Decipher (32 page)

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Authors: Stel Pavlou

BOOK: Decipher
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The Popol Vuh cannot be seen anymore … the original book written long ago, existed, but its sight is hidden from the searcher and the thinker.
 
Popol Vuh: Sacred Book of the Quiche Tribe of Maya,
University of Oklahoma Press Edition, 1991
It was raining. Again.
They had told him it didn't actually rain all that much in the rainforest, except maybe during the rainy season. They had lied. Jack Bulger pulled the canvas flap over on his canopy to stop the rainwater from dripping down into his computer.
Piled in front of him were nineteen individual two-foot-square cubes of Carbon 60 crystal, cut out and removed from the tunnels below ground in a systematic process that had taken the best part of twelve hours. Under their own tarp, they had been placed directly onto the ground, where a muddy puddle had collected, like a brown soup that was fast becoming home to an array of festering insects.
A lightning burst arced across the sky as Bulger pulled the tarp back and set up his microscope on the topmost block. He had removed its base so the optical unit peered directly down at the block below. After all, the sample of C60 was too big to slip under the lens on a glass slide.
He had been watching the blocks under the power of the camp lights, and it had become increasingly obvious that dark shadowy veins seemed to have feathered throughout the crystal blocks, like faults in a gemstone. They were not features he had noted when he examined the Carbon 60 in its original state, wrapped in a spiral around the inside of the tunnel. If the crystal were an animal, he would have said it was dying.
He hooked the microscope up to his laptop, and powered up. It wasn't what he preferred to be doing. He'd rather be down in the thick of it, carving this stuff out, but they wouldn't let him. He would have argued the point, but they had the guns. Jack Bulger was many things, but he wasn't stupid.
Eddie the winch operator was busy stringing out the chain and hoist for the next delivery of Carbon 60, running the length of metal links out to the hole in the ground leading down to the tunnel, as Bulger zoomed in on his own specimen of crystal.
“Make sure that thing doesn't snarl up on a stump this time!” Bulger snapped over his shoulder, not bothered if Eddie the winch answered or not, so long as he did as he was told.
Bulger concentrated on his screen. There were three fields of magnification, across a wide band spectrum. The first was maximum optical magnification. Unfiltered. Undiluted. Pure visual data. The second field was enhanced optical. The image was filtered through a patchwork of software to artifically clean up key features of the specimen in different parts of the spectrum. The third field was artificial magnification. Extrapolating key data from the first two fields, the computer used the optical data as a baseline and enhanced what it detected based on a set of algorithms. The result was the computer could artificially increase apparent optical magnification by a factor of 1,000 to an accuracy of 98 percent.
Fine. So long as the damn thing gave him a close-up, Bulger didn't care how inaccurate it was. A fracture was going to look like a fracture, hazy image or not. The important point was, if the extraction process was damaging the crystal in some way, he was going to have to do something about it. A damaged crystal was a damaged pay packet.
He lit up his cigar and blew rings. Keyed zoom, and inspected the surface.
There was movement.
Bulger jerked his eyes away from the screen. Eyeballed his microscope on the crystal block with some suspicion. Was he tired or had he done something wrong?
His first instinct was contamination. Fucking rainwater. He stumbled to his feet and pulled the canvas canopy further over his microscope. He picked the thing up briefly, wiped down the surface just in case it really was wet, and set it back down again. He hit RECALIBRATE and waited.
Movement again.
“Jesus H. fucking God all—assholes.”
“Pretty, Jack,” Eddie the winch commented, as he sat out by the generator, smoking a cigarette. “Real pretty.”
Bulger glimpsed the tip of the man's cigarette glowing in the dark. “Shut up, asswipe.”
“Yessir.”
He studied the screen intently. Could the artificial magnification be reacting to something like an external light source? Misrepresenting a moving dance of shadow and light across the subsurface structure?
“What's the problem?” Eddie the winch asked.
“None of your damn business,” Bulger replied, instinctively shifting in his chair to shield the screen from the other man's prying eyes. Eddie shrugged and stuck to his winch.
The image on the screen seemed to be showing tiny filaments, like tubes of carbon, intricately woven throughout the crystal. It was within these filaments that there seemed to be movement, very much like a liquid. Did this Carbon 60 have some sort of super-fast capillary action as one of its properties? The ability to suck a liquid in if it came into contact with it? Most rocks had this property, but not at this speed.
He hit MAGNIFY, boosting the image far beyond the system's recommended levels. The result was greater inaccuracy but Bulger was prepared to live with that. He passed microns and was in the realms of nanometers now—measurements that covered billionths of a meter. A place where materials began to act very differently.
There it was again. Something shot past the lens. A blur, a dark burst. Then another, and another.
Like shadows on glass. There was no way he could move the lens accurately enough to keep track of, or pace with whatever was speeding through the tubes. No problem. This was a laptop. It had highspeed shutter capabilities. He hit RECORD and took a digital film shot at 10,000 frames per second. The three-second burst was theoretically enough to give him the information he needed.
And as it happened, it was.
It first appeared on frame 1037 and was gone again by frame 1104. More blips appeared in succession soon after, but it was the first one that interested Bulger. It was isolated, and easier to discern. He increased magnification again. And couldn't believe what he was seeing.
Tiny arms. A barrel-like body. Like no design he had ever seen before. Part machine, part organic. It wasn't based on any conventional, modern wisdom. It was based on something superior.
Bulger's cigar fell from his mouth as he watched the
spectacle unfold on his monitor. For a tiny machine, no bigger than some of the human body's own cells, was whizzing through the crystal substructure.
Bulger snatched his cigar up before it burnt a hole in the keyboard. There was only one explanation. “Nanoes,” he said.
 
Carver adjusted his goggles, bracing himself for the back-blast of dust, as the particle beam under his control sliced into the Carbon 60 spiral that was wrapped around the inside of the underground passageway, stretching off in both directions.
The crystal itself was covered in a type of writing he had never seen before, while the ordinary stone portions had glyphs carved on them that resembled ancient Mayan writing. Which, if he remembered correctly, was entirely out of place. The Mayans were from Central America, not South. They never reached Peru or the Amazon. But then, what did he know?
The particle beam finished cutting out a pre-programmed cube of C60 and shut itself down. The cube dulled and slid slowly out of its position. Gathering speed, it crashed to the ground. Garrison was the man with him. He quickly heaved the pail of water by his feet and sluiced the crystal cube down. It hissed in a cloud of steam as two members of Maple's team passed them by on their way farther down into the tunnel's extremities. They adjusted the flashlights bolted to their hard hats as they went.
“Maple wants to know how much more of this stuff we can get out before the tunnel collapses completely,” the larger one said tersely.
There were cubes of C60 missing from the spiral, all over the tunnel. Stress fractures had already started to appear in the ceiling areas. They had plundered in earnest.
But Carver wasn't too worried. “My guess is, a whole lot more,” he said, as the men went about their business.
There was a harness on the ground, hooked up to a couple of heavy-duty chains. Carver and Garrison worked together, stooping to fasten the entire cradle around the Carbon 60 cube and had tied off the last of the clips when Carver's radio kicked in.
“Pack up your kit,” Maple instructed. “We're moving that gun straight out.”
“What's going on?”
“Just be ready to move,” Maple insisted. His voice sounded resonant, as if he were standing in a cavernous room. “We've found something that makes the crystal in that tunnel look like a snack.”
Garrison eyed his boss as he ran the chains through his gloved hands, checking that the way was clear for Eddie to shift the winch into gear and haul the crystal out. “What do we do?” he asked.
“Go find out what he wants,” Carver replied gruffly. “I'll pack that thing up when I'm good and ready.” Garrison shrugged in acknowledgment.
Carver watched Garrison march off into the darkness as the now familiar light storm of energy pulsed down the tunnel and lit up the surroundings for a mile. When it reached his position where the blocks of Carbon 60 had been removed, it seemed to stall. To flicker, like a dying neon tube light. Before passing through what remained of the connection and moving on.
 
“Woo-Wee!” Eddie the winch whooped, bent double over the entry hole, as the energy pulse lit up the tunnel below. He descended into howls of laughter. “Woah boy, that sure is somethin'.”
“Yeah,” Bulger barely murmured through gritted teeth, his mind distinctly elsewhere.
Nanoes. Micro-machines. Constructed at the atomic level, operating on a molecular level, measured on the nanometer scale. Robots that were so small that, given the right instructions, they could literally climb inside a heart through the smallest artery, and perform surgery from the inside out. To be sure, this wasn't the nanotechnology of the modern vision. Current thinking on nanoes dictated that these tiny little robots were so small they were submicroscopic, visible only with an electron microscope, their moving parts the size of protein molecules. Current nanothinking pointed to nanoes that, if they could be made, would be no more than 100 nanometers long.
But they had never been made. The closest thing to structural
manipulation at the atomic level was twenty years old, when Japanese scientists actually had spelled out the word “atom” in Japanese—and
in
atoms.
Clearly, what Bulger was seeing was a machine that was hundreds of thousands of nanometers across. Much larger than theory. But then, theory was worthless without some experiment, application, and the collection of a few facts. And the fact was, a nano was staring him in the face. The first working microscopic machine ever seen.
And that had more cash worth than all the Carbon 60 on the planet.
Jack Bulger shivered with anticipation. God damn, he couldn't tell the men he was with. Not only would they not understand, they'd want a share in the profits. Which just wasn't on offer. Besides, they were going to get rich off the crystal anyway. Screw them. So the only problem now was—what to do with the information.
He couldn't keep it here. They might stumble across it, or rifle through his belongings and discover any handwritten notes. Certainly this piece of digital film would have to be deleted.
So should he send the information somewhere? Maybe e-mail it to himself. Certainly, it was a double-edged sword telling Houghton. If he kept it quiet and didn't tell the company lawyer, then every day that passed increased the probability that some company scientists would run across this discovery in the crystal he'd brought back from Antarctica—if they hadn't already. And he didn't want them getting the glory
or
the money.
But if he told Houghton and it really was a new discovery, he would have safeguarded his personal revenue, albeit at a substantially reduced rate than if he simply put it out to auction to the highest bidder.
There was, of course, the third way. He could do the smart thing, and do both. Tell Houghton. Get paid. Then sell the information on anyway.
Yeah. That sounded better.
So while he put in his call to Jay Houghton, and waited for the system to locate the lawyer, he busied himself by collecting more data. And made the most curious discovery.
The nanoes, depending on what they were trying to
achieve, worked either independently or collectively, using chemical bonds to consciously bind together. To form a larger device.
Incredible. He was going to be so freaking rich!
 
Carver put up his collar. Whistled away to himself as he fastened the chain around the dangling greasy pulley system above. He was directly under the entry hole that had opened up during the initial earthquake. Slimy mud continued to slide down. the sides as torrential rain flooded in from the surface. Carver looked up to see lightning flashes and was actually glad to be underground for a change—even if it was creepy down here.
Glistening clear tree roots, all twisted in glassy knots, jutted out at him. Creatures he hadn't even conceived of before crawled and slithered all around him. Some smaller insect-like things swarmed and fluttered their gossamer wings. He had to flick the odd oversized glass-like spider from his boots. It made his skin crawl. But at least he was dryer in the tunnel.

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