Europa Strike(46)

“Ten years, eight months, twenty-four days,” Sam Too said. “Other versions of myself might have interacted with him in recent years, but I have been…somewhat out of touch. Hello, Paul.”

“Uh…hey. How ya doin’?” He seemed uncomfortable, and Jack remembered David telling him that for a time when he was ten and eleven, a commercial secretary package had acted as Paul’s cissie. He frowned, wondering if Paul was embarrassed talking to a servant that was about to become world famous. The Alexanders had always seemed a bit aristocratic where AIs were concerned.

“Well, thank you,” Sam replied. “Jack, Teri, David, I have a large amount of information to impart, if you are set to receive and record it.”

“Ready to record,” Carter’s voice said. “Laser receiver on.”

“Uh, yeah, Sam,” Jack told the screen. “Go ahead.”

“Here it comes, then.”

A tiny red light on the probe’s lower torso winked on. The vid equipment they were using on Mars wasn’t capable of replicating the heterodyning of data on a standard lasercomm carrier beam, but it could record on-off flashes at very high speed, so fast that the individual blinks were undetectable by the human eye. All data and all electronic communications in human space was binary encoded as long strings of 0 and 1, off and on. Carter was now recording those blinks and translating them into data interpretable by humans.

It was a good thing, Jack thought, that they weren’t now using the Builders’ trinary encoding, with logic gates set to read electron spins of up, down, or none. That would be harder to transmit in this fashion. It had taken ten years just to figure out the arithmetical basis of the Builders’ computer system, and how to extract it by reading the spin state of electrons imbedded in crystalline lattices. Using brute force methods, the research team had learned to identify graphics, full sensory, and audio files, but until they found a key to the Builders’ language, further decryption was almost certainly impossible.

David laughed. “Smoke signals,” he said.

“Beg your pardon, sir?”

“Using laser this way, to transmit data. They did it by quantum pairing. Having Sam Too send us data this way is like using a laser comm to transmit images of puffs of smoke. Smoke signals.” He shook his head. “May the Builders forgive us!”

The invocation carried a biting, sarcastic edge. David Alexander, Jack knew, had a particularly strong disdain for the ET religions that had been proliferating around the Earth in the past quarter century, especially those worshipping the Builders as gods. His first wife, many years ago, had been a member of The First Church of the Divine Masters of the Cosmos until her death in the destruction of Chicago during the UN War.

“Then you think this proves their communications network works with quantum pairing?” Teri asked.

David waved at the probe on the screen with its solitary red light. “Has to be. We’re getting this with no time delay I can perceive. The theory has been in place for a century. Unless the Builders are using something even more magical…”

“This is quite enough magic for me,” Jack said. Quantum pairing took advantage of one of the more oddball aspects of quantum mechanics. Create two quantum particles—electrons, say—in the same event. Trap them, separate them, and change one aspect of one particle…flip its spin, for instance, from up to down. The spin of the other particle changes too, no matter how far away in space it might have been moved.

There was no beam, no transmission of signal. The two particles simply acted as if they were the same particle, regardless of whether the distance between them was centimeters or light years. Within the receivers in the Cave of Wonders, there must be bank upon bank of crystal-locked quantum particles paired with twins now located on other worlds in other star systems, arrayed in such a way that their eerie paired shifts of spin or moment or other characteristics carried data.

As the flood of data continued pouring in through that fast-flashing laser light, Sam Too added, “I have some information that may particularly interest you, Dr. Alexander.”

“Yes?”

“As you suspected, the Plaza outside this room is ringed by a number of statues carved from various types of colored crystal, some standing, most toppled. I have just observed one which appears identical in size, shape, and detail with the Martian floaters.”

“Did you, by God!”

Jack felt a cold, deep stirring of awe. “Floaters? Are you sure?”

“As certain as I can be, given the information available. Probability is in excess of 90 percent.”