Timelines

by Bob Blink

  Al was right. If he had remembered the symbols correctly, then these keys corresponded to numeric input keys for a hex system. “Any idea what the top and bottom keys are?” I asked.

  “None,” he admitted. “Even knowing the other keys are numbers doesn’t really help. I could make a dozen guesses, all probably wrong. But with the translator we can find out. We’ve only had it half a day!”

  I knew what he meant. We had made a major breakthrough already. I was impatient for more. But the important question was answered. The device was indeed a translator of the alien language, and would be able to help us decipher the secrets hidden in the complex. Finally we were on the way. “Too bad we can’t feed symbols into the device and have it give us the English equivalent,” I commented wistfully.

  Al nodded. He had been thinking the same thing.

  Chapter 23

  Monday, 26 June 2006

  Seattle, Washington

  It was more than two weeks before another discovery relating to the keyboard was made. Granted, a dictionary of words, symbols, and sounds was being built up by the team responsible for the investigation of the alien language, but the euphoria resulting from finally locating the device and the immediate discovery of the numbering system was beginning to wane. In fact, an increasing degree of frustration was being felt by every member of the team. We had expected too much. A major source of disappointment had to be the failure to find the equivalent of an ‘on’ command for the computer system. Every possible word that might be interpreted as an activation command had been tried.

  In truth, it shouldn’t have been such a surprise. The computers in the storage or equipment area, and those in the ‘lab’ area had been investigated quite thoroughly. While the computers in the tunnel control area had been left strictly alone for fear of initiating an undesirable change, the others had been considered safe enough to experiment with. Every possible button and combination of buttons had been pressed with no result. For the computers in the equipment room, two levels of access were required. Those computers were completely powered down, the small square in the front center not even showing the faint purple glow characteristic of active hardware and seen on every other piece of equipment in the lab and control areas. For that matter, even the translator device had its small glowing square. So far, no equipment had been brought from the powered down to powered on state, and none of the equipment in the powered on state had been brought from the dark or ‘sleep’ state to an active state ready for input or output.

  It was pretty clear we were missing something. There were not that many ‘keys’ on the computer input pads, and only eight more unidentified symbols. The remaining two symbols on the outer ring had finally been identified to be the equivalent of a save and delete function, although the English words that corresponded to the symbols were only loosely translated as such. That left the inner circle of eight keys, and the unmarked central circular key. There were simply too few to see how the computer could be used effectively. John had made the suggestion that the symbols may not correspond to words at all. Using our keyboard as an example, he pointed out that some of the keys had symbols that had evolved to represent functions, but which had no English equivalent. Another thought had been the keys were used for mathematical functions, but every term we could think of had been run through the translator without success. That theory had since lost its supporters.

  We believed getting the computers activated was crucial to our ability to learn. We speculated that once the screens became active, we would have access to more of the alien text. The more text available to us, the better our chances of developing an understanding of the Alien language, its structure, and ultimately the greater ability in learning about their system. The hope was that we would be able to access files that would teach us about their systems, how to use the time complex controls, and also hopefully provide clues to their real purpose for being here. What was the time complex being used for? That was a question we desperately wanted to answer.

  “No ideas at all?” I asked John hopefully. He and I had crossed paths in the outer office a few minutes before and I had asked him to step in for an informal chat. Our formal progress meeting wasn’t until tomorrow, and I was reacting to the same lack of progress as everyone else. Initially, a daily review had been held to see what new treasures had been unlocked, but the meeting soon scaled back to bi-weekly when it became clear that answers were going to be slower coming that we had hoped.

  “Nothing on the keyboard symbols,” he responded sadly. “The database continues to grow, but we are limited by how we have to approach the problem.”

  I knew what he meant. The easiest approach would have been to take the symbols we had and input them into the device giving us an immediate translation of the alien text we had on hand. Unfortunately, it seemed the device was not designed to accept graphic input. It appeared to be a tool the alien could use to translate it’s own language into any of the common earth languages, or to translate the earth language into the alien language. It was probably a tool carried with them against the need to communicate with humans, although so far we had no evidence they did so. The single encounter we knew of resulted in the removal of the person, Carol’s brother.

  Speculation about the device and its capabilities often got in the way of progress as well. For a while there was a concern that continuous heavy use of the device was another possible drain on its power source. So far, there was nothing to indicate that was so, although people continued to monitor the device for any kind of change that might indicate it was weakening. Another line of speculation was how extensive the internal language database might be. Did the device support only the languages current to the time, or did it have languages from the full history of earth locked inside? Some wondered if there might be the potential to find translations of languages that remained closed to us. There had been at least one request to experiment with some ancient languages since we weren’t making noticeable progress anyway.

  “The consultants you brought on board have been very helpful in getting us organized,” John observed. “They are very curious as to the source of the information they are being asked to work with, but reluctantly adhere to the ground rules of their employment.”

  We lacked expertise in linguistics. For years we had nothing they could work with so having them on staff would have been pointless. Early on some of the symbols had been run by a number of ‘experts’, but always to no avail. “Curious. Not like any writing I’ve encountered. Where did you find it? Perhaps it isn’t really writing, but some form of decoration instead?” But, having a tool to convert between the languages, we had used our connections with the government to fake a top-secret project and bring some of these people on-board. It had been easy to modify some of the non-disclosure agreements and top-secret privacy act documents. Each of the people interviewed was led to believe this was something being funded by the government. They would work on the language aspects, not knowing anything else about the activity. Questions outside their assigned areas were strictly prohibited. Conversation outside of the closed area was also strictly forbidden. Potential prison sentences for disclosure of any of the information were indicated. The usual government fear package. Some subtle bits were left floating that might lead to the impression it was an artificial situation created to see if a team could crack an unknown language should we encounter it. It was the kind of activity these men had been exposed to before dealing with secret government contracts. This was yet another program that was probably a foolish waste of taxpayer money. Not their problem. Anything useful they found was further processed on the advanced computers and software we couldn’t allow them to see.

  “Run it through for me once again,” I asked.

  “Okay. One of the first things we tried after our initial success with numbers was the alphabet.”

  I remembered the disappointment. “No luck, right?”

  “That’s correct. There were no sounds or symbols generated for a
ny of the letters of the alphabet. Either they weren’t structured that way, or it wasn’t considered important for the device to handle that aspect.”

  “Given the extensive capabilities of the translator, that would seem odd. Leaving out something that basic.” The failure to find the symbols had been the first failure, coming close on the heels of the initial successes.

  John nodded. “That’s the general agreement. So we have focused on words and their corresponding symbols. Patterns are few and hard to recognize. For example, words for various kinds of water have symbols that differ completely, lake, sea, ocean, pond, etc. Seems to be the same for everything we have tried. Where we might expect to see words as derivatives of each other, the alien language doesn’t seem to have any correlation between the terms.”

  “What about the sounds?” I asked. This was all old news. We were quickly running into the same obstacles that had blocked our learning for more than a decade.

  “We have been capturing every sound from the device,” John explained. “We actually had to backtrack a bit and repeat some of the earlier work.”

  I hadn’t heard this. “Why?” I asked curious.

  “Fortunately it was only a couple of days. We decided to try and playback the recorded sounds and check for reverse correlation of the language and symbols. Oddly enough, some sounds worked and others didn’t. The output English was a bit mechanical, but definitely understandable.” He dropped his train of thought for a minute to throw in a tidbit of information. “This was during the early experimentation before we decided to stay with English and get an English to Alien database. The output of the device when Alien is fed into it depends on whatever Earth language had been used for input last. Truly an amazing device!”

  I indicated that I wanted to know more about the sounds.

  “Okay,” he said apologetically. “When some of the sounds weren’t working in reverse, we set up spectrum analyzers and frequency counters to monitor the sound from the device and what we were playing back from the recorders. The recorders we had weren’t faithfully reproducing the sound range of the alien speech. Their range extends significantly beyond human hearing both on the high and low sides.”

  “So what we heard isn’t really the sounds they are making?”

  “We only hear a part of the sound. Probably explains why so much of the ‘speech’ sounds the same to us. We are missing much of the subtle variation because it is outside our hearing range. And more important, the frequency sensitivity of the standard recorders wasn’t capturing it either.”

  “That explains the urgent need for high end audio recorders early last week?”

  “Exactly. Once we got the proper equipment we were able to record and playback every word.” He looked pleased with himself. I still wasn’t certain how much use the extensive audio files would be, but it seemed prudent to gather as much information as possible against a later need. We didn’t know when there might be another opportunity.

  “Have we done anything with the files beyond capturing them?” I asked just out of curiosity.

  “We have one recorder running full time in the center ‘lab” playing back words that we have ‘translated’.” It looked like he thought this to be a waste of time.

  “You mean the lab in the control center?” I asked. “Why?”

  “Carol wanted us to do it. Says the time she saw the aliens operating the computers in the control area there was a lot of growling and rumbling. At the time she thought the alien was talking to itself, but she wonders if there might be a connection between audio and computer control.”

  “Anything?” I asked surprised at this development.

  “Nothing. But we just started this testing the other day. We are going to brief everyone at the meeting tomorrow about this new aspect of the study. It’s a pretty basic test. We have the tape running and the computer monitored for any kind of reaction. We don’t know what to expect, but anything would be progress of a sort.”

  There didn’t seem to be anything else to pursue, so I switched back to the consultants. “Have they come to any ideas on the structure of the language?”

  “Actually, yes. They think it is closer to Chinese or some of the other Asian languages than English. The lack of an alphabet equivalent seems to be driving their thoughts in this regard. Rather than the English approach of building words from a basic set of symbols, the alien language seems to have unique symbols for a word, like Chinese.”

  “So every word is unique. Each English word has it’s own character or symbol?”

  “Well, not every word,” John admitted. “We have found a great many English words that don’t have a counterpart in Alien.”

  “But without getting the computers activated which would hopefully provide us with more than random symbols, we don’t have any sense of their grammar. The fundamentals of their language still remains out of reach?”

  “There are still the texts,” John suggested hopefully. The lab had the bookshelves containing a small number of alien books. At first we had thought these would be a possible basis for our first translations of the language as the database of symbols grew. Unfortunately, we encountered yet another problem.

  The pages of the books were made from some form of extremely durable plastic, resistance to staining, tearing, and most other forms of damage. They were also resistant to being written on. There were several blank books on the shelf, and many tests had been run on one of these trying to understand the nature of the materials. Whatever was used as the writing implement, our experts thought it caused a chemical reaction to take place below the surface of the page. This reaction caused a color change, which appeared as the writing. More to the point, the text captured in all of these books was the equivalent of handwriting. Handwritten text could vary significantly from the strict form of a character. Even written forms could vary. Consider all the fonts available for English text. Then there are all the stylized additions to the printed word. When handwriting is added to the mix, the result could be symbols that varied significantly from the standardized symbol being given to us by the translator device. When you know a word, for example, you can frequently recognize it written, for a variety of writing styles. Even here, though, some writing is so bad that only the author is able to decipher what he has written. If, as in our case, the symbols are new and unknown, and acceptable variations are not understood, then the effects of handwriting can be to totally mask a character you might already have in the database.

  “I thought we didn’t have much hope for those?” I asked. “Even between the books, we have seen significant variations in the form of the writing. Clearly they are notes of some kind written by different individuals.”

  “All true,” John admitted reluctantly. “But when you’ve got nothing else you work with the bits and pieces available. We have scanned all of the texts into the computers, and have started a match routine of the characters in our database against what we find in those texts. When a possibility is found, it is recorded against the character. Possible matches are signaled to the operating system, so someone can periodically review hits.” He shrugged.

  “Sounds like a slow and almost random effort,” I said, trying not to be critical. They were doing everything possible, and many things I wouldn’t have thought to attempt. I had hoped for more progress.

  “Actually Carol says she is certain a better program for this is available uptime. Someone said she would be bringing that back for us so we can try it and see if our results improve. Do you know when she is going?”

  I knew that both she and Naiya were planning trips. Other activities had been neglected the past few weeks while the team was consumed with the prospect of an imminent breakthrough. Now we needed to get back on track and support the existing avenues of investigation as well as continuing with the translator. Carol needed to make an appearance uptime for the continuity of her persona there, as well as see about acquiring additional computer resources. She needed the break from here anyway. She had
been pushing her ‘cycle’ theory again, without much success. No one else on the team had been able to see the possibility as more than a numbers game, based on a lot of guesses.

  Almost sixteen years ago the aliens had taken Carol’s brother and she had followed them into the time matrix. I had stumbled upon it a two and a half years after she had first entered the control room. Somehow, we hadn’t crossed paths for all that time. That event sixteen years ago marked the one data point that was solid. We knew the aliens had been here then. Other than that, we don’t know if the time matrix has existed a hundred years, or came into existence shortly before we found it. Since the time her brother was taken, there has been no indication they have visited again. But Carol has been looking at the time history associated with each of the tunnels. We have no indication when they were first opened, nor whether any specific actions were taken by the aliens in the times accessed by the affected tunnel. The one hard fact surrounding the tunnels seems to be once opened, time moves forward linearly and is linked to time elsewhere in the other tunnels. In most cases we have found nothing. Dave has discovered a couple of instances where he is suspicious that the history of the period may have been meddled with. How, he can’t say. He feels that the direction major societies were taking seems to have suddenly shifted away from the established direction more quickly than would normally be expected. ‘Feels’ is the operative word. Supporting evidence is something else again, but is one of the reasons we have teams in several downtime eras.

  Carol became intrigued. Using her perspective from uptime, several societies uptime of us here in the 21st century have shown similar unexplained shifts in direction. Maybe natural, but perhaps not. By looking at the current time in the various tunnels that access some of these periods, and correlating the current time to an estimate of when the shifts have occurred, she thinks she has evidence of perhaps six alien activities. The most recent, 16 years ago, affects her brother. There are two events she points to that would have happened roughly 24 years ago, and another 40 years ago. Based on uptime histories, she had identified two suspicious events occurring nearly 31 and 32 years from their current matrix times respectively. Based on this limited data, an eight-year cycle can be postulated, if one ignores the fact that there is no evidence of a visit eight years ago. At that time we had people using the system almost daily, so we would surely have noticed. Still, she has seriously suggested that we are approaching a time when we might expect another visit. If her eight-year cycle is correct, then this year is the next eight year point. I had to admit that I had trouble with the ‘softness’ of the data. On the other hand, Carol was very astute, and she sometimes could see patterns that the rest of us missed. Maybe I believed her conclusion more than I admitted to myself. I had been really uneasy with Naiya’s proposed trip downtime, and had tried to convince her it wasn’t necessary.