Cosega Sphere (The Cosega Sequence Book 4) (18 page)

While Rathmore organized a team to uncover the leech siphoning NSA data, he simultaneously monitored reports from a separate team tracking Asher’s plane. The satellites and Navy Hornets kept easy tabs on the Gulfstream for several hours as it flew toward the west coast of the continental United States.

“Are they crazy?” Rathmore asked after reviewing many projected flight paths for Gale’s plane. “They may be heading for San Diego. What do they think is going to happen when they land? That no one will notice?”

“Maybe they’re going to try to sneak in under the radar and land on a smuggler’s strip somewhere in the California or Arizona desert,” Murik offered.

The Conductor came back on their screen and interrupted the debate. “We’ve got a professor who’s willing to talk about UQP and the Sphere,” she said.

It had been a steady stream of denials and refusals with one scientist after another. The stone wall of secrecy made the top officials at the NSA even more determined to crack the encryption. Rathmore was desperate to get one of the geniuses to spill what they’d been working on with Gaines and the Sphere. UQP, Booker’s Universe Quantum Physics, had previously been ridiculed by government scientists, but now it seemed it could prove to be the key, not just to finding the Sphere, but to actually understanding it.

“There’s a break,” Murik said, clapping his hands triumphantly. Even Rathmore smiled at the news.

“I warn you though,” the Conductor cautioned. “You may not like what he has to say. You damn sure probably won’t believe it.”

The Conductor nodded to someone off camera and the view changed to a holding room in the Honolulu Federal building.

“Professor Yamane, this is Claude Rathmore of the NSA and Quinn Murik of the CIA. I’m sorry we’re all talking to you on screens, but I’m at another location on the island,” she said, having abandoned the airport and returned to her temporary command center at Pearl Harbor. “But at least technology allows us to all be in the same room.”

“I understand,” Professor Yamane said, scratching his bald head and shifting in the hard plastic seat.

“Well, professor,” Rathmore began, “we appreciate your cooperating with us on this matter of national security.”

“Oh, it’s more than national security,” Professor Yamane said, sniffling and wiping his nose.

“Meaning?” Rathmore asked.

“The Eysen-Sphere is about global security . . . survival of the species, really,” Professor Yamane responded, urgency in his nasally voice.

“Species?”

“The human race,” Professor Yamane clarified. “If the Sphere is not handled carefully, it will lead to an extinction event.”

Rathmore looked at Murik as a classmate might when hearing a lecture in another language for the first time.

“How could the Sphere lead to the extinction of humans?” Murik asked the professor. “Last I checked, there were more than seven billion of u
s
‒
‒
”

“A little glass ball,” Rathmore interjected. “Even with all the legends I’ve heard about it, destroying the world with a tiny object like the Sphere would be impossible.”

“Oh, the world will be fine. It’s the people who won’t be,” Professor Yamane corrected. “And it’s not the ‘glass ball’ that will destroy us.” The professor sniffed again and took a sip of hot liquid from a thick mug. “It’s humans that will end it. We’re going to do it to ourselves.”

Rathmore turned his attention to another screen. Professor Yamane’s credentials rolled down it, including a long list of degrees, awards, papers published, and other accolades. Yamane, a microbiologist, had even been on a Presidential Committee on pandemic response preparedness.

“What is a microbiologist doing involved with the Sphere anyway?” Rathmore asked.

“Because of the future scenes,” Yamane replied.

Rathmore looked at Murik again. “Why can’t this guy just answer a question in a way that doesn’t lead to more questions?”

“Because he’s a scientist,” Murik replied, smiling. “Let me try. Professor, give us a little background about the Sphere and what your role with the project has been.”

“Have you all seen the Sphere? Do you even know what it is?” Professor Yamane asked.

“Pretend we know nothing,” Murik said. “Walk us through it.”

“As you might imagine, I haven’t had too much time with it myself, none of us have. Well, except the physicists. A few of them have logged more hours themselves than the rest of us combined. I’m not sure I agree with that method, given the severity of what we’re facing, bu
t
‒
‒
”

“Professor, please. The basics?”

“Right,” he said, wiping his nose with a light blue handkerchief. “The Eysen-Sphere doesn’t just show the past. There is also, of course, the amazing details it displays in the present, but the most powerful, or rather dangerous thing it does, is when it gives glimpses into the future.”

Rathmore rolled his eyes and was about to interrupt Professor Yamane, but Murik held up a hand to stop him.

“Really more than glimpses,” the professor continued. “Sometimes we see grand visions, and as strange as it seems, the physicists do a fairly good job at explaining how it’s all possible. I could try to elucidate, convert amazement into simple language . . . ” He looked at their shaking heads. “No? Okay. Anyway, in the beginning I was still skeptical, but I saw enough to convince me that what we were seeing was actually going to happen. We saw things that became the future.”

Rathmore muted his end and leaned over to Murik. He muttered, “I thought this clown was a scientist. He’s three ducks short of a quack. We have better things to do.” Rathmore turned toward a shielded monitor, showing which bits of data had been accessed by the leech. Another composite graph overlaid the same information with everyone who had access. The two leading suspects were the Conductor and King. Both had far more clout and connections then he did. He had to be sure, and the team still hadn’t discovered how the leech was getting the information out.

No doubt one of Booker’s advanced technological tricks or gizmos,
Rathmore thought as Murik called his attention back to the screen from Hawaii, as if this part of Yamane’s testimony might be important.

“That’s when I saw the plague,” Professor Yamane continued, in mid-sentence. “And it’s because of seeing it that I decided to cooperate with the government.”

“Why wouldn’t you cooperate?” Rathmore asked, annoyed.

“It’s not that I’m not patriotic, you understand,” he said sniffling. “It’s just that we all agreed the science was more important than the competition.”

“What competition?” Rathmore asked while checking the progress of Gale’s plane.

“Between nations. The lines on the maps . . . it’s kind of elementary when you stop and think about it. You can’t see them from space because they aren’t real. And anyway, the bacteria, the pandemics, they don’t care about borders, not the imaginary ones that humans draw.”

“So what you’re saying,” Rathmore began, “if I understand you, is that the Eysen-Sphere is like some kind of crystal ball, and it has shown you a future where all of humanity perishes in some massive worldwide pandemic?”

“Yes, but it should sound much scarier than it does when you say it.”

“It might, if I believed it.”

Professor Yamane just sniffled and wiped his nose.

“We know the Eysen-Sphere is some kind of ancient supercomputer,” Rathmore said. “I’m even willing to believe that it might have been left here from some ancient aliens or something, although I doubt that.”

“Supercomputer?” Yamane smiled, as if a child had just mispronounced a common word. “The Sphere is so much  . . . you don’t know.” He shook his head.

Rathmore narrowed his eyes. “Look, professor, I’m sorry, but the future hasn’t happened yet, so anything you’ve seen inside the Sphere is a prediction, not a
fact
.”

“Really? What if I could prove it to you?” Professor Yamane asked. “Because I know how you feel, I felt the same way. I’m a microbiologist, sir. I assure you I revere facts and have no use for fantasy.”

“How are you going to prove it to me?” Rathmore asked, intrigued.

“By telling you something that hasn’t happened yet. Something important. Something you will not be able to deny.”

Rathmore smiled at Murik, as if he was part of a gag, maybe a practical joke. But Rathmore couldn’t decide if he was the victim or the perpetrator of the joke, worried he might even be the punch line. His smile turned sour. “Professor, we’re busy, but thank you for your time. An agent will finish debriefing you.”

“Mis-Mister R-Rathmore, aren’t you even a little curious?” Professor Yamane stuttered.

“All I am is curious, professor, but I don’t have years, or even months to wait. You’d have to show us something today. What could you possibly say right now that would prove to us that the Eysen-Sphere can predict the future?”

“What about a war? A
serious
war?”

“When?”

“It will erupt before the end of the day.”

“Today?” Rathmore shot a look to Murik, as if the CIA might be involved or, at least know about this.

Murik shrugged.

“Between whom?” Rathmore asked.

“China and Russia.”

Savina knew she had to talk to Booker, and she knew the Judge would never allow it. Just how much her communications were monitored by the Foundation was unclear, but she couldn’t chance it. She handwrote a letter and sealed it inside a small envelope, which she gave to one of her assistants. He had a friend, working on UQP at Cal Tech, who would know how to get this urgent message to Booker. Savina communicated wordlessly, with gestures and lip-reading, to the assistant, who soon signed out for the day.

There was plenty to do until she heard from Booker, which hopefully would be soon. She needed to talk with him before the Foundation or the NSA caught up with Gaines and got hold of the other Sphere. In the meantime, Savina had to work out a plan to slow down the future.

She knew what was coming, a dangerous period for humanity in which more than half the world’s population would die. “We must make sure the ‘right’ half survives,” the Judge had said many times. The Foundation was working to engineer just such a scenario. The Phoenix Initiative, years in the making, would launch in less than ninety days. The diabolical plan had been designed to circumvent the prophesized natural plague which was coming, whether the people were ready or not.

More than seven billion on the planet, and only about a thousand of them knew that it was all going to end soon.

The secret had been kept because only Booker and the Judge controlled who knew. The two powerful men had assembled people to solve the planetary death sentence, and those participants understood that if word got out, pandemonium would surely follow, spiraling civilization into an inescapable stew of anarchy and apocalyptic horrors.

Within the Sphere, Savina had seen views of the world after the plague. The Judge had convinced her that “designing the end” was the best way to ensure that it didn’t
actually
become the end. But the risks were frightening: one miscalculation and it could quickly erode the population to numbers too low and too weakened to sustain themselves. “Earth would be left to the heartiest animals; ants and cockroaches,” the Judge often repeated.

The same was possible with the natural plague. They’d seen it in the Sphere. Clastier saw it hundreds of years earlier in his Sphere, and Malachy discovered it nearly a thousand years before. Like everything else that had happened in the history of the planet, however, the Cosegans had known about it at least eleven million years ago.

“Time is a place,” Savina reminded herself whenever she thought about how the Cosegans could have seen humanity’s entire future.
They found a way to go there and look around,
she thought while searching the digital caverns of the Sphere.
It must have been an easy trip for those ancient people, since they were able to record everything and preserve it for me to access eleven million years later.

She shook her head, still in awe and, at the same time, baffled by the technology that allowed them to provide a map into time.
How did they get it all contained in this indestructible crystal ball?

She called it indestructible because it had lasted for eleven million years, but in truth, it had always been handled with the utmost care. Savina had a fantastical theory that she had not dared to share with the Judge, or even her assistants: that if one day she happened to drop the Sphere, it would shatter into a million splintered fragments, and with it, all existence would vanish, as if it had never been.

It would be another hour until Taz’s flight would leave for the Big Island. His driver had arranged for a four-wheel-drive rental car, which would be needed to get to the Mauna Kea Observatories. All the while, Taz had been reading more of Dabnowski’s files and intermittently trying to reach the jumpy astrophysicist.

Finally, Dabnowski answered his phone. Taz begged him to meet at the Observatories.

“No, don’t go to Mauna Kea!” Dabnowski hissed. “The NSA has a team there now.” Instead, he reluctantly gave Taz an alternative location of a nearby oceanfront beach to meet.

On the way, Taz continued to read and struggled to comprehend it, but Stellard’s words kept repeating in his head.

“You go and find Dabnowski. Find him before the NSA does and do whatever it takes to get him to start talking again. Make that crazy scientist trust you.”

Taz knew that would not be easy. He had definitely made an awful first impression, but at least Dabnowski had agreed to see him again.

“Dr. Dabnowski, I’m sorry. I know I was acting like an idiot earlier. Please accept my apology,” Taz said, extending his hand as the astrophysicist found him in a grove of palm trees, sitting on a beautifully carved bench overlooking the Pacific.

Dabnowski nodded, giving him an annoyed, skeptical look. He motioned his head toward the briefcase. “So you can read.”

“Yes. I . . . please, let me say again that I’m sorry. Science isn’t my thing. I’m mostly just trying to track down Gaines and the Sphere.”

“I know, but you read those papers, and now you realize how much is going on that you had no idea about. Science is king. Not money. Not weapons.
Science
.”

“Science without money is hard to do,” Taz said, but immediately regretted initiating a debate with the person he was attempting to win over.

“Tell that to Booker Lipton. Booker may have been rich before, but once he got hold of the Sphere, he became more like a Pharaoh. And what was in that Sphere? Science.” Dabnowski smiled. “Money and weapons may have been the power of the past, but it is science that will rule the future . . . or, I should say,
save
the future.”

“Okay,” Taz said. “And you know that either the US government, Booker, or the Foundation will likely end up with the Sphere. Obviously you want the winner to be the Foundation or I wouldn’t be holding this briefcase and you wouldn’t be sitting here.”

Dabnowski nodded. “I may be a scientist, but I know that the US government cannot be trusted with the Sphere. Either they will lose it, or, at the very least, vast quantities of its information will fall into the hands of Chinese spies, or some other countr
y‒
the Russians, the Israeli
s‒
or they’ll just filter it to the corporations.”

Taz was not about to point out that the Foundation was run by the rich elites who controlled the most powerful corporations. Instead, he asked a nagging question. “But if Booker funded all this research and brought you and hundreds of others to study the Sphere, why not take this to him?”

“That was our original plan, but then the NSA discovered Gaines was alive. Booker is one man. What if he gets it wrong? What if he dies?” Dabnowski looked at his shoes, scuffed Nikes, years old. “Have you seen what’s in there? The future . . . it’s extremely dangerous.”

Taz nodded knowingly.

“With the NSA back onto Gaines, Booker is in trouble. He may not survive,” Dabnowski said. “Then I realized the Foundation, as a consortium of bright and influential people, would be a superior alternative. Spread the risk, spread the knowledge, spread the power. Do you see?”

Another nod from Taz

Dabnowski continued his manic rant. “Booker has helped advance the cumulative knowledge of what is now a whole new area of science, but UQP had grown bigger than he is, and he’s too secretive. I’ve met him once. He’s not very likable, and he runs his empire, the largest in the world, as a dictator.”

“No argument from me,” Taz said.

“In the scientific community, we like committees and shared, group efforts. There is too much at stake to trust this to the whims of one man,” Dabnowski continued, thinking of the coming plague. He, like many of the UQP scientists, had seen the future in the Sphere. The unpredictable nature of the ancient object made it impossible to hide, so Booker, rather than trying to hide it, had used the apocalyptic visions to recruit and elicit written promises of secrecy. “Booker claims to want to understand the Sphere in order to save humanity from the horrors waiting in the near future, but he continues to use everything we and Gaines have gleaned from the Sphere to create new products.
Products
! And those products aren’t going to help us change the future. All they’re going to do is make Booker richer.”

Taz could hardly believe his luck, and wondered if it was a trick. But Booker’s reputation had never been one of a savior. Quite the opposite, in fact. “I assure you that the Foundation is quite different from Booker.”

Dabnowski nodded nervously, allowing only a faint smile. “We have to act. Time is running out. Billions may die.”

“It’s the Foundation’s greatest priority. We already have whole teams working to stop the plague.” Taz thought he detected a hint of relief in Dabnowski’s eyes. “And this, your great discovery, will make a huge difference.” He patted the man’s shoulder. “So you’ve actually done this? You’ve used coordinates that were found in the Eysen-Sphere and plugged them into certain telescopes at the observatory and they were there? You could see them?”

“Yes,” Dabnowski said. “We detected anomalies at the precise points in space, right where they said we would.”

“How did you find the coordinates?”

Dabnowski didn’t know why this would matter, but he appreciated someone, especially an “idiot” like Taz, showing interest in his field, so he answered. “There is a Cosega Sequence that begins every session with the Eysen-Sphere. It’s like a language. A universal language of science, if you will. Complex, yet simple. The key was the rotation of the Earth around the sun, representing a year in ‘human time.’ Far more than that though, it utilizes planetary movements and sizes, all types of astronomical data that’s constant and knowable. Gaines decoded it. From there we can understand much of what we find in the Sphere.” He looked out to the ocean as if trying to remain grounded while talking about such an enormous topic. “Of course,” Dabnowski continued, “it is far too vast an object to really understand or attempt to control, but we have made great strides, particularly in the past year.”

“But is this really true?”

“You mean time travel?” Dabnowski asked, knowing the layman would go for the sensational aspect of his report. “Not in the science-fiction sense of getting into a contraption, turning a dial, and then walking out into a medieval castle during a siege or some such thing.” He looked around, certain the NSA would be there soon.

“I’m sure it’s not like that.”

“Are you? Good.” Dabnowski couldn’t help but smile. “If we hit those points in space, it is possible to project back in time, and because the world is made up of energy and matter, matter being composed of atoms, which in turn is made up of subatomic particles, protons and neutrons, electrons . . . Of course, when you talk about matter we should also bring up massless particles. There’s photons, and then that leads us to quarks and leptons, but—”

“Please,” Taz interrupted. “I’m not quite as bright as you.”

“Of course you aren’t.” Dabnowski smiled in a curt, condescending way before continuing. “Because these particles make up all things in the universe, some theorize that we might be able to rearrange time by rearranging those particles. Kind of like genetic manipulation. We rearrange a few things and the corn grows bigger, a few more and the earworms and sap beetles won’t eat the corn. Of course, if we do it wrong, it won’t be fit for us to eat either, but no matter.”

“Back to the time travel issue,” Taz prompted.

“Yes, we rearrange a few particles at the right time in the right place in the universe, and voila. Everything after is different.”

“But how would you control the outcome? It could be total chaos.”

“The same way we do it with corn, or human embryos. We have a DNA map.”

“But how do you map the universe?”

“We don’t have to. The Eysen has already done it. That magical little Sphere has mapped all of time and space.”