InterstellarNet: Origins (13 page)

They took the hint that he didn’t want to discuss Alicia. “The moon’s an amazing place to visit. We have a few hundred holos that your father intends to inflict on you. Very nice hotel at Tycho City, too.” Discussion of their dream vacation occupied the rest of the drive.

Justin tossed his travel bag into his old room, then started searching the kitchen. The refrigerator’s display warned that the cheddar was within two days of becoming moldy, but it smelled fine and he decided to take his chances. The fridge read labels; it couldn’t test the food.

“Quit foraging,” Dad called from the living room. “There’s finger food on the coffee table, and you know where the bar is. We’ll head out for dinner in a bit. What with the time-zone difference, feel free to call it lunch.”

Justin joined his parents. Munching yogurt-covered pretzels, he glanced around the living room. Same spectacular view of Lake Geneva outside. Same old furniture inside. Lots of familiar framed prints and downloaded art, mostly of planets and moons spanning the solar system, plus several shots of Mom and/or Dad with renowned personages.

He wasn’t being fair. Mom and Dad were themselves famous. It was just hard to think of one’s own parents that way. To start, they’d been key players in the Leo first contact. Then Bridget Satterswaithe, not quite yet Matthews, had been tapped to establish the Interstellar Commerce Union, a new UN agency, and been the ICU’s first Secretary-General. Dean Matthews had ping-ponged between lead-technologist roles at aerospace and telecomm companies and senior positions at the ICU. Both parents still occasionally consulted for the ICU.

Amid the many familiar images Justin spotted some new ones. He gravitated toward a striking holo of Jupiter with several of its moons in transit. For years, that display unit had been dedicated to previews of the lunar vacation. “Your next jaunt, guys?”

“One can dream,” his mother answered. “These things take years of planning.”

Jupiter and years of planning… As Justin stared at the little marble that was Europa, the room seemed to recede.

ISI was the original winner of the United Nations Aeronautics and Space Administration base-operations contract for Europa. ISI had been the most aggressive bidder—had, in fact, underbid to the point of losing a small fortune. Justin had never understood why someone had wanted the UNASA contract so badly.

Under that contract, ISI had serviced Europa base’s environmental systems, flown shuttles between Earth and Europa with supplies and for staff rotations, managed the Earth/Europa comm link within the corporate interplanetary ’net, and overseen a fleet of robotic Jupiter probes. UNASA-funded scientists ran the labs at the base, researched Europa itself, and did most of the onsite data analysis.

A few years later, and just as inexplicably, ISI had bid
way
too high when the UNASA contract came up for a recompete. Solar Services Corporation had held the contract for Europa base ever since. Almost to a person, the ISI staff on Europa had accepted the winner’s employment offers. Princely retention bonuses cost SSC much less than sending replacement staff far across the solar system.

Zhang’s security goon in Justin’s garage had posed as another company’s representative. Was ISI’s outwardly inexplicable bidding strategy an elaborate way to plant disavowable staff on Europa? If so, might that long-term ploy relate somehow to the mysterious Kyle Fletcher and the multiyear nature of interstellar trade?

What had seemed unrelated facts began to form a pattern. On Earth, there was no need for especially sensitive components to build an ET radio receiver. Collections of standard direct-to-home 3-V satellite dishes worked fine. Components like those Alicia had been tracing were designed for the largest radio telescopes. Hooked into an interplanetary dish antenna, though, a TSC receiver might well be the best way on Europa to listen clandestinely to ETs.

Who would notice a few no doubt innocently labeled electronics modules on a Europa resupply ship? Upgrading the base’s ninety-meter radio dish could be done quickly and quietly. And such a single-point upgrade would certainly be less obvious—and far safer, given the high-radiation environment above Europa’s ice—than distributing an array of small antennas across the icescape, aligning them all, and doing the integration testing. Upgrading of the receiver electronics could be done with little risk of detection from UNASA scientists at the base.

Had the Europa dish been upgraded years ago? Was the rush order for parts because an in-use receiver had failed?

“Earth to Justin?”

“Sorry, Mom.” He draped an arm across the shoulders of each parent. “You can take the boy out of the office but…. Something you guys said helped me sort out a problem I’ve been wrestling with.

“Let’s go eat. By the way, the schnitzel is on me.”

■□■

Justin tossed and turned, his feet dangling off the end of his boyhood bed.

A Europan explanation for the Alicia situation made a sort of sense, but he was working more from inference than evidence. The only reason for a clandestine receiving station was the expectation of a secret signal to be received.

If this theory held water, ISI’s conspirators had placed an order with an ET species for…he didn’t know what. They had broken international and interplanetary law to do so. They might even have killed Alicia to protect themselves. The notion was awful—and the immense profits to be made from xenotech made it scarily credible.

Still, Justin couldn’t get past one problem: the other side of the deal. Humanity and the ETs traded government to government. How could ISI have gotten ET cooperation with its plot?

Not even the collective wisdom of the four known intelligent species had found a loophole in the Einsteinian light-speed barrier. Interstellar interactions were all by radio transmission.

The nearest ETs were at Alpha Centauri, about four and a half light-years distant. That put any unsolicited offer from the Centaurs at least four and a half years into the past. On the other hand, suppose that the Centaurs were responding to a secret ISI message. Then that illegal request was at least nine years old. If any other aliens were involved, any such plot had been hatched even longer ago.

Could Justin find evidence that old of the supposed conspiracy?

Lalande Implosion:
the regional and industry-specific economics crisis of 2006-2009, in which the price of petroleum collapsed. The crisis was concurrent with, and caused by, the introduction of a practical electric car. The new electric cars used fuel-cell technology derived from the first-contact message from Lalande 21185 (from the species popularly known as the Leos). Petroleum remains useful as a feedstock for the chemical industry, but petroleum production levels and prices never again approached their pre-2006 levels.

The reduced costs for transportation energy and chemical feedstocks were highly beneficial to much of the world economy. Major oil-producing countries and companies were, however, devastated by the unanticipated collapse in demand. In 2010, the United Nations enacted the Protocol on Interstellar Technology Commerce that established the Interstellar Commerce Union and gave it authority over matters of trans-species technology import and export. See related entry, “Proscribed Technology Transfers.”

—Internetopedia

Trying to sleep was futile.

Justin left his parents a note that he had shopping to do—he did intend to buy Swiss chocolate for some Richmond neighbors while he was here—and headed for the Geneva spaceport and its anonymous ’net kiosks. He had no desire to bring Mom and Dad to ISI’s attention.

He once again used the compromised ISI employee-travel program to get sysadmin privileges. Posing as a sysadmin, Justin retrieved the archive history of every ISI program in any way related to xenotechnomics.

And realized he was staring.

It seemed that the mysterious Kyle Fletcher had a longstanding relationship with ISI. Even stranger than that Fletcher had recently used the Decode program, the discovery that had brought Justin this far, nine years earlier Fletcher had used Justin’s
Encode
AI.

The audit log identified the input file Encode had processed and the output file it had produced.

The kiosk was for email and web surfing; it couldn’t begin to handle the files about which Justin was very curious. Muttering in frustration, he commanded the ISI system to copy the information to a ’net-based archive he opened under an assumed name.

With a bag of souvenir chocolates in hand, he returned to his parents’ house. His former bedroom had become his father’s den; the workstation more than sufficed for Justin’s purposes. Trusting to the precautions he had already taken, he opened the first of the talk-to-the-aliens files downloaded from ISI.

He was staring at the display when his parents silently walked up behind him.

“I see two violations of UN protocol just on this screen,” his mother said. “I’d sure like to know what’s going on.”

“That’s not even the most interesting part,” Justin replied. To the workstation, he added, “Return to start of file. Display new page every minute.” Images flashed. His parents, each with decades of experience in interstellar commerce, read the
lingua franca
without difficulty.

“Pause display.” Bridget Matthews tapped the workstation screen. “My God. Does that passage say what I think it does?”

Justin swiveled his chair. “If you think the message purports to be from an alien species on Europa, then yes.”

■□■

“Shit.” Crimson text pulsed strobelike on Michael Zhang’s workstation. “What’s that?”

The question was rhetorical—there was no mistaking an intrusion alarm. The hacker, whoever she was, had covered her tracks well.

She? That was reflex. Alicia Briggs was out of the picture. Someone else was poking around in the archives. But what in such old files could possibly still be useful?

Michael didn’t take long to pinpoint the intrusion. To see what data had been copied was to know who this hacker must be. To know who must be poking around in things that ought not to concern him.

Justin Matthews.

Mathews had been warned. He had been given a payoff—and then figured out where it came from. Foolishly, he continued to pry.

An icy calm came over Michael. He had mastered his trade in T2, the Second Terror War. Those skills were not limited to watching.

■□■

Fortified with a large mug of Swiss mocha, Justin brought his parents up to speed. “Be honest. Am I making sense?”

“Tell me if I have this right,” his mother said. “ISI, through some fancy maneuvering, placed secret employees on Europa. Those agents surreptitiously upgraded the big dish at Europa base to interstellar capability. Nine years ago they used one of your AIs to encode an unauthorized transmission to the Centaurs. In that message your cabal claimed to be a separate species, to have monitored past Earth/Centaur dialogues, and to be opening their own communications. The fake Europans were therefore able to explain knowing that the Centaurs had nanotech and wanted fusion technology, and that humans did
not
want nanotech.

“The fake Europans broadcast UN-proscribed fusion technology, including the design of the super-powerful lasers used for inertial containment of deuterium/tritium fuel pellets.” (It was the lasers that the ICU had specifically embargoed, Justin knew, because of their potential use as weapons.) “And in return, the conspirators requested that the Centaurs send the mature industrial nanotech the UN has refused to order.”

To Justin’s nod, his father added, “The claimed sensitivity to Earth’s desire to avoid imported nanotech…oh, what a clever touch. It would’ve motivated the request that the Centaurs use a comparatively unattractive freq”—by which he meant a radio frequency with significantly more attenuation than commonly used for interstellar comm—“to reduce the likelihood that anyone but the plotters would hear the signal. ISI will not only obtain revolutionary technology, but they can claim it as indigenous. They’ll be able to build patent walls in Sol system around the Centaurs’ advanced nanotech, to supersede whole industries, and—unlike everything else we’ve ever learned from the ETs—do it all without competitors.”

Justin felt a sense of relief—despite having involved his parents. For all that Alicia had baited him about working in the family business, there was truth to her jests. Drs. Dean and Bridget Matthews had literally written the book on ET commerce. Mom and Dad accepting all this meant that he wasn’t crazy.

“There must be trillions of dollars at stake.” Justin sighed. “I believe they killed Alicia to protect their conspiracy. I can’t help but think that they would kill again.”

7

“The horror of Alicia’s death aside, might not the worst be over?” Mom asked, pacing about her living room. “We know the frequency on which to listen, lest the Centaurs answer the fake Europans. I think it’s time to turn matters over to the Interstellar Commerce Union.”

The advice reflected a trust in government that was admirable in a public servant and ennobling in a parent. It seemed impractical in a counter-conspirator.