Future Chron Universe Book 2 - From The Earth Series Book 2 - War Through The Pines - Chapters 1 - 5

Image: 3000ad - Spaceship wheel near Earth - dreamstime

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Ideas about the geopolitics of the war described herein follow closely those outlined in the book The Next 100 Years by George Friedman, highly recommended.

Chapter 1

Donner Jackson was thirteen years old when his family moved to the remote valley. At first, he found it lonely and frightening, the way the wind howled through the pines at night sounding like an animal alive. And the darkness, Donner found it all-enveloping, almost suffocating. It was too dark, almost too dark to sleep.

Donner busied himself with getting a satellite internet connection so that his nights wouldn't seem quite so lonely. Although Donner's dad, Jack, was too busy to help, Donner had no trouble setting up the old mini-dish and modem bought at a yard sale. The dishes and their electronics were cheap now since the introduction of the omni-directional antennas a few years earlier. The new antennas didn't require the careful alignment that the dishes needed. But cheap was good on Donner's budget.

He used his dad's metalworking equipment in the barn to attach the dish to his telescope mount for accurate tracking. It wasn't necessary to track the satellites in the array but it would bring in a stronger, steadier signal and consequently, a higher data rate. If he could get the data rate high enough he could even play online games again with his friends.

Luckily, the house was located across the grassy field from the mountains and slightly above the valley floor which kept the peaks from masking the satellites Donner needed. He worked at locking his makeshift antenna onto their signals. He managed to catch an occasional signal. And the more he worked on his system the better it got at tracking and locking onto the satellites. 

The next step was decoding the signal. Donner would use his personal AI device, called an ANI (Artificial Narrow Intelligence) or Annie. Annies could learn to do anything with a little software and a lot of machine learning. They learned by training on data sets that the user submitted to them. It was very important to use complete, correct and valid data. Good data, good result; bad data, bad result. Donner's Annie was a portable device but still had the power to decode the satellite data streams if enough samples from the satellites could be acquired to train it.

Because of the obstacles the mountains offered, Donner had a twenty-minute window with each satellite which was reduced somewhat as the dish took time to lock onto the signal. So it was hit or miss for a while. But slowly Donner built a database of satellite data. And his Annie became better and better at decoding the data.

Once his Annie could decode the data sufficiently Donner was quick to renew his game-play. His friends were happy to have him back online because he was a good game player although they would kid him about being out in the sticks. Donner also got his shows and movies and access to online bookstores again. Unlike his friends, Donner had a love for physical books. His mother, Phylicia, found Donner's latest purchase one morning when a delivery drone landed in the front yard with a package addressed to her son. She was upset that Donner would be so extravagant when he could easily have downloaded the e-book version.

When she told his dad about Donner's exploits, his dad suggested to Donner that it might be a good idea to get the family's media Annie online so that his mom could catch some of her shows too, Donner could charge the service to his father’s credit account. Donner did so and the incident faded from family memory.

With his dad's support, Donner soon had two dishes running. One could be receiving from the satellite currently visible while the other was locking onto the following satellite in the array. Because of the high data rate he was getting, he was even able to meet up with his old friends using his virtual reality helmet, almost feeling as if he was back home. It helped relieve the loneliness.

The setup worked great unless his mother was recording something off one of the satellites, then he was back to one dish. He solved this by talking his dad into buying a cheap used dish, amplifier and tracking mount and adding it to his setup. Now he had at least two dishes at all times to monitor his internet satellites.

Then he got the idea that he could use his setup to receive more television channels for his mom if he could receive the satellites in geosynchronous orbit, about ten times further away. All he had to do was combine the signals from his dishes to get enough signal strength to pull in the weaker signals. In effect, he would create one large dish out of his three smaller ones.

He talked to his dad. 

“Son,” replied his father. “You are right in theory but in practice that is a very difficult engineering job. And professional equipment that could do something like that costs in the five-figure range. It would be easier and probably cheaper to get one of the newer omni-directional antennas and the appropriate electronics.”

But not as much fun, thought Donner. “But if I wanted to try what would I need?”

“Well,” said his dad. “You would need to phase lock the signals from the different antennas so that they don't destructively interfere. You want the signals to synchronize so that they build in amplitude like ocean waves approaching the shore. To do that you will need a super-accurate clock that would allow you to compensate for position and tracking errors between the dishes. So it's quite a challenge isn't it?”

“Yeah,” said Donner. “I'm going to have to think about it for a while.”

Chapter 2

To Staff Sergeant Emily Rosen they weren't just sleek flying machines. The hypersonics were her babies. She programmed the onboard flight ANI and nurtured the “beast,” the hypersonic scramjet that put the hyper in hypersonic.

And every one of the more than thirty hypersonics located at the secret west Pacific island airbase had a personality as far as Emily was concerned. She was sure that “Supersonic,” as she had christened one of her charges, would no doubt make a success of any mission he was assigned. But as for “Lex” well, he would do okay as long as the others led the way. Lex hadn't exactly shown himself a leader.

Most of the squad were kinetic energy weapons. The size of a small fighter jet, they would deliver their bulk against the target at hypersonic speeds. The resultant destructive force would pierce any target no matter how hardened it had been constructed. A couple of hypersonics in the squadron provided reconnaissance, they would help guide the others if local conditions required. They were the only two that might return from the mission. Emily had named them “Looker” and “Booker”.

She was talking to Looker now.

“Looker report status,” Emily said to her Annie which relayed the request to Looker.

“Status nominal. Download of latest reconnaissance mapping from DOD satellite is complete. Integration into existing database is proceeding. Estimated completion, sixteen hundred hours.”

“Looker, memory upgrade sufficient for new information download?”

“Yes, a ten percent buffer will be maintained.”

Emily worried over that number a moment.

“Looker, how much did this last download decrease memory capacity?”

“Memory capacity decreased by five percent.”

Damn, thought Emily. Even with all my efforts memory is still going to be a problem. I can't believe the red tape involved in procuring upgrades. I ask for a thousand terabytes and I get ten. 

Okay relax, she said to herself. Time to go off-script.

When Emily went off-script she meant she was going to solve the problem through her own efforts. The brass didn't need to know.

“You still talking to machines Sgt. Rosen?” asked a voice behind her.

Emily turned to see Lieutenant Warner.

“Sir,” said Emily as she saluted. “I find the audio interface far more efficient than a keyboard.”

“Yes, you've made that clear to me and the other officers Sgt. Rosen. But it still seems strange to me.”

“Sir, I can assure you that there is nothing strange about it. These machines have the same intelligence as the Annies most of us carry. And sometimes more,” said Emily, referring to her unauthorized modifications to the ANI in the aircraft which only she knew about.

“Well, carry on,” said the Lieutenant.

“Yes sir,” said Emily saluting.

After the Lieutenant had left the hangar, Emily said quietly, “Good thing he has a great head of hair, makes him at least look like an officer.”

“I agree,” said Looker.

Emily laughed.

Chapter 3

While Donner researched the electronics needed to get his antennas to sync, he helped his father around the farm. Each week brought a delivery of some new equipment to make the farm more self-sufficient. They soon had the robotic vegetable gardeners working. Then they automated the water purification and distribution system, including the well, stream and the rainwater cisterns. The fruit orchard was planted and attended to by a specialized robot. The work for Donner and his dad soon devolved into keeping the machines in good condition and updating their programming.

Working on his antennas and helping his dad didn't keep Donner completely occupied. He also explored around the farm and the adjacent woods and soon became comfortable with his new surroundings. He missed his friends but realized how much of their time together had been spent playing games online which they could still do.

These exploratory wanderings were something that he came to look forward to. The woods were always changing according to the weather or time of day, the nearby stream was quiet or raucous according to the last rain, and the birds and deer he saw were mostly unwary of him as if he were not the intruder he thought himself to be. He made it a goal to learn more about the plants and animals in this part of the country.

Just after Donner turned fourteen it was time for school to start. He took his classes at home online with his mother as his tutor. Donner's mother was well qualified to teach with one degree in Biology and another in Mathematics. She had even completed much of a Ph.D. in Microbiology before a disagreement with her adviser forced her out of the program. In fact, she and her husband had worked in the same lab, becoming close when Jack also was forced out of the program because of illness.

It was just before the end of the school year that Donner first got his project online. The electronics he designed with the help of his Annie used predictive look-ahead to estimate the necessary phase adjustment for each antenna signal. This look-ahead design gave the tracking motors the time they needed to maintain a lock on the satellite signal. This reduced the corrections necessary to something that a fast processor, such as the one in his Annie, could digitize and then use to eliminate the remaining errors mathematically.

Donner set the system up for nightly surveys of the geosynchronous region with an analysis the next day using his Annie. It wasn't long until he found a very unusual signal.

Chapter 4

Lieutenant Brently Armstrong had always wanted to go into outer space. But he hadn't expected it to be his first assignment after graduating from the Space Force Academy. No doubt his double major in Astronautics and Physics not to mention his summer internships at the NASA Ames Research Center contributed to his selection.

The ride up had been a thrill. Chemical rockets might be old-fashioned compared with the Maglev system, which rail-gunned cargo into orbit, but wow, they were still a kick to ride. Arriving in geosynchronous orbit the spacecraft docked with the Space Defense Platform and Brently transferred down the short docking tube to be welcomed aboard.

After a quick orientation lecture, he was shown his quarters. The transition from the zero gravity of the docking section to the one-third gravity of the living quarters seemed natural to Brently as he traversed the ladder. Once he was in the wheel-shaped rotating section which was sandwiched between the equipment and station keeping booms, he simply turned his body one-hundred and eighty degrees and continued 'down' the ladder. The rotating section provided enough gravity for people to do most of their daily activities normally. Besides personnel quarters, also in this section was the exercise area, workrooms and the mess hall.

Brently was impressed with the number of robotic servers aboard. Most were about the size of a roll-about storage bin, some with drawers, some with doors. They would exit from a room and cross to the opposite wall and follow it to their destination. Brently later learned that they navigated by the colored strips and numbers painted on the floors and walls as well as a wireless hookup. They carried tools, food, clothes, anything that a station resident would need. They were all business, not stopping unless someone or something got in their way.

Stowing his personal effects he headed off to workroom seven to meet his immediate boss.

Brently buzzed the door and heard someone call, enter. Pressing the button again rotated the latch and opened the door to reveal his working quarters. The workroom was large enough to notice the station curvature. Seeing someone at the far end Brently snapped to attention and said, “Lieutenant Brently Armstrong reporting for duty sir.”

“At ease Armstrong,” came the reply. “In this workroom we are all equal. Outside this room you can salute me if you want.”

“Yes sir,” said Brently reflexively.

“My name is Eric Fermion, and yes I know that a fermion is a particle so you can leave the jokes outside if you don't mind.”

“Of course sir.”

“In here call me Eric please, we haven't enough personnel in our department to maintain the usual protocol.”

“Of course, Eric.”

“Now let me explain to you what needs to be done before we go live. Most of the installation work is finished. But we still need to calibrate our instruments. I'm going to ask you to work with the electromagnetics, which is the EM sensors. The electromagnetic fields up here are small but significant. They could provide us with advanced warning of a change in the space weather or even an attack. So we want the EM sensors calibrated to a fine degree and dependable.

“And let me introduce you to our robotic assistants. This is Test and this is Measurement, as I have named them. They may assist you in whatever way you need.”

The robots were similar except one was trimmed in red and the other in blue. Modeled on human anatomy they had stereoscopic vision, two powerful arms with end attachments that could be replaced as needed according to the job. They also had two wheels like the old self-balancing scooters upon which they moved. They stood about five feet but could extend their height to seven feet if needed.

“Pleased to meet you Brently,” said Test. “Please call me Tess.”

“Just call me Mess,” added Measurement.

“Good to meet you and call me Brently please.”

Dr. Fermion added, “They came up with the nicknames themselves.”

He continued, “Brently I picked you because of your experiences at Ames, I think you are uniquely qualified for this job.”

“Thank you, Eric. I'll get right on it.”

“Slow down a minute. It's my dinner time. Would you like to join me in the mess hall.”

“Sure Eric.”

After dinner, Dr. Fermion excused himself to his quarters. Brently decided to get an early start in his duties and returned to the workroom.

The real trick with calibrating EM sensors isn't so much picking up the electromagnetic fields you want but not picking up the fields you don't want. It was difficult not to pick up EM fields with so much electrical and electronic equipment around. So the known fields had to be canceled in order that unknown EM fields could be detected.

Brently worked well into the night calibrating the sensors. He had identified and nulled out almost all the station EM sources except for a very small remainder.

Tess had been working with him. “I think that's all we can do tonight Tess. I'm getting too tired to continue.”

“Very well Brently, why don't you go ahead to your quarters, and I will finish up before powering down.”

“Okay Tess, see you in the morning.”

The next morning Dr. Fermion was in the workroom before Brently. He was observing the EM sensors and talking to Tess when Brently came into the room.

“Good morning Brently,” said Eric.

“Good morning,” said Tess.

“Good morning Eric, Tess. I see you are inspecting my EM sensors.”

“Yes,” said Eric. “Tess told me you two worked pretty late to get them calibrated this far. I see a slight residual in the readings; you have a bit more to do?”

“Yeah, I tried to get them completely zeroed but that stubborn signal remains.”

“Well, you seem to have made an excellent start. If we can get these sensors online today the General will be very pleased.”

“I'm gonna try,” said Brently.

Brently continued his calibrations which went quicker this time as Tess was able to handle some of the work. By comparing readings in different sections of the station with external sensor readings and noting the correlations he was again able to reduce the remaining sensor reading to almost zero but not quite. Then just as he was about to let out a string of invectives not befitting a military officer the reading dropped to zero.

Brently stared at the readout. There was no way that it could be a coincidence he thought. 

“Tess, that can't be a coincidence.”

“I agree, highly improbable.”

Measurement came over, “I have finished my assignment, I am free to help here if needed.”

“Thanks Mess,” said Brently. “Well let's get busy.”

They set about to again recalibrate all the sources, something that took them well into the afternoon. When finished the reading was as before, zero. Brently told Dr. Fermion about his experience.

“It just went away?” asked Eric.

“Yes. And I haven't seen it since. Maybe some machinery cycling on and off?”

“Possibly. Brently, I want you to make a correlation between readings and the machinery causing those readings, then I want you to start logging the sensor outputs. Make it one-second intervals. Let's get a history of this signal. Maybe then we can correlate it to something onboard the station.”

“And if not?”

“Well, then we take it to the General.”

Chapter 5

The antennas had locked in a southwesterly direction and stopped moving. Donner figured that the signal came from a region of geosynchronous orbit that was above and slightly off the coast of equatorial South America. He made an estimate of the satellite's orbital elements and consulted a database of orbiting satellites but found no match. 

Donner soon came to realize that the signal was not aimed at him but was spillover from a signal that was probably aimed directly below the satellite. The signal strength was such that Donner’s antennas had to be almost exactly on target to attain lock. Donner thought he must be in a zone where the signal reinforced, but that zone couldn’t be too wide or surely someone else would have already identified this anomaly. The signal also seemed to use a spread spectrum technique, but his Annie easily accounted for that.

Anyway, receiving the signal was one thing, making sense of it was something else. He was sure it was encrypted and cracking the encryption would be challenging. Donner set his Annie up decrypting the signal but made no progress. He didn't know at the time that it would take several weeks.

After school was out for the year, Donner became serious about decrypting the strange signal. He had quite a large amount of data stored which had been collecting for several weeks. He decided that the best approach to decryption would be to farm out portions to his friends and let them set their ANI devices to work. He would edit the snippets, keeping them short, to keep from giving away too much information if someone did decrypt it. 

Donner prepared several different samples. His Annie sent the samples to his friend's Annies. They immediately put their Annies to the task of decoding the samples. Decryption algorithms on their devices would run in the background during the day and evening, taking over all the CPU cycles when the owners didn't need them.

Donner then setup the Annies to run as a wide area network over the internet. He wrote supervisory software that allowed them to exchange algorithms, trade samples and build a common, shared database of results. It took hundreds of CPU hours before the first sample was decrypted and exchanged among all the devices. Further results came quickly as the Annies developed a voting system to choose the most probable decrypt. But the decrypted signal only led to another mystery.

The samples were in a language that Donner nor any of his friends or their Annies recognized. Donner found an online translation website and scanned in the language samples. He then set the website to translate the samples into English. The translation database identified the samples as a dialect of Japanese but gave no other information and served up a very incomplete translation. 

After much research and false leads, Donner found the solution to the unusual Japanese. It turned out to be a dialect spoken on Hachijojima and Aogashima, islands south of Tokyo. It was the Hachijo dialect and it was quite divergent from primary Japanese, retaining many features inherited from ancient Eastern Japanese.

Donner, with the help of his Annie, labored several days to complete a manual translation of the snippets. The importance of his discovery slowly dawned on him, he realized he would have to show his dad.

Chapters 6 - 10