Terminal Reset Omnibus: The Coming of The Wave

by A. E. Williams

  Golovanov operated some control switches to arm his non-nuclear test cruise missile, the Kh-101. His aircraft also was carrying the nuclear version, the Kh-102, but the necessary arming codes had not been communicated to any one officer on the flight crew. Instead, there was a four-phase challenge and response procedure that would ultimately arm the device. Major Golovanov held only one-quarter of the needed codes. His co-pilot held another quarter, with the navigator holding a code that would combine with the others to decrypt the master computer commands. Once given, this machine spat out a series of complex numbers that would enable the arming for the missile. Entered in sequence, this then was corroborated by a series of other onboard computers within the missile itself that were encoded into the EEPROM of its motherboard and CPU. A final verification code was sent to the missile by a small transponder that only activated after another sequence of commands were entered by Major Golovonov.

  The mission was to launch the Kh-101 conventional missile as part of a test of the Zvezda particle beam weapon. The process to launch it was identical to the nuclear version, but the codes used were different.

  Since 1977, the Russian’s had taken the lead in energy and phased-wave weaponry. The aborted Star Wars Initiative that began under President Ronald Reagan in the United States was a weak attempt to force the Russians into showing their hand to the rest of the world.

  While the US made some inroads regarding lasers and phased-array battery masers, the Russians concentrated on charged particles, Tesla coil, and static electricity systems, and finally had mastered the ability to produce heterodyned ray projectors.

  This energy cannon did not require the tracking devices and precision that the US lasers did. A target hit by a laser had many ways to defend itself, from ablative surface materials, liquid nitrogen gasification deployment mechanisms, mirrored skins, and finally sheer electromagnetic warfare techniques. A target that was hit with the plasma cannon merely vaporized.

  On this test, the parameters included a low-level release of the cruise missile, which would mask the Kh-101 from radar. A modified propellant was being used, along with a novel exhaust system that cooled the outgoing gases to a range where satellite-based imaging would be confused into thinking the missile was a commercial aircraft, with a normal contrail profile.

  Major Golovonov frowned again at his co-pilot, who seemed to be having some difficulty in completing his portion of the code entry. The co-pilot, Alexi Kronov, was intimately familiar with the procedure, and was double-checking the code to assure it was the correct one. This extra step angered Golovonov, primarily because they were burning a considerable amount of their fuel. The Blackjack was in Nap-of-the-Earth mode, and flying supersonic. This profile would exhaust their supply of fuel in fifteen point three-three seconds, according to experience. Every second wasted in confirming the launch codes put them in a less favorable position to reach the next waypoint.

  Golovonov growled and Kronov shrugged. The co-pilot entered the code, and Golovonov glared at the HUD in front of him. Immediately, four red luminous bars appeared, and he grunted satisfaction. The missile launched as he released the control bar and sped away from his Tu-160. He put the aircraft into a sharp bank, and at 180 degrees from the direction the missile had left, he threw the plane into an inverted attitude and slowed the engines to seventy-two percent power. Now, relaxed, he knew they could attain the second waypoint with fuel to spare, and within normal operational parameters. He lit a cigarette. When the co-pilot looked at him as though he might ask for one as well, Golovonov growled at him. “You think you deserve a reward for that shit performance, Alexi? Boris had already entered all of his code except the last digits and his response time was far faster than yours! No soup for you!” he shouted. Alexi looked momentarily confused, then shrugged again, and went back to monitoring the telemetry for the missile’s flight.

  He laughed to himself at the absurdity of his last sentence. Alexi had no idea of who Jerry Seinfeld was.

  *****

  SOMEWHERE TWO MILES BELOW THE SURFACE OF THE PACIFIC OCEAN –

  The Captain opened the safe in his stateroom and removed an envelope. Inside, there was a small USB drive, of the Ironkey model. It was made of a polished stainless steel alloy, and there was a little green LED light on top. He closed the safe, spun the combination lock, and pressed five numbers on the door that armed the RDX explosives that would destroy the safe, and sink the submarine if it were not opened correctly.

  He always thought that this was a bit insane, putting a live explosive charge next to the inner hull of a nuclear-powered submarine, but then again, he lived inside a long, cramped metal tube that traveled under 3,000 feet of ocean, more or less, for nine months of every year.

  The Captain inserted the Ironkey into his desk-mounted computer console and activated the number three USB port by pressing in a code, that was his daughter’s age, his wife’s age, and a number transmitted to a SecureID fob he had on a black aluminum carabiner that threaded through a belt loop.

  The Ironkey prompted the Captain for its own code. He typed in the name of his favorite Beatle’s tune. A slight smile appeared for a minute as he laughed at an internal joke he always made to himself about that song. The computer whirred for a moment, and then he clicked a few times with his fingers on the screen.

  What came up was this:

  - A map.

  - A code word.

  When he read the code word, he swore out loud.

  - A track for his course.

  - A picture of something he had never seen before in his entire forty-six years.

  He began to read his orders. There was a particular set of instructions.

  - Another code word.

  The Captain read the instructions, leaning in and removed his glasses. He carefully wiped them with a microfiber cloth, and then positioned them back on the bridge of his nose. He read the instructions again, to be sure.

  “Fuck” was all he could say.

  "I used to think information was destroyed in a black hole.”

  -- Stephen Hawking

  Chapter Three

  During the millions of years that The Black Galaxy worked its bizarre magic on our Universe, certain events unfolded on Earth. These events would be of vast import to the life on the newly formed planet, causing huge changes in the biosphere, but would leave scant evidence of their causes.

  Humanity eventually had evolved sufficiently to begin to uncover information regarding past events. The study of ancient life, paleontology, was born. Archaeologists, paleontologists, and evolutionary biologists came to index and catalog a vast array of life forms that had left fossil records in the sediments and rocks, which could be found by digging in the ancient riverbeds and canyons of the Earth. An enormous number of species were discovered, and theories that suggested a logical evolution of life from single-celled to complex animals were proposed. During the course of over a hundred years of scientific investigation and discoveries, an alarming fact became apparent – at intervals of time throughout the past, huge gaps appeared or species disappeared.

  All over the planet, evidence of life flourishing and then suddenly dying off was there. Many theories were advanced to account for the extinctions, and studies undertaken that proposed disease, volcanic influences, or even extra-terrestrial objects impacting the Earth.

  It had been suggested by many scholars that these extinction events occurred periodically, within an interval of 26 to 30 million years. (Some variance in this pattern allowed for an episode every 62 million years, which coincided nicely with the disappearance of the life forms in the Aptian stage of the geological time scale.)

  Attempts to understand these events even proposed the presence of a hypothetical companion star to the sun, oscillations in the galactic plane, or passage through the Milky Way's spiral arms. However, it had been shown that the data on marine mass extinctions did not support the idea that they were predictably periodic, or that Terran ecosystems gradually build up to a
point at which a mass extinction is inevitable. Observations from the Mars rovers and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter provided additional data that correlated that these extinction events were not likely the event of currently understood physical mechanisms. (Many of the reports regarding this information on the Mars discoveries were suppressed by NASA and JPL, but still remained under study by the SPARTACUS divisions.)

  Space exploration with telescopes and later robotic exploration vessels bolstered the idea of large objects such as asteroids, comets or fragmented moons that might account for the extinction events. But, these presupposed the trajectory for multiple objects, often over spans of millions of years, was similar enough, and targeted enough on Earth to produce these effects.

  Scientists began to find this line of reasoning increasingly suspect once the actual nature of the expanding Universe and the vastness of space were understood. Ordinary physics could handily dispense with packs of rogue asteroids impacting the Moon and Earth simultaneously. The evidence that the impacts did indeed occur in the distant past could be seen in any photograph of the lunar surface.

  But, it precluded similar impacts on Earth from being deleterious to life for the same reasons: significant impacts would have completely extinguished all known life forms. A cataclysmic event of the magnitude required for a mass extinction would in all likelihood produce total collapse of biospheres, the ecological and atmospheric effects would not allow for aerobic parthenogenesis, and temperature variations would extinguish anaerobic processes because of energy-state instability.

  Even deep-water oceanic processes would be most likely affected since an impact of that magnitude would likely create abyssal and littoral effects orders of magnitude greater than usual. These mega tsunamis, super-volcanic eruptions, and other chemical adsorption processes would create a gigantic soup of carbon dioxide, sulfur, and nitrous oxides under which life would not be able to survive. Some other researchers and bio-historians felt there was strong evidence supporting periodicity in a variety of records, with additional proof in the form of coincident periodic variation in non-biological geochemical variables.

  They were all wrong, of course.

  *****

  During a time coinciding with the Black Galaxy’s imminent collapse, unusual perturbations in the space-time continuum led to streamers of dark energy and other arcane constructs that were common in that cursed area to sheer through the reality of our Universe, sometimes emerging near our Solar System.

  One such incursion blew apart the planet that had been forming between Jupiter and Mars, forming the asteroid belts. Another, infinitely smaller one had blown four of Saturn’s moons into dust, leaving the proto-material that became its rings. One actually took Pluto from a star system literally across the cosmos and deposited it into its current eccentric orbit.

  These incidents occurred over the lifespan of the Black Galaxy, but some found a conduit, where, much like terrestrial lightning, there may have been only a small chance for a second strike, but there was indeed a chance. Given the immense number of years in which they had to work, the streamers would inevitably find this crack in the space-time fabric, and snake their way back towards the Milky Way Galaxy. Many times, the insane and abnormal conditions were not able to complete a connection.

  On five distinct occasions, the outpouring of these forces managed to bathe the region of the Milky Way where the Solar System lay with their weird energies.

  For scientists that studied these events, the geologic and fossil evidence bore out that some huge occurrence had wiped out 98% of Earth’s known life forms during the Permian extinction event. Other events approached similar loss of life. Scientists created theories for these events suggesting that the possible causes, supported by strong evidence, indicated a sequence of catastrophes. They proposed that the Siberian Traps eruptions, occurring near coal beds and the continental shelf, triggered immense releases of carbon dioxide and methane, causing massive emissions of hydrogen sulfide.

  Mankind has often wondered why no other life forms seem to be prevalent within detectable distances from Earth. Many scientists have pondered why if life should be common, (at least according to the precepts and mathematics of the Drake equation) we did not come into some form of contact with extraterrestrials? Even given the limitations of biological life forms, would not some artificial satellite or probe be prone to encounter our planet?

  The why of this was subject again to much conjecture, but the simple fact was that the Black Galaxy, over millions of years, had been systematically sterilizing vast areas of space with the erratic outbursts of dark energies, wormhole propagation and disruptive reorganization of the Einsteinian Universe.

  Evidence of it having done this could be produced mathematically, but only in the sense that Unified Theory could not be explained adequately unless certain ‘fudge factor’ numbers and equations were used. It did not readily occur to the scientists and mathematicians who sought answers to these cosmological constants that the reason they could not be found was because, although they had at one time existed, they were not in our Universe any longer.

  Thus, Einstein again was correct, in that his understanding of the Relativistic Universe worked as it did because of the mathematics supporting such structure. He just did not consider that the Universe had been dealing cards from the bottom and that the Joker in the deck, the Black Galaxy, had been removed.

  God, indeed did not play dice with the Universe. He had been playing poker.

  The vast prehistoric extinction events that wiped out almost all life on Earth that had been documented by Sepkoski and Raup in their landmark 1982 paper for the Science periodical surmised that these were recorded at least partially by marine sediment records. But, such records could not disclose that their formation had been by exposure to the Lovecraftian Black Galaxy energies.

  "I have noticed even people who claim everything is predestined, and that we can do nothing to change it, look before they cross the road."

  -- Stephen Hawking

  "No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new."

  -- Steve Jobs

  Chapter Four

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  The President of the United States and his Cabinet sat listening to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. They were in a large room, secure and buried deep under the White House, where the President would likely go if he could not be safely removed from any local dangers. The air conditioning whirred and a few vents blew drafts of cold air that disturbed the smoke being exhaled from almost everyone present. Ironically, here in this safest of places, old, dangerous habits died hard. The President picked up his cigarette, drew upon it deeply, and the tip glowed bright orange. He blew a few precise smoke rings, which the air vents immediately set about to rip apart into gossamer filaments. The men eyed the monitors that showed the latest telemetry and optical observations being made of the incoming phenomena. They showed a strange waveform, shaped much like a tsunami, but with streamers that would shoot out at odd angles, and then vanish.

  Much like coronal ejecta, these streamers seemed immense in size but disappeared far faster than would seem feasible when subjected to relativistic understanding of light and radiation propagation in Einsteinian space-time. A team of the JPL experts had managed to execute this miracle of visibility by first adjusting the Fast Fourier Transform algorithms in the sophisticated software packages of the Hubble, and redirecting its trajectory. The first glimmers of The Wave were being seen.

  False coloration added by NASA scientists assisted in the JPL engineer’s calculations about the measurable characteristics of The Wave. Additional attempts to use radio telescopes and the Arecibo Observatory, combined with the Keck Observatory’s Near Infrared Camera 3,
(which is used for studying the forces of galactic formation and evolution, proto-galaxies and quasar environments) provided the first indications that they were on the right track.

  By modifying pre-existing parameters used for the observations of the Galactic center, analysis of proto-planets, and stratification of high-mass star-forming regions in the software, and inducing regression feedback branch functions, the scientists and engineers were able to reproduce an approximate simulation of the conditions found in the sensors of CPNS-4. Although it did not accurately define The Wave in the same resolution, it was able to make portions of it visible.

  What the President and his advisors were looking at on screen was the projection and path of The Wave, and coupled with that, near-real time optical telescope images of the planet Jupiter. Since entering the Solar System, The Wave was being constantly watched by all manner of instruments, where such measurements could be attempted. Someone had the bright idea of using optical and radio telescope information, and existing deep-space satellites to watch for effects of The Wave impacting other planetary bodies such as Neptune, Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars.

  Pluto was too far off the path, being on the lowest side of its orbit relative to the ecliptic, and would actually be the last Sol object affected. Uranus was an unknown quantity, and no space-borne observation platforms could be made ready to take measurements in time.

  Another idea had borne fruit when an engineer thought about utilizing the capabilities of the Kepler spacecraft, which was currently crippled by reaction wheel malfunctions. After some rapid calculations, a series of classified phone calls were made to the appropriate NASA and JPL project managers by DoD leaders. They were told that their future efforts would be funded for a period not to exceed five years, provided they could meet the deadlines and make the necessary modifications to Kepler’s attitude, and orbit. The project managers conferred briefly and decided they were able to accommodate the Department of Defense. The cost would be close to $1 billion US dollars.