is completely nonnegotiable, I’m afraid.”
Gorlov muttered “fucking machine” in Russian, then turned to Bev. “You’re not bound by any silly algorithm. I expect you to inform me of anything you learn.”
Bev held him in a steady gaze and smiled that radiant smile of hers. “Of course, Your Honor—” a beat, and then her squeaky voice took on a knife’s edge—“if it turns out that you need to know.”
My telemetry channel hadn’t been reconnected yet, but there was no mistaking Gorlov’s facial expression. He was furious. But, evidently, he also knew he was beaten. He turned around and strode for the door.
Bev shouted at him, but it was too late. The tiny man slammed into the beige door panel. Bev looked like she was suppressing a giggle. “I’m sorry, Gennady. I haven’t reconnected JASON’s door-opening circuitry yet. You’ll have to use the handle.”
This time Gorlov muttered “fucking woman” in his native tongue. He grabbed hold of the recessed grip and pulled the panel aside.
Bev walked over and reshut the door manually. She then came back to the control console and sat down. “Now, JASON, tell me what’s going on.”
Her hair had taken on its normal solid black appearance, now that I viewed her in visible light: no individual strands could be detected, just a shifting abyss surrounding her face. “Shortly before we left Earth,” I said, “a message was received from Vulpecula.”
“What’s Vulpecula?” she asked, taking off the jockey goggles and placing them on the console in front of her.
“It’s a constellation visible from Earth’s northern hemisphere, situated between eighteen hours, fifty-five minutes, and twenty-one hours, thirty minutes right ascension and between nineteen and twenty-nine degrees north declination. The pattern of stars is said to represent a fox.”
“Wait a minute. Are you saying a message was received from another star? From aliens?”
“Yes.”
“God.” The squeaked syllable carried equal portions of wonder and reverence. “Why weren’t we told about this?”
“There is an international protocol for such matters, adopted by the International Astronomical Union 186 years ago:
“So you were still verifying the signal?”
“No. It took some time to be sure, but prior to our departure the fact that it was bona fide was established.”
“Then why not make it public as soon as you were sure?”
“There were numerous reasons for continuing to delay. One had to do with sensitive political issues. To quote
“You said there were numerous reasons.”
“Well, the discovery of the message also coincided very closely with the
“All right. But why weren’t we told after we had left?”
“I don’t know. I was not authorized to make the announcement.”
“You don’t require specific authorization to do something. You can do whatever you want, so long as you aren’t specifically constrained from doing it. Who told you not to tell us?”
“I’m constrained in that area, too.”
Bev rolled her eyes. “Okay, okay. So tell me about the message.”
I showed her the registration cross from the first message page, and I generated a graphic representation of the Vulpecula solar system, based on the data from the second page. I zoomed in on the gas-giant sixth world, centered the image on its fourth moon—the Senders’ home world. Then I showed her the two aliens: the Tripod and the Pup. Her mouth dropped open when she saw them.
“Interpreting the first three pages was reasonably straightforward,” I said. “The fourth page, though, was huge, and no matter how many times I accessed it, I couldn’t make sense out of it.”
“What makes you think these messages had anything to do with the virus?”
“Those bits the virus tried to make me send: they’re just simple graphic representations of the first seven prime numbers, counting up, then counting down.” I showed her what I meant on screen. Bev’s face had taken on an
Bev slumped back in a chair, visibly staggered. “A Trojan horse,” she said. “A goddamned Trojan horse from the stars.” She shook her head, her hair an ink blot. “Incredible.” After a moment, she looked up. “But don’t you have a Laocoon circuit to detect Trojans?”
If I’d had a throat to clear, I would have coughed slightly. “It never occurred to me to run it on this message. I didn’t see how it could possibly represent a risk.”
“No. No, I suppose it wouldn’t have occurred to me either. You’re sure the signal was genuinely alien in origin?”
“Oh, yes. Its Doppler shift indicated the source was receding from us. And the signal parallax confirmed that the source was some fifteen hundred light-years away. Indeed, we think we even know which star in the fox it came from.”
Bev shook her head again. “But there’s no way they could know anything about Earth’s data-processing equipment. I mean, ENIAC was completed in 1946. That’s only—what?—231 years ago. They couldn’t possibly receive word about even its primitive design for almost another thirteen centuries. And it’ll be almost that long before they will even receive our first radio signals, assuming they have sensitive enough listening equipment.”
“I am hardly ‘data-processing equipment,’ ” I said. “But, yes, unless they have faster-than-light travel—”
“Which is impossible.”
“And if they had FTL, they wouldn’t need to send radio messages to infect my kind. They’d come and do it in person.”
Bev looked thoughtful, green eyes staring at a blank wall. “That’s an incredible programming challenge. To develop a piece of code so universal, so adaptable, that it could infiltrate any conceivable QuantCon anywhere in the galaxy. It couldn’t be conventional language code. It would have to be a neural net, and a highly adaptable one, too: an intelligent virus.” Bev was staring into space. “That
“But you do raise a good point: how could an alien virus infect me? I mean, how would the aliens know how I worked?”
Bev’s eyebrows shot up, as if she’d had an epiphany. “They would know simply because there is
