“It could be a long time Ali,” he said, looking back to the servers. “It could be years before they spit something out. Hell they may never spit out anything at all.” He opened his eyes wide trying to fight off the exhaustion. “But I’m just like you, too excited to go home, and sitting here watching it work is…I don’t know…addictive.”
By it, he meant the large flat panel monitor on his desk. On its screen were displayed the collective results from over a hundred servers which were constantly processing. On the top half of the screen, dozens of jagged lines stretched from one side to the other, like the line graphs found in spreadsheet programs. The lines represented various streams of raw data recorded twenty-four hours a day for the past four years; frequencies, interval clicks, pitches, video, everything. The lines jumped up and down vertically, weaving in and out while the system looked for relationships between the streams and their trillions of bytes.
Lee looked at the last rack along the wall. The systems there had a noticeably different look with far fewer lights, and unlike the servers, these lights all blinked at exactly the same time. It was the rack that held the data itself, thousands of terabytes and a seemingly infinite number of variables, all of which IMIS was diligently sifting through.
Alison knew that Lee had a special place in his heart for the equipment. He worked hand in hand with IBM in setting things up and was part of the programming team which designed the artificial intelligence software that was now working through all of the data. He was also the expert on all of the digital camera and recording systems located strategically around the giant tank, recording every conceivable angle of Dirk and Sally’s movements and body angles. The system was now going over those shots frame by frame along with everything else. As a marine biologist, how the intelligence of the machines worked was beyond her but Lee was as sharp as they came, and he had spent thousands of hours testing the algorithms. If it failed, she knew it would not be due to lack of effort on anyone’s part. Her worst fear, in fact, all of their worst fears, was that they would be long retired, or even dead before IMIS found anything.
She looked at the screen with Lee and watched the pictures of dolphins flash across, frame by frame, beneath the dancing, jagged streams of data.
“Do you think we’ll ever see anything?” she asked lowering her chin onto her crossed arms.
After a few moments he sighed. “I don’t know. I sure hope so.” He turned and gave her a wink. “If not, it’s sure been a great ride eh?”
“It sure has.” She patted his arm softly. “Let’s go home. It’s about time we slept in our own beds. Besides we don’t want your wife down here chewing us out.”
Lee laughed and stood up. “Yeah, you don’t want that. Trust me.”
Alison sat in her car and watched Lee drive away. The lamppost overhead showered her small Chevy with yellow light as she stared past the building and out at the dark ocean behind it. She had dreamt of this day for years and now that it was here she was scared to death. The tens of thousands of hours she’d spent studying and planning and documenting, it was all to get to this point; Phase Two. She knew that of all of the work they would do, Phase Two was the biggest unknown. Not gathering information, but actually being able to translate it. Lee was right, it was a long shot. There was no way to know whether any of it would be decipherable using something so potentially limiting as human logic.
Alison realized that she had been afraid of this phase from the very beginning, and had simply ignored it, suppressing her fear by focusing on all the work that was still ahead of them. What if it didn’t work? What if the last six years had been a complete waste, getting this far only to find a brick wall and a giant computer system that couldn’t make heads or tails out of their data. What if the data was collected wrong? What if they had left a major piece out, something that never occurred to them?
Alison leaned back against the vinyl seat and closed her eyes. God please let this work. Please don’t let me die without ever knowing.
8
The Antarctic was unforgiving in November. At two full miles above sea level the interior of the continent could reach temperatures of -130 degrees. The Halley research station was located near the south end of the Ronne Ice Shelf and served as a research outpost for some of the most intense climate studies on the planet. Shared and co-funded by the United States and Europe, the station was used year round by various teams conducting research, the bulk of which was measuring climate warming changes over the last several thousand years. Using ice samples drilled from the frozen ground, the evidence was overwhelming; the planet was warming quickly, faster than any natural cycle recorded. Whatever the arguments and theories back home regarding cause and effect, the result was indisputable. The atmosphere was warming and the ice continent was melting.