Post #125 June 4, 2018

 

“Here Comes Convergence!”

 

Some time around the end of June, I’ll be uploading the newest episode in The Farpool Stories.  It’s called The Farpool: Convergence.  To get everybody ready for what’s coming, below is another excerpt from the story….

 

Chapter 2

 

Trieste Operations and Mission Control

Gateway Station

Earth-Moon L2 Point

September 4, 2120

0350 hours EUT

 

On Europa, there is only ice…to the naked eye.  Ice cliffs and ice valleys.  Ice ravines and ice canyons.  Ice bergs, buttes, badlands.  Ice continents.  Above the ice is the vacuum of space.  Below the ice is a vast ocean, black as night.  Normally, the two don’t mix.

In the late summer of 2120, as people on Earth reckon time, a small channel of sluggish, slightly warmer ice surged upward through the badlands of Conamara Chaos, embedded in a column known to geologists as a diapir, and burst through the surface crust.  A geyser erupted into space, not in itself an unusual occurrence on Europa.  However, this geyser extended over several square kilometers, flinging tons of ice and steam into the heavens. 

This geyser caught the attention of observers on Earth and at Korolev Crater’s Farside Observatory, on the Moon. 

After the Jovian Hammer mission some years before, an orbiting detection network had been put into place around Europa.  Known as Europa-Eye, it was designed to provide intelligence on the ceaseless heaving and churning of the Europan ice surface.  The network contained numerous instruments: visual cameras, mass spectrometers, neutron flux devices, radiometers. 

Not long after Europa Eye had been put in place, a new visitor came to the badlands of this mysterious moon of Jupiter, a small robotic explorer called Trieste.  The little ship landed and immediately began boring through the ice, eventually carving out a narrow tunnel though which it could descend into the black ocean below.  Five days after it had set down among the ice mountains of Conamara Chaos, the ship came to the bottom of the kilometers-thick ice layer and scooted off to explore the ocean.

On the first day of September, Europa-Eye detected evidence of some kind of vast movement under the ice.  Increased thermals, spikes in electromagnetic activity, even acoustic signals well above baseline were detected and processed through SpaceGuard Center at Farside. 

There was no consensus on what the signals meant, just a growing suspicion that something seemed to be stirring beneath the ice.  Analysts at SpaceGuard Center, vidconferencing with their colleagues at the UNISPACE Watch Command Center in Paris, concurred that something was happening on the surface of Europa, something different, something unexpected. 

Visual analysis from Europa-Eye was inconclusive.  Trieste was directed to proceed cautiously toward the source of the disturbance. But it was plain to see from the imagery streaming back from Jupiter’s huge satellite, that a newly formed geyser had just erupted on the surface.  After some discussion, UNISPACE analysts finally decided to log the event as an icequake, a shifting of ice plates and ice continents, that had opened up a channel to pressurized water beneath.  That water, rising through the newly formed channel from the Europan ocean, was now sublimating into space, in a series of spectacular geysers.  The phenomenon seemed to be mainly centered along a series of ice grooves, known as linea, starting in the Conamara Chaos and ending at the southern end of Radamanthys Linea, longitude 192 degrees, latitude 12 degrees north.

Or so they thought.  The report issued to CINCSPACE made the conclusion that the geyser field was nothing more than an unusual series of ice plates shifting about, despite growing evidence of massive movements in the ocean below.  Europa-Eye would continue to observe and record the event, providing thesis material for astronomers and geologists and glaciologists for years to come.  Farside and UNISPACE would continue to monitor the activity that had roiled the surface of Europa.  Trieste would give them answers once she came within instrument range of the disturbance. 

But the report was firm in its principal conclusion:  natural forces were responsible for a series of new ice geysers erupting on the surface of Europa.  It was more violent and spectacular than before, but nothing the investigators hadn’t seen before on countless other worlds, even on Europa itself.

What Europa-Eye could not see, however, was what was actually embedded in the main geyser, hidden from view, obscured by the violence of tons of ice sublimating into space every second.   A massive swarm of nanoscale robotic devices, most no larger than a few atoms, was no longer submerged in Europa’s ocean of night.  Instead, the swarm had bored through more than thirty kilometers of ice and arisen to the surface of the satellite.  Now residing in a steep ice ravine, surrounded by towering ice cliffs, hidden by geysering spouts of water, the vast swarm boiled away like a festering sore, slamming atoms to maintain itself and expand in the maelstrom of erupting ice and water.

As it settled onto the icy surface, the swarm had begun to bud off trillions of replicant bots from its main structure.  The swarm was shedding parts of itself.

These bots sloughed off and drifted upward, some riding on droplets of water, particles of ice sublimating into the vacuum.  Most of the bots managed to achieve escape velocity through infinitesimal nano-scale thrusters, using the available water as propellant.  Orienting themselves toward the Sun, the swelling swarm of nanobots soon entered a steep, elliptical heliocentric orbit, an orbit which would intersect the orbit of Earth in less than six months.

Disguised by the geysers, the swarm escaped Europa and the Jupiter system completely.  It now drifted sunward…and Earthward.

 

Mission controllers Leo Benford and Marcie Jameson were on duty at Trieste Mission Control when the signal came in from the little robotic explorer cruising in the sub-ice ocean of Europa that something odd had been detected on sonar.  It seemed to be a large formation of nanobotic elements, floating several hundred meters below the ice and below a region called Rhadamanthus Linea.  Acoustic signals, electromagnetic signals, everything pointed to bots, uncountable trillions of bots, slamming atoms like a frantic brick mason, dead ahead of the little submersible.  Trieste was commanded to investigate and the nature of this phenomena soon became apparent: something intelligent had left this swarm there and further investigation now seemed critical.

Jameson blinked hard at her displays.  “What the hell--?”  Her fingers played over the keys on her console, bringing up more windows, more displays, more data. 

“What is it?” asked Benford, studying radar imagery of the Europan surface from Europa-Eye. 

“Something just happened to the Trieste feed.  One moment I’m getting telemetry on all systems, radar, radio, infrared, everything.  Then…zip.  Nothing.  Nada.”

“Comm failure?  Have you got a carrier…any signal at all?”

“Zilch.  Trieste has gone quiet.”

The idea that the little submersible might have gone belly up on their watch at Ops gave rise to a sour taste in Benford’s mouth.  “Run all diagnostics.  And make sure everything is backed up.  I don’t want anybody saying we screwed up.”

“The last data we had was what we’ve had for several hours—that amorphous blob that was putting out thermals and EMs like there’s no tomorrow.”

Benford rubbed two-day old stubble and loosened his restraining belt a little more.  He swore silently; already the belt was too tight as it was and he was on the last notch.  Too many pancakes, he muttered.  Zero-g was all fine and good as long as you didn’t have to button your pants.  “Bot swarm…is that still your theory?”

Jameson shrugged, shoved back a few auburn bangs from her eyes.  “Signatures match…pretty well.  Maybe it could be argued.  Maybe it’s some kind of instrument glitch…wouldn’t be the first time.”

Benford would have scratched his hair, if he had any.  “Before we go to UNISPACE with this, I want to make sure CAESAR’s covered every angle.  I don’t want some supervisor at Farside or Paris taking a big chunk of my ass over hare-brained notions of alien bugs under the ice at Europa.  What about Europa-Eye?”

“Still chirping on all bands.  She just went through Level 1 diagnostics two days ago.  Everything looks good but I’ll pull up the spectra, see what kind of matches we get.”  The astronomer massaged her keyboard, calling up spectrographic profiles on every blip the satellite had seen the last month.  “Eye’s showing the same anomaly…  Europa’s been quiet for months…SpaceGuard’s not showing anything.  Now, all of a sudden, BLAM!  Energy spikes all over the place.  We should have seen something before…rising X-ray, rising gamma levels, radar spikes, something.  But nothing until this.”

Benford mulled that over.  “Two sources of data, each showing the same thing.  They can’t ignore that.  Are you recording everything?”

“Every last bit…backed up per usual.  It’s all on disk, Leo.”

Benford finally released himself from his belt and drifted off, letting faint air currents sweep him around the Ops compartment to a nearby window.  Outside, the crescent moon hung like a sliver of a dish from the mess hall, with a blue green sliver of Earth on the opposite side of the porthole.  All the cylinders, trusses, girders and modules of Gateway Station loomed below the window edge in the foreground.  Something moving caught his eye: it was only Cavanaugh outside, fixing something on the ‘front porch’, nadir side of the Hab module.

Benford realized looking at his reflection in the optical glass just how haggard he looked.  Too many extra shifts, trying to cover for others.  He was starting to look like a street bum.  “Okay, what else have we got for explanations besides alien bots?”

Jameson twisted around in her seat, watched Benford watching himself in the window.  “The traditional answer is icequakes.  Then there’s tidal flexing from Jupiter.  Some kind of weird ice breakup over the Chaos, little ice cubes tinkling down into the depths.  Meteor strike, though Europa Eye should have seen that kind of impact.”

“None of these theories match the signatures as well as alien bots?”

“Sorry.  Data is data.”

Benford shrugged.  “Doesn’t mean a thing, Marcie.  You did the normal correlations, didn’t you?”

“Several times.  The results came up the same every time.”

 “It’s statistically insignificant.  Run Statcheck…you’ll see what I mean.”

 Jameson hesitated before running the statistical routine.  “You really want to do this, Leo?  What if Statcheck shows significance?  How do we explain that?”

Benford ran a hand through his thinning hair.  “We’ll make the numbers work out.  This data’s got to be bunk…you know it and I know it.  What do you want me to do: put out an alert: ‘Hey, guys, the Old Ones have arrived at Europa and the buggers are eating up the whole planet.’  I don’t think so.  I value my career too much.  No, let’s get all the data we can and set up a vidcon.  There’s some kind of weird anomaly going on up there, one with a perfectly reasonable explanation.  We just have to find it.”

Marcie Jamison started saving all of SpaceGuard’s data to a file called Europa Anomaly.

Leo Benford returned to his seat, buckled in and started composing an alertgram to UNISPACE’s Watch Center.

Maybe I’ll poke another notch in this belt, just to be safe, for when the real crap starts flying around here.

 

That’s the excerpt.  I hope that this intrigues everybody enough to download The Farpool: Convergence and check it out.  Look for it at the end of June 2018.

 

The next post to The Word Shed comes on June 11.

See you then.

 

Phil B.