Overture (Earth Song) (47 page)

Love, Billy.

I wish I had more ideas
, she thought as she read the message over. The little walk with Leo helped clear her mind so she walked up to the Portal and mounted the steps. Once her foot touched the top step, the holographic oval of the actual Portal flashed into existence. One of the scientists working nearby looked up at the flash of white light but went back to his work when he saw who it was.

“
Do whatever it takes, eh?” she said as she gazed over the symbols now indelibly ground into her brain. She closed her eyes and summoned up her memory of the old woman and her actions. She’d watched the recording a dozen times and gone over Osgood’s report at least that often. “She touched here first.” The entire oval gave no response. She pulled her hand back and tried again, this time over a slightly different location, but again with no luck.

Mindy
had been stabbing at random for a few minutes and was about to give up when suddenly the entire oval pulsed purple. “Bingo,” she said with a clap.

“
How the hell did you do that?” asked the scientist who was now standing on the bottom step of the Portal dais.

“
Luck,” she said and tried desperately to remember what image she had stuck her finger through. She pressed the one she thought was right again, but nothing happened this time. “Oh, come on,” she grumbled and tried it again. This time she was rewarded with that purple flash of light. “Maybe it restarts a sequence,” she said to herself but the other scientist heard her.

“
I better call Osgood,” he said and ran toward the phone.

“
No, don’t push the panic button until we have something real.”

“
That looked pretty real to me!”

“
Don’t fool yourself.” She didn’t try to push the same symbol again, instead she thought of where Osgood said the woman touched the second time. The oval portal glowed white for an instant and then would do nothing else regardless of where she tapped. “Gotta start over,” she frowned.

“
Getting somewhere?” Osgood asked some time later. The tech must have called after all. She looked down where he was standing at the bottom of the dais with a curious look on his face.

“
Slowly,” she said and looked back at the floating icons.

A
set of portable bulletin boards were near the dais covered with stills of the Portal icons and the woman touching them, including the final sweeping motion frame-by-frame. “Think you're close?”

“
No closer while I'm talking,” she said without considering how rude it sounded.

Osgood
stood and watched in silence for a few minutes before speaking again. “You know, I had no idea your real name was Melinda.”

“
I can't stand it,” Mindy admitted, “I've gone by Mindy since I was seven years old.” She wasn't looking at him so she didn't see him scratch his head and try to decide how to continue. She pressed a pair of icons and the Portal flashed in sequence.

“
Looks like dangerous stuff,” he said, his eyes wide at the unfamiliar reaction from the alien artifact.

“
No more dangerous than being here when Lebowski hits.”

“
Well that goes without saying, but do you know what you’re doing?”

“
Not really, just an assumption.”

His
face contorted and he bit his tongue. “What assumption is that?”

“
That your mystery woman keyed in a command sequence and that the designers possessed at least a small amount of human style common sense.”

“
I don’t follow you.”

“
If you designed something as fantastic as this and with such an incredibly dangerous power source, you would at least make it many times harder to do something dangerous as it was to do a routine function, right?”

“
That makes sense.”

“
So I just figured that as long as I mimicked what you saw, there was minimal risk.”

“
What do you consider minimal risk with a device capable of cracking the Earth's mantle?”

“
Stuff like this,” she said and started a new sequence. Mindy managed to get through the first three steps and was searching for the last ‘button press’ as she was calling it. If she could just find the last button, all that remained was that beautiful sweep of the arm. That action was recorded in high definition.

“
I’d better get some more people in here,” he said and turned to leave.

“
Whatever,” Mindy said and went back to work. On her next attempt, she hit the last spot on the dot. “Bingo!” she cheered and turned to look at printed stills of the movie. “Now, she did it just like this,” Mindy said and reached out an arm, but that was when she noticed that the icons were changed. All the symbols along the arch metamorphosed, and these were ones she'd never seen before. She looked at the spot where the woman started her arm sweep to the spot where she had finished it. The first symbol looked familiar, the second one did not. Far too soon, the symbols pulsed back to their original familiar shapes. “What the hell was that about?” she wondered.

Mindy
worked the sequence again and when she tapped the last symbol, up popped the new unfamiliar symbols. Using a remote control, she snapped a couple of pictures. On a monitor, she examined the eleven symbols. The last one was the most interesting. It didn’t fit in with the other ten.

She
ran down from the dais and back to her workstation. Harold’s computer still sat there flashing calculations. She pulled up a search directory and scrolled through the recorded images until she found that symbol and clicked on it. It didn’t take her where she expected.

The
computer just sat there for a moment, its hard drive light flashing as it worked. “Come on,” she moaned impatiently and gave it a little smack. The screen went black and her heart rate shot up. “Oh shit, I broke it!”

Mindy
hadn’t broken the computer, it had just been busy. The screen came back on with the translation program frozen on a spreadsheet.
This isn’t where I left off,
she thought and checked the control bar. Now there were two versions of the translation program running. “Okay, I’m officially confused,” she said to the computer and flipped back and forth between the two programs. Both were running the alien signal and correlating the symbols from the Portal. The difference was one of them, the one she had been using, had barely scratched the surface. The one that she just accidentally started had already broken the code.

Mindy
chewed her lower lip as she furiously ran down the formidable list of symbols. “Eleven hundred,” she gasped when she’d finished. There was a ninety-nine point seven percent match between the translation matrix, the patterns of the Portal, and the signal they'd received years ago. “He did it,” she said with awe and respect in her voice, “he did it all by himself.” Her eyes filled with tears as she realized what this meant.
He was probably trying to tell me about this when they killed him, that's why he was escaping
. She was about to go back and find out what the last symbol from the Portal meant when voices interrupted her.

“
-and she just started making it flash and respond like that woman did!” she could hear Osgood exclaiming as the dome began to fill with scientists and technicians. Leo Skinner was among the excited crowd. “Have you had any more luck?” Osgood asked her.

“
I’ve completed the sequence, but now I don’t know what to do.” She turned to Harold's computer to explain. Nothing came out of her mouth. Some part of her didn’t want to share the legacy he'd left behind. Why? She didn’t have an answer to that question. Maybe it was the look of expectant excitement on Leo and Osgood’s faces. Maybe it was all the implied threats over the last week or so. Her handler’s liberal use of the carrot-and-stick management style. Or maybe it was just that Harold would have wanted her to keep it to herself. And that was when she remembered her group of co-conspirators. All the hours they spent putting together their own group of colonists, even going as far as stacking the equipment list with items they deemed worthy of going across. All they lacked was the means to execute their plan. Now that means was staring at her from the computer. Mindy was in complete control. But only if she kept her mouth shut.

“
Well, let’s experiment,” Leo said and rubbed his hands together.

“
Not so quickly,” Osgood cautioned, “we don’t know how much damage we can cause by just screwing around.”

“
Well, we need to make progress. Can we risk it yet?” Leo asked Mindy.

“
I don’t know,” she lied. She knew without a doubt that the mystery woman knew what she was doing, and the sequence was safe. The last thing she wanted was this group realizing that she was considering an act of treason.  “Who knows where this thing could go, and we can’t find out without sending someone through. We could end up with someone floating in space, or at the bottom of an ocean.”

She'd
successfully started an argument that began to grow of its own accord. Mindy stood on the outside and offered an occasional 'innocent' comment. After a time, she retrieved Harold's notebook computer and retreated from the dome back to her tiny office. No one even noticed her leaving. Once there, she used the completed translation and the image of the new icons she’d taken to decipher the new ones.

There
were eleven new symbols, each with no obvious meaning. The alien language was a study in vagaries. Now with the translation complete she knew why she’d been having such fits trying to translate it. Harold must have lucked upon the correct sequence of character keys. Ten of the eleven symbols represented the numbers one to ten and associated them with a secondary meaning of site, or home, or maybe territory. The eleventh symbol was different and its translation was much more specific. “Outworld.” But what did that mean, really? She didn’t have to think for long, the answer was right in front of her.

Turning
back to her own computer she started firing off e-mail messages one after another. She worked fast and when she was done, she slipped back into the dome to continue acting like an innocent bystander. She got back just in time.

“
Ah, there you are, Mindy,” Osgood came over to put an arm around her shoulder. “I want to thank you for having the guts to just go for it; I think you are certainly earning your place on the team. But I think we’re going to have a top level meeting to talk this over and see just how far we’re willing to go down the rabbit hole.”

“
Do you want me there?”

“
Uh, yeah, listen, I don’t think that’s a good idea. You see, Hipstitch is going to be there and he’s not happy with what your friend pulled the other day.” Mindy’s face darkened and he quickly moved on. “So look, we’re going to have this meeting and we’ll meet in your office afterwards, okay?”

“
Sure, whatever you think is best.”

“
Excellent, see you soon.” Mindy returned to her office and waited for a goon to show up and arrest her. The e-mails she’d sent started getting replies almost right away. As she responded to them, she didn’t bother to conceal what she was proposing. If they were going to stop her, now was the time. When no one showed up with cuffs, she plotted her next moves with impunity.

Billy was surprised to receive an e-mail from Mindy at his desk. He read it quickly, looking around the hectic command center to be sure no one else was watching over his shoulder. Afterwards, he read it again. What his bride proposed was simple in word but frighteningly complex in deed. “Not asking too much, are you?” he asked quietly even though she could not hear him.

Billy
made the message disappear off his desktop and went back to work for a few minutes so he could think. He was in charge of a hundred patrolmen when he came off the street, now scarcely forty remained on duty. No one tried to look for them, there was no reason to. The end was close, no one cared any more. Still, the police valiantly fought to maintain a semblance of order in the burning city, and against all odds they were succeeding.

After
he’d had time to think over her message, a few ideas began to occur to him. The first couple he dismissed out of hand. Another he gave serious thought before discarding it as well. Finally, he came to the conclusion that the only way to pull this off was with help. He wrote Mindy back with his proposal and explained what he would need to accomplish it

In a darkened Manhattan penthouse, an exhausted Kadru looked up at the chime of her computer announcing she had a new e-mail message. Though not an unusual event in days gone by, it was not common lately. When she returned from that final attack, she said goodbye to those friends she was still in contact with, then closed the e-mail accounts. Since then, her computer had been silent and she was alone.