by Carl Rackman
She gave Galvin the task of collecting the phones from each person in an empty wastebasket. Then she went out into the corridor and phoned Trask.
“This is Mr Trask’s office—”
“Hi, Maggie—”
“—the office is closed for the day. If your enquiry is urgent—”
Dammit! Time had flown amid all the tension. It was already gone six thirty. Trask should still have been around. Callie hung up and quickly redialled the personal number.
It rang six times, and she was just about to hang up when Trask picked up. “Bill Trask?”
“Mr Trask, hello, it’s Callie Woolf down at Woodbury.”
“What is it, Callie? Are you all right?”
She tried to calm her voice. It must have sounded bad. She thought about it for a second and decided it was bad.
“Sir, we have a security situation here. We’ve processed the images from Voyager One and, well, I’m not sure what they are, but there’s a real problem. I think Voyager One has been compromised.”
“Compromised, in what way?”
“There are some very anomalous images. I think they may have been beamed to Voyager One from Earth. I think someone is messing with us, sir. I believe that’s what the warning messages were about. Have you had any information about the letter or e-mail?”
There was a pause. “Callie, I’m passing you to the Deputy Director’s office. He’s handling the security incident now. Hold on…”
Callie tried to collect herself. The deputy director was hard-core Department of Defense; the post was usually held by a G-Man (never a woman) and no one was more ‘G’ than the bull-necked Richard Petersen. He had been a lifelong military officer, finishing up as a two-star general and Deputy Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. He had also been a big wheel in the Bush administration. Some had tipped him for the Director’s office at the CIA, but he had appeared at the Lab instead.
As political nominees went, he was about as big a statement as NASA could make – the effete liberals of Caltech might run the place, but the Feds called the shots.
The call took a while to go through. Without Maggie to hand, Trask probably found the phone system a challenge.
Eventually the phone began ringing again. Callie swallowed, clenching her empty fist to calm her nerves and voice.
“Deputy Director Petersen.” He had the same direct and brashly confident tone common to all senior government men. The tone that said, “I’m busier than you, so make this good or get the hell off the line.”
“Sir, this is Dr Callie Woolf, Project Manager of VIM.”
“Yes, Dr Woolf. AD Trask tells me you have more problems with your project.”
Callie blushed at the insinuation, but she kept her voice steady. “Sir, as you know, we had a possible security breach at the Woodbury offices.”
She heard Petersen shuffle papers before answering, “Yes, Dr Woolf. A spoofed e-mail address and a handwritten note without a single piece of trace evidence – apart from your own, of course. We could have dismissed it as a simple prank if it hadn’t been so carefully prepared. Thank you for treating it seriously. So, what do you have now?”
Relief softened Callie’s voice at his words as if the project had been reprieved. “Sir, we have decoded the images Voyager was trying to downlink. They are very disturbing, and I have to conclude that somebody has hacked Voyager and planted these images on the storage drive.”
“What makes you so sure that’s the only explanation?” Petersen seemed intrigued, but then he hadn’t seen them.
Callie was more insistent. “Sir, the pictures cannot be real. They appear to show an artificial object in the vicinity of Voyager One.”
Petersen was very quiet, she couldn’t even hear him breathe, but she could detect other sounds in the background, as though he was moving things on his desk.
“Sir? Are you still on?”
“Yes, Dr Woolf. Just tell me exactly what’s on the images?”
“Well, we are still going through the downlink. There were twelve pictures altogether. We’ve looked at eight, and the last two are anomalous.”
“Go on.”
She chose her words carefully. “They show what appears to be a triangular-shaped object that changes perspective between the two frames.”
“Okay, Dr Woolf. Finish the run. I will personally come to Woodbury and view these pictures for myself. I don’t want anyone passing them around or leaving the building without permission. All non-essential personnel, and I mean all, must assemble in the lobby. You will notify all staff that Woodbury is on Security Condition Blue. Understood?”
“Security Condition Blue. I’ll have to look that up, but I understand, sir.”
“I’ll see you soon, Dr Woolf.” He hung up.
Callie clasped the phone to her chest with both hands. Voyager was spiralling out of her control. She had to put a lid on this, and quickly.
She re-entered the room, but no one looked up. They were glued to the small screen and crowding uncomfortably tight to see the next image slowly being created line by line.
Callie snapped on the lights. It didn’t have the desired effect as the environmentally friendly tubes ponderously flickered into life one at a time.
“I need you all to pay attention. Hey!” She had to clap her hands to get anyone to look up. “We need to thin out, people. Only Schlitzky, Pascoe, Brymon, Ortiz and Aggarwal stay in. The rest of you, assemble in the lobby. We are on Security Condition Blue.”
There was a huge groan.
“Vern, make sure security know not to let anyone leave the building. Your phones stay with me until we get clearance to leave. The deputy director is coming down here, so just sit tight. I’m sorry, people. This one comes from the top.”
There was a deal of shuffling as the people gathered their belongings, minus their phones, and headed for the door.
One or two of the older science team members asked to remain behind but Callie firmly and politely sent them on their way.
She closed the door behind the last person.
The other five people in the room immediately went back to their little black-and-white screen.
Callie closed the rest of the blinds. Dusk was falling at any rate, but she was now paranoid about Security Condition Blue – though she had never heard of it before.
“God, look at that!”
Schlitzky’s uncharacteristic exclamation immediately grabbed Callie’s attention. She was inexorably pulled towards the small group of watchers.
Schlitzky and Pascoe were mesmerised by the image on the screen. The triangular object displayed rows of lights all over it, in even lines. It sat sideways on to Voyager 1’s camera. If the images were genuine, this would have been the story of the century. No, the biggest story since Noah’s flood – an epoch-making breakthrough.
There was no way this image could show a natural object. The regular shape, organised lighting and other features made the idea preposterous. The smooth lines and regular rows of light were reminiscent of the unusual deep-sea creatures and jellyfish that were at once beautiful and grotesque.
In profile, the object resembled the head of a whale shark – a flat wedge more than a regular cone. It widened from the triangular tip and gradually spread out to form a delta planform.
Someone had put a lot of effort into these pictures. The only light came from the object itself, and the furrows and grooves in the surface played the light around its edges and shadows in a way that was literally realistic, rather than most space movies.
Popular sci-fi used references from real-life; it was all stark lighting from the sun as seen near Earth’s orbit. The realities of light in a black void, bereft of sunlight, remained in the realms of imagination. Yet, whoever created these had nailed the unseen properties of light-point refraction in a void. Also, they had perfected the grainy look of the photos at Voyager’s resolution beamed billions of miles through space and piped to this tiny monitor – truly epic workmanship.
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The annoyance Callie felt since the second picture was now giving way to a gnawing anxiety. Why would anyone go to this much trouble? How did they achieve it? And why now, when Voyager was too far away to make any difference to anyone on Earth?
Could we really be seeing the first meeting of humanity with another intelligence? She almost shook herself. Get a grip, Callie! She was glad none of the others could read her thoughts.
Suddenly there was a thick sniff from Ortiz before he put his hands up to his face.
“Victor, come on, man!” Brymon admonished the other engineer.
“God.” Ortiz wiped his eyes. Tears filled them still as he looked back up at the screen.
“Victor, you okay?” Callie put a hand on his shoulder. He just reached up and patted it.
“I’m okay, Callie. I don’t know what happened. I just thought of the possibilities, and it…well—” he sniffed again and wiped the rest of his face “—either way, it’s bad for us. This is bad.” He pointed emphatically at the screen.
Callie looked around the other scientists, who were awkwardly trying to avoid Ortiz’ eye. “Guys? What are your thoughts?”
Jerry sighed heavily but said nothing. Brymon shrugged, unwilling to say anything.
Schlitzky took the plunge. “I can’t say without a thorough analysis, but I’m willing to admit that it looks too regular to be artefacts.”
This did draw a reaction from Brymon. “Jeez, Leon! They gave you a PhD for that kind of incisive analysis?”
Callie challenged him in return. “Okay, Morris – what’s your take? Gut feeling. Shoot.”
Brymon straightened up, his back clicking. “Well, I’d say someone is yanking our chain. But I’m damned if I could tell you why. Or even, at this stage, how.”
“Jerry?”
“This is BS, Callie, but it’s perfect. I can’t see any flaws. It’s perfectly regular. It has logical point lighting and refraction, and the progression between frames is realistic. I know it’s not possible that it’s real, but somebody paid a hell of a lot of money to get these made and transmitted to Voyager; somehow they piggybacked all that information on our standard interrogation uplinks. So I end up with Morris. I can tell you someone did this. But how and why beats the hell outta me.”
Brymon humphed his agreement.
Victor found his voice again. “Guys. I can’t see us coming out of this with a project, never mind a mission. Voyager One is going to be shut down. It’s compromised. And since we can’t encrypt the code we send to Voyager Two, someone could mess with it next.”
Jerry tried to counter. “Victor, I gotta agree with you about One. I think we’ve seen the last of her.” Even his voice trembled slightly at this, but he held himself back. “But the only reason Two hasn’t been compromised is it’s below the ecliptic from our location. Only Canberra can see her. So whoever did this must only have access to the northern hemisphere uplinks. I think this is going through Madrid. This is some sort of European attempt to undermine us. It’s a cutthroat business.”
The IT guy, Vijay Aggarwal, said nothing. He was about thirty and knew Voyager only by proxy, unlike the older men.
Callie took the stand. “Okay, guys. I know how you feel; I’m upset, too. We might be losing our baby, but we still have a future. Voyager Two will be providing the specific plasma wave analysis later this year. It’s still in play. We’ve got good science going on. It may mean a reduced team, but we are going to see Voyager through to the end.”
It didn’t get the round of applause she had hoped. She looked back to the screen.
The image was now in good definition. If she wasn’t a rational adult with a scientific doctorate, she would have said she was looking at a spaceship.
She sighed before announcing, “Leon, let’s get the other images processed. I want them all on a flash drive for Deputy Director Petersen. Keep the raw data and leave the image processors switched on and live with the server. Vijay, make sure that nothing is tampered with; I want everything time-stamped and catalogued. Morris, make sure the data we received is correlated exactly with the DSN logs. This is evidence, gentlemen. Somebody, for whatever reason, has tampered with a federal scientific program – a felony, if not espionage. We need to preserve the paper chain. This is going to keep us busy for the next few weeks. I’m sorry, guys – this was not our fault, but we need to clean it up as best we can.”
The men began to drift away from the centre console. They had work to do; the anti-climax had happened. The hoaxers had dispirited them after a weekend of ball-busting hard work.
Three more frames to go meant an hour’s work. It would be gone eleven before any of them got out, assuming DD Petersen was in an accommodating mood.
The night wore on. The next two images would have been chilling had they not been fake. The object had drawn closer than in the first image; it was now nose-on and the lighting showed up clearly. It appeared to have an internal light source unique for each point; they were not of uniform intensity, but they had an organic quality. Again, the attention to detail was phenomenal.
The following photo was eerie. A larger block of light was visible on the facing side of the object. Callie supposed it was meant to represent a door. The object filled the visual field of the Voyager camera. It was a wedge-nosed, humpbacked object – a spaceship of sorts.
Callie yawned as the last picture appeared. It had been a long weekend. She looked at her watch to see it was 2145. Petersen still hadn’t appeared, so it looked like being another late one.
“Holy shit!” Jerry’s expletive was unexpected.
She looked at the ghost of an image filling the small screen. It looked superficially like the last one, only this time there was one big difference. Silhouetted in the foreground, against the light from an open doorway set in the side of the spaceship, was a hand. Clearly, a human hand.
Callie’s own hand flew involuntarily to her mouth with a sharp intake of breath preceding it. A genuine chill flew up and down her spine and her scalp tingled. Her stomach made an involuntary leap. Fear. Calm the hell down, Callie!
Even Schlitzky shook his head. “That’s very convincing.”
Ortiz was transfixed by the image now becoming clearer. The lines slowly scanned from top to bottom as the imaging software built up the picture pixel by pixel. His hands were also over his mouth and his eyes like saucers.
Brymon was unimpressed. “Those assholes,” he muttered. “At least it wasn’t E.T.”
Jerry said nothing. He leaned in, watching the image sharpen and the definition increase. Nobody else spoke.
After about ten minutes, the image was complete around the hand. It was hard to see how it could be anything else. The hand itself was out of focus, and there was a light bloom all around the doorway. It was indistinct but in clear definition. It had five digits and appeared to be inside a tight mesh glove, far thinner than a bulky NASA space suit. In the periphery of the bloom was the spaceship’s bulk, suggesting a large object maybe the size of a ferryboat.
Aggarwal came over to stand and watch with his hand over his chin and tapping his lips. “You know, I started out in digital imaging about twelve years ago. This is either the best work I ever saw, or not very good at all.”
Callie tore her eyes away from the screen to look at him. “What do you mean by that?”
“It’s too perfect. Too real. You know, you have to fool the mind into seeing what it expects to see. Motion blur, enhanced colours, frame composition, you know, that kind of thing. This isn’t made like that. It is perfectly realistic, so it looks lifeless. There is no drama here, just shapes, light, shadow… It’s not compelling, just bleak. You couldn’t put this on the news; it’s like a bad UFO photo.”
Callie couldn’t tear her eyes from the image. “Okay, but for purposes of scientific provenance, it would be excellent.”
Aggarwal did the Indian headshake. “Sure. Or it’s one hundred per cent genuine.”
Brymon snorted in derision. “Vijay,
there’s twelve billion reasons why this can’t be genuine!”
Aggarwal dared to disagree with the forthright communications engineer. “There is much about the cosmos we don’t understand, Morris. We need more humility when faced with the unfathomable.”
“Unfathomable!” retorted Brymon. “This looks very fathomable to me. The only unfathomable thing about it is why anyone would go to all this expense and secrecy. Why not just post it on the internet and claim it really is from Voyager? Jeez, half the goddamn internet would believe it anyway!”
Callie became animated as the penny dropped. “Morris, you nailed it. It has to come from NASA! It needs the scientific provenance. That’s it!” She clicked her fingers. “Guys – the contents of this tape can’t leave the room. You got that? Nothing. Don’t even tell your wives. This is critical. We have to deny them the publicity.”
The words of the mystery messages came back to her. Close Voyager’s eyes. Much depends on your discretion. Whoever sent those messages was helping, not messing with her.
Jerry turned away from the screen. “There is one way to completely screw this as a fake. If they want people to believe that someone physically interfered with Voyager One, then the telemetry would show something – a change in speed or trajectory. If we can produce the data, it would blow this whole thing out of the water.”
“Good call, Jerry. Morris?”
Brymon consulted his iPad nearby. “Yeah… These pictures were taken last week. Check the scheduled health report we took Friday morning.”
Jerry swung round to a work terminal. It took a few minutes to log in and find the relevant record. “Sonofabitch!”
Callie’s gut wrenched. “Jerry?”
“How did we miss this? Voyager One rotated one hundred fifty-five degrees about its axis at 2025 hours UTC on September first, then rolled back fifteen minutes afterwards. Trajectory and speed unchanged.” He slapped the table in frustration. “What’s the timestamp on the photos?”
