From the Earth: A Future Chronology Anthology

by D. W. Patterson

  “And let me introduce you to our robotic assistants. This is Test and this is Measurement, as I have named them. They may assist you in whatever way you need.”

  The robots were similar except one was trimmed in red and the other in blue. Modeled on human anatomy they had stereoscopic vision, two powerful arms with end attachments that could be replaced as needed according to the job. Two wheels like the old self-balancing scooters upon which they moved. They stood about five feet but could extend their height to seven feet if needed.

  “Pleased to meet you Brently,” said Test. “Please call me Tess.”

  “Just call me Mess,” added Measurement.

  “Good to meet you and call me Brently,” said the Lieutenant.

  Dr. Fermion added, “They came up with the nicknames themselves.”

  He continued, “Brently I picked you because of your experiences at Ames, I think you are uniquely qualified for this job.”

  “Thank you Eric,” said Brently. “I'll get right on it.”

  “Slow down a minute,” said Dr. Fermion. “It's my dinner time. Would you like to join me in the mess hall.”

  “Sure Eric.”

  After dinner Dr. Fermion excused himself to his quarters. Brently decided to get an early start in his duties and returned to the work room.

  The real trick with calibrating EM sensors isn't so much picking up the electromagnetic fields you want but not picking up the fields you don't want. It was difficult not to pick up EM fields with so much electrical and electronic equipment around. So the known fields had to be canceled in order that unknown EM fields could be detected.

  Brently worked well into the night calibrating the sensors. He had identified and nulled out almost all the station EM sources except for a very small remainder.

  Tess had been working with him. “I think that's all we can do tonight Tess,” said Brently. “I'm getting too tired to continue.”

  “Very well Brently, why don't you go ahead to your quarters and I will finish up before powering down.”

  “Okay Tess, see you later.”

  The next morning Dr. Fermion was in the work room before Brently. He was observing the EM sensors and talking to Tess when Brently came into the room.

  “Good morning Brently,” said Eric.

  “Good morning,” said Tess.

  “Good morning Eric, Tess” said Brently. “I see you are inspecting my EM sensors.”

  “Yes,” said Eric. “Tess told me you two worked pretty late to get them calibrated this far. I see a slight residual in the readings, you have a bit more to do?”

  “Yeah,” said Brently. “I tried to get them completely zeroed but that stubborn signal remains.”

  “Well,” said Eric. “You seem to have made an excellent start. If we can get these sensors online today the General will be very pleased.”

  “I'm gonna try,” said Brently.

  Brently continued his calibrations which went quicker this time as Tess was able to handle some of the work. By comparing readings in different sections of the station with external sensor readings and noting the correlations he was again able to reduce the remaining sensor reading to almost zero but not quite. Then just as he was about to let out a string of invectives not befitting a military officer the reading dropped to zero.

  Brently stared at the readout. There was no way that it could be a coincidence he thought.

  “Tess, that can't be a coincidence,” he said.

  “I agree,” said Tess. “Highly improbable.”

  Measurement came over, “I have finished my assignment, I am free to help here if needed.”

  “Thanks Mess,” said Brently. “Well let's get busy.”

  They set about to again recalibrate all the sources, something that took them well into the afternoon. When finished the reading was as before, zero. Brently told Dr. Fermion about his experience.

  “It just went away?” asked Eric.

  “Yes,” said Brently. “And I haven't seen it since. Maybe some machinery cycling on and off?”

  “Possibly,” said Eric. “Brently I want you to make a correlation between readings and the machinery causing those readings, then I want you to start logging the sensor outputs. Make it one second intervals. Let's get a history of this signal. Maybe then we can correlate it to something onboard the station.”

  “And if not?” asked Brently.

  “Well, then we take it to the General.”

  5

  The antennas had locked in a southwesterly direction and stopped moving. Donner figured that the signal came from a region of geosynchronous orbit that was above and slightly off the coast of equatorial South America. He made an estimate of the satellite's orbital elements and consulted a database of orbiting satellites but found no match.

  Donner soon came to realize that the signal was not aimed at him but was spillover from a signal that was probably aimed directly below the satellite. The signal strength was such that Donner’s antennas had to be almost exactly on target to attain the signal and lock. Donner thought he must be in a zone where the signal reinforced but that zone couldn’t be too wide or surely someone else would have already identified this anomaly. The signal also seemed to use a spread spectrum technique but his Annie easily accounted for it.

  Anyway, receiving the signal was one thing, making sense of it was something else. He was sure it was encrypted and cracking the encryption would be challenging. Donner set his Annie up decrypting the signal but made no progress. He didn't know at the time that it would take several weeks.

  ________

  After school was out for the year, Donner became serious about decrypting the strange signal. He had quite a large amount of data stored which had been collecting for several weeks. He decided that the best approach to decrypting the data would be to farm out portions to his friends and let them set their ANI devices to work. He would edit the snippets, keeping them short, to keep from giving away too much information if someone did decrypt it.

  Donner prepared several different samples. His Annie sent the samples to his friend's Annies. They immediately put their Annies to the task of decoding the samples. Decrypting algorithms on their ANI would run in the background during the day and evening, taking over all the CPU cycles when the owners weren't using the devices.

  Donner then setup the Annies to run as a wide area network over the internet. He wrote supervisory software that allowed them to exchange algorithms, trade samples and build a common, shared database of results. It took hundreds of CPU hours before the first sample was decrypted and exchanged among all the devices. Further results came quickly as the Annies used a voting system to choose the most probable decrypt. But the decrypted signal only led to another mystery.

  The samples were in a language that Donner nor any of his friends or their Annies recognized. Donner found an online translation website and scanned the language samples in. He then set the website to translate the samples into English. The translation database identified the samples as a dialect of Japanese but gave no other information and served up a very incomplete translation.

  After much internet research and false leads, Donner found the solution to the unusual Japanese. It turned out to be a dialect spoken on Hachijojima and Aogashima, islands south of Tokyo. It was called Hachijo dialect and it was quite divergent from primary Japanese, retaining many features inherited from ancient Eastern Japanese.

  Donner with the help of his Annie labored several days to complete a manual translation of the snippets. The importance of his discovery slowly dawned on him, he realized he would have to show his dad.

  6

  Donner's dad read the translated messages with increasing concern. When he finished reading he looked at Donner and shook his head.

  “Well Donner first, I have to say that your work on this project is top notch. What you have done here reminds me of my experiences in viral research years ago. But of course you also did the hardware design. This is college level if not graduate level
work.” Donner was silent but smiling.

  “Anyway, you certainly have something here. If I read this correctly I think it has to do with a manned space platform. And I think it is not an authorized transmission.”

  “What do you think it means dad?”

  “I think it is a message from an embedded informant.”

  “You mean a spy?”

  “Yes, son. I think we have a spy. See here,” he said, pointing to one of the decrypted snippets. “This looks like a technical description of something, which I think is a weapons system. I doubt that the owners of this platform would be transmitting such technical details. I believe you've discovered a top secret space platform Donner. Apparently undetectable if not for this unauthorized transmission.”

  “Do you think it has something to do with Japan dad? I mean it is a dialect of Japanese.”

  “Yes and it is an obscure dialect which would be difficult to interpret for most people, even other Japanese. But I don't think we can say who is behind it. The chosen language could just be a way to throw off someone who happened to decode the message. I think we are going to have to get some outside help Donner, before we take our next step. I have a friend in Space Command I went to engineering school with, I think I'll give him a call. He might be able to offer us some advice on how to proceed.”

  ________

  Colonel Reginald Allen listened to Donner’s father explain what his son had found. After listening to Jack Jackson, Colonel Allen said, “I’ll say one thing Jack that is quite an enterprising young man you have there, Space Command would be proud to have him someday.”

  “Thank you Reg,” said Jack. “He certainly keeps himself busy with these little projects of his. So what do you think we should do now?”

  “Could you and your son fly out to Colorado Springs and present your findings to a few people I believe may be able to help us?”

  “I think we could arrange that,” said Jack. “Donner is out of school for a few more weeks. When do you want to set this up?”

  “Let me check everyone’s schedule Jack and I will get back to you, okay?”

  “Sure Reg, just let us know, goodbye,” said Jack.

  When his dad told him Donner said, “That’s great dad, can we fly ourselves out or do we have to take a commercial airline?”

  “You love to fly, don’t you son?”

  “Sure, what do you think?”

  “Okay we’ll see what Colonel Allen comes up with and if we can get your mother's approval we’ll fly ourselves out there.”

  “Thanks dad,” said Donner with a big grin.

  7

  Emily was curious. Something was going on. The top brass on the island seemed to be scrambling. She had been told to make sure her fleet was ready at a moment's notice. There was nothing on the internet that seemed out of the ordinary. She would just have to wait until they believed she had a need to know.

  In the meantime she was arranging for the squadron to fly an evaluation mission. The objective would be to scout and find a target ship five hundred miles out from the base. The mission would depend heavily on Looker and Booker for real-time on-site target and threat determination. The other hypersonics would be evaluated on their flight performance over target as directed by the reconnaissance hypersonics.

  Emily and her team had worked overtime since the readiness command to get the hypersonics in shape. Maintenance was always a concern but this mission had a profile that would stress the hypersonics far beyond any previous evaluation. Emily was particularly concerned with losing any telemetry data. She absolutely wanted to be aware of the hypersonic's flight status at all times. She drove her team to finish all the preventive maintenance possible that might ensure nothing could go wrong.

  The day of the evaluation Emily was up at zero three hundred having only slept fitfully for some four hours. According to schedule the flight would take off at a half hour after dawn. Looker and Booker would quickly accelerate to Mach 7, or over five-thousand miles-per-hour, arriving at the target site some six minutes later. The rest of the flight would boost to Mach 4, over three-thousand miles-per-hour, arriving at the target a few minutes after Looker and Booker. This would give the strike hypersonics the needed margin to adjust course if the reconnaissance hypersonics deemed it necessary.

  Exactly at a half-hour after dawn the flight began to take off. Because of their highly networked and autonomous operation the entire flight of some thirty hypersonics was in the air in just over a minute. After watching the takeoff Emily headed for her monitoring post.

  Thirty streams of telemetry were coming in to Emily and the other monitors. Emily herself was monitoring Looker, Booker and Superman. The data showed smooth acceleration as the jet engines took the flight up to almost Mach 4. Then the scramjets took over. For most of the hypersonics their velocity settled at just over Mach 4. But for Looker and Booker the velocity climbed almost exponentially to Mach 7 before settling. The scramjets were working flawlessly.

  Because of the speed it wasn't long until Looker and Booker were within site of the target, an old navy ship that had been towed to the site and set adrift. Immediately telemetry from Looker increased.

  Emily's Annie began to speak. “Looker to Sg, Looker to Sg”.

  Surprised, Emily could only answer as she had many times before, “Sg here,” she said.

  “Sg we have found the target. Threat level is low. We are broadcasting location and speed data of target to flight. They should be making needed course corrections now.”

  Emily saw this in Superman's telemetry as he corrected his preflight track. But Emily was more worried with the extra telemetry that Looker was sending, the audio link.

  “Looker this is Sg,” she said into her Annie. “Please advise need for extra telemetry.”

  “Looker to Sg, determination was made that this was most efficient comm link.”

  Emily now remembered her conversation with Lieutenant Warner when he caught her talking to Looker. She had insisted that a direct audio link was most efficient. Looker had been listening and reached that conclusion also. But that was not under combat conditions, thought Emily.

  “Understand Looker,” said Emily. “But telemetry data may be compromised by added burden of ...”

  Just then the door to the monitoring room burst open. Lieutenant Warner was in the lead and behind him was the General and the rest of the brass.

  “Sergeant Rosen!” Warner yelled. “What is the meaning of this additional telemetry from the reconnaissance craft?”

  Before Emily could answer Looker said, “Sg this is Looker, flight has made its pass at the target. I estimate that there is one-hundred percent annihilation of target. Over.”

  Emily turned from Warner and said to her Annie, “Looker this is Sg, that is affirmative, well done. Make course for home and return to base.”

  “Understood,” was the answer.

  Emily turned to Warner. “Well?” he said.

  “Sir, it was the determination of flight ops that this would enhance the mission. As the Lieutenant has just heard mission goals have been achieved thus far.”

  “That is not the answer I was hoping for,” said Warner. “Who was responsible for this 'enhancement'?”

  Emily thought, she realized that an ANI making such a judgment could cost the whole squadron its readiness designation. It would be immediately taken off line until the brass understood how it could happen.

  “I made the decision,” said Emily. “But only because I thought it would be more efficient than the current procedure.”

  The General spoke up, “Sergeant Rosen, you are not an engineer are you?”

  “No sir.”

  “You did not develop the software or hardware that, by the way, the military has spent billions of dollars on, did you?”

  “No sir.”

  “It's my understanding that your job is to keep the squadron in flight condition. Any changes or improvements to procedures should be made by authorized personnel only, don'
t you agree?”

  Emily knew what was coming. “Yes sir,” she said.

  “Sergeant Rosen for your unauthorized change in procedures you are now on report. An inquiry will be made into this matter. You are relieved of duty.”

  “Yes sir,” she said. Emily saluted smartly and left the monitoring room.

  8

  Colonel Allen came through with a meeting date and Donner and his dad were on their way to the nearest airport a couple of counties over. Jack had already had his plane readied for the trip. Six hundred miles to Joplin, Missouri; refuel, and another six hundred miles to Colorado Springs Airport. The trip should take about eight hours in flight.