Jack threw him a look. “I know how much Anna means to you, but I wouldn’t dream of leaving her behind. I promised you once before I wouldn’t let anything happen to her and I make that same commitment to you again.”
Rajesh was in the process of mulling this over when Jack turned to Anna, now seated before one of the laptops. She inserted a USB cable into the computer, linking herself to the device. At once, the screen began to populate with a series of zeros and ones. The others gathered behind them, staring with wonder at the flood of data.
“You are observing the raw binary data NASA scientists extracted from the gamma-ray burst,” Anna explained.
Mia leaned in for a closer look. For her, this wasn’t merely an exercise in curiosity. By all accounts, the blast wave appeared to be how the ship was manipulating Salzburg, populating the chromatid with the ruinous genes currently affecting more than a third of the planet’s population.
“As you can see, Dr. Greer, without a key, the zeros and ones before you are little more than a meaningless jumble.”
“Sorta like static on a TV?” Dag said, the ghost of his BLT still lingering on his breath.
Anna regarded him with a touch of confusion at the reference.
“Before her time,” Rajesh explained. “The only television she watches is on the internet.”
“Think of radio static then,” Jack offered.
Anna nodded. “Yes, I understand now.”
As impressive as she was, even Mia could see that certain simple references still went over her head.
“Tell us how you cracked it then,” Grant said, growing impatient.
“It was Dr. Ward who helped me,” Anna admitted.
That was news to Mia. Although she was quick to recall the headache she had felt after searching the Salzburg genome for signs of a coherent message.
“The key to the equation is the number thirty-seven,” Anna pointed out.
“Oh, I get it,” Eugene said, pushing his way through those gathered around Anna and the laptop. “You simply selected every thirty-seventh byte. Child’s play.” Eugene did everything but blow hot air on his knuckles and rub them against his shoulder.
“Incorrect, I’m afraid, Dr. Jarecki,” Anna replied evenly. “Thirty-seven is a prime number. Which is to say, a whole number which can only be divided by itself and the number one. The first thirty-seven prime numbers are as follows: two, three, five, seven, eleven, thirteen, seventeen, nineteen, twenty-three, twenty-nine—”
“Okay,” Jack said, unbuttoning his shirt and removing his tie. “We get the point. Just tell us what you did next.”
“My apologies, Dr. Greer, I will speed up my explanation.” Anna’s speech became slightly faster and higher-pitched. “I selected the binary digits which corresponded to the first thirty-seven prime numbers and repeated the process until all of the excess data had been stripped away. From there, I laid the data out in the form of a thirty-seven-bitmapped image.”
“Why not the regular twenty-four?” Rajesh asked, surprised. It appeared he was also learning about this for the first time as well.
“Trial and error,” she responded, coolly. “I attempted many thousands of iterations without arriving at a recognizable image. It was only after I returned to practicing my stair work that I thought of using a larger-sized bitmap. Besides, there was a symmetry to the puzzle’s solution I found appealing.”
“Hell, soon enough she’ll be writing poetry and painting landscapes,” Dag said, only half-joking.
The others grew deathly still, their gazes fixed on the laptop as Anna showed them the process in action. First a series of zeros and ones dropped away, creating a new string of binary data. Then those bytes were being inputted into a thirty-seven-bitmapping program.
Slowly, the image of an X appeared.
All present stared with raw intensity, trying to understand the significance of what they were seeing. The X didn’t have the neat, tapered lines from the letter they all knew from the English alphabet. For some reason, the edges were puffy and uneven.
For Mia, it was the shorter length of the top part of the X which gave it away. This wasn’t part of the English language. They were looking at a pair of chromatids connected by a centromere. Put another way, they were looking at a full chromosome. But the implications didn’t stop there. This wasn’t some random chromosome. They were looking at Salzburg, but not as they knew it in its present form. The Salzburg syndrome Alan had discovered, the same one Mia had tracked as it spread across the globe, had been no more than a single chromatid. What she was seeing here was something else altogether. She was seeing the endgame. Not Salzburg in its current form, but what Salzburg would soon become. It was changing, mutating, growing. The realization chilled the marrow in Mia’s bones, since it meant that a whole new batch of genes would soon begin to appear. The human race, along with all life on earth, was about to face an even greater threat.
Chapter 5
By the time Mia was done explaining what they were seeing, it was clear she hadn’t done much to lighten the mood in the room.
“So not only is a doomsday ship heading straight for us,” Dag said, rubbing his temples in slow circles, “now you tell us the genetic disorder that’s crippling the world is about to get a whole lot worse.”
“I’m not sure about the rest of you,” Grant said. “To my eye, it’s beginning to look like these aliens, whoever they are, want us dead and gone.”
“But for what purpose?” Jack asked, genuinely curious to hear the biologist’s response.
Eugene shrugged. “Hell, for all we know they want our resources.”
Gabby pushed a lock of her silver hair out of her face and was about to light up a cigarette before pausing in the act. “That’s patently ludicrous. What could we have on earth that doesn’t exist in countless other places throughout the solar system and even the galaxy? If they’re after liquid water, they’ve got Europa, Enceladus and Ganymede. They want ice for their mojitos? Then their options just got a whole lot better. Metals and minerals are pretty much the same story.”
“I believe we’ve already agreed humans don’t make optimal slaves,” Rajesh added, a hint of hope in his voice. “For one, we’re far too squishy.”
Grant winked at Rajesh. “Speak for yourself. But our friend here does have a point. If they were looking for a work force, any sufficiently advanced civilization would be far better off building them.”
Dag pointed at Anna. “Case in point. I mean, if Elon Musk’s prediction about AI leading to the end of the human race is even ten percent accurate, we won’t have a hope in hell.”
Anna turned, her digital features filled with apparent sadness. “I can assure you, Dr. Gustavsson, we have no desire to endanger your species.”
“Maybe not yet,” Grant chimed in. “In fact, there’s a mighty good chance you may not feel much of anything right now that hasn’t already been programmed for you to feel, but give it time. Even the rosiest of relationships have a nasty habit of souring. Just ask my ex-wife.”
Gabby was sure the blame rested squarely at humanity’s feet. “I think we’re being punished for trashing the planet. We’re like that neighbor on your street who keeps Airbnbing his house to college kids. Eventually, someone needs to step in and put a stop to it.”
“Are we the lousy neighbor or the college kids?” Dag asked, confused.
Jack and Mia laughed.
“I’m not sure,” Gabby said, shaking her head and fighting a smile. “Maybe both. All I know for sure is my head is starting to hurt.”
After clearing his throat, Jack said: “As humans, we have an ego-driven need to make everything about us. Have any of you even considered the possibility that we aren’t the prime targets for what’s happening?”
Jack’s comment took the room aback.
“How could it not?” Eugene nearly shouted. “Aren’t we the ones bearing the brunt of what’s going on?”
“Jack may have a point,” Grant said. “One we h
aven’t fully considered yet. Stepping on an ant hill on your way to work doesn’t signal any malice on your part. For the ants, however, it might be catastrophic.” Grant locked eyes with Gabby, the astrophysicist. “If we found out tomorrow that the sun was going supernova, a process which would annihilate all life on earth, surely you wouldn’t think the sun was punishing us for any perceived sins.”
“That isn’t a fair comparison, since the sun isn’t a sentient being,” Gabby said.
“That has yet to be proven,” Grant replied.
The grin on Dag’s face grew three sizes bigger. “Give our esteemed Dr. Holland time and he’ll be more than happy to tell you all about his theory on morphic fields and the interconnectedness of all things. It’ll blow your mind.”
Gabby shook her head and slid the cigarette back into the pack. “I think it’s already working.”
Dag peeled away, brushing past two Air Force mechanics who were heading through the computer lab and into the hangar.
As the party broke up, Mia drew closer to Anna. “Can I ask you something?”
Anna twisted to face her. On anyone else but her, it might have made for a rather unsettling sight. “I enjoy answering questions. Did you want to know my opinion on the extraterrestrials’ motivation for interacting with our planet?”
“Uh, I…yeah, sure, go ahead.”
“I believe they did not intend for us to discover their presence.”
Mia tilted her head, trying to grasp Anna’s point. “Do you think they mean us harm?”
Anna blinked. “I tend to agree with Dr. Greer. Their intention to do harm may be secondary to the rule of unintended consequences.”
“Do you think they know we’re here?”
“That is impossible to conclude with any certainty,” Anna replied. “However, if you would like me to formulate a hypothesis on the matter, I would say they do not.”
Mia thought about the Atean ship hurtling through space towards earth. “Then we need to somehow find a way of telling them. You learned their language. Couldn’t we beam a message at their ship asking them to stop?”
A glimmer of hope appeared on Anna’s face. “That is certainly worth attempting.” She reached a hand to disconnect herself from the laptop before pausing. “Was there anything else?”
“Yes,” Mia said, feeling a surge of anxiety over the question she was about to ask. “You know the process that you used to decode the signal imbedded in the blast wave? Did you try applying that same thing toward the Salzburg genome?”
Anna nodded. “I am sorry to say that my attempts to apply the key to Salzburg have so far not been successful. Rest assured I am constantly running alternative methods in the background.”
Although that wasn’t the answer Mia had wanted, it was certainly the one she had expected. Life never seemed to give you what you wanted. It gave you a sprinkle of what you needed and left you perched on a limb to figure the rest out for yourself. But before entertaining any thoughts of flying off to Greenland and whatever awaited them there, there was something Mia needed to do first.
Chapter 6
“And what pisses me off the most,” Trish Han shouted, pacing back and forth behind the desk in her office, “is that you went over my head to Ron Lewis and made me look like an asshole.”
The stress ball Trish was working feverishly in her left hand didn’t seem to be quite doing the job and she tossed it at the glass wall. It bounced back with enthusiasm, only to plop on the floor and roll to a stop. As Lifestyle editor at the Washington Post, stress was nothing new. Neither was dressing down young reporters who had grown far too big for their britches.
The young reporter before her listened intently to Trish’s list of grievances, her face a mask of neutrality. Christened Kayza Mahoro, a Rwandan name meaning ‘beautiful,’ she had decided early on, mostly out of mercy for her friends, colleagues and neighbors, to simply go by Kay. It elicited fewer confused looks and long explanations which mostly went something like this:
“What an interesting name. Where are you from?” she was often asked, as they surveyed her dark skin and short afro.
“America.”
Her curt response was often met with a mix of shame and embarrassment for the insensitive way the question had been phrased.
“If you’re asking about my parents, they came from Rwanda.”
“Ohh,” they would say, and quickly change the subject.
When it came to Rwanda, most everyone knew two things. That a terrible genocide had taken place there in the early 90s. And that the Hutus were responsible. Not surprisingly, the complexities of tribal politics in that part of east Africa were often lost on them, just as the complexities of American politics would baffle the average Rwandan goat farmer.
Kay was a Hutu, born five years after the genocide in a country thousands of miles away, and yet the prevailing narrative of Hutu guilt seemed to follow her throughout her life. She found that more often than not, it was simply better to avoid the topic entirely. But avoiding never meant lying. She was proud of who she was. Her father was a former diplomat, her mother an employee at the state bank. They had been at a posting in Ethiopia when the war broke out in April of ’94. Back in Rwanda they had had land, houses and a large extended family. Within three months all of that was gone. It had been a terrible shock they had never fully recovered from. Telling the truth about what had really happened there and why was of tremendous importance to Kay. She wanted to set the record straight and do what she could to remove the kind of stigma that made speaking with strangers an often painful experience.
It was for these reasons that she had wanted to become a reporter in the first place. And, to a greater or lesser degree, it was why she was sitting in Trish Han’s ultra-modern, glass-walled fishbowl of an office, listening to her editor try to tear her a new one.
Kay felt there were important stories that needed to be told and covering the opening of art galleries and celebrity gossip for the Lifestyle section just wasn’t cutting it.
“I bumped into Ron at lunch the other day,” Kay tried to explain. “And he said the news section had an opening if Lifestyle could spare me.”
Ron Lewis was the news editor, a crusty relic from a bygone era famous for his refusal to use a computer until Sandy Yeats, the editor-in-chief, threatened to fire his ass if he didn’t. Disheveled and often unshaven, Ron was one of the best in the business.
Trish halted her apparent mission to wear a hole in the carpet and stood with her arms folded over her chest. “That’s all good and fine, Kay, but I’m sorry, I simply can’t afford to spare you. You’re the best I’ve got. Kanye’s new fashion line breaks in two days and I need you on it.”
Kay felt her heart drop down through her chair and tumble into a bottomless pit. “I’m done asking celebrities asinine questions about things that don’t matter. Besides, Kanye’s clothes all look the same. Beige and with more holes than a colander. Send Sarah, she loves that stuff.”
Trish combed back a swath of thin black hair behind her ear as she sat down. Although calmer than before, she didn’t seem particularly swayed by Kay’s arguments. “Sarah’s busy with something else. Maria and Brianne are off for medical reasons. So are Kelly, Roger and the two others I just hired to replace them.”
“That’s exactly my point,” Kay said, attempting one final run at the wall. “People all over the world are falling sick. We just discovered an alien ship on earth. Countries around the world are struggling to maintain order. Millions are convinced the end of the world is coming and you wanna pretend like none of it matters.”
Trish rooted through a desk drawer and came out with a white envelope. “I agree with you, Kay. Those stories are important and that’s why the paper has reporters covering them. But you weren’t hired for that. You were hired to tell the world about celebrities. What they like. What they don’t like. Who they’re fighting with. It might not seem like much, but a little distraction these days can go a long way.” Trish handed Kay the
envelope.
She hesitated before taking it. “Am I being fired?”
Trish smiled. “Far from it. It’s your ticket to Kanye’s fashion show in New York tomorrow. I don’t have the luxury of firing you, even if I wanted to. But don’t test me. And leave Ron Lewis alone.”
•••
Kay’s march back to her desk was filled with humiliation and despair. While the glass walls in Trish’s office might have muted their voices a touch, it offered the reporters outside an unobstructed view of the action inside. Kay had gotten reamed. They didn’t know exactly why, but the whys never seemed to matter much.
Ellis Dow, a string bean of a guy who covered home renovations, popped up above his cubicle, one of the few non-transparent partitions in their ultra-modern head office. “Kay got in trouble,” he sang. His juvenile quip elicited a cackle of laughter from the doorknobs who sat around him.
It was hard to imagine Ellis in charge of anything, let alone a gaggle of idiots. His father had been a famous reporter and had shoehorned his useless son into a cushy job.
“You’ll get her next time, champ,” he called after her.
Kay raised her middle finger and held it over her shoulder as she walked away.
She arrived back at her desk to the persistent sound of pinging. Kay pulled the phone from her pocket and saw a Facebook message pop up a second before disappearing. Her eye caught sight of the word ‘lied’ before it went away. Then another muffled sound, this one coming from the laptop on her desk, scattered with documents and papers. Kay swore on a daily basis she would put some order into her workspace and every day she seemed to find a perfectly valid reason why the whole endeavor would have to wait.
After pushing aside fashion magazines and copies of recent articles she’d written, her laptop soon emerged. The cover was open and the act of clearing away the dreck had woken it from a deep sleep. She stared down at the screen and saw an email waiting for her. She slid into her seat. Someone had contacted her through her blog. It was a side project of sorts she used to address an eclectic assortment of topics close to her heart. Some had to do with social and political issues in Africa, others with problems in D.C. Her most recent blog post about free speech on university campuses had gone viral. “Is our education system teaching intolerance?” The title had been a touch hyperbolic, but it had served Kay’s purpose of asking tough questions, the kind too many folks felt were best left unexamined.
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