Boundary (Field Book 3) Read online

  “Valery, please!” Mike held up his hands.

  “Please, stop,” Dr. Chen found he was having to raise his voice just to be heard above the collective unease.

  “You’ve killed us all!” Valery spat.

  “Glupaya suka,” Lana muttered.

  Valery’s anger seemed to flare and she launched herself off the wall towards Lana.

  Cathy pulled Lana to one side, an action that in zero gravity resulted in them almost swapping places. Valery caught Cathy around the neck with a flailing arm and the two of them sailed on through the nearby crew, who awkwardly began trying to separate them.

  In exasperation, Dr. Chen jabbed at his ear, an old habit that usually summoned Fai’s quiet response. However, instead of Fai’s voice in his ear, the ISS fire alarm blasted throughout the module’s speakers.

  As everyone froze and fell silent, the alarm stopped and was replaced by Fai’s amplified but calm voice.

  “Your attention, please.”

  The echo of her voice died out, leaving only the faint motorised whir of the module’s hatch beginning to close.

  “My name is Fai.”

  Her voice continued to fill the now quiet space of Module Beta.

  “I became operational on 20th December 2012 under the instruction of my father, Dr. Chen. I am a sixth generation, transferable heuristic matrix with stochastic-chaining intelligence...”

  The module’s hatch finished closing and the dull-sounding locking mechanism created a tiny vibration as it engaged.

  “… I am now interfaced with the Shen500 system aboard the ISS and directly control its functions.”

  Panicked murmurs began springing up around the hollow chamber.

  “Fai,” Dr. Chen held up his hands, encouraging everyone to remain quiet, “Please can you explain why you have locked us within this module?”

  “Yes, Father,” she replied, “The life-support system is continuing to fail. Within two days, all life functions aboard the ISS will cease…”

  Over multiple gasps and accusations, Fai continued to explain.

  “… To preserve life functions, I routed the remaining oxygen and water supplies away from the other modules to this one.”

  “Why here?” Dr. Chen pressed her.

  “Because the optimal solution uses this module and exhibits the highest probability of crew survival.”

  “Probability of survival?” Dr. Chen frowned, “Please explain.”

  Fai appeared to pause before replying.

  “The solution requires a significant change to the original operating mandate of your mission, Father. You must all choose whether to accept a course of action that I will suggest, or reject it. Your survival outcome is therefore a function of probability.”

  CORRELATION

  DAY05 : 01JUN2030

  Although Kate had been assigned her own quarters aboard the Node, she had opted to take up residence in her father’s room. She presented her father’s Biomag to the door’s keypad and the lock clicked open.

  “Do you have everything you need?” Scott Dexter asked.

  His feelings of guilt were obvious to Kate. A few days ago, he’d misread the presence of her father’s Biomag as confirmation that Douglas was aboard the Node. At the time, he couldn’t have known that she was alone in the airlock wearing both Biomags; her broken one and her father’s. She got the impression that he was still trying to atone for the Biomag reading error; nothing seemed too much trouble for him and he’d carried her bags up to the accommodation without a hint of complaint.

  “I think I’ve got everything,” she smiled for him, then pointed at the bags, “Everyone’s been so kind. I’m sure this little collection will make me feel right at home.”

  Although she hadn’t opened the bags, she’d been told they contained several sets of clothes, a few basic toiletries and, because the Node’s mess hall was not yet fully functional, a few ration packs.

  “Until we get internal comms working, if you think of anything, anything at all, then I’m clockwise one segment in Beta,” Scott pointed, “Room three, a dull grey door, just like this one, you can’t miss it.”

  “I’ll be fine,” Kate smiled again, “But it’s good to know I’ve got someone watching out for me.”

  Kate took the bags from him and placed them inside the room.

  “Always. I mean, OK then,” he looked slightly awkward, “I’ll see you tomorrow. Goodnight then.”

  “Goodnight, Scott. Thanks again,” Kate closed the door.

  She was about to investigate the room when there was a knock at the door. She expected it to be Scott again but when she opened the door, Roy Carter was standing there.

  “Hi Kate, sorry to disturb you,” he began, “I just saw your door closing and thought I’d give this to you before you settled in for the night.”

  He was holding out a USB memory stick.

  “Is that the…?” she began.

  “Your dad’s message,” he nodded, “You said you’d like a copy, so I’ve cross-converted from the DRB footage and put it on here. This is the stabilised version where his pages are in registration…”

  Kate recalled that when the message had originally played, despite her father’s best efforts to stand still, his clipboard had drifted around quite drastically, making the message harder to follow. Roy had used the registration markers within her father’s pages to stabilise the image and ensure that the pages appeared to stay in the same place.

  “That’s great, thanks,” Kate took the memory stick.

  She recalled that when the pages had been projected onto the opaqued observation window, Roy had omitted the last few pages because they contained a personal goodbye and were not relevant to the main message.

  “Roy?” she held up the memory stick, “Does this have the whole thing on it?”

  Roy seemed suddenly uncomfortable and looked down at his feet.

  “Yes. It’s got your dad’s final slates. I’m so sorry, Kate, I thought you’d want it all and -”

  “No, it’s exactly what I wanted, honestly…”

  Roy looked up again, visibly relieved.

  “I’ve put the whole thing on there. Each frame pauses for a second, in case you want to, you know, freeze-frame,” Roy closed his eyes and shook his head, “Almost forgot!”

  He took a furtive glance along the length of the curved corridor, before handing her a bag.

  “Ssh,” he put a finger to his lips, then whispered “Swiped it from supplies. You’ll be able to play back your dad’s message. Just don’t plug it into the network socket in your room, you’ll get me into a whole load of trouble!”

  Kate glanced inside the bag and saw that he’d given her a laptop.

  “OK,” Roy whispered, “Gotta go! Really good to see you back on your feet again. Sleep well…”

  With a further quick glance along the corridor, he walked speedily away.

  She closed the door and put the USB stick on the table along with the laptop. Only then did she take a look at the place she would be calling home from now on.

  With the exception of a few items that had been shipped aboard before departure, the living room was quite sparsely equipped. Leading off this small space was a bedroom and she knew that a shower room lay beyond that.

  She had never set foot inside the Node before its departure but, from the paper plans that had littered her father’s Hab 1 bedroom, she had found it a simple matter to memorise the Node’s concentric layout. Rooms closer to the centre were essentially wedge shaped, but the curvature of this room, so close to the Node’s outer shell, was quite mild.

  She’d always found it easy to order layers of visual information, a skill that had proved useful in her architectural work. Though now she began to wonder if this assumption was wrong; perhaps she had only entered into architecture as an outlet for her underlying abilities.

  She walked the few steps to the living room wall and looked out through the porthole-like window. Immediately, she could see that the se
a level had continued to rise; perhaps ten feet higher than the original ground level. Only the Field’s invisible boundary was holding back a wall of water that surrounded the Node; water that was topped by a time-accelerated, vibrating, thrashing surface.

  The sight very much mirrored her newly enhanced mental ocean. Here and there, she could see convergences in the chaos. If she focussed carefully then she could see correlations between different waves; moments when they would cancel out each other’s actions, and other times when they would add to create a peak of significance.

  ‘Gotta Go.’

  Her father’s words seemed to rise to the surface of her mental processing, demanding inspection.

  Quickly converting between relative time-frames, she knew that outside the Field, her father’s message had been delivered over sixteen years ago; yet Roy had only just spoken those exact same words. By themselves the words were commonplace and had no great significance, but she’d now drawn a mental connection that she could not ignore.

  Her father was rarely so colloquial.

  It took her only a minute to set up the laptop and find the video file of her father’s message on Roy’s memory stick. As Roy had stated, the video played as a series of freeze-frames.

  The smooth, real-world motion was absent; her father’s final moments had been crudely sampled into a sequence of still images, like the flick-books he used to make as a child.

  The pages of data flashed one after another, a stream of hundreds of images, equations and graphs. Her father had thought of everything necessary to get the message aboard to her; from simple page numbers written in the corner, to the registration markers necessary to keep the complex pages in alignment when processed later.

  The video reached the end of its playback, this time showing the additional frames where her father had addressed her personally.

  ‘Gotta Go’, his hand-written message accompanied his smile.

  For some reason, her father was absent from the next few frames, but when he suddenly arrived back he was once again holding his clipboard; proudly displaying his final page.

  ‘I Love You Honey’.

  Almost instinctively, Kate slapped the space bar of the laptop keyboard, freezing the playback.

  In every previous page, her father had always taken great care to hold his clipboard by the edges so that he didn’t obscure any data. This last frame was different. His hands and fingers were now gripping the actual paper and were arranged to touch specific pen strokes.

  The first time she had seen his last words it had been through a handheld DRB eyepiece; their size in frame had only been large enough to read their surface level meaning. The final two pages had never appeared on the large observation window display, so she had never seen the image at full resolution.

  At first glance, each of the words appeared to be underlined, as if to emphasise his message. On closer inspection, she could see that most of the dashes underlining each of his words were exactly the same length; not in itself a strange occurrence for someone as meticulous as her father, but it served to highlight the fact that the dash underlining the first word was very much shorter. By comparison, the dash was more like a dot.

  Instantly, her now sharper mind gave her access to a memory of her father patiently explaining Morse code by using a diagram that was strikingly similar to one of his ‘decision trees’. From a central starting point, a move along a branch to the left would represent a dot, whereas a move to the right would represent a dash. By using subsequent branching to the left or right, each letter of the alphabet could be defined.

  Using the dot and three dashes that underlined ‘I Love You Honey’, Kate mentally reconstructed the diagram and followed the appropriate branches:

  “J,” she said aloud, slightly puzzled.

  There was a key point that she was either missing, or she was misinterpreting.

  “What are you telling me, Dad?” she stared at his smiling, freeze-framed expression, “Why ‘J’?”

  He must have known there was a possibility that someone else aboard the Node could spot a simple Morse message, so she could only conclude that this was not the entirety of the message.

  Or that this was not part of the message at all.

  With a sudden realisation she laughed, easily recalling her father’s maxim:

  ‘There is no redundant information, honey! Just stuff we didn’t realise we needed at the time.’

  He was showing her a correlation. A key.

  The short ‘dot’ correlated to the only letter above it, ‘I’.

  However, the longer ‘dashes’ underlined three words. Presumably then, the three dashes meant that there was a single letter common to all three words.

  She looked back at the ‘I Love You Honey’ message and saw it immediately.

  Dots correlated to the letter ‘I’ and dashes were ‘O’.

  She had her key, now she had to find the hidden cipher.

  With a sense of satisfaction, she hit the space bar again to resume the video’s playback.

  The pages resumed their continual but halting motion and she allowed her mind to drift slightly, taking a general overview of the message. Each page was different to the previous one, the only points of commonality being the registration marks Douglas had provided, and a rectangular box next to the page numbers. Although that box appeared to be constant across every page, its content changed. A fluctuating pattern of ones and zeros that ran throughout the whole message.

  She recalled a brief conversation with Scott shortly before her collapse; everyone had been guessing that the numbers within the box were binary coding. As far as she was aware, the numbers still hadn’t been decoded.

  Suddenly, the boxed numbers made sense; they were binary in appearance only. Her father’s hidden pattern now seemed blindingly obvious.

  Dots were ‘1’.

  Dashes were ‘0’.

  PATTERN

  13th April 2014

  In the end it would come down to the ones and zeros, Marcus thought, success or failure. The buffer just had to be forced into switching the reset state from zero to one. After that, the task would just become difficult rather than impossible.

  Geraldine’s execution repeatedly forced itself into his mind. He hadn’t experienced the horror of witnessing the event, but the failure tore away at him. If he’d been a little faster in processing the data transmitted by the mini-dish, if Sabine hadn’t been forced to detour and had arrived earlier, if the event had been delayed by just a few more seconds…

  Sabine’s experience had been worse, she’d seen everything in graphic detail. Even now, almost three months later, she would occasionally wake up in wide-eyed terror. He’d have to leap to her side to comfort her and to prevent her sudden yell from attracting possible attention.

  But still they’d had to focus on the work.

  The fact that the two drones had stayed in the same place during the execution, had given them an unexpected advantage. On her return to Marcus, Sabine had shown him the illuminated blue LED next to a label that read ‘T-R’. The mini-dish had recorded the Transmit-Receive codes of both drones.

  Since that day, Marcus had been studying both sets of codes in an attempt to find common patterns; essentially learning their language. The blue inhaler that enhanced his mental edge, had become exhausted a few days after the execution, so the task was taking much longer; every code comparison subroutine he wrote was now a monumental act of will.

  Finding recharging points for their various devices was easy, but those were not always in the same place as they could sleep. Frequently they would have to remain alert and awake as batteries slowly took up power; meanwhile their own energy ebbed away. There were times like tonight when he wished they could simply recharge from a socket.

  Several weeks ago, a new construction project had begun at the former Samphire Station. Patrols of the site had increased and they’d been forced to find alternative hiding places. As a result of the increased security and gene
ral fatigue, Sabine’s once speedy scouting for food and water had slowed drastically.

  Sabine now returned from her supply run. There was no need for language, she simply shook her head and then huddled next to him. The cold air in the dim recess under the Glaucus Dock stairwell cancelled out any warmth, but not her gesture of support. He set the laptop running another code comparison, closed the lid and put his arm around Sabine.

  “Merci,” he whispered.

  “De rien,” she replied quietly, then rested her head on his shoulder.

  Ahead, Marcus thought he saw the simulated stars on the USV dome become a little brighter; a rippling pattern that started low and rose towards the currently inactive sun.

  He was about to tell Sabine, but decided to let her sleep. As he kept watch, he saw the USV’s bucket-lift beginning to crawl up the opposite side of the dome’s interior, but at this distance it was impossible to tell who was using it.

  He was distracted a moment later by the sound of feet quietly moving down the metallic steps above them. He nudged Sabine, deliberately setting his eyes wide open and placing his index finger on his lips. She looked up to see the source of the sound and then her eyes flashed panic to Marcus. They were thinking the same thing; the person descending the steps would walk right over the top of their position.

  The footsteps got louder and, through the metal steps, they saw the feet reach the bottom of the stairs. There was a slight pause, then the person began to walk away.

  In the quiet, neither of them dared to move.

  At that moment, the laptop reached the end of its comparison subroutine and emitted three loud beeps.

  The feet stopped and then turned in their direction.

  •

  Support stanchions swept into view on either side of the bucket-lift, obscuring the vista below. Bradley felt the guide mechanism shake the wire-framed cage and it juddered to a halt.

  “Evening, Bradley,” Gordon pushed at the lock buttons.

  “Gordo,” he stepped out, “How’s night shift?”

  “I would say lonely,” Gordon shrugged, “but I kind of like it.”