InterstellarNet 03 Enigma

by Edward M. Lerner

  • • • •

  In the shuttle’s view port, minute by minute, the matte-black cylinder grew. And kept on growing. As a habitat molded from a nickel-iron asteroid, it was not all that exceptional.

  As a vessel, it was huge.

  “Discovery is the biggest ship ever constructed,” Donald With The Ridiculous Sideburns recited. “A klick and a quarter long. About five-eighths klick in diameter. One hundred twenty decks in all, fifty decks devoted to sustaining the onboard ecology.”

  “That’s amazing,” Grace said, hand resting on Donald’s forearm. If she minded that someone else occupied the pilot’s seat, she hid it well. “But it seems huge for a crew of … what? A few hundred?”

  Donald beamed at Grace’s touch. “That’s about right. The final crew, including the scientific and diplomatic contingents, is three hundred twelve. As a safety precaution, the ship’s carrying capacity is much larger.”

  Corinne’s implant did the math. Volume approaching a cubic kilometer. Aggregated surface area of the decks: eighty-seven square klicks. Discovery was twice the size of the ship that haunted Corinne’s dreams. Imagining this new ship teeming with Snakes, she shivered. She hoped no one noticed.

  Given decent recycling, to indefinitely sustain one adult a habitat needed about four thousand square meters of botanical deck. If fifty botanical decks maintained their full efficiency, this ship could support at least—

  “Do I have this right?” Corinne asked, sure that she did. “Capacity of nine thousand?”

  “More or less,” Donald agreed. “As I said, a safety precaution. If the interstellar drive should break down light-years from home, even if something unforeseen then degrades the shipboard ecology, there’s ample margin. Because in that scenario, help might be years in coming.”

  No one could have missed this shudder. Everyone had the decency to pretend.

  The cylinder’s forward endcap had become a metallic plain, the dots scattered across it revealed as short-range craft similar to the shuttle in which they approached. Lesser dots that emerged had to be spacesuited workers. Just aft of that landing platform/endcap, caverns gaped: hangar bays for the times when the starship’s own velocity turned oncoming light and interstellar gas into a hail of lethal radiation.

  “Touching down in about two minutes,” the pilot announced.

  Within five minutes they were through a flexible docking tube, through the main air lock, and in a staging area aboard Discovery. The starship was not spinning—that was done only when liquids were being transferred aboard—leaving them, for all practical purposes, in free fall. During the starship’s long journey, a steady acceleration or deceleration would hold passengers on the decks.

  “You’ll want these.” Donald handed them magnetic slippers. Looking apologetic, he took clip-on badges from a locker. Where his badge showed a head shot, theirs each bore a bright red V: the scarlet letter for Visitor. Waving a wireless baton over Grace’s and Corinne’s left arms, he mated each badge to an embedded med/ID chip. “Wear your badge at all times. It’s a big ship. We don’t want to lose you.”

  Uh-huh, Corinne thought. A ship-wide security system would be watching them, making certain they did not stray from their escort and that their badges never went far from their arms. However smitten, Donald was following protocol.

  “Why bother with badges?” she asked. “Can’t you track our med chips?”

  Donald’s hangdog expression grew yet more contrite. “So people we meet know you’re not cleared.”

  From the security office, they were off to a VIP tour, their glorified golf-cart electromagnetically drawn to decks and elevator floors. Tier after tier of farmland, a dozen different crops ripening under artificial sunlight. Warehouses and storage rooms. Hangar bays for the starship’s landing craft. Dinner in one of the ship’s many mess halls, wherein Corinne gallantly (and to Grace’s netted frown) insisted upon eating at a separate table. The echoing bridge and, at the opposite end of the starship, the even more cavernous engine room. Crew quarters, labs, and machine shops.

  And the accident site. The incident that had made the project office so publicity-shy turned out to have been a bad weld in the heat-exchange system of a secondary fusion reactor. One among an army of welding bots had gotten overlooked in the course of a software upgrade. Stuff happens, Donald assured them. Alas, it was time-consuming to ensure that no other sloppy work like that had gone unnoticed.

  Grace appeared fascinated with every aspect of their excursion. Donald doted on Grace.

  And Corinne? She could not stop imagining—no, remembering! —a ship all too similar to this. A ship coming apart at its seams as Snakes battled the UP marine detachment—and Carl—come to liberate it. A derelict, its stern third blown to dust and gamma rays, hemorrhaging air, water, and bodies, adrift in the cold and dark ….

  Only with sheer willpower did Corinne rouse herself to feign interest. She had come billions of klicks so that her leaving Earth would seem less about Ariel; any suggestion now of distraction would defeat the purpose. And so she directed a barrage of questions, banal and obvious as many were, at workers and crew they encountered across the ship.

  How do you feel about the upcoming trip? You’ll be away for decades; what about the loved ones you’re leaving behind? What do you hope to learn? How can you expect to relate to beings as alien as the Mobies?

  The questions she wanted to ask—are you nuts? aren’t you terrified?—she kept to herself.

  Most answers were as trite as her questions, but between hours of recordings and her after-the-fact commentary, she could cobble together a one-hour documentary. Grace’s feminine wiles notwithstanding, they wouldn’t have been allowed aboard if their detention were not coming to an end. Editing the raw vid would give Corinne something to do on the slog back to Earth.

  • • • •

  Only when Grace did her preflight checkout of Odyssey, their detention finally over, did she discover that a key photonic component in the fusion-drive controller had gone bad. The design file for printing the part turned out to be corrupted—on Earth, too, when the file was retransmitted.

  The two of them were stranded, due to the age of the ship, till a cargo run from the inner system could physically deliver the replacement part.

  CHAPTER 32

  In Joshua’s mind’s ear, Tacitus 352 asked, “Are we there yet?”

  The AI’s tunic-and toga-clad avatar somehow nailed the cadence and nasality of a whining child. Joshua had gone on enough outings with his nephews to know.

  “Be happy we’re flying,” Joshua netted back.

  He looked over his shoulder to check yet again on his grandmother. Her eyes were closed, her cheeks drooped, and she had a white-knuckled grip on the armrests of her acceleration couch. Carl was keeping the short hop as gentle as possible, but even a quarter-gee surge, now and again, was more than Grandma had experienced in, well, Joshua chose not to dwell on that.

  As stressful for her as was the flight, hiking to the Intervener base from the maglev tracks would have been impossible. That left flying in. They needed her expertise—and she was adamant that she would help. In person.

  “Are we there yet?” Tacitus tried again. “I made it from Earth in under two seconds.”

  As bits streaming between worlds, he would not have experienced even those seconds. But he had come, given no more explanation than a chance to join Joshua’s “merrie band.”

  Merrie band. Robin Hood. Robyn Tanaka. Trust an AI to connect dots.

  As, at the start of this adventure, Tacitus had helped Joshua to recognize the subtle pattern of Intervener activities against the backdrop of all history and prehistory across eleven solar systems. And, much more than a capable historian, the AI was one of a rare breed: Joshua’s true friend.

  “Soon,” Joshua netted, patting the portable server in which Tacitus now resided. He could not help contrasting this comp with the rack upon rack of alien equipment Grandma insisted together comprised an Inte
rvener computer. If the Interveners didn’t have info tech, why not just have their human agents buy some?

  “On final approach,” Carl called. “Let’s take a good look around before we land.”

  From the bridge console, ghostly, a holo projected: the high-res, 3-D rendering of the local terrain to a depth of fifty meters. Here and there the lava tube penetrated too far beneath the surface to be sensed. The Intervener base, lodged in the tube like a pea in a peashooter, almost failed to register in the scan. From orbit, it would not show at all. Inside the anomalous crater above the Intervener base, antennas and telescopes did lurk within the (to the ship’s radar) obviously sham central peak.

  Less than a kilometer from the Intervener base, the lava-tube roof had fallen in. With a deft touch, Carl maneuvered their rented ship through the gap. He sidled the ship about forty meters into the tube, away from eyes in the sky, before setting down.

  “Are we done yet?” Tacitus netted, smiling.

  Carl toted their first load of equipment, including Tacitus’ server, while Joshua helped—as often, carried—his grandmother across the treacherous moonscape. Well before they reached the neighboring lava-tube entrance, the opening that gave access to the Intervener base, all were winded. As Grandma looked around the facility, Carl began unpacking.

  Joshua hiked back for another load of their gear. Reentering the lava tube, the Sun at his back, he could not help but notice several large, blackened splotches on the stone floor. These splotches looked no different than the newly scorched patch beneath their ship. Alas, they had no instruments with which to date the previous landings.

  In the time Joshua needed to retrieve the remainder of their gear, Carl had erected a portable electromagnetic shield: a Faraday cage. Tacitus’ server sat within; for security, they would net to the AI only while also inside the enclosure.

  In the back room, the disguised door panel hung ajar. Cheerful whistling suggested that Grandma was already at work.

  In the front room Carl sat perched on the shelter’s lone rickety chair, elbows propped on the scarred table, glowering at the portable comp they had found on their first expedition. He had shed his pressure suit. The handgun that had dangled from his suit’s utility belt sat alongside the comp.

  “Planning to shoot it?” Joshua asked.

  “I might as well. I’m still not getting in.”

  “We just got here.”

  Carl shoved back the chair. “My implant holds some of the Agency’s best crypto software. I’m no whiz, but with these tools I should be able to crack this.”

  “Unless you’re up against an Agency whiz,” Joshua said. “In any event, someone skilled enough to get at and wipe Robyn’s backups.”

  “Or an alien with alien algorithms,” Grandma called from far back in the corridor.

  “You’re both so encouraging,” Carl said.

  “What else is going on?” Joshua asked.

  “The last I looked, Joyce was puzzling over a keyboard. It was labeled with symbols that meant nothing to either of us. I showed Tacitus a picture of it. The symbols meant nothing to him, either. Now let me work.”

  Other than children too young for implant surgery, and Humanist Movement dinosaurs who shunned neural implants as impure, did anyone use keyboards? Mulling that over, Joshua went into the back corridor. The green walls were, if anything, more tarnished and textured than he had remembered. Spot welds and caulk dotted the welded seams that joined copper sheets. Several seams and two sheets had patches on patches.

  His grandmother knelt on the floor, peering into an equipment rack not noticeably different from any other. Well, perhaps a little different. A deck-of-cards-sized module unplugged from this rack was beside her foot. The module was chock-a-block with dice-sized components interconnected with hundreds of metallic interconnects that were actually naked-eye visible.

  “Why not just chisel their computer from flint?” he asked.

  “Look at these walls. They build to last.” She was poking and prodding into a gap—from which the module on the floor had, he inferred, been extracted—with the probes of a multimeter, then jotting notes on a sheet of paper. The enigmatic keyboard sat three racks away on a pullout shelf. “That said, do you remember my comment about your vids? That this equipment was like a museum piece from my youth?”

  “Uh-huh.” Taking notes on paper was pretty low-tech, too, but you had to make allowances for someone Grandma’s age.

  A simulated needle jumped on her meter’s display. She added a row of digits to her notepaper. “I was too kind. Think IBM 360 mainframe.”

  “What does that mean?”

  She brushed an errant lock of white hair from her forehead. “Big, slow, and energy hogging. But that era’s tech got men to the Moon and sufficed for an early antiballistic-missile system.”

  “Okay ….”

  She laughed. “Circa 1970. If computing had a Bronze Age, that was it.”

  At last, a comparison Joshua got. “Can I bring you something? A drink? A snack?” Because until they had new data to work with, he saw no other way to contribute.

  “No, thanks. Well, yes. A camera. The one with a laser rangefinder.”

  That was not intuitive. He fetched the camera. Crouching beside Grandma, looking over her shoulder into the gap in the rack, he saw a connector. One by one she was probing its array of metallic leads. Humming now rather than whistling, she took a note after each measurement.

  “I have the camera,” he told her.

  “Bear with me.” Finally, setting the meter on the floor, she wrote a bunch more notes. When her scribbling had finished, she reached up. “Okay, camera.”

  He handed it over.

  She took close-ups of the connector, returned the camera, and scooted backward. “I saw a 3-D printer out there. Josh, be a dear, and print me an interface to these specs.” She walked him through the details.

  He snapped an image of her notes, then uploaded from the camera to his implant. “An interface. What’ll it do?”

  “Convert between optical and electrical signaling, so that I can connect a pocket comp to this museum piece. With some trial and error, I should be able to read out memory.” To his doubtless blank look, she explained, “We think the Interveners have monitored Earth for eons. My guess is that the most common modules store those observations. If so, this”—she nudged the module on the floor beside her—“is a memory unit. I’ve been characterizing the electrical interface between it and the rack.”

  “And when the contents read out”—he pointed at the keyboard with its enigmatic symbols—“like that?”

  “Have faith.” She stretched her arms out and back, joints creaking. “My interface?”

  • • • •

  Joshua was unwrapping three meals from their supplies when, from Tacitus’ shielded enclosure, the gleeful shout rang out.

  “Eureka!” Grandma declared.

  She and Tacitus had been cloistered for hours, coy about whatever they did. Some manner of attempt to parse the downloaded data, Joshua supposed, but beyond that he had no clue.

  “Come see,” she said. “Both of you.”

  The enclosure was snug for three, but they crowded in.

  “We saw the telescope hidden up top,” Grandma netted, appending a high-res radar image taken earlier that day of the anomalous crater. “It stood to reason they kept image files.”

  “Okay,” Carl responded.

  “The challenge,” she went on unperturbed, “is in knowing how to recover the images. I found a recurring lengthy bit pattern I thought might be an end-of-file marker. After that, with Tacitus’ help, it was a matter of running candidate files through possible image-encoding schemes and compression algorithms, seeing if any pictures would pop out.”

  “I’m assuming it worked,” Carl netted, “but how?”

  “These devices are primitive. It seemed worth trying algorithms from early human computing. If an algorithm was obvious to us, maybe it was obvious to them, too. Tacitu
s was a big help. He can try out algorithms and diddle parameters really fast.”

  “Tacitus?” Joshua was incredulous. “He’s an historian, not a programmer.”

  “My taking an interest in programming,” the AI snapped, “is no less likely than you taking an interest in medicine and your own body.”

  “Let’s focus,” Carl netted. “What was the ‘Eureka’ moment?”

  The crater image vanished, and into their consensual meeting space blossomed …

  The beautiful blue-brown-and-white orb was not quite Earth. Europe and North America crowded up against one another. Only a narrow channel separated Africa from South America. A landmass to which Joshua could not put any name bulked between Australia and Africa. Annotation along the left edge used characters he had seen on the alien keyboard.

  “According to paleogeologic simulations,” Tacitus netted, “this image of Earth was captured around 110 million years ago.”

  CHAPTER 33

  In one recovered file after another, the alien archive kept yielding surprises. They found extensive imagery of arrays of chipped stone tools and video of mass demonstrations against genetically modified foods. They saw early English-language outlines for Frankenstein and (according to Tacitus) a precursor to humanity’s earliest known alphabet.

  Oddest of all were the detailed topological and subsurface maps of undersea volcanic ridges. Intervener interest in those seemed inexplicable until, again tapping paleogeologic simulations, Tacitus approximated a date. When mollusks and trilobites had suddenly appeared in Earth’s oceans, a half-billion years or so ago, those advances had been revolutionary. Absent a huge surge in calcium (compounds of which, the AI pedantically offered, awakened volcanoes along those ridges would have spewed into the oceans), animals with hard shells and skeletons—like mollusks and trilobites—might never have developed.

  And still, Carl marveled, their progress remained halting. Joyce had yet to deduce the Intervener indexing principles. Many clues—the drift of continents, the literally glacial advance and retreat of ice ages, occasional views of night sky—permitted the rough dating of selected images. Whatever the aliens’ organizational scheme, it wasn’t chronological.