Decipher, p.22
Decipher, page 22
She wanted to gag. Every instinct in her body wanted to force her stomach to give up its contents in one gut-wrenching convulsion. But she fought it, clamping a hand over her mouth.
Glassy and transparent, thousands of tiny spiders scuttled and crawled all over each other in a mass of seething alien life. Some shot off when they were caught in the light. Others merely sat there, glistening and twitching. Throbbing back and forth on their tubelike spindly legs as they sensed their new visitor.
How on earth had they survived down here? Kynosynthesis was the surest answer. Like the shrimp, plankton and bacteria that fed directly off mineral deposits in the hydrothermal vents found all along the mid-Atlantic Ridge, at pressures four hundred times that of the surface, these creatures did not require sunlight at all.
Sarah relaxed a little, awestruck. She couldn’t help but smile. What a discovery! She put out her hand and gently stroked one of the glassy spiders on the edge of the nest.
“Hey, there. Hello there, little fella, hey.” And although it went against every instinct in her body, she brushed her finger down one of its legs. Moved the flashlight a fraction to the left. And screamed.
A translucent spider the size of a dinner plate had crept up, intent on inspecting the situation. It tapped one of its forward legs insistently on the cold, hard crystal surface. Then flexed its tensile appendages. These things had to be blind, but Sarah was convinced it was looking at her.
Sarah backed off, nice and slow, skimming the light across the water in case there were more creatures there. She heard a splash, turned back to view the nest and froze in pure terror as the spider flew at her.
She felt the gust of wind accompanying the swift action and almost fainted as the larger crystal-like arachnid landed on her left shoulder, using it as a springboard to get to the other side of the tunnel.
It landed with a crunch, and casually scuttled away up the passage.
Sarah shuddered and gulped back a breath.
She gingerly unclipped her radio, peered into the inky blackness of the depths of the tunnel and thumbed the channel. “Eric,” she said shakily. “Eric, come in!”
A cool, damp gust of air suddenly whipped up past her and rushed onward around the bend behind her. Sarah brushed hair out of her face.
Then she saw it. A faint glow, like a pin-prick of light in the distance. But getting bigger. Rapidly so. “What the hell is that?” she murmured. “Eric, is that you? Eric, there are creatures down here!”
She could hear a whistling noise now, like an approaching train in a city metro system. A rush. And an indescribable feeling of utter inevitability.
“Eric!” she shrieked. “What the hell’s going on?”
And then it hit.
The roar was ferocious, and the light so intense, Sarah could almost see the bones of her hand through her skin. The crackle of energy was unlike anything she had ever experienced. Instinctively she jumped back from the wall as the approaching light entirely engulfed her section of the tunnel. Every hair on her body stood on end as pure energy coursed its way through the spiraling Carbon 60 at the speed of light. The whirling maelstrom of electricity flowed from floor to ceiling and back around again. On and on, following the endless spiral.
Sarah’s eyes bulged as it suddenly dawned on her: she was standing in a puddle of water! But by the time she could even contemplate what to do, the energy had already dipped under the water and streaked through the snaking C60 beneath her feet. Sarah couldn’t breathe as it felt like every single atom in the tunnel had come to life. Charged.
She shielded her eyes, and it was then that she became aware of a voice hollering through the radio. “Sarah!” It was Eric. “Sarah, can you hear me?”
She hammered on the transceiver. “Eric!” she barked. “What is this?”
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”
“What—is—this?” she demanded.
There was laughter from the other end of the connection. Followed by abject honesty. “I have absolutely—no—fucking—idea! But I love it!”
And then as fast as it had arrived, it was gone. Like someone had thrown some giant switch, the energy pulse ricocheted off around the corner and left Sarah standing alone in the dark, panting to get her breath back.
In the silence of the moment she tried to take in what had just happened, but it was impossible. She went to thumb the radio again, but forgetting which hand it was in, she ended up bringing the flashlight to her face. It blinded her and she dropped the thing again. “Goddamnit!” she spat, fishing around to get it back for a second time. “Sarah Kelsey, get a grip.” She thumbed the radio this time. “Eric,” she said. “Which way to get to you guys?”
“Follow the bend,” he instructed. “Just follow it around and keep going. Simple,” he said.
After a few minutes of trudging through the water, swinging the flashlight to try and find some kind of exit, she rounded the bend up ahead. It was much farther off than it appeared. And in front she could see that it narrowed upward into a funnel with the C60 forming a strip in the floor. This smaller tunnel led to a room just a little way on.
She was careful not to slip back down as she climbed the incline. Steadying herself at the top she couldn’t help but proceed by planting a foot either side of the C60 strip in the floor. Despite the lucky escape she’d just had, she wasn’t taking any chances. She didn’t want to be electrocuted. Up ahead she could see lights and movement. And at the edge of the tunnel, where it connected to this new room, she noted that the sandstone changed abruptly to a much darker color. The color of granite.
“Good morning, gentlemen,” Sarah announced as she entered. She jerked a thumb back at the tunnel. Breathless, she said: “That was incredible! What did I just experience?”
Eric shone his flashlight over at her. “God knows—literally. I mean, it’s been going on for thousands of years right beneath our feet. We’ve been down here an hour and it’s happened like, what three?” He looked to Douglas. “Three? Four times?”
Douglas shrugged. “Four times.”
“It’s incredible. How far back does that tunnel go?”
“What we measured—and this is a conservative estimate—comes to over eleven, maybe eleven and a half miles before it dips down, deeper into the ground, and out of our radar range. And it’s in a straight line, heading exactly due east.”
“Eleven and a half miles?”
“At least. And on the other side of the ring there are two more.”
The room was heptagonal. It was thirty feet high and definitely manmade. It had an exit on every other facing wall, which from Sarah’s perspective, meant one way in, and three new ways out. She eyed the ceiling. Eyed Clemmens. “We’re somewhere under the Sphinx,” she said.
“Atta girl,” she heard Douglas comment from somewhere else in the darkness.
“What have you found in here, Douglas?” Sarah demanded. To which a couple of obliging flashlights redirected themselves to show her.
Directly in the center of the room was a huge, square-based pyramid, made entirely from a single crystal of Carbon 60. At least 10 feet high, and perhaps 15 feet across the base length, the monolith must have weighed close to 200 tons.
Suspended by a stone armature, it touched neither the C60 strip in the floor beneath Sarah, nor the strips that extended from the ceilings of the other three tunnels.
“What is that?”
“That,” Douglas explained proudly, “is about a hundred million dollars in revenue.”
“Look,” Clemmens added, beckoning her deeper into the room, “in these alcoves. These look like tools.”
Sure enough there were recesses all over the walls. Each recess contained an object, every one very different from the next. The workmanship was intricate but also very plain. They looked decidedly un-Egyptian. “What are these?” Sarah quizzed.
“Beats me.”
“So what’s the plan?”
Douglas slapped a palm on the Carbon 60 pyramid. “We get this thing, all several tons of the sonofabitch, out of here.”
“How?” Sarah asked in all seriousness. “Take a look. You’ll never get it out the door. And besides, we’ve got nothing in Egypt that can lift this kind of weight.”
Douglas patted the set of pneumatic drills propped up next to him. Big, sturdy and greasy. “What d’you think we brought these for?” he twinkled.
LIGHT COMPUTER SCIENCE DIVISION CERN, GENEVA
They tracked down the guy named Harvey, in the light computer center. Michela Weisner seemed to like driven men who didn’t require any sleep. Each made their own terse introductions, light on pleasantries, heavy on formality. Harvey fumbled with his electronic pass before sliding it through the reader and unlocking the heavy vault-like black door.
“Now this isn’t show and tell,” he announced sharply. “You want access to this room, you keep your mouth shut, okay? I’m just doing this because Mickey asked me to. Now what is it you want me to put into my scanner?”
Hackett pulled out the C60, and within seconds Harvey was escorting them inside. Following on behind Weisner’s confident stride, Pearce tugged sharply at Hackett’s elbow. “You sure you should’ve gotten that out?”
“Excuse me?”
“The rock. Are you sure it was a good idea to get it out and show everyone? Dower’s gonna be pissed. Have you told Dower? He would never have cleared that.”
“No, I haven’t told Dower. They way I figure it, Bob … you’re here. And that’s as good as.”
There were white bio-suits hanging on hooks. Lockers where they could put their shoes and other belongings. Harvey instructed them to get changed and led them through to the air-lock. “My equipment’s very sensitive,” he explained. “We can’t have a contamination of more than four parts per billion.”
Hackett was surprised. They must still be in some kind of experimental stage.
“This is a Class 100 clean room—though we keep it cleaner than that. Just to let you know, a particle three millionths of an inch across can ruin seventy-five-thousand-dollar mirrors in here. All they have to do is make a scratch that you won’t even be able to see under some microscopes and the show’s over. There’s enough grease on the end of one of your fingers to ruin a whole batch of components, so please … be careful.”
He led them into the air-lock, closed the thick chunky door behind them and ran the routine to cycle the air. “There’s enough air in your suit for two minutes. Once I give the signal and we’re clean, you can hook yourself up to the overhead oxygen-supply in the next room.”
“I guess I can’t smoke then,” Matheson added smartly.
No one found it funny.
The lab was a sprawling mess of wires and units, exposed ducts and lights. Everybody had to be careful to make sure their overhead air hoses didn’t get caught up in it all as they picked their way through.
Every two years for the past sixty, Harvey explained proudly, computers had become twice as fast while the components they were made from had become twice as small. So by 2012, two major changes to computing were emerging. Firstly computers had begun to operate, albeit at a rudimentary level, on a quantum scale. Systems were being built that could calculate an infinite number of answers to a hypothesis. But to be able to do this effectively meant utilizing computing powers that operated at speed. So the old lithographic technique of printing circuitry on boards was reaching its limits. But to date, no one had successfully answered the second question: When would computers run at the speed of light?
Harvey was one of the few scientists dedicated to meeting the challenge of storing information at the atomic level. And it meant the only thing that could read that kind of information was a laser.
“We started off working with hydrogen,” Harvey explained, “for simplicity, since it only has one electron. I decided an atom in its ground state, that’s when the atom’s electron is at its lowest possible state, would represent ‘zero.’ Then I chose a higher energy state to represent ‘one.’ So by determining what state the electron is in you get a one or a zero. That’s how I built up the binary system at the atomic level. You can change over here.”
Their air hoses had reached their limits. At an intersection between the benches dangled a whole other set of air hoses. They unhooked and changed over, one by one.
“But atoms have various energy states,” Hackett pointed out as they took a turn past more benches littered with hardware. “Many shades of gray. You’re not limited to binary.”
“Small steps, Jon, small steps. The equipment isn’t limited to binary, but I am. When I’m more confident we’ll move on. And besides, the programs we use can already read most types of mathematical base structures. I just chose binary as the encoding system.”
“Can you use any type of atoms to encode on?” Matheson asked.
“Theoretically we could encode water, but we’re way off that. At the moment it’s easier to limit ourselves to crystals. Actually, we tried a home-made version of C60, but a gram cost us over a thousand bucks so we ruled that out pretty quickly.”
“What’re you using now?”
“I can’t tell you that, but we did use common salt there for a while. We got it to work using pairs of neighboring ions. Plus we found using binary was good for error correction.”
“But salt dissolves,” Matheson interjected. “You get some high school kid tipping their Coke into the machine and you wind up losing your whole system.”
“Don’t worry, we realized that. So anyway, Jon, Carbon 60. Pretty exciting stuff. Sixty carbon atoms held together in thirty double bonds. That’s one hell of a stable structure.”
They arrived at a bench housing a device that appeared to be some kind of re-jigged electron microscope. On the wall behind it, tucked inside a sealed airtight glass frame was a dog-eared poster of Niels Bohr’s famous model of the insides of an atom. It looked more like the solar system, with negatively charged electrons whizzing around a positively charged “sun” of protons and neutrons. It was an incorrect concept by today’s standards, but it still looked cool.
Harvey ejected the subject housing and held out his hand.
“Gimme.” Hackett passed over the Carbon 60 rock and watched as Harvey gently lowered it into the harness. Keyed the system to retract.
“What are you looking for? Any particular pattern?”
Hackett took a deep breath as he eyed the data screens. System engaged. Seeker active. Commit when ready. He wished he didn’t have this hood on, or this visor blocking his connection to the device. He watched the laser bounce off the surface of the rock, creating sparkles, like fireflies in the night.
“Beauty is truth. Truth, beauty,” he murmured. Nobody got it. “Keats,” he told them. “Entropy is the disorder in a system. So ice forms from water because the temperature falls. But C60 turns entropy completely on its head.” Harvey still didn’t get it; Weisner did. She obviously still remembered he had moments like this. “No particular pattern,” he said finally. “Just take a look.”
Harvey keyed: Enter. The system whirred into life. Servos angled mirrors and the laser light searched. On the screens the structure of the C60 molecule rotated, a series of pentagonal and hexagonal facets bizarrely resembling a soccer ball, the pentagonal facets being key to the molecule’s curvature.
Pearce too, watched the screen in awe. “In Timaeus,” he said, “Plato outlined cosmology in terms of solids. The earth was a cube. Fire was a tetrahedron. Air was an octahedron. And water an icosahedron. The dodecahedron he connected with the ‘ether’ that enclosed the universe. Timaeus,” he explained, “is the same dialogue in which he talks about Atlantis …”
Weisner ripped the first set of results off the printer.
“Garbage,” she said. “Pure garbage. There is no binary code. Okay, debt repaid. Can I go now?”
“Honey,” Harvey pleaded in a whiney voice that served only to irritate, “I’m not done, okay?”
“Fine,” Weisner replied, upset. It was obviously far from fine.
“Let’s go up to decimal—”
“Actually,” Hackett interjected, pulling his air hose for more slack, “we can go to base six next?” Harvey asked why. “Well, there are six electrons in carbon. That’s all. It’s just a hunch.”
Harvey punched in the commands for the scanner to search for a base six pattern etched into the crystal.
“Bad luck, Jon.”
So they looked for another number base. That they didn’t look for decimal straight off was never questioned. It was only in the last 100 years that base ten was widely used as the basis for counting in most cultures. Mathematically it wasn’t even that efficient. With only three factors, or numbers by which it could be divided equally—1, 2 and 5—it was limited. Duodecimal, or base 12, once the basis of the Imperial system in Britain, had five factors—1, 2, 3, 4 and 6. It was so effective that part of the system had survived through to the twenty-first century: eggs were still bought by the dozen and screws by the gross. However, both of these, decimal and duodecimal, also drew a blank.
As did hexadecimal—base 16—and vigesimal—base 20, a number system once used by the ancient Mayans. With 1, 2, 4, 5 and 10 as its factors, 20 was also the minimum number of carbon atoms that could form a closed cage structure—a smaller version of Carbon 60 called C20.
And so it went. Until the results spewing off the printer read line after line: Error free.
**DETECTED**
**DETECTED**
Hackett had to check it again. Harvey turned from his monitor. “Confirmed,” he said. “It’s no mistake.”
SEXAGESIMAL PATTERN**DETECTED**
“Base 60,” Hackett explained, realizing the full implications. “Oh, my God.”
“Setting the system to decode in base 60,” Harvey said, tapping away on the keyboard.
“You knew,” Weisner scolded.
“I guessed,” Hackett replied. “I didn’t know.”
Pearce checked the readings again and suddenly it clicked. “Base 60. It’s the oldest number base ever used,” he blurted. “The Sumerians first used it six thousand years ago in Mesopotamia.”
