Prologue
The late afternoon sun rested well below the thick canopy of African trees, producing a rich pink-orange hue through the cloud-covered sky. The air was still and humid, leaving the vast expanse of mahogany and kapok trees almost motionless, save for the occasional movement of African snipes as they hopped between branches.
A tranquil scene shattered abruptly when a deafening scream arose in the distance, followed by a barrage of unintelligible shouting and cursing.
Dulce looked up, startled, still clutching a soft pink bromeliad flower between her black fingers. With a look of confusion, the small gorilla peered up at Dexter, a smaller capuchin monkey, who was perched nervously a few feet above her. Both turned and looked down a long narrow footpath toward the commotion.
The looks on their faces were strikingly similar to the expression of their alien companion, Ronin––unblemished but puzzled. His smooth, bald head gradually turning pink from exposure to the subtropical sun.
It was not until DeeAnn Draper appeared in the distance that they each jumped. DeeAnn was running. As fast as she could, huffing loudly and pointing frantically in the direction behind them as she barreled down the path.
“Run!” she yelled between breaths. “RUN!”
Ronin suddenly stared at the two primates who both remained frozen.
“I SAID RUN!” DeeAnn screamed and pointed again. When she was less than twenty feet away, the computerized vest strapped to her midsection blurted out the translation in a loud mechanical voice.
With a start, Dulce dropped the flower and began stumbling backward, still watching DeeAnn. A second later, Dexter leapt from the tree onto Ronin’s back as he too stumbled and began to run ahead of her in the same direction.
Trailing at a distance behind DeeAnn, a frail figure rounded the trees, angrily chasing after her. Shouts in Kinyarwanda spewed forth from the old man, who wielded what appeared to be a small axe above his head. But in his eighties, the man was already beginning to slow, which only seemed to incense him more.
The dark-skinned man finally slowed to a stop near the area where Ronin and the primates had been waiting––defiantly hurling the rusted axe forward, where it struck the ground, and tumbled helplessly along the dirt path.
A hundred yards further ahead and well out of range, Ronin pressed forward, running hard and pushing branches out of their way. Dexter and Dulce scrambled forward on his heels, and ahead of DeeAnn.
After several minutes, the trail opened into a wide, grassy area, where DeeAnn allowed her herself to slow. Her feet finally thundered to a stop, and she gasped for breath, looking back through the trees for any sign of the old man.
She held up a hand and continued sucking in air. “It’s…okay…I think…we’re okay!”
Ronin coasted to a stop and turned back to study DeeAnn. He then retreated a few steps toward the narrow footpath and looked past her intently. “Are we in danger?”
“No,” she said, shaking her head, still fighting for breath. “No…we’re fine now.” She glanced at Dulce and Dexter. Both were on the far side of the grass and waited nervously to resume. “Dulce…it’s okay now…We’re okay. You can stop running.”
The translation sounded through DeeAnn’s vest, but Dulce’s hazel eyes remained skeptical. Behind her, Dexter ambled forward anxiously.
You scare.
“I know. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to.” She straightened and tried to slow her breathing. DeeAnn then glanced at Ronin with an apologetic frown. “Things didn’t go as planned.”
Ronin was still staring down the path. “What had you planned?”
“Well…maybe not planned,” DeeAnn panted, more gently now. “I was just hoping for a less exciting outcome.”
He peered at her, curiously. “This was not your expected outcome?”
“You could say that.” With a wry grin on her face, DeeAnn leaned forward and reached behind her back. She fumbled for a moment before pulling out two thin and worn books. She held them up in her hand triumphantly. “But at least I got these.”
“You have retrieved your books.”
“Journals,” she corrected. “And sure. Let’s go ahead and use the word retrieved.”
Ronin did not get the sarcasm. “These are what we came for, yes?”
DeeAnn made sure they were still intact before tucking the books back into her pants behind her.
These weren’t just journals. They were the last remaining diaries of Dian Fossey––the legendary anthropologist who had vastly changed mankind’s understanding of gorillas in the wild, before being murdered decades before in the same jungle where they were now standing. A murder that to this day had never been solved.
No, these texts were not just journals. To DeeAnn, they were justice.
DeeAnn had been shocked to find that the diaries had been in possession of the old hermit. He had managed to somehow procure them after Fossey’s death three decades ago. But unfortunately, the old man refused to part with the books, even for a good price. So DeeAnn returned and waited––waited for him to leave his tiny shack before sneaking inside to retrieve them.
Of course, she did not consider it stealing. She left almost two thousand dollars on the man’s table, where he was sure to find it. She simply could not allow the last written words of Dian Fossey to be lost again, possibly forever.
We go now?
DeeAnn glanced at Dulce and grinned. “Yes. We go now.”
The small gorilla smiled and hesitantly knuckle-walked back on her hands. When she reached her human mom, Dulce raised her small black hand, allowing DeeAnn to take it.
Finally at ease, Dulce grinned up at her with a giant smile. You run funny.
DeeAnn laughed. “Look who’s talking.”
1
It was almost a miracle.
Will Borger and Lee Kenwood stood back to reexamine their work. Everything was in place and connected. The dim interior of the small concrete building made the bright green lights of the IMIS computer system appear somewhat eerie. They flashed several times and began blinking when the system was finally turned on.
The existing racks left behind from the older weather equipment looked mismatched and shabby next to IMIS’s sleek black servers––several of which needed to be stacked sideways on the floor to fit inside the cramped room. But fit they did. Barely.
Borger turned and watched Lee’s face in the soft green glow, as the young engineer’s eyes moved from server to server. Lee was looking for error lights that would indicate a hardware failure. Seeing none, he stepped toward an extended tray in one of the center racks and placed his hands on the compact keyboard. Just above it, on a fixed monitor, a seemingly endless series of text and diagnostics scrolled up the screen. He finally relaxed when the operating system began to load.
“How long does IMIS take to boot?” asked Borger.
“Fifteen to twenty minutes.” Lee frowned. “It has to run through a lot of parity checks for all the drives.”
Borger nodded and continued watching. “Back in the old days, moving these many machines at once without something breaking was impossible. These systems have come a long way.”
Lee grinned. “Well, back then we were still grappling with electricity.”
Borger laughed, loud and bellowing from under his light shabby beard. He slapped the younger man on the shoulder, causing Lee to laugh as well. He was really beginning to like this kid.
Together they scanned their eyes back over the systems, perhaps this time with more relief than concern. It was still too soon to celebrate, but so far it really was a miracle. Just the two of them, moving so many systems so quickly and in one fell swoop, without a major failure…or at least not yet. It left them feeling both lucky and nervous at the same time––and thoroughly exhausted.
The biggest downside was that they both stank terribly. Working for almost two days straight to strip the system down and immediately rebuild it some fifty miles away was no small feat. In fact, it was an effort that only a fellow computer expert could truly appreciate. But they had done it. And now they stood together, prideful, watching the lines of code scroll past on the monitor.
Borger reached for a chair behind him and plunked himself down. His button-up shirt revealed dark spots under each arm and his brow was still covered in beads of sweat. The old air conditioner hummed steadily in the background, not quite able to eliminate the mild dank smell from the concrete walls.
It would have been nice if they simply could have left the door open, but it was early morning, and even the dim lights in the room would have shone like a beacon to anyone outside.
The old maintenance building was comprised of three rooms––the server or equipment room, a small office, and an even tinier bathroom separating the two. It was a strange setup, but the structure was more than fifty years old and had a huge upside in that it was rarely checked anymore, if at all. It was the best they could do under the circumstances.
Hiding the IMIS system was far more difficult than it sounded. Especially since they needed a strong connection to several low-flying military satellites. Allowing them to literally hide the signal under one of the largest and most powerful radio dishes on the planet was a stroke of genius.
Of course, it wasn’t foolproof. Given enough time, someone would eventually notice the different signals. They could then trace them back to one of the old, forgotten maintenance buildings on the edge of Puerto Rico’s Arecibo observatory grounds. Or they would notice the power draw. Or a number of other telltale signs. But by then, with any luck, they would be gone.
Borger folded his arms over his large belly and watched Lee, still scanning the lines of scrolling text.
“So far so good?”
Lee nodded. “So far.” He studied the screen for several more seconds before finally turning away. “Now we just wait and see.”
Borger grinned. “And hold our breath.”
“I’m sure we’ll have some small problems to fix, but assuming nothing got seriously damaged, we might be able to have it all back up and running by tomorrow.”
“Good,” Borger replied, motioning at the worn-out chair behind Lee. “Have a seat.”
Lee complied and peered back with tired eyes. “So, what’s next?”
“We get some sleep. When IMIS is fully operational, we notify the rest of the team, so they can test it remotely. Then you and I get to work.”
“With the reprogramming.”
Borger nodded. “You’re sure IMIS is going to be able to do this?”
“Pretty sure,” Lee replied. “Like I said, it’s not all that different from what we did for Alison and those hieroglyphs in Guyana. At its core, IMIS is designed to find patterns––mostly in communication, but its algorithms can do more than just that. Heuristics are used for all kinds of things these days. Unfortunately, there’s a tradeoff in accuracy for speed. Which is why IMIS still makes mistakes. But once the solutions are verified…”
“We’re golden.”
“We should be. I have to warn you though–”
“Relax kid,” Borger beamed. “If anyone understands the fallibility of computers, I do. But so far your IMIS system seems better than most.”
“So, what do we look for first?”
“Good question. We’re not going to be looking for surface-level stuff but deeper relationships––historically, and over a long period of time. Things that may have been overlooked for a really long time. Dots that haven’t been connected yet.”
“Like what?”
Borger shrugged. “Things like Cambodia, for example, and what was discovered a couple years ago––huge medieval cities buried beneath the jungle since something like the twelfth century. Only found when some guy decided to scan the area with airborne lasers. I’m betting there’s a lot of stuff out there that we either haven’t found yet, or have found but haven’t realized the significance of. And I don’t just mean cities. How many other things do you think mankind has found over all these years that got lost or stuffed away somewhere?”
Lee Kenwood nodded his head, thinking. “This may not be easy. There’s an awful lot of data out there. Fortunately, one of the reasons it’s been so successful with the languages is because it uses unsupervised, deep-learning algorithms with multiple layers of data representation. So it doesn’t just connect dots, it searches more deeply to determine what dots should or should not be connected.”
“And that’s exactly what we’re going to need,” Borger said, “because if a single alien race came to Earth and secretly buried millions of embryos here with their DNA, what else might be out there…from them or someone else?”
“And we still have to figure out why.”
“Precisely.” Borger nodded again and removed his glasses to clean them with his shirt. “Our friend Palin said Earth has more water than most other planets, which makes us a prime candidate for relocation. So, if other forms of alien life can live here, there’s no telling what else might already be here that we don’t know about.”
Lee Kenwood raised his eyes to the room’s concrete ceiling, chipped and littered with dozens of small cracks. “I wonder how many of them might be out there…in space.”
“Probably a lot,” Borger answered, his weariness quickly fading as he stared intently at Lee from his own chair. “You remember me telling you about that Drake Equation?”
“The predictive thing?”
“Yes. A brilliant but simple equation that most in the field of astronomy are familiar with. In the late 50’s, when radio telescopes became big enough, some astronomers got to thinking and wondered if they would be sensitive enough to pick up extraterrestrial signals from other planets. If there were any.”
“You mean like radio signals?”
“Right,” Borger said. “All kinds of technologies work using the radio spectrum. And if it’s true for us, it would undoubtedly be true for other races out there too. After all, we all use the same spectrum. So along comes a guy named Frank Drake who puts forth a question. Actually, it was less a question than an equation, really. The point is, everyone had already pondered or asked whether life existed elsewhere in our galaxy, but no one had really asked how much life might be out there.”
“As in?”
“As in how many. A lot of people agreed that an alien race could be out there. But it was Frank Drake who first attempted to estimate just how many there might realistically be.”
“And he did this with his equation?”
“Yes.” Borger tilted his head. “No…well, kind of. More than anything else, he tried to quantify an answer…using his equation.”
“And you said it’s simple?”
“It’s very simple. It’s really a set of questions that carry us to some reasonable conclusions. It starts with the first question: how many stars are in our Milky Way galaxy?”
Lee shrugged.
“The answer is about three hundred billion.”
Lee breathed out a soft whistle.
“Yeah, it’s a big number.” Borger nodded. “Once you have that answer the next question is, how many of those three hundred billion stars have planets? Then when you have that number, the next question is how many of those planets could support life? For example, how many might have water and oxygen? Then, how many of those might actually develop life, and then how many of those might be intelligent life, and then how many would develop technology that could transmit a radio signal, and finally, how long might that signal be transmitting for.” He looked at Lee who was listening intently through reddened eyes. “It might sound a little convoluted, but here’s the gist. Let’s say you only assume one in a thousand for each question––say, one in a thousand of our galaxy’s stars actually have planets around them. And then only one in a thousand of those planets can support life. Then only one in a thousand is advanced life. And so on and so on, you’re starting with such a huge number of stars that by the time you get to the end of the equation, the number of possible alien races out there is a lot bigger than you might expect.”
Lee sat, eagerly waiting. When Borger didn’t continue, he finally blurted out, “So, how many?”
“Even when assuming a one in a thousand result, over and over, you’re left at the end with a number somewhere in the neighborhood of ten thousand civilizations.”
“Ten thousand?!”
Borger nodded. “Yeah. As in a one with four zeros.”
Lee blinked multiple times at him. “Are you serious?”
“I’m completely serious. There could be as many as ten thousand alien civilizations floating around out there in our own galaxy. Maybe more.”
At that, Lee’s eyes widened. “More than ten thousand?!”
“Maybe. Remember, we assumed that only one out of a thousand stars had planets. But nowadays, with all of the searching we’ve been doing with planets outside our own solar system, called exoplanets, we’re finding nearly all stars have planets. So, imagine what happens to our calculation when one of our answers gets changed from one in a thousand to one in ten.”
“Holy crap!”
Borger smiled at the shocked expression on Lee’s face. “So if Drake’s equation is even close to accurate, and there really are thousands of alien civilizations out there, do you see why it might be worthwhile to find out how many more of those have also made it to Earth?”
Lee Kenwood stared at Borger through his own dark-framed glasses, pondering the question. “Well, now I can.”
“We’re discovering all kinds of things now,” continued Borger. “Everywhere. Even Sanskrit, one of the oldest human languages, talks about some strange things happening. And that’s two thousand years ago. Imagine what else has been found since then, even accidentally. I mean, what if the alien ship we found underwater was not even the first to arrive here? It certainly wasn’t the first strange thing to be found, that’s for sure. And now, with a powerful enough system like IMIS, we may be able to discover things previously missed. Not just by you and me, but all of mankind.”
Kenwood began nodding his head again slowly. “Or…what mankind had found and tried to keep secret.”
“Bingo! That’s the next piece.” Borger grinned approvingly. “Look, I’m a history buff, and one thing I know is that there have been a lot of wars on this planet that go back a very long time. And the one thing every victor has done was to take whatever treasures their enemy had. Whether it was Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, or the Spanish Conquistadors and the Aztecs. To the victor go the spoils. Napoleon did it. And the Nazis. Even we did. At the end of World War II, we raced the Russians to grab as much of Germany’s remaining assets as we could. In the form of both technology and people. It’s human nature. To the victor go the spoils.” Borger straightened in his chair and leaned forward toward Lee. “So, if these treasures or assets have been taken back and forth over all these years by different empires and governments, the question is…what do they have? And what do they know?”
“So, it’s not just about the treasures…”
“It’s about the secrets,” Borger grinned.
Lee raised his hands and pressed them in front of his face. Even through his tired eyes, it was clear the concept had grabbed him. “Which brings us to the NSA.”
“The N–S–A,” Borger repeated triumphantly. “The government organization that collects information on everyone, both inside and outside of the country, in every electronic medium it can. Email, phone calls, text messages, even every digitized form of the written word. Books, lectures, letters, everything. You name it. Any medium, any country, any person, and they’ve tried to get it.”
“But how would they store all that? You’re talking about a tremendous amount of server space.”
Borger smirked. “I’m guessing you don’t know about their giant data center in Utah, buried under a mountain.”
“For real?”
“For real,” he nodded. “Located nearby Bluffdale, Utah. It’s huge. Really, really huge.”
“Geez.” Lee shook his head. “And you think we can crack some of their encrypted files?”
“The new stuff? No. But the old stuff…absolutely.” Borger glanced at the computer screen to see the IMIS software still loading. “Cryptography goes back a long way. The first documented ciphers were used by the Egyptians, then later by the Assyrians, and pretty much every civilization since. Of course, everyone knows about the Enigma machines used by the Nazis, but once encryption became computerized, things really got interesting. The first computerized encryption algorithm was developed in the 70’s by IBM. It was called Lucifer and was comprised of 64 bits, translating plain text strings to binary. More secure forms of encryption weren’t conceived of until the 1990’s. And just like any technology, these early versions were rife with problems and vulnerabilities for cracking them. Believe it or not, a group of mathematics and computer-engineering students at the University of Toronto just cracked an even more advanced encryption using something called quadratic curves.”
“What the hell is that?”
“It uses numeric sentences like Fibonacci’s sequence and a bunch of others. But it’s the hardware they used to crack it that you might find more interesting.”
“What hardware?”
“A supercomputer,” Borger replied. “As in Watson.”
“Watson?! Are you serious?!”
“As a heart attack. You used to work for IBM, didn’t you?”
“Yes! I was on the team that wrote code for some of their original Deep Blue instructions.” In the middle of his excitement, Lee Kenwood suddenly stopped, considering something. “But that’s way beyond what IMIS can do. She simply doesn’t have that kind of horsepower.”
“I know,” the older Borger nodded. “We’re going to need a bigger system.”
“How much of the NSA’s data do you think is vulnerable?”
Borger’s grin was still visible when he nodded again, a little smugly this time. “A lot. There have been several recent leaks from within the NSA, from analysts claiming that there’s just way too much data to go through. And there are not that many versions of encryption out there. So for each one we crack, everything encrypted with that particular version becomes vulnerable–”
Kenwood finished the sentence. “And readable by us.”
“That’s right. And with all those exabytes of data, how many secrets do you think the government could be hiding? Some that they’re not even aware of?”
