Origin - Season One (36 page)

“Mitch,” she said, “what do you think all this is? I mean, what do you think we’re doing here?”

Mitch considered the question for a moment. “Well, I haven’t seen anyone making Kool-Aid, so I’m ruling out mass suicide.”

“Mitch, I’m being serious.”

“Okay, I guess I’m assuming this is a research facility of some kind. Something run by Skyline Defense?”

“Oh my god!” she said. “What the hell did Brendan tell you?”

“You mean General Eisenhower?”

“Yes, the chief. Didn’t he tell you
anything
?”

“Err… nope. Just that my being here wasn’t his idea. Actually, I got the impression he’d be happier if I was locked up in the dungeon.”

“What an asshole,” she said. “Mitch, the spaceship is real. Origin is real.”

As Mitch studied her face the smile on his own grew wider. “First of all,” he said, “you’re talking to a man who’s done a fair bit of reading up on the subject of space travel. Nice try, though. I’m pretty sure the Saturn five was the biggest thing NASA ever built. I’m prepared to believe there are a few feasibility studies kicking around for making something bigger. Like the Russian orbit assembly idea for a manned scout to Mars. But –”

“Mitch,” Sarah said, “we’re not building a spaceship. Origin isn’t a project. It’s been there for hundreds, maybe even thousands of years. It’s why we’re here. It’s why we’ve built all of this.”

When she didn’t return his smile, Mitch let out a sigh of exasperation. “I can’t believe I’m actually having this argument, but fine. I’ve seen most of the project traffic at NASA. I’m not saying there aren’t things going on there they don’t want anyone to know about. There are. But assuming something like this was discovered, there is no way I wouldn’t know about it. I probably shouldn’t be telling you this, but I’ve actually seen some of the things our government is trying hard to keep out of the public domain. There’s some pretty crazy shit, but on the subject of extraterrestrials it’s mainly a lot of old men sitting around talking about how UFO sightings and stories about alien abductions have a way of turning into budget increases. What I mean is, there are no little green men out in Nevada, but no one will ever come out and flatly deny it because popular superstition is a hallmark of the American psyche and the basis for much of what goes on in our political system.”

“Are you done?” Sarah said.

“Yeah, I’m done. I just –”

“Come with me,” she said.

She led him outside and across the bridge onto the road that looped around the back of the cave. They passed the east corner where a crew of about a dozen men in yellow jumpsuits were busy burrowing two large holes. Mitch was mesmerized for a moment by the sight of a tractor that must have been electrical because it made no sound even as it moved forward and scooped up a bucket full of loose rock.

“Where are we going?” Mitch said.

“There’s someone you need to meet,” she said.

The glass panes opened automatically as they approached the doors on the platform at the other end of the road. Sarah led Mitch into a round tunnel about forty feet long that ended in another set of glass doors, although these were tinted almost black. The Roman numeral “VIII” had been etched into the wall above them.

“Wait here,” she said. “I need to find him.”

Mitch waited.

When a quarter of an hour had passed and he was still waiting, he stepped closer to the doors and was surprised to see them open.

The room was at least a hundred feet across and appeared to be a perfect circle rendered in smooth polished concrete. The ceiling was a conical shape that began about twenty feet above the floor and rose steeply, ending in a wide circular shaft that led up into darkness. Directly below the shaft a pole about ten feet high jutted out of the ground. It was roughly ten inches in diameter and appeared to be made of solid steel. It arched out at the top, making it look like a giant golf tee.

A thick concrete counter protruded from the wall and ran all the way around the room, broken only by the door behind him and an identical one on the opposite side of the room.

Mitch walked to the counter and examined one of the flat-screen monitors mounted to the wall above it. Below the monitor a pane of dark rectangular glass with a thin chrome frame was set into the counter itself. These workstations were duplicated at intervals all the way around the room. In fact the only things that didn’t appear to be a permanent fixture were the strictly functional brushed aluminum chairs sitting in front of each terminal.

Mitch walked to the strange metal pole in the center and examined it for a moment. He reached out and touched it with his index finger. It was as smooth as glass.

“Hello?” Mitch said. “Anyone here?”

There was no reply.

He waited another minute or so, then, unable to help himself, he walked back to the computer terminal by the door and sat down in front of it. The monitor was both larger and thinner than any he had ever seen. At the bottom of the screen the letters TSI were etched into the white plastic frame. He found the same logo on the glass pane on the counter. Mitch, who prided himself on knowing just about everyone in the computer business, had never heard of TSI.

Convinced he had been forgotten, Mitch decided it would be best to find someone and let them know where he was before the chief or one of his guards walked in and found him in violation of his parole. As he stood up his hand brushed the glass plate on the counter and a keyboard suddenly appeared in crisp, bright lines and characters of neon blue. When he looked up a cursor was flashing in the top left-hand corner of the screen.

– – –

He had no idea how long he had been sitting at the terminal, only that what he was seeing so captivated him that the rest of the world had all but ceased to exist. When someone spoke up behind him Mitch was so startled he almost fell off the chair.

“It’s quite something, isn’t it?”

Mitch turned to see a man standing next to the pole in the center of the room. He looked like he had just gotten out of bed and forgotten to brush his hair. Unlike everyone else Mitch had seen, he wasn’t wearing a jumpsuit but a pair of gray tweed slacks and a green knitted cardigan.

“I was just admiring the keyboard,” Mitch said. “I’ve never seen touch-screen technology that works this well before.”

The man walked over and extended a hand. “I’m Heinz Gerber.”

“Mitch Rainey,” Mitch said.

“The man from Washington who found our missing satellite. Tell me, did you actually track it, or did Marius forget to secure the connection?”

“I used an index of signature values I created based on previous test readings,” Mitch said.

“And if you don’t mind my asking, how did you trace them to Darkstar?”

“The launch registry,” Mitch said.

Heinz considered this for a moment and nodded. “Quite ingenious, I must admit.”

“What is this place?” Mitch said.

“This is room eight, the home of my beloved Harriet,” Heinz said.

“Harriet?”

“Our interface to the base-eight programming language used by Origin. I named it after my first dog because getting either of them to do what I wanted at first proved almost impossible.”

“Used by Origin?” Mitch said. “The spaceship?”

Heinz laughed. “I know. When two grown men start using that word in a serious conversation you have to ask yourself what the world is coming to, right? But you get used to it, trust me.”

“You’re saying that programming language came from a spaceship?”

“Indeed,” Heinz said. “From what I can gather, it’s not unique to Origin either, but the base computer language of the entire civilization that built her. I’m speculating of course, but it seems like a fair assumption.”

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Mitch said.

Heinz nodded. “That’s hardly surprising when you consider the nearest computer using it is almost four hundred million miles away. The system uses eight characters because –”

“Because it’s based on high-density multiple layer compression,” Mitch finished. “I’m guessing something in the region of three or four thousand to one.”

Heinz looked taken aback. “More like six thousand, actually. Sarah says you studied computer programming. May I ask where?”

“Arizona State. How fast is their system?”

“We don’t actually know, but based on response times, we think somewhere in the region of one and a half terahertz.”

“Christ,” Mitch said. “How the hell do they do that?”

Heinz pointed at the pole in the middle of the room. “Probably by building systems out of that alloy. We pulled it out of the ice twenty miles from the North Pole. If it were made of steel it would weigh just under half a ton. Its actual weight is six point five seven tons. The alloy is one of four used in the ship’s construction.”

“You’re telling me that thing is indestructible?” Mitch said.

“Hardly,” Heinz said. “It would have been forged like any other metal. Although it’s fair to say there isn’t a foundry on this planet that would be able to get it much more than warm.”

“What is it?” Mitch said.

“It’s a probe. A kind of automated landing beacon, you might say. It has no propulsion or guidance systems, so whatever launched it was probably a lot closer to the planet than the ship is now. We think it was simply super-heated, aimed and fired like an arrow. It was buried in solid rock when we found it. The hardware is embedded in the top. It’s a signal transmitter and receiver, an atmospheric measuring platform, a proximity sensor, and a link to the ship’s main computer.”

“You can actually use that thing to access the ship’s own systems?” Mitch said.

“Not with that, no. Or at least, not directly. The probe has no user interface or input devices, and creating a physical bridge to our own system is out of the question. For one thing, we don’t know enough about the hardware, so any attempt to deconstruct and reverse engineer it would almost certainly end in disaster. What we have had to do is intercept the incoming and outgoing signals and study them in order to create a crude emulator that can run base-eight code on a base-two system. I probably don’t have to tell you, but that’s like trying to render full-texture three dimensional video on a calculator.”

“Is the transfer protocol at least similar to ours?” Mitch said.

“Not even close. Their system uses six separate data streams, each transmitted simultaneously at slight frequency variations within a very narrow band. The sixth stream is an encrypted merger algorithm needed to combine the other five. And it changes with every transmission. Once we put the files together, there are five levels of decompression. The main difficulty is that the merger algorithm is only valid for a single reply.”

Mitch nodded. “You need more time than the system will give you.”

“Correct. When you consider we have to not only decompress and assemble the files, but trans-code them too, and then reverse the entire process, we just don’t have the power to return more than crude responses.”

Mitch could barely keep up with his own racing mind. “Your emulator, what hardware does it use?”

“I’ll show you,” Heinz said.

Mitch followed him to the doors on the other side of the room and Heinz pushed a button mounted to the counter next to it. The doors parted to reveal a much thicker set of doors with a large rectangular view-port in each. Mitch stood looking in for a long time before he said, “What chips are the servers using?”

“Six hundred custom made eight-core processors using a chip-integrated liquid nitrogen cooling system.”

“Clock speed?” Mitch asked.

“Sixty-three hundred Megahertz.”

Mitch considered this and said, “You could get them to eight with helium. Seven and a half at the very least. How do you transmit the response if you can’t use that thing?”

Heinz regarded Mitch with a kind of guarded reverence. “We don’t actually intercept the incoming transmission here, only what the spike itself sends back. The atmospheric loss is too great for any of our ground receivers to pick up a clear enough signal. The amazing thing is that that thing can do it without a hitch. We still rely on the antenna array we put into orbit over a decade ago to see if the ship was sending anything at all. It’s how we isolated the signal from Origin in the first place and also how we eventually located the spike. Our platform relays the signal to Darkstar, which passes it on.”

Mitch turned and looked at the workstation he had been sitting at. “Is that their language?”

Heinz walked to the monitor. He pulled a pair of glasses from his pocket, put them on and knelt to look at the screen. The image contained a list of characters drawn from a simple matrix of symmetrical lines. Next to each was one or more letters from the English alphabet.

“Is it really that simple?” Mitch said.

Heinz stood and nodded. “They use forty-one letters, but the sounds they represent appear almost identical to those used in our own languages. Structurally, the language is remarkably similar to Hungarian, although the pronunciation is more Germanic.”

For once, Mitch was lost for words. Heinz laughed and nodded. “That’s right, the crew of Origin are as human as you or I. Or at least they were.”

London, Heathrow

Sunday 23 July 2006

1900 EDT

Neither Jesse nor Amanda would have recognized the man who stepped into the arrivals hall at Heathrow International Airport that Saturday afternoon, but they would certainly have noticed him.

Gary Copeland was a punk of the old school variety, and the spikes of his Mohawk were colored green and red alternately to prove it. When he emerged from the bathroom he had added jet-black eyeliner and lipstick. There was a silver ring in his nose and several earrings in both ears. His faded black leather jacket had more studs than a Texas horse ranch. He’d also chosen a black t-shirt with the word “Pantera” printed across it in red letters made to look like dripping blood. To finish the look, he had even managed to squeeze into a pair of skintight dark gray drainpipe jeans that were held up needlessly with a black studded leather belt.