Deep inside the Stack, Felix sat in a comfortable chair at a solid wood table, utterly perplexed about why he was there. The room was large, yet sparse. It had the feel of rented space, never serving a defined purpose. The head of AESA, Professor Eugene Graham, had broken into Felix’s apartment the night before as he returned from the Unicycle and offered him a job. The details of which he’d been less than forthcoming about. Not that Felix would remember anyway, on account of how many little rum bottles he’d indulged in on the flight home.
Felix was joined by Graham’s assistant, Jeffery, and a horse of a man named Harris. Also present was a quirky Englishman with hair like exploded cotton, who couldn’t stop playing with an abacus slung around his neck, while a pair of lackeys to his right watched with reverent attention. Felix questioned why he’d gotten out of bed at all.
Graham’s chest expanded like a bellows before he spoke. “Good afternoon, everyone. I’ve asked you here because we’ve added another member to the team.” All eyes turned toward Felix. “This is Mr. Fletcher. Today is his first day, and this meeting will serve as his introduction to our little project. Please keep in mind that he may need a little patience and extra explanation. To that end, let’s recap.” He keyed the table and the room’s lights dimmed.
The center of the table opened like an iris to reveal the built-in holo-projector. The air above it coalesced into a shape like two silver bullets joined at the tips.
“Twenty-five days ago, the AEUS Magellan wrote home to announce an artifact of unknown origin recovered in deep space. Spectrographic analysis determined its shell is comprised of a titanium and palladium alloy we’ve never seen before. Further isotopic tests show the metal was not mined on Earth or any of our colonies. Further, Magellan discovered this signal keeping the neighbors awake…” Eugene tapped another key. The room filled with a bizarre yet fascinating noise. The result one might expect if Salvador Dalí had taken up composition.
“The object was found motionless four light-months away from the nearest star, yet the signal is too weak to reach it. That’s about as far as we’ve gotten.”
With some reluctance, Eugene looked toward the cotton ball to his right. “Dr. Kiefer, how are we doing on the communication bottleneck?”
“Well, we’ve fired up the Magellan’s reserve QER, so that doubled our bandwidth. And Marvin ’ere”—he slapped the closest lackey on the shoulder—“’e’s workin’ on some new data compression programs. That should speed things up another 20, maybe 25 percent.”
“Excellent. Keep working on that, Marvin. We’ll need to be able to shift huge amounts of data once they crack the artifact open and the research really gets going. The fewer delays the better.” Eugene looked to his assistant. “Jeffery, how goes the unwanted publicity front?”
“Better than expected. We feared word of the artifact would leak immediately.”
“Can’t imagine who might leak mission-critical information accidentally,” said now Sergeant Tom Harris.
“Look, Thomas, I said I was sorry. Besides, you got a promotion out of it.” Jeffery found his track again. “Anyway, we decided to head it off and leak it ourselves to a few of the most fringe, sensationalist, and disreputable independent news sites. They’ve been running strong on the ‘Government / Alien Cover-Up’ angle ever since.”
Harris spoke up again. “Okay, I’ll bite. How is that ‘better than expected’?”
Jeffery grinned. “Once we selectively leaked the story, it found itself in a wilderness of other conspiracy theories, false-flag accusations, Antichrist sightings, the usual noise.” Jeffery smiled broadly. “It’s currently fighting for its life against the nutters who still believe the planet is some sort of flat discworld. Our story is almost completely lost in the noise.”
“That’s brilliant,” said Felix. “I’ve had to deal with some of these people. There are still folks out there who insist the moon landings were faked.”
“But you’re from the moon,” Eugene said.
Felix shrugged. “It doesn’t faze them. When I told one of them I was from New Detroit, he insisted I was a government hologram and started trying to wave his hand through me. They’re impenetrable.”
“Maybe our yanks could use them as meteor shielding,” Harris added.
“Well, just this once we can be thankful for the sad state of education,” Eugene said. His gaze passed over the young Lunie. “You seem to be taking this well, Felix.”
“Ah, yeah, I’m fine. Just curious how I fit into all this.”
“A perfectly natural question. None of us here has an engineering background. Dr. Kiefer and his men are educated in particle physics and quantum theory, but their technical training is limited to the QERs they maintain. You’re sort of the reverse. Your experience is light on theoretical physics, but heavy on real-world applications. You know how things work. Therefore, where you fit in will be to take what we learn from the artifact and put it to practical uses.”
Felix put his hands on the table. “Just so I’m clear, last month, a ship stumbled onto an alien thingamajig, so you’ve recruited me, a twenty-four-year-old college student, to remotely watch a crew thirty light-years away tear it apart and build stuff from what I see on the screen?”
“That about sums it up,” Eugene said.
“Oh. All right, then.” Learning about the job didn’t have the reassuring effect Felix had hoped for. “Who does our little project answer to?”
“Well, that’s a good question, one that hasn’t really been answered yet. At this point it’s more an issue of who we ask for money and how much we tell them about how we spend it.”
“So we’re like teenagers?” asked Felix.
“Yes, now that you mention it. Liberating, isn’t it?” The rest of the room chuckled. “Look, Felix, people way above my pay grade are in the decision loop here, so don’t worry. The cops won’t burst through your door in the middle of the night.”
“Why should I worry about cops? My boss handles the residential break-ins.”
“Touché,” said Eugene. “What do you think you’ll need to do the job?”
“I don’t know exactly. I’ve never built a reverse-engineering department from scratch before. But for starters, I’ll need work space, a quantum computer loaded with dynamic modeling software, access to theoretical physicists, and a molecular printer for rapid prototyping. Most importantly, I’ll need something to copy.”
Eugene looked to Jeffery, who consulted his data pad. “There’s work space open here. The computer and the mol printer will be simple to acquire. We can probably bring in any physicists on the AESA payroll you want to consult, so long as they can pass security checks, so give us a list of people that need to be cleared.” Jeffery looked up from his pad. “But as far as source material, that’s up to Magellan.”