InterstellarNet: Origins (16 page)

Insight remained stubbornly absent.

ISI had denied knowledge of any unauthorized extrasolar transmissions. They protested that Solar Services had managed the Europa base, from well before the supposed message had been sent to Alpha Centauri, right up to the present. And neither Solar Services nor government agencies seemed able to establish communications with Europa—

As though the base’s big dish pointed elsewhere.

The limitless sky demanded Justin’s attention. By profession he was sympathetic to change. Humanity had survived first contact and the Lalande Implosion, and then thrived. ISI’s actions were unconscionable—and he would yet see the responsible people punished for Alicia’s death—but humanity would, once the disruptions had been recovered from, benefit enormously from Centaur nanotech.

Like the fusion technology for which it was being traded, nanotech had turned out to be an enormously complex challenge. Earth had taken more than seventy years to advance from the H-bomb to a commercial fusion power plant. Human nanotech, after sixty years of research, was still seemingly decades away from practical applications.

How would the new technology be used first? He imagined cell-sized cholesterol disassemblers scuttling around the human circulatory system. He mused about swarms of tiny machines digesting meteors directly into pure metal ingots and steel I-beams. For whatever reason, neither application held his interest. Then, the Lalande Implosion freshly in his thoughts, and under a starry sky, the Oort Cloud came to mind.

Humans had yet to visit the Oort Cloud, a vast region far beyond Neptune, more for the lack of motivation than any inherent difficulty. Where the asteroid belt was full of stony and metallic bodies, the Cloud was made up of great snowballs of CHON: compounds of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen. CHON was the stuff of life, freeze-dried primordial soup, but the remoteness of the Cloud had made its vast resources too expensive to exploit. Until now.

Self-replicating nanotech would be ideal for converting those snowballs to petrochemicals. Mounting an expedition to the Oort Cloud, locating suitable planetismals, and nudging them to Earth—all that would take time. Still, a single large CHON body could be converted into petroleum to rival the once-fabled Saudi oil fields. OPEC might be facing a rerun of the Lalande Implosion for its residual market in chemical feedstock.

Another near-Earth habitat arced overhead. A shooting star followed.

Justin began to visualize planetismals and how easily they could be guided to the inner Solar System. Use a small fraction of the body itself for reaction mass, with a Leo fuel cell to provide initial power. It wasn’t as though Cloud objects had particularly stable orbits. Gravitational perturbations, whether from the planets or interstellar objects passing unseen, often sent planetismals plunging sunward. When that happened, the objects were called comets.

He pondered aloud until Barbara interrupted. “Of all possible applications for nanotech, this one seems the least imminent. How long will it take to catch a wannabe comet and do something useful with it? Why are you obsessing on that?”

“Good question.” Something about comets had to be significant, had to be bugging his subconscious. What?

Maybe not comets. Maybe comet watching.

NASA and the European Space Agency, before consolidating with their national and regional equivalents into UNASA, had had several comet-chasing missions. Something about comet missions?

Even deep in the cemetery Justin’s PDA had wireless access. “Query: comet-related space probes,” he whispered. A few exchanges between man, digital assistant, and the ’net, and Justin knew what his subconscious had been shouting about.

The last of the early comet chasers, the Shoemaker probe, had been conceived by NASA in 2009, had gone under contract in 2015, and was finally launched, by then under UNASA auspices, in 2023. Its glory days were over by 2030, but with two low-budget mission extensions it had stayed in limited operations until three years earlier. The decision to put Shoemaker into a low-energy safe mode had been purely financial.

“Display current position of Shoemaker relative to Earth, sun, and Alpha Centauri. Superimpose an Alpha Centauri-to-Sol radio beam.” An image filled the PDA’s tiny screen. “Max brightness and contrast.”

Wow. Shoemaker was out beyond Pluto, but still well within the forecast beam from the Centaurs. The ancient probe was nowhere near the conspirators’ jamming beam.

Shoemaker’s mission profile had been baselined in 2010. The spacecraft’s design had been heavily constrained by the need to receive signals across the solar system from that era’s comparatively low-powered transmitters. Justin retrieved an Internetopedia image of the probe and whistled. Shoemaker’s body and instruments were dwarfed by the probe’s main antenna. The parabolic dish unfurled after launch, like a very large umbrella.

“A
very
good question, Barb.”

Did Shoemaker have the sensitivity to receive the Centaur signal? Could the old probe even be reactivated?

It seemed impossible to block the secrets of Centaur nanotech,but perhaps there was a way to keep that information from becoming ISI’s monopoly.

“Just maybe the Shoemaker probe is the answer.”

11

So much for the notion that great wealth would protect him. Michael Zhang went underground as soon as reports hit the ’net: A Centaur transmission had been picked up at an unexpected frequency. No monopoly meant no wealth. He would have to look out for himself.

He took his time deplaning, placing himself near the middle of the queue forming at Customs. The Americans were so damn touchy about their borders. He traveled enough to know that those who tried to rush through and those who held back alike drew the closest scrutiny—not that he expected to draw any notice. All he carried of possible interest to the authorities was a passport, and the forged credentials in his PDA were first rate.

From time to time as the line inched forward he nudged his overnight case with a shoe. He had only one thing to accomplish today. Once he took care of the ICU’s star witness, Michael had no plans beyond letting his normally full head of hair regrow. His bare scalp and thinned eyebrows itched.

He felt supremely confident until the moment squads of armed guards burst simultaneously from every entrance into the customs lounge.

■□■

Near the center of Justin’s living room, turning slowly, two holo heads floated. On one, the pate was shaven and waxed. The other head was crowned with thick black hair. The faces varied less dramatically: in eye colors, an earring, the thickness of the eyebrows. Both images were of Michael Zhang.

“According to a spokeswoman for the Boston police, additional arrests are—”

“3-V freeze.” The images stopped turning; the voiceover ended. Without interrupting his pacing, Justin shook his head in disbelief. “Damn, but you were good, Alicia.”

“I really miss her,” Barbara said. She was seated on the couch facing the immobilized holograms.

Me, too.
The arrests had brought everything back. If Justin looked at Barbara, he knew he would lose it. He kept his gaze on the spectral heads. “The image enhancement program she wrote for you is incredible.”

Since shortly after the Twin Towers were brought down, every airport in America had had surveillance cameras coupled to facial recognition software, tied into a database of known terrorists. The commercial system on which Homeland Security relied had not picked out Zhang. The version hurriedly upgraded with Alicia’s superb image-enhancement software
had
.

Justin would probably be dead at this moment, but for that exceptional code (and new friends in very high places to force its expedited deployment). That narrow escape was another memory he did not care to dwell on.

“Unfreeze 3-V,” Barbara said.

The pretentious entrance of ISI global headquarters, its vaulting chrome-glass-and-copper atrium unmistakable, replaced the two heads. Reporters and video gear packed the lobby. “Wayne LaPointe, the disgraced and newly sacked former CEO, appears to have been spirited away through a remote door. Meanwhile, unconfirmed rumors continue to—”

“3-V off!” Justin needed to think about something else. Anything else.

“It would do my heart good to see LaPointe pay,” Barbara said. This time she left Justin’s 3-V alone. “And I mean,
really
pay. Do you think he’ll go to jail?”

Justin had used his new influence to make the Boston police investigate Alicia’s death. Now too much information filled his thoughts. The counterfeit IDs used in Zhang’s recent surreptitious entries to the US, both traced to a suddenly talkative hacker. Video of Zhang in disguise, instantly recognizable to Alicia’s algorithms, from the security camera of a Boston car rental. The date-and-time stamp in the vid was only hours before Alicia’s death. The New Hampshire Highway Patrol holo of a car, its hood and front bumper mangled, traces of Alicia’s DNA still clinging to it, dragged from an abandoned, water-filled quarry. The car had been rented with another of Zhang’s fake IDs, never returned, and eventually reported stolen. Zhang’s rage whenever the interrogators mentioned LaPointe.

Zhang’s only chance for leniency involved telling everything he knew.

To respond fully to Barbara’s question meant reliving all that. Justin’s pacing had once again brought him to the bookshelf. He took down the beach photo. Alicia and his own younger self studied him. They expected an answer, too. They deserved an answer.

Justin made a promise to all three. “LaPointe and Zhang will both go away for a long, long time.”

Epilogue

The Earth spun beneath the space station, the terminator a racing wall of darkness. City lights sparkled across the night side of the planet. Much closer to the observation window, spacecraft ranging from planetary shuttles to deep-space tugs to free-flying microgravity factories to individual workers’ vacuum suits sailed in and out of sight.

“It’s a view I never tire of,” the ICU Secretary-General said.

Justin nodded, uncertain whether Ganes’s summons had been a response to his email. Her aide hadn’t explained.

“
That
,” and her emphasis encompassed the vistas spread before them, earthly and space-based, “is what the ICU is here to protect. ISI put it all at risk. The worst possible outcome would have been mature Centaur nanotech introduced in the guise of an ISI monopoly. The industrial free-for-all we will have instead, using the Centaur message as relayed by Shoemaker, is better only by comparison. It’s still a nightmare.”

Justin remained silent.

Still admiring the view, Ganes reached into a pocket. She removed and unfolded a sheet of paper. “I’ll give you this, Justin. You don’t think small thoughts.”

He recognized the printout as a hardcopy of his email. “Large problems demand large solutions.”

“How ironic that the big problem started out nanoscaled.”

She wasn’t going to come out and ask, so Justin plunged ahead. “You mentioned a monopoly. As outlined in my note, we have a problem that demands fixing. The ICU can no longer count on exclusivity in interstellar transmission. ISI has shown us that. Other megacorps might be building transmitters as we speak. The ‘we are not human’ gambit that ISI invented could work again, at least told to another alien species. The next time we might not find out.”

“When we met at L5 you had an equally interesting problem, but no solution.” As she gently waved his note the paper crinkled. “This says that you have something to propose.”

The simplest way Justin had found to express his idea was an analogy. “Do you ever buy things over the ’net?”

“Of course…oh.
Oh
.” She made the mental leap. “So how can ET know which technology orders to fill?”

Justin patted his PDA. “The same way an e-tailer knows which orders to fill. Cryptography. Forgery-proof digital signatures. Public/private key technology.

“In short, we should send basic e-commerce technology to the Leos, Centaurs, and Aquarians
immediately
. They need to know how to recognize which transmissions to ignore.”

“A reasonable solution, but why the emphasis on
immediately
?”

Engine ignition of a nearby shuttle caught his attention. He watched the spacecraft recede from sight before answering. “We’re in a race. Suppose there is another megacorp out there with a transmitter. If they have this idea first, they could teach the ETs to honor only their requests. Or to always reply using encrypted messages that only they can decode.”

“A terrible thought.” Ganes shivered. “Yes, I see the urgency.”

“There’s one more detail I’d like to include in that urgent message, at least to the Centaurs.”

“And what is that?”

Justin pointed out of the observation deck at Jupiter, for Europa was too small to see with the naked eye. “I think we owe it to our Centaur friends to explain that there is not, and never has been, a native civilization on Europa.”

■□■

Sometime in the course of discussing Justin’s proposal, Secretary-General Ganes became, simply, Charise. She insisted that Justin be her guest at the space station’s fabled four-star restaurant before taking a shuttle back to Earth. A good dinner was the least, she said, that the solar system owed him.