Starcosmo

Chapter 4: Discovery

One year earlier

Johnson Space Center Imaging Center

Building 6

Dr. Emily Banner tapped her keyboard speculatively. The email was just two lines long.

The first line was a long, 26-factor formula. It described the angular momentum, spin, and about two dozen other factors that would correctly model the size, shape, and overall dispersal pattern of fuel leaking out a stage 2 rocket motor as it spun out of control in the troposphere.

Below it was a single line of text:  

How dumb do they think we are?

Below the text was an embedded video.

Biting her lip, Emily tapped “Scan for viruses” and waited while the White Hat software sifted the video code. A green check mark appeared in a few seconds.

She clicked the oval “play” button and sat back.

The video was simple: in split screen, it showed a ray-traced drawing of a stage 2 rocket spinning out of control, obviously a simple computer simulation based on the formula written above. On the other side of the screen, the video taken over Iceland, showing an eerie blue beam of light reaching up into the sky, and the perfect, geometric spirals of white light ballooning out from a brilliant center, encircling that center two dozen layers deep before evaporating as the beam’s center imploded in a gush of black.

Emily sighed, puffing her lip up and blowing a strand of hair off her forehead. The official story was not holding up.

“Check this out,” she said to Jason, her research assistant. “I’m forwarding you an email.”

“NSFW?” Jason Lordes popped his head up over his monitor, eyebrows raised lasciviously, using the acronym for “Not Safe For Work” that accompanied the usual naughty videos and photos on the Internet.

Jason definitely wanted to sleep with her. Fat chance Emily thought loudly at him, for probably the third time that week. All too common were the NASA men that mistook ‘single’ for ‘desperate’.  

“I wish,” Emily said, sending off the message. “More like ‘Not Safe for Thinking People.’”

There was a silence as Lordes scanned the message. “Great, more conspiracy theory stuff,” he said. “Banner, you should really stop encouraging them.” He tapped a pencil on the screen, running the formulae in his head. “They got a term wrong here.”

“Yeah, they fucked up big time,” Emily said. “And when you correct that term, it looks even less like what happened over Iceland.”

Lordes sat back and gave her a wry grin. “Emily, Emily,” he rubbed his eyes and yawned. “You know those guys just send you this shit because of that interview.”

It was true. She had been fielding emails from conspiracy theorists, Internet-crazies and amateur astronomers for three months now; ever since her appearance on that dumb TV show. One amateur astronomer had even signed his message, Thanks for being hot-t-t-t-t-t-t. Embarrassing.

It was the damn book. She was writing an official NASA history and had been dragged up in front of several cable and public stations as part of the publicity tour for the book. There was, in fact, a PR reason that NASA had chosen her to write the book in the first place: she was, in their words, “a good representative of the Agency.” Or, to put a finer point on it, hot-t-t-t-t-t-t.

But this particular puff piece had gone all wrong. They were taping for Now.TV, an Internet cable station, and the interviewer had gone off the reservation with a ‘gotcha’ question about a ‘plasma-based magnetic’ propulsion system that could theoretically end the wasteful and environment-damaging practice of launching chemical rockets.

Emily had been momentarily flustered, not because it was a dumb and aggressive question, but because she’d come across hints of that exact propulsion scheme in some of her research.

It was another weird case of evidence popping up in the real world that corresponded to her personal, private, unpublished research.

“Come on, Jas,” she said. “They send me this shit because of the shit going on out there.” She jabbed a finger emphatically at the nearest wall.

“I don’t get it,” Jason said, reaching for his coffee mug. “Why do you entertain this stuff? I mean, sure, it’s right on, or nearly right on –“ he gestured at the screen “But you know nothing’s going to come of it. It’s just . . .you know. People rattling the bars.”

“Oh, I don’t know, Jason,” Emily had walking to the window and was staring out into the rain. “It’s just so typical: something weird happens. Nobody knows what it is, but then some government or other advances a plausible-sounding explanation. And then the people have two choices: they can accept what their government tells them or they can dispute it, and you know what disputing it gets them?”

“Fired?”

“Fired, ostracized, alienated, you name it. Step out of line, and bam, that’s it for you." She slapped her hands together.

“You got it.” Jason tapped his screen and they both heard the electronic whoosh of a file being deleted. “So why don’t you just delete this shit before it gets you fired?”

Emily didn’t know.

No, that wasn’t true; she did know. She’d known the day she got her first security clearance, since before that, while she was walking across the the stage to accept her Master’s summa cum laude from Cal; she’d even known during those early years in high school, as the pile of straight-A report cards got higher, despite soccer and guys and bulimia and Dad.

She wanted in. She wanted to plumb the unexplored depths of the universe, to map the stars, to reduce the total quantity of unknowns. And she realized early on that that math, a subject that seemed so mysterious, so impenetrable to so many of her peers, would unlock the secret doors of the world to her. No more secrets.

That was why she only paid attention to the kooks who had math and science. There were some smart folks out there, some classically trained and some who, although their grasp of math was not refined, understood it in an impressionistic, almost artistic way. She’d seen some attempts at mathematical expressions that took her breath away.

There was something else. Nobody had anything solid, but taken together, the work of this speculative fringe was describing an edge of knowledge and an outline of the forbidden; the secret history of the United States Government.

Their conjectures were often wild, sometimes contradictory, and frequently they accepted huge leaps of logic that polluted their whole thinking, but many of them had their hands on a tiny fragment of something that felt deeply true.

Gradually, after months of collecting these incidental fragments, Emily had become aware of something large and vaguely sinister, just beyond her periphery, creeping into her awareness.

She shook her head. It didn’t matter. No matter how smart these kids were – and some of them were kids – it wasn’t going to change anything about the way the world worked. The government would keep dissembling about whatever it wanted to, for reason that were entirely its own.

There would be no disclosure. The peoples of the world would stay in the dark.

“Wow.”

She turned from the window and saw that Jason was staring at her. “Is this stuff getting to you, Em?”

“No,” she replied briskly, “No, it’s not getting to me.” And she marched back to her workstation and sat back down to resume her morning email ritual.

“You say so,” But Lordes didn’t sound convinced. After a beat: “You should talk to IT and have them up your filters.”  

Emily was pretending to scan her email, but she had clicked the video again. It really didn’t match up at all. And if these yahoos had figured that out, others must have. Must have.

“I might just do that,” Emily said, and forwarded the email to her home address.

And that was how she met the men that called themselves Lore and Node.

* * *