THE END [[#Wattys2020]]

MONTH 3

Chapter 225: Baby On Board

Shannon (Pacific Ocean, 680 Miles NE of Hawaii)

7:22 a.m., February 3rd -- 63 days since the silence occurred.

Lisa popped on the boat.

...

...

Chapter 226: Holding Back

Vice-President Todd Lewis (Government Bunker, Sierra Nevada Mountains)

It had taken several weeks to work out the print on the documents. Round the clock teams deducing logic and timelines and grouping and ungrouping data, and they still haven't cracked all of it!

We, mostly just senior leadership and higher level staff, had been mustered in the debriefing room of the central ring for the last 35 minutes waiting for Sam and his team's report.

...

"Sorry, Madam President, sorry, everyone, had a last minute development... a breakthrough. It couldn't be helped," he said, placing and opening his laptop on the white plastic foldout table.

...

"...So..."

"...the..."

"...One second, sorry!" he said, plugging in the HDMI cord, removing it, flipping it around the other way, then pulling it and flipping it back again, then flipping it back 'again'.

"...so the parchment, 'writing--' aand here we go... the parchment writing was actually printed with a magnetic powder and was 'encoded' into what's called LTO or linear tape-on," he said, showing a slide on the projector of the magnified print blown up several thousand times.

"...with a recording density of 130 characters per inch, similar to the old UNIVAC computer data storage reel-to-reel drives from the 1950s," Sam said, looking around the room... we didn't really know what he was talking about of course.

...

"...anyone?"

...

"...well, basically the Senator, who, I assume, is the one who encoded it," he said, looking at Captain Thiggs, who simply nodded affirmation.

"...He basically made a giant cassette tape. Not so much for secrecy, as you all may be thinking, but for space... Going with LTO allowed for just an immense amount of data in an infinitely small space," he said, fumbling with the next slide.

"'Small space', that's enormous!" I said, looking at the next slide... referencing a picture of the 4-foot wide, 16- foot long brown-colored sheets spread out over several tables in the receiving bay.

"Right you are Mr. Vice President... Counting the four single layer sides of the actual box and doubled top and bottom flaps, including the insides of both inside and outside walls, and both sides of the inner corrugated sheet itself, and the fact that it 'was' corrugated, which was genius in itself, when stretched out and flattened you're talking almost 83,000 square inches of content, which is just an incredible amount of area!"

The thing 'was' enormous. The image being displayed, split-screened, showed several large, seemingly black sheets, side by side by side by side by...

"...at 130cpi, that's 10,782,720 characters!"

...

Sam looked at us for validation... maybe awe. Maybe just a sign we were all still alive. Besides a handful of people in the building, most of which were on 'his' staff, we had no clue what he was saying.