, a tough nut to crack. Hey, by the way, we’re on the map, too. The two oranges at the bottom? The one on the left is Antares, and the one just to its right is Betelgeuse. Neighbors, relatively speaking. The sun is in between them.”
Daniel quickly pulled up the star map and placed the computer cursor where he thought the sun might lie. “Well, I know it’s about five hundred light years to Antares, and maybe six hundred to Betelgeuse. That would put VY Canis Majoris… several thousand light years away.”
“Three thousand eight hundred and forty. Give or take. I looked it up.”
Daniel turned to Nala. “Can we go that far?”
She wrinkled her nose. “Maybe. Depends on what’s along the line of sight. If there’s another star in the same path, then no.”
It was a question that had come up in Daniel’s own observations of the night sky. How often does one star block another? The answer, it turned out, was only rarely. Within four thousand light years of Earth, there were millions of stars, but there was also a lot of empty space. Two stars rarely aligned exactly.
Marie answered the question. “Nala, I was wondering the same thing, so I asked him, if I needed to fly to this star, would I hit anything?”
Nala laughed. “You didn’t give away much.”
“Well, I couldn’t think of any better way to put it. His answer was… it depends. He said we have a direct line of sight in a telescope, but we’re seeing this star as it was four thousand years ago, and stars move. Where VY Canis Majoris is now is harder to determine with any precision. So, the bottom line, there’s some uncertainty.”
“Sounds like we’re clear to go,” Nala answered. “As of four thousand years ago. Not the most up-to-date information, but I can work with it.”
The background noise became muffled, like Marie had put a hand over the phone. “So, you’re really thinking about going there? I mean, with a camera?”
Quantum Space: Book One in the Quantum Series Page 24