Containment

by Christian Cantrell

  Arik thought about what Darien had told him about Rosemary. At the time, it seemed perfectly feasible to him that a woman with Rosemary's passion for learning and admiration for innovative and creative thinking could feel impossibly trapped and suffocated by her life in V1. But now the idea that she would even consider taking her own life was unfathomable. Arik realized that Rosemary hadn't given up on V1; she had been silenced, and Arik believed he knew why.

  He brought up the proposed V2 schematics and the water pressure data that Rosemary had copied into his workspace the morning they met in her office. He had been so consumed by his responsibilities at the Life Pod and his terraforming experiments that he hadn't had a chance to review her work as she requested, but he now knew exactly what the problem was. Both the physical and the computer models were using elevated water towers rather than pumps to pressurize the V2 water supply, but the tiny sensors embedded in the physical model were showing more relative pressure than what the computer model was simulating. Arik exposed the computer model's hydrostatic pressure formula and made a single modification to it: he recalculated the value of g — the variable representing local gravitational acceleration — using the gravitational constant of Earth rather than Venus. The results immediately updated, and every number was in perfect agreement with those from the physical model.

  Rosemary obviously knew exactly what the problem had been. In fact, Arik believed that she had created the error intentionally, then passed it along to him in order communicate with him in a way that he could understand, and that would hopefully go undetected. She knew that the truth about V1 was something he would have to discover for himself — a conclusion he would need to reach gradually, proving it little by little along the way. She also understood the type of thinking he would need to use in order to reach a conclusion which was almost beyond comprehension. Arik now realized that everything Rosemary had ever taught him about problem solving and how to think both critically and creatively was in preparation for solving this one puzzle. He wondered how long it would have taken him to figure out that something which was supposed to be a constant — an immutable, invariable, unquestionable fact — was flat-out wrong. When would he have remembered that the only way to solve some problems was to Question Everything?

  Arik knew that all these new premises he was forming led to one unavoidable, unyielding, and very simple conclusion: he would never be allowed to leave the room he was in with the knowledge he now possessed. Even before he had figured out the truth about his parents and Rosemary, it was clear that he'd seen and figured out way too much to ever be allowed to communicate with anyone in Gen V again.

  Darien had promised to be there in an hour. He sent Arik a short video message apologizing again for not being able to get there sooner. Once again he committed to answering all of Arik's questions, promised to explain and to stay for as long as Arik needed him to. And then, Darien added, they would discuss options, figure out what was next, determine the best course of action for everyone. But Arik knew that this was no different from any other decision he had ever been presented with. In the end, it would not be his to make. His remaining time and energy were better spent preparing rather than trying to resist.

  His top priority was to protect his terraforming research. He knew it would not be safe in the central quantum storage grid, no matter how well he obscured, encrypted, or obfuscated it. He thought about trying to transcribe it to silicon paper, but an hour wasn't nearly enough time, and he knew that a request for a notebook would be met with suspicion and that its contents would be reviewed. Even if he used a cipher, and even if nobody managed to break it, his work would never find its way back to him or anyone else who could successfully interpret it. There was only one place Arik could think of where the data could be safely concealed and that no one would think to look for it: the ODSTAR device that he and Cadie had built.

  Fai had blocked Arik's access to all known communication protocols at the network level, correctly assuming that even if Arik were to write a new protocol that the network routers were not able to detect, no other nodes on V1CC's network would know how to interpret it. What Fai had not taken into account, however, were communication protocols that Arik had already written and that other nodes on the network already understood.

  Arik had decided to write a custom protocol for transferring data to and from ODSTAR in order to increase its efficiency and simplify the hardware. The process of encoding and decoding data to and from strands of DNA was time-consuming, so Arik wrote a protocol that buffered the data and fed it to ODSTAR as the device was able to process it. Fai had been too proud to ask Arik for any details about how ODSTAR worked which meant he had no idea that the protocol existed and therefore couldn't have blocked it. Arik searched for the ODSTAR node on the network, and found that it was available, ready to read or write data to or from any network node that knew the proper protocol. As a test, Arik queried it for available space, and ODSTAR reported that there was over 600 megabytes of storage capacity remaining in the specialized twenty-forth chromosome that Cadie engineered. During the process, no communication packets had been blocked or dropped.

  It took several minutes to compress and transfer all the data, and for it to be successfully encoded. Once Arik was certain it had all been copied and had verified its integrity, he removed the ODSTAR node from the network, then deleted the protocol library he had written to communicate with it. Without the library, and without a specification describing how the protocol worked, it would be nearly impossible for anyone but Arik to read or write data from ODSTAR again.

  The last thing Arik needed was a time capsule. He needed something he could bury deep inside V1CC's code base with the truth about V1 encoded in it so abstractly and obtusely that it would be meaningless to everyone else in V1 but him. Since he had to assume that his workspace would be compromised, he needed something he could hide in plain sight, something that would find its way back to him without him needing to go looking for it, something that Fai himself would deliver right to Arik at precisely the right time. One thing the Code Pod loved to delegate to Arik were incoherent and unrecognizable error codes in the shell program. They claimed they didn't have the time to spend on such trivial tasks, but Arik knew that most of them simply didn't understand the shell program's code base well enough to debug it themselves. Somehow Arik needed to express the truth about V1 in the span of a single error code — condense everything he had learned into one line of alphanumeric characters that would baffle everyone in the Code Pod, but speak as clearly to him as a prophetic voice from the past.

  By the time Darien arrived, the table was next to the bed again, and the chair was back in the corner. Arik's workspace was closed, and he was lying on the bed with his back to the door. He didn't react when the panels snapped open and the man who raised him stepped in.

  Darien stood just inside the room and silently watched Arik for several seconds before he spoke.

  "You must have quite a few questions for me," Darien finally said.

  "No," Arik said without rolling over or opening his eyes. "I don't want to know anything else. I just want to forget."

  Darien nodded at Arik's back. "I think that's best," he said sympathetically. "I really think that's the right decision. I'll go get Dr. Nguyen."

  Darien left and the door snapped shut. Several minutes later, Arik felt the air circulation in the room change very slightly, and then he fell asleep. The next time he woke up, his brain was exposed, and he felt tingling in his head.

  PART III

  A New World

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  The Circumference of the Earth

  Access to V1's main frequency scanner and receiver wasn't restricted. Instead, access to specific frequencies themselves was controlled. But there were several frequencies used during the day-to-day operations of V1 that anyone was free to scan and listen in on.

  Arik used the receiver's software interface to lock in 882.758 MHz — the difference between the two
frequencies specified in the message he had sent himself across time. The scanner accepted the input which meant the frequency wasn't being blocked, and the fact that all he heard was static told him that the frequency also wasn't being used for any type of encrypted chatter. Arik piped the audio stream into his workspace so he could record it. It was five minutes before noon.

  Cadie was at work. Arik was supposed to be working as well, but he sent Subha a message that morning letting her know that he had a headache and wouldn't be in until after lunch. Like everyone in V1, Subha gave him a lot of leeway since the accident. Arik had never taken advantage of it until now.

  He was in his home office with the door closed. Since Cadie wasn't home, he wasn't using headphones; if it turned out that the message was so faint that he couldn't hear it emanating from the polymeth, he could replay it and amplify it as necessary. The static was low and constant, and he increased the volume enough that he would be able to hear anything below it. Since he didn't entirely trust his ears to be able to detect the message, he was also using a sound visualization program that converted even the smallest audio anomalies into graphical waves and movements. It drew a three dimensional green line through black space which Arik could rotate and zoom to get different perspectives on any sound waves it interpreted. The line was slightly jittery from tiny amounts of ambient noise.

  Arik checked the time on both his watch and his workspace. They were identical. It was thirty-three seconds past noon, and still all Arik could hear was static.

  After a full minute had passed, Arik began to worry that he had made a mistake. He wondered if the code should have been interpreted more literally. Perhaps the message was being broadcast on the original two frequencies, 922.76 and 40.002, and the word "DELTA" was intended as a clue on how to post-process the data. At a full three minutes after noon, Arik configured the scanner to check the two encrypted frequencies but found that they were quiet, as well. Dead air, just as his father had told him. And even if for some reason there had been chatter, Arik knew that he would probably not have been able to decipher it.

  At fifteen minutes past noon, Arik decided to replay the recorded static while continuing to record in the background. He increased the sensitivity of the visual effect and expanded its threshold beyond the range of human hearing. At these levels, the green line was reacting dramatically to any electromagnetic radiation that happened by the frequency. Arik put a pair of headphones on over his ears, turned up the volume, and fixated on the agitated green line.

  He listened to almost thirty minutes of static, jumping back occasionally when he thought he heard or saw something significant, but whatever it was, it was never there the second time. It was now almost one o'clock, and when the recording software reported nothing out of the ordinary in the additional twenty-three minutes of static he hadn't listened to yet, Arik took off his headphones and shut off the audio. He sat in the dark with the visualization software giving the room a jittery green glow.

  Arik hadn't realized how badly he needed some kind of message to be there until he knew that it wasn't. Even though the chances of detecting something were small, the disappointment was far more intense than he anticipated. He looked down at his hands and saw that they were shaking, and he could feel perspiration forming on his face and neck. He wanted to hurl his headphones against his workspace and watch them shatter, ram his fist into the polymeth, smash the bones in his hand and snap his wrist.

  The message was far more than just a mystery he had been trying to solve for the last three days. He had no idea what he expected to hear, but some part of him believed it was much more than just an explanation for Earth's sudden radio silence. Whatever it was, it would give him some purpose beyond his current work in V1 — something more profound to devote himself to than scientific distractions and pathetic attempts to please Subha and Kelley. The message, Arik now realized, somehow represented a life beyond the containment and sterility of V1.

  Most of Arik's life had been a search for this message in one form or another. He had searched for it in science, in mathematics, in computers, and even in Cadie. Over the course of the last few days, Arik had come to believe that rather than finding the message, the message had finally found him, and at a time in his life when he needed it most. Arik knew that the idea of a mysterious voice embedded in the static of radio waves delivering truth and somehow giving him purpose was absurd, but he wanted to believe that it was possible. He wanted to believe that the message represented more than just an archetypal need for meaning — a form of faith which, in most humans, manifested itself as religion, but in a godless and engineered society like V1, could take the form of hidden messages in radio noise.

  Arik should have been on his way to work, but he had already made the decision that he would not go back. He wasn't ready to move on. It would be easy to return to the Life Pod, to eventually figure out AP, to stand up on stage in front of all of V1 while Kelley once again declared him a savior. But even the image of his baby daughter confined to an oxygen tent was not enough to make him give up on the message yet. In fact, his refusal to give up was somehow as much for her as it was for him. He wanted to change V1 before she was born. There was something about this world that made him reluctant to bring another life into it. But life could not be stopped; it was the world that would have to change.

  He brought up the original output from the shell program and tried to see it from a fresh perspective.

  2519658000000 922.76 40.002 DELTA

  As far as he could tell, there was no other reasonable interpretation of the numbers: the first one had to be a date, and the second two had to be radio frequencies. But if nothing had been broadcast on either of the frequencies — or the delta frequency — on the specified date, the meaning had to be hidden elsewhere.

  Arik began looking for patterns. Why these two specific radio frequencies? Why not random frequencies? Why not the frequencies the Wrench Pod used to communicate with the remote maintenance rovers? Why not the frequencies used by the backup communication system? Why not one of the frequencies reserved for distress beacons? The two things the antennas had in common were that they were both used for communicating with Earth, and they were identical models of identical design. They were 10 meters high with visual diagnostic systems built into them, and they both were installed on rooftops.

  The visual diagnostic systems consisted of tiny cameras built into the tips of the antennas aimed down at their bases. If the antennas ever malfunctioned, the Infrastructure Department could bring up their video streams to make sure they were physically intact before sending someone out in an environment suit to inspect them. Arik couldn't imagine that the antennas themselves could be significant in any way, but he did know that he had probably been outside several times prior to the accident, and could have come into contact with one or both of them. He brought the two cameras' video streams up and placed them side-by-side.

  If it hadn't been for the labels in the top left-hand corners of the images — "ERP (922.76)" and "V1 (40.002)" — the two views would have been entirely indistinguishable from one another. The cameras' fields were just wide enough to capture the bases of the two antennas, but nothing beyond them which would have betrayed the fact that they were positioned a kilometer apart on entirely different rooftops. Arik reconsidered the various meanings of the word "delta." The fourth letter in the greek alphabet. The fourth brightest star in a constellation. The sediment-rich mouth of a river. The only definition that had any meaning to him was the variation in a variable or function, and since the message had originated from him, that had to be the correct interpretation.

  Arik took a snapshot of each video stream and ran them through a bitmap comparison algorithm to see what the differences were between them. The cameras weren't capable of being optically zoomed, but Arik could digitally zoom in and enhance specific regions if they stood out for any reason. The first difference the algorithm reported was in the two labels in the corners. Arik applied a mask to the t
wo regions and ran the algorithm again. The computer still uncovered several thousand differences, most of which Arik couldn't see himself, so he adjusted the threshold of the algorithm and ran it a third time. This time the highest percentage of variation occurred around the shadows cast by the two antennas.

  The sun was far enough away from Venus that the shadows cast by the two antenna should not have been significantly different, but after a moment of reflection, Arik realized that the discrepancy was probably due to the curvature of the surface of the planet and the fact that the two structures were a kilometer apart. This was easily explained and would not have seemed significant to Arik except for the fact that the shadows were unusually strong. Shadows on Venus were usually little more than faint blurs due to the incredibly dense and refractive atmosphere, but today they had an unusual amount of definition. Today was the exact middle of the Venusian 3,024-hour solar day, and the Sun was as strong and as close to being directly overhead as it ever got. Since it was never perfectly overhead due to their distance from the equatorial region, both antennas always cast shadows of some length, but they were probably as prominent right now as they ever got.

  Arik piped the output from the bitmap comparison algorithm into another algorithm to calculate the exact difference between the lengths of the two shadows which turned out to be .0015708 meters, or 1.5708 millimeters. Now that Arik was accumulating data, he needed to start thinking about how to interpret it. He wondered if the number represented another radio frequency, but if so, the decimal point was probably not in the right place. Although it would be easy to scan all the frequencies that could be associated with the number, Arik's intuition was leading him in another direction. Since he knew that the height of both antennas was exactly 10 meters, and he knew that the antennas were exactly one kilometer apart, knowing the difference in the length of the shadows cast by the antennas because of the curvature of the planet's surface would actually allow Arik to calculate the planet's circumference. This experiment was first performed by a Greek mathematician named Eratosthenes over two hundred years before the birth of Christ in order to calculate the circumference of the Earth for the first time. The relevance of the circumference of Venus, which Arik already knew to be roughly 38,000 kilometers, was not at all obvious, but the calculation was easy enough that the path seemed worth pursuing. If nothing else, he might uncover additional sets of radio frequencies to scan, or reveal another lead worth investigating.