Decipher, p.9
Decipher, page 9
“We just met with the Chinese officials at the UN’s Palais des Nations,” he explained. “There is no way in hell the Chinese are gonna let just anyone walk onto their base in Antarctica.”
“Unfortunate,” muttered Gant.
“It’s what we expected,” Dower reminded him.
“It’s still unfortunate,” Gant replied heavily. “I don’t want to take in a civilian search party. They’re not trained for it, mentally or physically, sir.”
“The Chinese have no objections to a UN inspection team in principle,” Houghton added cheerfully. “But they will be vetting for any kind of military connection.”
“I bet they will,” Gant spat harshly, only adding a final “sir” in deference to the Rear Admiral, at the last moment.
Scott and November exchanged anxious glances. Inspection teams? What did they have planned?
“Is that spectroscopy equipment down there?” Hackett asked wistfully. He’d gotten to his feet when Dower entered and now stood by the window assessing the surroundings. He faced the assembled body with his familiar faint smile. “Nuclear Magnetic Resonance, if I’m not mistaken. Tut, tut, Admiral. I’m sure the physics boys really appreciated a chemistry toy being wheeled into their precious laboratory.”
“They whined, as usual. Hello, Jon. How was your trip?”
“Bumpy.”
Dower pursed his lips before responding. “It’s getting worse, isn’t it?”
Hackett didn’t seem like he wanted to answer, but Pearce did. “Much worse,” he intervened. “I think this planet is being subjected to levels of solar radiation the like of which haven’t been seen for over twelve thousand years. Twelve thousand and twelve—to be exact.”
Papers were shuffled. Two officers conferred with Dower and passed over notes as Hackett commented: “Well, that was a little melodramatic, maybe. But off the mark? No.”
Scott sat apprehensively, catching Hackett’s eye momentarily.
Another one of those infuriatingly enigmatic smiles tugged at the physicist’s lips. Slouching against the window he chewed a thumbnail briefly. “You’re looking at the assembled heads of the United States Space Command, Dr. Scott,” he said gently. “I’ve briefed Tom Dower on physics more times than I care to remember. Los Alamos as a grad student was the first time, wasn’t it, Tom?”
Scott was none the wiser. “Space what?”
“Space Command,” Dower said gruffly. “We’re advising the government over policy, while they negotiate with the Chinese. We are the last line of defense between peace and World War Three.”
Buried under 18,000 feet of granite, deep within the Cheyenne Mountains of Colorado, Dower told them, stands a door twenty feet wide and four feet thick, designed to withstand a nuclear attack. Behind it lies the military intelligence nerve center known as NORAD. And part of that nerve center is given over to the United States Space Command, whose remit is twofold.
“We track space debris, Dr. Scott. We estimate over nineteen thousand objects are in orbit at any one time, from flecks of paint to defunct satellites. Over eight thousand of these objects are larger than a baseball and are tracked twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. But when the sun goes into spasm and ejects plasma during a sun storm, it can knock out our tracking system from anywhere up to ninety-six hours—four full days and nights.”
“And that’s bad?”
“Oh, that’s pretty bad,” Hackett stepped in. “When sunstorm plasma hits the earth, it causes the atmosphere to expand. The increased drag slows orbiting objects down. Some re-enter the earth. And the signature of that re-entry tends to mimic an incoming warhead.”
It was Gant’s turn again. “In any event, a sun storm is a good time during which to launch an attack undetected. The sun is about to spasm again, and the Chinese know this.”
“I’m sorry, but didn’t the sun already just do that?” Scott was shaking his head. “And how can you be so certain the sun is about to flare up again? It’s chaotic, isn’t it? Unpredictable?”
“It’s complex, not chaotic,” Hackett said irritably.
“We can predict the sun,” Pearce added. “It goes around in mini-cycles every eleven years.”
Hackett grabbed a Magic Marker from the table and sketched out a circle on the wipeboard at one end of the room.
“I’m not going to insult your intelligence by giving you all a lecture on solar and magnetic physics, but there are a couple of important points you need to remember. The sun is not, contrary to popular belief, much like the earth. It’s massive. It’s so vast that the average size of one sunspot on its surface would envelop the earth two or three times over. It’s a continual mass of shifting nuclear explosions, held together in a ball due to its mass. It’s big. It’s heavy. It’s violent. It also—and here’s the most important point of all—has more than two magnetic poles.
“We have north and south. The sun has six poles. Call them whatever you want—North, South, Tim and Clarence. It really doesn’t matter. What matters is that it has highly complicated magnetic structures which we’re only just beginning to understand. It has a North and South Pole like we would understand it, but because it is a ball of superheated plasma, it has four other poles spaced equally around its equator. And because it’s a ball of plasma, it doesn’t rotate evenly. You get a shorter day at the equator than if you were further north or south.”
There were three Admirals, Scott realized. No, scratch that. Two Admirals and a General. There was a Major, Gant. There were five Lieutenants who acted as aides. Two much older than the rest and obviously important. Introductions had not been made. Their minds were sharp and they seemed to grasp what Hackett was saying with relative ease, which was disconcerting at best. Downright embarrassing, at worst. Either way, the questions that were filling his head were likely to remain there for some time. Hackett wasn’t finished.
The physicist tapped the marker on the board. “In its smallest fraction, the cycle repeats itself on a tiny scale every eighty-seven and a half days. An event cycle, the timing between similar intense events, is every twenty-two years. What you were describing, Bob, I’m sorry to disagree, was only half a cycle, but statistically similar events have occurred at the eleven-year point. A full sunspot cycle—when sunspot activity appears to start from square one again—is actually once every one hundred and eighty-seven years. And the cycle Bob was referring to is highly theoretical, but it’s based on the movements of what we call the sun’s warped neutral sheet. Which theoretically cycles once every three thousand years or so.”
“What happens when the neutral sheet cycles around?” Scott asked.
“According to theory, it’s so devastating you want to be someplace else.”
“Which means what?” November jumped in. “I’m not a physics major.”
Scott folded his arms and said, “Look, I didn’t major in physics either. I’m a linguist. What the hell does this have to do with me? I came to visit some rocks. There are rocks, aren’t there?”
“All you need to know is that bad things happen on the sun every eleven years,” Pearce said succinctly, shooting a look at Hackett who scrawled the number 22 on the board and underlined it emphatically. “Just keep adding eleven and eleven and eleven together until you reach three thousand. Geological records show clearly that the earth’s climate changes drastically every three thousand years. Six thousand years ago, the period of climatic change was so severe many ancient civilizations set their calendar by it. The Mayans called it Year One; in our terms it was 3113 B.C., August twelve to be exact, when a white-bearded man descended from the sun. The Egyptian Year One was around 3141 B.C., called the Age of Horus. Horus was the son of Ra—who in turn was the sun. The Hebrew calendar says the earth was created in September of 3761 B.C. They were so influenced by lunar and solar cycles they put a sun on their flag in the shape of a six-pointed star. The fact is, every fourth cycle something really bad happens. Then you’ve got a legitimate reason to panic. The geological record shows four cycles ago—or twelve thousand years ago—there was a flood. And guess what? Time’s up again.”
“We think the sun is about to reverse its magnetic poles, Dr. Scott,” Rear Admiral Dower said solemnly. “We think it just reached the high point in a twelve-thousand-year cycle, and that it is about to set off a chain reaction of events that puts this planet in very real danger.”
“Wait a minute!” Scott cried. “Are we talking about the end of the world here?”
Hackett shrugged. “Oh, no, no, no,” he said. The others sighed with relief. “Just everything on it. Tell me, Admiral, what’s the end of the world going to feel like?”
Gant moved to the far end of the room and stood by a large digital screen mounted on the wall. “Admiral. With your permission?”
Dower gave a quick nod of approval.
The lights dimmed. Up on the screen a photo-real representation of the earth spun effortlessly through space. With a constantly shifting perspective, its orbit around the sun was depicted, followed sharply by close-ups of countries that were best placed to serve as monitors.
“There are six main observatories on earth given over exclusively to monitoring solar activity twenty-four hours a day,” Gant explained steadily. “The normal procedure is that once an event has been witnessed, we are notified immediately, and the effects are felt back here approximately forty-eight to seventy-two hours later.”
Scott and November instinctively looked to Hackett for confirmation. He nodded, saying: “The sun is made up, primarily, of hydrogen that’s in a continual state of nuclear fusion, keeping its surface temperature at over two million degrees Celsius. When a coronal mass ejection occurs, highly charged particles are thrown out and wrapped into a ball with its own magnetic field—called a plasma. About the size of Jupiter, this plasma cloud contains enough energy to boil the Mediterranean Sea dry. It travels at about two million miles an hour, so …” Hackett totted up the calculations briefly. “Yeah, I’d say it takes about three days to get here.”
November gulped. “And this is about to happen?”
Hackett smirked. “Oh, that happens every week. What Major Gant is about to explain, I assume, is much worse.”
“On March eighth, exactly nine days ago, an unprecedented number of sun spots were observed on the surface of the sun. Solar-storm activity was intense and the release of plasma was both rapid and vast. The magnetic turmoil within the sun was such that at precisely seven-oh-nine that morning, exactly eight minutes after several ejecta events simultaneously exploded around the equator of the sun, the effects were detected here at CERN.”
Hackett was suddenly very alert. “How?” he asked simply. “You’re talking about an effect that we could feel, that traveled just as fast as light.”
“There are five experiments currently set up around the earth to do the kind of physics we’re talking about. One in Japan, at ISAS. One in Russia. Two in the States, at Caltech and Stanford. And one here in Switzerland. The other four were undergoing recalibration and were off-line, while the one here at CERN was the only one operational at the time, and was the only one that detected—a gravity wave.”
Now was the time to sit down, Hackett decided. He ran his fingers over the cold black onyx tabletop. “Good God … they finally did it.” No one else seemed quite that overjoyed. “The graviton,” Hackett said, smug in his own certainty, “is the key to everything.”
Scott shifted in his chair and murmured, “Sorry to disappoint, but it wasn’t the key to the breakdown of my marriage.”
“How long did it last?”
Scott had to think for a moment before he realized Hackett wasn’t talking about his marriage while Gant announced: “Four point three microseconds. Congratulations, Dr. Hackett. Physics proved another theory.”
Hackett scratched his neck. “I’m not sure I should be glad about that.”
Gant took a long, deep breath. “The laser-light interferometer equipment used in ELIGO was not the only thing to react to the gravity wave.”
Scott shook his head for a re-cap. “ELIGO?”
“Explanations later,” Rear Admiral Dower insisted gruffly, eager to get to the point.
Gant pressed another button. Images of ice floes and the Antarctic basin were suddenly visible. Details spewed down one side of the screen. Complex and nonsensical to the layman.
SPACEBORNE IMAGING RADAR-C/X-BAND SYNTHETIC APERTURE RADAR (SIR-C/X-SAR)
GROUND PENETRATING RADAR (GPR)
CONJUNCTIONAL EXTRAPOLATION FROM NEMESIS.
MICROWAVE LENGTHS:
L-BAND (24 CM)
C-BAND (6 CM)
X-BAND (3 CM)
MULTI-FREQUENCY ENHANCEMENT: ON
GPR DIGITAL WASH FILTERS: ON
GPR WAVELENGTH FEATURES: [WITH HELD-AUTHORIZATION FAILED. ACCESS DENIED.]
Suddenly, close-up images of Chinese armored columns came into focus, slowly making their way across the ice. Black specks against pure white, like ants on ice cream. Buildings appeared. Fortifications were being erected. The Chinese base, Jung Chang, was well equipped.
“Needless to say, ladies and gentlemen, this is classified information—”
“But hardly secret,” November interrupted cheekily. Gant shot her a look. “You flicked on CNN lately?”
“Believe me, Ms. Dryden,” the Major intoned, “CNN does not have its hands on this particular tape.” He turned to the others. “We’ve had the Chinese under surveillance for some time. Their recent pursuit of fossil fuels and mineral ores has been relentless, as has their experimentation on high-tech weaponry. Approximately three months ago, at their base in Antarctica, they sunk a well and started complex drilling procedures.
“Two weeks ago we detected a signal indicating that an enormous power source had been activated. As this hidden power source’s output began to increase, so too did sunspot and solar-flare activity. Naturally we want to know what they’ve found. If we switch to Ground Penetrating Radar …” the image on the screen turned psychedelic “ … what you’re seeing is a false color image of what the human eye cannot see.”
Scott squinted. “What exactly are we seeing?”
Hackett stepped up for a closer look. “We did the scan you asked us to perform, Jon,” Dower explained.
“And?”
“And you were right.”
“Shit.”
“Right? Right about what?” Scott wanted to know.
Gant nodded at the screen. “Just wait.”
A clock cycled down. The date read March 8, 2012. Suddenly purple waves blasted out in tremendous ripples and dissipated some distance on.
Pearce had already seen the footage but was still impressed. “Woah!”
Hackett craned forward. “Can we see that again—from a wider view?”
Gant keyed in the request. Again, huge false color waves spread out across the ice as if a pebble had been dropped into a pond.
“The area of land you’re seeing is roughly the size of Manhattan.”
Scott was confused. “What the hell was that?”
“What you’re looking at is some kind of energy wave,” Dower offered by way of an explanation. “Traveling well over two miles beneath the ice, through what appears to have the same geological signature as a material called Carbon 60.”
Hackett was resting his chin on his fingers, studying the image intently, when he asked quietly, “Can you slow the film down for me—a lot?”
Gant and Dower exchanged knowing looks. Dower seemed pleased. “We thought you might notice that.”
“Notice what?” Matheson demanded. It was clear he was out of the loop on this one.
Hackett never took his eyes off the screen. “There’s structure within the wave pattern.”
“What are you talking about? Structure? I don’t understand.”
“Major Gant, can you separate out each individual frame where the energy waves have expanded out from the epicenter?” Hackett requested. “And then, overlay them on top of one another.” Gant said he could and went to work as Hackett addressed the others. “Every time the wave gets bigger, I’m getting him to take a snapshot of it. Then by overlaying each shot, like a stack of pancakes, the overall image of what I think I can see should, uh … should present itself.”
Like a jigsaw puzzle of concentric purple circles the image slowly built up until the screen turned more and more purple with each overlay. And what was becoming clearer to everybody was that structure had indeed been revealed within the energy waves. With the exception of the military, a mood of excitement and incredulity filled the room. Cubes. Oblongs. Curved surfaces. All the hallmarks of construction stood out as glitches in the purple. It was intricate. Vast and dense. Like the layout of—
“That’s a city,” Scott whispered. “Under the goddamn ice … A lost city!”
“And somehow,” Dower said gravely, “it appears to be linked to the sun.”
Pearce was mesmerized. “Not a lost city. The lost city. Ladies and gentlemen—welcome to Atlantis!”
“My God … we’re talking about a complex adaptive system on a scale I’ve only ever theorized ‘about,” Hackett murmured darkly.
Gant flipped text up onto the screen in a separate subbox. Tales of the Deluge: A Global Report on Cultural Self-Replicating Genesis Myths by Dr. Richard Scott. In his hand he had a hard copy. He scratched his cheek in between thumbing through the hefty document.
“Dr. Scott,” he said, “according to your research, in Central Colombia, South America, and I quote: ‘Bochica, a bearded man of another race, brought law, agriculture and religion to the Chibcas savages. But one day his evil wife, Chia, appeared to thwart his plans and flooded the lands, killing almost everyone. Bochica exiled his wife to the sky where she is now the moon, and brought the survivors down from the mountains to start over.’”
