New Eden

by Kishore Tipirneni

  “You weren’t kidding when you said that the place has the feel of a schoolroom,” Vinod told Joshua.

  “It’s appropriate I guess,” Rachael said, “since we’ll be learning from them while they’ll be learning from us.”

  “Quite literally true,” Joshua said. “Notice that a protective case that contains the Bowman sphere and detector has been inserted into the front wall that the chairs face. If you look closely, you’ll see that the case has a clear, bulletproof panel so that the sphere is visible, but the sphere itself is secured in the case with an electronic lock that can only be opened with the thumbprint of either Langdon, Williams, or myself. It was Porter’s idea, but I was fully on board with it. Without the spookyon, there’s no project, and who knows when we’d trap another primordial particle or if it would be entangled with Seth’s.”

  Vinod pointed to several cables running along the walls of the space. “A lot of the equipment is located in a secondary chamber that’s been excavated so as to minimize the number of staff that will be here at any given time. Porter and Langdon told me it was for reasons of security and practicality. That’s fine with me. The less feds around, the better.”

  Joshua motioned to a projector mounted on the ceiling and aimed at a large screen on the front wall above the case containing the sphere. “That will eventually provide full or split screen images of Earth and Seth’s home world and interface with the touch screens on the desks. That is if we can get Porter to approve the sending and receiving of images.”

  “Speaking as a writer,” Rachael said, “a picture really will be worth a thousand words. I can’t begin to imagine what we’ll see.”

  “Personally, I would have made it Imax quality,” Vinod remarked. “Go big or go home, but I’m just a lowly servant being paid half a million dollars to help people speak to each other. But what’s with all the audio and video equipment in here? It’s everywhere. Is Big Brother watching?”

  “I think that’s a given,” Joshua replied. “But there’s a utilitarian value as well. No information will be inconsequential. Everything needs to be preserved for the purposes of both security and analysis. Video cameras and microphones have been added and will constantly record all happenings in the room. The recordings will be stored on secured servers in the ancillary chamber that Vinod referred to.”

  “Secure is the operative word,” Vinod said. “I’ll bet a hundred grand of my salary that nothing that happens in here will ever be announced to the public, at least in our lifetimes.”

  “That’s my biggest concern,” Rachael said. “I’m glad to be included on the project but keeping this from the world still seems wrong.”

  “I don’t think any of us can predict what will happen in the future,” Joshua said reassuringly. “My own feelings are that there are a lot of variables involved in this endeavor that no one, not even the government, can predict. As you’re fond of saying Rachael, some things don’t happen by random chance. Who knows what events lie in the months ahead?”

  “I’m not a religious man,” Vinod said, “but I hope you’re right.”

  “Jurassic Park,” Rachael said.

  “What?” Joshua and Vinod said at the same time.

  “My favorite part of the movie is when the main characters find out that the dinosaurs find a way to procreate despite the best efforts of the theme park owners to prevent it. General Porter is arrogant enough to think he can control everything, and maybe he can. But even though Seth is a long way from here, this dialog could take a lot of unforeseen turns, just as Josh said.”

  It was a sobering thought, and the three figures looked at one another without adding further comment.

  All contact with Seth was highly scripted for security reasons—Langdon and Williams had insisted on it—and it was a full three months before the text interface developed by Vinod to communicate with Seth was upgraded to an audio interface. The audio interface itself was a compromise since the scientific team wanted a video interface while General Porter, who never let anyone forget that he was in charge of security, determined that too much information would be transmitted via video interface. After all, he reasoned, video was simply numerous frames of still pictures that were stitched together, and each frame contained an enormous amount of information—too much in his estimation.

  “Why were the projector and screen even installed?” Joshua asked Langdon.

  “For obvious reasons,” the director replied, “which demonstrates that even I can get overruled by the Pentagon. They play hardball, Josh. Let’s play it by ear. Maybe Porter will come around.”

  “The audio interface with Seth works just like an ordinary phone call,” Vinod explained to the technical team after one of the early contacts with Seth, little more than a dry run for the equipment installed thus far in the bat cave. “We speak to him, and he talks back to us. Since the aliens communicate digitally, they have no voice or sounds even though they’ve designed themselves specifically for communication.”

  “I get the basics,” one of the technicians said, “but I’ll be stationed in the secondary chamber, so can you be a little more specific on your specs.”

  “No problem,” said Vinod, who’d learned to keep his frustration in check by frequently checking his online bank account balance. “The sphere is connected to a digital-to-analog converter, which in turn is connected to speakers here in the bat cave. The timber and tone of his voice is now completely controlled by Seth. He picked a male human voice since he originally chose a male name for himself. His voice sounds completely human since it’s not electronically generated.”

  “It’s not what I or anyone on my team expected,” the technician said. “We thought we’d be listening to something similar to the voice that came to be associated with Stephen Hawking when he was alive.”

  “Way more sophisticated than that,” Vinod said. “Seth is the man—or at least he adopted that gender—and he can really do some amazing shit. Take a listen.” He pointed to Joshua and Rachael, who sat in two of the chairs facing the screen.

  “Hi, Seth?” Rachael said.

  “Hey, guys,” Seth replied, his voice sounding entirely human. “Good to hear from you. How’s everything going?”

  “Fine,” Joshua answered. “And you?”

  “We’ve never been better. I mean I haven’t. I mean—well, you get the whole gig, right? That I’m part of the collective.”

  “Yeah, I get it,” Joshua responded. “By the way, when we talk to you, do you cut yourself off from the collective for a period of time, or are we always talking to your entire species?”

  “It varies, but I can’t really tell you what goes into that decision-making process. It wouldn’t make sense to you. I guess the best way to put it is that it depends what we’re rapping about—or talking, right?—during any one of our conversations. Can you dig it?”

  “Yes,” Rachael said, laughing. “We can dig it just fine.”

  “Laughter,” Seth said.

  “Does your species laugh or have humor?” Joshua asked.

  “Absolutely,” Seth replied. “Laughter is actually a very intelligent trait. It takes a complex thought process to understand when something is humorous.”

  “Simply incredible,” the technician said. “Are you sure this is digital intelligence?”

  “As far as we can tell,” Vinod replied. “I don’t see how they could do what they claim they can without being digital in nature. Speaking as an information theorist, that is. If they’re truly a collective, then they’d almost have to be digital.

  The pace of learning about Seth and his alien friends was glacial by most standards, and Joshua complained in the fourth month that greater progress could and should be made. The conversations with Seth were cordial in nature, but the information flow was stunted by the limited audio communication despite the realistic sound of Seth’s voice.

  Joshua picked up the phone in his office and was connected to Langdon.

  “Robert,” Joshua said, “
Seth is giving us precious little information, and what we do get is of a generic nature and always vague or heavily redacted. Everything is valuable, of course, but we need to take this to the next level. He’s described what his DNA-based engineering can do, but it’s all theoretical. Your own scientific teams stationed here are growing impatient, which I’m sure you’re aware of. We need to up the ante and get some visuals. Seth is willing to comply, but Porter’s being a real ass.”

  “I’m told by the science team that Seth has informed us that life is spread throughout the universe,” Langdon contended. “That alone is worth a lot, isn’t it?”

  “Of course, but he won’t tell us where that life is located. We also asked about the technological levels of these other species so we can measure them on the Kardashev scale, which evaluates a society based on its energy consumption and output, but Seth’s only answer was that civilizations reflect numerous stages of technological development. We were interested in finding out if most alien species were more advanced than Earth—in other words, have humans come late to the party—but he’s playing it close to the vest. Data analysis could increase exponentially if we had images to examine, but Porter has nixed the idea. He still doesn’t believe that these beings won’t hop in some rocket ship—his phrase, not mine—and pay us a visit. The man is positively paranoid.”

  Langdon was surprisingly receptive to the case Joshua was making. “The small number of people here at NASA who know about this tend to agree with you, Joshua. I’ll see if I can get Dina to twist the general’s arm a bit even if she has to go through the president.”

  “Thanks, Robert. I’d appreciate that.”

  Langdon was true to his word, and within forty-eight hours, an image interface had been reluctantly approved by Porter after receiving orders from the White House. The images, however, were to be restricted in number until an assessment could be made by the general’s security team as to whether any particular image posed a security risk.

  “Security risk my ass,” was Vinod’s observation. “This isn’t a kid’s game of I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.”

  The image interface was established by the scientific personnel with, as usual, considerable help from Vinod. He had taught Seth the JPEG compression algorithm for images which was used for the image format.

  Joshua, Rachael, and Vinod gathered in the bat cave, waiting for the first picture to be projected onto the screen. General Porter had insisted that he and his adjutant be there to personally evaluate the initial images—and shut them down if necessary.

  “By the book,” he asserted as he waited for the screen to come to life, glaring at the three members of the personal team, all of whom he still resented.

  “Reminds me of waiting for the images from the Mars Rover that day in Wheeler Auditorium,” Rachael said.

  “Our first close encounter,” Joshua said affectionately, “even though I didn’t know you were there.”

  The screen displayed static for a few seconds and then resolved to clarity as everyone in the cave held his or her breath.

  “Damn,” Vinod said. “It’s certainly not what I imagined.”

  The first image received from Seth was a high-altitude image of the collective’s home world. It was a red planet dotted with millions of shallow fresh water lakes. There were no oceans, but there were white, wispy, water-based clouds high in its atmosphere. Upon analysis, it would later be determined that the mass of the planet was approximately one and a half times that of Earth. Its axis of rotation varied only two degrees from the plane that prescribed the body’s orbit around its star—its ecliptic—which meant that there were no meaningful seasons on Seth’s home world. It orbited its sun approximately every seven Earth years, but it rotated on its axis every twenty-two hours as measured by Terran time. Therefore, a year on the planet lasted much longer than on Earth, but its day was shorter. It was also learned that day and night had no meaning to Seth and the collective since they didn’t sleep, which was a small revelation in itself.

  “No sleep?” Porter inquired on one of his visits to the bat cave. “Another tactical advantage.” He appeared smug and vindicated by his pronouncement.

  By this time—several months into daily communications with Seth—Joshua, Rachael, and Vinod had learned to ignore the general’s grim and at times bellicose manner and warnings.

  One of the most noteworthy images from Seth had been a selfie. The staff in the bat cave was shocked to see his appearance since it was, as Vinod put it in his usual succinct, blunt manner, “Not much to look at.” His body was spherical and colored a dark green, with multiple small appendages that the scientific team thought made him look like an enormous sea anemone.

  “And to think people originally made fun of Star Trek and its bad costumes,” Vinod said.

  The image of Seth was set against a red dirt background, which reminded the scientists of a bacterial colony on a blood agar plate in a petri dish. This eventually prompted the scientific team to name Seth’s planet Petri, and the occupants of the planet as petrins.

  “The other red planet,” Rachael commented, “only it’s got life that looks like something we inoculate against with antibiotics. You’re right, Vinod. Gene Roddenberry had it right all those years ago.”

  In later months, the teams learned that there were only three species of life on Petri, a shocking revelation to Langdon and exo-biologists at NASA, who had assumed that all planets where life had evolved would display a diversity of forms. The petrins had completely reformed the biology of their planet billions of years ago—an indication of just how long they had possessed advanced technology—in a process that Seth termed bioscaping.

  “That certainly answers the basic question of how far above us they are,” Rachael said.

  The writer, on sabbatical from Scientific American, was allowed to take notes on a laptop provided by NASA even though General Porter had insisted at first that no information be committed to any electronic storage device since he feared valuable data on the aliens would be smuggled out of the mine using a flash drive. Langdon had persuaded him to change his position, stating that the team couldn’t do its job without taking notes and recording their observations. NASA, he reassured the general, would always have access to their laptops.

  Rachael, standing next to Joshua and Vinod, pointed to her head with her index finger, and both friends had seen and understood the gesture before. “Even if they take away my computer, they can’t hack my brain,” she said in a parody of Henry Bowman and his allusion to his three hundred lab notebooks.

  The first species on Petri was the petrins themselves, the species to which Seth belonged. They were the size of adult pigs and were comprised almost entirely of structures that resembled neural cells. Their outer covering was made of cells that could absorb sunlight and generate energy, so they had no requirement to eat or take in nutrition. Petrins, however, were not mobile. They couldn’t walk around their environment and, in fact, petrins had no sensory organs. They were deaf, dumb, and blind, a fact that caused Vinod to frequently wear his “Tommy—Pinball Wizard” tee shirt to work. The petrins were scattered throughout the temperate zone of Petri at the edges of numerous freshwater lakes. They used their appendages as straws that dipped into the water to replenish fluid loss in their bodies caused by evaporation. For these reasons, humans considered petrins to be more plant-like than animal-like, albeit highly intelligent plants.

  Even though petrins were not mobile, they could change the shape of their semi-gelatinous bodies as their environment dictated. This, Joshua pointed out in discussions with the scientists on several occasions, was an aspect of their self-determination. When the environment was cooler, they became more spherical in order to preserve heat. When it was warmer, their bodies spread out like thick pancakes in order to radiate heat. Since there were no radical weather changes, their bodies only had to accommodate a narrow range of environmental changes.

  “Gross looking dudes,” Vinod remarked.
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br />   “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” Dina Williams countered on one of her rare personal visits to the bat cave. “Didn’t you ever watch the Star Trek episode ‘Is There No Truth in Beauty?’ An alien ambassador is brought aboard the Enterprise, one who is deemed so ugly that one glimpse of it drives humans insane.”

  “Damn, you got me there,” Vinod admitted. “I would never have taken you for a Trekkie.”

  “I’m not, but my husband loves the reruns. Some of the shows have some interesting social commentary.”

  Vinod had gained a begrudging respect for the White House chief of staff. She’d been the main force, second only to Robert Langdon, in making sure that the teams coordinated with each other and were given as much as possible in accordance with General Porter’s restrictions.

  “Wouldn’t you just like to kick him in the ass sometimes?” Vinod asked her.

  “You’re forgetting, Mr. Bhakti, that everything in this room is recorded. Besides, the general may be gruff, but he’s a good officer and serves an important purpose.”

  “We’ll have to agree to disagree on that point,” Vinod said.

  “You’re doing a great job,” Williams said. “Just remember that the automatic deposits into your bank accounts are always open to an ongoing review of your job performance.”

  “General Porter,” Vinod said loudly to make sure his voice would be picked up by the recorders. “Hell of a guy.”