Analog SFF, November 2008

by Dell Magazine Authors

  Casey Tungarook had raised both arms toward the sky. Within moments, she was encased within a wavering spire of green radiance so intense it made Morgan blink to look directly at it. Brighter and wider, it was otherwise no different from the astonishing phenomenon he had witnessed earlier inside the garage.

  Gradually lowering her arms until they were thrust straight out from her sides, she began to spin. Slowly at first, then faster and faster. Occasionally she would leap into the air. Though few Inupiaq had the build of a ballerina, Casey's jumps were often impressive and always full of enthusiasm.

  Leaning close to the enthralled photographer, Tungarook murmured from beneath the wolverine-rimmed hood of his parka. “Our people are great singers and dancers.” He smiled anew. “We have lots of time to practice, you know."

  Morgan heard but did not turn to look at the hunter. In front of him, out on the rocky snow-swept ground, a single smiling, stocky sixteen-year-old was singing a song in her own incredibly ancient language, spinning and twirling while enveloped in a softly hissing translucent tornado of light that spread farther and farther beyond her outstretched arms, until it seemed that the entire tundra was ablaze with red and green incandescence.

  As the edges of the shimmering aurora that had been brought to ground expanded to envelop him as well, the smile on the face of a thoroughly entranced Morgan grew wider and wider. There were many things he could have murmured, innumerable comments he could have made. Instead, like the proud father standing beside him, he said nothing. Merely looked on in rapt silence as the girl before them continued to energetically dance away the arctic night, partnering with the fire from the sky.

  Copyright (c) 2008 Alan Dean Foster

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  Short Story: BUG EYES by Richard A. Lovett

  * * * *

  Ilustration by John Allemand

  * * * *

  By definition, you can't really anticipate the unanticipated....

  * * * *

  Frank Rogers was staring at a bug-eyed monster. Or more precisely, it was staring at him, out of his computer screen.

  "Holy...” he said, recoiling so quickly he nearly fell over backward. He did slop coffee on the carpet. “What the hell's that?” Then: “Okay, who's the joker?"

  Of course, nobody answered. Frank was working at home and whoever'd planted the image could be anywhere. It was definitely the type of thing Robin Tripp might do. Except that Robin was up to her ears in other projects.

  Whatever the thing on the screen was, it was a pretty good monster. Multi-faceted eyes, a forest of antennae sprouting from what might be its forehead, and ... Frank recovered his chair and wheeled closer ... was that a radio dish sculpted into its backside?

  * * * *

  The monster was staring at him as though expecting something. “Hi,” he said, waving his hand. Not that it could see him. He was looking at a one-way feed, supposedly from the Vulcan 1 rover, forty-two light minutes away, on Io.

  Frank called the rover Fido, which, if pressed, he'd claim stood for Far-Io Data Observatory, though he avoided the name in public. JPL had cut out nicknames years ago, after some genius took to calling a Mars rover “Smith” after a character in an old novel. The press had picked up “a Martian named Smith” and run it into the ground, until the order came down that henceforth there would be no more nicknames. Space was serious business. So now, Frank was staring at his screen, talking to somebody's concept of a bug-eyed Martian—or Iovian—via a receive-only link from a rover not named Fido.

  Robin couldn't be the culprit. She had the right sense of humor, but she wasn't insane, and whoever'd planted the image was in big trouble if the press saw it. Big enough even if they didn't.

  That left an outsider. But why waste the effort on a sideshow like Io? Years ago, Fido had made major discoveries, but the only reason it was still running was that, these days, it was pretty much autonomous. Check in every now and then to see if anything new had popped up ... then, when it hadn't, wait until next week. Half the time, Frank left the whole thing to his grad students.

  Could the hacker be a grad student? Every year he swore they looked more and more like high school kids, but surely they weren't stupid enough for a stunt like this. But if it really was an outside hack, all hell was going to break loose regarding data contamination. Everything from Io, and most likely an entire generation of other missions, would be suspect.

  Frank had always had a tendency to panic. That was probably why the prankster had picked him. The data was safe, he told himself. Anyone who could create a bug-eyed monster wasn't going to mess with something as mundane as magnetic field deviations or geochemical analyses. Besides, they probably hadn't actually hacked the data stream from Jupiter. You'd pretty much have to send your own probe out there to do that. They'd simply hijacked his not terribly secure home computer. Ha-ha, be a sport, and all that. Still, it sure as hell better not be one of his students.

  There was only one thing to do. He picked up his coffee and drained what was left of the still-hot liquid. When dealing with a crisis, awake is always a good thing. Then he grabbed his wallet and RailPass. It was time to go to the lab and see what was really coming in from Jupiter. Then he could set about finding out who'd nearly caused him to scald himself.

  The monster was still there when he got to campus. Worse, Fido hadn't moved. That meant the probe also thought it was detecting something and had gone into standby mode, awaiting instructions.

  Frank fast-reversed through the recorded feed until he found the monster's first appearance, nearly a full day before. Unlike Fido, who moved on wheels, it appeared to flow across the ground, as if on some sort of ground-effect field. Though there wasn't much opportunity to watch it. Until the monster blocked its course, Fido had ignored it, intent on its orders to visit a chain of volcanic features near the base of Io's Tvashtar volcano.

  One moment, the rover had been en route to a sulfurous-looking cone where, if prior history meant anything, it would discover a lot of sulfur. (There was a reason the project had nearly been defunded. Of late, even the lower-level journals had been taking a seen-that, been-there attitude.) Then the monster moved in and parked itself right in front of Fido.

  Sulfur cones were definitely in the seen-that department. Bug-eyed monsters weren't. Nor were they in the rover's programming. It had stopped and assessed the situation for about forty-five seconds. Then it extruded a sensor arm, apparently planning to take a sample—just as it was programmed to do for rocks. It reached for the apparition, hesitated, and stopped, as what passed for its brain finally deduced that rocks aren't supposed to move. It withdrew the arm ... and ever since, had been awaiting instructions.

  The monster hadn't moved either. The hacker, it appeared, was waiting for Frank.

  He got up and closed the door. Whatever he did, he most certainly didn't want to get second-guessed by his students. Whoever was toying with him was patient. And good. It would have been one thing for the rover to go into standby mode when it tried to take a sample of a rock that proved not to exist. But the telemetry indicated that when it reached out, it actually thought it had touched something.

  If I were good enough to have done this, he thought, what would I expect me to do now?

  * * * *

  For the next couple of hours, Frank imitated Fido and did nothing. One option was just to ignore the apparition. Maybe the hacker would get bored and go away. One could always hope.

  Unfortunately, that wasn't the way most practical jokers behaved. And since Fido thought there was a solid object sitting in front of it, it wouldn't try to drive through it, no matter what instructions Frank sent. Not without a complete rewrite of its navigation program.

  Eventually he opted for a drive-around option. Turn right, he told the rover, go ten meters, turn left, and return to course.

  He also asked it to activate an old subroutine that verified all commands before executing them. It was mostly a debug program, though it had proven
useful, early in the project, when Robin, in Australia, thought it was her shift and sent instructions that not only conflicted with Frank's, but arrived in overlapping packets. Eighty-five minutes later, they'd watched in horror as the rover tried to implement both at once. Each had immediately told it to abort, and they were very lucky not to have left it turtled at the base of a steep slope or with its antenna pointing uselessly away from the Jupiter orbiter.

  For a while, they'd turned the command-verifying program on to prevent future hiccups, but eventually controlling the rover had become Frank's sole responsibility and he'd switched the program back off. With the speed-of-light delay, waiting for confirmation was just too much nuisance on what was supposed to be a low-budget, super-extended phase of the project.

  Now, however, he wanted to know who else was talking to the rover. If he got lucky, he'd see the hacker's data stream coming in. While he was at it, he set the activity log to run in a pop-up window. So far, no other member of the rover team had come online since the monster first appeared. If one did and Frank didn't immediately get a what-the-bleep phone call, he had his culprit.

  Unless, of course, they were busy cleaning up their coffee, too.

  * * * *

  In the nearly three hours before Frank could watch the rover verify and execute his new command, nothing happened. Nobody logged on, nobody called, and nothing in the activity log gave him a clue where the apparition had come from. But eventually, Fido stirred to life. It turned as directed and began trundling on its new course, veering a bit to avoid a very normal rock. Then, it swung back to the left.

  Since the rover lived in an environment where nothing but it was expected to move (except the volcano, which would be hard to dodge if it suddenly erupted), both of its cameras normally pointed forward when it was in motion. Frank hadn't thought to override that, so it wasn't until the rover started to turn back onto its original course that he got a view to the side.

  The monster had flanked Fido's motion, and now, the rover again found itself blocked. This time Fido didn't bother to reach out a sensor. Instead, it immediately went back into standby mode.

  For a moment, Frank simply stared at his screen. As far as he could tell, the monster had moved in tandem with Fido. But that could only happen if the hacker had fed the image to Fido's sensors at the same time Frank had sent his own commands. Otherwise there'd be a phase lag between the illusion's motion and Fido's, and the whole charade would have collapsed. That was one very sophisticated hack.

  Frank thought a bit longer, then told Fido to juke right for one meter, then reverse course for twenty meters at randomly varied speed. Only then was it to resume its original course.

  He'd have liked to encrypt the command, but that wasn't possible. He did switch to a different computer, just in case someone had tapped this one.

  Three hours later, he watched Fido zig, zag, turn ... and again come face to ... whatever ... with the monster.

  Actually, this time, it was face to quarter profile. The eyes were still looking at Fido, but the body was at a different angle, giving Frank a better view of the bowl sculpted into its nether regions.

  It sure as hell looked like a satellite dish. But it equally sure as hell wasn't pointed in the same direction as the first time he'd seen it.

  "Ha!” he exclaimed. “Gotcha, bastard!” Though a moment later, he wasn't sure what he'd caught other than a programming error.

  Even as he gloated, the monster moved. This time, it wasn't content merely to block Fido's way. Just as Fido had reached out a sensor, now it extended an arm. But it wasn't the insect arm Frank's subconscious would have expected, based on the monster's eyes. It was more like a telescoping rod, crossed with a tentacle. Another arm appeared, along with a new pair of equally flexible antennae, which undulated in tandem above the monster's eyes.

  Frank wasn't sure he liked this.

  Back up, he ordered Fido, barely remembering to turn off the command verification program, so he didn't have to wait for two speed-of-light delays.

  Even so, it was forty-two minutes before Fido could comply, and another forty-two before Frank could see it do so. Meanwhile, the tentacles probed, touched, twisted, and appeared to remove one of Fido's command hatches. They reached inside, finding data ports, and briefly, Frank lost the signal as Fido's antenna swiveled offline, then returned. His own computer erupted in frenetic activity, beaming random files off toward Jupiter, until, unable to interrupt it, he shut it down.

  By the time he rebooted, the rover had come to life and was moving away, leaving the access plate on the sulfur-stained Iovian ground.

  The monster picked up the plate and advanced, intending to do ... something, as Fido scampered backward.

  Unfortunately, Frank had kept the cameras directed at the monster, and he'd been slow to realize, after he'd given it the back-up command, that he'd ordered the machine to do so blind. The moment he'd realized his mistake, he'd frantically told it to reverse one of its cameras, but for a full thirty seconds he could only watch the monster, as Fido accelerated backward.

  By the end, the monster had dropped the access plate and was waving its tentacles like a loose-limbed semaphore. Then the camera angle swiveled, just in time for Frank to see a gaping fissure. Fido saw it too and tried to auto-brake, but came up shy, and the signal vanished as though the electromagnetic thread had been snipped by scissors.

  * * * *

  Needless to say, JPL wasn't happy. Frank had panicked and driven their four hundred and fifty million dollar rover into a crevasse—hard to forgive, even if wanting to back up, now, was an understandable impulse when something, however unreal, appeared to be trying to take it apart. On the other hand, the mission had nearly been shut down in each of the last three budget cycles, so at least it was a four hundred and fifty million dollar rover most people thought had outlived its usefulness.

  Luckily, Frank had tenure, and the only truly bad thing was that the rover hadn't been able to get data from inside the crevasse, once the walls cut off its signal. Too bad, the ultimate verdict was, we've seen plenty of volcanic fissures from the outside; it might almost have been worthwhile to see one from the inside, if only we'd gotten the data.

  Nobody talked much about the monster. To do so raised the specter of data corruption. Better to presume it was a one-time hack. Nobody could quite figure out how it had been done, but they didn't want to draw media scrutiny by investigating too deeply, for fear of headlines about incompetent NASA engineers getting their systems cracked by some kid in Thailand, Texas, or Timbuktu.

  But Frank wasn't so sure. He'd watched the monster shadow Fido's movements in real time, or something very close to it. He'd seen it appear to take off Fido's access plate and try to suck data out of his own computer. He'd watched it wave its tentacles, as though aware of the crevasse and trying to warn him. How could a hacker's illusion do any of those?

  Maybe it had been a Chinese probe. But when he suggested that to a colleague, all he got was a snort. Why would the Chinese send a probe without announcing it to the world? And why then go visit NASA's?

  "You might as well suggest it was from Alpha Centauri,” his colleague said. Then he saw Frank's look. “No. Don't. Remember cold fusion. Or Roswell. Hell, back when they found the first pulsar, some poor sap thought it was somebody's cosmic lighthouse. All that happened was that some kid got into your system. Yeah, it's embarrassing, but let it go. Occam's razor and all that."

  But Occam's razor cut both ways, and Frank couldn't help but think about why NASA had sent Fido in the first place. That, at least, was simple. Io was the most volcanically active body in the Solar System. In the entire known universe, for that matter, though that didn't mean much, since, when it came to planetary geology, the known universe ended at Pluto. But who knew how unique Io truly was? Maybe it really was the most volcanically active body in the universe—or at least this corner of it.

  Humans had reached stepwise from Earth to ever more outlying parts of the Solar Syst
em. Maybe outsiders would start at the fringe and work inward. And if they met us along the way, would they know what they'd found, or just presume we were Iovians, or fellow long-distance travelers, like themselves? A million and one ideas had been propounded for what to do if a probe discovered life on Mars or some outer-system moon. But as far as Frank knew, nobody had ever asked what would happen if instead we met someone else's probe.

  Fido's tragic plunge didn't bring the project instantly to an end. There was always hope that the rover might manage to extract itself. In Io's eighteen percent gravity, it could fall a fair distance and survive, and while it wasn't designed to climb out, it might be able to inch along the bottom and find an exit that way. Unlikely, but it gave Frank an excuse to monitor the feed, in case the monster tried to communicate directly. He even tried to help by sending signals: beep-beep-beep, prime numbers, even the “Hi” he'd wanted to say at the start.

  But all he got was silence. Though, even if he'd gotten a response, he had no idea how he'd have proven it wasn't just hacker, redux.

  Meanwhile, he studied images of the monster, intrigued by how the thing's orientation had changed. Fido's dish did the same, tracking the Jupiter orbiter, but that was hundreds of thousands of miles away, and the angle shifted slowly. That was why, initially, he'd thought the monster's changing angle had been a gaffe. But what if it was real?

  Over and over, he measured angles and calculated orbits, trying to see what, if anything, it might have been tracking. Meanwhile, he asked a computer geek friend to search his computer for signs of break in.

  The computer search was useless, the angles intriguing. It turned out that the monster could have been following a non-NASA orbiter—circling Io, rather than Jupiter: close enough for a sophisticated computer to allow the monster to react, for all intents and purposes, instantaneously.