The Gift (6 page)

“Our logic is sound. I’m more convinced than ever that you were right. There is a program in there.”

“I’ll grant you that our premise appears to be sound. Unfortunately, our approach to the problem is clearly flawed," Sam responded.

Reading emotion on Sam’s face was difficult. Dan had known him long enough not to need such clues. “We don’t have time for self-recrimination, Sam," Dan said gently. “Let’s start with the first piece, the header. Your first script found a number of them in the message because that was what you wrote it to do. You initially made an assumption about where the header portion ended based on a series of null terminators. We’ve since invalidated that assumption by finding enough duplicate copies of the file fragments to allow us to overlap them and keep the consistently common data. Your approach to finding the next pieces was sound, but because you were starting with the wrong end point to the header, you were finding the wrong matching starting point to the next piece of the file. That problem fixed itself when we addressed the first one. Since then, we’ve found enough duplicated examples of every matching portion to convince me we’re putting the right pieces together in the right order. I was concerned about knowing which piece was the last, but your observation that the eighteenth piece was a mirror image of itself was ingenious. When we excluded the mirrored data on the last run, I really thought we had it." Dan slipped from describing the process into acknowledging their defeat.

Sam finished his water, rose to get another and sat back down. Dan was mindlessly peeling the label off of his emptied bottle.

“Dan, you're a genius!”

“What are you talking about?”

“Look at what you’re doing.”

Dan looked down at his hands. “I’ve had enough mysteries for one day, Sam. How about you just tell me what you’re talking about?”

“When we figured out the terminating file was mirrored, we discarded the mirrored portion, right?”

“I just said that.”

“But when we connected the other pieces, we kept the overlap, like on the label you just peeled off. The overlap isn’t necessary for the label to do its job. It’s a by-product of the manufacturing process. Just like the mirrored portion. It exists to let us connect the pieces, but it is not part of the finished product.” Sam got up and started for the door before he finished talking. Dan was right behind him.

They rushed back to Sam’s workstation. Sam began making changes to the script that assembled the program and reran it. Like dozens of times before, it produced a potentially executable file. Sam was just about to try running it when he stopped himself, got out of his chair and said, “This time I insist, Dan. We need all the help we can get.”

Dan took a seat, paused for a moment, then executed the program. It ran.

“Yes! Finally!” Sam put his hand up for a high-five. Dan was still staring at the screen.

“We have a problem, Sam.”

C
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S
IX

Before Sam called Web, he looked around the room for Chang, who wasn’t there. Not wanting to have this conversation with Web without Chang’s support, he asked Dan to find him and bring him back. Waiting to tell Web was not an option and neither was leaving his workstation. He picked up the secure line and dialed Web. The phone rang twice before Web picked up.

Web answered curtly, “Web.”

“Web, it’s Sam. We got the program to run. I think you should see this.”

“I’m busy, Sam. Can it wait?”

As much as Sam would like to put off the conversation he suspected he’d soon be a part of, if their roles were reversed, he would want to know about this immediately, “No, it really can’t.”

“I’ll be right there.” Web closed the line.

Sam looked back at his screen. Whatever the programs were doing now, they continued to increase their share of the cluster’s processing power. As complex as some of the malware he’d worked with in the past had been, he’d never seen anything like this. He rubbed his dry eyes to no avail and waited for the others to arrive. Thankfully, Dan arrived with Chang before Web joined them, undoubtedly accompanied by Jack.

Sam greeted Chang with some relief, “Thank you for joining us, Chang.”

“I wouldn’t miss it. This is now where the action is. Dan told me a little bit about what you did to get the program together. Fascinating.”

Before Sam could respond, Web walked in, with Jack on his heels. Somewhere along the way, Jack had found time to not only get into a freshly pressed uniform, but also shave and otherwise clean up. He was back to being a well-kept dick.

“So, you got the program to run. Should I congratulate you or fire you?” Web asked.

“Neither, yet," Sam replied.

Dan started to say something, presumably in Sam’s defense, but Sam stopped him with a gesture. Nothing Dan could say would improve the situation.

“What do you have?” Web asked more pointedly.

“I called you right after we executed the program, so we know very little about what it’s doing right now, but we can surmise it’s doing quite a lot by monitoring its resource usage, or rather, their resource usage," Sam answered.

“What do you mean, ‘their’?” Jack asked.

“As soon as we ran the program it began making additional programs and executing them. Within seconds, according to the process logs on the other nodes in the cluster, versions of the program were running on all of the nodes. There are currently hundreds of child programs running across the entire cluster. They are using the majority of the cluster’s combined processing power and a substantial portion of its I/O.”

Jack hated having to ask, but would hate it more if he left it to Web to do so. “I/O?”

“I’m sorry, input/output. The programs are writing a massive amount of data to disk as well as using substantial amounts of memory.”

“Do you know what it’s doing?” Web asked.

“Technically, yes. We know which programs have been created by the one we stitched together and we know which files it’s creating. Functionally, no. We do not know the intent or purpose of those programs or files," Sam answered.

“We should shut it down," Jack said to Web.

“There’s no indication it’s hostile," Sam directed to Web.

“It’s taken over the analysis cluster!” Jack responded.

“It has not ‘taken over’ the analysis cluster. It is using most of the resources, but we have sufficient left to keep working. Isn’t this what we built the cluster for anyway, to analyze whatever data we received?” Sam asked.

“Don’t pretend you anticipated this. You said if it acted like this it could be hostile," Jack replied.

Sam didn’t recall having said that, but moved on, “I said if it breached the containment of the cluster it could be hostile. It either hasn’t tried or hasn’t succeeded. Unless it does so, we should continue to let it do whatever it’s doing.”

“You just said you have no idea what it’s trying to do and you want to let it continue?” Jack asked incredulously.

Chang chose that moment to join the conversation, to Sam’s relief. “We have had a day full of measuring, planning, speculating and reporting. Sam and Dan have given us the only opportunity to provide our government with information they couldn’t have obtained from any number of monitoring sites, aside from our opinions. We must not shut it down. I do not understand why we are revisiting a decision we have already evaluated and made.”

“We have new information, Chang. In my experience it’s a good idea to re-evaluate decisions when new information presents itself," Web offered.

“We have results that fall into the group of outcomes we anticipated before we made our decision…” Chang started. He stopped himself as all of the monitors connected to a cluster workstation went black.

Sam turned away from the conversation and was about to start investigating when an image began to form. What appeared to be a star field, a very populous star field, formed. Then a very faint sphere became apparent in the middle of the image and the image began to rotate. In moments, a much smaller, but far brighter sphere appeared in front of the first. The smaller, brighter sphere was growing slowly. Suddenly, there was a flicker and the larger sphere was gone, replaced by a group of smaller spheres.

“We’re seeing its arrival," Dan said, almost reverently.

Sam looked around the room and noticed Rui wasn’t there. Barely taking his eyes off the screen, he picked up the phone and called him. Rui picked up on the first ring, “Hello?”

“Rui. It’s Sam. Come to the main conference room immediately.” Sam hung up without waiting for an answer.

Rui arrived almost immediately, nearly running up to the group gathered around Sam’s monitor, “What is it?” He asked.

“We appear to be seeing the anomaly’s arrival from a space-based perspective," Web replied. As he did so, the smaller spheres seemed to drift apart slightly.

“That looks like when they retargeted," Rui observed.

“Can you tell how far out they are?” Jack asked.

“About eight hundred thousand kilometers," Rui answered absently. “How long has this been running?” He asked.

“I called you as soon as it started," Sam told him.

The team watched in silence as the Earth continued to grow and the spheres drifted farther apart. As details began to become visible, the pace of approach slowed. Only one sphere was still visible.

“We’re inside the moon’s orbit," Rui informed the team as he glanced at his watch.

“How can you tell?” Sam asked.

“The continents are visible," Rui answered.

A couple of minutes passed, with the view of Earth steadily gaining resolution.

“We’re about 150,000 kilometers out now. We’re oriented on the Western hemisphere. I believe we’re seeing this from the viewpoint of our anomaly," Rui continued to update the team.

The Earth was visibly growing. Within less than two minutes, it filled the screen. As it did so the view began to rotate again. The team appeared to be watching the sphere enter the atmosphere from within the atmosphere, below and to the side of the sphere, and the pace had slowed again. There was no indicator of speed, but there was also no sign of atmospheric violence.

“We appear to be following it down, but there should be obvious signs of friction and atmospheric disturbance," Rui continued to narrate.

The team watched as the sphere continued to descend until it ultimately came to rest in a field in Kansas. There was no impact. There was no violence. The series of images stopped.

“Did everyone else see that?” Sam asked rhetorically.

They had all seen it. The sphere was no taller than the corn growing in the field around it.

C
HAPTER
S
EVEN

Moments after the projection faded to black, it began a second time. Everyone in the room watched it through again. Rui, having missed the beginning of it during its first run, paid particular attention to that portion. No one responded to Sam’s question.

When it once again faded to black, Web turned to Sam and said, “I want a copy of that video.”

You’re welcome, Sam thought to himself, but said, “I’ll get right on it.”

The projection started again, apparently in a continuous loop.

“When you’re done, join us in the west conference room. I need to report this and I want to do so with as much context as possible. Jack, find Camilla and Angela and ask them to join the rest of us after they’ve watched this.” Web left the room with most of the team right behind him. Dan stayed a moment to talk with Sam.

“That was good work, Sam. You know, you’re probably the first person in human history to have communicated with an alien culture.”

“You were as much a part of it as I was, Dan. I wouldn’t even be here if you hadn’t convinced Web to bring me in.”

“I’m proud enough to believe I would have solved it eventually, but I’m also honest enough with myself to know I wouldn’t have figured it out in time to make a difference tonight. You did that. I’m sorry Web is too biased against you to tell you that, but I will.”

“Thanks, Dan. I appreciate it.” Sam paused for a moment, clearly debating saying more. Deciding against continuing that conversational thread, he said instead, “I’d better figure out how to get a copy of this.”

It was Dan’s turn to debate pushing Sam. Like Sam, he decided to let it go. “Do you need any help?” He asked.

“Don’t know yet. I’ll let you know if I do," Sam replied.

“I’ll see you in the conference room.”

As Dan walked away, Sam turned his attention to the problem at hand. Sitting down at his workstation, he opened up a new screen and found the process running the projection. To Sam’s surprise, all of his previous work was exactly where he’d left it. The alien program had done what Sam had just done, opened a new screen to display the projection. So, it’s a polite alien program. Interesting, Sam thought to himself as he prepared a script to capture the output of his instance of the looping projection. In less than ten minutes, he’d recorded a copy and verified it worked.

While he was working, Camilla had walked in with Angela. They’d been quietly watching the projection play on one of the other workstation screens. Their second viewing was wrapping up as Sam rose from his chair. He waited until it finished before disturbing them.

“Amazing, isn’t it?” Sam asked them.

“I would never have thought to use video of this sort to establish first contact. It’s brilliant," Angela responded.

Major Angela Leone—Angela never Angie, she couldn’t stand the Rolling Stones—had been a child prodigy. An American by birth, her biological father had been a Marine pilot before being killed in a training accident, she spent most of her formative years in England and China. Following her father’s death, her mother had returned to her home in England before accepting a position in Hong Kong. It seemed natural to her that little Angela had learned Mandarin as easily as she’d learned English. Kids just did that, right? It wasn’t until her mother met the man who would become Angela’s second father that she learned her daughter was special. It seemed her four-year-old was speaking Mandarin with a precision and nuance seldom mastered by a child of any age. Recognizing Angela’s linguistic proficiency, he encouraged her to learn languages as she wished, and supported her efforts to do so. By the time she was 10, she’d added Japanese, Hindi, Spanish and Russian to her toolkit. Fascinated with the structure of all forms of communication, she’d completed an undergraduate degree in mathematics from the United States Naval Academy before receiving a rare service deferral allowing her to earn her PhD in linguistics from Harvard before she turned 25. In the intervening 10 years, she’d long since decided the gesture of respect she’d shown for her first father by becoming a marine was the best career decision she could have made.