Redemption Protocol (Contact)

by Mike Freeman

  Charles nodded. The princes’ suits made Havoc smile. Charles’s suit was gleaming silver with a rearing red lion on it. Tomas stood off to the other side in a brilliant gold suit with a red griffin on it. Their resplendent suits were in stark contrast to Havoc's active camouflage which mimicked his surroundings. Both lads had insisted on augmenting their suits with an additional cannon, which they hefted proudly as only young men could. Tomas faced outward, sweeping his right arm laterally. Havoc knew the body language. Tomas wanted to shoot something.

  Charles shouted again.

  “Where are the people that live here? Do you think they're hiding?”

  Havoc chuckled. He thought that telling Charles he didn't need to shout for the fourth time in thirty minutes would be a bit nannyish. His receiver leveled the volume so it didn't matter.

  Tomas turned to Charles with a look of disgust.

  “Stop shouting you fucking moron.”

  Karch moved up alongside him. Her dark suit stood half a meter over his, with a reverse articulated joint below her feet like a goat legged satyr.

  “Anything?”

  Havoc scanned into the blizzard. There didn't appear to be anything here. Well anything that had revealed itself, so far.

  “Not yet.”

  Karch thumbed back toward the gate.

  “We definitely want to open that?”

  Havoc glanced over his shoulder. They’d already been waiting a quarter of an hour.

  “I’ll check it out.”

  Karch nodded.

  Havoc stepped forward to join Weaver, who was huddled with Kemensky by a panel to the left of the cavernous entrance.

  “This the door you want?”

  Weaver nodded, somewhat distracted.

  “We think so.”

  “Any reason why this one in particular?”

  Weaver pointed at one of the ideograms inscribed above the panel.

  “We think we have the best chance of opening it. This symbol corresponds to a class of problems in the puzzle tower, not very far down from the top in this case. And this glyph next to it seems to indicate some kind of power or energy level.”

  Havoc frowned as he tried to decipher Weaver’s words.

  “Not far from the top?”

  “The easier puzzles are at the top. This puzzle would seem to correspond to the eightieth row. We've solved those.”

  He nodded. Weird but ok.

  “And the power level?”

  She shrugged as she studied the panel.

  “There isn't really a direct translation – try 'signal-power-level-deployed' or something like that. These are Touvenay's words, by the way, and he could talk to you for hours about the challenges of mapping concepts from one language to another one where the basic concepts may not even exist.”

  “You can't.”

  “Right, you can only approximate.”

  As Havoc spoke to Weaver he gently reached back and lifted Charles's cannon to point away from the group in general and Kemensky in particular. Charles cast 'Sorry' to him. ‘Don't worry' he cast back as he nodded toward the center of the Colosseum.

  “So how does this door compare with the one in there?”

  “The gateway on the obelisk appears to have a much harder problem, in that it comes from much further down the puzzle tower.”

  “And the power level at the obelisk door?”

  “Much higher.”

  “So you like this door more?”

  Weaver nodded.

  “We think so.”

  Havoc considered what he’d heard.

  “So do I.”

  “Ok.”

  “So you want us to drill?”

  “No.”

  “Blast?”

  “No.”

  “You got a key somewhere in that suit, Weaver?”

  She actually smiled at him.

  “Maybe.”

  “Oh?”

  “We think we should be able to access this puzzle somehow, that's what we're working on.”

  He stepped back to let her work.

  “Ok.”

  Weaver turned back to her huddle with Kemensky, while Fournier and Touvenay contributed from orbit.

  From listening, Havoc understood that they were interested in the flat panel that was set below the ideograms. They were suggesting that the species that inhabited plash might place a hand or appendage of some type on the panel to activate it. Havoc didn't like the sound of that at all.

  His ideal alien would be peaceful, dim witted and slow moving. Importantly, it would be about the size of a pixie; small, but not so small it was hard to hit. Weaver’s 'hand panel' was a meter wide.

  Karch was looking at him. Her line of thinking seemed to be going the same way.

  “I hope no one's at home.”

  He nodded.

  “Knock knock.”

  64.

  Weaver stood in a huddle with Kemensky to one side of the ornate gate, studying what they thought was an access panel.

  The panel’s gray surface was streaked with blue and white like marbled granite. Running her gauntlet across it revealed an abrasive texture. She and Kemensky had attached various probes to the panel, examining a variety of phenomena. Their initial anticipation of an early opening had subsided. They had been here for just over an hour and in that time Weaver had been punched to the ground nine times.

  Karch marched back and forth with increasing frequency, communicating her escalating boredom. Havoc, on the other hand, was as immobile as the Sphinx. Except for when Weaver gave him an occasional update, he never moved.

  Kemensky sighed again. Weaver looked at him sympathetically. Kemensky struggled with interruptions and Karch marching past broke his concentration. She turned and looked at Havoc.

  “Could you...”

  Havoc rotated his head as he followed Weaver’s gaze. He barked abruptly.

  “Karch.”

  “What?”

  “If you've got an itch, scratch it. Stop moving around. You’re distracting our scientists.”

  Karch came to an abrupt halt and turned to stare at Weaver. Weaver tried to look conciliatory.

  “Thanks.”

  Karch nodded.

  “No problem, girl.”

  Weaver smiled, pleasantly surprised. Havoc resumed his impersonation of a statue. Weaver turned back to Kemensky.

  “I'm getting it again,” Kemensky said.

  Weaver reviewed the data generated by the sensor she was holding. Nothing very interesting.

  “So each time the panel is touched, when nothing else is touching it or has touched it in the last ten seconds, we get the spike?”

  Kemensky nodded.

  “Exactly.”

  “Hmm.”

  Touvenay spoke from orbit, where he and Fournier were reviewing the data alongside them.

  “I have an idea.”

  The storm interfered on occasion but they were pumping a hefty signal up and down. The other ships would be monitoring their transmissions, though they would have no idea what they said, just their location. Hence Havoc, Mr Paranoid himself, had insisted that she drop a series of relay drones on approach, culminating with one drifting in the atmosphere some four hundred kilometers north of here.

  Weaver looked covetously at the mug of coffee in Touvenay’s hand.

  “Go on.”

  Touvenay wrinkled his nose.

  “The ideograms indicate identity – a unique identity, mathematically.”

  “Yes.”

  “Which we have taken to be the access code.”

  “The key, yes.”

  “But what if it's not?”

  Weaver frowned, bemused.

  “You think we’re wasting our time?”

  “Pardon me for getting philosophical for a moment.”

  Oh dear, Weaver thought, wary of imminent waffle.

  “Go on.”

  “Well we don't definitively understand the ideograms, so our interpretation is likely flawed, but I was tryin
g to think of what it could mean, ‘present unique identity’. If it wasn't one's key.”

  Weaver frowned.

  “Yes...”

  “And it occurred to me that it could mean...”

  Weaver focused hard.

  “Oneself,” Touvenay said.

  “Right,” Weaver said, clueless but concentrated.

  “What?” Kemensky said.

  “Ah,” Fournier said.

  Fournier liked it. Breakthrough, Weaver thought. She grappled with Touvenay’s statement. The light came on.

  “Ah ha.”

  “But that’s still your key, isn't it?” Kemensky said.

  “No,” Touvenay, Fournier and Weaver said together.

  Kemensky shut his mouth.

  Weaver turned to Kemensky.

  “Touvenay is suggesting that the idea of presenting a unique identity is not presenting a key, it is presenting a...”

  She searched for an appropriate word.

  “Consciousness,” Touvenay said.

  “Right.”

  “After all,” Touvenay said, “what is consciousness but a unique, personal identity?”

  Weaver found the ramifications of this too great to consider all at once. Instead, she focused on the panel.

  “So our hypothesis is that the panel is sensing for contact with a consciousness?”

  “Direct contact,” Touvenay said.

  Weaver nodded.

  “Right. Direct contact.”

  “But how?” Kemensky said.

  Weaver gestured at the panel.

  “Using the energy spike.”

  Kemensky shook his head.

  “No, I didn't mean that. I meant how? How could they do that?”

  Weaver rolled her eyes.

  “Well, duh, Kemensky...”

  Kemensky looked at her expectantly.

  Weaver spread her hands.

  “Because they're aliens.”

  Laughter.

  Even Havoc, Mr Statue himself, laughed.

  Kemensky gave an exasperated sigh.

  Weaver contemplated Touvenay’s idea.

  “Which would explain why we have a representation of a generic level of puzzle, like a difficulty level, but no actual sequence to work with.”

  Fournier nodded.

  “It would explain that.”

  Weaver stared at the panel.

  “We need to test it.”

  Kemensky stepped back, away from the panel.

  “On one of us? Sounds like going out on a limb to me.”

  Fournier smiled.

  “That's where the fruit is...”

  Touvenay nodded.

  “Nothing ventured, as they say.”

  Weaver felt nervous excitement rising inside her.

  “I'll do it.”

  65.

  It was another hour before Weaver was standing in front of the gate and ready to go. The driving horizontal snow had abated and the wind had dropped from ferocious to merely brutal.

  She’d set up a transparent sample chamber over the access panel and evacuated the plash atmo. She’d attached a pipe that continuously pumped in warm air to keep the chamber at positive pressure so that no Plash contaminants could find their way inside. One of Weaver’s main concerns was contamination. She didn’t want to pick up an alien virus. She’d scanned and scanned again without finding any results. Still, they were operating way outside the standard protocol. If it hadn’t been for the other ships and the tettraxigyiom contamination, the crew would have spent months sending down quarantined drones until they’d built up a detailed understanding of the surface environment.

  She was going to test Touvenay's hypothesis about consciousness by touching the panel. Straightforward as experiments went, analogous to the early development of chemistry – drop these two substances in a test tube and see what happens.

  Havoc had told her beforehand that they were going to cover her with weapons, purely as a precaution, but she still found it disconcerting that the static defense station was pointing kinetic weapons and micromissiles straight at her. She had heavy sedatives attached to her external vening interface so that Havoc could knock her out if necessary. Havoc had also run a cable from the back of her suit, attached to the front of his, so that he could haul her away from the gate. Weaver was pleasantly surprised by Havoc’s meticulous approach; it wasn't what she’d expected. He stood by her shoulder as she checked the experimental apparatus one last time. His jetpack extended out from his shoulders like a winged predator. He looked insanely dangerous. She glanced back at him.

  “I think I’m ready.”

  He nodded.

  “In your own time.”

  She cast to Kemensky, who sat in one of the two pairs of cabins that Havoc had deployed to either side of the entrance.

  “Ready, Kemensky?”

  “Ready.”

  “Are you ready for us to proceed, Intrepid?”

  “We’re ready,” Touvenay said.

  Weaver steeled her resolve and nodded at Havoc.

  “I’m good to go.”

  Havoc patted her arm, his touch surprisingly gentle given his massive presence in his combat suit, and backed away from her. She was alone beside the gate with its sinister carvings. The air pipe writhed as the wind toyed with it.

  She slid her arm into the front of the sample chamber. The chamber interface locked onto her suit arm and formed a seal.

  She swallowed, feeling alone.

  “Are my readings good, Kemensky?”

  Kemensky sounded preoccupied with his instruments.

  “Subject is good. I mean, yes, your readings are good, Evelyn.”

  “Ok.”

  She signaled her suit and her gauntlet and forearm parted and retracted. Her spine tingled as she felt the warm air blowing across her hand.

  “Fiat lux,” Fournier said. Let light arise.

  Weaver took a deep breath. This was probably going to be a big anticlimax. It was bound to be. Nothing was going to happen. It was just a wall, after all. She wondered how cold it would feel. Pretty cold, she thought.

  She flexed her fingers and pushed her palm against the panel.

  66.

  Weaver felt a burning cold on her hand, rapidly warming. The warm sensation traveled up her arm and tingles spread across her body. The heat in her hand soared to an uncomfortable intensity then faded. She felt random patterns of stimulation in her head as if someone was sprinkling sherbet on her brain.

  Weaver hardly noticed. Her mind was somewhere else. She felt like an aircraft bursting through cloud into brilliant sunshine. She had clarity across a vast arena, though she didn’t know where she was. She was in a place that was expansive and empty and full of potential.

  A sequence flowed across her awareness. It had the form that the puzzles had taken in the puzzle tower, with a number of elements followed by empty slots. Weaver felt as though she was looking across a vast plain of nothing, with the sequence moving across her mind's eye in the foreground, almost beneath her.

  She tried to concentrate on it, but the feeling was so novel that she couldn’t grasp or manipulate the symbols. She tried to relax. She'd gone down to the one hundred and tenth row in the puzzle tower. This sequence was from the eightieth row. It felt much harder, here and now, as it flowed across her mind.

  She was struck by a sense of urgency as she perceived a limit. She was struck by the realization that she couldn’t see – she couldn’t physically sense anything any more. Where was she? She couldn’t see, feel or hear anything. She was locked in this place with only this puzzle. She felt trapped. What if she couldn't get out? Panic started to rise in her like pressure building in a geyser.

  What if she couldn’t do it?

  What if she could?

  ~ ~ ~

  “Anything?” Havoc asked.

  Kemensky highlighted Weaver’s data on mission net.

  “Her vitals rose and then spiked. Her heart rate has gone from twenty to sixty and jumped to two h
undred and fifteen.”

  Kemensky didn’t need to say this sounded like a panic attack. Havoc tightened his grip on the cable attached to Weaver’s back.

  Fournier’s voice was calm.

  “That means something is happening. Let’s wait and see.”

  Havoc watched Weaver intently.

  “Kemensky?”

  “Two-ten, two-oh-five, one-ninety.”

  ~ ~ ~

  Weaver calmed herself and worked the sequence. Her powers of visualization were dramatically beyond what they’d been before. The ideograms spun as she mapped them into equations she could work with more directly. The sequence involved equations recursively manipulating primes. It was elegant and clever. She had an insight and then another. The sequence started to glow more brightly. The intensity of it was hard to hold in her mind. She tried to ignore it as she manipulated the concepts and determined what she considered to be the solution. She had a buzz of pleasure, the intensity faded and the flat horizon collapsed down to a point surrounded by nothing.

  She was back outside the gateway. Her hand was burning on the panel. She cried out as she pulled it away. Her mind was reeling with what had happened. She felt a wave of euphoria, an echo of the heightened awareness that she'd just experienced. She giggled.

  “Weaver? Are you alright?”

  She realized it was Havoc speaking.

  “I’m ok. I’m ok.”

  “The gate!” Karch said.

  “Seal your hand please, Weaver. Do it now.”

  She grinned.

  “It was––”

  “I’m sealing your suit remotely, watch your hand,” Havoc said.

  Weaver saw her suit extend down her forearm and her gauntlet swing back over her hand.

  “It was––”

  “The gate is opening!” Karch said.

  “I’m bringing you out,” Havoc said.

  Weaver felt a powerful tug on the back of her suit. She fell back into a sitting position and was dragged across the ground on her butt.

  She felt giddy as she looked at the gate. The giant door had split into seven chunks that were recessing into the surrounding wall of the Colosseum. Beyond, darkness beckoned. Faint light came from several points inside, diffuse like gas lamps seen through fog.

  “The gate is open. Repeat, the gate is open,” Havoc said.