Noriama: Chapter 8

Half way to Proxima Centauri, the Croatoan flipped upside down.

In accordance with procedure, the team strapped themselves into their chairs in the Crash Room half an hour before the rotation, and ran three drills, making sure they understood exactly what they were supposed to do.

Sughouri was well versed in the bureaucracies of space, and she knew running mock drills was important, but it was still a little silly, seeing as what they were supposed to do was practically nothing at all. Computers and automatics handled almost every aspect of their trip.

It wasn’t a luxury, it was a necessity. Mistakes were measured in fractions of fractions, and even the most minor of computer systems could assess, correct, and resolve errors faster and more effectively then any human. The Croatoan computer did everything perfectly. Victoria had said something about keeping everyone’s brains functioning properly, but mostly they were just reciting what their computer screens told them like play-by-play commentators.

At last the moment came, and they all repeated their actions for the fourth time.

“Relay Laser disengaged,” Zuri reported. “Reactor output lowering.”

Sughouri felt the fraction weight she had felt for the whole journey slowly fade. Her body pushed against her straps as it tried to float out of her chair. For the next few minutes, she would be truly weightless, inertia carrying her through space as fast as the Croatoan.

Now it was her turn. She fiddled with her keyer, chording in the proper commands as her screen flashed information back at her. “I am beginning main hull repositioning,” she recited. “Croatoan rotation at point one rad.”

Gravity began to return. For a sickening moment, it felt like she was falling forward.

“Just be thankful we aren’t up at the top of the ship,” she muttered to no one in particular. “The centripetal force would be much stronger.”

“Delightful,” Victoria muttered

Sughouri stared at her screen. The rotation delta on her screen stabilized, and the orientation monitor continued to spin. Now came the waiting.

It was a simple solution to a complex problem. Halfway through the Croatoan’s journey, the constant acceleration needed to turn into constant deceleration. When that happened, the faux-gravity that kept the team on the floor would switch directions, and the floor would suddenly become the ceiling.

The traditional solution was to flip the space-craft so its rear would be pointed towards Proxima. This wouldn’t have worked for the Croatoan, primarily because of the sails. For all their import, the light-sail of the Croatoan was frighteningly delicate. If the Croatoan needed to flip end-over-end, it would also need to retract the sail, rotate, and then extend it again. Then it would need to do that all over again at the midpoint for the trip back. Each retraction and extension was a moment when things could go wrong, especially with the lateral strain on the sail as the ship rotated.

So, if the ship wasn’t going to rotate, perhaps its innards could? An earlier blueprint of the Croatoan had included chairs that could be detached from the floor and attached again to the ceiling, along with tables and consoles on rotating arms so that once the ceiling became the floor, everything could continue as normal.

This had its own problems; namely, cost and complexity. There was a fair amount of scientific equipment on the Croatoan, and making sure it was installed in such a manner that it could be operated from two separate orientations wasn’t worth the effort, especially when there was a much simpler solution: attach the main body of the Croatoan to the light-sail by a simple rotating harness. The capsule itself could rotate while the sails themselves remained stable.

The rotation would be complete in ten minutes. Until then, there was nothing to do but wait.

“What do you think happened to them?” Kristiana asked, her eyes tightly shut.

The silence settled on the room like a blanket. They had steadfastly avoided the subject for the whole trip, so far. Sughouri had considered broaching the subject herself, but hadn’t been able to think of a sensible manner of bringing it up.

Kristiana obviously cared less about the propriety of it. With the subject raised, there was nothing for it but to plow forward.

“Could be almost anything,” Sughouri muttered. “At absolute best, something…weird went wrong with their communication systems and they’ve been too busy to bother getting it fixed.”

“Assume something catastrophic did happen,” Kristiana pressed. “Assume the colony is destroyed. What do you think was the cause?”

“I disagree with the premise,” Zuri answered, her words floating in a message box across the top of Sughouri’s screen. She was more of an iconoclast than any of the others, and delighted in playing about in the theoretical. “Why assume Noriama is gone? They could simply have stopped talking to Earth.”

“Then why is the OLCR not still transmitting meta-data?” Victoria gamely joined in. “Why didn’t the black box transmit?”

“Maybe they hacked the satellite and performed some work-around?” Sughouri said. “It’s not impossible. There’s no such thing as an un-crackable system.”

“But why?” Kristiana asked. “Why would they want to cut off communication so completely?”

“Independence,” Victoria offered.

The others turned to look at her. “They have that, don’t they?” Sughouri asked. “It was in the compact. They’re not a part of the URC.”

“No, I mean real independence.” Victoria struggled to explain. “Severing all ties. When Cortez invaded the South-Americas, his first order was to burn the ships. Escape is easy when you have the option.”

“Four and a half light-years distance…” Kristiana frowned. “I don’t think escape was ever a viable option.”

“Oh, I don’t mean physical escape, escape from Proxima b; no, I mean…well…psychic escape. Mental. As long as there was a connection to Earth, however tenuous, the colonists couldn’t be Proximans. There would always be that little reminder, that tiny connection to the life that had once been. They could fool themselves into believing that they were still Earthlings on an Earth colony.”

“Is that a problem?” Sughouri rested her hand on her chin.

“It’s unsustainable.” Victoria closed her eyes at the memory. “I worked with the First-Responders. Let me assure you, no one ever lasts who is doing it “for a while,” or “for the experience.” They make it through one, maybe two mild crises, and if they aren’t pulled from the field for freezing up or making a huge mistake, they never want to saddle up again. Big risk ventures need full devotion. You can’t get that if your colonists are busy dreaming about what’s happening back home. Noriama needed to be their home, and they may not have been able to manage that knowing there was still a laser-thin connection to the Earth.”

“It’s still unsustainable,” Zuri’s answer popped up on the top of Sughouri’s screen. “Even if they were brainwashed with zealous passion, Noriama would have only lasted maybe one generation longer.”

“What makes you say that?” Sughouri could see the dismissal in Zuri’s face.

“You’ve heard of the Three Generation rule? It was codified by a turn-of-the-century author, Ken Burnside. It says any space colony or station will survive for only three generations before complete collapse.”

“Care to back up that claim?” Sughouri shifted in her seat against the straps, facing Zuri as best she could.

“I’d be delighted,” Zuri smiled. “It all stems from a few truths about human nature and the universe at large. One, the Noriama project was expensive. Two, space will kill you. Three, humans are lazy.”

“And?”

“And that’s it. Everything follows from those three truths. Space travel at such a long distance has never been done before, and what’s the one constant with travel in extreme environments, whether deep-sea or outer-space? they’re all closed systems with very precise tolerances. Closed by necessity. If you go camping, you bring as much as you think you need. You can guess, because if you bring more than you need, you can throw it out, or bring it home. If you lose it all to a bear or a flood, you could drive to a gas-station or nearby town. Or go home early. There are no gas-stations under the sea or in space. The colonists couldn’t go home early. If they run out of food, water, or air, they’re dead. The system needed to be exact, because even tiny mistakes can’t be easily fixed, and unfixed mistakes can be deadly.”

“Okay, so the Noriama was tightly designed.” Sughouri frowned. “I don’t see how it follows that it was doomed to failure.”

“That’s because of the second problem. With any system that’s tightly designed, there are laws, rules, procedures that needed to be followed to make everything work. Scheduled maintenance, that sort of thing. The first generation of colonists are people like us; people chosen and trained to be the ideal team. Once there’s a new generation, however, they grow up inside this system. Even if trained, they’re not devoted to the mission in the same way. There’s always cultural shift among generations. Call it laziness, youthful rebellion, entropy, what have you; it’s inevitable.”

Zuri shifted in her seat, and continued chording. “It gets worse with each consecutive generation. Humans are short-sighted. We can’t help it. Pleasure now at the expense of later is always an easy decision to make, and without immediate consequences, there won’t be any clear disadvantage to it. Things get worse. More band-aid fixes, more slap-dash efforts, more entropy; both on the equipment and in the system. As time passes, the chance of a fatal mistake is more and more likely.”

“What if it’s aliens?” Sughouri asked. The laughter was short before she continued. “Come on, I’m serious. It could be aliens, couldn’t it?”

“It’s not aliens,” Kristiana sighed. “You have a better chance of winning the lottery than it being aliens.”

“I don’t buy that,” Victoria shook her head. “At least, not with a proper definition of aliens.”

“Oh?” Zuri asked. “And what definition is that?”

“Well, it’s probably not green-skinned humans,” Victoria grinned back. “I agree with you there; but beyond that, we just need a big enough imagination. There could be water on the terminus of Proxima b, and if there’s water, there could be some form of viral or bacterial life. That’s technically ‘aliens’ right there.”

Sughouri was about to pry further when the tipping sensation stopped and her computer beeped again. “Rotation complete. External rigging-arms beginning adjustments.”

She kept her eyes on the numbers until they all glowed green. “Rotation complete. Sails re-positioned. Yar, me mateys. Rigging arms prepared and within tolerances. They’ll monitor and adjust the cabling over the next few relays.”

Sughouri could hear the smile in Kristiana’s tone. “Rotation time fifteen minutes and sixteen seconds. The next relay will begin decelerating us in a five-point-seven minutes.”

“How do you know that, Kristiana?” Sughouri asked.

“Know what?”

“I mean, do you remember how long before the next relay, or did you just pull it from the database?”

“Memory is a database,” Kristiana rubbed her hand over her eyes. “I really don’t know how to answer your question.”

“Connection established with Relay DN-340523-t2,” Zuri’s words flashed across the top of Sughouri’s monitor. “Confirmed safety check. Laser is targeting the sail. Reactor power at sixty-five and holding.”

Five minutes later, Zuri counted down the time to the relay’s activation, and a soft tug brought gravity back to the Croatoan.

“At last,” Sughouri grinned as she slipped out of her harness, and launched herself towards the ladder like an excited flea. “By my schedule it’s time for my exercises. Any of you lay-abouts care to join me?”

---

Kristiana hated waking up. It had been unpleasant enough pulling herself from slumber on Earth, but the extra three days of sleep on the Croatoan made it far worse. On Earth her groggy mornings were simply suffered through. In space the gummy fog of sleep clung to her like cobwebs, keeping her mind unfocused and clammy while her body struggled to remember how to move, how to pump her heart, how to keep her awake. She didn’t truly feel awake until three or four hours later.

This time, however, she had woken up early.

Did she know because her waking up felt different? Or because her subconscious brain had already checked the alert status of the Croatoan sleep systems?

It was a feeling unique to Netters. They called it ‘foreign instinct.’ Brains had a difficult time differentiating the real from the imagined at the best of times, and connection to the global network provided a large trove of information for the brain to pull from, both consciously and subconsciously. The boundaries between experienced and external information became blurred. For a brief disassociative moment, you couldn’t tell if you were yourself, or if you were someone else.

Her worry, however, was genuinely her own. Waking up early wasn’t supposed to happen; the hibernation beds were quite effective at keeping the crew asleep, and she had constantly slept for six days straight for over fifteen years. Waking up early was only supposed to happen in emergencies, though emergency wasn’t quite right. The remedial AIs of the Croatoan was more than capable of classifying certain readings as ’expected’ or ‘usual,’ which meant it could also recognize the ‘unusual.’ If something unusual was happening, it could interrupt the crew’s hibernation cycle to make sure nothing catastrophic threatened the mission.

Here was where Kristiana was most useful. Being able to access the Croatoan’s data-banks like one thought about yesterday’s lunch was far more efficient than needing to climb out of her sleeping unit and clumsily chord commands into her keyer while reading from a monitor.

It meant that by the time she was dressed she knew what was happening, while the rest of her team was still blinking at the red flashing panels next to their units.

“What tripped the alarm?” Sughouri asked. “Kristiana? Do you know?”

“There’s been an explosion,” Kristiana answered, pushing towards the ladder. “On Proxima b.”

By the time the rest of the team had arrived in the Crash-room, Kristiana was already in her seat, chording commands at the computer at a frantic pace. When they had all seated, she brought up the information she had gleaned on their screens.

“About ten minutes ago,” she began the briefing, “our sensors detected a sharp spike in heat and luminosity from Proxima b. At our current distance and sensor resolution, the Croatoan computer calculates the origin of this explosion is a point two hundred thousand kilometers above Proxima’s surface.”

“Noriama’s station exploded?” Sughouri’s tone was flat.

“Likely not,” Kristiana continued. “The explosion has continued for the last ten minutes, with no sign of dissipation or spread. The Croatoan’s AI compared the radiation signature and confirmed that this explosion is likely the exhaust of an L-M5 engine undergoing a standard preliminary burn.”

“L-M5?” Victoria asked. “What’s that?”

“It’s an engine designed almost a century ago for the purpose of long-term space travel,” Kristiana explained. “It’s also the engine that the KAP mission plan designated to use for any freighters built on Noriama to ferry precious minerals from Proxima b to Earth.”

The team looked at each other.

“Hold up,” Sughouri’s smile was uneasy. “Are you telling us that Noriama Colony just launched an ore-freighter towards earth?”

“It’s not certain,” Kristiana hedged, before plowing on. “According to the KAP mission plan, the Noriama’s ore-freighter flight-plan requires a three-day preliminary burn to reach cruising speed of ten million meters per second. This will give them a travel time of about a hundred years to Earth before their arrival burn which will put them into earth orbit.”

“So if this explosion lasts for three more days…” Victoria’s voice trailed off.

Kristiana nodded.

For a moment, no one spoke. Each of them in their turn was considering this turn of events, and what it would mean for them and their mission.

Victoria spoke first. “So what are our options?”

“We complete our mission,” Zuri’s answer crawled across the tops of their screens, a digital voice giving her words weight.

“But they launched a freighter,” Sughouri pointed at the screen. “They’re alive!”

“We don’t know that,” Kristiana said. “The launch could have been automated.”

“It’s been, what, twenty years of silence?” Victoria shook her head in amazement. “Now a ship launches like nothing happened.”

“A ship launching is never ’like nothing happened,’” Kristiana said. “It takes incredible amounts of effort and resources to send anything through space.”

“Okay,” Sughouri rubbed her face. “Either they’re all still alive on Noriama, and they just stopped talking to Earth before launching a freighter to earth, or they’re all dead and this launch is part of some automated system that never got shut off. Is that the short of it?”

“Are they talking on the OLCR again?” Victoria asked.

Kristiana stared at tiny woman as she looked at the other team members in turn. How had she been the first person to think of it?"

“No,” Zuri answered at last. “The OLCR is still clear of direct or meta communications from Proxima.”

“That could change,” Kristiana said. “Can you set the computer to watch the OLCR for any sign of communication?”

“Already done.” Zuri answered. “The Croatoan’s AI is monitoring.”

“We can’t…I don’t know, talk to the freighter?” Victoria asked.

“The freighters are unmanned. Life support for a hundred-year journey is a waste of space when you could just have a robot pilot it.”

“If Noriama’s still alive,” Victoria said, slowly, “could we turn around?”

“No,” Kristiana answered. “we’re already decelerating as fast as we can. We won’t stop until we reach Noriama.”

“Still, we can’t just ignore it, can we?” Sughouri protested.

“We’re not,” Zuri said. “The Croatoan has recognized the launch as anomalous, and will keep watching it and sending all the information it gathers back to Earth along the OLCR.”

Kristiana took a deep breath, willfully ignoring the stabbing pain lancing down the back of her skull. “There’s nothing more to do. We should all get back to sleep.”

She wondered what the Earth would make of it. There would be arguments, no doubt, but in the end, as was so often in life, there would be nothing they could do. They knew something was heading towards Earth from Noriama, and they simply had to wait a hundred years for it to arrive. The Croatoan and its crew would be back on earth long before then.

---

Ivan rubbed his forehead. He felt numb.

It was refreshing, almost, after such constant panic. His heart hadn’t stopped beating like a jackhammer. He hadn’t slept; even high-powered sedatives hadn’t worked. He finally resorted to scotch. It worked, but he felt no more rested and paid for the brief stretch of unconsciousness the following morning.

It was a crisis. A hundred trillion euro crisis.

For not the first nor last time, Ivan cursed the URC Information Exchange protocols. If he had only been given a few days to work out what had happened, what it meant, and what they could do about it…

But no, every region of the URC needed their fingers in the soup, and now a crisis council had been called, and time was running out.

Ivan scanned the room. Politicians, Military officers, and bureaucrats from a hundred different organizations were all sitting, talking, fidgeting, arguing with each other and rehearsing their righteous indignation while waiting their chance to speak.

Ivan could not keep his gaze from wandering to the far edge of the room, seated in a chair on the wall, hands folded politely in her lap.

How the hell was she allowed in here?

At first, Ivan had allowed Antje a presence in the project as a courtesy, a gentle acknowledgment of respect both for her years of service and her personal connection to the first Earth colony in space. Over the course of the past eighteen years, the Croatoan’s daily reports had crossed his desk, and like clockwork, Antje would arrive once a month for a briefing on everything that hadn’t happened. She never got board, never impatient. She was like a robot, striding through the hallways of the old EUSAA with her cane, never stumbling or breaking stride. She would listen intently, ask clever questions and never showed the slightest hint of complacency.

Now, eighteen years through the Croatoan’s twenty-one year trip to Proxima b, the worst possible thing had finally happened, and here — in the room with the tightest security imaginable, for a meeting for which there was no security clearance high enough, with military and government officials without parallel — sat Antje, calmly, like she was watching a play.

Over the years, Ivan had come to respect Antje. Now he was starting to fear her.

The rest of the room’s occupants paid her no mind. They were too focused on their own panic to pay any attention to the old woman sitting off to the side. They were too focused on what was about to happen.

Ivan rubbed his forehead again. Small mercies, he wasn’t giving the report.

Brigade General Simone Coli’s normally placid face was lined with worry as she walked to the front of the room, setting her briefing materials on the broad lectern. She cleared her throat. The lights dimmed. The slideshow began.

“Four days ago,” she began–Had it only been four days? Ivan shifted in his seat —“the NOS space telescope detected a surge of radiation in the direction of Proxima Centauri. This spike of heat and light registered in Mission Central’s AI as a deviation from expected norms, and so compared the readings to a pre-defined list of possible situations. After finding the closest analog, the AI reported the spike as an explosion, alerting Mission Central personnel with a Code Red.”

The room was still. The Code Red alone had been a crisis: had the Croatoan exploded? Had Noriama? Perhaps one of the OLCR nodes? In the first hour, that spike in light and heat had been the center of his panic. Everything in space was planned to multiple decimal points; so much so that there was no such thing as surprises in space, only disasters.

General Coli switched slides. “The explosion has continued for the past forty-eight hours, without notable dissipation or expansion. Triangulating the explosion with both the Seven Nations Kyu-won satellite array and the South American ILT,” she gestured in the direction of the two delegations, “has confirmed that the explosion’s origin is too far away from Earth to be the Croatoan, which is currently located here.”

The slide shifted again. A long line connected Earth to Proxima b, a small dot marking the Croatoan’s progress along its path. In the corner, detailed measurements of velocity, Lorentz contraction, and the current ship-board time were dutifully ignored in favor of the childishly simple diagram.

“In accordance with the Mission Plan, the Croatoan’s communication data-stream was updated with then current data regarding their own sensor readings. Based on what we were able to receive, we can confirm that this explosion occurred about two hundred thousand kilometers above the surface of Proxima b. This is the same height as Proxima Station, the colony’s geocentric orbital satellite.”

General Coli took a deep breath. “Twenty-one minutes after the Croatoan first registered the explosion, the data-stream’s encryption changed. The receivers and AIs monitoring the data-stream became unable to decrypt the transmission, even after trying every decryption code in the URC database.”

Ivan watched the faces of the politicians and the generals. Which one of you was it?

“Intermittently,” General Coli continued, “an unencrypted transmission interrupted the data-stream.” The slide changed again. The room stared.

They’d all seen it. They knew what it was. No one knew what it meant, but it was clear what it was. A poem written in old Nigerian.

General Coli leveled her gaze back at the room. “The encrypted transmission has continued, as has the poem, for the last forty-eight hours. Our decryption AIs are continuing to work on the transmission, but as of right now, we are receiving no intelligible communication from the Croatoan.”

The room turned to stare at each other. They were thinking the same thing that Ivan and General Coli had been thinking for days. Was this a joke? Was the explosion still exploding? Had the Croatoan crew gone mad? Would the AIs ever succeed?

Had one of the governments in this very room managed to commit sabotage?

It was such an alluring question. It would at once explain everything and the next steps would be self-evident. It meant they could do something.

Theatre General Pajarero, the highest ranking EU military general in the room, spoke up first. “To be clear, General Coli; the Croatoan has broken Mission Protocol, and is transmitting an encoded message that Mission Central cannot understand?”

“That is correct, Theatre General,” General Coli cleared her throat.

“There are no other explanations for this?”

“There is a lot we still don’t know, but we are positive this is not the result of damaged equipment or human error. This is a deliberate transmission from a fully functioning Croatoan computer system.”

A politician — Ivan didn’t bother remembering who or where they were from — spoke up from the other side of the room. “If you don’t have the decryption codes, who does?”

The room began to boil, with cross-talk and muttered protests spilling out from the politicians and officers. General Coli held up her hands.

“We have already discussed this with multiple governments and military strategists. The truth of the matter is, we are confident we can crack this encryption without the code.”

“When?” Antje’s cracked voice muttered from the corner.

Ivan bit his tongue. Was she trying to start a war?

General Coli winced. “It would go faster with the code, of course, but we expect progress within ten months.”

Ivan watched the assemblage grumble. Ten months hadn’t been acceptable to him, and it certainly wasn’t acceptable to them.

“This is espionage,” A General from the South American Region stood up. “Some country has put a spy on the Croatoan, and has hijacked the data-stream for their own ends!”

“There is no evidence of that,” Ivan shouted before the room could explode into chaos. All we know, is that the Croatoan’s transmission along the data-stream has deviated from the Mission Plan. It is entirely possible that this is little more than our team being…playful."

“Playful?” came Theatre General Pajarero’s reply. “Is that supposed to reassure us, that the team has started to behave erratically?”

“Which one did it?” another politician asked. “You must have some idea which of the four is most likely to either have gone off the deep end, or been a foreign agent all along?”

“They’re all foreign agents,” Ivan snapped. “That was the whole point!”

“What I think was meant was,” Pajarero throat-clearing was like a gunshot, “is one of the four actively working against Mission Central? Has one of the four decided to pursue their own personal goals, instead of the proscribed mission plan, and if so, which one?”

“To what end?” Ivan returned to the well-worn arguments he had shared with General Coli for the past several days. “The Croatoan’s mission is to collect information, nothing more. There are representatives of every URC nation throughout Mission Central, and all results of this mission are being publicly distributed to the world. As General Coli says, we can crack the code. This is only a delay, and an absurd one at that. What political or militaristic advantage does it give anyone?”

“Perhaps they thought the potential of there being some advantage outweighed the risks,” the politician answered.

“They.” Pajarero repeated. “General Coli, Mr. Fyodorov, please give us a solid answer to this question. There are four people on that ship, and one of them has just violated the Mission Plan with this transmission. Do you know who did this, and do you know why?”

Ivan glanced at General Coli. Her own look was not comforting. “We do know a few things. The communication datastream is an automated process undertaken by the Croatoan’s onboard computer system. To adjust the encryption algorithm would take direct manipulation of the system’s base coding. This means our culprit is likely to be either Zuri Conde, or Kristiana Kwan.”

The slide changed again. Two pictures. Two suspects.

“I’d like to point out, however,” she continued, “that both Sughouri Chowhury and Victoria Hastings have had several years to study any topics they wished that were available in the Croatoan’s database, which included advanced programming. It is possible that they learned how to adjust the Croatoan’s encryption system on their own. For that matter, any two could be working together, or this could have been a decision made by all four of them. As for motivation, no, we have no concrete evidence to support one theory over another.”

“I think it’s important…” Ivan cleared his throat, “I just want to make it clear that this being some form of political subterfuge is highly unlikely. It has always been the policy of this mission that every member of the URC will be given complete access to any and all information that comes out of this mission.”

“Perhaps someone doesn’t like that,” A general offered. “It could be a powerful bargaining chip, couldn’t it? Knowing what happened on Proxima b? This is a multi-trillion euro mission, and if the URC don’t get anything from it, that’s going to be a huge failing for the URC to stomach. It could cripple faith in the institution for generations.”

“Can we warn them?” Pajarero asked. “The Croatoan? Inform them that one of their number is a traitor?”

“No,” Ivan snapped. “First off, we still don’t know what this is. Secondly…” he winced. The time discrepancy always bothered him. “We keep talking about this like it just happened. It hasn’t. It actually happened three years ago, and it took that long for the light and communication-stream to reach us. Could you bring up that slide again, General Coli?”

He pointed after she did. “See, they were almost exactly three-quarters of the way to Proxima; about five years away from the colony. Then they kept traveling for the three years it took for this transmission to reach us. At this very moment, they’re only two years away from Proxima b. If we send any message at all, it won’t reach them until two years after they reach Noriama. Unless they stick around for that long — which is admittedly not impossible — its more likely that any message we send will only reach them after they’re already on their way back to earth.”

“Thirdly,” he took a deep breath. “Even if we could get a message to them in time, and even if we knew what to say, we shouldn’t tell them. The only way those four survive and get back safely is if they work together. If we suggested to them that one of them was untrustworthy, they’d become paranoid, be at each other’s throats, and the whole mission would be a failure.”

“Maybe that’s the goal,” a politician smoothly interjected. “This is prime evidence that someone is doing something nefarious, and if someone sent a message back up along the OCLR to the crew, got them to turn on each other, made the mission a failure…”

“Not possible,” Ivan shook his head. “Mission Central has complete control over the OCLR data-stream. If we’re not sending the message, it doesn’t get sent.”

The Theatre General snorted. “How was this not screened for? In their psych evaluations, their histories, their…hell, their politics? Weren’t those looked into? How could you have missed this as a possibility?”

“I assure you, we screened our four crew-members exhaustively. Their psych evaluations, political histories, national and geographic movements, families, friendships, everything, and all of it is available by request.” She took a breath. “There was nothing to indicate that any four of our crew would be acceptable or receptive to recruitment by anyone outside the project, much less take initiative on their own volition to do something like this.”

“Why not finish the job?” Another well-worn question. “Why encode the transmission except for this poem?”

There was a soft snort from the corner of the room.

The room looked at Antje as she gently shifted. “Perhaps they didn’t,” she said.

“Didn’t…” Pajarero pointed at the slide. “That looks like plain English to me, Ms. Seidel.”

“It does,” Antje smiled. “And if the Croatoan had used your codes, it would look like garbage. But it wouldn’t be, would it?”

Ivan felt a small sense of satisfaction as the General took their seat again. It had taken Ivan and Coli almost an hour to realize what Antje had realized in five minutes. Somehow she makes fools of us all, Theatre General…

“Is this…poem…part of the code? The decryption code itself?” Another elected official asked. “Is it a better idea to refocus your efforts on decrypting the poem?”

General Coli’s fingers lifted in the air, and then dropped again. Ivan couldn’t help but smile. Her standard posture of a pinched nose-bridge was not appropriate at the moment. “Our best decryption AIs are trained to brute-force algorithmiclly encrypted codes, and finding sensible patterns from stochastic chaos. This isn’t that. Encryption is taking information and using a key to scramble it into nonsense. Without the key, all anyone can see is a chaotic mishmash. But the information is still there, just hidden through a complicated and inscrutable algorithmic process. It has to be, otherwise you couldn’t decrypt it again. With a specially trained AI, you can find the original information. It can take from days to years, but it’s possible.”

“But this,” Pajarero pointed at the slide, “isn’t mishmash.”

“No,” General Coli sighed. “If this poem is a code of some kind, it’s encoded in a way our AIs are perfectly unprepared for.”

“Who is prepared for it?” Antje asked. “If this isn’t a message to a confidant, then who does know what it means?” She smiled wickedly. “Are any of you experts on poetry?”