Europa (Deadverse Book 1) (11 page)

“That’s what I thought at first,” she said. “Mostly because I was seeing it visually, the waves, that is. But it’s not data compression. The whole sound, the entire sound, is compressed.”

Ben was excited for the first time in a while.

“So all we have to do is decompress it?”

“The opposite,” Joyce said as she typed and touched the screen furiously. “The signal isn’t compressed on this end, but on the other end. It’s somehow been compressed and we are getting it, slowly, REAL slow like. It’s just a trickle on our end.”

“How is that possible?” Ben asked, half wondering out loud.

Joyce shrugged her shoulders, but offered no response. She drew the screen back and collected the entirety of the wave from when the app first identified it. Nearly forty two hours of sound. She took the stream, making a copy of the segment from the beginning to that very moment, and separated it. Then, she used her sound manipulation app to compress the sound. The flat line began to get shorter until it suddenly jumped into the familiar waves of a sound.

“That,” Joyce nearly gasped, “I recognize.”

She copied the wave relay into an audio app and pressed play. Something played back, clearly recognizable, but at a very high pitch. She slowed down the signal a few factors and played it again. This time, the voice was instantly recognizable.

“Command, we’re headed out now.”

Joyce turned and met Ben’s look. She laughed, deducing that the look he had on his face was the one she had as well.

“A four second wave,” Joyce said excitedly, “that came to us stretched out over forty two hours.”

Ben lurched forward and typed in Thomas’ comm signal. His link opened up.

“Again?” Thomas’ slightly annoyed voice chimed in from the other side. “What are you guys doing up there?”

“Uhm, Mr. Astor. Do you mind firing up the rover again? I think we need you out at the artifact.”

- Thomas –

He was tired. He stunk like a week old sock and he was getting hungry. With everything that had happened in the past few days, what he most wanted to do was take his helmet off and let the air whip through his hair. Best he could do was imagine. The thought of Connie alive and well was more than enough of a boost of energy for now.

The rover was going as fast as it could along the ice covered surface. Behind him, tiny chunks of ice flew off into the sky, leaving behind a trail of ice dust akin to a horse galloping in an old western movie. Thomas felt like a heroic cowboy, dashing off to a rescue. He had to concentrate, because despite the boost of hopeful energy, the exhaustion was entirely too real. Back and forth he went through the ice spear field until, at that final turn, he cleared it. Jupiter’s might and glow greeted him on the other side.

The alien artifact grew in size as he approached. He sped by the shaft he and Jenna had so painstakingly carved out for nearly a year, the now worthless elevator crane standing out as a monument to history. The rover skipped a bit and floated through the air, and Thomas let off the accelerator, coming to a stop on the ice. He had been going too fast and the spikes on the rover’s tires were not gripping the icy surface.

“Just get there,” Thomas thought.

The alien vessel seemed deformed, even more so than the last time he had been out here. The shape had melted forward onto the ice, flattening out a bit. Still, it was an imposing mountain of green hue that only kept growing and growing. He wasn’t entirely sure where he was going to, as the entrance point they had plotted out for nearly a year was covered once again under ice. Instead, he just aimed in the general direction Susan had run off to. The last thing he hoped to find was her body, somewhere out here on the ice plains under Jupiter.

When the alien vessel grew so large in his view that he could barely see Jupiter behind it, he knew he was near. Still, the enormity of the ship created an illusion where the hull of ship blended in with the ice.

“You there yet?” Ben’s voice cracked in over the comm.

Thomas let go of the accelerator and peered off in the distance. He couldn’t just how far he was from the ship’s hull.

“Yeah, I think so.”

He got out of the rover and began walking straight forwards. It was only when he tried to look down the length of the ship did he realize how close he was. When he turned down to his left, he spotted them. He couldn’t believe it. There they were, a group of people in the official mission lunar suits, walking towards him. Some were waving. He looked down at his comms, but saw no connection status with them.

“Screw it.”

He began bouncing over to them as quickly as the moon’s little bit of gravity would allow him to. His heart began pounding in the anticipation that Connie was there. He recognized her suit as he got closer, as it was the only one she would wear outside. The gas giant was casting a pretty ominous shadow across the icy landscape as it shone behind the exposed alien craft, so Thomas couldn’t see into the face shields. For a brief moment, he came down from a bounce and stopped, wondering if what he was doing was wise. That wall came crashing down as some select memories of his time with Connie burst into his thoughts.

“Yeah, screw it.”

Within a few moments, he was in front of them, smiling. It was them. His sheer relief was so great that he could barely speak. Instead, he found Connie and held her hands. He was so focused on her that he failed to feel Charles tapping him on the shoulder, and pointing down at his own tablet. Thomas looked down and saw the frequency and tuned his radio into his.

“Oh, man, Captain. You have no idea how glad we are to find you.”

“I think we are too,” the Captain chipped in, “Lot of weird stuff has happened. How long have we been gone?”

Thomas turned and looked at the Captain, confused.

“It’s been eight days,” he said, then adding in “sir” at the end. He wasn’t sure why he had done that.

Charles looked back at Jenna and gave a thumbs up.

“Looks like our girl did her math right then. Thomas, is the rover nearby? We need to get back to base right now. A lot has changed and we have much to discuss. Also, why is the alien artifact half way out of the ice?”

Thomas started to chuckle, then held it back.

“Yeah, we can get back to base, or what’s left of it.”

- Gary –

Horace would be fine. No internal bleeding, just a good concussion and some stitches on his head and on his leg. His life threatening wound had been the gash on his leg nearly everyone had missed. It had been really just a matter of luck that the vessels had managed to clot enough for him not to bleed out. That, or divine intervention. No one cared right now; they’d take help from the aliens if they could.

Horace was conscious, though, if a bit woozy. The shrink was actually surprised he was still alive. The guy who was supposed to keep everyone’s spirits up had very little of his own apparently.

Clearly, the events of the past couple of days, or hours, as was Gary’s case, were mind blowing. Shortly after returning to the base and seeing the destruction and the patchwork repairs, Gary had gone straight to where Horace was, and been fully surprised to see the drone soldier, Paul, there.

Back on Earth, in what seemed like several decades ago, Gary had gone through some extensive training in dealing with soldier drones. He had learned the cybernetic symbiosis between the mech, the AI and the human body and knew exactly how to deal with the biological injuries the soldiers could have suffered, up to and including the need for extreme surgery and how it integrated into the mech. In that training course, they had gone into the whole awakening sequence, really only for information purposes. Even a severely wounded drone soldier was not supposed to wake up. Only the AI system, tied into the main automated controls at several military bases could actually wake a soldier up. He knew of exactly zero cases where a soldier had woken up without going through the twenty seven day waking sequence.

It wasn’t far to say he was quite shocked to see Paul sitting up on his bed.

He ran a small battery of tests on him with whatever equipment he could find. Mostly, he just ran blood samples, pressure, and physical tests, and the soldier checked out fine in all of them. What Gary really wanted to know was what his mental state was like, and unfortunately, the best person to diagnose him was currently in a fuzzy state of mind himself. That being the case, Gary had taken the time to dig through some old manuals and ran a simple code test on Paul.

Artificial intelligence was quite common place in America, but there were several very extreme limitations. For one, AI did not stand for artificial intelligence, but automated intelligence. It was not the AI that was portrayed in fictional literature and media. There were no conscious machines on Earth, at least as far as Gary knew. Instead, nearly every household, business and company had some sort of learned automated system that, with training, could run every day operations. Everything that could possibly be automated was run by an AI of some sort. It was one of the modern discoveries that had once again propelled America years, if not decades ahead of other nations. When wars had broken out all over the planet, America held on tightly to their technology, although it was quite clear that other nations were developing their own automated intelligence systems.

One minor side effect of the automated intelligence wave that swept the nation was an entirely new drug, based not on chemicals, but on code. Technological addiction was already a reality due to social media, virtual and video games and handheld social devices. From that technology arose a new drug called IO, or information overload. The developers, if they could be called that, had created a new app that allowed the program AI to take over several functions of the human body simply through lines of code the human eye saw. It was incredibly revolutionary and the soldier drones were based on that technology. Unfortunately, it was also abused, and thousands, if not millions of young Americans found themselves addicted to the control of the AI. The ethereal high achieved from losing control of your body to code was unlike any chemical drug sensation.

For the doctors of the time, it was nearly undetectable. There were no biological tests that could be done to an individual to see if they were under the influence of the code. Instead, they, along with countless neurological and psychological experts managed to create tests that could help determine if the individual was under the control of the AI or not. A series of images and questions that would yield answers that only an AI could or could not answer. It had a reasonable success rate until the original code was abolished and newer AI biological control codes were created that were highly restricted and controlled.

So Gary ran one of his simpler tests he still had in the database, and the results were, in his eyes, quite confusing. There were no right or wrong answers; instead, it was the kind of answers the test tried to find in order to determine the type of control over the human mind. But his results were almost entirely inconclusive. In the end, he wasn’t too surprised, as there was simply no way of telling just how the young man’s mind was handling the transition from AI control to his own.

The doctor had his work cut out for him, though. Bobby was still missing, and at this point, presumed dead. Emir and Glorin had suffered some kind of breakdown from the events inside of the alien craft. He set down their charts and hoped Horace would be mentally clear enough soon to help deal with them.

The events inside the alien vessel.

Gary looked down at his watch and nearly jumped. He was going to be late. The Captain was about to brief everyone about all that had happened in the eight days or thirty or so minutes inside of the alien craft. He rushed out of the door and nearly lost his balance when one of his magnetic boots caught a dead zone in the floor wires, nearly causing him to flip. There was still plenty of damage to the base, most that would take months to fix.

He slowed down and headed down the dark hallway towards the central dome.

- Charles –

He had extensive training in absolute live-or-die situations. He had extensive experience in the same. He had led men into combat, saved some of those lives, and lost some as well. He had followed orders from the chain of command he knew for sure would result in the death of his men, and he also gave orders that would yield the same result. Charles Hoarry was a confident man, both from his personality and his training. He had tackled many difficult situations head-on. That was the military way, most of the time.

Now, he sat at a table in front of the remaining crew of the Europa mission, and he was nervous. He was nervous not because of what he had to go through with them, but how they might react. Soldiers he knew, and he understood how they would react, most of the time. But scientists, engineers, civilians?

And the news was the worst there could possibly be.

“I know most of you, well, all of you, are really interested in knowing what happened inside of the vessel, so I will relate as best as I can what happened. And to the crew with me, please feel free to interject as you see fit.”

Charles looked around and saw the nodding agreements from Jenna, Emir, Gary and Connie. Glorin sat on the far corner of the room, on top of the remains of an ice shelf. As always, he felt he needed to be above everyone else. Charles grimaced a bit in anger.

“First, the question on everyone’s mind. Yes, we were only in the alien vessel for what appears to have been 38 minutes, while Mr. Ignacius appears to have been in for about 45 minutes. That translates into the eight to nine days that passed out here on the moon surface. There was nothing different about our passage of time, we felt nothing, and had no idea what the extent of it was. We did suspect it when we first found Mr. Ignacius inside the vessel.”

The group began discussing theories. It was the scientists’ way of dealing with the confusion and stress. How such a feat was possible was clearly far and above anything humanity was capable of, that part was clear. There were some wild speculations ranging from the manipulation of gravity to string theory articulations. To Charles, the only real non-scientist in the group, they all sounded like fantasy or magic. Then again, that was how it felt.

“The thing is, no matter how this civilization appeared to have managed it, time compression is entirely vital to space travel,” Connie added.

“Civilization?” someone grumbled. It was a common thread of argument: the origins of the alien vessel.

“Why is that?” Charles asked.

Connie continued. “In nearly all our studies on how we would deal with long distance space travel, the most common theory involves putting people in sleep chambers, some kind of stasis, in order to endure the extremely long distances in space. So what if instead of putting people to sleep, they were able to just completely compress time within the vessel. While time continues outside of the vessel in whatever state of relativity it’s at, inside, time continues at a completely different pace.”

There were many nods of agreement.

“But that means that the ship was designed to carry a crew then, and we saw none,” Emir added.

There had been no hint of any life at all on board the ship. Since its discovery in the solar system and its subsequent crash on Europa, myriads of theories abounded about the pilots of the ship. Many postulated that it was automated. The inside of the vessel had only added confusion to the argument.

“There is no way I can describe the hull, but the inside of the ship looks just like any submarine I have been on. If I could have blocked all the craziness before being inside, I could have been tricked into thinking I was back on Earth. The floor has a metal grating similarly used in U.S. subs. The similarity was uncanny. There were chairs too, and what appeared to have been a command center, just like on any ship.”

Charles drew on a board as he explained what they had seen.

“The only different thing were these three green columns with some kind of gas, or liquid, flowing up through them. But I will let Mr. Ignacius here tell you about that, as he was foolish enough to touch them.”

Emir raised his hand, sheepishly.

“Yes, Mr. Tagula did as well.”

Everyone turned their focus, first onto Emir, then onto Glorin, as he came off his ice shelf throne. He strode onto the table Charles was sitting at.

“Our wonderful Captain was just afraid to meddle in things that are beyond his comprehension. His expertise is with his hands and guns while ours are with our minds. We can see beyond our own eyes.”

Charles caught Jenna chuckling out of the corner of his eye and he could instantly feel the tension grow in the room. Glorin considered himself a fellow scientists with the rest of the crew, and that had always created animosity.

“The green beams the Captain described are the ships computers. Interaction with the vessel’s systems required integration with them, and so I did. Merely putting your hands into the stream brings you online with the ship, and it was in this fashion that I was able to request an exit from inside.”

Many of the crew members eyed Glorin carefully.

“I can’t say that what he says is true, but he did stick his hands in the green stuff and seconds later, a small shaft formed just outside that room which we took to the outside of the hull. As crazy as it sounds, it happened.”

The cynicism changed to surprise as everybody gazed up at Glorin. He basked in his moment of glory until he began being bombarded with questions. What else could he do? Did he see any navigation charts? Did he see any ship specs? Crew logs? Glorin was taken aback. He hadn’t seen anything else. He had requested an exit to the ship, and one had formed.

“The Captain here was in a hurry and he wanted to leave, so I didn’t have enough time to request any information.” Glorin stood by, huffing. He realized that in one of the greatest moments in all humanity, he had simply asked for a way out.

“I saw more,” came a sheepish voice from the back of the room.

Everyone turned to stare at Emir.

The engineer described that as Glorin had reached into the green beam, he had instinctively reached out to pull the man’s hands and arms back, but had also inserted his own in. Glorin scowled as the attention of the group was drawn away from him, and onto the disgraced engineer.

“I saw a design. I think. Or a schematic,” he began.

Charles looked at him. Emir hadn’t said a thing since Glorin had pulled his arms out and the exit had appeared. In fact, he hadn’t hear him say anything since they had returned to the base.

“The ship’s schematics?” someone shouted out excitedly.

“I don’t think so,” he continued, “it was on a far lesser scale. It was more like a control panel. A console. But in my mind. I really don’t recognize anything I saw, can’t make sense of it, but…”

Everyone waited.

“Well?” Ben asked.

“I want to say it was an….well….an on-and-off switch?”

“Really?” Connie asked with a heavy dose of skepticism.

“I know, it sounds really odd,” Emir hung his head, “I can’t explain it.”

Glorin looked over at Connie with disdain, his lips pursing together.

“An alien vessel far beyond anything we can comprehend, which can be talked to via mental thought, shows this man the on-and-off switch, and you can’t believe it?” he barked.

Connie turned to face the short man.

“It’s part of my job to not believe everything. It’s what scientists do. Not that you would know.”

Glorin’s eyes opened wide in anger and he was about to explode in rage when Charles stood up in front of him.

“Ok,” he said, holding his arms out, “the point is they each saw something, and clearly, the ship can react to that. Emir, did you see anything else?”

Emir hung his head even lower.

“No. Nope.”

“Well, there we go. I would have had everyone write up reports in detail, and we may yet, but we came back into a crisis. My question to all of you is, did anything we do on the ship cause all of this?” Charles asked.

Ben shook his head.

“We’ve been over the data. It was a tidal quake. The ice field we put the base on wasn’t due for a tidal shift. It was supposed to only happen once every hundred years, and we must have hit that mark. We have very accurate data that shows exactly what happens nearly all over the surface of the moon. We just got unlucky.”

“And so this, ice quake, pushed the ship out?” Charles looked around the room. He saw heads looking back and forth and each other.

“We just don’t know how that happened,” Ben answered.

“Pointless now, I think. At least for the moment.” Charles thought that was that.

“Except that we simply don’t have the equipment and the knowledge to study the tidal rift to see if another one is coming,” Ben said, standing up for the first time during the meeting. Charles held out his arm to say something else, when Ben interrupted him to continue.

“That brings us to something a bit more urgent. Some of us are hoping you could clue us in a bit, Charles. We haven’t been able to reach mission control in Indy for some time now and, well…” Ben stopped and looked over at Joyce. Charles looked over as well and noticed a hint of anger and apprehension in the woman’s eyes.

“Can you explain why…?” Joyce started, standing up to speak. Charles raised a palm and stopped her.

“I was getting to that. Please, sit down.”

Joyce looked around and then at Ben, who nodded then sat down himself. The communications expert then sat back down on the icy floor.

“What I have to say is very difficult, and even I wasn’t, or maybe am not, still, completely sure,” Charles paused to look at the faces of his crew.

“Ok. About ten months ago, the Russian Federation sent tanks and troops into China and Eastern Europe. You all know the famine conditions. Well, it apparently boiled over.”

“Wait, why didn’t we know about this?” Susan asked.

“My guess is that mission control didn’t want anyone to know and worry. And to be honest, mission control didn’t tell me, either. I have a direct laser link to the Pentagon, and have been receiving messages from them. That is the only way I know.”

“Yeah, we know,” Joyce said, looking back at Crysta. Charles nodded and continued.

“I knew that you were aware of my laser link. I even knew you could crack it if you really wanted to. It’s a one way link, and it’s just an informational thing. They’re just the regular messages sent to all higher ranking officers. So, even I don’t know all of the details.

BUT…

Here is what I do know. The war did not go well for Russia and they found themselves within a month of starting the war being pushed back into their own country on two fronts. Fighting got fierce from everything our intelligence could find. There was some kind of coup in Russia and everything fell apart. It appeared that within two months of starting the war, it was going to be over.

Well, some rogue unit within the Russian military somehow flew a bomber deep into Germany and bombed a nuclear reactor. Incredibly enough, they didn’t destroy it as they had hoped to, and so they didn’t get the kind of explosion they had expected. Now, and I don’t have the information for it, but two days later, the reactor did go critical, there was some kind of explosion, and radioactive material began spewing into the skies over
Grafenrheinfeld
and beyond. That was one of only two reactors left in Germany.

And that’s where things get murky.”

The world had become an automated theater. Computers across the globe ran nearly every aspect of the modern world, running software as programmed by operators. AI’s ran day-to-day operations of transport, air travel, food production and even media and data. Even giant factories were autonomous in their operation, requiring just a few eyes on the premises to account for delays. The American military had become the world’s leader in automation, proudly displaying the munitions factories that ran one hundred percent automatically.

The joke was that even if all mankind died, they would continue making weapons.

It wasn’t so much of a joke anymore.

Somewhere, within the myriads of automations, in the trillions of lines of code, someone forgot to put some common sense into the system.

Satellites detected the explosion in Germany and information started flowing back to the United States, where another automatic sensor began extrapolating its next move based on their code. Somehow, and Charles had no way of knowing, but all this data went by without any kind of human eyes. Instead, the dependency on the automation failed them. About fifteen minutes after the explosion, the American automated system came to its last option in the code, and executed them.

One nuclear missile was launched towards Russia.

Charles had worked once, for three months, at NORAD. It had been a training exercise. He had seen the levels of automation already in place seven years ago and had also witnessed the games the engineers ran the automation through over and over again. When he read that the missile had been launched, he could only envision the level of panic that ensued when the engineers worked frantically to disable the automation. Even the kill switch on the missile had been left in control of the Automation Intelligence.