by J C Ryan
As she looked around for something else she could work on, she noticed a stack of plates that had been set aside and asked Mackenzie about it.
“Oh, those . . . something’s different about them. The computer couldn’t make anything of it when we ran it through. I’m afraid it’s damaged.”
“Mackenzie, remember when we talked about how odd it was that we’ve only found text on all these plates? How even our early encyclopedias had pictures? And now, with electronic records, there are sound files included?”
“Yeah. What brought that up?”
“Well, you know we put that on the back burner because Carter was so certain the information you both are looking for will be found in text files. But what if this plate isn’t damaged? What if it contains images, or even sound files?”
"It would be great to find information in those formats. Go for it."
The images on the screen showed nanodots on the plate, just like the others. Yet processing it had produced no text. Interesting. She increased the magnification of the image — and jumped back in surprise when what showed up was an actual image. She could make out what it was! The dots were organized much like pixels, and when she reduced the magnification again, the image proved her earlier impression correct. It was a human face.
“Holy Toledo,” she breathed. She looked over at Mackenzie, not yet ready to trust what she’d found. It was so simple! Yet the tiny dots were too small for the naked eye to make out a pattern. Only by enlarging it to a size too large to make out much, could she see that there was a happy medium, and she’d found it. A picture of an ancient . . . giant?
With trembling hands, Samantha shifted the image to the next nanodot, this time at the exact magnification to see the image immediately. And then the next and the next. By the time she’d gone through the first row, she was about to jump out of her skin with excitement. She couldn’t wait any longer!
“Mackenzie!” she shouted.
Mackenzie jumped and hit her head on a lamp that was bent over her work. “What? Jeez, Sam, you scared me to death!” Then she looked up and saw the excitement on Samantha’s face. “What is it? What have you found?”
“You’ll never believe it. Come here and look!”
After an intense half hour of poring over image after image of the giants, Samantha noted they’d been keeping this all to themselves for too long, and they were going to be in serious trouble.
Mackenzie just laughed. “You’re right. We need to call Carter and Liu in right now. Let’s show them. But wait. Carter’s always pulling jokes on us — let’s turn the tables.”
“I’m not touching that one with a ten-foot pole,” Sam said, rolling her eyes. “It’s on you.”
“Okay, just go along with me then.” Mackenzie’s eyes sparkled with mischief as she left the room to go and get the others. A moment later, she spoke to Carter. “Honey, something’s wrong with some of the plates.”
Alarmed, Carter looked up. “What do you mean?”
“Well, Sam was running the ones that wouldn’t translate under your electron microscope, and, well . . .”
Carter jumped up and ran toward the other room. “Don’t tell me the microscope damaged them! Those are irreplaceable—” He stopped short when he saw Sam, who had managed to put on a contrite expression.
“I’m not sure,” she said. “Here, have a look for yourself.”
Carter slowly approached, the trepidation on his face nearly making Mackenzie lose it and start laughing. She managed to save the joke by turning the laugh into a cough. Carter took one look at the viewer and started shouting.
“Oh, you have got to be kidding! Pictures! How? What? Mackie, I have a good mind—”
At that, Mackenzie did lose it. She laughed so hard that tears started rolling down her cheeks.
“You clever girls! How did you do it?”
“I have to confess, it was a total fluke,” answered Sam. She explained how she discovered the photos.
Carter nodded. “I can see why you say it was a fluke,” he began. “But it wasn’t. You tried something and it worked. That’s the scientific method. At least if you can repeat the process. Are there any more pictures on that plate?”
“Hundreds of thousands.”
“Wow. We’re going to need to look at every one of them and catalog them.” Growing even more excited, he exclaimed, “What if there are pictures of those nukes? This is critical! Sam, you’ve made an important discovery.”
Sam blushed.
“Can you stay and begin the cataloging process? I’m assuming it's possible to automate it . . .”
“Hmmm. I can write a routine that would identify the major components. Or at least sort the faces from landscape and large objects . . . it would make it faster to get to the images you’re interested in.”
“Trust me, I’m interested in all of them. But some are more time-sensitive than others. That sounds like a good project. Can you get in touch with Rick and arrange to spend some more time here?”
“I’ll try,” Sam answered. “I’ve got another day before my pickup is scheduled. I can at least do some more before then. Let me get back to work.” She sent an encoded text message to Rick. Remember Kelly’s birthday is in five days.
After everyone settled down from the excitement, Sam went back to her quick scan of the images, moving the plate carefully from one to the next under the microscope. Hours later, she stretched her back and took a break. She hadn’t mentioned it to anyone else yet, but there were some nanodots that didn’t translate or expand to an image. Something about them tugged at a memory she couldn’t quite bring to the front of her mind.
Sam went to the kitchen, selected an apple from a bowl of fruit on a counter, and went outside for a walk. The beauty of this place never failed to awe her, and this day was no different. Late afternoon sun lit the trees, highlighting their subtly different shades of green. As she gazed upward, the contrast of the clear blue sky peeking between the treetops and the green of the leaves made her sigh with contentment. In a light voice, she began to hum a favorite song about the woods from her childhood. And then a thought struck her like lightning.
Music! That’s what some of those dots reminded her of! They had a pattern, just not one that she’d recognized. As much as she was enjoying her walk, she turned and rushed back to her work to test her theory.
Sam thought hard about how she could go about translating the dots into recognizable music. There was little chance the notation she thought was in the patterns would be the same as modern music notation. But she had to start somewhere. Before she could form a plan, her cell phone received a text.
5 days. Thanks, I would have forgotten.
Just then, Bly rang the dinner bell, and Sam composed herself to look as if everything were business as usual. She was quiet during the dinner, but no one remarked on it. Maybe they just thought she was tired, but nothing was further from the truth. She planned to work all night.
The idea she had was to run a few songs through a program she wrote quickly to identify major chords of “modern” music, though she would use the oldest she could find. She began with Arabic music, since the scale was different from European. Her reasoning was that because these plates came from that area, the music probably did, too. And modern music had to have evolved from the ancient.
Her program was designed to do something similar to codebreaking. It charted the notes and chords from most common to least common. Then she copied and modified the translation program to create a new one — this one to sort the data on the nanodots in question in the same way. Once the charts were complete, a third part of her experiment assigned notes to the dots by correlating the two charts.
By morning, she had the first iteration of her experiment ready to “play”, using computer-generated music. She’d lost track of time and had forgotten it was 4 a.m. and the others were asleep when the first “song” blared from the computer’s speakers.
Scarcely thirty seconds had passed before
Carter ran into the room closely followed by Mackenzie. “What is that awful racket?” he shouted.
Sam had been trying to make the music sound like any Arabic music she could remember hearing. There were some resemblances, but when Carter’s shout broke her concentration, she realized she needed some refinement of the program.
“I think it’s music,” she explained sheepishly. “It may need a little work.”
“Definitely needs some work, especially if this is going to be our morning wakeup call,” Carter mumbled. He smiled to take the sting out. “I need some coffee before I hear that again.”
Over a very early breakfast, the four of them, periodically interrupted by Liam’s questions, discussed what Sam could do differently to make the sounds something their modern ears wouldn’t find too bizarre. Sam pointed out that most Westerners found Asian music jarring, and Arabic or Indian music if not jarring then at least foreign.
“It’s the difference in major and minor scale,” she said.
“That may be,” Carter allowed. “By all means, keep working on it. It would be fascinating to know about their instruments and whether they sang like we do. But don’t forget, we need the pictures of the nukes day before yesterday. If there are any of those left to process, the images are most important.”
Sam began working on a database that would store the images by subject and cross-reference them by position on the numbered plates. As soon as she had the database designed, she planned to work on code that would recognize certain patterns so the database could be automatically populated. But before she had the database matrix worked out, Carter arrived in the room where she and Mackenzie were working. He was breathless, and his face was redder than Sam had ever seen it.
“Carter! What is it?” Mackenzie was clearly concerned by the way he looked.
“Sam, I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to pull you off the sound files for a while. We’ve just found a plate . . . Well, here. Read it for yourself.”
Sam took the paper he waved at her and began to read, at first to herself, and then aloud as Mackenzie continued to ask what it was. “’. . . had no choice but to disable and confiscate the weapons of mass destruction . . .’ Carter, did the translation seriously say that?” she interrupted herself.
“It did! How’s that for irony?”
Sam shook her head and continued. “’From the [enemy warmongers]. I am deeply concerned about storing them within our capital, but there is no better place to defend them.’ Carter! You’ve found the nukes!”
“Well, we now know they’re out there, and we know where, more or less. But we still don’t know where the capital is, or was, located. I need all eyes searching for any clues. Mackie, can you break loose and help Sam scan pictures?”
“Of course, I can, but it seems as if there’s something you aren’t telling us?”
“I planned to. Just got word from James. There are many ships in the area where we plan to send our expedition. We know the Saudis are in the area, as well as Russians, Chinese, and others. The sooner we find the right place to look, the better. Before one of the others stumbles on it.”
“In that case, we need another microscope or two and another body. There are literally thousands of images on each microdot, and we have maybe fifty plates set aside that don’t have text on them. That’s a lot of scanning,” Sam remarked.
“I’ll have everything you need here within twenty-four hours,” Carter said. “Meanwhile, I think we should move to round-the-clock in three eight-hour shifts. Of course, you’ll need to eat and sleep.”
“Thanks, boss,” Sam said with a wink. “Appreciate a job where there is time to eat and sleep every now and then.”
Carter, whose good nature had been suppressed by the alarming news, changed his serious expression for a smile. “Welcome. Don’t make me regret it.” He winked back.
Sam asked Mackenzie whether she wanted to take the first or second shift. Despite the need for her to get some sleep, she wanted to use the opportunity to work a bit more on her sound-recognition programs. Now that they knew some of the non-text, non-image nanodots contained sound, she was eager to identify them all pull them into a database and find if any were of speech rather than music. What Carter didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him — at least for the next twenty-four hours. She set her alarm for six hours later and promptly went to sleep, a talent she’d cultivated during her college years.
Sam came awake instantly in response to the soft ping of her cell phone alarm. She was rested and ready to work. She checked on Mackenzie, who said she had another two hours in her if Sam wanted to get something to eat and clear her mind. Ten minutes later, a sandwich in hand, Sam was again at her computer, working on a nanodot that had produced a particularly horrible sound when converted as music.
Her theory was that dot might represent speech instead. Because of the type of language, they’d previously determined, she had a head start on assigning common sounds to the data on the dot. She had only to borrow the chart of what sounds they’d identified in the language, which in turn they’d based on the Semitic languages they’d determined to have sprung from this one. Once again running a common statistical analysis program to analyze the text they’d translated so far and correlating it with the dot patterns, she was able to synthesize the sounds represented. To her delight, an artificial voice started speaking recognizable syllables into her earphones.
By the time Mackenzie turned over the microscope to Sam, the latter had set the computer to automatically synthesize all the relevant dots. She figured there’d be something to show for her work at the end of her image-scanning shift.
When Mackenzie turned up after eight hours of sleep to take over again, Sam checked the computer files. To avoid another incident of jarring noise, she put on earphones to play the files the automation software had created. The first couple were hauntingly beautiful music in the minor keys she expected. The third, however, was a male voice speaking rapidly in a language that sounded to her like the proto-Semitic syllables she’d heard while Carter, Rick, and she were creating the translation software. Eureka! Although it was now midnight, she thought it was important enough to wake anyone who might be sleeping. “Carter!” she called.
Carter had been working still, desperately searching for more of the translation that mentioned the weapons of mass destruction. When Sam shouted, he wasn’t aware that Mackenzie had taken over the scanning again, and he rushed in expecting to see an image of an ancient nuke. His disappointment quickly turned to elation when instead Sam played the speech file for him. Even though it was a boring recitation of a crop report, hearing the language he’d been reading for weeks was exciting.
“This is the second breakthrough you’ve made in as many days. I could kiss you!” Carter shouted.
“No, you couldn’t,” Mackenzie interjected. “A hug will do, and only one.” She smiled.
“I agree. A hug will do,” Sam echoed. She winked at Mackenzie.
“All right,” Carter said, ignoring the teasing the women were giving him. “Now we need someone who understands the language to come and listen to these files and alert us if anything about the nukes is discussed on any of them.”
“The more, the merrier,” Mackenzie said. “But where will everyone sleep?”
“Tents if necessary,” Carter answered. “Everyone get back to work, and I’ll wake up James in a few hours with our latest request. Good job, Sam.”
Within a week, Carter had two more electron microscopes and an expert in ancient Semitic languages James had “borrowed” from the University. The borrowing was somewhat traumatic on the elderly Jewish professor, given the rush job of clearing him for top secret information. But once he understood what he was hearing and what he was listening for, he became a wholehearted member of the team. His remark was he’d been through one Holocaust already, and a nuclear one was not on his bucket list.
Everyone settled into a routine now that there was enough equipment to go around and they didn�
�t need to work in shifts anymore. Midnight to six a.m. was for sleeping. First thing each morning, Carter and Mackenzie had their training session with the Executive Advantage team, while the others each pursued their favorite exercise — which for some was a stroll in nature and for some it was sleeping another 30 minutes. Then they all met for breakfast where they discussed their progress and the day’s goals. There were lunch and dinner breaks, but on average the work consumed more than twelve hours of each day.
Carter was convinced they were under a deadline. The only problem was they didn’t know the date. A lot like someone on death row waiting for the day of execution. Despite the interesting work, no one was free of the pressure of knowing their efforts might well be the difference between a world at peace and a world at war. Or more precisely, a world annihilated by ancient nuclear weapons.
Chapter 49 -
Dolphinese
It was on the third day after he arrived that Professor Wasserman had a question for Sam.
“I understand, young lady, that you are responsible for the sound synthesis of these files I’m listening to. Is that right?”
Sam smiled. “It is. Did you have a question about them?”
“Yes,” he answered. “What is the meaning of the squeaks and whistles in the files? These are not sounds I recognize as part of the language.”
“Squeaks and whistles? I’m not sure what you mean.”
“Please, come and listen. I will put it on speaker.”
Sam smiled again. The professor must be an octogenarian, yet he said things like “on speaker” as if he were part of her generation. She waited for him to queue up the file and listened in astonishment as the voice pronouncing the familiar sounds of the language was interspersed with, exactly as he’d described, squeaks, whistles, and other sounds, like hoots, similar to electronic beeps, and others.