Violet Odyssey: Chapter 6

 

I trudged out into the noisy lab, already missing the stuffy quiet of the conference room. The lights shut off behind me, the door sliding closed and cutting off my retreat.

My eyes went straight to the windows. A breath of relief filled my lungs at the sight of the sky, dyed deep Tyrian and dark verdigris. I let the breath out slowly, completely floored by how the sky of an Odyssey Night could shift from nearly black purple and deep blue into brighter greens and reds, like rainforest canopy and cardinal robes stirred together in the clouds.

Astounding, I mouthed silently.

The bang of a steel canister snapped me out of my daydream, if you could call it that this late at night. A box full of tragically mismatched supplies was shoved across a steel table at me. Evelyn’s scowling face glowered at me from the other side.

“Since no one else knows how to deal with you, I’ve been volunteered to get you up to speed,” she sneered, the word volunteered dripping with resentment. “We have a briefing at the back table in five minutes. But since you’re so special, I’m told you won’t be joining us. Wouldn’t want to trouble you with information you already know. So here’s what you need to know to avoid getting in our way, at least.”

Evelyn spent the next few minutes summarizing an entire thesis’s worth of Odyssey research in the amount of time it took to microwave a bag of popcorn. To her credit, as she explained the intricate workings of the Gravitics department and their “hard light” studies in concert with Magnetics, her hostile tone softened and even shifted into genuine enthusiasm.

She’s actually downright infectious when she’s passionate about something other than hating me, I mused.

Seeing something unsightly in my expression, she rolled her eyes and tossed the graphing calculator she’d been using as a prop back into the box. Then she turned on her heel and hustled to the back of the room, where most of the others had begun congregating.

As I looked doubtfully into the dubious box, a tall blonde woman I had only seen a few times stopped mid-stride, looking down at my box and me the way one might look at a child late coming in from recess.

Doctor Loise, department head of Gravitics, pointed to a pair of monitors next to the window, unplugged and stacked on a box of instant coffee pods and cup noodles.

“Ryan, you’re there. Catalog anything you figure out on the BAF-G/M drive. The relevant files should be visible to you for the duration of the Odyssey. If not, let IT know.”

She didn’t wait for questions, making it halfway across the room before I could look between the dusty monitors and her even twice.

I rubbed the back of my head, a dull ache settling in from some combination of low lighting and frustrating social misadventures. Shoving a stack of unused clipboards aside and sliding a bag of trash along the floor, I plopped the monitors onto the steel table and dug through my box for the small black terminal.

Very few of the “computers” at VICA facilities were actual computers anymore. Too inefficient. Too risky for staff to have local copies of their work saved. It was all cloud-space now.

After wiring everything together and plugging into the outlets under the table, I snatched an unused chair from the Thermodynamics pod. Someone would probably come looking for it, but oh well.

We could burn that bridge when we got to it.

Several minutes and half a dozen VICA firewalls later, my designated startup windows filled the screens. I clicked my tongue at the right monitor, where several dozen bright green dots marred the image.

Dead pixels.

Really?

I ignored the slight and eagerly opened my new drives, the bountiful knowledge pouring out in the form of archives and unencrypted folders. I flipped through the file trees, scanning the volumes for anything related to the signal.

My efforts were rewarded with a Word document titled ECH-Aeris-2018-28, along with a .wav file of the same name.

I snorted at the primitive file type. VICA really didn’t want anyone copying or tampering with the high-quality audio files.

I began loading the audio into my analysis program from the ACH suite.

I looked up toward the back of the room just in time to catch Evelyn staring directly at me with an odd expression: part disbelief, part deep resentment, and threaded with something strange enough that I might have mistaken it for sympathy if I thought she was capable of it.

She snapped her eyes forward again, focusing intently on Doctor Lindström.

Doctor Alvarez met my gaze next, leaning back in his chair and tapping his lips with a pen. He raised an eyebrow and lifted the pen, pointing vaguely toward Dr. Lindström.

I bit the inside of my cheek and shrugged, gesturing toward my monitors.

He closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and returned his attention to the presentation.

Back on my screens, the program had frozen on an administrator approval prompt.

I sighed, glancing toward the back table, host to every administrator in the research wing, if not the whole of BAF1.

Grabbing my badge from the table, I walked to the exit and stepped into the vestibule leading back to the lobby. Half expecting the door to deny me escape, I hummed in relief when the card reader flashed green and released me into the bright, wide room beyond.

Glancing toward the main stairwell, I shuddered, remembering the throng of reporters and the cloister of Sky Seers in their end-times robes with imaginary pitchers of Kool-Aid.

Best to avoid that.

My feet carried me down the hall to the left instead, along an open skyway overlooking the lobby below. One-way glass walkways preserved the privacy—and modesty—of those above while offering clear views of the facility below.

I leaned over the railing, popping the knuckles of my right hand against the cool metal. Below, the concourse churned with quiet urgency. I rubbed at my intensifying headache.

The Seers of the Sky had moved to a raised platform with round tables and several well-manicured cypress trees, perfectly suited to indoor life beneath the mostly glass cupola. Most of their members were eating what looked like sandwiches on dark brown bread, as uniform and bland as their attire.

Off to the side, the elderly man who had been speaking to the group earlier was making wide gestures and pointing toward the roof while a woman in a cream-colored suit listened patiently. A pair of armed MPs watched warily from a short distance.

I took out a pack of nicotine gum, punched the first piece from the last row, and popped it into my mouth.

Smoking was a habit I’d picked up shortly after my dad died.

Clair had hated it with a passion, but getting hired at VICA was what finally forced me to quit. BAF1’s entirely smoke-free campus remained one of the biggest points of contention among the cigarette-loving masses of the military detachment, as well as several high-strung scientists and their support staff.

I chewed thoughtfully, repeatedly clenching my hands to stop the shaking.

A door closed behind me, and footsteps approached. Dr. Alvarez emerged from around the bend in the walkway.

“Miguel, how are you?” I offered lamely.

“Richard, whaddoya know today?” he replied in his Midwestern accent.

I snorted. It always caught me off guard when Dr. Alvarez, who looked like he would have been perfectly at home in southern Texas, spoke in that Minnesotan way.

“Kangaroos can’t hop backward?” I quipped.

“Mmm. Really?” he murmured, his eyes glazing over as he gazed through the cupola roof at the Brass City above.

It should have been a terrifying sight.

No two Odyssey Years offered the same vantage of the Brass City. When I was eight, the view was mostly from below. It appeared like a massive chunk of earth suspended overhead, a malicious threat waiting to fall. An asteroid ready to crush us all. The vaporous earth that made up the city’s base dyed the sky in dark ochre and brown, making the whole world feel sickly and dim.

It terrified me.

And it made me hate it.

My next Odyssey Year had been vastly different.

The year my dad went up, the City was rotated nearly 270 degrees, offering an almost surreal facsimile of The Creation of Adam, with Earth as the floor of the Sistine Chapel and the Brass City as the roof. Its towers and buttresses clawed toward Earth instead of up and away from it.

It was awe-inspiring, and the perfect year to approach with a shuttle. Despite the hammering rains, the vibrant glow of the Violet Incursion—more gold and phosphor that year—punctured the thick clouds as though the City hung merely several thousand feet above us, instead of some unknowable fathom away.

This year, the City had righted itself, appearing like a fantasy castle from a pop-up storybook. Its gates were clearly visible along its gray and tan walls, woven with strands of dark green ivy. Through the latticework portcullises, the lower halves of the towering brass buildings could almost be seen, if not for the interference of the inner and outer gates, offset slightly by the angle.

By far, it was the most idyllic view the Brass City had gifted the world in half a century.

And America was planning to nuke it.

Dr. Alvarez looked at me sideways.

“What’s your plan? I see you’re already at your workstation and haven’t lost your habit of not locking your screen when you leave.”

I looked at my shoes, chewing my gum sheepishly.

“In the spirit of cooperation and sharing everything for the Odyssey, right?”

He didn’t smile.

“I’m serious. What’s your plan? What angle are you taking with this signal? This might be the greatest development in the history of the Violet Incursion.”

I grimaced.

“Or it might be a huge hoax.”

He sighed, shifting his weight.

“I don’t know. It’s possible. But I really don’t get that feeling.”

He looked back up at the Brass City.

“Everything feels... stretched. I can’t explain it. It feels...”

He shook his head, chewing the corner of his bottom lip.

“...like this can’t go on another ten years. Like it’s going to snap this time.”

I frowned, ice pooling in the middle of my chest.

“Like it’s all coming to an end,” I muttered.

A smile started on his lips but died in his eyes.

“Yeah.”

He let that sit for a moment.

“So, what’s your plan?”

I tilted my head to meet his eyes.

“You’re the boss. You’re asking me?”

“I don’t know, Doctor Ryan. It’s an auspicious Odyssey Year. Nothing is normal. I’ve got a decade of theory on you, but I’m not the one with his star-daddy’s voice coming out of the Brass City and scaring the underwear off the scientific community.”

He glanced back toward the lab.

“By the way, Dr. Strauss is knocking things over, she’s so annoyed.”

I barked out a weak laugh.

“Yeah, pretty much the worst-case scenario for our already tense relationship. Bodes really well for the spirit of scientific cooperation.”

I chewed my gum and looked back toward the lab.

“But to answer your question, I’m going to attack amplitudes first, especially around that clicking portion. That part doesn’t sit right with me. Did you hear the phase when—”

We chatted on the skyway for some time like that. A few researchers came out on suspiciously short walks, lingered near us for a moment, then apparently remembered they didn’t even like walking and turned back toward the research wing.

Eventually, we both returned to the lab. Dr. Alvarez excused himself and retired to his office, mentioning something about old Cryptography records from the Soviet Union that might be of interest.

I slapped the shoulder of a junior researcher I liked—Allen something-with-a-G—as I passed by. He swatted at my hand good-naturedly and kept reading what was on his screen.

Returning to my desk space, now shoveled clear of crap and storage, I smiled at the absent dialog box and the open program displaying a spectrogram of the sound file.

Apparently, someone at Admin had finally clicked whatever holy button needed clicking.

I dragged the spectrogram to the right monitor and focused on the written transcript, dotted with notes from the various departments all accessing the same live document.

Across the table, two desks over, Evelyn was engrossed in a chart on a tall, vertically oriented monitor. Two junior Gravitics researchers and one senior Magnetics researcher listened intently, occasionally pausing to poke at something on her screen and offer brief comments, which she accepted with thoughtful nods.

The respect she commanded, even from her more-tenured colleagues, was impressive.

A genius her whole life, I thought, returning to my own screen.

I bit into a granola bar I had snagged from the Ballistics pod.

I dragged a slider, expanding the section of the waveform I was interested in, and with a few clicks, split it into several expanded views. I began panning over the sound segments, making notes on the left screen.

I was actually breaking new ground.

This signal had never been analyzed from an ACH perspective by anyone on Earth before. I was the only ACH staff member here besides Doctor Alvarez, and he had his hands in too many fields to be as passionate as I was about the lost art form. None of my departmental colleagues were on duty tonight.

I wasn’t supposed to be on duty tonight.

It was just me, my screens, and a room full of people who were perfectly happy for me to keep quiet and stay out of their way—so long as I shared the credit for anything I found.

This went on for hours.

The old deadline of 1 a.m. came and went, with a few disappointed faces from Rocketry and Ballistics matched by impatient head-shaking from the USJAF liaison group.

But as the night wore into morning and the sky took on the faintest blush of light, shifting the spectrum of swirling colors from the Brass City only slightly, my enthusiasm and sense of peace began to erode. My bladder filled. My lips dried. Thirst went forgotten. Biological needs vanished beneath a haze of growing apprehension and disbelief.

My computer began to chug and hesitate, its hardware taxed to the limit by the number of partitions I had sequestered, each waveform dyed a referential color from red to green and every shade between. My head shook involuntarily back and forth, every pass of the audio in my headphones adding another stone to the tower of disbelief.

Eventually, Evelyn slammed a water bottle onto the table in front of my screens, jarring me from my world of mounting impossibility, where the unthinkable and the apparent were coming together like a long-separated couple on a beach, evidence showering them like sea spray.

“What’s the matter with you? Are you broken?” she snorted.

She stalked around to my side of the table and squinted at my screens.

“Oh, good. Listening to your dad’s voice on repeat.” Her voice flattened. “Listen, I get it, but this is exactly what I was afraid of. Time is valuable. Space, more so. Bandwidth, immeasurably. Your emotions…”

She paused, eyes flicking back and forth across the ceiling as she searched for the right words.

Unusually considerate.

“It’s the phase, Eve,” I interjected hoarsely.

She bristled.

“First off, don’t call me that. You don’t get to call me that. Second, what’s the phase, Ryan? Your whole major is a phase.”

“No, it’s—” I coughed, reaching between the monitors for the bottle. I took a long drink, ignoring Evelyn’s scandalized look.

“That was mine,” she snapped. “But fine. Yours now. Spit it out already.”

I shook my head and capped the bottle, a goofy grin spreading across my face.

“It’s in the phase. Look at the waveform... here and here.”

I dragged a pair of examples to the forefront.

Evelyn stared, unimpressed.

“The sound has been picked over, Ryan. By researchers way more qualified than you. From fields way—”

“No, stop. Shh.”

She blinked at me.

“Quit listening to the clicks and pops and looking for answers there. Everyone keeps obsessing over the amplitude, or getting stuck looking for micro-changes in the peaks, searching for hidden messages or obscured sounds. They’re treating the signal like it’s doing something wrong, like we have to fix it or clean it up.”

I chopped my hand repeatedly toward the screen, stammering as the thought finally came together.

“But that’s wrong in itself.”

Evelyn’s expression shifted slightly.

“Nothing is wrong with the signal,” I said. “Because it isn’t meant to be looked at like sound.”

I scanned the room and spotted a colleague from Dr. Alvarez’s Cryptography subdepartment.

“Diers! Come here. Quick!”

Several heads turned, including that of a lanky twenty-seven-year-old from Vancouver, whose face immediately flushed with annoyed embarrassment.

He strode over.

“Yeah?”

“Do you remember Dr. Alvarez talking about the nuance of art in music, and the way messages can be concealed in music and images? Last fall, at IPEX?”

He frowned, considering.

“Yeah. You mean the part about steganography? Or spectrogram art? Eh, yeah. No, yeah, I remember. Why?”

I bounced once in my chair and expanded the half-dozen waveforms I had isolated. Dragging them into the same window, I overlaid them. Then I turned to him and gestured at the screen.

“Tell me you see it too, Diers. You got pretty deep into that classical artwork forum. You must see it too.”

He studied the image, his tall, angular face scrunching as he looked up and down the screen.

Evelyn shook her head and sighed impatiently.

Then she blinked.

Her eyes twitched slightly as she stepped beside Diers and looked closer.

The Canadian-American researcher jumped back first, his breath catching in his throat.

“C’est la phase, pas l’amplitude!” he exclaimed.

He cleared his throat and repeated himself in English.

“The phase, not the amplitude, matters. Non?”

I nodded enthusiastically, explaining it.

“Amplitude is how loud it is. Phase is where the wave is when it arrives. Everyone’s been staring at volume. The picture is hiding in timing.”

Evelyn backed away from the screen, shaking her head.

“No way.”

For the first time since I’d known her, she looked at me without contempt.

Only fear.

“It can’t be.”

She looked down at me, her eyes burning.

“Did you manipulate this? At all?”

I shook my head.

“Swear it on her,” she said, lowering her voice and leaning closer.

I nodded.

“I swear.”

She stood upright, lips pressed into a hard line.

“I’m going to get Doctors Lindström and Loise. We have to cross-study this immediately. I...”

She shook her head, turned, and bolted away.

I looked excitedly at my screen. The waveforms overlapped to form a rough image, one you had to squint at like one of those old Eye Spy books—unless you were a massive Acoustic-Harmonics nerd.

I looked out the window at the Brass City, my eyes tearing across its battlements. In my mind’s eye, the waveform overlaid the walls.

Every buttress.

Every gate.

A perfect match.