Interrupt (5 page)

Walking back to Laura felt like walking a tightrope. Emily didn’t want her sister’s life, which was something she could never admit.

She blurted other words instead. “I need to know what to do,” she said.

“What do you mean?” Laura asked.

“I have two speeches. Those notes you’re holding are the company version. But there’s another one.” Emily grabbed her handbag. She opened it and showed Laura a second set of note cards. “They only want me to say part of what I should say. I didn’t tell you because, uh, I’ve been working on more than gene therapies for babies and kids.”

Laura stared at her. “Are you in trouble?”

“Yes. It’s a prenatal vaccine. It would stop anyone from ever being born with ASD.”

“What about people like P.J.?”

“We’ve talked about this before,” Emily said quietly. “There will be complications with juvenile therapies. By their second year, kids are establishing their permanent neurological makeup even if some pathways are underperforming or missing altogether. The therapies… They’ll change him, Laura. He’ll become a totally different person.”

“Isn’t that what we want?”

At least right now you two can get through the day,
Emily thought.
P.J. would have to relearn everything, maybe even how to walk or use the toilet.

But you’ll be angry if I say so.

She understood Laura’s hope. Sometimes P.J.’s pixie face lit up. On his best days, Laura was able to coax him into sharing what he saw inside his head, stammering through discussions of his favorite toys and snacks. And if he lost his talent for math, Laura would gratefully trade that ability if P.J. gained new social skills and normal awareness.

“We’ll help him, too,” Emily said. “That’s what my boss wants me to focus on. But our company will make plenty of money if we tell people we’re also refining our data for a vaccine. Selling out to Enring Corp. shouldn’t be the main point of the media release.”

“Maybe your boss knows what he’s talking about.”

Emily was shocked. “What?”

“It sounds to me like you’re doing good things either way,” Laura said. “You don’t have any patience, Em. You never did. Why can’t you finish the gene therapies first?” Her smile was gentle, even pitying. “You know I’m right.”

“I guess,” Emily said.
You’re wrong,
she thought.
If I don’t make my data public, they might bury the vaccine for years.

But if she used the media conference to say what she wanted, she would lose her job. They’d probably hit her with a lawsuit. Even if she walked away free, even if another company hired her, DNAllied owned her statistical models. She would be forced to start from scratch if she could re-create her data at all, and once again the prenatal vaccine would be delayed or lost.

Her idealism had a price. She’d made her deal with the devil. Now she was locked in.

Worse, she’d shared her apprehension with Laura. She felt disloyal for not making P.J. her first priority.

Laura turned away from her. She used P.J. as an excuse to rebuff Emily, walking across the room to her son, but she couldn’t have hurt Emily more if she’d slapped her.

“P.J.?” Laura said. “Sweetheart? Let’s go to the bathroom before Auntie Em is ready for her talk.”

He didn’t answer. Emily couldn’t speak, either, her insides whirling as Laura glanced back at her. For a long moment, the two women studied each other in silence.

“What are you going to do?” Laura asked.

Emily nodded, trying to reassure her sister. She wanted to say,
I’ll do it your way.
Instead, she thought,
We’ll see.

NORTHERN CALIFORNIA

W
e may be in trouble,” Marcus Wolsinger said as he shut the door to the control room. Dust and flies were anathema to their electronics, but Marcus closed the door harder than necessary in frustration.

Most of his staff had yet to return to their desks. They’d been up for thirty-six hours straight before last night. Marcus was exhausted, too. Nevertheless, he’d woken early to call the East Coast and Colorado. His mind hadn’t allowed him to rest. He wanted to get back to work. He needed his staff.

Steve Church was the only person in the shoebox-shaped room, a small, prefabricated structure. The walls were aluminum and glass. The furniture consisted of six cheap desks and eight good chairs, although each desk held its own computer and expensive flat-screen displays.

“I told everyone to be here,” Marcus said.

Steve looked up from his Mac. Even with the AC cranked to a frosty sixty-eight degrees, Steve was bleary-eyed, and Marcus wondered if his friend had slept.

“I just got off the phone with SWPC,” Marcus said. “They think I’m crazy.”

“They’re right,” Steve said.

“Nothing’s wrong with our software.”

“There must be.”

Marcus shook his head uneasily. “Two observatories confirmed our data. It’s the satellites that can’t hear it. And if we move past the idea that we’re getting false reads, we may be in trouble.”

Marcus and Steve were senior astronomers with the Hoffman Square Kilometer Field, a radio telescope array in the mountains north of San Francisco. Marcus was black. Steve was white. Otherwise, Marcus felt like they might have been brothers. Both of them were in their mid-forties, although they dressed like kids in T-shirts and jeans. Steve had a crop of beard stubble he’d let go for two days. Marcus wore a
BEAM ME UP
pin given to him by Steve’s wife, harking back to a time when they’d been as fresh as the crew of
Star Trek
. Now both men had potbellies (Marcus more so than Steve) and receding hairlines (Steve more so than Marcus), and yet their relaxed appearance could not mask the intensity he felt.

Marcus took the computer beside Steve. He began to type, then, half-consciously, he paused to survey the desktop.

Marcus had a touch of obsessive-compulsive disorder. He was notorious for rearranging the junk on any desk into neat geometries—keyboard, mouse pad, sticky notes, pens. He shaved when Steve did not. He changed his socks when Steve did not. His ex ridiculed him for being an anal robot, but that he’d brought order to her life was precisely why Janet had been attracted to him in the beginning.

He aligned three pens and a binder with a cold, stale cup of coffee. Then he rattled on his keyboard, opening the files he’d developed since sunrise.

Outside the control room’s broad windows, the brown California hills were a stovetop warming in the sun. None of the worn, dirty peaks
of the Coast Range lifted higher than five thousand feet, and the landscape consisted of weeds, brush, and scattered oak and pine trees. Their array was more commanding. The terrain was dotted with thousands of white six-meter dishes identical to those used for commercial television. The Hoffman Square Kilometer Field and another like it in Australia were the cutting edge in radio astronomy, with more channels and capabilities than anything else on the planet.

Marcus pointed at his files. “The signal creep is subtle, but it’s there,” he said. “I think the sun is experiencing a rise in microflares.”

Steve answered with tired irritation. “We anticipated a lot of background chatter when we built the array. What if the software is creating patterns that don’t exist?”

“Our system’s one hundred percent. The programmers and I ran a dozen integration checks.”

“It would be better if those guys were here.”

Marcus shrugged. Their lead programmers lived in Silicon Valley. They’d consulted with him online despite his connection failing twice. The net had been spotty all morning. Marcus had asked them to drive to the array but was met with excuses. No one wanted to stay in the mountains. Their programs often ran for weeks, so the site staff were a few postdoctoral kids in their twenties. Marcus and Steve had only made the trip up from the San Francisco Bay Area because they’d discovered more junk noise than usual in their data during the past week.

The noise was escalating.

Marcus found that disturbing.

“Look.” He opened a series of waterfall plots on his computer. Each plot—a square graph—was a cascade of color-coded lines, a snapshot image of the broad spectrum of electromagnetic radiation analyzed by the array. “There’s an irregular but upward trend,” he said. “The electrostatic bursts in Earth’s magnetic field have hit one plateau after another.”

“Why isn’t SWPC forecasting a solar storm?” Steve asked.

“They’re still gathering reports from the satellites.”

“The sats would record the flares.”

“No.” Marcus shook his head. The Space Weather Prediction Center in Boulder, Colorado, was where the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration monitored solar activity, but Marcus had grown accustomed to the role of the devil’s advocate. He could be ruthless about proving his ideas. “These are microflares,” he said. “The satellites have inferior hardware, software, and data storage.”

“I’m not convinced.”

“We’re seeing something new. Something deeper than surface activity.”

Most of Marcus’s self-respect stemmed from his career, which had begun with the SETI Project before he was asked to join ES2, an innovative new venture to explore the reaches of space. Unfortunately, a lot of people belittled the Extra-Solar Earth Search Program and everything associated with it. Science fiction had made sure of that. The public thought aliens were a joke. They expected bloodthirsty monsters. Steve’s caution was understandable. He wanted to make sure they didn’t embarrass ES2, whereas Marcus was more willing to trust his intuition.

“If we could go further back, the trend would be obvious,” Marcus said. “It’s easy to extrapolate our readings.”

“So everything you’ve said is just a hunch?”

“No.”

One of the challenges in radio astronomy was the sheer volume of incoming noise. The universe was unimaginably vast, although Marcus sometimes felt as if he could grasp a complete model of its ancient, busy clockwork in his head.

Every day, tracking one hundred million frequencies in a tiny portion of the sky, the Hoffman Square Kilometer Field listened to 800,000,000,000,000 bits of data. Their computers discarded 99.999 percent. They didn’t have the capacity to retain so much information, much less analyze it. No one did. For the time being, the engineers who’d designed the array had leapt far ahead of the processing power of
any computer. It was like asking a blind old man to sort through the voices in a jam-packed football stadium.

“I know this isn’t how you wanted the array to make its first big splash,” Marcus said. “Me neither. But even if the microflares stop, this could be an important discovery. And if the flares don’t stop…”

Earth’s sun was a remarkably mild G-class yellow star. Life had flourished on their planet because of the sun’s benevolence, although the most tranquil star was still a star, a ball of hydrogen gas so massive it was collapsing under its own weight.

As the sun burned, it crumpled and pulsed. Beneath its erratic surface violence, it maintained a slower, deeper cycle from stormy to simmering and back again, a cycle from solar maximum to solar minimum. The process took roughly eleven years—but eleven years ago, everyone had been astonished. The solar maximum hadn’t happened. Instead, they’d borne witness to the calmest period in recorded history.

Given the abnormally long minimum, experts predicted the oncoming max could be severe. During a solar max, the sun was more likely to produce sunspots. From these spots came solar flares. Some were bursts of X-rays and radio noise. More lethal were coronal mass ejections, clouds of charged particles much larger than Earth. Fortunately, most CMEs spun off away from their planet. Others brushed by or collided head-on, overloading electrical grids and telecommunications systems. In 2009, the crash of Air France 447 was thought to have been caused by a fluctuation in Earth’s magnetic field above South America, killing two hundred passengers and crew.

Marcus gestured for Steve to take his place at the computer. “I’m sending our files to SWPC,” he said. “If you want to correct anything, now’s your chance.”

“Okay, okay.” Steve rolled his eyes, defeated.

Marcus scooted back in his chair. Steve slid over. He began studying the plots in detail while Marcus reexamined the data himself, searching for errors. There were none.