by Clayborn, JJ
“Well, yes. I just spoke with them this morning, actually.”
James straightened up. “Ranger Blake, did you talk to a Ranger Blake?”
“Yes. Julia is leading their group…” Chad explained.
“Fill me in, explain everything,” James demanded.
“Originally I contacted Ranger Thomas Lester about the impact site…”
“And when you couldn’t reach him anymore, I called Julia about it…” James butted in.
“Right. And then I didn’t hear anything for about a day and a half, then Julia contacted me from a different number. She said that she talked to you and you warned her to be careful. She rolled out with a posse and saw some metal robots walking around. They managed to escape and take the footage back to town and recruit a larger force to go capture them.”
“And?” James asked, impatiently.
“They had a battle on the shores of Lake Jocassee and Blake’s group was forced to retreat. They were heading south, toward Athens, Georgia the last time I spoke to them.”
“Send me her contact info, and if you talk to her again, tell her to push west and we’ll try to meet up with her group.”
The colonel shot James a disapproving look, but James stared right back at him unyielding. Daring him to say anything.
“Thanks for the update, stay safe. We’ll be in touch,” James said as he hung up the phone.
“I’m not comfortable with you sharing that amount of information over unsecured channels,” Colonel Ryan said.
James shrugged. “I don’t have any other way to contact him, so we’ll have to take our chances.”
The Colonel shook his head. “I still don’t have to like it.” Ryan stepped up to the phone and dialed back to his military command. “This is Colonel John Ryan, I need to speak to Major General Aleksander Malley immediately, it’s urgent.”
There was a moment of silence and then an angry voice burst over the speaker. “Colonel Ryan, I have been trying to reach you! Is it true that you attacked and destroyed the 2nd Battalion, 20th Special Forces Group?”
Colonel Ryan shook his head. “No, sir. We were prepared to engage them, but they were destroyed by another party. A very dangerous…”
“Shut up, Colonel. You’re a lot of hot water, son. As far as the military is concerned, you are responsible for the destruction of the 2/20th. If you hadn’t disobeyed an order to stay at base none of this would have happened.”
James squinted and eyed the phone.
“Sir, it’s not my fault,” Colonel Ryan pleaded. “There’s an urgent issue of national security that….”
“I said quiet!” General Malley yelled. “You are hereby ordered to return yourself and your unit back to base immediately. You are to face court martial. And you are hereby ordered to bring with you the robot prisoner that Ranger Hutchinson acquired in Holly Springs. You are to place him under arrest for the murder of Sherriff Long. Now, report your current position so that we know when to expect you.”
Col Ryan sighed, defeated. “Understood, Sir. Our current location is…”
James reached over and hung up the phone and ripped it out of the wall.
“What the hell do you think you are doing, Ranger?” Ryan asked, his hand on his pistol.
James put his hands up. “Easy, Colonel. I’m not the enemy. Can’t you see what’s happening?”
“And what is it that you think is happening?”
“Your General has been subverted,” James said.
Colonel Ryan shook his head. “It can’t be.”
“Why? Because he’s protected behind an Army base?” James asked.
“Well, yes,” the Colonel said, uncertainty creeping into his voice.
“The can look like us, remember?” James put his hands down. “Shoot me if you must, but you know that I’m right. I didn’t kill Larry, they did. They killed him, then they skinned him and tried to masquerade around pretending to be him. When I shot Larry he was already a metal robot, ask any one of my people, they’ll tell you.”
“But that still doesn’t explain why you think that the general is subverted,” Ryan said.
“Did you tell your CO that I had captured a robot?”
Colonel Ryan thought for a moment. “No, I didn’t.”
“Then how did we know that I had captured one of them?”
Ryan shook his head. “Maybe he read it in the paper.”
James shrugged. “That’d be kind of hard to do. We never publicly announced the capture. It wasn’t in the paper or on any public medium.”
Ryan took his hand off of his gun. “Maybe Governor Smith told him.”
James nodded. “Maybe. And the only reason Governor Smith knows is because he’s one of them.” He paused and let that sink in. “So, either the good General is one of them also, or else he’s sympathizing with them. Or he’s being manipulated by them into doing what they want. In any event, you can’t follow his orders.”
Ryan shook his head. “Damn you.” He thought for a minute. “If he’s not truly subverted, then I’m going to be in a world of trouble when this is over.”
Wednesday, November 19th
Lieutenant Vasquez and Dr. Kosnick burst into the science lab. “Colonel, I believe we can identify who is an alien,” Vasquez said before coming to parade rest. Dr. Kosnick looked at him quizzically and put her hands in her pockets.
James and John exchanged surprised glances. “That’s excellent news, Lieutenant,” the Colonel said. “How?”
“Well, sir, I was going over the recordings of the comm chatter from our battle,” Vasquez explained.
“And then I had the idea to run the recording through a wide spectrum equalizer to break out the individual frequencies in order to look for any irregularities,” Kosnick added.
“Well, it was my idea, but I wasn’t sure how to do it,” Vasquez said.
“Enough!” Ryan said. “How do we tell?”
Vasquez and Kosnick looked at each other and then said, in unison, “a custom receiver.”
“We know that the robots are communicating wirelessly,” Vasquez pointed out.
“And anything that is communicating by wireless signal must have a way to get those messages,” Dr. Kosnick added.
“So we figured if the robots could be receiving the signal wirelessly, then it must be something on the EM spectrum,” Vasquez said.
Kosnick smiled. “And from there, it was a simple matter of running the recording audio samples through multiple filters in order to hear something that wasn’t audible before.”
Lieutenant Vasquez produced a small audio recorder and pressed play. A strange, throbbing hum filled the air. Vasquez turned it off.
“That sound,” Kosnick explained, “is well above the threshold for human hearing. We can’t hear it with our normal ears – kind of like a dog whistle – so we’ve transposed it down into a lower frequency that we can hear.”
“And what’s more,” Vasquez said, “they’re using a signal we can detect to transmit it.”
Ryan blinked. “A regular radio signal?”
“Not quite,” Kosnick clarified. “It’s essentially the same in principle, but on a much different wavelength. We have devices that can produce and capture this frequency, but it’s not a frequency that’s commonly used.”
“So,” Ranger Hutchinson asked, “the idea is to build a receiver and then wave it around in front of people?”
Kosnick smiled excitedly. “Yes! If the receiver gets a signal, then the person is a robot and is transmitting a signal.”
“That’s excellent,” Ryan said. “When can you get started? How long before we have a working prototype?”
Vasquez shrugged. “Based on the equipment here at the school, we can probably build a couple of units in a few hours.”
“Great, get on it,” Ryan said.
“Hold on a second,” James interrupted. “So this receiver, what’s the range on it?”
“Depends on how strong the transmission signal is
,” Vasquez said.
“And how can you tell that the transmission is actually coming from that particular person and not some interference?” James asked.
Kosnick answered. “Easy, each receiver will be fitted with a directionality sensor. If we use three receivers together it should be able to confirm if the signal is originating from in between the three receivers, or outside of it.”
James nodded. “Fair enough. I just want to avoid a witch hunt here. But here’s another question, what if the robots just turn off their transmitters?”
Vasquez and Kosnick looked at each other and shrugged. “They can’t do that,” Vasquez said.
“At least, we don’t think they can do that,” Kosnick offered.
Colonel Ryan had an idea. “If there are a lot of these robots in close proximity would the signal be stronger?”
“Hypothetically, yes,” Kosnick said.
“So could we use this to track the location of their bigger groups?”
“It’s hypothetically possible, sir,” Vasquez said.
“Good, get on it,” Ryan ordered. He turned to Hutchinson as the other men walked out. “Finally, something is going right.”
Captain Thompson came into the room. “Colonel, I have something I think you’re going to want to see.”
John looked at James. “Maybe I spoke too soon.” He turned to address the captain. “Good news, I hope?”
Thompson shook his head. “Afraid not, sir.” He walked over to a computer and pulled up some files. “I’ve been monitoring the work of Lt. Vasquez and his team. Once they identified the frequency I started listening to the recordings and I paid attention to the actual pattern embedded within. I figure that if they are using this to communicate it probably has to be some kind of code or language, and there might be a way to decipher it.”
“That seems logical. Have you had any success?” Colonel Ryan asked.
“In deciphering the actual message itself, not really. We’ve been able to determine that it’s based off of a base 6, or senary, numbering system. We’re still trying to work out the specifics of what it all means,” Thompson explained.
“Then I assume that you have something else to report?”
Thompson nodded and pulled up a map. “Since I don’t know what the language says yet, I thought it might be helpful to run a query of transmission traffic to look for embedded instances of base 6 communications. It’s not one that is very common at all.”
Thompson adjusted the screen and a light pinged at Jackson, Mississippi.
“That’s the state capital,” Hutchinson observed. “Governor Smith’s office, like I said.”
“There’s more,” Thompson said as he adjusted the map. Red lines shot out from Jackson in multiple directions. Within moments red lines crisscrossed over much of the United States. “There’s a communication going here…” Thompson said, zooming the map in on Fort Campbell.
Colonel Ryan looked at James, who nodded.
“And there’s a line going here…” Thompson said, zooming in on the Pentagon. “…and another going here,” he said as the map zoomed over to the capital building.
“Congress and the senate both?” John Ryan was dumbfounded.
“And also here,” Thompson said. The map zoomed in on the White House.
“The President?” James asked.
Thompson shrugged. “If not the president, then someone in the White House staff at least. It could be anyone.” He zoomed the map out to show a view of the world. Red lines shot out from the White House and spread around the world to capital cities in many other countries; Russia, China, Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Finland, Sweden, Ukraine, Belarus, France, Germany, England, Spain, India, and Iran.
“Wait, the lines are going to more countries than there were impacts,” James observed.
“Yes, they’re spreading. It looks like they are taking over key offices in the governments of the world. At least the major governments anyway.”
“Damn,” Ryan blurted out. “This is a classic invasion strategy. If they have imposters in the major offices they can easily order the troops to stand down and let the invaders in.”
“That’s probably been their plan all along,” James said.
Ryan pointed at the map. “How certain are you that this is correct?”
Thompson shrugged. “95%? We’re watching this in real-time, by the way.”
“How are they sending this message?” James asked.
“There are a lot of computers that are running a program I’ve seen before, sending the signals over the internet,” Thompson said.
James nodded. “I’ve seen that before.”
“And we have no idea what they are saying?” Ryan asked.
“Not enough to be useful. It looks like their language is number-based, but we still haven’t cracked the code. It’s complicated and will probably take us a while,” Thompson said.
“How long?” the colonel demanded.
“Honestly, sir, I have no idea.” Thompson shook his head. “It could be hours or it could be years. I couldn’t even begin to guess. This is a totally foreign language here. Once we make a breakthrough the rest will fall into place, but we still have to find that first piece of understanding.”
“I hate all of this not knowing,” Ryan said.
James stared at the screen. “Can you put the code up visually? I’d like to take a look at it.”
“Sure,” Thompson said as he displayed the code.
James sat down on a terminal and stared at the code, lost in thought.
The door burst open again and Vasquez and Dr. Kosnick ran in. “Sir, I think we know how to beat them,” Vasquez said.
“One of their biggest advantages is their limited hive mind ability. It allows them to communicate and share information almost as fast as they think it,” Dr. Kosnick explained.
“And,” Vasquez continued, “The way they are able to achieve this is through wireless communication.
“I follow,” Colonel Ryan said.
Dr. Kosnick smiled. “All wireless communication has limitations. For one, it needs good signal strength. And for two, it needs good signal clarity.”
Vasquez took over. “The idea then, is to take that ability away from them.”
“How so?” Colonel Ryan asked. “Are you saying that you can stop them from transmitting?”
They both shook their heads. “No, not at all,” Vasquez said. “But we can interrupt their ability to receive the message.”
Colonel Ryan cocked his head. “We don’t understand their language.”
“And we don’t have to,” Dr. Kosnick explained further. “Imagine for a moment that you are in a room talking to your officers when someone outside starts blaring Metallica through a hundred megaphones.”
The look of realization spread across the Colonel’s face suddenly. “And you’re saying that you can make this interrupter?”
“Yes, quite easily, actually. We can build it onto a trailer and tow it into battle. Any robots nearby wouldn’t be able to communicate with each other,” Vasquez explained.
Thompson interjected from his computer. “But that still doesn’t do anything about the fact that they are physically stronger and resistant to our weapons.”
“Actually,” Kosnick explained. “We may have a solution for that too. Being essentially giant computers, they would be especially prone to intense blasts of EMPS.”
“We can’t go around dropping nukes on people,” Thompson pointed out.
“No, and we’ve been trying to figure out how to build some small EMP generators. Once we can do that, it should be pretty easy,” Vasquez said.
Colonel Ryan shook his head. “You may not have to. There are some prototype EMP rifles nearby that we could commandeer. They were originally developed for shooting down UAVs and UCAVs, but I imagine they would work equally well here.”
“Well,” James said, typing on the keyboard. “I’d suggest you hurry. I’ve cracked their language code, and what they�
��re talking about isn’t good news.”
The others were stunned into silence at James’ admission. “How in the world did you crack a base-6 alien language so quickly?” Vasquez demanded.
James shrugged. “I don’t know. I used to break all kinds of codes as a kid. It was fun. I guess I had practice?” James said, not really sure he believed it himself.
Dr. Kosnick shook her head furiously. “No, no. It’s not even close. That doesn’t make sense. You shouldn’t have been able to do this.”
James shrugged. “I can’t explain it, but I’m pretty sure that I cracked it.”
Colonel Ryan walked up the computer and looked over James’ shoulder. “How can you be so sure?”
“Because, this message actually makes sense. The odds of me cracking the code with a different algorithm that also makes sense but isn’t actually right is so remotely improbable that it really shouldn’t be considered at all,” James said.
Dr. Kosnick shrugged and nodded. “Well, he’s right about that. The odds of two different sets of decryption methods working and giving messages that make sense is astronomical.”
“Well, Ranger,” Colonel Ryan said, “what does the message say?”
James put the screen up on the main display so that they could read the message as it decoded in real time.
Main areas secure. Seeding Complete. Checksum Protocols Initiated. Commence Download.
Everyone stared blankly at the screen. Colonel Ryan shook his head. “I thought you said that this makes sense?”
Lieutenant Vasquez stepped in. “It does, sir. It actually does make sense. If I’m understanding this, their impact sites are the main areas. The seeding they are talking about, I think, is referring to propagating themselves as humans.”
Dr. Kosnick chimed in. “In which case the Checksum Protocols would be the systematic elimination of all non-robot entities; those who fail to pass the check.”
“And the Download?” Ryan asked.
“Invasion,” James explained.
“We have got to get our hands on those weapons,” Ryan declared.
Thursday, November 20th
“Okay, here’s how this has to play out,” Colonel Ryan said as he briefed the command staff. “We’ve been declared rogue agents by the military command at Fort Campbell, and they will be looking to arrest us. They have already sent out orders to bar us access to all military bases. We don’t have time to try to talk our way into the gates, but we desperately need those EMP Rifles.”
