‘We’re drilling into one of the fuel cylinders soon. We intend to extract some of the contents for chemical analysis. We don’t yet have a plan to open the small cylinders, but we’ve detached one of those which was hanging outside the ship and we’re going to try to discover if any power can be transferred along the wires. That’ll be my job after this conversation.’
‘What about the node at the front and the thimble-like structures?’
‘Sorry, Eve, they’re a long way down the list of priorities.’
‘I’ve a feeling it or they could hold the key to this thing,’ I said.
‘I’ll keep that in mind, Eve.’
‘Any ideas on age yet?’
‘Yes, when we began a close examination of the hull, we found it has a great deal of shallow pitting. The metal’s extremely hard. By comparing it with the pitting on the oldest parts of the ISS and considering the strength of the alloy, we believe it’s been in orbit for a very long time indeed.’
‘How long?’
‘Thousands of years, possibly hundreds—’
‘Thousands!’ I broke in.
‘Possibly hundreds of thousands I’m afraid, Eve. We’re certain this isn’t a recent arrival.’
‘Really? That long! How sure are you?’
‘Would be safe to say it’s older than the pyramids in our opinion so far.’
This was amazing information. It changed the urgency of finding out what it was. If it had been in Earth orbit for thousands of years, its creators would be even more advanced today and the technology needed to put it into Earth orbit in the first place from another star system was way ahead of ours already.
‘Fascinating. Any other new information, Reg?’
‘Most of the new material should already be with you. Hans sent the first packet this morning and we’ll give you daily updates now you’re in situ.’
‘Any guesses on where it’s from? What about Mars if it’s been around a long time?’
‘Hundreds of guesses,’ he said, ‘and all totally unscientific. Could be from anywhere.’
I laughed with him and we finished our conversation.
My first day in the new job had begun with a whole string of deepening mysteries.
I arrived home about six. Mario had cooked a chilli and we ate on our laps with a bottle of Chianti before spending the rest of the evening browsing through property details he’d collected from local estate agents. It all seemed so domestic, considering the momentous events I was now likely to be dealing with almost every day.
The next morning, I was in early because I wanted to get Michael Brown to show me around the rest of the complex and I’d a few emails to draft first.
I slid my finger into the thimball and my monitor sprang into life. There was a red flashing light in the top right of the screen. There was a priority message from the Cluster, for my eyes only.
I waved my thimball at it and the message header appeared:
‘SUBJECT: Breakthrough!’
14 Breakthrough
I was in my office before dawn and had received an email from Reg in the Cluster which was headed ‘Breakthrough’, I couldn't wait to open and read it.
Several of us had speculated these small cylinders might hold computer data and now the work done by Reg and Hans appeared to confirm it.
I’d read the email three times when there was a knock at my door. Janet popped her head in.
‘You’re in early,’ she said.
‘Had plans but they’ve gone awry. Get Tim to come in the moment he arrives, and a cup of coffee for me, please. When do the hackers usually get in?’
‘Any time after about now,’ she said and closed my door.
It was eight thirty-five.
The email was fascinating. If each of those tubes had that many terabytes of data in them, there was a danger we’d be overwhelmed with the need for storage.
I walked through the communal office and out into the corridor, saying to Janet over my shoulder, ‘I’ll be right back.’
I tapped my code into the computer room door and entered. One tousle-haired young man was leaning back in his chair, his feet on his desk, eating a bacon roll and reading the newspaper. When he saw me, he almost choked on his breakfast and only just managed to save himself falling off his chair.
‘Doctor Slater! Sorry, I usually read the paper for a while before I start work.’
‘Don’t panic, David. It is David, isn’t it?’
‘Yes.’
‘How much memory do we have here?’
‘What, in total or free?’
‘Free.’
‘About four exabytes.’
‘What’s that in terabytes?’
The young man was silent while he did a mental calculation and said, ‘Roughly four million terabytes. Why? It should be far more than we’d ever need.’
I felt relieved at the storage available. ‘I hope it will be. Get ready for a lot of work, David. We’re getting data from memory modules in AD1. Tell Doctor Sweet something big is coming soon and I’ll call for him during the morning.’
‘Yes, Doctor Slater, will do.’
‘Now finish your roll and paper, because you won’t see much in the way of coffee breaks once this data arrives.’
I was about to leave but he spoke again. ‘To be honest, Doctor Slater, we’ve all been a little bored. Can’t wait to sink our teeth into this thing.’
I laughed again. ‘Be careful for what you wish, young man.’ I winked and returned to my office.
Coffee arrived with Tim swiftly on its heels. I let him read the email and asked him to read it slowly a second time. I’d found the implications didn’t sink in on the first read.
When he finished, I commented, ‘Polarised electricity. Think about it. This isn’t simply a matter of one or two polarities either, these wires seem to have an almost infinite number. Who can we get to work on it?
‘Make enquiries via NASA as to how we can get a high-speed data transfer from the Cluster. We’re going to need it.
‘Thirdly, the wires themselves. We have no one here who specialises in metallurgy. I want you to speak to our top universities and find out which would have the most relevant experts.
‘What is even more fascinating is the fact these small cylinders or tubes can contain vast amounts of data. The problem is we can’t cut into one now or we might lose crucial information. One door has opened for us, but it’s closed another.’
‘Okay, Eve, I’ll get onto it right now.’ He got up to leave.
‘Be here for my call to Reg,’ I called after him.
‘Will do.’
‘Janet,’ I shouted as he opened the door and she came running in.
‘Can we record my calls to Dr Naughton and the ISS?’
‘I think we already do, but I’ll check,’ she said.
That was a revelation. All my calls were being recorded.
‘Any particular reason?’ she asked.
‘Yes. What we’re working upon will become of great historical interest and we ought to have a true record of it.’
‘Something happened?’ she asked.
‘We’re getting data from the alien craft.’
‘Wow,’ she said, before asking if I needed her for anything else and returning to her work-station. I loved Janet’s simple acceptance of the extraordinary.
I sat back and contemplated the importance of my function. It was going to be mind-boggling in its complexity.
My call to Reg and Hans was not only historic, but technologically important too. The single tube or cylinder had so far transferred 55TB of data and it was still going. He told me they’d checked to be sure it wasn’t the same data transferring over and over again and it wasn’t. It was all unique.
Tim told them NASA was going to dedicate a dish to data transfer and it would come in through one of ours each time the Cluster cleared the horizon in each orbit. Ours was capable of handli
ng 1TB per minute, so even though the data transfer would be spasmodic we should soon catch up with the amount being downloaded from the cylinders.
We talked about the wiring and Reg told us NASA wanted to bring MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) on board. I had Tim make a note to liaise direct. I didn’t say it over an open line, but I wanted to be sure America didn’t get all of the new technology from this discovery. I made a note to speak to the Home Secretary about allowing me to discuss this with the Department of Trade and Industry. Would the security hold on this thing much longer? There were too many benefits in the offing. Even the wires were a breakthrough if we were able to manufacture them, and the polarisation of electricity itself had incredible potential to prevent leakage, electrocution and so on. Perhaps it could even be broadcast in its polarised form.
Reg sent us copies of the symbol from each of the spheroids, which we believed to be fuel containers. I understood what he meant when he suggested this was probably a brand rather than a word. I sent it through to the language experts with a note informing them we were starting to get data which might give them more to work with. I hoped it would be the case.
After the call, Tim and I exchanged glances.
‘Phew,’ he said, ‘we’re about to be very busy indeed.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’m going to visit John Sweet and the hackers. How much data do we already have? Any idea?’
‘The first package was one terabyte. It’s on this card, but more’s arriving each orbit. It’ll be about one terabyte per orbit until we get the high-speed connection. I’ll speak to Michael Brown about freeing up a dish shortly,’ he said, handing me the SDXC card.
‘Good. Tell him I’m sorry about our planned meeting and will reschedule,’ I said as I stood.
We both left my office, Tim heading into his, as I made a beeline to the computer room.
The four hackers were sitting around John Sweet’s desk in his office. He stood up to greet me and I waved him down, grabbed a spare chair from behind the door and sat casually with the others.
‘Right. Wonderful news,’ and briefed them over the data collection.
‘When do we get the first packet?’ asked Mary, one of the hackers who was obviously raring to go.
I pulled the SDXC card out of my pocket and handed it to her in its cellophane container.
‘You’ve got one terabyte there, so get started.’
I was almost trampled in the rush as the four of them dashed out to the main terminal, slotted the card into the reader and transferred it to the hard drive. John and I laughed at the enthusiasm. He joined his team and I stood beside the window and watched.
Soon there were screens full of gobbledegook and I watched hands, pens, and notebooks flying into action as they got the first opportunity to examine alien data.
‘John,’ I said.
He’d forgotten I was still in the room.
‘Sorry, yes, Doctor Slater?’
‘If there’s anything like language, even computer language, don’t forget the language boys in the end lab. They might well be useful to you.’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘I’ll leave you to it.’
I was sure the second breakthrough would come from these whiz kids. I wasn’t wrong.
15 Our Star or Theirs?
The second major breakthrough took a lot longer than I expected.
The first 200TB of data from the first cylinder showed nothing other than a huge amount of binary which didn't seem to be taking us anywhere, although Mary was now leading her own team of three to work on it and they were becoming concerned that the data it contained seemed to be changing depending upon when they tried to read it. There was much head-scratching going on and Reg had been asked to send the data several times. Each time it was different when it was downloaded.
The second cylinder was much more informative. The hackers discovered data which appeared to be an image when it was coded to base-8. I went through to watch the image developing.
'Definitely an image,' said John.
'Yes, and that’s a star at top right,' I said.
'And a second on the left, Doctor Slater.'
'Plenty of background stars and the usual deep space galaxies. I wonder if our visitor is trying to tell us from whence it came?' I asked rhetorically.
The image continued to fill the screen.
'What's this in the centre?' asked John.
'Another star. Is it dead centre?' I asked.
'Fifty per cent of the data showing,' confirmed David.
'Must be their sun,' said John.
'Looks like it,' I said.
Line by line the remainder of the image was completed with another large star in the bottom left corner.
'Do you recognise it?' asked John.
'No, John. I might be able to if it were in colour so that we can see which stars are red, blue, yellow et cetera.'
'I've got the same image over and over again,' said David.
'Identical?' asked John.
'Almost, but not quite.'
'Colour filters? RGB or CMYK?' I asked.
'Well, possibly, but look at this one. It’s almost completely washed out. Why would a star field have so much messy background imagery?' said David.
'Good grief!' said John. 'Could it be X-rays or some other background radiation? We only see from red to violet so cyan, magenta, yellow and black prints almost perfectly for our eyes. Maybe they see into the infrared and ultraviolet so need more "colours" when they view images.'
'That's it. That's it!' shouted David and his fingers were like a blur over the keyboard.
I watched, fascinated. The keyboard action took about ten minutes. I was about to leave them to it when there was a scream from David.
'Ye-e-e-ess!' he shouted, and his fist punched the air over his monitor.
The image began to develop again, but this time, in colour.
'What did you do?' I asked.
'The aliens do see a far greater range than us, including X-rays and, probably other parts of the spectrum, too. The first image represents black and it’s followed by ten other images. Images four, five and six are the visible components for human eyes. So, what you’re seeing now comprises one, four, five and six or, KMYC – black, magenta, yellow and cyan.'
'Brilliant, David,' said John.
We stood and watched the colour image develop. Whoever created AD1 had very different eyes to us.
'There’s something familiar about the blue stars, but I can't figure out what. I wonder if the central star is their home star.' My knowledge of star fields was letting me down. Normally, I’d expect to recognise a star field with four such distinctive stars.
'We’ve data which is probably another image,' said Jack, another of the hackers.
'John, can you stick the first image onto a memory chip for me as a big jpg file? Also, find out if I can have the images appear on my large monitor as they’re downloaded here,' I asked.
It took four or five seconds to transfer the image. Meanwhile, scans one, four, five, and six of Jack's second image were taking shape on the other monitor.
'Looks like the moon,' said Jack.
I instantly recognised Mons Appeninus, although it was at ninety degrees to normal images.
'Yes, those mountains are the central ridge of the moon's Montes Apenninus. I'm taking this back to my large monitor,' I said, taking the memory chip and returning to my office where I slid it into the memory slot of my huge 8K television.
I wasted at least forty minutes trying to line up the stars with constellations I knew, then it hit me like bolt from the blue. This was not their star – it was our star. This was Sol, but from their point of view. It was the sun in the centre of the screen.
I rotated the image through ninety degrees, one hundred and eighty degrees, ignored Sol and recognised I was seeing the hind quarters of the constellation Leo. When they took this image, we were in L
eo.
I'd missed identifying it because it was upside down from my normal viewpoint and I hadn’t recognised the central star. The image showed us! If the image showed us from their star, we should be able to find the diametrically opposed star and it’d show us where they were viewing from.
I grabbed my reflexlet and checked the star charts. If my reasoning was correct, the alien came from HD210277 in Aquarius, seventy light years from us. I worked out the declination and ascension of us within Leo and banged off an email to Jodrell Bank to find out whether my guess was accurate.
I was both elated and devastated at one and the same time. We knew from which star the aliens probably came, but it was so far away I wouldn’t meet them in my lifetime. Why was the universe so ridiculously huge? It wasn't fair on tiny life forms like ours. Einstein once said that God didn't play dice, but it damn well seemed like he did sometimes.
If we built a ship to travel to their star, it would take centuries to get there. Even sending a signal would take seventy years. By the time they responded I’d be more than one hundred and seventy years old. Okay, a hundred and twenty was the new hundred, but a hundred and seventy seemed impossible. I'd die before receiving their reply. I was furious about relativity and the impossibility of faster than light travel, but I was wasting my time ranting against the laws of physics.
An oppressive sadness came over me as I resigned myself to never having more than AD1 to investigate. What wonders would future generations learn from a species capable of travelling between the stars? Maybe they’d return one day. I clung onto that hope.
More images were being found within the masses of data but there only seemed to be one or two images hidden within tens of terabytes of data. We were working on a long-haul project. John had quickly organised for my 8K television to have a channel dedicated to the images as they downloaded in the lab.
The second and third images were of the moon and Venus. They were nothing special, but the image following that was staggering.
It was obviously an orbital view of Mars. The huge Olympus Mons extinct volcano dominated the scene, but there were clouds surrounding its slopes. Proper clouds. As the colour image built up there were other features which did not exist on the red planet today. Green patches, blue areas, more clouds. This image showed Mars as a living planet, answering questions about whether it had ever had life. It sure did, even if only plant life. How long ago was Mars so alive? It was indicating our alien device was old indeed. Reg's hypothesis that it was older than the pyramids suddenly seemed to be an underestimation.
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