by Mark Wandrey
“I am yours,” he said looking up into Victor’s eyes with intensity.
“Then stand by my side and stop kneeling.” He did as he was asked, handing Victor a dirty rag to wipe blood from his face. “It would be easier if I knew your name.” The other man looked bewildered, as if he were trying to remember his own name. “If the name that is coming to your lips is not what you used to be called by, fear not. God often gives new names to those reborn in His service.”
“My name is Duke,” the man said, still looking bewildered at calling himself something other than the name he’d grown up with. “That is what I'm to be known as.”
“I am Victor, Duke. And we have a lot of work to do.” Duke smiled at him and the two shook hands. No sooner had they finished their formal greetings then three others in the cell came over.
“I’d like to learn more,” one of them said.
Victor
looked at all of them and nodded his head. “Well, let’s learn together,” he said and sat down. They all formed a circle and began reading his new bible.
March 17
Mindy yawned and then took a bite of her sandwich. The view from her office window was the same as always, the decorations on her office walls were the same, the work was the same, and most of all her discontent was the same. “You were meant for more than this,” a voice whispered in her mind. She shook her head and looked at the printouts on her desk, taking in the logistics of what she was coordinating. Mindy had passed her customs broker exam three months after starting at her office as an entry processor. The test was one of the hardest ones administered to become a licensed and recognized expert with the US government. Eighty-nine percent of those who took the exam failed, and she’d passed with a ninety-eight percent score after studying for a week. The job provided distractions in dealing with unscrupulous importers, suspicious US Customs officers and her greedy bosses. But it was still not even a minor mental challenge for a mind which never rested.
Putting aside the work on her desk she accessed the Internet for a break. Another bite of sandwich found her browsing familiar territory. The World Astronomers’ Association home page still listed her as a member in good standing. That only stood to reason since she wrote them a check every year. There were no links from her name where there used to be. It was as if she were just some hobbyist, only a member so they could brag about it at the cappuccino bar.
Her next stop was SETI.COM, formerly SETI.ORG. Five years ago, the government cut all funding and association with the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence. And it had been completely her fault. But there in the SETI site she found herself still listed prominently among contributing astronomers. All her links were in place. Her photo was still there, as well as the video of her keynote speech to the World Astronomers’ Association convention five years ago. Here it was like nothing had happened, even though SETI’s fall had been more directly her fault than anyone else’s.
Some old longing made her click the link for her speech. In a moment she was watching herself, a younger more confident version, standing behind a podium covered with microphones. The speech was momentous for her career. Only seven years in the association, she was both the youngest member to ever give this speech and the newest member as well. The press had been made aware and what was usually a collection of old men listening to boring details became a media event. She was also the first woman to give the address. Halfway through the speech she sprung the trap.
“Ladies and gentlemen of the press, at this point I would like to deviate from the script. Two months ago, while working at the Arecibo radio observatory, we received the first signal from another star system. It was, without a doubt, from an intelligent species.” The room exploded into roars of amazement and outrage, and her career exploded soon after.
“That was a stupid move,” she chastised herself for the thousandth time as she stopped the playback. It had been a move of desperation. The signal they received was only nineteen seconds in length and cut out before any other radio observatories could lock in on it. To make matters worse, one of the two main data recording drives had failed to record and the one copy was not perfect. One recording of the signal and no corroboration was a worst case scenario. The governing scientific bodies refused to authenticate the incident and there was no wide baseline interferometry, so the specific star system that originated the signal couldn’t be pinpointed.
Mindy spent the next month watching the suspect channel and coordinates in space every moment they were in view, but the signal had not been repeated. Other friends at SETI had analyzed the signal itself and found tantalizing structure in it. Because of the quality they couldn’t yet decode whatever the signal contained.
SETI had been accused of trying to create public hysteria over the supposed alien signal. Congressional hearings had resulted and SETI was publicly torn to pieces. Mindy had hoped that the public limelight would create pressure for JPL (NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory) and NASA to use its formidable power to decipher the garbled signal and help them look for the source. Instead, they were made to look like fools. It was the first real mistake she had ever made, a critical overestimating of the public opinion. Her career and SETI’s funding had paid the price. Mindy sighed and clicked on her IM, paging an old friend.
“Hi stranger,” came the typed reply just a few seconds later.
“Been a long time,” she typed back.
“Still moving freight?”
“Yep. Still making pizza?”
“SEG,” was the reply. It stood for Shit Eating Grin, a bit of computer shorthand. “Pays the bills, if you know what I mean.”
“Yeah, same here. How’s the crunching going?”
“Slow, real slow. You been walking down memory lane again?”
“Of course. I got a line on a dedicated server on eBay yesterday; I’m going to try to get it to you.”
“I saw it too, but the pizza business isn’t going so good.”
Mindy sighed and typed on. “I’m not rolling in it either, but I just got a bonus check.”
“I thought you were going to be going on a honeymoon with that?”
“Yeah, well, sometimes things don’t work out the way you hoped they would.”
There was a long pause, long enough to make Mindy wonder if her friend had signed off before he replied. Long enough to make her worry just how deep of a grudge he might hold against her for taking his life down the crapper with hers.
“I don’t blame you, you know,” he finally typed, reading her mind.
“No, I don’t know that. I like what you’ve done with the new website.”
“Thanks. The rest of the gang wants you back.”
“I can’t make it on pizza money.”
“It was only the stuffed shirts that abandoned you, abandoned us really. The real sky watchers are still faithful.”
“Really?”
“Really. You were sitting in the chair E.T. called. You’re the hero. I get a thousand hits a day on your section of the site, a hundred times that on the anniversary of first contact. As for pizza money, we’ve got some prospects for funding.”
Mindy sat up a little straighter. “All forgive and forget with Uncle Sam?”
“Hardly, this is semiprivate, corporate cash.” Another pause, shorter this time. “I think we’ll need you to get this money.”
“I’ve got a new life, a new career.”
“Right, and sooner or later you might even get married.”
“Am I that transparent?”
“Do you want me to answer that?”
“Not really.”
Another pause before her old friend resumed. “We’ve been chewing on that signal with surplus PCs and borrowed mainframe time for five years now. We’re no closer to getting anything from it than we were when we started. Five layers of data, all in frequency harmonics with a base multiplier of one hundred forty-four, all tightly compressed into a transmission only five seconds long.”
“We go
t nineteen seconds of seamless data” she started to complain, then stopped typing.
“Uh-huh,” came the reply.
“You made a breakthrough?” She had to type it three times before she got it right, her hands were shaking so bad.
“I wouldn’t call it a breakthrough. Let’s just say we found what looks like terminators in the signal.”
“Then it was repeating.”
“Almost certainly. The signal is so complex we probably would have spent another five years trying to find the repeating sequences. Leon had a brain stroke one night while tripping on some particularly righteous Columbian weed,” she shook her head as she read on, “and decided to look for anything that resembled a terminator block, like you would find in a program. He found three of them.”
“No shit.”
“Nope, good shit. I’ve tried it. Anyway, once we had the terminators we isolated a five second block of signal and overlaid it with another five second block.”
“Did they match?”
“Not in the least.”
“Fuck!” Mindy snapped aloud, then typed the same thing.
“That was our reply too. How could we have found such a clear indication of structured signal length and not had it played out? Simple really, looks like each five second block is a unique block. We’ve been chewing ten millisecond segments of each one looking for repeats.”
“Any luck?”
“None, until last night. Funny that you IM me just now since I was about to ping you.”
“You trying to give me a heart attack?”
“No, just dragging out the drama.”
“Well, enough dragging. Spill it.”
“It’s taken a lot of computer time, and a lot of bread we don’t have, but we’ve found ten recurring data groups. All are nearly identical. Nine are in packets one, two and three. Those are the complete packets. At least as complete as we have. One is in packet four, that’s the one on the end of the data stream right before we lost the signal. The last one is the least interesting, only really useful to prove a theory. The data groups are 12 milliseconds long. It looks like they are ALL twelve milliseconds long. These groups occur through the entire length of the transmissions. We’re searching for more matches, but it could take years. Centuries. It’s unfuckingbelievable!”
“It sounds like it.”
“Remember how I said they are NEARLY identical?”
“Sure.”
“The fascinating part is the nearly identical bits of data. They are each different in a very particular way. We don’t have enough to make sense out of it yet, but I think it’s a primer, or a lexicon.”
“You’re kidding? We don’t have enough of the signal, do we?”
“Each packet is twelve milliseconds; if they are contiguous that means every five second terminator brackets more than four thousand bytes of data. How many bytes would it take to show a comparative of the English language and our base ten numerical system?”
“Probably about four thousand or so if you went at it straight on.”
“Our thoughts exactly.”
She sat and stared at her computer for a moment before noticing the pile of work just to the side. “This is fascinating; keep me up to date, okay?”
“Sure,” was the reply. “Also, I thought you might want to know that WAA is crucifying another member like they did you.”
“Who this time?”
“You’ve never heard of her. British amateur visual astronomer named Alicia Benjamin. She calls her place the Worth Hill Observatory, in southern England. Month ago she says she spots a rock, one of the bigger NEO rocks, suddenly accelerate. Problem is she lost some of the data, and no one else saw it happen.”
“Sounds all too familiar.”
“Right. She went public, and got a little play with her pictures. Problem was her telescope is just a worked up civilian job so the imagery is not up to association standards. The WAA said she was making it up and now she’s a laughing stock in the media.”
“I’m beginning to hate them again.”
“You mean you stopped?”
“LOL,” she replied, computer shorthand for Laughs out Loud. “So, what rock, and is it really gone?”
“The rock is LM-245. About twelve miles long and doesn’t get closer than point one five AU for fifty thousand years. There’s no way to confirm her story, as it’s due to be behind the sun for another forty days.”
“I guess she’ll either be vindicated or screwed in forty days.”
“Too bad we didn’t have those options.”
“Yeah, too bad.”
Harper found a lame excuse to enter in his log for swinging by Central Park late in his shift. Removable concrete barriers now permanently blocked the 97th street entrance to Central Park. He could see despondent-looking NYPD and even more despondent-looking FBI agents manning the blockade. He was really curious who called the shots now; it didn't seem to be either NYPD or the FBI. There were no answers to be found here so he drove on.
He’d hardly gotten any sleep at all last night after leaving Victor in the lockup. Harper spent most of the time working his way through all his contacts trying to get information on what was going on inside the government cordon. He hadn’t found out a damned thing. It wasn’t that they were unwilling to tell him, it turned out no one at NYPD knew what was going on. The desperate truth was that the information Harper had gotten with Victor’s help was probably more than anyone else outside the Feds knew.
A couple hours later, he was parking his car in front of his apartment and wearily climbing the stairs. He waved to his neighbor, Mr. Nebowitz, who was taking out his garbage from the landing above as he worked the locks and went inside. His gun went into the table drawer by the door, coat on the stand, and then he headed straight for the kitchen. A few minutes in the microwave yielded previously frozen and nutritionally adequate sustenance.
Harper carried his meal into the living room and took a seat. While spooning the amorphous chow into his mouth with one hand he used the remote to channel surf with the other. After a day submerged in the filth and scum of New York City he always found the death and carnage around the world almost a refreshing break.
A typhoon was raging in the South Pacific. In Northern Africa, famine was looming due to some communist state’s refusal of international aid. One group was insisting the world was getting warmer and the polar icecap was melting, while another was simultaneously insisting that the planet was getting colder and another ice age was looming. Meanwhile, scientists worked on an Antarctic excavation, trying to beat the return of hard winter. The team should have departed weeks earlier but had uncovered evidence of a pre-human species nearly a hundred thousand years older than anything previously known. Tax day in the USA was approaching and a march of one million protesting the increase of the flat tax to 29% was planned for April 15th. Officials doubted more than one 100,000 would show up. It was just another day on planet Earth.
Harper threw away his microwave tray and brought a brace of beers back to the little living room. Hours more went by as events around the world played out. He didn’t see much of interest, and fewer important events. It was nearly midnight and he was beginning to fade. The national news had held no mention of what was going on in his NYC. Just before he pushed the off button a news segment caught his attention. It gave a feeling of haste and lacked the refinement of many network news spots.
“We have a developing story in China. Tiantan Park in South Eastern Beijing has always been a peaceful place, even through the revolutionary periods that have embroiled other landmarks of that city. Mainly known for hundreds practicing Tai Chi and the famous Vault of Heaven historic landmark, today it has become the scene of violent conflict.
“Unknown people occupying the park at dawn attacked Beijing security forces. Those forces have now pulled back and military personnel have shown up to create a perimeter. This park of approximately six hundred acres is now controlled by what officials have estimated betwee
n fifty and one hundred thousand civilians. No demands have been made at this time, and there are likewise no indications that it is another spate of pro-democracy demonstrations.”
The image cut from the reporter where he stood to a rooftop camera taking pictures of the park itself. Masses of people could be seen milling around as well as the cordon of military vehicles and troops. The camera panned past something that made Harper sit up suddenly. There in the distance surrounded by a tight circle of people was what many would think was a glowing white sculpture. Harper had first seen a picture of the sculpture only hours ago, drawn from the descriptions of a reformed drug user. It was an exact match for Victor’s “Portal”.
The cameraman was ignorant of what he had just captured because the view simply continued to pan onward without fanfare. Harper knew what he had just seen and the event left him stunned. “Oh my God,” he said and started flipping the cable news channels. He found one more bit on the Beijing disturbance but that network didn’t have video coverage. He decided to go to bed because he still had to work the next day. He lay awake for some time thinking about what he’d seen, and what was in another park only a few miles away.
Others noticed the footage as well. Most notable were certain government agents and workers in such far flung locations as Sydney, Cairo, and Moscow. Reactions of these people varied from amazement to fear. One person caught the footage and instantly sent it onward digitally. When his e-mail beeped for attention, agent Mark Volant popped the computer open and looked at what he’d been sent. He knew it would be significant; this e-mail account was on a server that required a password and special encryption to send a message. As he read and watched the enclosed video he felt his blood pressure rising. Once again the agency director was correct, this was something big. There was at least one other Portal in Beijing, and preliminary intelligence reports from overseas bureaus were pointing toward indications of at least five more.