Accidental Gods (13 page)

Part 2

Chapter 20

Week 1: Monday

Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore.

—Andre Gide

The sun peeked through and then over the tops of the hills on the eastern horizon, warming the trees and the jungle’s other inhabitants. A panther lapped up water from a wide, south-flowing river. The sunlight streamed into the jungle at the river’s edge and lit on the panther’s gleaming black coat. After finishing a quick drink, the giant cat yawned and stretched, swishing its tail like a whip, arching its back, and digging its claws into the damp ground, and then returned to the trees to sleep until darkness came again. This was not its time.

***

The sun also warmed Austin on this hot summer day. A less friendly sun, though, beat on the six lanes of cars stuck in early morning I-35 traffic, reflecting off Lake Austin and the glassy high-rises downtown like bright mirrors. Ross liked it, though. The traffic might be bad, but it was better than DC. He had just started work as an analyst at IACP and was excited about his new job.

***

Full-color printouts, more like satellite images than maps, covered three of the Galileo conference room’s walls and most of its tables. A new team member, Ross, had requested they use printed pictures if he were going to be scanning for something. Thomas assured him that it would be unnecessary given the large number of huge touch-sensitive monitors they had all over IACP, but Ross wanted to work with something familiar. Thomas obliged.

A projector on one of the partially cleared tables cast a similar satellite-like image onto the one wall not covered with printouts. A wireless keyboard and mouse sat next to the projector, and Stephen stood next to the projector’s beam, giving Jenn and Ross an overview of the new tracking system. Thomas sat in the back of the room observing. He already knew all about this stuff. In fact, he and Stephen had argued about it repeatedly.

“Basically,” Stephen said, “the system is really pretty simple. As you know, you can already—” He made quote symbols with his fore- and middle fingers on each hand. “—‘snap a picture’ or ‘make a video’ in the system now. However, since things have been heating up on Alpha, I think we need a better way to monitor it.”

He pointed at the screen. The camera’s perspective was from space looking down on the Alpha planet.

“As you can see, this is a sort of satellite view—”

Ross asked, “Is it geosynchronous?”

Ross was from the National Reconnaissance Office. Thomas had recruited him specifically for this. At the NRO, Ross had been responsible for analyzing satellite images from North Korea, Iran, and other nefarious locations for possible WMD research and production sites.

“Kind of,” Stephen said. “Obviously, it’s not really a satellite. You can choose to lock it to a fixed position in space, or you can lock it to a target. If you lock it to a target, like a planet, it will basically act like a satellite in a fixed orbit without the restrictions. That is, it doesn’t need to be over the equator.”

“Oh, that’s cool! Sorry for asking silly questions. I’m still getting used to not thinking of everything as coming from satellites with pretty limited options. This stuff is amazing.”

Thomas had felt that this new tool took the romance out of exploring. Stephen thought it was a cool way to find stuff quickly and to monitor things as necessary. Once Thomas had admitted that Stephen’s approach, though less fun, was more practical, he had secretly searched for an expert in the field. Thus, Ross.

Stephen was fascinated by Thomas’s most recent hiring spree. Thomas seemed to be fixated on hiring spooks. When questioned, he would say only, “Good people. Underpaid. Know how to keep a secret. What more could we want?”

Stephen dragged his wireless mouse across from behind the projector and positioned his fingers over the buttons.

“So if I want to monitor from this spot,” he said, moving the mouse on the tabletop, “I do this—” He clicked “Options” and chose “Drop Camera.” “—and the system drops a virtual camera here.”

A panel popped up asking him to select anchor type: fixed or target. He selected “Target” and then picked “Planet.” The system then asked him if he wanted the camera to orbit with a visual lock on the current point on the surface or from a fixed location in space.

“These two options basically allow you to act as a geosynchronous observer, like you asked, with your virtual camera always on the same place or to see broader coverage as the planet rotates. So you’ll get a view of everything around the circumference of the planet across one of Alpha’s days.”

He clicked to fix the camera over the current point on the surface. The program then prompted him to select recording type: periodic image or video.

“If you select a periodic image, you can choose how often you want the camera to take pictures. You could then watch it like a time-lapse video, or you can record video. Keep in mind that recording video takes a ton of storage and is in real time, so I doubt you are going to want to record a thousand years at one spot. I believe only Dracula has that kind of time at his disposal.”

Ross asked, “So I can set it up to print these things automatically?”

“Yep, put that tech in just for you.”

“Why don’t we just cover the planet with cameras and record everything?”

Stephen laughed. “There are two problems with that. First, even if we had Dracula on staff, I’m not sure we could store that much video without dedicating diamonds solely to that—which we’re not going to do. We have to save our limited supply for the SUs.” He sighed, knowing he’d never get all the diamonds he could use. “Second, and of far more importance, each camera slows down universe processing. Video makes it even worse. It’s an issue I—”

“Universe processing is already slowing down,” Jenn interrupted him. “A lot. I know it’s been getting incrementally slower, but it seems like in the last month, it’s gotten a lot slower.”

Stephen glanced at Thomas. “Well, it’s always going to be slowing down as the universe expands and has to process and store—”

“Yeah, I know that, but why now?”

“We think there are two reasons,” Stephen said, still watching Thomas. “One is that we are spending a lot more time observing, and that puts substantial strain on the system.”

“I buy that.”

Stephen hesitated again. Thomas gave a slow, permissive nod.

“Two is, we think the presence of living beings in the SU slows it down. A lot. Intelligent beings would likely slow it down even more.”

Ross’s jaw dropped. His eyes were bugging out. He didn’t blink but looked uncertainly at Thomas, then Stephen, and then back at Thomas.

Stephen assumed Thomas had “forgotten” to mention that part in the recruiting pitch. Thomas did, after all, prefer just to toss people into the fire. That didn’t strike Stephen as a wise way to manage, but the strategy seemed to work for Thomas, so he didn’t question it.

“Intelligent beings,” Ross said. “Is that what I’m looking for?”

“You got it,” Thomas said from the back of the room.

Stephen figured Thomas had probably been sitting there this whole time just to see how Ross would react to that.

“Anomalies.” Ross smirked and looked at Jenn, who had also played a large part in recruiting him. “I guess an intelligent being running around on the planet could be an anomaly.”

“The truth, from a certain point of view,” Stephen said, mimicking Obi-Wan Kenobi from
Star Wars
, “young padawan.”

Thomas smirked.

“Sorry, Ross,” Jenn said, mockingly pleading with him. “The devil made me do it. And by ‘devil’ I really mean Thomas.”

Thomas shrugged innocently.

Everyone laughed.

Chapter 21

Week 3: Wednesday

It soon became obvious that we were but on the threshold of the discovery.

It was a sight surpassing all precedent, and one we never dreamed of seeing.

—Howard Carter

Ross waded through stacks of images with Jenn in the Galileo conference room, which they had coopted for this purpose. In many ways, it was similar to his previous job at NRO, except that he was looking at all new stuff. At NRO, sometimes they looked for tanks and troop movements, but for the last few years, they had looked mostly at buildings and other structures, analyzing specific shapes and sizes. He had gotten good at spotting anomalies, mostly bizarre traffic patterns—like lots of traffic into and out of remote locations with only one or two small buildings or large construction projects in remote locations. It was pretty basic stuff—you looked at images of the same area over an extended period of time trying to spot things that were out of the ordinary.

Now, this was a lot more interesting because he didn’t know what he was looking for—well, not exactly, anyway. Obviously, if they found a village or city or some other huge manufactured thing, well, that would be a dead giveaway. But Ross expected he and Jenn were more likely to find migrant movement—packs of lions, small tribes, or some other form of evolved life forms—and more subtle, especially given the extensive foliage that draped much of the Alpha planet’s solid ground.

They had been flipping through these glossy prints for two weeks. The images were amazing, better than the satellite images he was used to looking at, both in image quality and color. He now had a good feel for the geography of the planet: polar ice caps, four major landmasses, not so different from our own. Things were shaped differently, but the basic makeup was the same.

In a Mercator projection, the top and bottom of the world looked much like Earth’s. It was unclear whether the north polar ice cap was a massive field of floating ice like the North Pole or whether it was a landmass covered by snow and ice like Antarctica—the only hint was a small chain of islands that reached out from one of the large continents toward the frozen northern pole. The southern pole had a clear landmass that stretched out beyond the grasp of the ice.

Like on Earth, oceans covered most of the planet and wrapped the continents in their watery embrace. Alpha had three primary continents, two of which were loosely joined by a bridge of small islands—there was no complete land path connecting them.

The upper continent had a mountainous spine that led from the north, where it began. The islands that touched the northern polar ice cap wove down, off center to the right. Ultimately, they became the islands connecting the upper and lower continents.

A large inland sea, several lakes, and river systems punctuated the continent. But only one of the rivers met their “cradle of civilization” requirements.

Below the connecting chain of islands, the southern continent reminded Ross of Australia, although this continent was much larger. Its most remarkable feature was a large inland lake near its center that was completely ringed by mountains. He suspected it was the location of an enormous collision and that this was a planet-changing crater. The continent was covered with several river systems, but most cut through tropical areas like Earth’s Amazon and Congo. Therefore, they were less likely to be locations where civilizations might develop.

Strangest of all, the third continent vaguely resembled a dog, if you squinted at it just right—like those abstract posters that become sailboats, for most squinters, anyway. The continent’s tail was comprised of a peninsula, which was further extended by a string of islands. Its open mouth looked as though it might bite the upper continent. Peninsulas reached out forming paws along the western shore, while the eastern coast was a straight line—well, straight for a coast—drawn at a forty-five-degree angle from the base of the tail up to another set of outcroppings where the dog’s head would be. They looked strangely similar to ears. A large bay formed the dog continent’s mouth, and another formed to the north between the “ears.” A third major river system divided the dog’s back between an arid desert to the east and a more-hospitable savannah to the west and emptied into the bay formed by the dog’s upper legs.

Ross had already identified three of the rivers, which he had not-so-cleverly named Uno, Dos, and Tres. These, which he had very cleverly guessed—admittedly, after interrogating Don on the criteria necessary for the development of animal life—were the most likely locations to become the cradles of civilization for this world. Time and resource constraints had forced him to focus the search this way. It was, he hoped, a very-well-educated guess.

He hoped if civilizations, or even organizations of semi-intelligent creatures, were to arise, they would do so around these three rivers. He knew that in our world, the Nile, the Tigris-Euphrates, the Yangtze, and the Indus Rivers were prime focal points for the development of civilizations. But a river was not the only criterion. Other giant rivers like the Amazon did not act as anchors in the same way, perhaps because they were too fertile and foraging was so easy that there were few incentives for organization.

The planet was well-developed now, and there was a lot of area to look at, even narrowing it down as much as they had. They still scanned other areas, although it was an almost futile exercise, since no one had time to look at all those scans. The process they developed was to look at images in intervals of five hundred years, focusing primarily on the three rivers. It took them three or four days to go through a new set of images, and this process allowed them to keep up with the edge of the SU’s time horizon. The system itself snapped images every year and stored them, but Ross and Jenn didn’t have the time to look at but the tiniest fraction of them.

They were excited to find game trails and even a predator that looked very much like a panther, drinking at the Tres River in the last set of images. A lot of chance came into play in this process, just like back at the NRO when satellites could take only periodic pictures. To catch that panther drinking from the river, the image had to be snapped at just the right instant.

Today, they had just gotten a new set of images. Ross supposed it was a little archaic to be looking for this stuff on actual paper when they had all this computer equipment, but for some reason, he found it far easier to do it this way. They could pull anything they found up on the projector wall, even do a time lapse leading up to the current image, starting from five hundred years before it and including the system’s saved images from every year in between. The few times they had done that had been particularly fascinating. Turns out watching five hundred years in time-lapse motion in five minutes was pretty cool.

Ross spotted an anomaly in one image, unnatural geometric clusters near the Tres River. He popped the Tres River view up on the computer, and the image was cast in intricate detail on the entire wall.

He zoomed in on the clusters.

“They look like huts!” Ross said excitedly.

Jenn stood and looked at the screen. “I think they are.”

Ross continually zoomed in, and the anomaly resolved into an aerial view of a small village. Ross and Jenn watched expectantly, as if someone might walk out of one of the huts at any moment.

Then Jenn laughed. “This isn’t a video feed. It’s a static image.”

“Duh.”

She started typing. The image blinked briefly and then returned to the original high orbit view. She zoomed back in, and now it was a live video feed.

There were people all right—or at least what looked very much like people. There were hundreds of them, obviously not technologically evolved yet, but they had certainly passed the hunter-gatherer stage.

Ross asked, “They look really human. Just how much—what did you call it? Nudging? How much nudging have you guys been doing?”

Jenn made a noncommittal half shrug. Ross couldn’t tell whether the shrug meant she didn’t know or that she wouldn’t answer.

One building was larger than the others. Ross and Jenn zoomed right down next to it and pitched their view so that the ground was down and the sky up and went inside. It was a shrine or temple of some sort. On the wall directly across from the entrance was a large diamond, a dot in each of its corners and in its center.

“Look beneath the diamond,” Jenn said. “Is that writing?”

Below the diamond were symbols painted in different colors and laid out on an organized grid. It was not clear whether it flowed top to bottom or left to right or perhaps some other way.

“Sure looks like it.” Ross’s mouth went dry. “Somewhere between hieroglyphics and Chinese.”

They took several pictures of the writing and projected it on the other wall.

“Wow, Thomas is going to flip.”

Ross continued taking pictures while Jenn sent an instant message to Thomas.

***

There was a stampede into the room. Thomas was first, and within two minutes, the room was packed with most of the IACP core team. The crowd continued to grow. Eyes darted between the aerial view of the small village projected on the north wall and the image with the prominent diamond figure with writing beneath it that was projected on the west wall.

Thomas blurted out, “Wow! This is huge.”

Murmurs of agreement came from the still-growing group, packed now to far beyond the conference room’s legal capacity.

Stephen said, “That definitely looks like a language to me.”

Ajay said enthusiastically, “Forget that. There are people walking around!
People
!”

Thomas said, “Cracking this language has to be our number-one priority.” He began typing an e-mail into his phone. “I think,” he said, still typing, “I know someone who might be able to help us. Jenn?”

“Yes.”

“Can you make me a pdf of that image and e-mail it to me?”

“Sure,” she said. “By the way, the last five hundred years processed dramatically slower than before.”

“It’s the people!” Stephen and Ajay said in near unison.

Ajay finished, “They are slowing it down.”

“We thought this might happen,” Stephen added.

Jenn hit her enter key. “There you go, Thomas.”

“Got it,” he said. “OK, attaching now, and…Send.” Thomas closed his phone, looked up again, and asked, “What time is it in the SU?”

“Five-oh-nine p.m.,” Jenn said.

Thomas chuckled. “No, what year?”

Jenn glanced at the screen and said, “It’s year 13,508,915,218.”

“OK,” Thomas said, “to make tracking this civilization’s time easier, let’s call it PC.”

“PC?” Jenn asked.

“Post-civilization,” Thomas replied. “So PC will be time marked from when we first found this civilization.