Origin - Season Two (4 page)

The car, a model of local manufacture that had clearly been inspired by a Mercedes of the late 1980s—in looks if not build quality—rolled into the compound over an hour and a half late. The driver, a short male in a gray Zhongshan suit and cap, held the door open with an unsteady hand. As they were leaving, the captain came running over, waving several sheets of paper. “Sir, copies of the parts requisitions you asked for.”

“I’ll see to it these are expedited as soon as I return to Pyongyang,” Rhee said.

“Thank you, sir,” the captain said, bowing to show his appreciation.

When they reached the main road Rhee picked up the sheets, crumpled them into a ball and threw it into the front passenger seat. “Burn these. And turn on the damn air conditioning.”

The driver, already in a state of only partially suppressed panic, motioned to the console and began to stutter something Rhee couldn’t make out. When Rhee looked over the seat he saw why; the car
had
no air conditioning. He opened the window instead.

Half an hour later the car pulled off the road onto a dirt track. Any remaining illusion of German pedigree was quickly shattered as the stiff leaf-spring suspension did battle with the uneven terrain. The road wound ever upwards through thick woodland. When they reached the top of the hill the distinct curve of the Imjin River came into view. On the far bank lay the South. It was less than two miles away, although to the people of the North it might as well have been on another continent.

When the car reached the bottom of the hill they were in a narrow valley occupied by several scattered concrete buildings and two tall, rusting steel silos. A sign proclaiming this to be the
Jangdan-myeon Copper Mine
dangled from what remained of the old perimeter fence.

Rhee was greeted by a painfully thin man in his early forties. He wore an olive drab boiler suit covered in dust. The hard hat now hanging from his belt had left a bright red band across his forehead. Rhee told his driver to wait in the car and followed the man.

“Colonel Ji, do you have anything to report?” Rhee said.

“Everything is on schedule, sir,” Ji said. “We reached 18,900 meters last night.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” Rhee said. “The dear leader will be too; I have no doubt.”

They walked down a narrow path through a cluster of trees. When they emerged on the other side, they were standing at the edge of a large clearing. At the far end stood an enormous concrete structure that began several hundred feet from the foot of the hill and disappeared into it, as if a great landside had buried one end of the building. To the right of the building there was a small train yard lined with narrow-gauge tracks full of empty mine cars. Two of these tracks led inside, while another wound its way along the base of the hill before disappearing from view. As they watched, a train of over a dozen cars filled with dirt and loose rocks passed through the doors at the side of the building and made its way slowly down the track.

Rhee followed the colonel inside and spent a moment taking in the scene. The place was a hive of activity. Everywhere men were going about their business, some with tools, others with clipboards, and all wearing the same olive boiler suits. At the opposite end of the building a tunnel at least six yards in diameter disappeared into the side of the hill at the base of a concrete wall that rose halfway to the ceiling. Both sets of tracks ran into it alongside a thick steel pipe. From somewhere deep inside came the faint rumbling of machinery.

“Colonel,” Rhee said.

“Yes, sir.”

“I received your letter,” Rhee said. “Unfortunately, I cannot grant your request.”

“I understand, sir,” Ji said.

“But you may rest assured your wife will receive the best treatment available.”

“Thank you, sir. I’m very grateful.”

“Of course when your work is done here you will be free to return to your unit. And I will see to it personally that you are granted generous leave.”

“Thank you, sir.”

Rhee regarded the man for a moment, wondering how much of this lie he actually believed. That none of the personnel assigned to the project would ever return to their previous lives was a decision that had been made long before most of them arrived. A lucky few might find themselves transferred to labor camps, but Rhee thought even that was unlikely.

“Keep up the good work, Colonel,” Rhee said, turning for the door. “I can see myself back to the car.”

Aurora

Thursday 7 June 2007

0900 EEST

Mitch and Heinz watched as the crane on the Karl Gustav lifted the enormous diesel generator from the open cargo hold and lowered it onto the newly constructed dock.

A small marvel of engineering, the dock was really just a large concrete shelf built into the vertical cliff face of the island and supported by several pylons that jutted from the dark blue waters of the Baltic like the stone pillars of some ancient submerged temple. At the base of the cliff, a set of steel doors opened onto a small chamber from which an elevator shaft ran several hundred feet up to the new research center, a two-story concrete disk that jutted out over the edge of the cliff on thick steel supports.

The official lease on the island had finally been granted by the Estonian parliament less than six months earlier. Valid for twenty-five years, it entitled Arman Tenner, a German research and design subsidiary of the Karl Gustav Foundation, to construct a facility on the island for the purpose of testing systems that used dangerous elements, such as Fluorine and Rubidium. In reality, it was the culmination of two decades of lobbying by the foundation aimed at both securing Aurora and ending its dependence on the Callisto.

Captain MacDonald, the Karl Gustav’s skipper, saw them and waved them aboard. They crossed the narrow gangway and made their way to the bridge just as the crew began to cast off the lines.

Less than twenty minutes later the Pandora, anchored only a few miles away, appeared on the horizon.

“You can head on up,” MacDonald said, pointing at the ladder leading to the helipad above the bridge. “Yoshi’s ready.”

Mitch sat looking out of the small viewport as they closed the distance to the strange vessel. The Pandora, built at a cost of 245 million dollars in the South Korean port of Busan, was a ship like no other. It had taken considerable guile and ingenuity to mask her sole purpose—to act as a landing platform for a visitor from the outer reaches of space—from her builders. RP One had been sitting in the hold for almost a year now, and still she had yielded only a fraction of the secrets they knew she must hold. Mitch and Heinz, along with a small support team, had devoted almost every waking hour in that time to putting the puzzle together.

Two months ago the first major breakthrough had come when, with the help of Professor Watkins, they had finally isolated the sequence required to access RP One’s onboard logs and backup files. Because the mainframe onboard Origin used every available sub-system in the network as a backup location, this had meant access not only to RP One’s mission log, but also to a host of random and unrelated data. These, more than anything, had made it possible for Watkins to begin the laborious task of first deconstructing the language, then translating the cornucopia of available information.

Using a camera system set up in front of one of the terminals on the bridge, they had started recording this one frame at a time in image form before sending them on to Watkins for translation. It was an awkward and time-consuming method, but lacking any way in which to physically connect the two radically different computer systems, it was the only choice they had.

Mitch, who was quickly becoming as fluent in the base-8 programming language used by the onboard system as the base-2 language he had spent his entire life studying, nevertheless remained clueless when it came to the actual written language, dubbed Saishan by Watkins after the literal pronunciation of the planet’s name. That job had fallen to Naoko Misora, a boy barely out of his teens whose parents had arrived at Aurora from the University of Tokyo in 1992. Naoko, already fluent in English, German and French by the time he was ten, had been Watkins’s first understudy. Watching the two of them converse in that strange language was a surreal experience. Neither guttural, nor particularly harsh, Saishan, by Watkins’s account, sounded most similar to Hungarian, a language unique among all the hundreds spoken on earth. This arrangement had made Naoko somewhat of a permanent fixture in Mitch’s life, and it was Naoko who stood waiting for them as the helicopter set down on the pad behind the superstructure of the Pandora.

“How’s Sarah?” Naoko asked as soon as Mitch was in earshot.

“Don’t ask. You’d think I was having an affair.”

“Aren’t you?”

“No,” Mitch said, laughing. “Well, not really.”

“Women can become jealous of anything, trust me. Even a spaceship.”

“Really? And where did a boy who can’t possibly know the first thing about women stumble onto that scrap of wisdom?”

Naoko offered him a wide grin. “I read a lot.”

The others were waiting for them in the hangar. RP One, RP being short for Reconnaissance Platform, sat flooded in bright light. Its bulging round shape made it look more like a creation of 1960s science fiction than a real alien artifact. The near-indestructible alloy it was made from seemed to absorb the light, giving the hull an odd two-dimensional quality. It stood on four retractable legs, each twice the height of a man. True to the calculations Heinz and his team had made, these now rested on reinforced plates a foot thick, supported from below by girders that ran the length of the ship. At over seventy thousand tons, RP One had the added distinction of being the heaviest non-solid object of its size on the planet.

“How are you getting on?” Heinz asked.

A black woman with a full head of afro hair shrugged and said, “We just sent another batch through to Watkins. Justin’s on camera duty. I’m taking over in a minute. Not much else to report, really.”

“If it’s alright,” Mitch said, “We’ll get back to our exercise in frustration.”

“By all means,” Heinz said. “I need to have a word with the captain. I’ll be back in an hour.”

Mitch and Naoko just stood there for a moment looking at the ship.

“It looks like the Millennium Falcon’s fat little brother, doesn’t it?” Mitch said.

Naoko laughed. “And that would make you what, Han Solo?”

“Actually, I’ve always thought of myself as more of a Luke.”

“You know,” Naoko said, “I keep asking myself if these people were really just like us.”

“What to do you mean?”

“I mean, as messed up in the head as we are. To get this far, to travel beyond their own solar system. We’re pretty good at making movies about it, but we’d have no chance of getting there on our own.”

Mitch considered this. “No, I guess we wouldn’t. But you know what scares me even more than our ignorance?”

“What?” Naoko said.

“Our complacency,” Mitch said.

“What do you mean?”

“We’ve been working on this for what, a year now?”

“Almost, yeah.”

“And we already take it for granted,” Mitch said. “It’s a fucking spaceship from another solar system and we walk around as if it was just another machine. Watkins was at the meeting today. You know what he said?”

“What?”

“These people found a formerly inhabited planet on their way here.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. And guess what, it had been nuked into dust millions of years ago by God only knows who.”

“Holy shit,” Naoko said, “that’s crazy.”

“Yeah, it is. And I sat there thinking ‘wow, this should be blowing my mind.’ But it wasn’t. Not really. You know a year from now, when we’ve read the logs and everything else, we’ll just take all that for granted too. It’s like we’ve reached the end of our capacity for incredulity. Next week Watkins’ll probably tell us he knows where God is and we’ll sit there and go ‘great, well that’s another question answered.
Now
what the hell do we do?’”

Naoko began to laugh again. “Jesus Mitch, I never realized you were so pessimistic. Speak for yourself, I still get a weak bladder every time I step onto that thing.”

“Forget it,” Mitch said. “I’m just in a bad mood.”

“Sarah?”

Mitch nodded. “I keep telling her she should come out here, but she won’t. She likes her job too much.”

“It’s none of my business,” Naoko said, “but isn’t that a bit hypocritical?”

Mitch glanced at him, amused. “I don’t know, Don Juan, is it?”

“I’m just saying—”

“I know what you’re saying,” Mitch said. “I was kidding. Never mind, let’s get back to work. You need to take a leak before we step back into the belly of the beast?”

“Very funny.”

They walked to the ship and up the retracting gangway leading to the bridge. For its size, RP One had relatively little room inside. Most of it was taken up by what they had taken to calling the ‘anti-gravity drive’, a large magnetic disk inside the ship that spun at several hundred thousand revolutions per minute and extracted the current it needed from the ionosphere through eight shafts that ran straight through the hull. The system provided enough power to slow the descent of the ship, but not to hold it, and nowhere near enough to reverse the descent. At least that had been the theory until that morning, when Watkins had informed them that RP One had been used on several surface landings before.

The bridge, like the ship itself, was round, measuring just over thirty feet across and eight feet high. When they had first entered it everything had been covered in a thick layer of dust. On examination most of it turned out to be the remains of the crew. Almost everything else on board was made of the same heavy alloy as the hull, a metal that appeared all but impervious to the second law of thermodynamics. There were six seats facing out and spread evenly around the perimeter of the bridge—the padding had long since gone the way of the crew—and one larger and slightly elevated one in the center. That one, presumably the captain or mission commander’s, had armrests that sported an elaborate interface of touch-sensitive buttons and switches.