Source code, p.12
Source Code, page 12
“How do we know this thing was man-made at all?” somebody else asked.
Marathon pressed a button on the remote, jabbing it at the screen. “Does that look natural to you?”
The remote button called up a series of pictures, taken in the hangar under brighter light. From those, it was obvious that the outside surface had been machined. It was cracked, pitted, scorched by intense heat, but it had strong radial symmetry. Roughly reminiscent of a tear drop, narrow at the top, fat at the bottom, it almost reminded Argo of the old Mercury and Apollo capsules he and his brother had seen at Johnson Space Center a few weeks back. More elongated. Not so sleek.
“The size and shape of this thing clearly is not natural,” Marathon said.
“Aerial footage and rough airspeed estimates from Splatto also indicated that it fired retro-rockets before it hit the ground,” JP said, lounging by the intel station. He got up, walked up to the screen, pointing as he spoke. “If you look at this, you can see divots in the object, here and here. A ring of six go around the entire spacecraft.”
“You think it’s a spacecraft?” somebody else asked.
“Based on what little data we’ve got, yeah, that’s my guess.”
For a moment, nobody said anything.
Then.
“Is it broadcasting?”
That was Daelia.
Marathon gestured at the comm station. “No,” the sergeant there said immediately. “But we haven’t looked too close yet. Why do you ask?”
She shrugged, arms folded, like it didn’t matter to her. “I got some junk code in my monocle while I was walking up here. I was thinking maybe it, uhh, it came from there.”
“We can take a look after this,” the comm sergeant said, sounding far less bored now than he had a moment ago.
“Hall, Norris, let’s wait until EOD clears it before you start fucking around with any signals analysis, okay?” He flipped the slide again. “Okay, let’s go over the rest of this.”
The rest of the briefing was less eventful. More about roles, responsibilities, reporting procedures, that sort of thing. A reminder for everyone, Argo supposed. He’d never been involved with a domestic response event. It wasn’t something that active duty had ever really participated in. And now, of course, state military departments kept the feds as far away as possible.
The briefing ended quickly, but Marathon lingered on the last slide for a few moments.
Nobody that worked for a federal agency could be called up. In fact, he said, their current orders were not to notify such personnel at all, unless there was a need for it.
“Why is that?” Argo asked Ho quietly.
“Other than the Day Four Incident?” Marathon replied loudly from the front. Everyone went quiet. Very quiet. “Why don’t you tell him, JP?”
“Is there a reason other than the Day Four Incident that matters?” JP replied, but continued anyway. “Somebody made this and dropped it in our backyard. That makes it a Texas problem. The governor gave explicit direction last night that he wants this staying with the state as long as possible. Once the feds are notified of it, they’re going to come after it.”
“Won’t they know about it anyway?”
“Sure. But part of the Ruiz-MacStruan Act stipulates that the states maintain full command of their allotted military forces and all associated assets, unless and until an event affects multiple states, or other higher-level strategic objectives can be established. We know they know, and they know that we know they know,” JP said with a shrug, “but they can’t do shit about it while it’s in our hangar. A hangar that was funded by the state and built for state domestic operations.”
Argo realized what he was saying. “We’re doing all this so the feds can’t take it?”
“That’s right.”
“Are we sure this thing isn’t a bomb?” Ho asked again.
“Pretty sure.”
“Very sure?”
“Considering that it is sitting in a hangar a hundred yards away from this building,” Marathon said, “I’m choosing to be an optimist.”
Daelia hung back after the briefing had finished, not entirely sure what to do with herself. She hadn’t meant to get involved with this; last night had been necessary. But this?
She got the impression this entire thing was some kind of theater. An act. Marathon had said himself it was about keeping the feds at bay. And that was probably honest, because who didn’t remember the Day Four Incident, but even with that—
“Miss Hall?” somebody said, interrupting her train of thought.
“You guys can call me Daelia,” she grumbled. “Or Hall, or whatever.”
“You’re Lee’s daughter, right?” It was the guy from the comm station. He held out a hand. “Master Sergeant Brett Norris. Nice to meet you.”
She sized him up. “You’re cyber here?”
“I’m one of the traditional status guys. Or was, anyway. Haven’t been to drill in a few months. The shop’s got nothing but good things to say about you.”
“That’s nice to—”
“You’re a grad student, right? Nonlinear Systems Design?”
“Does my dad talk about me that much?”
“He doesn’t talk much at all, outside of work,” Norris said. “But I’ve seen your name before.” At her confused frown, he laughed. “I’m a senior administrator for Omphalos. Sausage just put me on a six-month order set. Leadership backfill. We’re having a lot of trouble hiring replacements for the captain and superintendent, and the job listings got fucked up again, so here I am. I was actually supposed to start on Monday, but Rover asked me to come in today. Lucky me, eh?”
Daelia didn’t know what to say to that. “How many people did the Group lose in that bombing in Tokyo?”
“Twenty-three. Not counting the four contractors who died as well. Goddamn Bathtub, everything’s crazy over there,” Norris said, using the military slang for the South China Sea. “Usually doesn’t affect Japan, but what can you do? Anyway, can I see what you were talking about?”
“Sure,” she said, and looked back over at the door. “Marathon made me leave my monocle outside.”
“Yeah, let’s grab that and we’ll go see what you’ve got.”
Which was how Daelia found herself in the back of the cyber office.
Daelia wouldn’t have called herself a neat freak, but she liked to keep her workspace workable. Tools picked up. Everything in its proper place.
This place, by comparison, looked like a bomb had gone off in it. It was absolutely crammed with shit. A workbench filled one wall, flanked by a pair of rolling tool cabinets. Beyond that, the room was full of boxes. Boxes stuffed with old computers, monitors, servers, cabling, components. Trash.
Daelia tried not to look at any of it as Norris booted up a terminal. There was a stack of empty monitor boxes next to the workstation, piled up like something out of a Dr. Seuss book. Unstable.
“Don’t come in here much?” he asked.
“This place gives me hives,” she told him honestly.
Norris laughed at that. “You and me both.”
She kicked one of the boxes. Something rattled inside. “What is all this anyway? I’ve been wondering since I showed up.”
“This,” he said, “is five or six years of decommissioned shit that’s piled up.”
“Some of these boxes had never been opened.”
“And those machines are already out of their life cycle. It’s all scrap at this point, as far as I’m concerned, but I can’t just toss it in a dumpster. The disposal process is a fucking nightmare. Our captain was working this for the past three years.”
“Three years?”
“Nothing moves fast in the Guard. It’s my problem now,” he replied, and held out his hand. “We’re up. Can I see your monocle?”
Daelia handed it over. Norris plugged it in and started scrolling back through the data feed’s memory.
“Sing out when you see it,” he told her.
“You’re a senior admin at Omphalos, and you’re a master sergeant?” she asked, watching the screen.
“Yeah,” Norris replied. “So what? You think I’m dumb enough to commission?”
“Too much work?”
“Too much ass-pain. Not enough hands-on work, and way too much bullshit.” He waved a hand around the room. “This is only the start of the headache I’ve got in the shop.”
Daelia was going to ask what he meant by that, but then spotted it. The file. “Here it is,” she told him, and pulled it up on the monitor.
He looked over her shoulder and frowned. “What the hell is that?”
“That was my reaction.”
“That almost looks like something’s eclosing,” he said, and pulled the thing into an AR browser. “You know, those little spurts of babble they give off when they first come out?”
“It’s not, though. See, look at the TGLP.”
A couple more clicks, and the code spooled out in a window below the text. On the opposite screen, Norris opened a render window.
“Ah,” he said, looking it over. “You’re right, this is just junk. That initial eclosing babble condenses out in words or pictures through the TGLP. Pretty quickly, usually a few seconds max, but this doesn’t look like anything.”
Except it did. Daelia realized, as it was scrolling across the screen, that it looked very much like what she’d captured in Emily’s virch yesterday. The code that had accompanied the meteor image.
This wasn’t the same image, though. Hell, it wasn’t even the image she’d seen in the hangar. That mist. This was just static.
But what did that mean? Had something been trying to tell her about this? Trying to warn her? Half a day before the object struck? And if that was a warning, what was it doing now, and why—fucking how—was it coming from the object itself?
Or maybe it was all just bullshit. Maybe there was no pattern.
Maybe it was all just coincidence.
“You said you saw something, though, right?”
“Mist. But I’m not seeing that here.” She rubbed her left bicep. “Maybe it’s just something wrong with my monocle. I should probably go check on that.”
“You’re welcome to work on it here.”
“No thank you. How do you function in all this junk?”
“I usually take my laptop out to the patio.” With a chuckle, Norris unplugged the monocle and handed it back to her. “Thanks for the look.”
“Do you have an EMF meter somewhere in this mess?” she asked.
He went over to the left-hand toolbox. Far from the mess outside, the drawer was neatly organized. Compartments labeled. Cables bundled. Accessories neatly stored in clear boxes. “Here we go,” he said, and held up a small unit. “Broad-spectrum signal analyzer. Let’s take a walk.”
The hangar was still largely empty. A guard was at the door now—human, not one of the security kugus—but other than that, Daelia and Norris had the place to themselves.
It was disappointing, in a way. Here was a massive mysterious object that had fallen from the sky, been picked up by the Air Force, and it was all but abandoned. No plastic sheeting, lit up by big lamps. No team of mysterious people in white lab coats working on it. Nothing.
Norris gave her a look, and Daelia realized her expression must have betrayed what she was thinking. “You an Orpheus Watch fan?” he asked.
The original series had been one of those low-budget Star Wars knockoffs from the ‘80s, a show canceled before its second season was even up. But it had gotten a reboot now, one that was in its fourth season now and the most watched program on Delphi Plus, Omphalos’s streaming service.
Its basic plot followed the adventures of a group of characters at a military-led space station, orbiting the gas giant Orpheus. In the original series, the planet had been located in the distant Hades star system, but the reboot had moved the action into the Epsilon Eridani system. With that star being only ten light years away from Earth, the titular space station was no longer a little speck in the galactic night, but reimagined as the prime galactic gateway to Earth.
Daelia found the thing ridiculous, but she still watched it. Everyone did. At least it was unpredictable, in contrast to a lot of the predictive-written stuff on TV these days. Shows like that had no soul.
“What does that have to do with anything?” she asked.
He shrugged. “You know in the pilot, when that asteroid strikes one of the station’s habitat spheres? And they retrieve it and put it in one of the hangars because—”
“—because it’s giving off a radio signal,” Daelia finished. She frowned. “It’s got an alien inside of it, though, doesn’t it?” The production house had quite intentionally never said exactly what the species looked like in their raw form, but Daelia had seen quite a bit of fan art online. Both sanctioned and unregulated.
There were some really weird interpretations out there.
“Yeah, the Roc, and then they build it the sealed power suit, so they can talk to each—”
“There is no alien inside of this thing.”
“You sure?”
She couldn’t tell if he was being serious or not. Unsure what to say to that, she frowned deeper. And finally, he laughed.
“Sorry,” Norris said. “I’m surrounded by that shit at my regular job. People take Orpheus Watch really seriously there.”
“Can we just scan this thing?” she asked. “I’ve got other stuff I need to go do today.”
“Already done,” Norris said, and held up the EMF meter. “I’m not seeing anything on this I can’t attribute to the air show. But it’s a fuckin’ slow day today. I’ll talk to the base frequency office, see if any of this is unexpected or unusual. Get the guys on it, see what we can do.”
“You don’t really think there’s an alien in there, do you?” Daelia asked.
“I wouldn’t complain if there was,” he said. “Might make my weekend a little less boring.”
15
Augmented reality was a funny thing.
Most of the abiota Daelia had encountered in her life maintained some kind of presence there. It was, after all, their primary means of communication, at least with humans. With each other, too. Abiota tended to broadcast instead through whatever AR overlay they happened to find themselves in.
The military had proprietary AR, of course, encrypted and heavily protected. OPSEC. Dad had been lecturing Daelia on that since she was old enough to understand what a firewall was. But that made integration difficult. Military to civilian, or even service to service, interoperability was practically nonexistent. A legacy of how the networks had developed over time.
Under normal circumstances, an Army abiota couldn’t just pop up in an Air Force-managed overlay. While all the services here were integrated within the base overlay, the units coming in from off-base couldn’t necessarily access it. So, the air show had its own overlay. One specifically designed to allow for a wide range of access. There were technical reasons for it, good technical reasons for it, but Daelia stood by her statement to Raijinn the day before.
There was a strong propaganda aspect to it as well. The military used it to show the public what they wanted them to see. More aesthetically pleasing, far less detailed.
“They are on their way up now,” Raijinn told her through its kugu. It was standing next to her, in the shade of the barely cracked main hangar doors. “The press. We are their first stop. Then Gravipause, Integrated Fueling Solutions, Orbital Refinement Solutions, Astraeus Astronautics, and Exxon.”
Daelia huffed a breath and scrolled through the small tablet in her hand. She’d tried loading the notes on her monocle, but she still had a bit of a headache from that beer yesterday.
She did not want to deal with reporters.
“What do you think? Am I going to be dealing with a bunch of bullshit about why we’re still using jet fuel?”
“I doubt it,” Raijinn said. “I have observed a thirty-five percent drop in such sentiments online over the past six months, corresponding with an eighty percent rise in positive stories regarding the state of the fossil fuels industry. With ninety percent of the nation’s power now being supplied by Tamm’s Nu-Fusion reactors, the overall environmental impact of the aerospace industry is of a lesser—”
“You pay attention to the news?”
“Energy sector, yes.” It didn’t elaborate.
Daelia ran a hand over her head. She’d yanked her hair back into a messy ponytail; she wasn’t great at styling it. It had nothing to do with her hand. Mom hadn’t been able to teach her, and she’d never had much patience for it on her own.
She looked over the notes.
Dad’s notes.
Shit, where was he?
“Noisy this morning,” Raijinn observed.
“A server abiota’s making small talk?” Daelia asked, trying to force her tired brain to absorb something from Dad’s notes. “I should put this in my thesis.”
“It’s been my observation that a little meaningless conversation sometimes eases nervousness in humans.”
“I don’t think anything’s going to ease my nerves this morning,” Daelia grumbled. “They are fucking loud, aren’t they?”
The runway was stuffed that morning. Some of the aircraft parked in the static display area weren’t abiota. But they were mostly the classic planes, the vintage stuff from Vietnam and before. Most of the abiota were predictives. Even with a cursory glance it was easy to tell. But a few, just a few, were emergents.
Not that it made much difference with the noise. They were all calling to each other, threatening and cajoling and cackling with each other. Trying to establish some kind of pecking order.
Right in the middle of that was Emily. The expanded aesthetic rendering capacity of the show’s AR gave her plenty of room to stretch out her form. She was screeching up a storm, too. Most of it probably directed at the Eurus that was situated nearby. Its AR form towered over the entire field, taller even than Emily’s and just as vocal.
A pterosaur. A gigantic colorful pterosaur. Standing there like some kind of psychotic winged giraffe.
