Spheria (26 page)

Chapter 31 - The Exchange

"Our sun is one of 100 billion stars in our galaxy. Our galaxy is one of billions of galaxies populating the universe. It would be the height of presumption to think we are the only living things in this enormous immensity." - Wernher von Braun

Ashley removed a beaker from the cabinet and filled it halfway with ice crystals. She placed it gingerly on the granite counter, knowing from experience that it would shatter if placed too hard. She turned her attention to the aluminum cylinder that had already been set there. Examining the top, she rotated it to face her. Taking care not to break a nail, she grabbed a small metal lever that had been crafted onto the top and pried it upward. The cylinder made a short popping sound followed by a whoosh of rushing gas, as an opening in the top formed. Ashley picked up the can and poured its contents into the beaker, making sure not to let the foam bubble over. The sweet smell of Dr. Pepper rose to meet her nostrils.

A flash illuminated the dark kitchen as lightning streaked across the sky outside the window. Ashley took a sip, and as the bubbles danced on her tongue, she waited: one one-thousand, two one-thousand. Boom!
Guess the storm is two miles away
, she thought,
a perfect night for some scary TV. Alone!

She returned to the couch, took a seat, and put the beaker on the end table next to her. Grabbing her favorite crocheted blanket and the remote, she unpaused the show.
The Walking Dead
resumed playing a particularly dark scene. She pulled the blanket over her, tucking her feet inside.

On the TV, Rick Grimes was sneaking through a warehouse riddled with zombies. Old crates stacked to the ceiling filled the space. Chains hung here and there, painting the perfect setting for any imaginable horror scene. Rick bent low and slipped between the crates, being careful not to make any noise. Suddenly there was a knocking sound, but Rick didn’t seem to react.
Odd.
Nor did the zombies seem to hear it. The scene changed to another character walking outside. The knocking continued. The sound made Ashley jump, even though she was watching a daylight shot.

Then she realized, the knocking was coming from her actual door!

She threw the blanket aside and paused the show before depositing the remote on the coffee table. She scampered to the door, a bit annoyed, but curious to see who’d be visiting her in the middle of a thunderstorm. She looked through the peephole. A short, thin Asian woman with glasses stood in the hallway. Ashley didn’t recognize her, but she looked harmless.

Turning the deadbolt, she opened the door. “Can I help you?”

“I hope so,” said the woman outside who looked at a Post-it note with some writing. “Are you Ashley Swanson?”

“Yes, I am. Are you here to see the apartment?”

“Um, no. Not exactly. Was Olivia Holland your roommate?”

Ashley made a slight but distinct frown. “Yes, were you a friend of hers?”

“No, although I feel like I knew her. I'm the intern that replaced her at the Health Center. My name is Min.”

Ashley’s eyes glazed over for few seconds as she took this in. “So what do you want?”

Min felt she had to disarm Ashley, or this conversation was going to end abruptly. “I'm really sorry to bring up any painful memories. But I think I may have some information about Olivia’s death. I found her deleted journal on a computer at work.”

“Really?” Ashley’s voice got higher, and her eyes widened. “Does it say why she committed suicide?”

“Well, that’s the thing, I don’t think she committed suicide.”

Ashley just stood there in disbelief as her eyes began to water.

Min continued, “You mean you never saw her work journal?” She knew the answer but wanted confirmation.

“No,” Ashley replied with a quivering voice, “how would I have seen it?”

“Look,” said Min glancing down the hallway, “I don’t want to say too much out here in the open.”

“Yes, sorry. Where are my manners? Please come in.” Ashley turned away from the doorway, trying to obscure her hand brushing the tears from her eyes. She flicked on the lights. The dark apartment now seemed warm and inviting.

Min entered and closed the door behind her. Turning, she found herself standing in the living room, which was small but cozy. It had decent furniture and a bunch of framed photos on the walls. To the right was a breakfast bar separating the room from the open kitchen. Straight ahead were two doors, one open, leading into a bedroom. It occurred to Min that she could easily live here, had she not had six months remaining on her lease with Sheila. Then she pushed the irony of that thought out of her mind. “Nice place,” she commented.
 

“Thanks,” said Ashley. “Please have a seat.”

Ashley moved into the kitchen and turned on some recessed lighting. “Would you like something to drink? I've got water, soda, milk, juice, and,” she opened the fridge, “yep, a fairly old beer. Probably still good. I could also make some coffee or tea.”

“Water is fine, thanks. I drink coffee all day so water would be nice for a change.”

“Sure thing.”

Ashley proceeded to fill another laboratory beaker with water as Min looked at the photos on the wall. Shot in interesting places, they all were of Ashley and another woman her age.

“Those are all Olivia and me,” said Ashley as she returned to the room, handing the water to Min. “We used to take a lot of road trips together, and hung a photo after each one. I should take them down before people start showing up to rent the other bedroom, but I haven’t had the heart to yet.”

“You two were close?”

“Well, yes, you could definitely say that.”

“Did she show any signs of depression or unhappiness before, well, you know?”

“No, the police asked the same thing. I told them definitely no. Olivia was always happy and loved her job. She did mention there were some strange things happening that she didn’t want to tell me about ‘just in case.’ She’d never elaborate. I figured it was just office politics and brushed it off. Now I wished I’d persisted.”

“I've got a feeling she was trying to protect you. Whatever she discovered, I'm convinced it cost her her life.”

A glazed look entered Ashley’s eyes. They began to water but she managed to suppress a tear. “I knew it,” she said softly. “I tried to get the police to investigate, but they said this was a cut and dried case.” Ashley removed one of the photos from the wall and gazed at it. It was her and Olivia at the Statue of Liberty. “What did she discover?”

“That’s just it; I don’t know. I decoded a hidden file that Olivia had on my, um, her computer. It’s a work journal that she kept, but it gets sort of weird toward the end.”

“Weird? How?”

“Well, she talks about something she did ‘in case something happens’ to her.”

“In case something happens to her,” Ashley repeated. “That could be planning a suicide.”

“No, I don’t believe so. It’s the way she phrased it and led up to it. I think she was preparing to email this file to you since you're mentioned by name at the end. I suspected she didn’t get the chance. If it were a suicide, she would’ve completed sending it. It took a lot of work for me to get the journal. Someone went to great lengths to ensure that it couldn’t be found.”

“Do you have a copy of it?”

“I have a printout of it here.” Min reached into her purse and pulled out some folded pieces of paper, handing them to Ashley. “It’s only three pages.”

Ashley sat on the couch and read them.

Min sat next to her. She sipped her water, watching for a reaction.

Ashley completed reading and began again from the top.

“Ashley,” Min interrupted. “I’m curious about the passcode she set using the characters ‘w-o-w-!’, most systems don’t allow passwords with only four…”

“Screw the password!” Ashley scowled. “We need to go to the police immediately. She even says so. This journal is new evidence.”

“Not so fast. I had the same thought, but it’s not enough evidence. The police will only tip off whoever is behind this that there is a leak. That person will fix it, and will get away with murder
.
I want to find out what Olivia knew, from the inside. Then we’ll have the evidence we need to redeem her.”

Ashley stared at the frozen image on the TV screen, mulling over this new information. “Yes... Yes, that sounds like the best approach. But it’s putting you at risk just like Olivia. And whoever is behind this is probably even more observant than before.”

“I know, but I’m good at covering my tracks. As long as I can be sure this password works, I think I’ll be able to find this hidden system and get in. Then I can dump all the data onto a flash drive and go to the police with hard evidence.”

Ashley reread the last entry in the journal. “I know what this is, this ‘Wow!’ passcode. Olivia didn’t mean it literally. She phrased it that way for me. So when her boyfriend broke up with her, she was, she was depressed for a few weeks. To cheer her up we started hanging out a lot and became close friends. I like to sightsee, so she joined me on road trips every weekend. That’s when we took all these photos.

“Sometimes, we’d go as far as a ten-hour drive to whatever destination we chose. To pass the time in the car, we’d listen to podcasts. There were several we listened to, but she seemed to take a liking to one in particular.
Stuff You Should Know
, hosted by Josh Clark and Charles Bryant. These two guys just talk about some random topic each week, as if they’re having a chat about it over a beer. It’s both fun and informative. I dug the format, she dug the information, and it worked for us both.

“So there was this one episode, not too long ago, about something called the ‘wow signal.’ It’s a radio signal from space that many believe came from an alien planet. It had a hidden code in there. I don’t remember what it was, but I think that’s what Olivia means. Here, I think I still have it on my phone. Let me play it.” Ashley began tapping on her phone.

“Great,” said Min. She took a sip from her water. “I have to compliment your choice of glassware.”

Ashley looked up and laughed. “Yeah, Olivia got those. She thought it was cool to drink out of lab equipment. She liked things that were conversation starters. I felt it was novel, and I’ve grown attached to them. Plus, they’re great to measure how much you're consuming.”

“I might try using one at work to see how people react,” said Min. “Then again, knowing who I work with, they wouldn’t even bat an eyelash.”
 

That got a chuckle from Ashley. “Here we are, ‘How the Wow! Signal Works,’ released June 9, 2015.” She hit the position slider to jump past the intro. It began playing at 2:23.

#

Chuck: …fascinating stuff because this is something that even the most hardened skeptic hasn’t been able to fully debunk.

Josh: Yea that’s, that’s a good point.

Chuck: It’s pretty neat that they’re, they’re upset probably.
 

Josh: So we should say that we keep saying the Wow! signal, and Chuck’s talking about skeptics and everything. There is evidence of a potential transmission from an alien civilization…
 

Chuck: Mm hm.
 

Josh: …here on earth, and it’s been here on earth, printed out, sitting in the Ohio State University archives, since the 1970s.
 

Chuck: Yea. And “potential” is the key word there. I think that’s where most skeptics’ heads will pop off.
 

Josh: Right but again…
 

Chuck: You gotta say potential. You…
 

Josh: And I did. I don’t want anybody’s head to pop off, you know. Um, the thing is, like you said Chuck, no skeptic has been able to say, “here’s your explanation, dumb dumb”, and they’ve tried. There have been plenty of explanations but every single one has been systematically addressed and reduced to rubble, basically.
 

Chuck: Yeah.

#

Min interrupted, “When do they actually say what it is?”

Ashley said, “If I remember correctly, they don’t describe it until further in. They do this a lot. It’s their way of building suspense.”

She hit another spot on the position slider, and it jumped to 5:11.

#

Chuck: So SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, it’s not a single organization, although there is the SETI Institute now since the early 1980s. But SETI is a bunch of different groups that are not tinfoil hat-wearing crackpots who are bound and determined to find if there’s life out there, but they’re open-minded folks that say if there is life out there let’s get ahead of the game here and listen out for ‘em and see if they’re trying to say something to us.

Josh: Right. They’re basically people who say there’s just too many stars out there that have planets and that are potentially habitable to life, for us to just, it boggles their mind to think that we are the only living beings.

Chuck: They’re scientists.

Josh: Right, and to these scientists the much more logical conclusion is that we’re one of many civilizations out there and so they have dedicated their astronomical talents to searching for that.

Chuck: Yeah and this all started happening in the early 1970s in earnest and…
 

 
Josh: I think it actually started in the ‘60s in earnest but with the Big Ear it was in the ‘70s, with their SETI program.

Chuck: That’s right 1973, The Ohio State University Radio Observatory.

Josh: Ha ha.

Chuck: I love that you laugh at that every time. Ha ha. They have something called the Big Ear, or had something called the Big Ear.

Josh: Yeah.

Chuck: They needed a golf course though, so they got rid of the Big Ear.
 

Josh: Even worse than that, the Big Ear radio telescope at Ohio State was demolished, not to build a golf course, but to expand an existing golf course.

Chuck: Um, we need another nine holes.

Josh: Right, we need another clubhouse.

Chuck: Well I think the Big Ear had seen its best days by that point, so don’t feel bad for the Big Ear.

Josh: I still feel bad for the Big Ear.