The Gift (3 page)

“The team is currently working out of the east conference room. I’ll be there after I update the CO…Sam, don’t make me regret this.”

Sam nodded, ignored his confusion, got up and headed for the conference room. The rabbit hole had gotten deeper in very short order.

“What the hell took you so long?” Jack asked as Sam entered the conference room. Jack was not in uniform and hadn’t shaved. In the many years he’d known him, Sam had never seen Jack so unkempt. Jack was a dick, but he was usually a very well kept dick. So, apparently not a drill.

“I got here as quickly as I could. What’s going on?” Sam replied.

“We have a first contact situation and it does not appear to be a friendly visit.”

Sam choked back his first, incredulous response, thought for a moment and asked instead, “How do I get up to speed and what do you need me to focus on?”

Captain Andrews started walking toward the pair when she saw Sam enter the room. She arrived in time to hear Sam’s question and was pretty sure she’d be the one providing him the SITREP, but was waiting for Major Thompson to answer.

“Captain Andrews will provide a situation report. Focus on how we’ve tried to communicate with them and how they’ve responded. That will make more sense in a moment. I don’t want to bias you with my opinion. Captain Andrews is not a member of the contact team and as such, has no opinion on the matter. Her report will be as unbiased as possible under the circumstances. Report to me when you’re up to speed. Proceed, Captain.” With that, he left the two of them alone in the doorway and went to join a heated discussion in the far corner of the large room.

Sam did not think it odd that Jack started the conversation by introducing his bias and ended by taking credit for not doing so. He shook his head almost imperceptibly before turning to Jane.

“Jane, I could really use a lot of information right now.”

“Let’s go in here,” she led him into an office adjacent to the conference room. It held a single wooden desk pressed against the middle of the far wall, surrounded by matching bookshelves. There was a large flat screen monitor on the desk. The monitor showed a representation of the Earth and one bright yellow line originating some distance beyond the orbit of the moon and extending about a third of the way to Earth. As Sam got closer, he saw that it wasn’t actually a single line, but rather a group of lines very close to one another.
 

Jane gave him a moment to look at the monitor before asking, “Okay, Sam. How do you want to do this?”

“How about we start with that?” Sam pointed to the lines on the screen. “Is that live?”

“Yes," Jane started to add more. Sam interrupted her.

“What time was this?” He asked, pointing to the origin point.

“03:22 this morning.”

“And the speed is constant?”

“Yes.”

Sam looked at his watch, the back at Jane, “Then I’d better let you talk. Start with what we know about the objects, please.”

“When we first spotted the anomaly, it presented as a single object, a featureless black sphere with an albedo approaching zero. It stayed that way until 04:49, when it appeared to reform into eighteen smaller spheres, each 379.79 and change meters in diameter. One of them reversed course immediately. We tracked it until 06:18, when we lost it. The remaining seventeen continued toward the Earth with no change in speed, but a slight divergence in direction." Jane paused to let Sam absorb what she’d just told him. He took another, closer look at the screen, then nodded for her to continue.

“Colonel Web convened the first contact team at 04:38. They developed a plan of attack and broke into groups at 06:15. Their communication plan was approved by the NCA at 08:41 and implemented eight minutes later. The response was immediate: one of the remaining spheres began transmitting what appeared to be white noise. The sphere has continued to transmit from the moment of contact. It was still transmitting when I left to meet with you and Colonel Thompson. The data stream is being downloaded to a node on the cluster controlling the communications satellite. Dan’s team began running a series of pattern analysis programs against the incoming data stream. They have had some success, although I can’t tell you any particulars. Something they found surprised them. I don’t know what. That’s when Dan convinced Colonel Web we needed to bring you in.

“Sam, I didn’t hear that conversation, but it wasn’t hard to tell that Colonel Web was not happy about that.”

“You mentioned that the seventeen objects still headed toward Earth changed course. Do we know where they’ll hit if the situation remains constant?” Sam asked, without responding to her comment. She was walking a fine line, one he did not want her on.

“Rui’s team did that right away. Here’s the projection." She handed him a computer-generated image showing numerous impact sites in the Atlantic Ocean.

“And the one that got away, do we have any more details on that?”

“Not as of when I left.”

“Have we received any response to our attempts to communicate other than the data stream?”

“Again, not as of when I left.”

“Looks like it’s time to go talk with the team. Thanks for the briefing, Jane. How are you holding up?”

“I haven’t really had time to think about it and I think that’s best for now.”

Sam nodded and headed back into the conference room. He spotted Dan and walked toward him.
 

Dan looked up from what he was doing when he caught a glimpse of Sam entering the room. He managed a feeble smile, “A lot to take in, eh Buddy?”
 

Dan was an average looking middle aged guy. He was of average height, average weight with a slight paunch, black hair fading to brown with streaks of white combed straight back from the front with no attempt at being stylish. He had an equally salt-and-pepper mustache, which he spent more time grooming than he did his hair. It was, perhaps, his only affectation. Although he looked average, Sam would tell you there was very little that was average about Dan. Sam had been through some hard times with Dan by his side. Dan was like the brother he’d never had and Sam was glad to see him, especially under these conditions. “That may well be your ultimate master of the understatement moment, Dan.”

Dan’s smile became a little less feeble. “It would be hard to overstate right now, so I win by default.”

“Fair enough. Jane did a good job providing a 30,000-foot view. How about you giving me the details?”

“She told you we’ve been receiving a large quantity of data since we made contact, right?

“Yes.”

“And that we believe we’ve identified at least one pattern?”

“Yes, although she had no details.”

“Understandable. She’s had her hands full keeping Web apprised of everything that’s going on so the rest of us can focus on our specialties. She’s been quite remarkable, really. Anyway, as you can imagine we pulled all stops on pattern analysis. Chang worked with the tech team to put together a powerful cluster isolated from the rest of the network and we currently have dozens of different scripts running against various parts of the data stream. There doesn’t seem to be a single dominant pattern. Several of the scripts have detected what appear to be coherent data in parts of the stream, but when the same algorithm is applied to other parts of the stream, no coherence is evident. I suspect—I have no hard evidence, mind you—I suspect that the message is designed to be decoded using a variety of methods." Dan paused.

“Sounds like it’s right up your alley, Dan. What makes you think I’ll be able to help?” Sam asked.

“One of the first scripts to get a hit was one of yours, the one you use to find steganographically hidden executable files.”

“You know I wrote that as more of a sieve than a detector, right?”

“Yeah, I know, false positives and all that, but we’ve had several hits since the first one. I don’t know how coarse your sieve is and no one has time to get up to speed on your code; besides none of us are as likely as you are to make progress in time to be relevant. There’s an open workstation connected to the new cluster right next to mine. It’s yours now. Come on, I’ll show you what we’ve found so far.”

Sam followed Dan and stood behind him as he sat at his workstation. Dan pulled up a number of files, the most promising results of the previous runs of Sam’s script. Dan explained where in the data stream the script had found candidate programs. Neither of them saw any pattern in the location of the hits. Before long, Dan could tell Sam was only paying attention to be polite. He obviously wanted to work on the problem himself.

“That’s what we have so far. Any thoughts?” Dan asked.

“I think I need to get to work," Sam replied as he took a seat at the unlocked workstation and asked where to find the relevant test directories. Dan pointed out the primary input and output directories being used by the running version of Sam’s code. Sam didn’t need much else. He began to work. Within minutes, the oddity of the situation, the noise in the room and the pending threat were all set aside, not forgotten, just filed away where they wouldn’t be distractions.

Sam had worked in one form of counter-terrorism or another nearly all of his adult life. When he could no longer work in the field, he devoted himself to countering cyberterrorism. He spent most of his time during an average week monitoring the world’s networks for unusual content or behavior. Modern criminals and terrorists were quite good at covertly communicating information in a number of ways. Arguably the most effective of those ways was to hide messages inside of other content, a sort of Trojan Horse approach known as steganography.

Al-Qaeda is particularly fond of steganography, having used it to hide plans, photographs and other materials in images and audio files for years. Doing so effectively is a balancing act between the amount of data to be hidden and the level of degradation to the source file. Adding too much information increases the likelihood that the modified file will be detected and makes it easier to decode once found; so the terrorists, or anyone trying to hide significant amounts of information, frequently break it up into large groups of smaller files transmitted over time. As with all things related to technology, the tools for hiding information are always improving, as are the tools for detecting such efforts. Sam spent a fair amount of his time updating detection tools, as well as vetting improvements made by other teams, notably the NSA, and adding them to the command’s cyberterrorism fighting kit. He had never imagined he’d be using the same set of tools to analyze an alien signal, yet here he was doing just that.

“I told you to report to me when you were up to speed," Jack interrupted Sam.

“I’m sorry, what?” Sam responded, still processing Jack’s words as he pulled back from the data.

“I said, I told you to report to me when you got up to speed. Jane finished briefing you nearly two hours ago. I expected to hear from you by now. It’s important that I know what you’re working on and whether or not you’re making progress.”

Sam wasn’t sure how that fell in to the category of important under the circumstances, but chose to let it pass. “Good timing, Jack. I just finished something and could use some water. I’ll brief you while we walk.”

“Start with what you’ve been doing for the past two hours.” Jack said, clearly irritated.

Sam stood, stretched and started for the break room. He knew he shouldn’t let himself be annoyed by such comments, but he just couldn’t help himself. Exactly what did Jack think he’d be briefing him on? His breakfast? The weather? Wanting to say something very different, he settled on, “I’ve been submitting portions of the message we’re recording to a script I wrote to find potential computer programs hidden within other types of files. I’ve found quite a few potential candidates. I’m trying to put the best one of them together.”

“Why would they hide their message if they wanted us to get it?”

“You’ll have to ask AJ about their potential motives. He’s the one who’s supposed to work on alien psychology. I wouldn’t know where to start, but I get your point. I don’t think that they are trying to hide it. Dan thinks they’re trying to get their message to us using multiple methods, and I think he’s right. There seem to be multiple, interwoven messages. My program identifies areas where there appear to be executable files in part of that mesh of data. I just started running a version of that program I modified to include several pattern recognition algorithms from Dan’s team’s to try to piece together the most promising candidate when you walked up. That’s why I said you had good timing. It should be done by the time we get back.” They’d made it to the break room and Sam was getting a couple of bottles of water from the refrigerator. He offered one to Jack. Jack declined with a wave of his hand.

“So, what do you expect to find?” Jack asked as they headed back to the conference room.

“I expect to find at least a portion of an ELF, all of one if we’re lucky.” Sam was having a little fun with Jack. He was pretty sure he was the only one enjoying it.

“What the hell is an elf?” Jack asked. Sam resisted the temptation to respond with a lesson in folklore.

“It’s a type of program file. It stands for Executable and Linkable Format. Many servers can run programs compiled and linked to that format. I’d be willing to bet we’d find Windows executable files as well if we looked, I just proceeded with the script that Dan had already had some success with.”

“Why do you think that’s what you’ll find? What makes you think they’d send us a computer program?” Jack was becoming more annoyed as he received more information without becoming any more informed.

Sam decided it was petty of him to continue playing with Jack. “I think we’ll find an ELF because that’s what my program was intended to find and because I’ve been looking at the raw data and I’m seeing what look like parts of an ELF header. As for why they’d send us a computer program, I can think of a lot of good reasons, depending on what it is designed to do.”

“Have you been able to determine what that is?”

“Not a clue. It’s compiled code. The only way we can know what it’s designed to do in the short term is to run it. We don’t have time to reverse-engineer it," Sam replied as they approached his workstation. “Why don’t we take a look and see what we’ve got?”