Fimbulwinter Snippet 2

In which a challenge is taken up …

Chapter 1 Hostile Universe

Risk Enterprises Corporate HQ, San Francisco

1120 Days to Portal Closure

Elroy Risk’s personal phone rang, which meant a crisis. The few people with the personal number of the richest tech billionaire in the world never used it for anything less. His hands-on management style made his schedule a daily whirl of crises.

“Risk.”

“Angus, boss. We’ve got a first result.” The voice on the other end sounded weary but triumphant.

“On my way.” Risk ended the call, got up from his desk and strode out the door, his customary rapid stride even quicker than usual.

On his way out he turned his head to the strikingly good looking blonde woman at the desk in the outer office. “Annette, Portal.”

She fell into step with him like a fighter pilot’s wingman. Risk’s warp speed management style worked because of her. Annette managed the daily chaos of his empire of tech companies and and executed his decisions with flawless invisible perfection.

After passing through the three checkpoints into the Secure Wing of Corporate HQ, past the armed guards and biometric identification stations, they emerged into a cluttered and noisy cubicle farm. Alexandra McKellar, the VP of Business Intelligence, met him at the entrance. Her crisp military appearance was in stark contrast with the tall, hawk-faced man next to her, who had not showered, changed clothes, or shaved for days. Angus Archer was the Lead of the team Risk had assembled to attack the Portal message. Angus had been courted by CSE, the Canadian SIGINT agency, for their cyber-warfare group, but had come to Risk Enterprises for the greater challenge. The extra money hadn’t hurt, either.

He led them over to a workstation and keyed up a document.

“What have you got, Angus?” Risk said.

He pointed at the boldface top line. “We’ve translated the header on the Portal data packet. This is almost certainly a synthetic language. It’s based on universal physical constants, much like what Sagan did with the Voyager Golden Record. It starts off by defining their time units, which we can now translate into ours. The very first thing in the header is a deadline.”

“Deadline?” Risk was already in project planning mode.

“A deadline to keep the Portal. What we have here is a freebie trial period, one Star Period from the appearance of the Portal. A Star Period is, nearly enough, 1150 Earth days. At the end of the Star Period, if we haven’t paid the fee to keep the Portal, we lose it. The clock is running as we speak. It’s now at …”

He glanced down at a timer readout. “1120 days, 3 hours, 42 minutes.”

“Annette, Project Hermes. Priority One. Go.” Elroy kept his attention on Angus. Annette would marshal the resources of Risk Enterprises, alert key people, push lesser crises down the food chain, commit funding.

“We pay in their currency, which we have dubbed a credit. The rest of the header is a FAQ, deliberately phrased in baby talk. In order to keep the Portal, we have to put something on the table to earn the credit to pay the fee to keep it,” Angus said.

Alexandra chimed in. “Angus kept me in the loop. We’re working the problem. We infer from this an economy backing the Portal, mostly based on services and contracts. According to the FAQ there are at least three thousand planetary systems on the Portal network. The Portal Alien Race, or Races, take a piece off the top. Portal fees, probably others as well. Viable.”

Risk took three seconds to think, then gestured for her to continue.

“Our own currencies have evolved from being based on rare elements to being backed by, really, the economy of the entity issuing them. We live in a huge galaxy with, as we know from the exoplanet searches, a lot of uninhabited star systems. The natural resources in our own Solar System are vast beyond comprehension. Multiply by the 300 billion or so stars in our galaxy, and you can forget materials shortages and thus basing a currency on them.”

“Manufactured goods?” Risk said.

She brushed that aside. “How are you going to sell a human computer or electric car to aliens from a whole different evolution? This isn’t television. These are real aliens, not human actors in rubber masks.”

She passed the ball to Angus with a nod. Angus ran with it. “We’ve worked out the overall structure of this data set, translated the header and we have a good idea of the chapter titles. There are multiple blocks of data. The titles say four of them are physics data of some kind. One is a Rosetta Stone to allow us to communicate on the PortalNet.”

“PortalNet?” Risk said.

Alexandra snapped her hand at the screen of the workstation. “Again, inference, but strong inference. There’s a galactic equivalent of the Internet, which we’re calling the PortalNet. What’s on it we don’t know. We would need the Rosetta Stone translated in order to access it to find out.”

“What about the physics data?” Risk asked.

“The header just says relevant information follows. We’d have to put in the time and effort to translate them to know what’s in them.” Angus replied.

Alexandra flipped her hand from side to side. “This has the flavour of cocaine marketing. There’s enough value here to motivate us to put in the effort to keep the Portal and pay for it, which is whatever is in the data blocks. The long term is the Rosetta Stone, which gets us access to the PortalNet and whatever value is there, probably a lot more.”

“What’s the competition doing?” Risk instantly went to the next question.

She frowned. “On the government side, I worked some of my old contacts at DIA. DARPA is working the problem, no surprise. DARPA doesn’t leak, but you can infer the area of interest by who they pull in to form the teams. They’ve got good people and very good facilities, so they are likely not far behind us, if at all. Lots of other teams, government and private, but we have the lead right now. My assessment, everyone is concentrating on the physics data, looking to turn it into technology.”

“Why?” Risk didn’t need to, or want to, understand the military and government classified worlds, which was why he had pirated a Marine Gunnery Sergeant out of Defense Intelligence Agency for this job.

“Their bosses, government or private, are going to be saying ‘Show me the value before I invest resources.’ It’s the lesser risk from their standpoint. At least some of those bosses will know about the clock, but it’s still unlikely they’ll take the risk on spec. Cost-benefit analysis will give everyone the same answer. It’s the wrong answer. They’re using the wrong tool, because it’s biased to the short term.”

She cut to the chase. “You have two Courses of Action here. COA One, exploit the physics data, turn it into technology. COA Two, break the Rosetta Stone and see what’s on the PortalNet.”

She ticked off points on her fingers. “COA One. Pros, better near term payout on the new technology, less business risk. Con, does not address the threat. COA Two. Pros, greater potential payout in the long term, and it addresses the threat. Con, higher risk of business loss, potentially existential.”

“Threat?” Risk’s total attention went from the computer screen to McKellar.

“The threat to the survival of the human race. The last item in the FAQ is a list of races in our local area, a few hundred light years, who didn’t keep their Portal and went extinct.”

She gave him a very short beat to absorb it. “The threat is not from the Portal Aliens. It’s a hostile universe, incredibly huge. The universe killed them. Nearby supernova and asteroid impact are the two we have so far. If someone is hanging off the side of a building, he dies unless someone cares enough to help him. The Portal Aliens didn’t care enough to help them.”

“Are you sure?” Risk said.

“High confidence. I looked at this hard. Elroy, the Portal is totally impossible according to all the physics we know. It upsets everything we thought we knew.”

She paused, then elaborated when he said nothing. There were people who assumed Elroy Risk knew everything. McKellar wasn’t among them. “According to physics as we know it, faster than light is equivalent to time travel. There’s a saying among physicists. Relativity, causality and faster than light. You can have any two.”

“We now have causality and faster than light. Relativity has a lot of notches on its pistol, though,” Risk said.

“So it does. So did Newtonian theory before relativity. The Portal Aliens understand the structure of the universe far better than we do. They can apply their knowledge on a vast scale.” She paused to let Risk process what she’d said.

“Their level of advancement is incredibly beyond any technology we ever thought possible. If the Portal Aliens wanted us dead or enslaved, we’d be dead or enslaved.”

Risk ran through the strengths and weaknesses of his own business empire, learned intimately from his hands-on style of management. He had very competent people finding the opportunities to turn cutting edge science into cutting edge technology. Alexandra McKellar was very, very good at spotting threats.

Risk’s eyes narrowed and his face went still in total concentration. “This is a test. If we want to be worth caring about, then we demonstrate we have the smarts and the organization to do something useful. We fail by doing nothing. The new technology is a red herring. It distracts us from looking at the long term.”

He turned to Annette. “COA Two. Go.”

She tapped the stem of her AR glasses, issued commands with gestures, then turned to Angus. “You are now part of Project Hermes. Funds, resources, ask and get.”