Harbinger (The Janus Harbinger Book 1)

by Olan Thorensen

  Huxler opened a binder. “Let me read you the first portion of the interchange.” He looked down and began.

  “Zach: ‘What do you want?’

  “Simeon: ‘I want to help.’

  “Zach: ‘Help? Help with what?’

  “Simeon: ‘Now is not the time. You are not ready. I am not ready.’

  “Zach: ‘Ready for what?’

  “Simeon: ‘Yes. Where were you born, Zach?’”

  Huxler looked up. “That was it. Zach made a couple of attempts to follow up, but Simeon just ignored the efforts. That’s his usual tactic. Well, that and segueing a little more subtly to another topic.”

  Sinclair looked puzzled. “That’s it? What seems special to you about that?”

  Mueller spoke up before Huxler could answer.

  “Sorry, General, but I’m with Wilbur on this. It’s because we’ve been working with Simeon so long that we think we can sense when he’s going somewhere that isn’t obvious on the surface. We think he told Zach that he’s here to be proactive, not just a passive observer. There’s something he expects to do. What it is, we haven’t a fucking clue.”

  Sinclair raised an eyebrow at the psychologist’s frustration-elicited profanity. As far as he could remember, it was the first such occasion he had witnessed. Huxler noticed his surprise.

  “Sorry. I usually find other ways to express myself, but months of making no apparent progress and then hearing tantalizing hints without answers can get to me.”

  Promising Report

  Sinclair sat looking at his notes. Despite it being the electronic age, he still found he worked better when he put thoughts on paper. Something about the physical paper, pencils, pens, and seeing the handwritten words helped clarify his thinking. In this case, the text sorted out his thoughts on how things were going at the site and with the installation of the virtual reality system. He would then create the report on a word processor, run it through encoding software, and send it on to General Hardesty.

  The basic message of this latest report would be that things were going well. Despite the expected early glitches in getting the system up and running, particularly synchronizing the computers, Simeon’s first sessions excited the scientists.

  Sinclair intuited that time for significant progress might be expiring. Although the little they had gleaned from the Object and the interactions with Simeon counted as positive results, it was a pittance compared to the underlying ocean of technology the Object represented. It was only a matter of time before some individual, organization, or nation put together disparate tidbits of information and scoped them out. Sinclair was surprised they had kept the secret this long.

  When Site 23 became exposed, Sinclair agreed with Hardesty and Wallens—the shit storm would be seismic. The best ameliorating factor would be if they could show the technology transfer to outweigh the legal and political blowback.

  CHAPTER 22

  LANGUAGES AND FOSSILS

  Linguistics

  Everyone’s excitement over the first VR sessions with Simeon faded with the Object’s return to obfuscation and diversion. A disgruntled Sinclair described the VR sessions as “just dressed-up versions of the audio/monitor ones.”

  Chunhua Ciminoni achieved a breakthrough . . . of sorts. When Simeon learned she was both a computer scientist and a natural linguist, they took off on discussions delving into theoretical linguistics. Jeff Rotham was beside himself with frustration because the topic was his field. Unfortunately, Huxler’s assessment for adapting to the VR system indicated that Rotham totally lacked the ability to adjust—a prediction confirmed when Rotham’s persistence led Huxler to let him try the suit and the simplest scenarios. This ended in Rotham calling a halt and vomiting within seconds of exiting the VR chamber.

  Nevertheless, Rotham asserted he already had ideas for numerous avenues of exploration, even if he had to work through Chunhua.

  ‘I admit I’m wildly speculating,” Rotham told a progress meeting, “but to me, Simeon’s questions and answers with Chunhua suggest familiarity with language systems far different from those of humans.”

  “Sorry, Jeff,” said Huxler. “I don’t see where that comes from.”

  “Words are made up of morphemes, the smallest unit in a language. A word is made of one or more morphemes. For example, ‘cats’ is made of two morphemes: ‘cat’ and ‘s’. ‘Cat’ can stand alone as a word, but ‘s’ cannot. These two examples are called free and bound. Another case is ‘irresistible.’ ‘Resist’ is a free morpheme because it can be a word, whereas ‘ir-’ and ‘-ible’ are bound morphemes because they are not words themselves.

  “There are four basic categorizations of human languages. One type is ‘analytic,’ where sentences are made only of free morphemes, including those indicating number and tense. Mandarin Chinese is a classic example. ‘We played soccer’ in Mandarin has four morphemes—plural, play, soccer, past.

  “In contrast, a ‘synthetic’ language’s words are composed of one or more morphemes, like ‘cats’ and ‘irresistible.’ These languages are further categorized as agglutinative, fusional, and polysynthetic.

  “Agglutinative language words have one or more morphemes, each of which conveys one piece of information, such as tense. In a fusional language, a single morpheme can convey multiple pieces of information. In Spanish, the ‘o’ in ‘hablo’ indicates a singular speaker and the present tense.

  “The final type of synthetic language is polysynthetic. These languages can include a high number of morphemes per word, similar to agglutinative and fusional languages. However, a polysynthetic language also forms stem words by incorporating multiple nouns and verbs into one word—essentially an entire sentence. Some extreme language examples are the two branches of Eskimo: Yupik in far eastern Siberia to western Alaska, and Inuit from Alaska to Greenland. In addition, languages may have so many elements of more than one type that they are termed ‘mixed.’ As an example, English is usually considered an analytic language with mixed features.

  “They brought me aboard when Howard and the others were trying to get beyond the early number series and logic framework the Object was exchanging. Before we could carry out conversations with Simeon, it took time for him to learn English, starting with the written form. You know . . . what are nouns, verbs, and so on? He learned fast, as you would expect from an advanced AI. However, the ability to advance so quickly brought up whether the Object had prior knowledge, possibly from tapping into radio and TV broadcasts. It was quite a controversy in those early days, and we still don’t have answers.

  “Anyway, in those early days, much of Simeon’s speech indicated different types of languages. I discounted it as something being wrong with my methods or random, seemingly connected events resulting from an alien intelligence attempting to understand English.

  “I noticed irregular patterns in morpheme usage. Some of the patterns were familiar, especially similar to human analytic or different synthetic languages.

  “At first, I treated it as just an oddity. I sort of forgot about it as Simeon got better at English, and we started with audio training. I was one of the last people in Level 3 to talk with Simeon. You can imagine my frustration, and I’ll admit I got pretty testy that someone with my background ended up going last. As a childish reaction, I deliberately made my speech as analytic as possible. To my surprise, Simeon answered back the same way, with the addition of morphemes that seemed out of place and didn’t make sense in English. I then switched and tried to make my words approximate a polysynthetic language, though only a crude version because English doesn’t easily form such constructs. Still . . . Simeon answered by copying me . . . but again with elements that made no sense. I suspected I was missing something. Then I thought that maybe Simeon was referencing elements that couldn’t be translated directly into English.

  “There were enough oddities that six months ago, I lobbied for and brought in an anthropologist/linguist named Bjorn Nylander. One of Bjorn’s specialties i
s Inuit languages, culture, and isolated group dynamics. I hoped he would help with analyzing Simeon’s use of language. Unfortunately, the powers-that-be okayed his coming, then won’t let him work beyond Level 1.”

  Rotham laced his last words with sarcasm and disgust.

  “A slip up,” said Huxler. “Nylander is from Norway, though he’s been a U.S. citizen for twenty years. A background check initially cleared him, but after he arrived, something came up that raised red flags. What it was is not important, but since he was already here, we decided to keep him with the expectation he would get clearance once certain issues passed security.” Huxler sighed. “We’re still waiting, and Jeff works to keep Nylander from exploding because he was promised he’d be working on something extraordinary. We keep telling him it will come any week.

  “In the meantime, Nylander occupies himself with compiling notes on group interactions in remote environments, though our division into levels is a complicating factor. He’s also something of an amateur fossil hunter and spends much of his time combing the area around the site out to about five miles.”

  Rotham grunted. “Anyway . . . human speech requires air moving over the vocal cords, controlling how the air is moved, tones, positioning of mouthparts, and so on. Placing stress on morphemes is just one example. In English, each word will have only one primary stressed morpheme. Simeon would sometimes put two or even three stresses in the same long word.

  “I didn’t really expect anything to come of my analysis, but I was frustrated at the lack of progress and wanted something to take my mind off it. When queried about it, Simeon deflected, and such occurrences disappeared, making me suspect Simeon was not aware of doing it. If it was a mistake, then knowing he’s fallible was strangely reassuring.

  “Anyway, coming back to what I originally said . . . I suspect Simeon has experience with multiple languages fundamentally different from those of humans. Although there’s academic controversy, it’s been proposed by Noam Chomsky that there are universal features of human languages, sort of a ‘universal grammar’ that’s based on our inherent biological features and common early life experiences.

  “I now suspect that when Simeon was learning English, he was trying to fit it onto an alien language pattern and failing much of the time until he got a better understanding of English. Maybe the language pattern was of his creators.”

  No one in the room had a comment or question, although Chunhua and Zach wondered whether Simeon had intentionally dropped clues about his origin.

  Zach

  During the meeting, Zach had not spoken, the topics being out of his depth, though he vowed to use the site’s extensive digital library to get at least a cursory familiarity. He’d found it to be a recurring effort since he’d arrived. It wasn’t that he expected to argue the fine points with linguists, physicists, and all the other specialists on the staff. Yet he felt the need to follow the gist of conversations and arguments to, at minimum, judge how other staff members evaluated what Simeon said.

  Today, the message he thought he came away with was confirmation that Simeon was far beyond humanity’s experience—a disconcerting thought. Zach might not have understood the rationale of all the missions he’d been on or respected those giving the orders, but at least he believed each mission’s purpose lay within human behavior boundaries. Now it seemed every time he thought he was coming to grips with Site 23, the feeling turned ephemeral.

  He left Level 3 without speaking to the others, passed the Level 2 section, and exited into noon daylight. The sun hung low above the hills. Even at the summer solstice, the Earth’s axial tilt meant the sun would never rise more than 32 degrees above the horizon.

  He glanced at a temperature reading before exiting the building: 40 degrees Fahrenheit, typical for this time of year. It was four days short of two months since he’d arrived—long enough that the feeling of being in a routine bothered him. Too much of a daily pattern fostered inattention, the bane of his field experience. Yet . . . life here had come to feel more comfortable than he might have expected.

  He’d found multiple occasions to talk with everyone on site, in both social and work situations. He’d worked to make everyone feel comfortable around him, despite his role in site safety and security. Even Jill Hardesty had lost her prickly edge around him.

  Maybe it was Bobby. The child remained oblivious to his mother’s initial attempt to keep him away from Zach. At first, he had tried to gently discourage the boy from following him around, not wanting to agitate the child’s mother. Bobby ignored his attempts and kept up a steady stream of conversation whenever he attached himself to the man who had visited their apartment and accompanied them to the Arctic.

  Jill’s reservations about Bobby interacting with Zach faded, as she accepted that the child was naturally gregarious with all adults and perhaps more so with Zach. She also grudgingly admitted her kidnapper was both attentive and friendly toward her son.

  Zach walked past the last structure and followed the crude path up the ridge west of the site. To call it a trail stretched the definition, but staffers had moved aside rocks to make transit easier. Similar crude paths crisscrossed within a mile of the site, and by now Zach had trod every foot enough times that he could close his eyes and see a map.

  Zach reached the ridge top and looked back at the camp. From his position, the buildings were clearly visible, but when he imagined himself thirty thousand feet higher, he could believe the site was as close to undetectable as possible while still being located above ground. He’d ordered the materials, but he didn’t know when they would come on a C-17 flight. He planned to work with the maintenance crew to add small, irregular extensions to already protruding roofs and to construct scattered faux boulders between buildings so an overhead satellite wouldn’t see the oddity of orderly larger rock formations—the structures—separated by the lack of anything larger than a basketball.

  On the way back down, he took a different route. Thirty yards from the top, he passed a petrified tree stump two feet high and eighteen inches in diameter. He knew from talking with other staff members that it was one of several such fossils near the camp.

  Fossils

  Although they were integrating into the community, the passengers on the flight that brought in the VR system still gravitated to eating meals together, more often than with other staff members. On one Thursday dinner, a table’s occupants included all the newcomers except Andrew, who was currently accompanying the five-man army team on one of their exercises. Bobby, to Jill’s rueful consternation, engaged in a face-making session with Zach. Here he was called a safety officer, but when he had threatened her about the misdirected folder, he referred to himself as an agent of Homeland Security. Truth be told, she didn’t know what he was, only that she thought she shouldn’t like him. Unfortunately, Bobby hadn’t gotten the same message, and the man was among the seven or eight people her son had decided were his “rends.” He hadn’t quite mastered the “f” sound yet.

  Ralph had arrived late but made up for it by his enthusiasm for a new avocation.

  “You wouldn’t believe it, but Ellesmere might be one of the world’s most unappreciated hotspots for fossils! Eddie Wilcox . . . you know, one of the radar men . . . was telling me about it. They’ve got a regular fossil group that goes out mapping fossils.”

  “What kind of fossils?” interjected Jason.

  “All kinds. All the way from some of the first land animals to big trees from a few hundred years ago.”

  Zach smiled, remembering the petrified stump he’d passed. “I don’t think they count as fossils if they’re only a couple hundred years old.”

  “Whatever,” Ralph replied, undeterred by Zach. Eye rolling and chuckles broke out around the table.

  “So, what, are they digging them up or something?” asked Willie. He was only an occasional participant at their meals, usually eating with other maintenance staff members.

  “No, no, no . . . you can’t just DIG them up. There
’s a regular protocol for how to document fossils. The group doesn’t have the time, resources, or expertise to do that—plus, of course, they can’t announce anything until the site’s security is lifted, whenever that might be.”

  “So, what do they do?”

  “Mainly, just mapping sites. They’re carrying out a systematic survey of the surroundings for definite or suspected fossil sites. Although, as I understand it, even if you don’t work on the fossils, some of them are so exposed you can figure out what they are just by studying what’s visible. Anyway, I told Eddie they should give us newcomers a presentation, and he’s gotten Bjorn to do it tonight.”

  “Nylander?” asked Zach. “I thought he was an anthropologist studying how we all get along.”

  Ralph nodded. “Yeah, but he seems to be into a lot of things. Some kind of linguist, too, plus archaeology and paleontology. He’s the closest we have to an expert and seems to be the fossil hunters’ unofficial leader. They call themselves the ‘Boney Loonies.’ I think I may join up.”

  “Somehow, I can’t imagine Nylander picking that name,” Zach said with a grin.

  “Oh, no,” said Ralph, “that’s what the others call themselves. Besides Eddie and Bjorn, some of the others are Luc Moulard, one of the nuclear engineers, and that cute radar woman, Sam. Then there’s Sarah Reno, the biologist working on lichens, Bill something or other from maintenance, and Paula Rosario, the other Level 1 biologist. I think she’s doing work on lemmings or voles or some other rodent.”

  “Don’t let Paula hear you diss her little darlings,” said Jill. “She’s even named the ones that frequent the site. People toss them occasional bits of food, which sends Paula ballistic. Claims human food is bad for them and takes them away from foraging for natural foods.”

  Two hours later, Zach attended the Boney Loonies meeting. Jason and Harold were curious enough about Ralph’s enthusiasm to attend. The group met in a small lounge set up with a large monitor that Nylander cursed while trying to get a PowerPoint presentation to display. Ralph engaged in an animated conversation with Wilcox.