Bootstrap Read online

  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 [email protected]. 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.”