The Rising(19)

Donati’s team, of which Samantha was a part three afternoons a week and Saturdays, was also investigating the utility of SynBio for 3D printing to produce bio-based products, biomining to obtain minerals from planetary surfaces or recover valuable elements from spent electronics, as well as the production and purification of pharmaceuticals that might be necessary to maintain crew health on long-duration spaceflights. A science geek’s dream.

And Samantha’s work under Donati had been so stellar that he had recently recommended she be included in a team devoted to the conceptual study of astrobiology and exobiology that covered all issues pertaining to Earth’s place in a universe that almost surely contained other life forms. Much of the real work at Ames was top secret, taking place in a combination lab and think tank to which her security clearance didn’t yet permit access.

Because she was always in a lab, of course, she’d heard things. She knew that along with Donati’s bioresearch, his division also studied what they referred to as wormholes or black holes in space—shortcuts through the millions of light-years that it could take man to get from one spot to the other. A problem of space travel remained time—it was no good to get someone somewhere if they’d been dead of old age hundreds of years before they arrived. And, just as the Earth rotated around the sun, and the sun found its place in the galaxy, other masses moved in space.

All that movement, Sam had learned, meant that there were “doors” that only opened at certain times and then closed again until maybe the next thousand years or so went by. So it was crucial for scientists at Ames and elsewhere to study and understand the doors to ensure that future space travelers didn’t find themselves sucked into the true darkness of oblivion—a tremendous amount to comprehend, for sure.

Sam loved everything that she learned, and she knew she’d found her calling at NASA. For the first time in her life she was judged entirely on her brains and productivity, with no weight given to popularity and social standing. At Ames she was finally one of the cool kids, giving her a whole new perspective on how little all that meant in the great scheme of things. Because that very scheme of things, you learned at Ames, wasn’t just about this world.

It was about thousands of others, potentially.

And that had a tendency to change your view of the microscopic part of the universe taken up by high school. Sam wondered what aliens might make of Earth if all they got to see was a school, even one as well regarded and run as St. Ignatius. She imagined they’d be so horrified as to question how the human race had lasted as long as it had.

The vastness of Ames, employing over two thousand people who were spread out over six separate facilities in its Silicon Valley site thirty miles from her home in Moss Beach, had enthralled instead of intimidated Sam. She saw in it not so much a village-size community as a uniquely compartmentalized world where nothing was too impossible to consider. No theory was discounted out of hand, and even lowly interns like Sam were encouraged to provide input and formulate honest responses to data affecting their particular department. Speaking of which …

“Doctor?” she called, almost running to keep Donati’s pace.

“Not now, Dixon,” he said, from slightly ahead of her. “We’re headed to the future and I don’t want to get sidetracked along the way.”





18

PATTERNS

IT TOOK DONATI’S OWN top-level security card to access the extraterrestrial monitoring station through a sliding door where automated machines collected and collated millions of bits of data every day, most of which were ultimately discarded for being planetary echoes, star bursts, and other easily explicable events.

But today must have been different.

Inside the sprawling station, Donati stopped at one of the primary computer terminals displaying two versions of a bar grid projecting subspace electromagnetic chatter that could indicate some type of advanced or rudimentary form of communication.

“See? Can you see?”

Samantha couldn’t.

“The difference is what I’m talking about, the difference in the grids! There’s movement, consistent movement, not just a blip.”

Sam looked closer at the dual bar grids and, yes, there was a deviation from the standard level indicating the norm. No more than a hair—well, a micromillimeter, actually—but definitely a jump recorded steadily over a six-hour period earlier that day.

“There was a similar bump yesterday,” Donati explained. “But I discounted it, taking it for a blip. I hate blips, all the false hope they give us. But it repeated today and didn’t fall off. See? Can you see?”

This time Sam nodded, wondering maybe, just maybe …

“I’m going to isolate its source,” Donati continued, “even if it takes me all of the night, all of tomorrow, all of the next week. Here I’ll be, ready for the breakthrough to break through. I had to tell somebody. This is too big to keep to myself. I could fall, bang my head, lose my memory, and then no one would ever know it wasn’t just a blip this time. That somebody out there’s talking. There was something similar, indicators anyway, before—about eighteen years ago—but that’s, well, another story. The source, Dixon, we must find the source! Are you with me?”

With him? This was Sam’s ultimate dream, to be involved on the forefront of something this exciting. But she was supposed to tutor Alex tonight; not that he’d care if she had to postpone the session until tomorrow. Still, they’d made plans and the truth was— “Eighteen years,” Donati repeated, breaking her thought. “Wonder if there’s significance in that, a cycle or something. Know what I mean?”