Decipher, p.29
Decipher, page 29
And as it happened, it was.
It first appeared on frame 1037 and was gone again by frame 1104. More blips appeared in succession soon after, but it was the first one that interested Bulger. It was isolated, and easier to discern. He increased magnification again. And couldn’t believe what he was seeing.
Tiny arms. A barrel-like body. Like no design he had ever seen before. Part machine, part organic. It wasn’t based on any conventional, modern wisdom. It was based on something superior.
Bulger’s cigar fell from his mouth as he watched the spectacle unfold on his monitor. For a tiny machine, no bigger than some of the human body’s own cells, was whizzing through the crystal substructure.
Bulger snatched his cigar up before it burnt a hole in the keyboard. There was only one explanation. “Nanoes,” he said.
Carver adjusted his goggles, bracing himself for the back-blast of dust, as the particle beam under his control sliced into the Carbon 60 spiral that was wrapped around the inside of the underground passageway, stretching off in both directions.
The crystal itself was covered in a type of writing he had never seen before, while the ordinary stone portions had glyphs carved on them that resembled ancient Mayan writing. Which, if he remembered correctly, was entirely out of place. The Mayans were from Central America, not South. They never reached Peru or the Amazon. But then, what did he know?
The particle beam finished cutting out a pre-programmed cube of C60 and shut itself down. The cube dulled and slid slowly out of its position. Gathering speed, it crashed to the ground. Garrison was the man with him. He quickly heaved the pail of water by his feet and sluiced the crystal cube down. It hissed in a cloud of steam as two members of Maple’s team passed them by on their way farther down into the tunnel’s extremities. They adjusted the flashlights bolted to their hard hats as they went.
“Maple wants to know how much more of this stuff we can get out before the tunnel collapses completely,” the larger one said tersely.
There were cubes of C60 missing from the spiral, all over the tunnel. Stress fractures had already started to appear in the ceiling areas. They had plundered in earnest.
But Carver wasn’t too worried. “My guess is, a whole lot more,” he said, as the men went about their business.
There was a harness on the ground, hooked up to a couple of heavy-duty chains. Carver and Garrison worked together, stooping to fasten the entire cradle around the Carbon 60 cube and had tied off the last of the clips when Carver’s radio kicked in.
“Pack up your kit,” Maple instructed. “We’re moving that gun straight out.”
“What’s going on?”
“Just be ready to move,” Maple insisted. His voice sounded resonant, as if he were standing in a cavernous room. “We’ve found something that makes the crystal in that tunnel look like a snack.”
Garrison eyed his boss as he ran the chains through his gloved hands, checking that the way was clear for Eddie to shift the winch into gear and haul the crystal out. “What do we do?” he asked.
“Go find out what he wants,” Carver replied gruffly. “I’ll pack that thing up when I’m good and ready.” Garrison shrugged in acknowledgment.
Carver watched Garrison march off into the darkness as the now familiar light storm of energy pulsed down the tunnel and lit up the surroundings for a mile. When it reached his position where the blocks of Carbon 60 had been removed, it seemed to stall. To flicker, like a dying neon tube light. Before passing through what remained of the connection and moving on.
“Woo-Wee!” Eddie the winch whooped, bent double over the entry hole, as the energy pulse lit up the tunnel below. He descended into howls of laughter. “Woah boy, that sure is somethin’.”
“Yeah,” Bulger barely murmured through gritted teeth, his mind distinctly elsewhere.
Nanoes. Micro-machines. Constructed at the atomic level, operating on a molecular level, measured on the nanometer scale. Robots that were so small that, given the right instructions, they could literally climb inside a heart through the smallest artery, and perform surgery from the inside out. To be sure, this wasn’t the nanotechnology of the modern vision. Current thinking on nanoes dictated that these tiny little robots were so small they were submicroscopic, visible only with an electron microscope, their moving parts the size of protein molecules. Current nanothinking pointed to nanoes that, if they could be made, would be no more than 100 nanometers long.
But they had never been made. The closest thing to structural manipulation at the atomic level was twenty years old, when Japanese scientists actually had spelled out the word “atom” in Japanese—and in atoms.
Clearly, what Bulger was seeing was a machine that was hundreds of thousands of nanometers across. Much larger than theory. But then, theory was worthless without some experiment, application, and the collection of a few facts. And the fact was, a nano was staring him in the face. The first working microscopic machine ever seen.
And that had more cash worth than all the Carbon 60 on the planet.
Jack Bulger shivered with anticipation. God damn, he couldn’t tell the men he was with. Not only would they not understand, they’d want a share in the profits. Which just wasn’t on offer. Besides, they were going to get rich off the crystal anyway. Screw them. So the only problem now was—what to do with the information.
He couldn’t keep it here. They might stumble across it, or rifle through his belongings and discover any handwritten notes. Certainly this piece of digital film would have to be deleted.
So should he send the information somewhere? Maybe e-mail it to himself. Certainly, it was a double-edged sword telling Houghton. If he kept it quiet and didn’t tell the company lawyer, then every day that passed increased the probability that some company scientists would run across this discovery in the crystal he’d brought back from Antarctica—if they hadn’t already. And he didn’t want them getting the glory or the money.
But if he told Houghton and it really was a new discovery, he would have safeguarded his personal revenue, albeit at a substantially reduced rate than if he simply put it out to auction to the highest bidder.
There was, of course, the third way. He could do the smart thing, and do both. Tell Houghton. Get paid. Then sell the information on anyway.
Yeah. That sounded better.
So while he put in his call to Jay Houghton, and waited for the system to locate the lawyer, he busied himself by collecting more data. And made the most curious discovery.
The nanoes, depending on what they were trying to achieve, worked either independently or collectively, using chemical bonds to consciously bind together. To form a larger device.
Incredible. He was going to be so freaking rich!
Carver put up his collar. Whistled away to himself as he fastened the chain around the dangling greasy pulley system above. He was directly under the entry hole that had opened up during the initial earthquake. Slimy mud continued to slide down. the sides as torrential rain flooded in from the surface. Carver looked up to see lightning flashes and was actually glad to be underground for a change—even if it was creepy down here.
Glistening clear tree roots, all twisted in glassy knots, jutted out at him. Creatures he hadn’t even conceived of before crawled and slithered all around him. Some smaller insect-like things swarmed and fluttered their gossamer wings. He had to flick the odd oversized glass-like spider from his boots. It made his skin crawl. But at least he was dryer in the tunnel.
He tugged on the chains, put his radio to his lips and announced, “Okay, let her up.”
He could hear the distant roar of power as mechanical motors cranked into gear. Saw the tension build in the chains. And stood back as the Carbon 60 block was suddenly dragged across the floor.
He monitored its progress gleefully, making sure his prize made it over every rut it encountered. This one block alone was worth a quarter of a million U.S. dollars. When it was time for payday the only certainty he knew was that the whores in Mexico City better be geed up on something a little stronger than Pro-Plus, coz there was gonna be some ridin’ goin’ on. And it wasn’t gonna stop till Christmas.
When the block scraped its way over the right spot, Carver radioed to the surface for them to stop. It was time to unhook from the pulleys so the block could be raised directly to the surface.
He paid scant regard to the translucent bug on his shoulder. Or the glass tubelike roots that jabbed at his throat as he grabbed the chains and yanked them free of the pulleys. He was just about to radio back again, however, when he heard something odd. He stopped what he was doing mid-whistle.
There it was again. Like a fall. Some kind of muffled cry. Very faint. But it was coming from the direction of where his two teammates had just headed.
He peered into the darkness. Angled his flashlight and shone it into the distance. Tentatively he called out to them: “Hinkley? Gerome?”
Nothing. Not a single response.
Carver tugged on the chains, a clear signal that they could start lifting the block again. As he went for his radio to confirm the order, he heard what could only be described as a scream. Guttural. Explosive. Like the knotting of entrails being wrenched from within.
Carver brought the radio to his mouth as he reached for the semiautomatic rifle slung over his shoulder. He was only going to say this once. “Guys,” he said, “quit fucking around. Now what’s going on?” But all he got back was static. He put his radio away, raised his gun, and tugged on the chains sharply. Twice. To let them know there was a problem.
The block jerked to a halt and was left dangling at eye-level.
Carver peered into the darkness once more. As each lightning strike above lashed out across the sky, its light reflected down into the tunnel. And for Carver it gave the briefest glimpse of something disturbing. A figure was approaching.
CROSSED WIRES
The lab door flew open, right around where Ralph was busy tapping away on his computer and across from where November sat cataloguing the Atlantis glyphs. A belated sharp knock accompanied the intrusion. A redhead in jeans and a T-shirt hung her head around the door.
“Anyone in here called Jon Hackett?”
Hackett was startled. “Uh, yes. That’s me.”
“Hi. Rebecca Devon—microbiologist. I think they made some sort of a screw-up, upstairs. They’re pumping data into our lab across the corridor. Number streams. Mean anything to you?”
Hackett was on his feet. “How long?”
“About an hour.”
“That’s the completed crystal data from CERN,” he glowered, heading for the door. “I’ve been waiting for that. How come you didn’t notice before?”
“Well, uh,” she grinned apprehensively, “it’s an easy mistake to make. It looks just like biological data.” Hackett pulled up short. Checked with his colleagues. Did he just hear that correctly?
“Complexity,” Scott winked, “is the key.”
“What? Yeah—I guess you’re right,” Hackett agreed as Matheson pulled out his lemon and started joining the dots across its bumpy surface. He had a rotating globe on his monitor and had started to copy the pattern onto that image too.
“This is some machine,” he murmured.
Hackett eyed it briefly. “You think these sites are all interconnected, like some kind of network, don’t you, Ralph? Like an ancient Internet?”
“Yup—I’m convinced of it.”
“You know what this is? This is a monkey puzzle, my friend—on a global scale.”
“Gee, you make it sound like the ancients built all this so we’d have something to while away the hours with in our dying days,” Bob Pearce commented sourly. He looked exhausted.
He stood in the doorway, made his apologies and squeezed past Rebecca, who continued to wait patiently. She grinned at him in an overly condescending, overly friendly manner. “Hi,” she said. But Pearce didn’t respond.
“Those sites are connected, all right,” Pearce said. “Ever wonder what the hell ley lines were? Ancient channels of force. Maybe an entire ancient tunnel system is what we’ve been detecting all this time.”
Hackett said playfully: “Did I miss a meeting? Did you go dowsing without me again? Bob, you know how I hate to miss that.”
Pearce shrugged it off and grabbed Matheson’s lemon with the gridlines marked on it, joining the five ancient sites and traced his finger over them.
“Hey, I’m not finished with that,” Matheson complained. “I was just about to scrawl the Giza tunnel system on that thing.”
Scott shook his head. “I’m not convinced,” he said. “There’s no way a tunnel system could stretch all the way from Egypt to South America to Antarctica. It’s just physically impossible.”
“Besides,” Sarah added, “the tectonic plates are moving. Continents are continually shifting. Those tunnels wouldn’t last long—they’d be destroyed. Ripped apart or flooded.”
Pearce held up the lemon. “In relation to this puzzle,” he said, “the five sites and the earth? We are but a flea on the ass of an elephant. In relation to the sun, we are a tick on the ass of a flea on the ass of an elephant. We’re nothing. So until we step back, and get far enough away, like going into orbit, we can’t possibly see the whole picture. The bigger picture.”
“Trouble is,” Rebecca the microbiologist added without thinking, “you step too far back and you wind up falling off a cliff.” All eyes settled on the woman who had spoken out of turn. “It’s just an observation,” she added meekly. “What are you guys talking about?”
Hackett inclined his head toward her and said quietly: “Why don’t you go on ahead, huh? I’ll be along for my data in just a second.” Rebecca made her excuses and left. Hackett held up a hand defensively. “Bob, calm down. We’re on your side on this thing. No one agrees with your assessment more than I do. I also happen to agree with Ralph. But whether these sites are linked physically or any other way, unless I challenge him we’ll succumb to fuzzy thinking and that won’t help any of us. We have to be very clear about our conclusions and the science that gets us there.”
Pearce rubbed his head, and seemed to be shaking from the cold. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m just … very tired.”
“I’m not surprised. Must take a lot of effort to do what you do.”
Pearce was unsteady on his feet and allowed November to guide him to a seat. “For all we know,” he murmured, “the sun is a living breathing creature. It just takes it four million years to say a word, let alone string a sentence together. We are gone in the blink of an eye on a cosmic scale. We don’t live on the same timescale as the sun so we wouldn’t recognize life that way. We only recognize life that lives roughly at the same pace as ourselves …”
Hackett looked to November as he tiptoed out the door. “And get him some coffee,” he advised. “Lots of sugar.”
“Hi, This is Ted,” Rebecca annouced, introducing everybody. “Ted, this is Jon and Sarah. Ted’s a marine biologist. He studies jellyfish.”
“Oh,” Sarah commented brightly. “They must be very interesting animals.”
“They’re not animals per se,” Ted responded icily. “They are planktonic marine creatures. Protoplasm.” Ted wore sandals and had long greasy hair, like a surfer with a personal hygiene problem. He also didn’t know when to break eye-contact, which made conversation with him awkward and uncomfortable. “Some of them are not single creatures at all, but a collective of tiny creatures that choose to work, live and hunt together in a form we call the jellyfish.”
“Oh,” Sarah replied with an air that she hoped suggested she stood corrected.
“Ted’s a little edgy at the moment, aren’t you, Ted?” Rebecca interjected apologetically.
The other biologists steered clear of their little gathering. They also wore their hair long, were in the process of growing beards, and were more interested in the spores they were cultivating in glass dishes than infiltrators from the lab down the hall.
“We studied C60 before,” Rebecca announced sweetly, tapping the screen of her computer and signaling to her colleagues that everything was fine. “There you go. That’s your transfer started. Shouldn’t take long.”
“Thank you,” Hackett replied dismissively, aware Sarah was hovering beside him. “What, uh, what do you mean you studied C60 before? Why on earth would you do that as a microbiologist?”
“Fullerenes,” Rebecca explained, “are a good candidate for seeding life through space. Didn’t you know?”
Sarah folded her arms tightly across her chest. “Obviously not,” she said, thinking of the hand back in the tunnel in Egypt, and shivering.
“Oh,” Rebecca cooed dreamily, watching the data on the screen. “Carbon’s a really special little element. And C60’s a really smart little molecule.”
“Carbon’s very adaptable,” Hackett agreed. “It’s in the ink we write with. It’s in the flesh we live by. It goes from being a gas to being part of the human brain, able to contemplate its own existence.”
“Which is incredible considering that, as an element, it’s so mediocre,” Rebecca added. “It does most things, but isn’t an extremist, like say potassium, which blows up at the drop of a hat. Carbon only makes up 0.2 percent of the earth’s elements, but is part of more compounds than any other element. Hundreds of thousands of compounds.”
“But why the C60 molecule as a candidate for spreading life?” Sarah persisted.
“Because it’s hollow,” Rebecca replied, as if Sarah, since she knew so much about carbon, should have known the answer to that question already. “It’s the shape of a soccer ball.”
“The Carbon 60 molecule,” Hackett objected, “is only approximately three angstroms across. That’s enough space for about one atom only.”
“Yes, but think about it. What atom?” Rebecca threw right back at him. “You choose the right atom and you wind up creating the world’s most powerful non-metal magnet. You make C900, which they’ve done in the lab. The same enclosed structure as C60 emerges but with 900 carbon atoms. And that isn’t a ball anymore—that’s a capsule. You put a combination of the twenty standard amino acids into the heart of that structure and it’ll end up sprouting legs and walk off.”
