First | Previous | Wiki | Next
Then the Midianites’ merchant men passed by, and they drew forth, and lift Joseph out of the pit, and sold Joseph to the Ishmaelites for twenty pieces of silver: who brought Joseph into Egypt.
— Genesis 37:28
As the truck bearing the shipping container with its precious cargo finally dropped it off at his facility, Solomon Riviera allowed himself a moment to reflect.
He'd travelled to the United States to investigate what had initially not seemed to him like a very promising lead. The images of the purported "alien spaceship" could all have easily been faked with props and lens tricks, and while the "alien language" was definately at least the work of a skilled conlang builder, he hadn't expected much — this was going to be just another fake. Still, it had looked convincing enough to be worth the trip: even if it was a fake, it was at least convincing enough that he'd probably be able to upsell it with the right pitch to one of his wealthier patrons.
He'd worked for various governments for long enough to know that most — likely all — of the different "coverups" that alien nutcases and conspiracy theorists pointed to were just a way for various officials to shift blame and try to hide their mistakes. Heavens knows he'd actually been involved in one of the more famous incidents in recent years — the "ghost town" that had been "abducted" had really just been built as a way to launder funds through a construction company, and the census records for the area were complete fabrications that had been concocted as part of the scheme. Easier to let everyone think there's something spooky going on that to admit to the public that you just let someone run off with billions of their tax dollars. He still disagreed with and hated that decision, and this combined with a number of other cases were what led him to end up quitting the government sector, although he still had contacts.
This was, paradoxically enough, why he'd ended up here with a business of being an "alien hunter", as much as he hated the term. Among all the mundane corruption and fakes, if aliens did actually exist and came here, how would anyone even recognise it? The Fermi paradox spoke to him, and while he might never find anything, someone ought to be keeping an eye out, and it might as well be him.
Still, playing up the "government conspiracy" shtick was useful sometimes.
Based on Mike's rough estimate for the number of copies that had been made of the airplane, and Angela's back-of-the-envelope calculations about how large the initial intrinsic energy for the wind sigil should've been, they had a rough estimate for how long it would be until all the paper airplanes dropped dead.
As best they could figure, they probably had around fourty-five days.
But Mike was quick to point out - this could still be off by an order of magnitude — not only could the actual number of planes be significantly more, but they had essentially no way of estimating what effect the various ongoing research experiments from other groups would have.
"Is there any way we can get a tighter estimate on this?" Matt asked, after hearing the results. "Because if nothing else, the way we need to handle public relations here is going to be drastically different depending on exactly how long we have."
Angela spoke up. "I remember there's supposed to be a way to directly measure this kind of thing — I even remember doing it as part of a physics lab in school — but I don't completely remember all of the details and it'd likely take at least a day to set up. I think I still have that textbook but I'd need to get it out of storage in Elko."
"I think we're going to need to do that. Jess, can you drive up to Elko to help Angela retrieve her stuff?"
"I'll see if my aunt will let me borrow her truck, I assume you've probably got more than just the one book?" Jessica looked at Angela, who nodded.
"I'll work on drafting up a press release to try and address this."
Mike offerred.
"Probably the worst thing that can happen at this point is if the sigil suddenly fails with no warning at all,
so in case we've only got a few days we need to at least put out something to let everyone know.
"Also, Matt,
we've finally gotten a few actually serious offers for funding and stuff that I've sent to you and think we should consider,
you should look through them to try and figure out which ones are a good fit for what we're trying to do."
"Ok, I'll get to it."
Solomon had shown up unnanounced on the doorstep of the man who'd supposedly "found" the "alien spaceship", dressed in a suit, wearing an expensive-looking watch and a pair of imitation Ray-Bans, and carrying a faux-leather handlebox. He'd takem special care to make sure the limousine he'd hired specifically for this was parked on the street in clear view of the front door, and he'd had the driver stand outside the car door to give the impression of a chauffer.
The point of this whole charade was, assuming it was a fake, to try and get the man to admit to having created it, or figure out who did, as quickly as possible with the least amount of effort. Although there was always the risk of someone reacting negatively to having someone dressed like this showing up on their doorstep.
He rang the doorbell, and, after a second, knocked three times.
It had taken them quite a while to get the measurement working, largely because they'd had to make a number of changes to the original design to be able to make it work with what they were able to make or get hold of. While the textbook had details about how to construct the actual measurement sigil — the part that had to be specially tuned to match the sigil they were trying to measure — this sigil was meant to be used in conjunction with a kind of all-in-one measurement apparatus that was apparently common equipment.
But after carefully going over the text to figure out the underlying mechanism behind it, they were able to make it work using human-made equipment. Some of the components hadn't been cheap though: in addition to the photon counter and diffraction gratings, they'd had to have a 641nm red laser specially made for it to work. The sigil worked by probabilistically cross-converting pairs of 641nm photons to 645nm and 637nm. The exact conversion probability would in turn vary with the laser power over time, and by pulsing the laser on and off they could measure an exponential decay curve on each cycle. The resulting time constant was in turn related to the intrinsic energy of the wind sigil, and by measuring how quickly it changed they could get a more precise figure for the amount of time left.
"I figgered a @#$%^& like you'd be showin' up 'ventually," growled the Native American man who answered the door, as he leveled a shotgun at Solomon. The man's two dogs growled and barked at Solomon as his mind raced to try and figure out how to defuse the situation, before arriving at a last-ditch strategy.
"I think you misunderstand, Mr. Locklear, if you are Mr. Locklear" he began, and carefully pulled off his sunglasses, being careful not to make any sudden moves. "I'm here on behalf of a client who may wish to purchase your —"
"Horse@#$%." The man interrupted him, then paused for a moment. "Well, if you're on the level about money we can talk, 'least you ain't talk like a fed. I'm warning you though, one wrong move and I'm'ma blast your @#$%ing brains out."
For once Solomon was grateful for his accent.
The man turned around and walked back into the house, and the two dogs trailed off. "Well come on," he said, gesturing with the shotgun to follow. "It's in the back."
"Four or five years?" Matt repeated back.
"That's what the measurement indicates, assuming we haven't made a mistake." Mike flipped back through a notepad. "I'm not sure where we could've though, all the units cancel out and we get the same answer doing it in xenometers as with human units."
"Well we should keep monitoring it, but that's definitely good news, we don't have to scramble to figure something out."
The past few weeks had been very stressful with having to get everything ready for the expo, then having to deal with the public fallout while simultaneously scrambling to figure out the intrinsic energy measurement, all with the threat that the tech they'd shown off might just suddenly drop dead hovering over their heads. Needless to say, Jessica was relieved by this news.
Still though, now that they had time they couldn't simply waste it. "So, what are our priorities at this point?"
"There's the couple of books, getting them translated or having one of us learn to read them should be a priority," Mike began.
"That's going to take a while though; at this point Angela's basically the only one who understands any of this stuff or can read it," Matt responded. "I've made some progress understanding the math notation, but that's a far cry from being able to read the books."
Angela gave a non-committal "mh-hmm". She seemed somewhat distracted, which Jessica had learned usually meant she was feeling stressed, although by what Jessica wasn't sure.
Mark continued on. "There's also figuring out the few other bits of equipment that Angela brought."
Angela seemd to suddenly snap back into focus. "What about the ship that brought me here? There's the interstellar stage that's still in orbit."
"It'd be good to get a hold of the lander if we can find out who has it." "Getting at the interstellar stage is going to take some doing though —"
Angela cut Mike off. "I don't mean like that. The deal was that I'd help you with this technology, and in exchange you'd help me get off this planet and back on my way. I'm already beginning to feel the same pull to leave that brought me here — I've trusted you so far but I simply cannot stay here forever. We need to get on track so I can get home."
Solomon hadn't been convinced initially when Mr. Locklear pulled back the tarp to reveal the craft. The shape was reminiscent of the Mercury reentry vehicle but smaller, only about 1.5 meters in diameter. The exterior was in very poor condition, with several large scratches on one side around which paint was beginning to flake. When he pushed it to feel the weight, dirty water poured out of a puncture in the impact skirt around the base. There appeared to be some kind of docking fitting at the apex, but it would've been too small for a man to fit through comfortably.
After half an hour spent examining the pod, he had decided:
"I'll take it," he began, and handed Mr. Locklear the handlebox.
"This is all still just speculation though, none of us have the expertise to even launch a cubesat much less anything manned," Mike said as the discussion wound down. "We'd have to partner with someone who already has the resources and expertise."
"Speaking of partnerships, I've taken a look at what you sent me" — Matt pulled up the list — "and several of the companies who've expressed interest do have spaceflight capability, I think we should open negotiations with several of them to work out a deal."
"That works for me, as long as that doesn't stretch out for too long," Angela confirmed.
Jessica was slightly more wary, though. "We need to make sure that we're able to keep everything under wraps though. I know you don't care, Angela, if people know you're here, but a lot of people would, and if the wrong sort of people find out, everything is going to get a lot harder."
Getting the pod back to Egypt had taken nearly all of the rest of Solomon's savings. He'd ended up having to rent an 8-foot shipping container, and between this and the actual shipping and trucking costs, this part of the process had cost him over twice what he'd paid Mr. Locklear.
While the case had mostly contained fake bills, he had included a few thousand real dollars as well — he wasn't a complete asshole, and he hated lying like that. Although he could somewhat rationalize it as nessisary, the fact that he was really good at it only made it worse.
But now that that was behind him, and he finally had actual proof of extraterrestrials, not only that they exist but that they have visited Earth.
Marshall looked up from his tablet as one of his aides entered his office.
"They've just made it official, sir, the partnership with Lockheed-Martin."
"Honestly can't say I blame them, at least it's not China or the AU."
"Yes sir, but what's really interesting are the people Lockheed just hired along with this." The aide handed Marshall a stapled sheaf of paper.
"Mostly it's the standard fare of administrative staff and engineers, although there are a few high-profile rocket scientists in there, but they've also picked up several top biologists and veternary doctors —"
"Veternarians?" Marshall paused flipping through the packet and looked at the aide.
"Yes sir, presumably to further study the fish species that originally led to the discovery."
"I guess ... go on."
"But they've also hired two psychologists, Doctors Nettie and Donald Evans &mdash considered among the best in their field — and even more strangely they're currently in the process of recruiting Doctor Stanley McGinnis, professor of linguistics of all things, from the University of Chicago."
"Wait, what?" Marshall flipped back through the packet and found their profiles. "What for?"