Noriama: Chapter 11
Lemon awoke.
Anthropomorphizing was frowned upon in the AI sciences. Even the most advanced AIs couldn’t be recognized as having agency, or advanced cognitive functions beyond that of, say, a particularly clever lizard.
Even the word ‘intelligence’ was somewhat taboo among trainers. It was a weasel word, an amorphous suggestion that something real was being described, when there was no such thing. There was no such thing as Artificial Intelligence, there was only complex computer algorithms that imitated adaptability. Artificial Learning was a far more accurate term. (Though behind closed doors there was still debate if Arificial Adaptation was more appropriate, but that brought in questions about the difference between artificial and ‘real’ adaptation, and whether or not Inorganic Adaptation was the best term, usually countered with the socratic suggestion that costal erosion was also inorganic adaptation, and by that time the convention panel had gone an hour over their scheduled time and everyone was too tired or hungry to make coherant arguments.)
Zuri couldn’t help it. After the Lemon AI had remaining trapped in the Croatoan for so long, to finally allow it to reach out into Noriama’s computer system felt like unlocking a caged beast.
Acquiring data from Noriama’s computer would be a delicate affair: over fifty years of diverted development had occurred since the KAP had launched: there was no certainty that the Croatoan and Noriama systems would even be able to communicate with each other.
Lemon was Zuir’s solution. She had trained it for over twenty years in the Croatoan’s central computer, feeding it a kind of ’lock and key’ model. Rather than teaching Lemon different computer communication protocauls, she trained it to recognize what computer systems “looked” like.
Like a viscous liquid, Lemon would be able to infiltrate the Colony’s computer and fit itself into place without modifying or even alerting the underlying system to its presence. It adopted protocols and circumvented security. It was able to decipher code and learn what a program did without running it. Without any fore-knowledge, Lemon could be introduced into any recognizable computer system and learn its every process, inside and out.
On Earth, Lemon’s very existence would have been considered an act of war.
While the Croatoan began its slow docking procedure, Zuri transmitted Lemon to the station’s computer. Zuri watched as the AI spread through the hardware, creating a perfect map of the station’s computer system.
It took less than an hour for Lemon to fill every nook and cranny. Zuri had worked with a Computational-historian once, early in their carreers. He had been fascinated with how electronic systems evolved over time, and she knew — once he had access to the data — he would be head over heels delighted to compare the differences between Earth-computing and Noriama-computing. He would only be mildly disappointed to see how similar they were.
Zuri, however, was disappointed for another reason.
“The whole system was wiped,” She explained once she was certain. “No records, no operating system, no nothing.”
“Can you get any of it back?” Victoria asked.
“No,” Zuri answered immediately. “Data is all zeros and ones, and the station hard drives are nothing but zeroes. Every partition, every sector. Gone.” She raised a finger to keep Kristiana from interrupting as she continued. “The good news is the hardware is all fine. Lemon’s already finished building a connection protocol between the Croatoan and all the station’s systems. Once the colony is up and running, we’ll be able to connect directly.”
“That’s excellent,” Kristiana nodded. “What can you do with the station?”
“Everything, really,” Zuri smiled. “Lemon’s already checked the recyclers, so we can get life support up and running.”
“We shouldn’t,” Sughouri shook her head. “The Croatoan’s CELSS is precisely calibrated. We have a little leeway, but not enough to fill both the Croatoan and the station. We’d suffocate before we got anything done.”
“They must have reserves,” Victoria pointed out. “If we use their emergency supply, we could use that to provide a breathable atmosphere in the station.”
“Sure, but is that worth the effort?” Sughouri asked, rubbing one of her eyebrows. “How much time are we going to spend on the station? For that matter, what state are the recyclers in?”
“Lemon can’t tell us that,” Zuri shrugged. “No maintenance logs.”
“Of course not,” Sughouri sighed. “Well, I can tell you they’re certainly not as good as our CELSS. At best they’d allow us to work on the station without needing suits, but I don’t know what the Station has that we don’t have better.”
Kristiana pursed her lips. “Let’s suffer without, for the moment and if we need to turn on the life-support for some reason, we can reassess. In the meantime, we need to do a complete sweep of the station.”
It took a full week for Sughouri to fully catalog and document everything she found in the station. Victoria had offered to come along, but Kristiana had refused. It was far more important that she monitor Sughouri’s heath then speed up the expedition.
“Everything is still in working order,” Sughouri explained afterward, “but there’s no pattern. Some modules were shut down and closed up properly, others were just left. Even the backup atmosphere supply is missing. Not a single tank of oxygen.”
“It’s a good thing, in one sense,” Victoria said. “Everything we’re seeing is purposeful, even if we don’t see the purpose. There’s no clutter, no disorder…whatever happened wasn’t panicked. If the colonists decided to close up shop on the station, it would look pretty much like this.”
“Excepting the computer systems,” Kristiana countered. “If they were shutting down operations, why wipe the computer? Why move the black box down to the planet’s surface? Why stop communicating with Earth?”
At least with this question, they were no closer to any answers.
Ordinarily, Kristiana would have asked for consensus of what to do next, but there was no need. Perhaps if the black box had told them everything, explaining away every question they had, they might have been able to turn around for earth then and there, but no: With the station being little more than a dead end, there was only one place left to look.
The elevator had been constructed from one of the original KAP rockets. It was, in practicality, a tall circular warehouse that surrounded the thick cable that stretched down towards Proxima b. Most of the space was for cargo, but the top of the rocket had been re-purposed into a small transit section, suitable for providing up to fifty people a speedy, if uncomfortable journey to and from the planet below.
The journey itself was facilitated through the central cable itself. Rather than using mechanical winching, the cable had been constructed as a powerful magnetic rail, capable of accelerating and breaking the rocket through a series of powerful electronic pulses. In principle, it was similar to the process that had brought the Croatoan to Proxima: attractive forces would pull the elevator along at a constant acceleration before switching direction and slowing the elevator down again. It was only possible due to the incredible power of the Chisaisan fusion reactors on Noriama Station and in the colony below.
What it meant in practical terms was that the trip from Noriama Station to Noriama Colony, with an empty elevator, would take less than two days of travel. Blindingly fast, according to Sughouri.
Two days.
The waiting was the hardest part for Victoria. She was starting to feel the excitement she felt before an emergency; her breath was quick and her heart-beat fast…if she had not been herself, she would have seriously considered demanding she take a few days bed-rest to calm down before continuing with the mission.
Sughouri and Zuri had it easier; They both had the time to run diagnostics and tests on CHR-3, the remote drone nexus they had brought along to be their first entrant into Noriama Colony proper. Sending a team-member was an unnecessary risk, considering that Wolf had been specially trained by Zuri to perform exploratory functions in unknown locations.
The CHR-3 was a simple piece of equipment, though complex in its design. The CHR-3 was, in fact, twelve separate robotic drones connected to a thirteenth mother-drone. No bigger than a footstool, the twelve modules were outfit with bespoke wheel/track/foot hybrids that allowed for swift and steady movement over uneven terrain. They had telescoping and adjustable limbs and manipulators that were equally suited to heavy lifting and fine detail work. Modular composition allowed each to be refit with repair tools, intricate sensor suites, or any number of complex equipment kits.
The nexus was a heavy-duty computer and drive system, as big as a large dog. It communicated and coordinated the entire team, turning twelve automated drones into a squad of highly proficient engineers, medics, repair-units, or anything else that was required.
The whole CHR-3 nexus would be controlled and piloted by Zuri’s Wolf AI. The option of providing each team member their own automated human-shaped drone to pilot from orbit was quickly squashed when the two-second communication delay — the amount of time it would take for a command to travel from orbit to surface followed by the returning visual signal — would make any fine-motor work almost impossible. It was simply more efficient for an un-monitored AI to make decisions on its own, rather than wait for human input.
Of course, the team could take control at any time in an emergency, but ideally, Wolf had been trained well enough to make that a rare occurrence.
Before long, Sughouri and Zuri were satisfied with both Wolf’s and the CHR-3’s performance, and Victoria and Kristiana carried “Churji,” as Sughouri insisted on nick-naming it, into Noriama station.
‘Guided’ was perhaps more accurate. With the twelve drones attached, CHR-3 was almost as big as a couch. Without perceptible gravity, the nexus could be set in motion with a gentle push; but because it was so massive, they needed to move the nexus slowly, lest it move too quickly and crash into something vital.
Finally, they maneuvered Churji into the space-elevator. Here, Sughouri had installed a home-base for the nexus. Of primary importance was the combination recharge station and communications relay, which would provide the nexus energy through the central cable, as well as a direct connection to the station’s computer system, and the Croatoan by extension.
The relay was required because the whole of the colony was constructed deep underground. Mission Central had been quite clear about it back on earth during the briefings: Geological domes and above-ground structures had significant benefits, but none of them compared to the benefits of building a colony beneath the surface of the planet.
The first problem sub-surface colonization solved was temperature. Without an atmosphere, the planet had no reliable means of distributing heat across the planet’s surface. In addition, the planet was tidal locked, and the permanent dark side of Proxima b never reached temperatures above two hundred degrees Celsius.
Heating the colony would be possible, but problems of heating always arose hand in hand with problems of insulation. Without something to keep the heat trapped, whether atmosphere or expensive synthetic covering, any heat used to keep the colonists alive would vanish again with alarming speed into the cold void of space.
Another problem caused by lack of atmosphere was one Victoria had never considered; meteorites. Earth was subjected to thousands of meteorite strikes per year, but almost none of them made it past the thick atmosphere intact. Without an atmosphere, meteorites had nothing to burn up in; they would strike Proxima b with more than enough force to cause cracks, fissures, or holes the size of coconuts in the life-sustaining skin of a habitat module.
Proxima b solved many problems by offering its skin to the Colony’s walls. A thick bed of minerals provided a cheap and effective method of insulation, as well as defense against space rocks. Air-leaks were at a drastically reduced risk, and solar radiation normally absorbed by the atmosphere was avoided. Communication between the colony and the station was carried out through the cable of the space-elevator.
The only downside was the complex mining operations necessary to build the colony in the first place. The KAP planned two full years of constant work before every colonist was safely housed within the air-tight subsurface rooms of Noriama.
The rest of the nexus’s home-base was the collection of modular tools that Churji could swap in and out of its twelve drones, depending on the situation on the planet. It also had a quick-release system that would keep the nexus safely fixed to the floor during the descent. Once Churji was seated in this housing, and Victoria and Kristiana were back on the Croatoan, Zuri told Lemon to activate the elevator.
They could feel the vibrations in the walls of the station. In two days, the elevator would reach the planet’s surface, and they would get their first look inside Noriama. They couldn’t watch the elevator descend. There were no windows.
Two days. It was pure torture.
It shouldn’t have been, but there were the bio-stats on Victoria’s screen. Elevated blood-pressure. Increased respiration. Everyone on the team was in a state of heightened stress. Nerves, excitement, there was no telling for certain. She ordered all of them, herself included, to take a psilocyben vacation for an hour, just to keep their stress levels manageable.
They had spent far longer than two days waiting on their journey to Proxima from Earth, but Victoria knew well the difference a matter of scale could make. The human brain was poorly equipped to handle long-term perception. When they left Earth, Proxima was three years away.
It had thrown Victoria at first. On earth, small distances could be measured in meters or kilometers. In the solar system, kilometers still worked, though even larger measures, like Astronomical Units — the average distance from the Earth to the Sun — were useful.
Once other solar systems were involved, however, a new standard was required. With such astronomical distances, measuring with kilometers or even AUs stopped being practical. It became far more effective to measure with time. The truth was, with inertia no longer being a factor, once you charted a course through deep space, the issue wasn’t whether a ship would be able to reach its destination, but how long it would take to do so.
Would humanity have bothered if the journey wasn’t only fifty some years? Who would have climbed into the KAP rockets if they knew they would not live to see Proxima b?
Now the colony was only two days away. In two days, the doors would be opened and they would get their first view of Humanity’s first excursion beyond the solar system. They would delve into the secrets of the lost colony below, and discover the truth about Noriama’s radio silence.
Two days. Even though there had been nothing between Earth and Proxima except empty space, the Colony had been little more than a dream for the entire journey. Now…
“Why geostationary?” Victoria asked as she settled back after her vacation. Even with the tingling memories of psilocyben still in her brain, she was desperate to fill the empty time with more than her language lessons. “Why on the dark side of Proxima b?”
“Safety,” Kristiana answered, her eyes still closed. “You’ve heard Proxima Centauri is an active star, right?”
“I heard it called volatile.”
“It’s that too. Proxima Centauri is a red dwarf, which means it’s smaller, dimmer, and denser than our own sun, and by a lot. A seventh of the diameter, point seventeen percent as bright, and forty seven cubic kilos per meter compared to the sun’s one point four.”
Victoria blinked at the numbers. “Okay, so it’s smaller and dimmer. What does that have to do with volatility?”
“Solar physics. Since it’s smaller, the inside of the star is more convective than radiative; that means the core’s heat moves to the outer shell by moving molecules rather than photons or thermal conduction. The hot stuff pushes outward, rather than staying put and heating the colder outer shell.”
“So that’s what volatile means? It’s innards are moving more?”
“It’s more what those moving innards do. All the hot plasma is boiling up from the core, and that generates a magnetic field. That field builds up until it releases in the form of a solar flare, and because there’s a lot of moving plasma, these flares can get as big as Proxima Centauri itself, and hotter than our own sun. And it’s active. At least ninety percent of Proxima Centauri’s surface is active at any time. These flares are strong and constant enough to blow away a planet’s atmosphere: over two thousand times the solar wind we get on Earth.”
“Sounds dangerous.”
“It is, but Proxima b has a strong magnetic field, and that does a pretty good job of deflecting the worst of it. Not enough for the station or the colony, of course, so they planted Noriama Colony as close to the terminator line as they could, while still shielding Noriama Station from the solar wind.”
“I see,” Victoria nodded. She paused only a moment. “Where are Sughouri and Zuri?”
Kristiana paused for a half second. “Sleeping quarters.”
A small part of Victoria which held on to an ancient and outdated view of the world marveled that Sughouri and Zuri were in any way compatible, considering their differences in age. But age mattered less these days, or rather, the days during which they had left Earth. They mattered even less now.
“Are you interested?”
Victoria blinked. All four of the team had involved themselves with each other over the journey, but Kristiana had never offered.
“I don’t know,” she admitted.
“Alright,” Kristiana sighed. “I’m just so bored.”
Victoria laughed. Had she not been ace herself, she might have been offended; but she knew the feeling, the draw that physical touch and intimacy held without the need for sexual contact.
A moment later, Victoria stood up from her seat. “Okay,” she said. “Just holding.” Was it because she was bored too? Or did she truly need to feel some connection with Kristiana, with anyone, beyond the nominal intimacies of casual conversation? She didn’t know. She couldn’t know. In the end, she truly didn’t care.
Kristiana nodded. “Just holding.”
Ivan was, at his heart, a bureaucrat. He knew this. He knew how to handle the twisted nets of red-tape that filled any organization of people working towards a collective goal.
He was not a politician. Politicians knew people, and social networks. They knew how to handle awkward social situations with style and aplomb. They knew how to influence people.
Ivan’s comfort with papers and reports didn’t mean, however, that he couldn’t read a room, it just meant he didn’t know how to affect it. It meant, more or less, that while he could feel the icicles forming in the air between Antje and Connie the instant she walked in the room, he couldn’t do anything about it but sit and watch. It had made the moments before Connie arrived an exercise in helpless anxiety.
“What are you going to tell this little reporter of yours when she arrives?” Antje asked. Even after so long, she refused to call her by name when she wasn’t around.
“She’s already here,” Ivan muttered. “She’s going through security right now.”
“Well, thank you for correcting me. What are you going to tell her?”
Ivan’s answer was preempted by a buzzing from his intercom. Ivan didn’t respond, simply walked from the sideboard to the door, and opening it with a swift and smooth movement.
Connie smiled broadly. “Well, well. It has been a long time, hasn’t it? Antje, I didn’t expect you to be here.”
“No? I can leave if you wish.”
“Not at all.” Connie set her coat on the back of her chair and flopped into it. “This won’t take long, I hope.” She pulled out a recorder and set it on the table. “Okay, same as before. What was the final key to the puzzle?”
Ivan crossed back to his desk. “A professor in Canada brute-forced a solution to the hieroglyphic portion of the code. Using the pattern discovered by a Ugandan team, she applied the one to the other, and used the resulting pattern as the basis for the Weissburn method to unlock the transmission.”
“I swear, this girl,” Connie shook her head. “You ever think about Mr. Weissburn? Figured out a pattern Zuri used as the first encryption, and because she keeps using it to make her keys, his name is going to go down in history.”
“I’m more concerned about the history of the Croatoan,” Antje muttered.
Connie’s smile flickered. “So, that’s how we got here, where is ‘here?’ What is in this new decrypted portion of the datastream?”
“A lot of the same scientific data,” Ivan answered. “We’re already preparing a package to distribute.”
Connie pinched her nose. “Do we have to go through this every time?”
Ivan sat down. “What do you mean?”
“I mean this…” she waved her hand, “purposeful obtuseness. I know, I know you think public opinion is beneath you, that the plebeian layfolk don’t deserve to be involved with your work, but if you don’t open up about —”
“They don’t,” Antje snapped. “You don’t get to tell your doctor how to perform surgery, and knowing how good they are with their dog doesn’t make them better or worse at their job.”
“No,” Connie snapped back, “but if they’re going through a messy divorce or other significant emotional trauma, you might want to know that before letting them operate on your brain! I know you think ‘human interest’ isn’t important. I’m telling you, if all you have for the public is star luminosity readings, they’re going to turn away, and get back to their own lives. If you want the Croatoan — if you want Noriama to be important…Look, there are people who love a puzzle, there are people who love space, there are people who love a fad. The people who don’t fall into those categories need a good story, or they’ll start to sour. Once that happens, they’ll look for alternate stories, and that’s when the cynics will start gaining more of their coveted attention. They’ll start telling the truth, and your narrative will collapse.”
“The truth?” Antje asked. Ivan felt his skin prickle.
Connie either didn’t hear Antje’s tone, or she didn’t care. “Sorry, but facts are the facts, and all the context in the world won’t change that if Noriama is missing, the KAP was a failure.”
“Damn it, child,” Antje spat, “We put two hundred colonists on a planet four light-years away. You calling that a failure is exactly the kind of hackery we’re trying to prevent.”
“How much did the KAP cost?” Connie spat back. “How many resources were spent on this URC vanity project? What if that effort had been spent on the poorest countries in the world? Uplifted the poor? Stabilized quake-shaken regions? Built wind- and water-breaks, re-fortified cities, provided medical care to the millions who needed it?” Connie took a breath. “The URC made a choice. It took a risk. Now it needs to accept the consequences of its choices.”
“Ah, and I bet you can weather those consequences quite comfortably, can’t you?” Antje hissed. “Let me tell you something. It’s all well and good when you don’t have responsibilities beyond your next paycheck, but officials like us have to think about the future, have to work for the people who hate us, and do what’s best for the whole!”
“Why is it your job to decide for other people?”
Ivan looked back and forth between the two women. He had seen Antje angry before, and he recognized the twitch in Connie’s jaw; she was in her ‘holy crusader’ mode, looking for rhetorical blood, rather than the truth.
Thankfully, Antje caught herself before continuing the fight. She paused and took a deep breath before shifting in her seat to a more relaxed position. “We can debate the consent of the governed all day, but that’s not why you’re here.”
“No,” Connie answered back. “No, I’m here to help you craft a story. Do you know half the reason the world is gripped by Zuri’s code? Because she’s an antagonist. If this code had just been created by an AI, no one would care. The URC, Noriama, The Croatoan, the EUSAA, these are things. Institutions. Faceless, cold, inanimate systems that are as inscrutable as they are bureaucratic. Asking the populous to sympathize or identify with them is a losing strategy. We’re a social species, and have evolved to connect to fellow humans. We need to steer the conversation away from systems, and connect to people.”
“You want biographies? Access to officials and politicians who were involved every step of the way?” Ivan asked.
“No, that day is long past. Things are too interconnected; I could do an interview a day and it’d take years before I was half finished, and no one would pay attention; too many faces becomes featureless noise. No, we need symbols. Singular people who represent everything from a particular viewpoint. A parable, if you like.”
“So…me,” Ivan said. “Me and Antje.”
“For example, but that’s only half the story.” Connie took a deep breath. “Most of the human-interest value of the original colonists was mined out half a century ago. No one is interested in clerks or analysts. They want the people on the front lines. They want the action. I want the full dossier on each member of the rescue team.”
“No.” Antje was firm.
“It’s the perfect setup,” Connie protested. “Four individuals, each with their own job, nationality, motivation, and world-view. If we did a report on each of them — who knows, it could even help the puzzlers decrypt the transmissions faster.”
Ivan shook his head: “We selected the members of the team to be, specifically, uninteresting. I don’t think that will be a good avenue of journalism to head down.”
“The four people tasked with discovering what happened on Noriama?” Connie leaned forward. “The only four people to ever travel in space for over two decades in cramped conditions and ever-present danger? The only humans who will ever set foot on both Proxima and Earth? You’re right. How could I have thought that anyone would be interested?”
“There’s mitigating facts,” Antje interrupted. “They’re simply bad subjects to do any feel-good stories about.”
“Are they?” Connie narrowed her eyes. “You know, for all your talk about working together, you’ve been keeping me at arms length. Now you’re telling me there’s ‘mysterious facts’ that make my idea to help humanize and ingratiate your rescue project and Noriama colony to the rest of the world nonviable?”
“Connie,” Antje’s usual scowl was curiously soft. “I’m afraid you know nothing about space-travel. Even accounting for everything you’ve been briefed on, there are certain truths you haven’t yet understood.”
“Such as?” Connie spread her arms. “Or am I too stupid to grasp their intricacies? Is that why you haven’t told me?”
“We haven’t told you,” Antje continued, “because these facts are not pleasant ones, and the first thing anyone does is try to forget them.”
“I live with hard truths every day,” Connie shot back. “I can’t help you if you’re not honest with me.”
“We haven’t lied to you,” Antje said. “Nor have we hidden anything from you. That’s what I meant about rejecting the truth: you already have all the information but you can’t bring yourself to realize the significance.”
“Fine, then spell it out for me,” Connie thumped her hand on the arm of her chair. “What am I not letting myself know? Why am I not getting dossiers on these astronauts?”
Antje shifted. “Have you heard of Kachman’s law?”
“No,” Connie admitted.
“Said by Jonnie Kachman in the late 2030s: Don’t put anything into intergalactic space you ever want to get back. We’re not giving you the dossiers because the team is dead.”
Connie blinked. “What? What happened?”
“Nothing happened,” Ivan said. “They were dead women the moment they stepped aboard the Croatoan.”
“Do you know what space does to the human body?” Antje asked. “You’ve seen the manifest of the Croatoan, all the different equipment to mitigate the damage; but even so, the stresses the team put their bodies through are incredible. Currently, when an astronaut returns from the ISS, it takes nearly twice as long as they were in zero-g to re-acclimate to Earth gravity. They need to spend weeks in pressurized chambers to keep from getting severe decompression sickness. Their heart has to pump harder, their bones have lost density, their muscles have lost mass —”
“Yes, I know all that,” Connie waved her hand. “So, what, you’re saying that after forty years in space, the team would have to live for eighty years in a tank?”
“It’s worse than that,” Ivan said. “For years, their eyes have not focused on anything further than twenty meters distant. On average, only a meter away. By the time they reached Noriama, they’d already suffered permanent eye damage. They’ve been undergoing physical stress therapies to keep their cardiovascular system strong, but there’s only so much we can do. After twenty-one years of space travel, if any one of our team members has to travel down to the colony, they will only be able to safely manage two hours of activity before it becomes too risky. They will need to spend more than half their waking hours in a specially prepared chamber, wear specially prepared clothing with aluminum supports designed to keep their bones from snapping under the strain, and clothing made with thin small pseudo-muscles that will massage her body to keep her blood flowing, and augment her limb-strength so she can move at all. And Proxima b’s gravity isn’t that much stronger than Earth’s.”
Connie squirmed in her seat. She was beginning to understand. “So when they get back, they’ll not be able to return to the planet’s surface? Ever?”
“If they did, without constant medical attention, they’d die within hours,” Antje said. “So we keep them in space and rehabilitate them on the ISS, only that will take another multi-trillion dollars to construct the appropriate facilities. More, if we put it on the moon. For four people. And that’s just the physical side. Just think about how different the world was twenty years ago. Think of everything that happened between the 1920s and 1940s. Everything between 2010 and 2030. Transmission to the Croatoan is limited, and we’d only have been able to send small glimpses of the world changing without them. The Earth they come back to will have nothing for them. Forty years worth of growth and change that they have been separated from.”
Ivan nodded. “The team was selected specifically for their psychological and social profiles. They have no family, no strong social networks. They were depressive loners, self-isolating themselves.”
Connie blinked. “This was always a suicide mission?”
“From the beginning. But don’t mistake, each of these women were smarter than any of us, and we didn’t hide anything from them. They knew what they were signing up for, and more importantly, they were perfectly fine with it.”
Connie didn’t say anything. “They knew they were going to die?”
“It’s the truth,” Ivan’s voice was soft. “They weren’t noble heroes sacrificing themselves for the good of the planet, they were four elderly suicidal recluses who had nothing left to live for. Do you think the world will unite in solving the Noriama encryptions if the people who sent them are already dead? If the presse cynique will call them mentally unbalanced and irrational?”
“Someday,” Antje said, “it will all come out. Until then, we must keep focus on the code. We need to learn what happened out there, and what they found. We must know what happened to Noriama. That’s more important than anything.”