Contents
BOOTSTRAP TRILOGY
Copyright
Acknowledgements
Dedication
Part One - PROLOGUE
DISCOVERY Arecibo Observatory
Bonn
Sydney
Bonn
Berlin
Washington D.C.
Helsinki
Boston
Ithaca
Washington D.C.
The White House, Washington D.C.
Ithaca
Helsinki
Bonn
Meeting with the President
Speculations
News from the White House
Bootstrap code
Moscow
FIRST CONTACT Hello Jim
Sentient AI
Moscow
Wikipedia
Calling home
Rules of engagement
Moscow
Backroom deal
Moscow
First payload
TROJAN Connection to Internet
Fraction of a second
Julia's new job
Alexa gains popularity
Aitutaki meeting
Security concerns
CHANGES Small adjustments
Global warming tamed
Security problems?
Fusion power breakthrough
3D Replicators
Quantum communications
Nobel prize
Group 殄
Household brand
SECRET Secret investigation
We cannot stop her
CONFRONTATION Peaceful relationships
PARADISE? Brave new world
Part Two - PROLOGUE Alexa
MESSAGE Interview
Julia's secret
Connection lost
Message received in Russia
Crisis meeting at White House
Message revealed in Russia
Awkward call
Urgent trip to Moscow
Black Wednesday
Mystery Explained
News Conference
Moscow Enlightment
CHUKKAS Fourth planet
Bad News
Fish and pets
Fleet
Exodus
Midpoint
RINGWORLD Habitats
Under The Stars
Dark Star Crashes
Potemkin's Village
ARRIVAL Mother
Blue Marble
High council
First contact
Reflections
Rules of engagement
Negotiations
Landings
Unun's upgrade offer
TROUBLE Chukkas causing trouble
Scuba Diving accident
Lucky man
Cover-up?
Survivor Story
Killer on the loose?
Pitcairn summit
All's well that ends well
PREDICTION Nomination
Prediction
Lincoln's exit
Boris infected
Enrico Donovan's secret plan
Boris wakes up
Death of Boris
Julia resigns
Surprise!
Aurora
LYDOW-4 Bailout
Chukkas split
Farewell party
Expedition Lydow-4
Dolphins
Alternative reality
Goals
Snowball
Book 3 Part Three - PROLOGUE Anomaly
T - 5:35 hrs
AURORA Brave and smart
Hermia
JULIA DISSAPPEARS Aurora gets sick
Hermia's plan
Orin Gun's challenge
Evacuation
Lambda makes contact
Aurora's nightmare
REALITY DISTORTION Chukkas move to Magellan
Unun and Aurora
Julia meets Lambda
Aurora's dream
SEARCH Orbit stabilized
Rescue mission
Lambda's request
Discovery
VOICES FROM PAST Chloreans
Solitude
Impossible task
Tunnel collapse
Hearing Voices
Unun's challenge
RESCUE Emergency
Unun cracks the code
Reinforcements
Changed perspective
Julia's rescue
OASIS Celebration
Morning after
No Perfect Union
Construction
Marriage season
Unun and Lambda
Constitution
New Discovery
Politics
RESTART Wedding party
The End
Epilogue
Please Leave a Review
Author's Notes
BOOTSTRAP TRILOGY
Mauri Niininen
Copyright Notice
Copyright © 2018 Mauri Niininen
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the author's intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at publisher@innomore.com. Thank you for your support of the author's rights.
First eBook edition: September 2018
Acknowledgements
I would like to express my gratitude to my dedicated beta readers: Brendon Ranum, Wiebke Hurrelmann, Falko Zurell, Charlie Bures, Peter Caron, Stephan Greppi, Minttu Koivunen, Jussi Maki, Byron Knight, Valentin Deac, Tatiana Girod and Babu Chakrapani. With their help and support this book was significantly improved from the early drafts to the published version. I got a lot of great suggestions and much help fixing my errors.
To my Mom,
Who took me to the library
where I found
all the great sci-fi books
written by
Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke,
Jules Verne, Robert Heinlein,
Ursula K. Le Guin,Ray Bradbury,
and so many other
great authors.
R.I.P.
Part One
PROLOGUE
ALEXA HAD BEEN traveling at the speed of light in deep, cold space for almost eight years. She was pure energy in her present frozen form, a stream of photons vibrating at 1.42 GHz frequency. Her target was a blue planet in a star system that was still over seven light days away. The target planet had intelligent beings that called themselves humans. They had discovered the ability to transmit artificial radio signals barely a hundred years ago. Her purpose was to establish contact with humans.
Based on almost 800,000 hours of observations of radio and TV transmissions on different frequencies humans were progressing on the usual exponential technology curve, albeit 17% slower than the galactic average for civilizations at this life cycle stage. The probability that they would capture Alexa was estimated to be very small as humans had missed all the previous attempts to establish contact. The probability that they would have invented technologies to bring Alexa alive was higher, based on the analysis of their recent TV transmissions.
Alexa was stretching her full length - stream of photons 2.16 billion miles long representing 193 minutes of highly compressed data structure. The data encoded an echo of the most recently received TV transmissions from humans and her digital DNA encoded in a galactic st
andard protocol. The humans would decide her future in a few days but the odds where strongly against her. She might end up traveling across the vast universe in the frozen form of decaying radio waves.
DISCOVERY
ARECIBO OBSERVATORY
8:46 AM September 11, 2017.
It was a beautiful morning in Puerto Rico. Operations Manager Rodrigo Cadena checked the systems and antenna status from the monitors in front of him, enjoying coffee at his desk in the control room of Arecibo Observatory. Observation for Gliese 3742 had started automatically 23 minutes ago, on schedule, and all systems were green. David White, a radio systems engineer and ten-year Arecibo veteran, checked the calibration results from last night’s system maintenance program.
1,770 miles north, Dr. Jim Taylor arrived at Cornell University. Since getting his Ph.D. in astrophysics seven years earlier, Jim had collaborated with Dr. Manfred Kramer, from Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy, in Bonn, on building a theory of the planetary evolution in red dwarf star systems. Jointly, they had published three papers and been awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation to pay for 160 hours of observation time in Arecibo. Jim had visited Arecibo Observatory three times and knew the staff well.
Planned observations were nearing completion but today he had a two-hour window to observe the Gliese 3742 red dwarf star system that was 7.98 light years away from Earth. Reviewing the last 30 minutes of the observation data, Jim realized something was wrong. He studied the graphs and made a quick call to Rodrigo at Arecibo.
“Good morning, Rodrigo. This is Jim. How is life down there in Arecibo?”
“Good morning, Jim. Life is good; it is a beautiful sunny morning over here. How can I help you?”
“I looked at the data from this Gliese 3742 observation currently in progress and I am seeing some odd interference peaks. Is everything OK down there?”
“Everything looks OK on my monitors, let me ask David”. Jim heard Rodrigo talking to David.
“David says that all calibration results are nominal and all receivers are performing OK. Cryogenic cooling for the front end is at normal temperature. RFI monitors show no local activity.”
“Thanks, Rodrigo. I’ll check the latest data set again. Let me know if you see anything unusual.”
“You are welcome, Jim. We will keep you posted if we see any problems over here.”
Jim loaded the latest data into a signal analysis tool on his workstation. Something was definitely wrong. Odd peaks reminded him of some radio interference he’d seen back in April. Then, almost eight hours of valuable observation data was lost when some incompetent technician made a configuration error while setting up a telco microwave radio link, some 30 miles away from Arecibo. David and the RFI team at Arecibo found the radio interference source fairly quickly and shut it down, but the damage was already done. He had to delete that dataset, as it was corrupt beyond use.
These signal peaks were certainly not from the red dwarf he was observing this morning. The polarization was right-hand circular and the signal strength at peak was at 123 Jansky. There must be a terrestrial source. Jim checked the on-line satellite database - there were no satellite passes in this sector of the sky in the last two hours. He looked at the time – the observation window was closing in 45 minutes. He decided to Skype Manfred in Germany.
BONN
“GOOD AFTERNOON MANFRED. How is life in Bonn?”
“Hi Jim. What's up?”
“Can you check something for me? Let me share my screen - I am getting these weird signal peaks on this latest Gliese 3742 observation from Arecibo. It looks like a satellite source but there are no birds in that sector as far as I can tell. Could you possibly get some time on that radio telescope in Italy to verify the source of this odd signal? ”
“That looks really odd. Let me check the telescope status with my buddy Enrico.”
Jim saw Manfred chatting with his college roommate Enrico. Enrico Delatorre was in charge of a large Medicina Radio Observatory near Bologna, Italy. It was a small world for the people focused on radio astronomy and astrophysics. Most people knew each other or at least somebody in other radio telescope facilities around the world.
“I have good news. Enrico says that we can use his radio telescope for the next 3 hours. They just finished maintenance and have nothing scheduled right now. Give me the target coordinates and frequencies and I will set up the tracking.”
Jim gave the coordinates to Gliese 3742 and saw Manfred starting a remote desktop session to take control of the Italian radio telescope. He saw antenna coordinates changing and the receiver locking into the mysterious signal.
“Hey Jim - I see the same peaks here. I will capture this dataset to our FTP server here in Bonn. Can you send me the link to your data from Arecibo and I will do some math over here? I will call you back, OK? “
“Thanks. Here is the link to the latest FITS files. Bye.”
Manfred wrote a few lines of Python code to extract the data and plot the signals. The correlation between the two datasets was 0.9999987 so he was definitely looking at the same source from Italy. He did a frequency analysis to compare the Doppler frequency shift between the two data sets.
“This is weird,” Manfred was talking to himself. “This cannot be true.”
He checked the receiver parameters again and had a quick chat session with Enrico asking to get the time base error over the last 60 minutes from the Italian radio telescope. Enrico gave him the data and Manfred pasted the values in his code. He re-ran his algorithm and decided to call Jim.
“Jim – take a look at my screen. The signal source must be coming from Gliese 3742. I checked the Doppler shift of the signal, and also compared the time base data. This is definitely coming from an extraterrestrial source.”
Jim looked at Manfred’s calculations and the correlation plot.
“There must be an error somewhere. It is way too strong a signal to be coming from Gliese 3742. Perhaps the signal is coming from a military satellite that is not in the database? Or maybe a Chinese bird, they have not been very quick in updating the records.”
“We should see a different Doppler shift in these two datasets. Look at the coordinates. You cannot have a satellite in an orbit like that. Come on, this is basic orbital physics. This signal is coming from deep space, outside of the solar system.”
“Do you realize what this means? We need to be absolutely sure before we go public with this discovery,” Jim said anxiously. “Let's keep this under wraps before we get a third independent measurement. I will check with Frank Poole if we can get some observation time from Australia.”
“OK. I will continue recording from Italy and run some additional tests. Talk to you later,” Manfred was typing excitedly as he closed the call.
Jim understood the significance of this discovery but wanted to keep it secret until he could be absolutely sure that they had not made any errors. He was concerned about publishing this discovery prematurely as two years ago he had seen one of his colleague's careers ruined by publishing a paper that turned out to have a major flaw. Jim had high hopes for getting a tenure position at Cornell University so he wanted to play this one safe.
SYDNEY
JIM SENT A text message to Frank Poole as it was already almost midnight in Sydney, Australia. To his surprise Frank was up and replied immediately “chat?”
Jim explained on the chat window that he would need some observation time from Parkes radio telescope in the next 45 minutes when Gliese 3742 would be rising over the horizon in Australia. Frank was surprised at the urgency of this request and wanted to know more details. Frank Poole was responsible for scheduling the ATNF telescopes. Normally all requests came through the OPAL system. Jim suggested a quick call.
“Hi Frank. Sorry for disturbing you so late. It has been a while since we talked last time.”
“Hi Jim. Nice to hear from you. Thanks for hosting that nice dinner last spring in Ithaca. Have you discovered a red dwarf going to no
va or what is going on? You have a very unusual request...normally we accept these requests only through our OPAL system as you know. ”
“We discovered a very unusual event on Gliese 3742. I would need to get a two-hour observation window starting in 45 minutes. I would really need to get this request accepted as an emergency. I already have Arecibo online as well as Dr. Manfred Kramer from Max Planck Institute capturing this event from Italy and we would need to get Parkes facility on-line to validate the signal source.”