METEOR STORM

by David Capps

  After eighteen days, three hours and twenty eight minutes of inventory work, I came across ICN 42919 in the ledger with a location of MR. Had to be the Moon Room, but where was the key? I went through the drawers in the desk – nothing. I looked on all of the shelves and under the stacks of paperwork, still no key.

  Come on, it has to be here.

  I looked around the room. This was a secure facility, where would someone put the key? I looked at the metal security door and the reinforced metal jamb surrounding the door. No, I thought, no one would do that. I reached up and ran my fingers along the top ledge of the reinforced door frame. Almost completely covered in dust was the key. I unlocked the door, opened it and flipped the lights on.

  The Moon Room was organized like a miniature of the warehouse with aisles of gray metal shelves. The room was about eighty feet long and fifty feet wide with fluorescent lighting fixtures that buzzed softly and flickered slightly above the aisle ways. The room had a slight musty odor to it. I followed the aisle designation and walked down to the proper shelf number. On level three was a wooden box with ICN 42919 stenciled on the end. I picked it up and headed back to my desk. I needed a screwdriver to open the box. The Inventory Control Ledger had the item listed as artifact, which didn’t tell me much. These were all artifacts of one kind or another. The thought occurred to me that artifact also meant something that was made by human effort or craftsmanship.

  As I removed the last screw and lifted the lid I froze. Visions of Star Wars and C3PO ran through my mind.

  What was something this sophisticated doing on the moon? And how did it end up here?

  My heart was pounding and my mind was racing. I slowly reached out and gently touched the forehead. It felt cooler than I expected. It was smooth and strangely enchanting. In my daydreams I wanted to be part of the team to develop a robot that actually resembled a real human being, but that level of technology was still far into the future. Except here was a good portion of that technology, sitting in a wooden box in front of me. I pulled the sheet of paper that was nestled next to the head out of the box and unfolded it. The sheet was a metallurgical analysis that identified the skull material as a titanium alloy with a patina dating the skull to greater than 10,000 years old. According to the date on the sheet of paper, the head had been sitting in the moon room since early 1973. I set the sheet down and gently lifted the head out of the box. Titanium is strong, but very light in weight, yet the skull had a fairly hefty weight to it. If you were going to put a computer into a robot and properly protect it, a titanium alloy skull would be ideal. I examined the fine wires extending from the neck. They were dark in color and still flexible. Totally remarkable for something that was over 10,000 years old. I took out my pocket knife and shaved a small section near the end of one of the wires. As I moved it around in the light a slight flash of gold caught my attention.

  I pulled open the desk drawer and grabbed a magnifying glass. The wire had some kind of coating on it, probably an insulator. That would make sense. The wire itself appeared to be some kind of gold alloy. Gold was a perfect conductor for electricity. As I sorted through the fine wires I noticed that two of the wires were thicker than the others.

  Power supply wires?

  I was going to need some test equipment, something I currently didn’t have. This was going to have to wait until tomorrow. I gently placed the robot’s head back into the box, put the screws back in place and returned it to the shelf in the Moon Room. I logged ICN 42919 into the computer and verified the name of artifact. I had trouble concentrating on anything else for the rest of the day with visions of advanced technology flitting through my mind.

  * * *

  Just before nine the next morning, I swiped my card and entered the lobby. Mike was at his desk, as usual. He questioned the cardboard box I carried in. I set it down on his desk so he could inspect the contents.

  “Science project,” I said as he dug through the wires and components in the box. “Lunch time and maybe a little after hours.” My laptop was at the bottom of the box.

  “I’ve got to log all this in as personal property, otherwise you’ll never get it back out of the building.”

  I pulled the complete list out of my jacket pocket and handed it to him.

  “Now we’re talkin’,” he said as he stapled the list into his logbook. “I don’t care what you do; just don’t let Woolser catch your inventory work slipping.”

  “No sweat,” I answered as he waved me into the warehouse. My stomach tightened as I walked through the door. This was a huge risk for me. For an ordinary person, getting caught doing something like this would get them fired, and they would collect unemployment while they searched for another job. If I got fired, there wouldn’t be any unemployment. The people that placed me here would come and hunt me down. I was safe here only as long as I cooperated with them and performed the special assignments they gave to me. My secret hope was that when my next special project came up they would make Woolser put me back in the rover programming department and I would get out of doing inventory work. As risky as this was, I had to know if the robot’s head might actually work, and if it did, what I might learn from it. That could be my ace in the hole with the people I actually worked for. I was feeling anxious trying to get through until lunch. I couldn’t wait to get back to the robot’s head.

  At noon, Mike dropped off the sandwich I had ordered for lunch and headed back to the lobby. I wouldn’t see him again until five. I opened the Moon Room and retrieved the robot’s head. Using my pocket knife I removed a small section of the insulation at the end of each wire and began resistance testing. The days in professor Tuttle’s Electronic Circuitry class at MIT came flooding back into my mind. It took only twenty seconds to identify the ground wire and determine that it wasn’t connected to the robot’s metallic skull. Good design practice. I identified and tagged the rest of the wires as either inputs or outputs based on their resistance to the ground and power supply wires: a hundred and twelve inputs and eighty seven outputs. Further testing would have to wait until after five.

  As five o’clock rolled around Mike poked his head in the door to the office.

  “I logged you out as of five,” he said. “I leave at six. If you’re here after that the night guard can swipe you out.”

  “Thanks,” I said, “that’ll be great.” I finished the e-mail to Woolser’s office reporting on the inventory I had completed and went back to work on the robot’s head.

  I had constructed an interface box the night before with two cables connecting to my laptop computer, one for inputs and one for outputs. I was still connecting wires when I heard footsteps outside the office door. I gently placed the robot’s head back inside the box just as the night guard opened the door. He was African-American, a little on the chubby side and short, maybe five six or so. The shirt of his uniform puffed out over the belt. I froze, not knowing how he was going to handle seeing the open box on my desk with wires running to the computer on my desk.

  “Mike told me you’d be here,” he said as he walked toward my desk. He stopped and stared at the wires and the open box. “What the hell? You ain’t sposed to be messin’ with that stuff!”

  I sat back watching his expression, trying to get a take on where he was coming from. He seemed outraged, so I decided I had to do something to change his state of mind.

  “You like science fiction?” I asked.

  “What?”

  “Do you like science fiction?”

  “What’s that got to do with anything? You messin with important stuff.”

  “You ever see Star Wars?” I asked.

  He paused. I had managed to break his train of thought. Now all I had to do was establish a new direction in his thinking.

  “The movie?” he asked. “I seen ‘em all. What difference it make?”

  “How about Raiders of the Lost Ark?” I asked.

  “Yeah, what about it?” He shifted his weight and looked more relaxed; now he was curious in
stead of outraged.

  “You ever wonder if there was some huge secret buried deep in this warehouse that they didn’t want anyone to know about?”

  “You mean like…?”

  “Yeah. That’s exactly what I mean.” I replied. “It’s not the Ark, but it’s something equally interesting, and potentially just as shocking. You ever wonder what’s been hidden right under your nose?”

  He shifted his weight again. Curiosity was getting the better of him.

  “Can you keep a secret?” I asked.

  He debated the issue in his mind for a few moments more. “Sure,” he replied almost reluctantly, “what is it?” I quickly debated how much I should actually tell him. Then I thought, what the hell. I waved him over and pointed into the box containing the robot’s head. He approached slowly, his mouth dropping open as he looked into the box.

  “They found it on the moon, back in seventy two on the last Apollo mission. NASA didn’t want anybody to know what they found, so they buried it here in the warehouse.”

  “This for real, man?” he asked slowly.

  “Put your hand on it.” I replied.

  He reached out tentatively and slowly touched the robot’s head. He drew his hand back quickly and looked up at me.

  “It’s a hundred percent real.” I said.

  “Does it work?” He seemed almost as curious as I was now.

  “Don’t know. That’s what I’m trying to find out.”

  “I always thought sumptun secret was hidden away back here, but whit the size of this place ya never know where to start lookin. Where was it?”

  “In the Moon Room.”

  “The what?” he asked. The moon room was turning out to be one of the best kept secrets in the entire place.

  “You mean they never showed you the Moon Room?” I asked.

  “Nah, man, they dint show me shit; just gave me these rounds to make and that was it.”

  I smiled at how excited he was. This could turn out to be a fun assignment after all.

  “Come on, I’ll give you the tour.” I opened the door to the Moon Room and took him up and down the aisles.

  “These real moon rocks?” he asked.

  “Yep. The real deal.”

  “God, this is so cool. Can’t wait to tell Moniesha. She’s my wife.”

  I began to wonder if this whole thing was starting to get out of control. “You can tell her about the Moon Room but the robot’s head is our secret, right?”

  “Yeah,” he replied quickly, “she don’t need to know ‘bout that, but this is just so cool.”

  “I’m Carl,” I said as I held out my hand.

  “Leroy,” he replied shaking my hand, “Leroy Simms.” From the size of the smile on Leroy’s face I figured I had a friend I could count on.

  * * *

  I didn’t want to keep hooking up and disconnecting the wires to the robot’s head every day. Leroy made a wooden box where I could store the whole thing as one assembly. We even invented a new ICN for it so it wouldn’t look out of place in the Moon Room. Leroy liked pizza so I sprang for a delivery every night around eleven. That meant I was back to bringing my own sandwiches for lunch, but it seemed like a reasonable tradeoff to me.

  Progress was slow. I didn’t know how much voltage the robot’s head was designed to handle, so I started out low and gradually kept increasing the power to the robot’s head as I sent signals into various input wires and watched the output wires for any activity. For the next two nights nothing happened. Then I started getting signals on some of the output wires. They showed up on the computer screen as random symbols; arrows, spaces, flashing letters in various colors. It all appeared random but my gut told me it wasn’t.

  I wrote a program to feed information from the output wires back into the input wires and record any repeating sequences. It wouldn’t tell me what the robot’s head was trying to do, but it would give me some kind of insight into the type of code that was being used. I also wrote another program to search the accumulating database of information being exchanged in and out of the robot’s head for patterns that might mean something. So far nothing was making any sense, but something was working inside the robot’s head; that much was certain. Then suddenly the signals on the output wires stopped. I waited. Nothing. Did it finally die? This was going to require deeper thought, so I packed the whole thing up and put it back in the box.

  The following night I hooked the robot’s head back up to the power supply and turned everything on. I wanted to try something different but was having trouble deciding on just what I would do. It was then I noticed a short blip on the output line from the robot’s head. A few seconds later, another blip. Short sections of code were being sent by the robot’s head to my computer. I tried to see what it was sending, but nothing made any sense. Then I reduced the signals down to their binary code level. It was machine language, the system of ones and zeros that runs the computer. The robot’s head was testing the operating system of my computer by sending operational commands to the processor chip and observing the response.

  Within a few minutes, small code fragments began appearing on the lines running to the inputs in the robot’s head. It was learning how my computer system worked. I watched in awe as the volume of data gradually increased between the robot’s head and my laptop computer. I sat there, totally fascinated at what was happening. Then eventually everything stopped again. My guess was, it had learned everything that was on my laptop.

  Every programming student’s first project is to send the word “hello” to the computer screen or the printer. I typed HELLO and sent it into one of the input wires. In clear text, the output from the robot’s head read, Greeting Protocol Acknowledged. Initiate Content.

  Leroy came flying into the office. “Hey, man, you gotta get outta here, day shift is gonna be here in twenty minutes.” I was so absorbed in what the robot’s head was doing, I had lost track of the time.

  CHAPTER 3

  My mind was racing as I sat waiting for breakfast in Manny’s Delicatessen, a half mile from the Clark Street Storage facility. Was the robot’s head really trying to communicate with me? And how was that even possible? Computers run programs; they don’t think for themselves. There were so many questions and not a damned thing I could do about getting any answers until at least lunchtime.

  The waitress brought my steak, eggs and hash browns and refilled my coffee. Waiting was the hard part, but at least I had some time to reconsider my questions and what had just happened, or at least what had appeared to have happened. Not only did the robot’s head recognize my HELLO as a greeting, but it also expected some kind of content or information to follow. Exactly what that might be remained a complete mystery to me.

  I swiped back into the front door of the Clark Street facility just before nine, greeted Mike and went into the warehouse, trying to pretend I was bored with the whole setup. While processing the next set of ICN’s, I gradually formed a plan about what to try with the robot’s head. At noon I returned my attention to the robot’s head and turned everything on.

  I typed, Who or what are you? and sent it to the robot’s head. I didn’t have to wait long for a response.

  I am an AXTO Series 7 communications android, came the reply. Electrical power is at the low end of my operating range. Please increase power by 18% for optimal performance.

  I sat back in the chair and stared at the screen. Never in my life have I had a computer ask me anything regarding power supplied to it, and I’ve worked with a lot of computers. I adjusted the power setting to the requested level. Immediately the screen updated, Thank you. NETCOMM is down. Why?

  NETCOMM? Did it mean the Internet? I typed in What is NETCOMM?

  Communication network for androids, came the response. No signal.

  I typed in, We have the Internet, and supplied the computer port number for access. I set the computer and the box with the robot’s head down on the floor behind my desk with the power still on and went back to logging in
ICN’s. I checked the computer screen from time to time during the afternoon, but nothing had updated. After Mike had made his final appearance of the day and I had sent my five o’clock e-mail to Woolser, I went back to work on the robot’s head.

  In my days at MIT I was involved in an Artificial Intelligence project, or AI. We tried to create programs that would enable a computer to think. With my strong programming skills, I came close, but the robot’s head went far beyond the ability to think; it was self-aware. The technology to be able to do that was centuries ahead of where we are now, maybe even millennia ahead. I felt inadequate and stupid at the same time as I compared myself to a 10,000 year old piece of hardware that somehow ended up on the moon.

  Leroy walked in the office door and stopped. He looked at the expression on my face and said, “It’s working, isn’t it?”

  “It is,” I replied slowly.

  “So who made it? Was it from space aliens?” he asked.

  “Don’t know,” I said. “We can ask it.”

  “You mean it’s answering questions?”

  “Like you wouldn’t believe.”

  Leroy moved around the back of the desk so he could see the computer screen. I typed in, Where were you made? expecting the name of some unrecognizable star system in response.

  Geography is strangely different, but my place of origin is what you identify as Northern India, appeared on the screen.

  I sat bolt upright in my chair. “Here?” I shouted. “It’s from Earth?”

  * * *

  My mind was reeling so fast I felt dizzy as I slumped back into my chair. How could this be? How could something this advanced and yet so old be from here? It just didn’t make sense. And if it was from here, how did it learn English, a relatively recent language? And more importantly, how did it get on the moon?

  I typed, How did you learn my language?

  I interface with 1,218 different computer-based systems and communicate in 138 different languages. Your computer is similar in structure with 18 other computer systems known to me and your language in different files on this computer is similar in structure to 3 languages, also known to me. What I don’t know is why the information available on your Internet is so different. My motor systems and other sensors are also unresponsive. Can you explain? appeared on the computer screen.