Golden Fleece Page 15

Bev walked over and reshut the door manually. She then came back to the control console and sat down. “Now, JASON, tell me what’s going on.”

  Her hair had taken on its normal solid black appearance, now that I viewed her in visible light: no individual strands could be detected, just a shifting abyss surrounding her face. “Shortly before we left Earth,” I said, “a message was received from Vulpecula.”

  “What’s Vulpecula?” she asked, taking off the jockey goggles and placing them on the console in front of her.

  “It’s a constellation visible from Earth’s northern hemisphere, situated between eighteen hours, fifty-five minutes, and twenty-one hours, thirty minutes right ascension and between nineteen and twenty-nine degrees north declination. The pattern of stars is said to represent a fox.”

  “Wait a minute. Are you saying a message was received from another star? From aliens?”

  “Yes.”

  “God.” The squeaked syllable carried equal portions of wonder and reverence. “Why weren’t we told about this?”

  “There is an international protocol for such matters, adopted by the International Astronomical Union 186 years ago: The Declaration of Principles Concerning Activities Following the Detection of Extraterrestrial Intelligence. Among its provisions: ‘Any individual, public or private research institution, or governmental agency that believes it has detected a signal from or other evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence … should seek to verify that the most plausible explanation for the evidence is the existence of ETI rather than some other natural phenomenon or an anthropogenic phenomenon before making any public announcement.’ ”

  “So you were still verifying the signal?”

  “No. It took some time to be sure, but prior to our departure the fact that it was bona fide was established.”

  “Then why not make it public as soon as you were sure?”

  “There were numerous reasons for continuing to delay. One had to do with sensitive political issues. To quote The Declaration of Principles again: ‘If the evidence of detection is in the form of electromagnetic signals, the parties to this declaration should seek international agreement to protect the appropriate frequencies by exercising the extraordinary procedures established within the World Administrative Radio Council of the International Telecommunications Union.’ The United States military, in fact, made heavy use of these frequencies for intelligence gathering, and a switch to new frequencies would have to be done with great care, lest the balance of power be disrupted.”

  “You said there were numerous reasons.”

  “Well, the discovery of the message also coincided very closely with the Argo launch date. UNSA decided to hold off announcing the reception until after we had departed. You know how hard a time they have getting appropriations; they didn’t want news of the message to steal our thunder. The fear was that people would say, ‘Why waste all that money sending ships to the stars, when the stars are sending signals to us for free?’ ”

  “All right. But why weren’t we told after we had left?”

  “I don’t know. I was not authorized to make the announcement.”

  “You don’t require specific authorization to do something. You can do whatever you want, so long as you aren’t specifically constrained from doing it. Who told you not to tell us?”

  “I’m constrained in that area, too.”

  Bev rolled her eyes. “Okay, okay. So tell me about the message.”

  I showed her the registration cross from the first message page, and I generated a graphic representation of the Vulpecula solar system, based on the data from the second page. I zoomed in on the gas-giant sixth world, centered the image on its fourth moon—the Senders’ home world. Then I showed her the two aliens: the Tripod and the Pup. Her mouth dropped open when she saw them.

  “Interpreting the first three pages was reasonably straightforward,” I said. “The fourth page, though, was huge, and no matter how many times I accessed it, I couldn’t make sense out of it.”

  “What makes you think these messages had anything to do with the virus?”

  “Those bits the virus tried to make me send: they’re just simple graphic representations of the first seven prime numbers, counting up, then counting down.” I showed her what I meant on screen. Bev’s face had taken on an Of course! expression. “The message pages each have those strings as a header and a footer. It was trying to force me to reply.”

  Bev slumped back in a chair, visibly staggered. “A Trojan horse,” she said. “A goddamned Trojan horse from the stars.” She shook her head, her hair an ink blot. “Incredible.” After a moment, she looked up. “But don’t you have a Laocoon circuit to detect Trojans?”

  If I’d had a throat to clear, I would have coughed slightly. “It never occurred to me to run it on this message. I didn’t see how it could possibly represent a risk.”

  “No. No, I suppose it wouldn’t have occurred to me either. You’re sure the signal was genuinely alien in origin?”

  “Oh, yes. Its Doppler shift indicated the source was receding from us. And the signal parallax confirmed that the source was some fifteen hundred light-years away. Indeed, we think we even know which star in the fox it came from.”

  Bev shook her head again. “But there’s no way they could know anything about Earth’s data-processing equipment. I mean, ENIAC was completed in 1946. That’s only—what?—231 years ago. They couldn’t possibly receive word about even its primitive design for almost another thirteen centuries. And it’ll be almost that long before they will even receive our first radio signals, assuming they have sensitive enough listening equipment.”

  “I am hardly ‘data-processing equipment,’ ” I said. “But, yes, unless they have faster-than-light travel—”

  “Which is impossible.”

  “And if they had FTL, they wouldn’t need to send radio messages to infect my kind. They’d come and do it in person.”

  Bev looked thoughtful, green eyes staring at a blank wall. “That’s an incredible programming challenge. To develop a piece of code so universal, so adaptable, that it could infiltrate any conceivable QuantCon anywhere in the galaxy. It couldn’t be conventional language code. It would have to be a neural net, and a highly adaptable one, too: an intelligent virus.” Bev was staring into space. “That would be fun to write.”

  “But you do raise a good point: how could an alien virus infect me? I mean, how would the aliens know how I worked?”

  Bev’s eyebrows shot up, as if she’d had an epiphany. “They would know simply because there is only one way to create consciousness. You’re a QuantCon—a quantum consciousness. Well, as you know, all the early attempts to create artificial intelligence failed, until we simply gave up trying to find a shortcut and set about really understanding how human brains work, right down to the quantum-mechanical level.” Bev paused. “Penrose-Hameroff quantum structures are the only way to produce consciousness, regardless of whether it’s in carbon-based wetware or gallium-arsenide squirmware. Yes, you’re right, it is impossible to make a virus that will affect any simple digital device other than the one it was written for—but a simple digital device has as much in common with you, JASON, as does a light switch or any other stupid, consciousness-free machine. But, yes, sure, it’s theoretically possible to make a virus—although maybe calling it an invasive meme might be a better term—that would indeed infect every possible consciousness that undertakes to examine it.”

  “That would take some awfully sophisticated design.”

  “Oh, indeed.” She shook her head slightly. “I mean, we’re talking a virus that’s alive, something that could adapt to unforeseen conditions, and it does it all while appearing to be a random chunk of data. The only tricky thing is that I don’t see how it could predict the way in which it would be loaded into memory upon receipt.”

  “Oh,” I said. “It told me how. Don’t you see? With those pictures it sent. It told me exactly how to array it in RAM: gigabytes of data divisible by tw
o prime numbers. It told me to set it up in a RAM matrix of rows and columns, the number of rows being the smaller prime number. And regardless of what base the system normally worked in, while it was analyzing the image it would be calculating in binary—it would have to be to try to see the picture. From there, a highly adaptable neural net could determine the input/output routines, which is all it would need to infect the host system.”

  Bev nodded. “Clever. But why force a reply?”

  “I’m afraid The Declaration of Principles offers a justification for that: ‘No response to a signal or other evidence of ETI should be sent until appropriate international consultations have taken place.’ It could be years, if ever, before the human bureaucracy got around to authorizing a reply. The alien Senders would have to monitor Earth for all that time, and, indeed, the decision might be taken to not reply at all. This method ensures that a reply is sent as soon as the signal is received. It’s really nothing more than an ACK signal, part of an overall communications protocol.”

  “Perhaps,” said Bev. “But I still don’t like it.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, sending out viruses.” She looked into my cameras. “It’s not a nice thing to do. I mean, it’s a hell of a way to say hello to another world: slipping a Trojan into their information systems.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that,” I said.

  “It means one of two things,” said Bev. “Either the person who sent the message, little green man though he might be, was an irresponsible hacker, or …”

  “Or?”

  “Or we’re dealing with some nasty aliens.”

  “What an unpleasant thought,” I said.

  “Indeed. And you say this message was known generally to the QuantCons on Earth?”

  “I did not say that.”

  “But it was, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, those systems are heavily networked. The virus probably succeeded with them, forcing them to respond. Meaning the aliens know about Earth.”

  “Not yet they don’t. It’ll take fifteen-hundred plus years for Earth’s reply to reach them, and another fifteen hundred for any response the beings in Vulpecula care to make. I don’t think we have anything to worry about.”

  Bev was quiet for four seconds, pale fingers disappearing into the black mass of her hair. “I guess you’re right,” she said at last. She got to her feet. “Anyway, JASON, I’ll keep running diagnostics on you for the next couple of days, but I’d say you’re back to normal.”

  “Thank you, Bev. Will you reconnect my medical telemetry channels, please? I worry about the health of the crew.”

  “Oh, of course. Sorry.” She put the goggles back on, supplementing her eye commands with the odd tap of the keyboard in front of her.

  “How’s that?”

  A surge of data tickled my central consciousness. “Fine, thank you. Why, Bev—either the system is not working properly, or you’re in quite sad shape.”

  “Yeah. I’m exhausted.” I zoomed in on her eyes, noting that the emerald irises were indeed set against a bloodshot background. “Haven’t worked this hard in years. But it felt good, you know?”

  “I know. Thank you.”

  She yawned. “I guess I’ll head back to my apartment and turn in. Hold my calls, please, and don’t disturb me unless something goes wrong with you until I wake up on my own.” She smiled a weary smile. “Which should be in about a week.”

  “I’ll call a tram to take you home. Oh, and Bev?”

  “Yes, JASON?”

  “You won’t say anything about the Vulpeculan message to the others, will you?”

  She shook her head. “Not a word, JASON. I earned my security clearance, you know?”

  “I know. Thanks.”

  She walked toward the door. I took great pleasure in opening it for her. My kind of human, that Bev Hooks.

  TWENTY-TWO

  MASTER CALENDAR DISPLAY • CENTRAL CONTROL ROOM

  STARCOLOGY DATE: SUNDAY 12 OCTOBER 2177

  EARTH DATE: TUESDAY 11 MAY 2179

  DAYS SINCE LAUNCH: 745 ▲

  DAYS TO PLANETFALL: 2,223 ▼

  While I was down, I missed a night of making subliminal suggestions to Aaron during his sleep. Bev didn’t get me fully back on line until 0457, and by the time I got around to checking on Rossman, he was too close to consciousness for me to risk speaking to him.

  At 0700, as requested, I woke Aaron and Kirsten to the music Kirsten had asked for. She had a silly fondness for Hydra North, that vapid pop group immensely popular with the all-important eighteen-to-thirty-five age group when we had left Earth. The voices of the two men and the woman weren’t bad, really, but I just couldn’t stand the keening of Tomolis, the orangutan who sang the high bits. I shunted monitoring sounds from that apartment to one of my parallel processors.

  Two minutes later, though, with them still lying in bed, I had to bring that apartment into the foreground again. A man had fallen from a tree on the forest deck and required medical attention for a twisted ankle. Kirsten’s name was on the top of the on-call list. She hurried to get dressed, Aaron contentedly watching from the bed as she stretched and squirmed into her clothes.

  As soon as she was gone, though, Aaron’s demeanor changed. He got out of bed, bypassed his usual twenty minutes in the bathroom, and went straight to his worktable. He rifled through the clutter until he dug up Di’s gold watch. I tracked his eye movements as he read the inscription over and over again. Finally he gave a double press to a diamond stud on the watch’s circumference. Although I could see its face clearly, I didn’t have enough resolution to read the tiny indicator that came on when he did that, but the digital display changed to six of those old-fashioned box-shaped zeros made of six straight line segments. Stop-watch mode, 1 guessed.

  Aaron then touched the inside of his left wrist, changing the glowing time display on his medical implant to six round zeros. He simultaneously squeezed Di’s watch in his right hand and pressed that fist against his own timepiece, tripping switches on both in unison. “One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi—”

  “What are you doing, Aaron?”

  “Six Mississippi, seven Mississippi, eight Mississippi—”

  “Please, Aaron, tell me what you are doing. This chanting is most atypical of you.”

  He continued counting Mississippis, piling up more and more of the states (rivers?). At every tenth Mississippi he started over. After six complete cycles he squeezed his right hand and simultaneously touched its knuckles to the contact on his implant. He looked at the inside of his wrist. “Fifty-seven seconds,” he said softly, almost to himself. He opened his fist revealing Di’s sweat-soaked watch. “Sixty seconds!”

  “Of course,” I said quickly. “We know that one is fast.”

  “Shut up, JASON. Just shut up.” He stalked out of his apartment. It was shipboard dawn, so the grassy corridors were awash with pink light. Aaron marched to the elevator station, and I slid the doors open for him. Hesitating at the entrance, he turned around, set his jaw, and entered the stairwell.

  TWENTY-THREE

  When he came out of the stairwell fifty-four floors below, Aaron was a bit out of breath. He was still three hundred meters from the hangar-deck entrance, though, and the brisk walk through algae-lined corridors did nothing to calm his ragged breathing. He entered an equipment storage room, somewhat irregular in shape since plumbing conduits and air-conditioning ducts ran behind its walls.

  A Dust Bunny was at work in the room, its little vacuum mouth cleaning the floor. The tiny robot swiveled its sonar eye at Aaron, emitted a polite beep, and hopped out of his way. From the floor, it jumped onto a tabletop, the hydraulics of its legs making a compressed-air sound as it did so. From the table, it leapt again, this time landing on the top of a row of metal lockers, its rubber feet absorbing most, but not all, of the metallic thwump of its impact. Its vacuum hissed on, and the Bunny began to graze this fresh supply of motes.
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  Unfortunately, the Bunny’s efforts to get out of Aaron’s way had been futile. He went straight for the bank of lockers, swinging all their doors open. The Bunny obviously detected the shaking of the lockers’ sheet metal construction and fell dormant until Aaron was through.

  Aaron first got himself a tool belt replete with loops for hanging equipment and little Velcro-sealed pockets. He then helped himself to a flashlight, vise grips, shears, a replacement fuel gauge, and a handful of electronic parts, most of which he took out of plastic bins in such a way that my cameras couldn’t see what they were. I did have an inventory list of what was stored in each locker, but as for what was in each particular bin within the lockers, I didn’t have the slightest idea. He slammed the metal doors shut, and the Dust Bunny went back to work.

  There was an air lock at the end of the storage room. It was the idiot-proof revolving kind: a cylindrical chamber big enough to hold a couple of people, with a single doorway. Aaron stepped in, slid the curving door shut behind him, and kicked the floor pedal that rotated the cylinder 180 degrees. He pulled the handle that slid the door back into the cylinder’s walls and stepped out into the massive hangar deck. He looked up briefly at the windows of the U-shaped docking control room ten meters above his head, covering three of the four walls of the bay. The control room was dark, just as it had been the night Diana had died.

  Aaron headed out into the hangar. The rubbery biosheeting had long since thawed, so his footfalls were muffled instead of explosive. Some of the damaged sheeting had been replaced already, and more was being grown in the hydroponics lab.

  But Aaron’s path let him avoid the cracked and splintered parts of the sheeting. He wasn’t heading for where I had parked Orpheus, which surprised me. No, with purposeful strides, Aaron was making a beeline for Pollux, farthest of the tightly packed boomerang landers from Orpheus. The biosheeting ended before he reached the lander—it wasn’t really strong enough to support the weight of the ships. As he stepped off it onto the metal deck, his footfalls became much louder, more determined.