Voyager

by Carl Rackman

  Children and babies wailed, and the general aura of tension did not help Matt’s mood one bit. He had a lump in the pit of his stomach – a constant nag of stress.

  He breathed again to calm his creeping anxiety; he wasn’t sure how his contact would make themselves known. He decided to sit in a corner seat next to a bearded man of Middle-Eastern appearance.

  Out of habit, Matt retrieved his e-reader and began to read. The words just sat on the screen, a meaningless jumble of shapes, which his nervous brain decided not to decipher. He was becoming stressed.

  His phone suddenly buzzed. He kept it on vibrate to avoid the attention of CBP officers because phone use was strictly prohibited until after immigration. He surreptitiously slipped it from inside his jacket pocket and glanced at the screen.

  It’s Bill. Where are you?

  Matt looked up quickly before writing his reply.

  I’m in reception by the second entrance. Where are you?

  Matt tucked the slim phone behind his e-reader and continued to browse. The man next to him looked on curiously. The phone buzzed again.

  Why are you by the second entrance? I’m outside in main reception with the others.

  Matt felt a cold flush in his guts.

  Sam said you would meet me at the SECONDARY entrance.

  He emphasised ‘secondary’ to make sure there was no doubt where he was. He decided to elaborate.

  They’re asking for ID, but Sam said I wouldn’t need any—

  Just then, he was aware of a shadow next to him. He looked up at the grizzled face of a mature but alert CBP agent.

  “Sir, you need to switch off the phone.”

  “Of course.” He went to shut off the screen, but the phone buzzed again. He had to look.

  “Sir, switch it off or I’ll have to ask you to come with me.”

  “Okay, I’m doing it.” He pressed the switch and briefly caught a glimpse of the message preview before it blanked.

  You have no ID? What are you—

  The CBP guy took a step back and moved a hand to rest on his holster. “Sir, stand up and let me see your hands.”

  Crap. This was getting serious. Matt did exactly as he was told and stood up slowly with his hands up. His heart was beating fast. The e-reader dropped from his lap. Matt didn’t move to retrieve it.

  The grizzly CBP guy spoke code into his radio, and Matt heard the buzz of a door release nearby after which two more men came out into the small waiting area.

  Matt felt the phone vibrating in his jacket pocket again.

  The new, younger CBP man wore a baseball cap covering his buzz cut, white-walled hair. The hard, blue eyes fixed on Matt’s from under the peak were not friendly. “Sir, you need to accompany us. Are these yours?” He indicated Matt’s flight bag and dropped Kindle.

  Matt nodded. “Yes, sir.”

  “Pick them up and follow us, please.”

  Matt slowly and carefully placed the e-reader back into his bag which he then picked up, keeping his hands open and in view at all times. He hoped the border guards weren’t as jumpy as he was right now.

  They stood on each side slightly behind him.

  Matt followed Buzz Cut through the door as he swiped them through. They entered a fluorescent-lit corridor with low ceilings and anonymous grey doors down both sides. The carpet was cheap government issue; Matt could feel the static building up in his polyester uniform as his feet scraped.

  Buzz Cut swiped his pass at one of the grey doors and opened it to a small room, or it could have been a cell. There was a plain table and three plastic chairs with tubular steel legs, a camera in the corner, and a glass mirror on the wall.

  Matt knew in an instant this was an ‘interview room’, but this was unlikely to be as benign as a simple interview.

  “Take a seat, sir.”

  Grizzly took up position, blocking the door, while Buzz Cut sat down opposite Matt on the other side of the table. The third guy presumably was watching from behind the mirror.

  Matt took a deep breath. He could play this as the dumb tourist – bluff his way out of the cell, pay his fine and go to the hotel – or he could play the anti-interrogation game and remain silent.

  It was a gamble either way, but right now the confusion of the conflicting phone messages was draining his resolve. The question was how lucky he felt. Had he not received the alarming messages he would have bluffed his way out with ease. But the threat of being alone made him uneasy. The butterflies leapt in his stomach, but he forced himself to stay calm.

  Buzz Cut began his interrogation. “Name?”

  Matt didn’t hesitate. “Matthew Ramprakash.”

  “You’re a pilot?”

  Well, duh. “Yes, sir.”

  “British?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you have any ID?”

  Matt raised a hand before moving for his jacket pocket. He took out his expired passport with a valid US visa prominent among the proffered pages. It was not uncommon in the airline fraternity for passports and visas to have overlapping validity periods. It provided Matt with a plausible excuse for not having his passport with him.

  “I haven’t been to the States for a while. I must have just picked up the old one with the visa in it.”

  Buzz Cut ignored him and shuffled through to the visa page. He gave Matt’s face a hard, professional look a few times as he scrutinised it. “Why are you trying to enter the United States?”

  It was the unexpected question designed to throw him. Matt played it back easily. “Well, I’m working. I just managed to forget—”

  “Where’s the SD card?”

  Matt stumbled. “What SD card?” Then he kicked himself a million times. The correct answer should have been ‘stunned silence followed by a bewildered “What are you talking about?”’ He had walked into it like an amateur.

  Buzz Cut just smiled, thinly. “You might save us all a lot of time if you just give it to us now.”

  Matt’s throat constricted. From his last bunch of texts, he was reasonably sure these CBP officers were not the intended recipient of the SD card – yet they knew all about it. He felt deeply conflicted, so he elected to remain silent. It was too late to play the dumb card.

  Buzz Cut continued, “Little thing like that, I guess you might hide it anywhere, huh?” He gave Matt a grim look. “But we’ve got time. I guess we can look everywhere.” His hard eyes fixed on Matt’s, which flicked down involuntarily.

  He was now in full evasion mode and dangerously exposed. Silence was his only defence unless help was coming.

  Whoever Bill was, Matt hoped to God he would work out what was wrong and get involved soon.

  Chapter Seven

  Monday, 5th September 2016

  Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Building 600

  It was almost 4:00 p.m. in the Mission Control Center in Building 600. Miraculously, all the data had been transmitted back from the DSN listening posts. The network had performed wonders freeing up both of its huge 74-metre dishes, one in Canberra, Australia, and the other much closer at Goldstone in California. It had been an almost clean take – an incredible feat considering the video feed downlink had never been attempted from such an enormous distance.

  Perhaps twenty-five personnel, the bulk of the science team on the VIM, were gathered. Thirty years ago there were over sixty; now most of the science team themselves were over sixty.

  There had been much backslapping and self-congratulation among the comms team; Brymon was enjoying the adulation of his colleagues for the first time in a while. He was practically strutting around the Control Center and simulating modesty at the refrains of “Good job, Morris” as he passed each desk.

  But Callie’s special thanks were directed to Schlitzky’s imaging team. They had found the imaging hardware stashed in a storage dump near the defunct Building 312. It was like finding a needle in a haystack when you weren’t even sure there was a haystack. The team had done its Voyager heritage proud.

  Cal
lie felt the IT guys deserved a special mention as well. They had dredged through thousands of lines of code over the weekend trying to iron out the ancient software for processing.

  She advised AD Trask of the current situation. Although he had asked for updates, he hadn’t made his way down to Woodbury – either a sign he wasn’t too concerned or his mind was already made up.

  The deputy manager of the Science Directorate, Vernon Galvin, had made it and was standing next to Callie. A balding, professorial-type cut from the same cloth as the engineers, he was fussy, precise and not the best at hearing other people’s problems when he regarded them as beneath his own.

  “What are we expecting, Callie? Is this going to be a newsworthy thing?” Galvin was nervous. He didn’t like the unpredictable, and Voyager’s antics were clearly unnerving him.

  Callie decided to keep the media people away. Despite the good news over the weekend, there was potential for embarrassment to the program exactly when the program didn’t need it.

  “I think it’s best if we review the data within the team and if there’s anything worth sharing, we’ll do it in a controlled manner through the PR department,” she answered.

  “What can we expect?”

  “Honestly – I don’t know. It’s hard to imagine it’ll be anything but a black void. There’s literally nothing out there but Voyager.”

  “So what would the camera focus on?”

  “It needs to be programmed with co-ordinates from our control center. It has a surprisingly large focal range and two imaging systems. It will pick up any large or bright object within its visual field, as long as it knows where to look. We don’t have any record of the signals sent to Voyager One, so as far as we know it was shooting blind.”

  “So we could have blown a lot of time, effort and budget on twelve black frames?”

  “Well, that’s a very subjective way of looking at what we’re doing here. If Voyager is malfunctioning, we need to know why. The cameras were switched off to save battery power; Voyager should be able to function into 2025. If the cameras are going to continue to record and downlink, it could knock years off Voyager’s useful life.”

  Galvin shrugged. “If it’s not going to stop climate change, Callie, then Voyager better have some tricks up its sleeve. The fiscal realities of the program are such that I’m not sure we can afford a bunch of blank frames.”

  “Sure, Vern.” Callie was irritated. She hoped Voyager would deliver HD frames of Superman or the Starship Enterprise just to set the bureaucrats and bean counters running for cover. Some chance.

  Mercifully, Schlitzky called her over at that moment. “Callie, the decoders are processing the data, but I don’t know how well they’re doing. I think the compression ratio is too great.”

  Callie’s shoulders slumped in dismay. “What’s happening with the data?”

  “It’s processing, but we’re just getting line after line of zero contrast.”

  Blank frames. “Let it run.” Despite the disappointment, Callie felt the same deep sense of anticipation as if there was more to come. Twelve frames. Give us something. Save the program.

  It took about thirty minutes to process each frame on the old computers. First the raw data would be processed, producing a grainy, barely discernible monochrome image. Once each image had loaded, the image intensifiers would run several enhancements until the picture showed the final representation of what Voyager’s camera had captured twelve billion miles away in deep space. Back in the day, Voyager sent fifteen thousand frames of Saturn back to JPL; the image processing had taken weeks.

  The team waited trying to remain calm and not despondent as each frame came up blank. The latest one showed a faint star field in the background, which suggested the images were being faithfully reproduced.

  By 6:15 p.m. even Callie was dispirited. After the time and expense of the downlink, the excitement and frenzied activity she had driven looked like being a bust. It was her first truly bad call since she took over the programme, and it had come at possibly the worst time. She didn’t like the feeling.

  She berated herself for overreacting. She should have known that in the black void of outer space the signals were simply anomalous whispers on the ether; glitches in an ageing machine that had been exposed to the most extreme conditions any human-made object had ever endured. She let out a sigh that Galvin heard.

  She might have remained despondent if she hadn’t received the mystery messages. Whoever sent them knew about the interfering signals and seemed to know what was going on with the imaging anomalies.

  Trask had not seemed overly concerned about them. JPL security were still working through the sources and surveillance; as yet they had not found anything they wanted to share with her.

  “Hey, look at this!” Schlitzky’s exclamation pulled every eye in the room towards his tiny eleven-inch monitor.

  Callie pressed in, leaning on the back of his chair as other techs crowded in on each side.

  There was no interface on the ancient monitor to pipe out to the big screen overhead, so everybody had to crowd in or simply wait their turn.

  The lights in the control centre were dimmed. The image on the screen was a bright square – the venerable CRT emitting light so that the darkest colours were dark grey at best.

  Despite these deficiencies, Callie could see a faint strip of brightness beginning to resolve from the image as it scrolled slowly, line by line, down the screen. It appeared as a single white line running diagonally across the middle of the screen occupying the dead centre of the image. There was a sudden hush in the room; the only noise was the hum of equipment and air conditioning.

  Callie watched, transfixed, as the image enhancers began to improve each line of the picture. The light source became a solid diagonal of white light thicker in the middle and fading at each end, much like the disappearing corona of the sun around a lunar eclipse.

  Someone chose to speak. “What is that? A comet?”

  Another scientist answered with a groan, “A comet tail, outside the solar system? Give me a break!”

  Callie spoke before any more speculation began. “Quiet, people. Let’s wait for the full data set. How many more, Leon?”

  Schlitzky was rapt in front of the screen. “Ah, that’s frame seven. Five more.”

  Nobody edged away as Schlitzky commanded the next image decode. The process began. The screen blanked before slowly building the image again.

  As they watched, the image resolved into the same diagonal light but with another appearing slowly alongside; the two lines met in a point at the left of the picture forming a V-shape. As the image built in resolution, they realised they were looking at something extraordinary. The lights could not be refractions, for the sun was virtually indistinguishable from any other star at the distance Voyager was travelling. The lines could only be artefacts from image processing, or light sources themselves. An impossible situation.

  “Looks like some artefacts – sorry, everyone, it looks like the imaging still has many glitches even though we captured almost all of the data. Not that there would be anything to see, really.” Schlitzky was calm and apologetic.

  The tension in the room lifted slightly.

  After the image finished processing, Callie could see a clean ‘V’ at the centre. She’d never seen artefacts form regular shapes like that, but neither she nor anyone in the room wanted to point that out – such was the power of peer pressure when half the room had PhDs.

  “Four left.” Schlitzky tapped the keys on the rattly, oversized keyboard again. There was another loud beep, more commands, and then the next picture began to scroll slowly down the screen.

  There was a sharp intake of breath from somewhere on Callie’s left. The same regular V of light was beginning to resolve, but the perspective had changed. The point of the V was now almost directly top centre of the image. It looked like an ‘A’ or delta-Δ.

  “That’s strange.” Even Schlitzky was rattled.

  C
allie felt Jerry Pascoe lean forward to her immediate right. His moustached face pushed into her peripheral vision, but she remained glued to the screen. Her gut was clenched and the butterflies were leaping. Her heart was accepting what her mind would not, could not.

  “What are we looking at, Leon?” said Ortiz, his voice pitched a tone higher than usual.

  “Uh, I’m not sure, but I wouldn’t read anything into this until we’ve had the images analysed properly up at the Lab.”

  Callie watched the image become sharper. Though monochrome, it was clear there was something in the image; the two white lines were attached to a structure, something solid, its shape a shade darker than the star field surrounding it.

  As the minutes ticked slowly by, the image shimmered as each line built up. It was obvious the deep star field was obscured by whatever was in the image: a black isosceles triangle with lit edges.

  Callie suddenly felt a flush of anger. This was no moment of wonder; they had been hacked. The sense of betrayal in that moment was the same feeling she’d had discovering Bryan’s texts to Laura and realising she was being played for a dumbass. It wasn’t the betrayal of trust that really burned, it was the feeling they thought they were being smart while she was stupid. Well, not this time.

  Callie caught the flare of a smartphone screen in her peripheral vision. It belonged to someone in the dim interior of the control centre off to her right.

  “Turn that phone off! I want absolutely no photos of this!” she ordered.

  Callie realised she had another call to make. Clear the room, and she would let loose twenty different rumours; keep everyone together, and she could control the information if necessary.

  “Listen, people. These are unusual circumstances. I’m going to make an unpopular call here – I want everybody’s cell phone until we can confirm the security level NASA wants on these images. And until the sequence is finished, nobody leaves the control centre. I’m invoking security protocols.”