Noriama: Chapter 9
“Excuse me, Ms. Sidel?”
Antje winced internally, careful to not crack the smiling facade she threw onto her face as she turned. Damn it, there she was: a reporter not thirty years old yet, wearing the helpless awkward smile they all wore before they became experienced, bitter, and mistrusting.
“Yes?”
“Sorry,” the apology came quick through a faint Spanish accent, her press pass brandished like a shield. “I wasn’t sure that was you. Would you mind answering a few questions?”
“I’m afraid I’m in a bit of a hurry.” Antje turned back to the doors of the EUSAA, but it was too late.
“Just one, then,” the young reporter’s speech suddenly quick and clipped. “Are you here because of something to do with the KAP, or Noriama?”
“I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Antje’s smile began to sting. “I’m here to visit an old friend. We were planning on going to lunch. An early lunch,” she corrected herself when she remembered the time.
“Can I ask you to comment on a quote from —”
“I am sorry, no. I have retired from public life, any comment or quote from me is no longer newsworthy. If you’ll excuse me?”
The reporter nodded and shouted her thanks as Antje swept into the EUSAA’s lobby.
Verdammt, verdammt, verdammt! Fool of an old woman! Why had she turned around? Why had her polite and ingratiating political instincts remained sharp over the years, but her cynicism faded? She should have kept walking.
Fifteen minutes of security later, she had knocked on Ivan’s door, and opened it without waiting for his answer.
“There’s a reporter outside,” she snapped.
Ivan looked up from his desk, the bemused look of a hapless bureaucrat plastered over his face. “Oh?”
“She recognized me,” Antje said, louder, sitting herself down in the chair she had come to think of as hers. “She knows I’m in here. We need to go to lunch.”
“Hello Antje,” Ivan smiled, closing a folder and setting it aside. “It’s been such a long time. How have you been?”
“Now,” Antje pressed. “We need to leave now and go to lunch.”
“Antje,” Ivan shook his head, holding up his hand for her to stop. “What are you talking about? What’s this about a reporter? Why are —”
“They know I’m here!” Antje spat. “They know I’m here, and asked me a question about Noriama!”
Ivan’s face fell. “What question?”
“She wanted a comment on a quote. I didn’t hear it, I brushed her off.”
“You think we have a leak?”
“Maybe, maybe not,” Antje stood up again, and began to slowly pace the room. “All the same, I was fool enough to engage with her, so now we need to fix my mistake.”
“Slow down,” Ivan raised a hand. “There’s only one reporter, she just wanted a comment, and she let you go when you refused? That doesn’t sound like a catastrophe.”
“It’s the start,” Antje huffed. “Tomorrow there will be three, seven the next. There is blood in the water, and if we don’t do something, the leak will become a flood.”
“And you think the best strategy is for both of us to take an early lunch?”
Antje opened her mouth, and then shut it again. She hated being called out on her foolishness. “Nevermind.”
“Too bad. I think it may be the best idea I’ve heard all month.”
Antje threw herself into her chair, furious at herself, the press, the world in general. For a moment she let herself simmer in her frustration, before Ivan spoke again.
“You seem upset,” he leaned back in his chair.
Her anger had not yet subsided, and so found a new target. “It’s been days.”
Ivan nodded. “We’re doing the best that we can.”
“No, you’re wasting your time,” Antje spat. “What is the phase…rearranging chairs on the Titanic? And what new information do you have today that you did not have yesterday?”
Ivan stood and walked to the side-table. “Me personally? Not much. I am assured, however, that our best analysts are making headway into deciding which of our four teammembers —”
“Bullshit,” Antje held out her hand for a drink. “Wasting time. Looking for scapegoats and assigning blame so you can cover you political asses.”
“We can walk and chew gum at the same time,” Ivan took a small sip of his own before shifting the papers on his desk, a feeble attempt to prove his protestation true.
Antje watched him for a moment before taking a quick sip. “You need to stop searching for the culprit.”
Ivan laughed. “I am certainly not going to suggest that.”
“You know its most likely Zuri.”
“Or Kristiana, yes, it seems likely, but likely isn’t proof, and we need proof.”
“It’s wasting time, time that would be better spent elsewhere. Finding a scapegoat, assigning blame, these are things that distract from the real goal.”
Ivan’s mouth twisted before he answered. “It may surprise you to know, Frau Seidel, but we aren’t looking for the culprit so we can throw her in jail when she gets back. You know everything about Noriama, but we have some of the best experts in the world on cryptography. Knowing who did this isn’t wasting our time, it’s imperative.”
Antje didn’t respond, giving Ivan the space to finish what he had to say. “If we know which of our four team-members did this, then we might be able to work out why. If we learn why, then we can figure out what their goals are. If we know that, then perhaps we can learn who has the key to this code. If this poem is part of the code, then knowing who chose the poem and why can only help us know where to go next.”
Ivan paused, his fervor spent. Antje spoke again. “We should be looking at the report. We should be seeing what they saw.”
Ivan took a deep breath. “We’ll see it,” he reassured her. “We’re recording the data-stream constantly, we won’t miss anything. It’s just a delay.”
“A delay,” Antje repeated. “If that is the purpose, if that’s all this is…If this is only an attempt to embarrass the URC, who would benefit?”
“Depends on your ideology,” Ivan leaned back in his chair. “In one sense, every nation on Earth would benefit, since the URC primarily exists to provide restraints to national self-interest. The EU, for example, would finally be able to accept Belarus’s application without suffering major trade sanctions. In another sense, everyone loses, because the strides made towards healing the planet only happened because a global authority provided a unified goal. Without the URC, the Seven Nations might have annexed India, or even part of the Austrilasian Hegemony…better? Worse?” He shrugged.
Antje frowned. “Someone wanted control of the information, and now they have it. What was the URC going to do with it when they had it?”
“Distribute it. Well, analyze it and remove any state-secrets, of course, but freely distribute the results of the mission. Do you think someone didn’t trust the URC would do that?”
“Then why encrypt the information? Surely our spy would have prevented encryption, so anyone in the world could see what was happening, and the information would already be distributed. No, someone wanted the URC to remain ignorant. They wanted to control the information. That makes them a very dangerous opposition.”
“How so?”
“It is one thing to control another’s actions. That is the basis of law and of civil society. To control what someone knows or can learn is to control how they think. To regulate the flow of information is the act of a tyrant, a slave-maker.”
Ivan placed a finger to his lips. “I’m not sure I agree entirely. After all, we regulate access to fascist tracts, racist literature, the EU has an entire wing of the Union Archives devoted to banned media deemed threatening to universal human rights. Would you call that tyranny?”
Antje didn’t respond at first. “When the rockets launched, I was sitting with Michael and watching them ascend into the sky. The last thing he said to me, before we picked up our things, was that this was our last chance. Humanity’s last chance. If the KAP didn’t succeed, we would never leave the solar system again.”
“Nonsense,” Ivan snorted. “Of course we’ll try again. It might take a long time, but this wasn’t our only chance.”
“That’s what I thought at the time,” she admitted. “Now, I understand what he meant. The KAP cost trillions in coin, and billions in work hours. A perfect storm of geo-political and -economic situations that made the impossible possible. It was time and energy spent on a project that didn’t get us anything of concrete value. Romantics might think otherwise, but any practical assessment of the situation is plain enough: Noriama was a waste of time. If the press starts reporting about the Lost Colony, whether or not it’s true, it will be generations before anyone in power will get the courage to try again, much less the desire or the means.”
Ivan nodded slowly. “You think we should get ahead of the story?”
It hadn’t been what she had meant. She wasn’t sure exactly what she had meant. It had flowed out of her, unbidden, drawn up through memories of Michael, champagne, and melancholy cynicism.
“I do,” she covered. “If this is a political ploy, whomever wanted the data-stream encrypted hasn’t released the information or acted publicly. Our best weapon is controlling the narrative.”
“Hmm.” Ivan scratched his forehead. “It’s too early. We still don’t have any idea about who did this or why. If we move too fast —”
Antje pointed a finger directly between Ivan’s eyes. “Years ago, the food riots started because of an information leak. Everyone in Europe panicked, and tried to figure out where the leak came from. Who was responsible? Who had been lax in their security? France didn’t bother with internal witch-hunts. They knew it didn’t matter whether the leak was connected to them or not, they needed to improve their security regardless. If you spend too much energy trying to figure out who did this, then we’ll not have enough energy to figure out what to do.”
With a heavy sigh, Ivan leaned back in his chair, staring at the ceiling.
Antje recognized the pose. “You already know what to do.”
“I think I do,” Ivan said, closing his eyes, “but my god, will it be a hard fight.”
“Well?” Antje demanded after entirely too long of a pause.
Ivan opened his eyes. “Why encrypt the data-stream with a code they knew we would throw at the Seven Nations’ AI? Somehow, whomever did this is certain the AIs won’t be able to decrypt the data-stream. So we need to find something else that can.”
“Such as?”
Ivan winced. “Such as people.”
“People?” Antje sneered. “There isn’t a person alive who can match an AI’s processor speed or power.”
“Not one, no,” Ivan nodded. “You’re right. We’ll need a lot of them. As many as there are, in fact.”
Connie Young looked around.
There was an art to journalistic observation. Her first lover had been a photographer, and their relationship had started one marijuana fueled evening after they compared notes on how they saw things. Not their world-view, but how they viewed the world.
Photographers, visual artists, and the like; they saw the world in lines and colors. A shallow observation, that took in only what was there. Shallow wasn’t the right word, of course. Nor was superficial, perfunctory, or cosmetic. All those words had connotations, and Connie was particularly sensitive to words with multiple meanings.
“Photography is subtractive,” her lover had said among plumes of blue smoke. “We take what’s there and crop out the chaff. The frame is everything in photography. When the picture reaches its edge, the mind either blanks, destroys everything past the boarder, or extends it beyond reality. Upward moving lines move on forever. Mountains become infinitely tall. forests move on forever. Horizons extend as far as you can see. We get rid of distractions, and focus the viewer on what’s important.”
“Well,” Connie exhaled at last, “Then I guess journalism is additive. We see what’s there, same as you, but then we add important things to it. Context. History. Details that aren’t visible to the naked eye, but exist all the same. We’re a conceptual medium. What you call distractions, I call important intangibles.”
They had fallen to giggling at her alliteration, but the idea had stuck with Connie well into her adulthood. Now, looking up at the buildings of the long defunct EUSAA offices as she made her way through security, found their retro style amusing, really. A sense of optimism about the future that had long since been considered quaint.
If they hadn’t been optimistic, though, could humanity have survived that turbulent era? The era of energy-rations and catastrophic climate?
Context. It was all about those invisible intangibles. The best journalists knew that all the important details were hidden, intentionally or not, and how to find them.
The EUSAA offices weren’t abandoned anymore. They had been re-purposed into any number of governmental purposes. Spare space to shove anything that wasn’t immediately or locally important. This was where politician’s pet projects went to die.
The perfect place to hide something.
Connie reclaimed her valuables from the security guards, and followed her escort towards the central building. The niggling intangible at the back of her mind kept bothering her: she wouldn’t be thinking like this if she hadn’t been invited.
No, it wasn’t the invitation that made her suspicious, it was who had invited her.
She’d dropped the ball, there was no avoiding it. If she had been paying more attention to EU political affairs, she might have noticed the subtle personnel changes, the misdirections, the minor increases in security…
As she stood in the elevator, she resolved to stop beating herself up over it. What was done was done, and by the time she was walking down the hallway towards Ivan’s offices, she felt as ready as she could be for whatever he might throw at her.
“Right here, ma’am,” the guard stepped to the side. The door was solid wood, with a thick paper sign slipped into the metal sign-frame. Ivan Fyodorov.
Connie paused for a moment to take a deep breath and tug on her shirt before pushing open the door. She always tugged on her shirt before walking into any room for an interview. It was her own little ritual; straightening and smoothing out all of the folds and little annoyances in her mind so she could focus on her subject and their responses.
She believed in these markers. Traditions. Transitions from one state of being to another. When she got into her car, she put on her tinted glasses, whether it was bright or not. When she sat down at her office desk in the morning, she sipped her black-tea with honey before her fingers made a move towards her computer. Her life was full of these signposts, guiding her along.
The room was small, with a long glass table and a couple of chairs. It looked like the office of any minor bureaucrat, and Connie didn’t believe an inch of it. Not with Ivan Fyodorov sitting in the opposite chair.
There was an old woman sitting in one of the chairs, twisting to look at Connie as she entered. She didn’t recognize the woman, but she had a firm businesslike air that suggested she had worked at her job for long enough to not care about politics.
She smiled internally. Whomever she was, she must have been driving Ivan up the wall.
“Mr. Fyodorov,” Connie gave her most professional smile as she stepped into the room, holding out her hand to shake. “A pleasure to see you again.”
“And you, Connie,” Ivan’s smile was the same. Exactly the same. It wasn’t fair. “This is Antje Seidel.”
Connie turned her smile to the old woman. It wasn’t returned. “Nice to meet you.”
“Have a seat,” Antje said.
With a glance at Ivan, Connie settled back into the chair. “Well, it has been a long time, hasn’t it?”
“Too long,” Ivan stood from his chair and walked to a small side-cabinet. “Can I pour you a drink?”
“I wouldn’t say no,” Connie admitted. I might not drink it until I know exactly why you asked me here, and I certainly won’t if neither you nor this Ms. Seidel are drinking…
Ivan sat down in his chair again, raising his own glass of scotch to his lips. He took a deep drink as Connie cupped her glass in her hands, smelling the rich peat. It had been a long time.
Antje didn’t make a move.
“We don’t get the good stuff on the mainland anymore,” Connie said, leaning back in her chair. “They’re certainly taking care of you here, aren’t they?”
Ivan took another swallow. “I couldn’t say.”
“I could,” Connie smirked. “You know, I took an interview with Leland Dagget not three weeks ago, and his office wasn’t half as polished as this one. He offered me water and called it whiskey. Now you…” She lifted the glass in a mocking toast.
Ivan flashed a smile. Antje still hadn’t moved. She was watching Connie like a hawk, skeptical and searching. I’m not here to impress you, Ms. Seidel, whomever you are.
Connie set her glass on the desk and pulled out her notebook. “So, what have you lost control of?”
Ivan blinked. “I’m sorry?”
Connie smiled, slowly slipping forward in her seat. “Ivan, you’re a known URC Liaison, working in the middle of an EU graveyard. I can think of seven other journalists off the top of my head who handle the EU beat. They know the people, the connections, they have the access, and you didn’t call a single one of them, you called me. It’s been over ten years, and you called me.”
Ivan glanced at Antje. Her face was like marble.
“So,” Connie leaned back again. “What’s the story?”
Ivan took a deep breath. “I can’t tell you that. Not yet.”
“Not yet?” Connie grinned as she reached for her glass. “What, you want to interview me first?”
“Yes.”
The glass froze on the way to Connie’s lips. After a moment, it lowered again. “Okay. I wasn’t expecting that, I’ll be honest.”
Ivan steepled his fingers, the same pose he had always struck. “You’re working for The Inquest now, isn’t that right?”
Connie’s lips tightened. “Ah. I’ll admit, Ivan, I expected better of you.”
“Are you surprised?” Ivan sneered. “Half The Inquest’s staff are signed members of the New Press. First and foremost, regardless of our history, we need to know if we can trust you.”
Connie’s mouth dropped open, then closed again. For a moment her jaw moved back and forth in frustration, followed by a sharp huff. “You know, this is exactly why the New Press is needed. When you say ’trust,’ you don’t mean trust me to uphold journalistic standards, you’re asking if I’ll betray my principles for yours. You’re asking for loyalty.”
Antje snorted from her seat, finally breaking her gaze to look at Ivan with an expectant stare.
Ivan took a deep breath. “You’re right. I am, because — No, no, because, listen to me — I need you to consider, just consider, that this might be a situation where your loyalty to the truth and loyalty to your profession as a journalist might be at odds.”
“Oh, Ivan,” his smile wasn’t the only thing that hadn’t changed, “are we having this argument again?”
“I’d rather we didn’t, but if you insist, I can break out all the old hits.”
“Right. Fine. For the sake of argument, even if you did finally manage to win the argument, I’d still advise you that if you don’t want something printed, don’t tell it to a journalist. You have a big old PR department smack dab in the middle of the EU campus. I’ve been there before. It’s a great place to put out press releases, and they know their business. You want to control a story, they should be your first call.”
Ivan licked his lips, tapped his spread fingers together in agitation. “The thing is, we don’t want this to come from the EU.”
He doesn’t like this any more than I do, Connie watched his hands. “Are you…giving me a leak?”
Antje laughed. “Hardly. We are not sources for you, Ms. Young. This entire meeting is off the record.”
Connie carefully sipped her scotch. “You know ‘off the record’ isn’t a thing for the New Press.”
Ivan cracked a mirthless smile. “We do. This is a bit of a risk for us.”
“Alright,” Connie set her glass down again, posing her pencil above her notebook. “Let’s start at the beginning. What is it, exactly that you want from me?
“We have a story,” Ivan winced, “that we need your help in distributing. You’ve been in the business for long enough that I presume your contact list is long and full of incredibly powerful editors.”
“I know my fair share,” Connie admitted. “You just want my contacts? I don’t buy it. You could call the desks of any number of publications, and if you have something newsworthy, they’d run it. Is this something boring? Deep politics stuff that only the invested will even care about?”
“It’s a puzzle,” Antje said.
Connie blinked. “Do you mean that…literally? Or…”
Ivan picked up a piece of paper from his desk and handed it over. “We’re working on decoding an encrypted message. We think that this may be part of the key.”
Connie took the paper and began to read. It was a poem, she could see that at once. She wasn’t particularly well versed in the art-form, so she scanned it like she would a press-brief, looking for important words or phrases that could clue her in to an appropriate line of questioning. It only took seconds for her to realize that would be a fruitless endeavor, and instead let her eyes wander sightlessly around the page. She was a fast reader — a necessity for her line of work — but had learned that pretending to read slowly could give her extra time to think.
Decoding an encrypted message means politics. Some foreign government…but Ivan is part of the URC. That means a small or poor country…but what country could create an encryption that the URC couldn’t break with the Seven Nation’s AIs?
Hold on…this is an old EU building. Are they targeting someone who is inside the URC? Can they not ask the Seven Nations for their AIs, either because they’re doing something illegal…or they’re targeting the Seven Nations themselves?
No, because if they’re distributing something to the press, they must know it will get back to whomever they’re trying to hide it from. They must not care if the encrypter knows its being worked on, just who is doing the work…
The more she thought, the less sense it made.
Adopting a bemused expression, Connie looked up at Ivan. “A poem? I don’t understand.”
“Nor do we,” Antje huffed. “The message came in two pieces; the code, and this.”
Connie began writing on her pad. Nothing useful, she could tell. Mostly just reiterating what had already been said, but it gave her time to think about what questions she needed to ask next.
“Let me make sure I have this right,” she said. “This poem is part of an encryption?”
“We think so,” Ivan nodded. “A fiendish one that our best AIs can’t crack. At least, not within any reasonable length of time.”
Time sensitive Connie wrote on her pad, and underlined it. “You should have got some poetry majors on staff,” Connie couldn’t help but joke. It was all so bizarre.
“We did,” Antje answered. “Apparently, the poem isn’t that subtle.”
“It was written by a Nigerian poet a couple generations ago, just before the EU food riots. It uses a hurricane and its aftermath as a metaphor for working together, and shared humanity,” Ivan explained. We’ve got a group of poetry professors from across the URC working on it still, looking for any hidden meaning that might have been missed, but as of right now, we’re stumped.”
“Then why are you talking to me?” Connie shook her head. “I don’t know a damn thing about decryption, let alone African Union poetry.”
“Because I…we think,” Antje sniffed, “that the poem isn’t part of the code. We think it’s part of the message.”
Connie looked at the poem again. “I’m not sure I follow you.”
“I didn’t either,” Ivan said, “but we have several smart people who agree. This isn’t something that we can brute force with AIs. We’d need more processor power than any region can spare.”
“So we need to borrow processor power from the most highly trained puzzle solving AIs in the world,” Antje smirked. “Puzzle fans.”
Connie barked a laugh. “Are you serious?” She looked back and forth between Ivan and Antje. They didn’t need to answer her. “Okay, let me be perfectly clear here; you want me to take this poem and give it to, what, the North American Star, have them print it in the entertainment section, and wait for someone to send you a decryption code?”
“That’s a pretty reductive way of putting it,’ Ivan said. “We’ll release access to a portion of the encrypted code as well.”
“What was deemed ‘politically safe?’” Connie cocked an eyebrow. Ivan, to his credit, looked embarrassed. “Good god, Ivan, do we need to have this argument again?”
Ivan snorted. “Believe me, there have been a lot of arguments about what we can and cannot release. Don’t think you can give me something I haven’t heard yet, because we’ve heard it all.”
“Here’s one for you; it’ll never work.”
“It’s worked before,” Ivan shrugged. “The zodiac killer, for one famous example.”
“Yes, but that worked only because they had all the information,” Connie countered. “If you just hand out a code and a poem to the world and ask ‘what does this mean,’ you’re not going to be happy with your results.”
“What’s the alternative?” Antje asked.
Connie wasn’t sure whether the woman’s tone was scornful or expectant. “Release it all.”
“All…all what?”
“Everything. The whole code. You ever try to complete a jigsaw puzzle with a third of the pieces?”
“Of course not. And don’t pretend like you have either.”
“Of course I haven’t. It’s a dumb idea.”
“I know that, and you know that, but if this works and we get a decryption code from the public, then they’ll have access to the entire transmission, and that was deemed unacceptable.”
“‘Was deemed?’” Connie pointed a finger. “It may have been years since we’ve spoken, but I still remember your tells. You don’t agree.”
Ivan sat back in his chair. After a moment he stood again, picking up his empty glass and holding out a hand for Connie’s. She gave it to him without hesitation.
“If we’re in the realm of poetic metaphor as a code,” Ivan began as he refilled the glasses, “there’s no telling what’s important. The problem is the…what did you call it?”
Antje shifted in her seat. “The pressynique.”
Connie looked back and forth between the two of them. “The what?”
“It’s a Northern EU phrase,” Antje grimaced. “Presse Cynique. It is what we call it when the press…” she waved her hand, searching for the proper description. “It’s an avalanche of smugness. Suddenly, those who said it wouldn’t work were always right, and everyone is instantly smarter than the people who failed. Even those who’ve been proven wrong.”
“Connie,” Ivan handed her a refilled glass, “you know as well as I do that the New Press is…idealistic at best. I’m all for keeping investigative news free from undue influence, but you can’t report a story without having a viewpoint. Even the act of choosing which story to write is impacted by the reporter’s biases. We have a story that needs to be told, and it needs to be told right.”
Connie took the glass from him. “Good god, Ivan, you aren’t asking for a small favor, are you? That goes against everything journalism stands for.”
“Does it? Remember Malta? We can have the same argument all over again, about what is and isn’t fit to print.”
“Ivan, Ivan,” Connie pressed a hand to her mouth. “You still don’t get it. That’s what the New Press is fighting for: freedom from social pressures and politics. A radical honesty. Unassailable facts from clear and established perspectives. I wasn’t saying your PR wasn’t fit to print, I was saying it wasn’t news.”
Ivan smiled. “So you are a member of the New Press?”
Connie paused, her smile shifting. “Let’s just say I haven’t signed anything. You’re still asking me to get involved in a story. I can’t do that. You know why I can’t.”
Antje coughed once, setting her drink aside. “How about we tell you the facts, off the record, and explain why we need your help. Then you can decide whether or not you help us.”
“You do remember that ‘off-the-record’ isn’t a thing for the New Press, right?” Connie said.
Antje’s smile was chilly. “Oh, I know, but you haven’t signed anything, have you?”
Connie took another drink, and shrugged. “Fine. But if I don’t like what I hear, I’m going to talk to one of my colleagues and set them sniffing, so be careful with what you tell me.”
They weren’t careful. Or perhaps they were. Connie wasn’t sure which worried her more. By the time the story was told, she had stopped writing in her pad and finished her second glass of scotch.
“You think she’s a foreign agent?” Connie asked, the first obvious question.
“We don’t care at the moment,” Ivan said. “If she is or she isn’t doesn’t change the fact that we need to decrypt the transmission.”
“You don’t think her political allegiances might be important?” Connie pointed at the poem. “Her sympathies might be an important clue.”
“This is already more political than it should be,” Ivan shook his head, “If we bring inter-regional conflict into it…you know as well as I do that a whiff of scandal will clog up the front pages for months.”
“Ah, yes,” Connie leaned back, the scotch loosening her tongue. “The old scandal-ridden muddy-rags routine. I’ve heard it before, usually in an attempt to discredit a well-supported story that could end a promising official’s career.”
“We need your help,” Antje interrupted. “We need a world project. Not the URC, not the governments all working together, but a truly worldwide endeavor. The data-stream has so far bested the Seven Nations’ best AI, but there must be billions of people who love a good puzzle. The people working together. The last time this world worked together was on the KAP. Now, it can work together again.”
Connie rocked her head back and forth. “Crowd-source it? What was that about the pressynique? The problem with crowd-sourcing is the lack of quality control. Bad-faith actors can twist anything.”
“Let them try,” Antje shrugged. “We’ll call them on it. Tell them that if they don’t want to help, then just let the people who do think for themselves.” She took a deep breath “I know there is no love lost between the politicians and the press, least of all the New Press. You know there are awful journalists just like I know there are terrible politicians. But I think you might be surprised as to how many people want stories about how, for all our differences, the world can still work together.”
Connie winced. She hadn’t wanted to listen. She was a journalist. She had her ideals, which primarily consisted of viewing politicians as the enemy. She hadn’t expected such a compelling argument.
“Could you tell that story?” Antje asked. Then: “please?”
Connie set down her glass. “Son of a bitch.” Ivan and Antje looked at each other as Connie rubbed her forehead. “You bastard, you’ve been playing me.”
Ivan gave a small smile. “Maybe a little.”
Antje finally took a drink from her glass.
Progress.
The word rippled across the world like a thunderclap. A young girl in Tanzania had, after repeated attempts and public access to a trained AI subsystem, accidentally stumbled across a pattern in the stochastic noise that was the Croatoan’s data-stream. The AI, trained to repair and restore sound and video from degraded or eroded storage systems — cleaning up static, bleed, and the like — caught itself in an endless loop.
Trained for mindfulness, the rudimentary AI knew to constantly check the data it was cleaning, ensuring it removed the noise from data, and not the other way around. After two hours, the girl realized the AI was caught in a loop, as no matter what it extracted, it recognized both noise and signal as valuable data.
It was blindingly simple, and horrifically effective. Zuri had combined two transmissions over each other, perfectly intermingled into one cacophonous data-stream. With the news, all across the world, hobbyists and puzzle-masters waited with baited breath while those with the means trained new AIs to separate them.
Antje set down the paper on her lap. “It was that simple?”
“Well, the report makes it sound much more simple than it was, apparently,” Ivan scratched at his nose. “That’s the layman’s version. Once there were two separate data-streams to contend with, a lot of the work done with the poem made more sense. Apparently Zuri used the stresses of the poem’s syllables to alternate between the two streams in a…oh, lord, don’t make me sound dumber than I already do. The point is, we never would have been able to decode anything until an AI unsophisticated enough to make mistakes found the divergent data.”
“I’ll take your word for it,” Antje grimaced. “I take it you haven’t finished decoding the streams yet, or else you’d be pouring over the reports.”
“Oh, we finished some of it.” Ivan’s head rolled, streching out the kinks. “We’ve decoded the Croatoan’s report on the ore-freighter.”
“That’s all?”
Ivan gave a grimace. “Once the freighter had passed by, she changed the code. Now a portion of the data-stream is devoted to a conglomerate of stanzas from twenty-three epic poems from across world history. Some puzzle-masters are claiming its a code-key for the new encrypted part of data-stream. Others think the transmission itself is using some kind of visual encoding. Or symbolic anti-logic, or theological allegory, or a red herring, or that there’s another transmission buried in it…and our AIs are still useless, because you can’t train one to decipher a poem.”
Antje chuckled. “Which ever one of them is causing the trouble, they certainly used their years of down-time to their advantage.”
“I’m glad you find it amusing,” Ivan stood up from his desk.
“I do, in fact,” Antje watched as Ivan paced back and forth. “You, on the other hand, seem a little perturbed.”
“Of course I am!” Ivan snapped. “It’s been months, and we have no idea what’s happening. Happened. Whichever it is. I’ve been sitting here with nothing to do except soak up all the bile from URC officials and deflect demands for explanations that I don’t have.”
Antje waited while Ivan took a deep breath. “Sounds to me like you’re feeling useless.”
Ivan looked at the old woman. “You aren’t?”
“You need to stop thinking of yourself like a mission commander. There’s no such thing as current events in space. It’s all archaeology.”
“I was never one for ancient history.”
“You’d better learn fast, because that’s all you’re ever going to get. This freighter business, for example. Noriama launched the freighter four years ago. That’s fifteen years after we launched the Croatoan, almost eighteen years after we first tried to re-establish contact through the OLCR. That leaves us a lot of questions. Why so long between losing contact and launching the freighter? What happened during those eighteen years? If they can launch a freighter, why can’t they talk to us?”
“We have a lot of time to find the answers to those questions. I don’t think you honestly expect me to have an answer right now.”
“Good. You’re on the right track. What don’t you know?”
Ivan rubbed his forehead. “We don’t know if the freighter was launched by an automated process or by humans. Noriama could have died twenty years ago, and an automated AI launched the freighter.”
“There!” Antje pointed at his face with a twig-like finger. “There! You’re missing the important questions already! Why did they send a freighter at all?”
“According to the Noriama Compact, they agreed to send —”
“So what?” Antje flopped back in her chair. “Why does the Compact matter? Do you realize how much effort and resources it must have taken for Noriama to build the freighter in the first place? Life on Noriama was a daily battle for survival. Constructing a space-worthy freighter, building engines, programming a flight computer, That’s time and energy that could have gone into farming. Building a sustainable ecosystem. Breeding. Why bother with sending us a pile of rocks? What would happen if they decided to not send a freighter laden with gold, spices, and tantalum? Would we send soldiers? Fire missiles that won’t reach them for over five hundred years?”
Ivan frowned. He’d never actually thought about it too carefully. In the brief moments where he’d been uncertain, he’d always hoped that the colonists hadn’t thought about it too carefully either. “What do you think is on the freighter?” He asked.
“Good!” Antje barked. “Now we’re getting somewhere. Can we assume for the moment that it might, in fact, contain anything?”
“No,” Ivan wasn’t going to let himself be baited into absurdities. “We know some things for sure, based on the ship’s velocity and heat emissions.”
“Such as?”
Ivan stared at Antje for a moment before sighing. “Has anyone ever told you that it’s hard to tell if you’re leading or sincere with your questions?”
“My parents were Educators.” Antje smiled — the first clearly sincere one Ivan had ever seen. He couldn’t help but return one of his own.
Ivan pulled up the report on his computer. “We know the length of the engine’s initial burn and current velocity. Based on the amount of acceleration from the initial burn, we know its mass. We know its current heading, and surface vibration frequency, which can tell us how much mechanical equipment is currently active inside the ship. We know its rate of radiation emission, which tells us how much electrical equipment is functioning.”
“Good,” Antje nodded. “What does that tell us?”
“The freighter accelerated at a rate inconsistent with the expected delta of the initial burn. Either the engine has a higher maximum acceleration, or the freighter’s mass was reduced from mission standard.”
“So why not fill it? Did they not want to? Or maybe they couldn’t?”
Ivan frowned, and then leaned forward. “Perhaps a catastrophe hit twenty years ago, and the mining operations stopped. That would be consistent with an automated launch.”
“A possibility,” Antje nodded, her eyes twinkling. “What else do we know?”
“There are vibrations and emissions greater than expected from the L-M5 drive alone. There is machinery running, probably the ship’s reactor powering the computer system.”
“A reactor large enough to create microvibrations and heat noticeable next to a rocket engine? That’s a bit excessive for powering a tiny computer driving a space-truck. Why fill a freighter with a powerful reactor when you’re not filling it with minerals? What would be useful for a hundred-year journey to earth?”
Realization hit Ivan like a lightning bolt. “You think it’s a lifeboat?”
“It could be,” Antje shrugged. “If they had to leave in a hurry, the Noriamans may have been able to mock up a serviceable CELSS and reactor to keep themselves alive for a hundred-year journey back to earth. I dare say it would be quite a desperate act. They would need a precise number of humans to provide the correct amount of waste products to keep the process going.”
“That’s absurd,” Ivan shook his head. “The freighters weren’t designed for carrying living things. They’re just large boxes; they would need to fill hundreds of thousands of square meters with oxygen, to say nothing of the energy required to keep the temperature livable. Besides, the modern CELSS wasn’t even invented back when the KAP was launched.”
“Perhaps not, but we invented one, why couldn’t they?”
“It would be a waste of time, the same point you made before. The goal was always for the colony to be its own life support system. We only invented the CELSS in the Croatoan for footprint reasons. If space and mass aren’t an issue, it’s safer and more reliable to have a full garden deck as big as a town. Why waste time inventing something smaller? And…” he flipped to the appropriate page of the report. “…/if/ they managed to invent and implement their own CELSS before launch, the heat generated would light the freighter up like a fireball. Hell, the cabin-temperature alone would be two-hundred eighty kelvin, and we’re not seeing anything like that level of heat from the freighter.”
“I question your skepticism of their abilities, but fine,” Antje spread her arms. “How about hibernation cells? They could have found a way to put their people to sleep for a hundred years without permanent damage. Could the reactor be powering those?”
“Now you are making assumptions,” Ivan pointed an accusatory finger. “If we are imagining technologies they may have discovered, why not an army of robots sent to destroy the earth?”
“Why not indeed?” Antje’s smile was sad. “We don’t know for sure. We won’t, until the freighter finds its way into our orbit.”
Ivan sighed, pressing his fingers into his forehead. The more he thought about it, the more problems arose. “Everything in this report, it happened years ago. We’re only hearing about it now.”
“The tyranny of space travel,” Antje smirked. “It’s a bitch.”
Ivan ran his hands through his hair. “Did you ever have the feeling that it was hopeless, when you were in government?” he asked, aimlessly rocking his chair back and forth a bit. “The freighter will enter Earth orbit, we’ll crack it open, and if its full of colonists, we’ll have all the answers we want.”
“Possibly,” Antje nodded. “If the freighter enters Earth orbit.”
Ivan closed his eyes for a moment before opening them again. “Alright, Frau Seidel, you made your point.”
“Have I?” Antje stood up, collecting her cane. “I’ve dealt with governments, corporations, and global players for most of my adult life, Ivan, and I know how much goes wrong the instant anyone thinks they know what’s going on. If we spend our time guessing and coming up with theories, we might miss something important, something that contradicts what we think we know. This is archaeology, Ivan. If we come up with answers, they’ll be wrong. We need to let the answers come to us.”
“I don’t think I’ll ever understand how you can be so blase about not knowing.”
“I don’t have a choice.” Antje paused at the door. “You know, you’re lucky. We’re going to keep decrypting the transmission, probably slower than we’d like, but steadily nonetheless. We know the information is there, and time is the only thing seperating us. You may live long enough to learn those answers for certain. I probably won’t be alive to see the end of this. I’ll certainly be dead long before the freighter ever reaches our solar-system.”