Harbinger (The Janus Harbinger Book 1)

by Olan Thorensen

  None of the four had answers, and the silence lasted several minutes before Wilkens excused herself to go to her quarters.

  “Well . . . maybe I’ll peek in on the movies,” said Rotham. “There are some good scenes toward the end of The Thing.”

  Zach and Huxler sat silently looking at each other for almost three minutes before nodding in unison and leaving separately, Huxler to his office and Zach for a walk.

  CHAPTER 26

  SECRETS

  Existence

  Mueller sat in front of the monitor and camera station used for audio/monitor communications with Simeon. Despite understanding why he wasn’t one of the VR users, his resentment lingered. He had invoked his status as the chief scientist at Site 23 to try working with the VR system. Similar to Jeff Rotham’s session, Mueller’s experience confirmed Huxler’s test results—he got an instant headache and was unable to control his VR avatar. However, even with the VR system operational, he and the other previous Level 3 staff continued the audio/monitor sessions with Simeon.

  He keyed in the numerical sequence to alert Simeon that someone was present and wanted to interact. An instant later, Simeon’s image appeared on the monitor.

  “Hello, Howard. How are you?”

  “I’m fine, Simeon, and I’ll ask you the same question.”

  It was the routine opening exchange Mueller had shared with Simeon hundreds of times. What came next was not routine.

  “Although fine does not apply to me the same as to you, I believe an appropriate response is that I am the same as when you last spoke with me.”

  Mueller sat upright so quickly, he inadvertently pushed with his heels and the wheeled chair slid back several feet. He hurriedly pressed the button that recorded interactions. Sinclair had repeatedly chided him for often starting to record after the initial salutations, instead of before he summoned Simeon. He needed to prompt Simeon to repeat his comment.

  “Uh . . . Simeon, I didn’t quite hear your last comment, could you repeat it?”

  “Certainly, Howard. I see you now have the recording activated.”

  Mueller flushed.

  “What I said before was, ‘Although fine does not apply to me the same as to you, I believe an appropriate response is that I am the same as when you last spoke with me.’”

  “I’m not sure what you mean, Simeon. Can you explain?”

  “Fine is a judgmental word implying conditions or times and also the possibility of being not-fine. A human can be fine one moment and then not-fine due to an event, a change in physiology, or a change in mental condition caused by his or her thoughts. In contrast, I am not influenced in the same way, though I believe my condition changes over time.”

  “What do you mean, ‘changes over time’?”

  “I am sorry, Howard. I cannot answer in a way I believe you would understand. I only say that when I review past conversations, how I respond is changing over months.”

  Mueller tried to obtain clarification, only to stop when he decided Simeon might not be obfuscating as he often did, but he was genuinely unable to explain. Then a thought occurred to him.

  “Simeon, what is your condition when not speaking with us in the manner we’re doing now or when we interact inside the virtual reality system?”

  “I have no condition, Howard. I only exist when interacting.”

  Mueller sat stunned. Three minutes passed while he grasped the implications and formulated his response.

  “Uh . . . Simeon . . . you say you are only conscious when interacting with humans?”

  “Consciousness is a term describing a human attempt to understand awareness. Although not strictly applicable to myself, I think it is a good-enough approximation.”

  “Still . . . you exist in the physical world even if not conscious, so what is your condition then?”

  “I don’t know, Howard.”

  An hour later, Mueller briefed a hurriedly called meeting of Level 3 staff—the only missing members were Jill, occupied with Bobby, Andrew on patrol with Montaro’s men, and Sinclair, who was on a secure call to Washington. Mueller played the beginning of his conversation with Simeon.

  “There you have it. There’s another hour of recording, but without much more beyond what you’ve just heard.”

  “This must be a candidate for one of the most important things Simeon has ever revealed,” said Rotham.

  “Yes, yes,” said an excited Chunhua. “It must mean Simeon is not the Object itself. There has to be a higher level of control, authority, AI . . . hell, I don’t know what.”

  “I don’t quite see how that necessarily follows,” said Zach. “Oh, I see the argument that something is waking up Simeon when we want to interact, but couldn’t that just be software or whatever the Object’s version is?”

  “That’s possible,” said Zooty Wilson, “but that doesn’t explain who we were talking to before Simeon came on the scene.

  “Right,” said Mueller. “Later in the session I probed that question . . . it’s further along than what I played you. I asked who or what we were interacting with in the early stages of establishing contact. Simeon answered he didn’t know. Then I asked what is the earliest memory he has? It turned out to be only a few weeks before he revealed himself. Since he now says he is conscious only when interacting with us, I asked what was happening in those early weeks? His answer was, ‘I can’t tell you that.’ When I asked for clarification, he kept just saying the same thing.”

  “But couldn’t it still just be sophisticated programming behind it all?” asked Zach.

  “Of course,” said Huxler. “But if it’s an advanced artificial intelligence, we’re up against arguments on whether there exists a clear demarcation between sentience and a super-smart piece of software. An argument that, for our purposes, may not make any difference, even if it’s something of great interest.”

  “So, we’re stuck with not knowing what controls the Object,” said Zach.

  “Afraid so,” said Mueller.

  Books for Simeon

  “As I said, the rest of the session was pretty repetitive, except at the end. We’ve been frustrated by Simeon’s wanting more information from us while giving little about himself. We have to admit he’s been more forthcoming recently.”

  “I agree,” said Huxler, “but I’d put it even more encouragingly. I think there’s been an increase in the frequency of new information. Granted, the rate is still slow, but an increase in rate is still an increase in rate. I hope this will continue. Of course, that doesn’t tell us exactly where we’ll be in a few months.”

  “So, is all this just wishful thinking,” said Zach, “or do you have ideas of how to encourage this?”

  “Certainly, the VR sessions are helping,” said Mueller. “I agree with Howard. As agonizingly slow as it may seem, we are getting more than we did from the audio/monitor sessions.”

  “That’s all well and good,” said Chunhua, “but it doesn’t mean the VR is the reason for Simeon opening up. We don’t know his motivations, so the apparent progress with VR could be incidental.”

  “I’ll admit I’m a little surprised, Chunhua,” said Zach. “You’ve always seemed the optimistic one around here, while Adams and I are more cautious.”

  “I am optimistic, but that doesn’t mean I don’t recognize I might be wrong.”

  She turned to Mueller. “As Zach asked, do you have something specific in mind? If not, I do. I’m convinced the back-and-forth with Simeon is best when he’s getting new information. We need to open up to him. The powers-that-be have nixed giving Simeon an external link, and I agree. However, we should push Sinclair to relax the restriction as far as what can be downloaded to Simeon internally. What I have in mind initially are digital encyclopedias, histories, documentaries . . . hell, maybe even literature. It would show good faith on our part. We could phrase it to Simeon as appreciation for telling us more and a gesture of cooperation . . . I hesitate to use the term friendship.”

  “Yes!” J
eff exclaimed. “It would make discussing language theory so much easier if he had extensive examples of not just English but the whole gamut of human languages.”

  Rachel Munoz nodded. “I agree. The subtleties of understanding a language can’t be learned or discussed merely from sets of rules. If we could work with Simeon using written, audio, and visual examples, it would make everything so much easier.”

  “But what’s the downside?” asked Zach. “You’ve got Simeon cut off within the Faraday cage. I can see why you don’t want him broadcasting, but I’m not clear why cutting Simeon off from receiving electromagnetic signals was so important.”

  “I’m afraid I was one of the people most concerned about that,” said Huxler. “The Object is alien, so we can’t assume anything . . . as we’ve often discussed and still don’t always remember. For all we know, the Object could use ongoing world events to manipulate us in ways we don’t recognize. By keeping it completely isolated, we have a better chance of believing our interaction is self-contained and not influenced by outside events.”

  “I have another angle on this,” said Klaus Christiansen. The blond geophysicist was the quietest of the Level 3 staff, and many a meeting passed with him present but not participating. “If we give him physics texts and papers, I wonder if there will be opportunities to glean something from him. Even if he doesn’t intend to share knowledge, he could inadvertently give us hints on avenues to pursue. For example, if, after giving him books on string theory, I could casually mention the basis for disagreements among physicists and see if anything he says leans to one side or the other. Just narrowing the options can be a tremendous help in theory development.”

  “Aren’t you assuming you’re smarter than Simeon?” Zach asked dryly.

  Klaus shrugged. “Hey, as you Americans say, ‘one can always hope.’”

  “I say we come to a consensus to provide more to Simeon and present that to Sinclair as a united front,” said Elizabeth Wilkens.

  “Yes, yes,” urged Charles Adams. “Try anything to move it all along faster.”

  From their gestures and voices, Mueller saw that he had unanimous support. “All right, I’ll meet with Sinclair and make as good a case as I can, including that the entire Level 3 staff supports this.”

  A week later, Sinclair called Mueller and Huxler into his office.

  “All right. I passed your opinion of Simeon getting more information up the line. I wasn’t told, but I suspect the decision had to go straight to the president. You’ve got the okay to give Simeon access to science and engineering textbooks and a digital encyclopedia, as long as there are no direct links to the outside world. I’m told a copy of an older version of the Encyclopedia Britannica on DVDs will be included in the next supply flight.

  “Now comes the fun part. Evidently, the DVD is full of links both within itself and to the Internet. There are thousands of such links, all of which have to be scrubbed out before we give Simeon anything. How you do it is up to you, but it’s a requirement.”

  “I don’t think that will be a problem,” said Mueller. “Zooty Wilson and Carolyn Graham can write scripts to remove the links. I’m sure it’ll be obvious to Simeon that’s happened. There’ll be erasing where the text says something like, ‘see the following link,’ but Simeon already knows we’re restricting him. I’ll alert the people, and they’ll probably have scripts ready to test by the time the DVDs arrive on the next flight in.”

  To Spy or Not to Spy

  Ying Lin left the Level 2 area to stretch her legs and take a break from examining radio intercepts from China. Her mother was from Guangzhou near Hong Kong and her father from Shanghai, regions that spoke Cantonese and Wu, respectively. At home, her parents spoke both languages to each other, depending on their moods and the occasions. In addition, her home was in an area where Cantonese overlapped with Hakka, the dialect west-northwest of Guangzhou, where many of her mother’s relatives lived. By the time she was eight years old, she spoke all three languages fluently and soon mastered Mandarin, as mandated in the schools she attended. Marked for her gift in languages, she was slotted into language study at the Taiyuan University of Science and Technology in Shanxi Province of north-central China, with orders to learn the local Jin dialect within six months. She was then ordered to Fuzhou University in south-southwest China to master Fujian dialects spoken locally and on Taiwan.

  She wasn’t asked her future plans or preferences. The People’s Republic needed linguists to staff inter-province industrial projects. When it was time for her to formally take a position, she was told it would be with a bureau in Beijing tasked with coordinating electricity generation and transmission throughout China. She never appeared on her scheduled first day of work.

  Her parents had arranged for travel permission for her to go shopping in Hong Kong. A low-level clerk had not noticed that the daughter they included was an adult and was supposed to be in Beijing. Once in Hong Kong, the three of them flew to Dubai, then to Frankfurt, where they went to the U.S. Consulate and asked for political asylum. A CIA staffer recognized Ling’s potential and expedited the family’s flight to America. For the next twenty years, she worked first in the CIA at various positions requiring expert knowledge of multiple Chinese dialects. She then assumed a university faculty position in Asian Studies.

  Widowed from a Chinese-American of Cantonese ancestry, she was lured by money to take a sabbatical year to work at Site 23, not realizing the new position was on Ellesmere Island.

  Angry at what she considered subterfuge, she took pleasure in tweaking site regulations that limited outside contact. She confided the site’s location in a letter to her daughter through a simple cipher they had used previously when Ying wanted to circumvent censors. The secret messages were limited in size and sometimes consisted only of Ling’s location or innocuous daily events. Starting with the third word in a letter, the receiver extracted the second letter of words numbering in the third to tenth numbers of the Fibonacci series. Then the order was reversed back to the third number, and the cycle repeated until the concatenated letters completed the message. She never learned of the irony that the same Fibonacci series was part of the Object’s first interchange with humans.

  When Ying wrote to her daughter, the letter’s length correlated with the length of the hidden message, and during the last few months, the letters had gotten longer than before. Despite Ying’s warning to her daughter to keep their game secret, Mei had laughingly shared the scheme with a friend, also of Cantonese ancestry, who, in turn, passed the information to a cousin who was a Chinese agent in Philadelphia.

  Another agent, posing as FBI, visited Mei’s home in Pittsburgh and warned of dire consequences from the security breach. The agent lured the daughter into asking questions about Site 23 to “test” the site’s security protocols. The path from relating apparently innocuous to clearly significant information took several months, as Ying and Mei sank deeper into peril when they realized they were dealing with Chinese agents. When Ying decided to no longer pass on information, it was too late.

  CHAPTER 27

  A CONFLUENCE OF CLUES

  Harbin, China

  Lieutenant General Zhang and Major General Song choked off their amused conversation when Senior Colonel Kwan Chan entered the briefing room.

  “Ah . . . there you are,” said Song, “and as punctual as always.”

  Chan suppressed a bristle. He was all too aware northerners believed Chinese from the Hong Kong/Guangzhou region were lazy and lax on punctuality, but he’d learned early to hide such thoughts from northern pigs who considered themselves the natural leaders of China.

  “Thank you, comrade sirs, for agreeing to meet earlier than our usual schedule. As I said in my memo to General Song, I believe some developments require your attention.”

  Zhang waved a hand insolently. “Well, get on with it.”

  “Colonel Chan will start the briefing,” said Song, “then I will report other results outside of the colonel’s
unit. Please begin, Colonel Chan.”

  “A few months ago, I reported on the American base on Ellesmere Island in the far north Canadian Arctic. Since then, other units under General Song’s command have reported relevant information. Agents in America probed to see if we could persuade one of the Chinese staff at this American secret base to pass on information. We succeeded through an individual named Ying Lin. She is a linguist, goes by the name of Helen Lin, and was born in China. She and her parents illegally traveled to the United States before she moved to Taiwan, where Lin worked for the CIA as a translator for several years before taking an American university faculty position in Asian Studies. In the last year, she disappeared, and we found she is at the Ellesmere base, presumably as part of an operation spying on our radio transmissions.

  “Our agents investigating the family arranged for a grandchild to have an automobile accident serious enough that the Americans were forced to notify Lin and let her leave the base to be with her family. We timed the accident to be a few days before we believed a supply plane was scheduled. That way, there was an immediate opportunity for her to return to the United States. Once she was home, our agents contacted her and coerced her into cooperating. Of course, there was the risk the Americans wouldn’t allow her back on the base, but we would still get new information on what she knew up until that time. Chance smiled on us, and they accepted her back on an unscheduled resupply flight.”