01-01-00 (8 page)

This morning, during one of her daily Internet excursions, Jackie had discovered that the timing of last night's signal from the southern constellation Centaur coincided with what appeared to be a worldwide computer freeze event, blamed on a new type of virus. Fortunately for Ishiguro and his team, the virus had not reached their systems in the Andes, not only sparing them from this dangerous event, but also allowing them to capture the incoming signal from outer space. Had their workstations been frozen, like so many other systems across the globe, the radio telescope would have stopped acquiring signals during that portion of time, missing what now seemed to be one of the most important cosmological events of the millennium.

Scrambling up the observatory's steps two at a time, he reached the main floor. The lights were off. Jackie and three technicians huddled around a glaring monitor, its pulsating glow forking through the spaces in between their bodies, casting a wan hue inside the large room. The clicking of his shoes broke up the silence, mixing with the humming of dozens of small fans cooling the HP workstations.

Ishiguro peeked in between two technicians, who politely stepped aside after noticing him. Jackie worked the mouse, clicking her way through layers of menus on one window while another window displayed the signal from yesterday's event in red and what had to be today's signal superimposed in blue. Beneath that window, a close-up map of the southern constellation Centaur displayed two X marks, one in red and another almost on top of the first in blue, their overlap shade reminding him of the violet hue of the nebula of Andromeda's feathery ring.

“They're not technically from the exact same origin,” Jackie said, zooming in to the point in space between HR4390A and HR4390B. “But awfully close, about two million miles apart.”

Ishiguro thought about that for a moment and suddenly opened his engineering notebook, making a few notes. “Hmmm, that's interesting.”

“What are you doing?” asked Jackie.

Ishiguro closed the notebook. “Let's assume that the signal originated from a planet circling the smaller of the two stars, HR4390A, roughly five times the size of our Sun. If we also assume that this planet circles the sun at about the same speed as our Earth, sixty thousand miles per hour, that would translate to just under 1.5 million miles in a twenty-four hours pe—”

“What's going on?” asked Kuoshi, struggling inside the room while hauling the ten-inch telescope and the laptop.

“Hold on, Kuoshi-san. Anyway, the fact that the signals are two million miles apart should be expected if the transmission is coming from another planet. Can you zoom in as much as possible and clean up the image to see if we can spot the planet?”

Jackie shook her head. “I tried the strongest setting, but all I get is this.” She clicked the mouse a few times and the image on her screen changed to one of near total darkness, save for a dimmed violet-white haze on the right.

Ishiguro leaned closer to the screen, trying to make out the round shape of a planet in the vastness of space. He could not.

“There's a few more interesting things about this event,” Jackie said, tapping her screen with a pen. “Yesterday's signal pulsated for twenty seconds. Today's pulsated for only nineteen.”

“Like a—”

“Countdown?” she said.

“Maybe. It could also just be interstellar noise altering the original transmission. Have you been able to make any sense of its content?”

Jackie shook her head. “That's another thing that seems unique about the signal. It's so polarized and of such narrow beam that you almost need to be right on the intended target on Earth to pick it up.”

“So you can detect it but can't get a clean download of its contents?” asked Kuoshi Honichi.

“Right,” she said. “Sort of like watching a car with tinted windows drive by. You see the car but not the driver or what's in the trunk. You need to be at its destination in order to see all of that.”

“Where is this point on Earth?” asked Ishiguro.

Jackie made a face. “That's the last issue. Since we weren't sure if this signal would ever come again, we focused our efforts on scanning the sky around its point of origin. We know that the signal's headed for our planet. In fact, it looks like it's being beamed down somewhere in the American continent, north of the equator and south of Canada.”

“Great,” said Kuoshi, throwing his hands up in the air. “That sure narrows it down! What am I supposed to tell Osaka now?”

“Hey!” Jackie began to get up, her index finger cocked at the corporate liaison. Ishiguro put a hand on her shoulder while rapidly adding, “We're scientists, Kuoshi-san, working on what could be the discovery of the millennium. The only way to be successful is by cooperating with each other and understanding the difficulties of the task. Now we need your help. We think we have a good fix on the point of origin, but we need to nail down the destination. For that we will need a minimum of three satellites to perform a terrestrial triangulation.”

Jackie exhaled heavily and remained seated, seemingly satisfied with Ishiguro's diplomatic intervention. Kuoshi nodded.

“All right,” Ishiguro said, pacing in front of the group. “We have to do this by the numbers. Protocol is to contact another researcher with a suitably equipped radio telescope to confirm the event.”

Kuoshi nodded. “Nobemaya. They have the best radio telescope in Japan.”

“Okay. What about satellite coverage of the next event?”

“Which should occur tomorrow,” added Jackie. “Assuming that the event is following a pattern.”

“I'll have to contact Osaka and set it up with our own satellites.”

“Okay. Now, Jackie, get on the phone with Nobemaya and follow it up with a detailed E-mail. If the contact is confirmed, we'll need to inform the International Astronomical Union, as well as the secretary-general of the United Nations, again following international protocol rules for extraterrestrial contacts.”

“No,” Kuoshi said. “One step at a time. First the contact confirmation. Then we wait for instructions from Osaka.”

Jackie stood next to her husband. “What do you mean?”

The corporate liaison crossed his arms, prepared to stand his ground on this one. “This operation is financed by Sagata Enterprises. Our executives will decide on the appropriate course of action once the contact has been confirmed by Nobemaya. Those are the rules. If you deviate, your employment will be terminated. Now I must contact Osaka.”

The Japanese technicians from Sagata lowered their gazes. Ishiguro held Jackie back as Kuoshi left the room.

“Those … those
bastards!
I knew they would do something like this if we ever came across a signal!”

Ishiguro held her from behind. “Easy, there. Easy. Let's take it one step at a time. First the confirmation of the contact. Tomorrow we'll also find out about the origin. Come. Let's go get some fresh air before you have to contact Nobemaya.”

They left the building not just to get out of the stuffy observatory room, but also to have some privacy. Ishiguro didn't trust the technicians from Sagata any more than he trusted Kuoshi Honichi.

A crystalline sky greeted them, having a soothing effect on Jackie Nakamura. She took a lungful of some of the cleanest air on the planet. It was cold and dry. The distant, snow-covered peaks of the highest mountains in the Andes looked down upon them beneath the starlight.

“This signal wasn't beamed for the exclusive monitoring of Sagata Enterprises' executives,” she complained after a minute of gazing at the stars.

“Let's
play ball,
as you Americans like to say,” said Ishiguro. “That way we're kept in the game. Our options remain open. Once we learn enough, we can apply some pressure to get this released.”

“Why do I get the feeling that they have already thought of that possibility?”

Ishiguro patted her cheek. “You're worrying too much. Right now you should be ecstatic that it was you who first detected the signal yesterday. Do you realize that you could be the very first person on the planet to ever have picked up a signal from outer space—with scientific data to back it up, of course.”

Jackie considered that for a moment and then smiled. “When you put it that way … I guess you're right.”

“You bet. And don't worry about Sagata. Kuoshi is simply following orders. Sagata can't contain this for very long, and when word gets out, you'll be the one on the covers of
Newsweek
and
Time.
Heck, maybe they'll even take your picture next to Jodie Foster. The actress next to the real thing.” He grinned.

“That's why I love you,” she said. “You've always found a way to calm me down, even back in college, when I couldn't sleep before an exam or a dissertation.”

“I'm always here for you.”

Ishiguro embraced his wife and gazed at the stars.

Chapter Four

000100

1

December 12, 1999

“I tried to call you,” Troy Reid said the moment Susan stepped into his office, “but the phone—”

“I took it off the hook. I was hoping to get a good night's sleep and come in fresh in the morning.” She made a face while sitting down. “
Obviously
you had other plans.”

Troy Reid regarded her haggardly from behind his desk. He actually looked pretty consumed himself. Dark and puffy skin encircled his bloodshot eyes. A salt-and-pepper stubble reflected two days without shaving, and Susan thought she could smell his perspiration.

“Looks like our friend's back,” he said in a voice hoarser than usual.

“That's what your two boys said, but couldn't provide me with any details,” she replied.

“Same time as before, exactly eight oh one in the evening, local time.”

“Did it also last twenty seconds?”

Reid slowly shook his head. “That's what I thought at first, but the official time was
nineteen
seconds.”

She raised an eyebrow. “Nineteen, huh?
Exactly
nineteen?”

“On the nose.” Reid locked eyes with her.

“You don't suppose…” she stopped.

“A countdown?”

She nodded. “Why do I get the feeling that tomorrow there's going to be another event at the exact same time?”

The aging Bureau officer frowned. “And it'll probably last
eighteen
seconds. I know. That's the first thing that came to my mind. That's why I sent for you.”

Susan stared in the distance, the intriguing finding overshadowing her exhaustion as well as her annoyance at being here again. She abruptly stood, snagging the carrying case next to the chair. The sooner she got started the sooner she could think about something other than killing herself. “I'd better go check the contents of the cocoons.”

“Let me know what you find. It's obvious I ain't going anywhere.”

2

Susan Garnett's system finished booting up, and she launched a program to access the information in all deployed cocoons.

SEARCH COMPLETE. WOULD YOU LIKE TO VIEW CONTENTS? Y/N

Susan pressed the
Y
key and the script automatically read the target address of each cocoon, mapping it to a string of binary code that acted as an access key, allowing her to view its contents. There was only one file inside each cocoon, just as she had suspected. The original virus had pierced each of her hundreds of software traps, infecting a decoy file inside each trap. The moment the decoy became infected, the trap's software automatically made a copy of the infected file and placed it in a separate directory within the software trap. This directory then cocooned itself, isolating the copied file from the original virus, which self-destroyed during the event.

Susan ran a script against the file in each cocoon, comparing a copy of the original, untainted decoy file with the infected version inside the cocoons. The difference between the two files yielded a passive copy of the virus itself. Susan dumped this inactive version of the virus trapped in each cocoon into a secured directory that acted as a petri dish to keep the code contained in case for some unanticipated reason it decided to wake up. She had to be cautious. She was obviously dealing with a highly skilled hacker, probably the best in the world to be able to pull a stunt like this one.

The custom petri dish software performed a comparison of the viruses, searching for differences in their signature strings. The process took less than one second of real time. She read the results on the screen.

She inspected the signatures of the viruses from the first six cocoons for several minutes, the extreme complexity of the virus making her hold her breath. She browsed down and glanced at three more screens of signature files before going back to the top. The lines under specific bits within a byte highlighted the differences between the strains trapped in each cocoon.