Next History: The Girl Who Hacked Tomorrow (20 page)

Other
partners come, dance, whisper things.
Your phone number. See me later
. A stroke on her Lycra-sheened flank. Tharcia deflects these with demure grace. Sees Charlene at the bar with a friend, waits for her glance. When she does, eyes hold.

Tharcia walks over.
“You ready?”

Charlene
goes with it, smooth, as though it’s understood. “Sure.” Grabs her jacket and they walk toward the door. Others look on, wondering what cue they missed. The two make their way into the night.

It is cold outside.
Tharcia hunches in the thin bolero jacket. Their breath mists the dark air. They leave the sidewalk for the darker parking lot alongside the building. Tharcia stops.

“We know each other slightly,” Tharcia tells her. “Cheryl and Doug.”

Charlene is taller, confident straight posture. Smiles. “Yes I remember. You were looking for beeswax candles.”

“Yeh.”

“So…” Question in Charlene’s eyes, expectant.

Tharcia steps close, lifts her face. “So, this.”

Charlene leans down, the lightest brush of lips, each watching the other’s face. Tharcia closes her eyes, softens her mouth. Cool hands on her cheeks.

“
Mmm.”

“
Mm, yes.”

They look at each other, nose to nose. “Your place,” Tharcia whispers.

“Sure.”

“You gotta drive me past my
house for a min, k? It’s not far.”

“Let’s go.”

On the way up the hill Tharcia watches Charlene in the dashboard light. Rests a hand on her thigh. They talk about little things, not saying much, both in that edgy, self-conscious heady space just prior to jumping off a cliff with a stranger, knowing they are going to. When they pull in, dense white ground fog eddies after the wheels. Only light is from the hall upstairs. Tharcia gets her keys ready. She has one foot out the door when Charlene’s fingers lift her chin. She lets her head fall back. Their kiss is easy, slow, abundant with promise.

“Wow,” Tharcia breathes. “Come in
hon, this will take just a sec.”

Tharcia
goes up first, gets the porch light on. Charlene follows into the dark room. Lights come on. The fire is dead, air in here crackling cold. Tharcia dashes up the stairs. At the landing she hurries past her shut bedroom to the bathroom, starts filling her small overnight kit, toothbrush, vitamins, a pill she needs for morning, a sleeping pill, a perfume she likes. As she turns to leave there’s Bomber, Clay’s Maine Coon, blocking the doorway. The cat’s posture stops her. Not looking at her, but toward the closet at the dark end of the hall, the cat is frozen in a hunter’s crouch.

Tharcia steps into the hallway. An icy hand clutches within her chest. A dim outline, as of a short bald man with exaggerated
shoulder hunches, the figure’s interior blackest of black. Hair tingles on her scalp. At her ankles, the cat lets go a screech of rage and launches itself at the indistinct form. For a blink, the cat is suspended in air, stretched out in its lunge. Then a loud bang and Bomber comes flying back, skids to a stop at Tharcia’s feet. For an instant she thinks the animal is dead, but with an enraged snarl Bomber flings himself down the stairs, through the house and out his secret door.

Not looking
at the dark closet, Tharcia makes a mad dash for the stairs and down. Charlene is not in the living room. Tharcia runs through and slams the door behind. Fog laps at the wheels of Charlene’s car. Tharcia runs for it. The door is locked. Inside, Charlene grips her phone in both hands, stares out with wide eyes.

“Charlene, it’s me open up!”

She hears the lock and jumps inside quick, slams it. Turns to Charlene, who is starting the engine and spinning the steering wheel.

“
I can’t get bars,” Charlene says. “My car made this weird noise. I came out to see. This awful scream came from in there. I thought someone…”

“It was Clay’s cat,”
says Tharcia, trying to manage a laugh. “I surprised it upstairs. Scared me silly.”

“It sounded like a person.” Charlene drives carefully, unable to see the ground, aiming between trees.
Tharcia puts a comforting hand on Charlene’s abdomen, leans close, with soft shushing noises. As the trees close around them, she looks behind. Her fleeting glance at the lit porch is just in time to see the front door swing wide open.

At Charlene’s
apartment it takes a couple glasses of wine and a joint to calm them both down. Then there is dim light soft laughter, whispers of discarded clothing. Bare arms and tender kisses, stroking hands in the warm bed and softly devouring mouths. Flesh pressed to yielding flesh, Tharcia in a corner of her mind wishes Clay had not gone out tonight, that she was safe at home with him.

Martin Shackleford, with Masters of Science degrees from UCLA and Princeton, Ph.D. from MIT, a Special Projects Technical Consultant to General Ralph Solberg, sits in his car beside the Potomac in Georgetown. The low sky is gray and fringed with rain. He speaks rapidly into his smartphone, his words convert to text characters as he composes a message to a colleague at MIT. Initially student and teacher, the two had enjoyed a brief romance while Shackleford studied there, drawn by her looks and in particular her acumen in the theory of gravity wave thought communication. Shackleford reviews the message he composes on the small device.

mrshack
: We need one of your grav detectors down here, will drive to you and pick it up asap. Attaching photo of pentagon subject, awaiting ethnicity analysis. Does he appear Russian or East Bloc? My team is thinking we have a portal or position translator. Who is doing work on wormholes?

Shack
leford pushes
send
.

Marina Petrovna Kutsenova, professor of
Advanced Physics at MIT, reads the message carefully. Her face expresses disdain.

He
will drive to me? Drive to fuck me is more like it.
She can send one of her detection webs easily by courier, avoid the entanglement. Wormholes? Not next to the Earth, perhaps she misunderstood. Still, something intrigues her. Looking at the beautiful man in the photographs Shackleford sent, Marina squirms in her chair. The kind of guy she’d definitely date. He could be Russian, the skull, the hair.

marinova
: possibly russian. is this the pentagon guy ???

mrshack
: Yes. When can we get together? I can be there in two hours.

marinova
: faculty meeting then evening plans - - can UPS grav web tomorrow if you like - - what address?

Shackleford curses.
She’s blowing him off, his charm works better in her presence. Still, one of the professor’s gravwave detectors will be useful. Perhaps it can chart the shape of the field around the Pentagon subject. All fields have an origin, a fundus, a source. Ideally, the Pentagon effect is a portal to another location, they can launch a bomb into the vortex of the portal, let it explode out the other side. In Russia, or China, or wherever the other end is anchored. Last laugh, USA. And score a big one for Martin Shackleford, whose luster is not its brightest of late.

In her
MIT office, Marina Kutsenova’s attention is on a research paper she is co-authoring with the department head, the phone beside her waits for a reply from Martin. She looks up. Several students and faculty are leaning in her door, a bouquet of fun-loving smiles.

“We’re going
down to the pub to test Dr. McKenzie’s gravity theory of beer,” says one.

“No it’s the absorption
rate of Chardonnay.”

“Advanced Alcoholic Appreciation,” says another
, arm around a coed he knows only slightly, fingers pressed beneath her breast. The blushing female does not seem to mind.

Kutsenova grins. One of the Ph.D
. candidates reminds her of an uncle in Kazakhstan. She gives a distracted wave, gestures at her laptop, says she’ll catch up. Watches the shoulders of the Ph.D. candidate as the group moves laughing and joking along the polished corridor.

Another message pings in on her phone.

mrshack
: If a portal, how would one detect or forecast location of the other entrance?

marinova
: those equations are in my paper, the syllabus for TelePsych 322…

Dr. Kutsenova’s detector web
will be at his lab tomorrow. Shackleford, pleased with himself, starts his car and heads toward central Georgetown, the onramp to the Whitehurst freeway. He has to get to Virginia right away. There are things to make ready in his lab. An expander array to increase the field density around Kutsenova’s detector. A 3D renderer to visualize the field shape on his laptop. He’s getting back in the game.

Strand, with Sami, Gary, Jerry and Carl in the Next History offices are well into the task of decoding whale messages. Empty take-out containers fill the trash can, paper cups line the counter. The decoding was rapid in the beginning. Sixteen of the 108 messages have been decoded, digested, and shared among the team. The documents range wildly: accounts of historical periods, descriptions of geologic and seismic events, epic floods, volcanic eruptions, a complex discussion on the workings of consciousness, two technical articles on an unworkable fusion power source, and a joke book.

One question sparked repeated discussion: if there are so few
documents, why are they scattered among such a landscape of topics? How can such an approach add up to a coherent message? Why did the whales deliver these particular ones? And each new message the team tries to crack takes much longer. After five hours of work, there are intervals of staring thoughtfully into space as fatigue and waiting take their toll.

And, although it was voiced hours ago, Carl’s question about Whalesong two still lingers.
Why is this here?
Why would the whales bring them a story about the failure of a decades-long scientific project, the search for other intelligent life in the galaxy?

Carl leans back in his chair, arms stretched above his head. “Hey guys, can we talk about something here?”

Jerry and Gary look up. Sami walks to the kitchen for a coffee refill. Strand is fixated on his screen.

“Okay,” says Carl, “assuming I have
a fragment of your attention, here goes. The thinking behind the ET projects is based on the Fermi hypothesis, which says basically that it’s improbable for life to not exist everywhere. Goes back to the Copernican principle, the Earth is not the center of the universe.”

“Well, yah,” Gary says. “Don’t forget, life may
not have started on Earth. It could have arrived by comet impact.”

Carl nods. “
The calculations assume that civilizations spend only a few hundred years in the radio phase of development. Even still, there should be many intelligent civilizations broadcasting right now.”

Sami plunks down in her chair. “If the singularity happens today, Earth will go dark. Our radio emissions will have lasted less than 200 years.”

“Miss Singularity is on point,” Jerry says.

Sami grins defensively but says nothing.

“So ET did phone home, but we didn’t hear,” Gary says.

“Okay,” Carl says.
“But there’s a good point in this whale message, the reason science has not discovered extrasolar intelligence. According to this, consciousness communicates via non-technologic means. Call it telepathy, clairvoyance, telekinesis. This says that individuals in the same species live in slightly different realities, with just enough similarities to get by. Different species are commonly invisible to one another.”

“Wait,” says Strand,
“are the whales saying they know how?”

Carl turns to him.
“Not directly. It’s saying every form of consciousness is tuned to a different channel.”

“What if the truly evolved races out there are post-biological?
What if they’ve become energy beings? Or pure consciousness?”

“
Well, this mentions a comment by some astronomers, that string theory defines a world hidden from our senses.”

“It was
Michio Kaku, years ago,” Jerry puts in. “He thought subatomic levels operated as parallel worlds.”

“Well, yah
,” Gary says. “But don’t forget, the way we are searching is culture-bound.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning that I won’t hear your answer unless it’s in my construct. Science looks for things that fit into science. Meanwhile, all over the world there are psychics, schizophrenics, shamans, and mystics, who have information that came to them in a nonlinear, nonverbal way. In other words, what astronomers will accept as a signal might be too rigorous.”

“That’s a valid point
,” Sami adds. “But does language remain a necessary component of civilization? Maybe they have advanced beyond language, communicate through images. Or something more abstract.”

“
Add to that,” Carl says, “is it reasonable to assume that civilizations millions of years ahead of us would have any interest in dumbing down to our level?”