Oceanworlds

by J. P. Landau

  “Utter tosh. You sound like a schoolboy trying to recite from memory a year after the exam. We came here because there was a big sign on Enceladus saying ‘FREE SAMPLES.’ Well, it was all a big fucking booby trap. Turns out there’s nothing. Nothing at all.”

  “You can’t be so stupid and self-important to assume we know better. Perhaps life is so alien that its biosignatures are unrecognizable to us, hidden in plain view. Right here,” said Sergei, pointing at the collector box. “Or it’s so slow we can’t perceive it in such a short amount of time.”

  “Want some science? Occam’s razor. Among competing hypotheses, the one with the fewest assumptions is usually right. Aristotle said: ‘nature operates in the shortest way possible.’ Sometimes a banana is just a banana. If biology ever began here, it’s long gone. Maybe all that organic goo is the last remaining bones from the skeleton of life.”

  “I didn’t travel half a Solar System for bananas,” said Sergei.

  “You’re bloody right we didn’t. But we have.”

  “Even if we find nothing, no sign of life whatsoever, it’s still a big discovery.”

  “Tell that to your wife!” The moment his lips shut, Derya knew he was dead. Yet instead of anticipating the coming slaughter, please forgive me was the one thing crossing his mind. He closed his eyes and waited for the mauling. And waited. And waited some more. If there was an axe on board, he knew where it would have landed the moment his eyes opened.

  Sergei was in front of him, staring at a point on the floor. Derya looked at the spot, guessing the only possibility for what did not happen was an extraterrestrial cockroach. His mouth was a desert. Even breathing burned. He was incapable of saying anything, it simply didn’t come out.

  The lights went off.

  Derya was crushed, defeated. The shame and existential sadness were like barbed wire, gashing around wherever his mind turned. Such promise and hope, now dead.

  Sergei was shell-shocked. The lid that kept Iman’s memories at bay had blown up in his head. Insomnia was back with a vengeance. There wouldn’t be any sleep tonight, but that was the least of his troubles. The brooding wouldn’t stop. The suicidal tendencies would reappear. The bleakness. Everything became black and white again. They came for nothing, yet he had still paid the ultimate personal price.

  The awkwardness of the next morning was short-lived.

  Sergei initiated conversation, skipping any mention of last night, sounding and looking paradoxically calm, almost upbeat.

  Something has happened, thought Derya. But the remorse in Derya was too present to ask him. Whatever it is, the lad seems somehow, absurdly and unlikely, content.

  “There’s three ‘URGENT’ messages from Earth asking, well, demanding information. We just need to authorize Caird to start telegraphing data back. I’m doing it now.” Derya’s tone was a question, not an assertion.

  “And say what? We have good news and bad news. The good news is that there’s all kinds of carbon molecules here. The bad news is that there’s no life, but we almost found it. Nobody cares we were close. You either have it or you don’t.”

  “Right …” said Derya, confused. “So, should I send the info to Earth?”

  “The evidence is inconclusive. It’s noise. Serves no purpose and will just confuse people. We don’t send information until we have high confidence in the results.”

  “Right …”

  * * *

  24 Einstein earned the Nobel Prize of Physics in 1922, but not for his 1916 theory of general relativity—which most physicists did not understand at the time. It was instead for one of the four papers published in his ‘annus mirabilis’ of 1905, the year in which he reshaped our conception of time, space, mass, and energy. The paper was on Brownian motion, the random movement of particles in a fluid resulting from the collision with other atoms or molecules. Temperature is not a fundamental quality of matter, but a human construct. What we call temperature is really the jiggling of atoms. ‘Hotter’ temperature is higher energy, which in turn means faster wiggling. Einstein derived the probabilistic equations, which established that the average distance traveled by a particle from a set origin is random, but depends on both time and energy level, aka temperature.

  25 The cosmos is ruled by the laws of thermodynamics. The second law states that anytime and everywhere, everything is either moving swiftly or crawlingly from order to disorder. It’s an irreversible process. An uncooked, unbroken egg can be scrambled or boiled, but neither can be reversed into the whole egg. Electricity can be transformed into heat, but that heat cannot be made back into electricity. It’s a one-way arrow. Except that life seems to fly in the face of the second law. Take some atoms, sprinkle them with life, and they self-arrange into a staggeringly complex collection called human beings. Only when you die does the second law claim possession of the body and eventually breaks it down—order to disorder. Life cunningly achieves this the way an illusionist turns a jack into an ace. Locally, magic irrefutably just materialized. More broadly, metabolism does the trick by degrading chemical energy into heat, thus the global balance still complies with the second law.

  48 | Chaos on Earth

  Two days later, September 11 2030. Main Mission day 8

  PARIS, FRANCE

  It was a sight to remember. Hundreds of thousands of people were blanketing the twelve streets that feed into the grand roundabout under the Arc de Triomphe, slowly moving onto the Avenue des Champs-Élysées, heading to the president’s palace where they would continue to the 7th arrondissement and Palais Bourbon, which housed the French National Assembly.

  The march had virtually stopped all traffic inside the Périphérique, Paris’ administrative limit ring road, on that Wednesday afternoon.

  The multitude was a microcosm of French society. A student sporting a Sorbonne T-shirt. One stylish octogenarian lady caked in make-up. Two Muslim women in purple hijabs. A class of impeccably uniformed 10-year-olds. Dozens of buses hidden right under the rectangular-trimmed sycamore trees at both sides of Europe’s grandest boulevard, hauling people in from the provinces for the protest, such as a group of pilgrim-tourists just arriving from Lourdes.

  Reporters were scattered around the crowd. One English-speaking news channel was interviewing a 30-something showing off a pair of waist-slung megaphones. The accent made him unmistakably French, but his English was fluent and his delivery eloquent.

  “—it’s outrage and consternation. Whatever Sergei Lazarev and Derya Terzi have found does not belong to the American government, it belongs to us, humanity at large. We financed the mission! Those are our people out there! So, as we continue marching, the cocotte—the pressure cooker keeps building up. We demand the immediate release of all the information—”

  Similar non-violent protests were being staged in cities around the world.

  MISSION CONTROL @ HANGAR ONE, CALIFORNIA

  “This dwarfs any interview I’ve done, so we are both rookies tonight,” said the news presenter. Nitha was surprised by how genuine and caring the anchorwoman seemed.

  Mission Control was dressed once again for television, but the seventy-minute delay between them and the Saturn system had rendered most of the room’s functionality useless. Its moment of glory is three years behind and three years ahead, thought Nitha. Of the twenty-seven specialists’ seats, only six remained staffed twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week—something the television director found unacceptable. He also found inadmissible that the giant screen occupying the one solid wall inside the ‘fishbowl’ was filled with numbers, coordinates, and diagrams, but no videos. Nitha went on to explain that using the precious bandwidth from Shackleton to Earth to send anything above low-resolution pictures would be a crime, but he was having none of it. He had even brought a chintzy pastiche of old videos that reminded her of a wedding slideshow. They settled instead on a Saturn photograph using the center half of the screen. One of the mission specialists even superimposed Shackleton’s current orbital position. And ha
lf the seats were now taken by new faces recruited from Hangar One’s floor to boost the numbers.

  The anchorwoman looked at Nitha one final time for confirmation. “And Nitha,” she said, “remember the message you want to get across. Prove to the world you guys are in no way conspiring with the US government, or anyone for that matter.”

  Nitha nodded in response, firmly grabbing the seat under her legs to hide the tremble.

  One of the four camera operators counted down. “Going live in three, two, one …”

  “Nitha Sharma, Shackleton’s Mission Director, thank you for having us here.”

  “My pleasure, Deborah.” Her usually thin voice was now full. That dispelled part of the insecurity.

  “Straight to the point. Can you explain to the world what is going on?”

  “Yes, but I first want to restate what we all know: the Shackleton mission is absolutely, entirely, and completely independent from any government or organization. It began and it has always been a private initiative. And not just private, but multinational: not only is the crew multinational but we have been financed by people from all over the world … now look at me. Listen to my voice. You guessed correctly. I am a foreigner. And an alien! At least according to the Department of Homeland Security. I’ve never worked for the US government. I owe them nothing. If anything, I have little sympathy for them. Exactly eighteen years ago my visa application to come to America was rejected, despite a full scholarship from MIT. Guess what. It was rejected again seventeen years ago, apparently because the first rejection cast doubts on the second application. Isn’t it Kafkaesque? For those wondering, I did get in on the third try … I’m from India for God’s sake. So, I’m afraid the answer will disappoint a lot of conspiracy theorists.” She drank from a plastic water bottle before continuing, “The fact of the matter is that Derya and Sergei have been deliberately holding back information and communication with Earth for over a day. We don’t know why. As for Caird and Shack, because of their relative positions in the Saturn system, they have been incommunicado for days and that will continue to be the case for a couple more, so let’s hold Sophia, Yi, and Jimmy blameless. That leaves my team, Mission Control, in the hot seat … except it doesn’t. I want everyone hearing me tonight to understand this: I am the mission’s Flight Director, but I only have access to the exact same information than anyone else on Earth has access to. At the same time. This is an ironclad rule imbued in the very essence of the mission. It has never been and will never be violated.”

  “How so?” said the anchorwoman.

  “We hired NASA’s Deep Space Network, the worldwide complex of antennas, to hear and reach Shack during the entire mission. In that agreement, Article II Section 4 clearly stipulates that all information received is instantaneously made public, protected under International Law, and immediately belongs to the human race … this means, in practical terms, that a person with mobile Internet connection in a mountain village in Bolivia has access to the same information at the same time as Mission Control. The main assets are the three huge 200-foot parabolic antennas, one each in the US, Spain, and Australia. So, data doesn’t even originate on US soil two-thirds of the time. Furthermore, the moment the signal arrives, it is beamed out via the Internet, and that interface is managed by a grassroots organization that anyone can join. And, while we decode it, there are tens of other independent organizations doing the exact same with the same results … we’ve thought this through and through.”

  “Why so many precautions? This may even sound suspicious to some people.”

  “Because inside those data bits coming from Saturn may lie the most important answer in the history of our species. And if and when that happens, everyone needs to know not only from here,” she touched her temple, “but from here,” touching her chest, “that there was no meddling, just honest, transparent, undebatable truth.”

  “Then, what’s your guess for Sergei and Derya’s actions?” asked the anchorwoman.

  “I don’t have the faintest idea. Maybe the sampling is not conclusive? But why keep it to themselves? Whatever the cause, I really hope this ends soon.” Great plan, guys, you’ve caused quite the carnival here on Earth, thought Nitha. “Now, if people knew Derya and Sergei like I do, well, what’s happening would appear less outlandish. Those two are quite something.”

  “Aren’t you worried? Some pretty big names have gone as far as to speculate they have been abducted by ETs.”

  Nitha chuckled. “Big names in show business, maybe. Not scientists—or at least I hope not! We get their heartbeat and other vital data every five minutes. It’s right there, center left on the screen,” she turned and pointed to the giant screen behind her. “If I was in front of an alien—another one I mean—I think my heartbeat would reflect that. Instead, Derya is averaging,” she turned her face back again, “67, while Sergei is at 48.”

  “Don’t you think the explanation may have to do with them having found something truly big?”

  “I certainly hope so,” said Nitha, her expressive black eyes sparkling in anticipation.

  MINISTRY OF DEFENSE OF THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION, MOSCOW

  The phone started ringing. The dreadful call. Oleg Artemyev, the Russian Minister of Defense, unstuck the previously immaculate button-down shirt now glued to his body by cold sweat.

  Lazarev, Sergei Dmitrievich. Decorated national hero. At a different point in history that wouldn’t have saved him from a court martial and, possibly, the firing squad.

  After Lazarev’s wife died, the Russian state seized his personal bandwidth. It amounted to a big pile of shit. Not one word back from him in over a year. During the last twenty-four hours requests had turned into pleas, at least by military standards. “Captain Lazarev, immediately report the Enceladus testing results in encrypted form.” This was met by the insulting silence of a traitor. The Foreign Intelligence Service found no leads, but Oleg knew it could only be a defection.

  He waited until the fourth ring and raised the handset with his left hand while crossing himself with the right.

  The call with the President did not go well.

  49 | The Triumph of Reason?

  A day later, September 12 2030. Main Mission day 9

  CASABLANCA, MOROCCO

  Neil deGrasse Tyson walked down the boarding stairs onto the tarmac of Mohammed V International Airport. Considered the most influential science communicator since his own mentor, Carl Sagan, this was one of the rare occasions where no one among his fellow passengers seemed to have recognized him. The anonymity was blown, however, by the escort awaiting him, which included armed Moroccan military personnel. A hurried stride took them to a transport helicopter with its rotor already powering up, which flew them over Casablanca to the stylish Al Noor Tower, the tallest skyscraper in Africa, a curiously pleasing incongruity between Sauron’s tower in The Lord of the Rings and Dubai’s glitzy skyline. The helicopter approached the 114-story building from the side and landed on a hanging helipad almost half a mile above the city.

  This was possibly the weirdest, most surreal moment of his life. The events of the last two days had implausibly turned the round table debate he was about to join into what one commentator called “a papal conclave, US presidential election, and Titanic 2 premiere, multiplied.”

  The perfect storm was triggered by Enceladus’ bizarre retained data situation and made incendiary by the release, within hours of each other, of alleged Shackleton video footage showing a massive alien spacecraft partially blocking Saturn’s view, and WikiLeaks’ top-secret US Air Force files reportedly documenting seven decades of covert UFO investigation. The sudden level of worldwide uncertainty and distrust pushed for a last-minute location change of the debate, from New York, seven subway stops from his home, to a so-called neutral country, settling on the Muslim nation of Morocco. Even CNN, the network leading the broadcasting of the show, was replaced by Al Jazeera in the principal role.

  Tabloids the world over running headline variations
of “they were there all along, examining us” was one thing, but Neil had learned of a high-profile, highbrow German news magazine printing their weekly edition with a similar nail-biting cover just hours before, only convinced to see reason after a call from the Chancellor to its editor-in-chief.

  The world was a very small, volatile tribe that evening. The exhilarating prospect of finding alien life in our own backyard turned instantly to terror by just one word: sentient.

  The conference room had been turned into a television studio with a circular stage crowned with lighting rigs and surrounded by video cameras on dollies and pedestals, all of that enclosed by a seated audience of 300 people. All five panelists—a philosopher, a Hindu swami, a Catholic cardinal, a Muslim mullah, and a scientist—were not so much practitioners as they were communicators with massive followings, yet they struggled to proceed with their discussion between shouts from seven hecklers strategically spread throughout the crowd.

  “Sir, sir,” said the ineffective moderator to one interloper, “I don’t think that language is appropriate or conducive to a civilized conversation. I ask you again to please refrain from disrupting—”

  “The truth will not be silenced, you swine!” he shouted back amid booing from the rest of the crowd. “I have with me—” he tried to continue while scuffling with someone to his side, “photographs—that prove they are coming—coming for all—for all of us!”

  The mullah’s voice prevailed momentarily over the general cacophony, “I propose one of you come onstage to present your views, on the condition that afterward you remain—”

  “No!” yelled the philosopher panelist. “You degrade this discussion and turn it into a circus whenever you validate them.”