Mars- The Red Planet Awakens

by Paul Reaver

  John finally settled in, learning how to handle himself in the campus environment, and learning his subject material at a feverish pace. To immerse himself as a student in the college world, and somewhat in opposition to Theresa’s advice to concentrate strictly on his studies, he decided to join a fraternity. He did some checking and found that one, in particular, seemed to be among the most sought-after fraternities. Getting into such a highly rated fraternity was a challenging goal for any student, but John was determined to do it. Fortunately for him, of the friends he had made so far at school, several of the “brothers” that had been helping him adjust to college life belonged to that fraternity. With a nudge here and a push there, he became a member. One of the delicate parts of adjusting to fraternity membership was the fact that fraternities had parties, which invariably involved alcohol, which John was too young to imbibe. However, other members were of drinking age, but they didn’t drink for various reasons. John simply hung around with those members for the most part, and everything was ok. Just as John had been fun to be around when he was younger, with an infectious personality and a great sense of humor, he still had these traits. He soon made friends with many of his fraternity brothers. However, John found in relatively short order that he didn’t have a lot of time to devote to anything other than his studies. So, although he would attend the occasional fraternity gathering, he found his grandmother was right and that his participation in the fraternity gradually waned to almost zero.

  Theresa continued to be invaluable to John’s progression in his studies. She helped him organize his time and his coursework. She also helped him to arrange the order of his degrees as he would pursue them. She knew that it was advantageous to achieve some degrees before pursuing others as they would act as “stepping stones” for the degrees he would pursue later.

  Once John was firmly ensconced in his academic pursuits, he studied as he had never studied before. His goal was to graduate by the time he was eighteen; the only way to accomplish this was to attend school year-round and put every ounce of effort into his work. However, attending school year-round was not quite the schedule that he followed. To follow the path of such an agenda would have burned him out quickly. Well, perhaps not quickly, but too soon for him to achieve his academic goals. Theresa again came to his rescue. She planned two vacations per year, each a week or so long, designed to give John a break from his studies and also to see and experience different parts of the world. If the vacations were any longer, it would impact his studies. If they were any shorter, he would not have time to appreciate the places they visited or have time to unwind. So his vacations would be to both exotic and exciting places; they went to Paris, Australia, Hawaii, Great Britain, Buenos Aires, the Amazon rainforest, and many other places.

  After a few of these vacations, Theresa noticed positive results. The short breaks helped John recharge his batteries and avoid burnout with his studies. He would come back refreshed and with renewed energy. Plus, depending on where they went, he would learn about the people and places he’d seen. There is the notion that a person should have a well-rounded education; John’s vacations definitely helped to provide him with that.

  John achieved his goal: he graduated from college at age eighteen with all of his degrees completed. Though other students had graduated at significantly earlier ages, they only earned a fraction of the degrees that John did. It would take them another 4 to 6 years or more to catch up with John’s academic achievements. To celebrate John’s graduation, Stanford, Olivia, Theresa, and John spent a month in Europe. It was something that John thoroughly enjoyed, and he was ready for a break after the amount of effort he had put into his studies. When they got back, Theresa decided to stay in at the apartment for a while longer, while John went back to Arkansas with his parents, who wanted to help John steer his career in an appropriate direction.

  Chapter 8

  One day about two months after John had finished his studies, with his newly minted degrees in hand (so to speak), his father said, “let’s go for a ride – I have something to show you.”

  Off they went in his father’s car and soon were miles away from civilization, surrounded by forest. At a particular point in the road, John’s father stopped and pressed a button under the dash. To their immediate right, a gate slid open in the fence that bordered the road. (Holograms, especially solid holograms, had not been invented yet – though they were on the drawing board.) John’s father drove through the opening, which closed again as soon as they had passed it. Now on a gravel road, they traveled about an eighth of a mile, at which point the road turned left. The roadway burrowed back into the forest, and they didn’t go very far before they reached another gate. Once again, a button push opened this gate, and they drove through.

  Though John’s curiosity was ready to burst, he said nothing. He knew his father would tell him what he needed to know when he needed to know it.

  They reached a sizeable non-descript barn in need of repair. The push of a third button opened a large garage door in the barn’s side, and they drove in and parked. After the garage door had closed, John looked around and saw nothing but a large, tall, featureless room.

  “Follow me,” said his father, getting out of the car. John also exited the car and followed his father to the left side of the room. A push of a button that looked like a nail head in the wall opened a sliding panel. John’s father allowed the equipment behind the panel opening to perform a fingerprint and retinal scan (heart scans and brain wave scans had not become a reality yet – but these concepts were also on the drawing board). Once the scans had completed, a door opened and the two of them walked through. John saw a featureless corridor made of solid concrete. At this point he realized the entire building was concrete, probably reinforced, and the barn exterior was just a façade. He also realized that the majority of the facility was underground.

  The door slid closed behind them, revealing what looked like a concrete wall at the end of a concrete corridor. John glanced back to see the hall behind them and then hurried to catch up with his father. They walked perhaps another 30 yards, and his father turned to an elevator door on their left, where he repeated the fingerprint and retinal scan. This gained them access to the elevator.

  Once inside, his father pressed a blue button in a numerical column of blue buttons with the number 7 on it. The button above the blue button marked one was white. It became apparent that the white button was for a floor above ground, and the blue buttons were for areas below ground. The blue buttons went from 1 to 15. 15 stories! John wondered what work his father’s organization did that required 15 stories. Once they had reached their floor, presumably seven stories underground, they exited into another concrete corridor, and Stanford turned to the right. They walked another 50 feet or so, and once again, his father went through the fingerprint and retinal scan. The door opened, and beyond lay Stanford’s lab.

  His father had to pull some strings to get permission to allow John to accompany him. However, Stanford had been so successful for the “company” that there was very little his boss wouldn’t permit him to do, provided there were no security breaches. (John’s boss was named Richard, but he preferred the less formal name Rick – at least when working with his team and those that were his friends.) Once John’s father had introduced him to his boss, Rick was quite taken with John and admired the intellect and maturity he displayed at such a relatively young age. He knew John did not represent a security breach, knowing that he had learned the concept of total confidentiality from his father. He was safely behind his father’s security net no matter where he was.

  John’s father proceeded to show him the various projects he and his team were working on, answering any questions John had along the way.

  They started with a project that expanded the components of an invention that was, in itself, relatively new on the scene: the personal computer. Though Atari, Commodore, and a few others had made their mark in the early PC world, the entry that had wowed the
world was the introduction of the IBM PC. IBM’s version included a video monitor with white letters on a black screen (some had green letters on a black screen) and a 10-megabyte hard drive. Unlike its competitors, it did not require the separate purchase of a cassette deck to record data or hooking up a television for video output, among other essential differences. It looked like the cutting-edge technology that it was; the case was metal instead of plastic like the Atari and Commodore, which made it appear sturdy and well-made. However, this also made it as expensive as well as ground-breaking – they cost about $5000.00.

  This project belonged to John’s father. He was working on it as though he could see into the future. If you had a hard drive, wouldn’t you naturally want to store large amounts of data for easy access? People had stated that no one could ever need more than 10 megabytes for hard drive storage – no one would ever need that much storage space! Though it seems ludicrous now, most programmers at that time used machine language, and even complex applications were only about 50k in size. At any rate, John’s father thought otherwise about storage space. He could easily envision the desire to install an entire encyclopedia on a computer for easy access. Likewise, one might like to store a dictionary. It didn’t take a lot of imagination to realize that, in the future, such items would require much more storage space. Also, he knew there would be many, many more things that people would want to store on their computers that required much more storage space.

  Along the same line, if you had a storage device like a hard drive, and the information it contained was essential and perhaps irreplaceable, you would want to back it up. The obvious answer was to back up to tape drives; that technology already existed. But why would you need to back up the information on the computer? Why, in case of a hard drive failure, of course. And what was the probable cause of hard drive failure? The fact that it had moving parts. Anything with moving parts would eventually break down. John’s father saw the obvious answer: a storage device with no moving parts, and enough storage space for (gasp!) gigabytes or even terabytes of information. John’s father approached projects such as these with the point of view that, if a little was good, a lot was better! He had produced the first storage drive with no moving parts. Granted, the device was massive at first, about the size of the PC itself. Also, its speed was very slow because it took time for him to work out an efficient storage algorithm for quick information access, and the technology at that time did not support rapid storage and retrieval. Still, the mainstream use of such a device was 20 years in the future, and long before that John’s father had worked out the size and speed issues. When he had the project completed, a 50-gigabyte drive was the size of a paperback book, and he measured the access time in milliseconds. Of course, as time went on, the capacities would grow more substantial, and the access times would become faster.

  Another idea he was working on was communication between computers. This concept also already existed, since mainframe computers had used it for some time. However, computer communication at that time required wires for the connections, and used telephone lines for long-range communication. John’s father saw with clarity that one day there would be a central computer that would store centralized information in an office environment. The peripheral computers that would access this information would, by convention, connect to the central computer using wires. This would allow the main computer to share identical information among people in the office with their own computers at their desks, and any updates made to the information would also be shared. His question was: why not use radio waves for connections that would be relatively close in an office building? So he developed a radio transmission system that allowed computers in an office to communicate wirelessly. He even went one step further: he increased the distance that the wireless communication signals could travel. He implemented radio signal boosters that would pick up the signals, enhance their power, and forward them on. Granted, the communication was somewhat slow, and each computer required an external box to act as the radio transmitter. But as with the hard drive project, smaller and faster were the goals he pursued and eventually achieved, though his results were not nearly as sophisticated as what exists today. Still, the ideas were very practical, the science was sound, and these were convenient gadgets to have. Had he worked in the private sector, he’d have been quite wealthy. But this was the government, and the ideas and devices were government secrets and government property. He wasn’t in it for the money, and anyway, he knew it would only take time before the private sector would come up with these ideas itself. The path might be different, but the results would be the same. There was also the possibility that the government secrets could be stolen and make their way “into the wild.”

  Last in his list of major projects was a substitute for the current computer monitors. The current ones had at least two significant drawbacks: they were bulky and only had monochrome displays. He knew that using LEDs, he could create a screen that was light, flat, and had a color display. So far, this project was only on the drawing board in his mind.

  John watched and listened intently while his father took him on the “tour.” His reaction was a combination of fascination and disbelief. With the depth of his education, he understood the concepts and even the science and the details of most of the projects. He asked many questions, and his father patiently answered them. He knew that one day John would have his personal projects to work on. He was also impressed by the type of questions that John asked; they showed both intelligence and potential.

  When they finished reviewing all of Stanford’s projects, they made their way back to Rick’s office. Stanford and Rick excused themselves and left the room, assuring John that they would be right back. They were gone for perhaps 15 minutes and returned. Unbeknownst to John, Rick had watched him and his father during their entire tour of Stanford’s projects. All the rooms had cameras and microphones, so it was as if he’d been there with them. He wanted to see how John reacted to all that he saw and heard, as well as to hear the questions that he asked, which revealed his level of knowledge and sophistication. Again, he was quite impressed by John and made this clear with his next question.

  “John,” he said, “how would you like to be a member of a team that works on projects like your father’s team does?

  John was dumbfounded but didn’t let it show. The thought of following in his father’s footsteps had become his desire more and more as his father displayed his projects.

  He did, however, express his answer with a positive response and a smile. “I can’t think of a better organization to which I could contribute my knowledge and education,” he said.

  Rick smiled. “Would you be available to start next week?” he asked.

  John’s heart leaped in his chest! “That would work out fine,” he said, working hard to keep his voice on an even tone while mentally doing backflips of joy. “What time would you like me to come in, and where should I report?” he asked.

  “8 AM would be fine,” said Rick, “and you can meet with me right here. Bear in mind that you will need to fill out a lot of paperwork, as this is a government job with a high-security clearance required. For that reason, until your clearance is approved, you will not be assigned to any classified projects at first. I will do everything I can to push your application through as quickly as possible, but there is only so much I can do. The first thing I’ll have to work on is getting you access to the facility. For that, please follow me so that we can get your fingerprints and a retinal scan so you’ll be ready to have access on Monday.”

  Rick led the way to an area where a very serious-faced man scanned his eyes to get the retinal images and also took his fingerprints. John figured the serious look was because this man worked in the security division.

  “Ok,” said Rick. “That should give you access to the different areas of our facilities. You’ll be following your father in your car on Monday so we can outfit it with the necessary equipment to enable your access into the upper e
ntrances.”

  “I understand,” said John. “I will see you on Monday.”

  John and Rick shook hands, and John left with his father.

  “So what do you think?” asked John’s father when they had gotten into the car and started on their way home.

  “Unbelievable!” said John. “I couldn’t think of any job I’d rather do, and Rick offers me the job of my dreams.”

  Stanford grinned from ear to ear. “Well, Rick and I might have discussed just such a plan before your trip here today,” he said. “So, this scenario might have been set up in advance.”