Truth & Code: The Future is Black and White
Tercera Parte

Tercera Parte

Block 7,922,059

A loud alarm awakens Fabian. He bolts up in bed and sees flashing red in his room lights. He glances over at his console on the nightstand, and the screen is flashing red. He can feel his heart racing, and he begins to pour in sweat.

“Ah, shit!”

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“You are needed at NodlSat.”

“I figured.” He says to himself.

He feels less anxious this time but gets ready with urgency and gets down to the street. It was much earlier than the alarm last night, so there were more people, AVs, and the occasional car up and down the road.

An AV is approaching as he gets to the street. He steps in and takes the short ride to NodlSat.

He gets upstairs. The alarm has already been silenced. He moved his team into shifts to monitor any new activity, so a crew was already on site.

He walks into the VC and says, “All right, what do we have now?”

One of his engineers comes over and begins to brief him.

“Well, it’s pretty much what we saw last night, but the signal is moving this time. So it appears that it moved from this location,” he points to the area west of Wuhan, “and is now moving towards the city of Wuhan. As you are aware, we no longer use satellites for any surveillance now, so we pulled up some old GPS data, and Google maps imagery from the last century to get an idea of the lay of the land. We don’t know how accurate this is, but the capsule moves along a route that used to be highway G347.”

“Ok, any idea what this might mean?”

“Not sure.”

“Ok, get me Laura Cortez on the line.”

Moments later, Laura Cortez is announced as being available. A blank screen comes up. She was asleep like Fabian when they got her.

“Hello?”

“Hello, Ms. Cortez. This is Fabian at NodlSat.”

“Yes, how can I help you?” She sounded a little irritated.

“Ms. Cortez, I’m sorry the capsule was activated again and is now moving.”

“Really?” The video feed starts. She was asleep. Her red wavy hair was a little out of place, and her blue eyes looked tired. She was wearing an emerald green pajama top and was clinching the top of it closed as she started the video feed.

“Even from waking up, she’s a nice-looking lady.” Fabian thinks to himself. “Yeah, the signal started where it did last night, and now it is moving along what we think is a road toward Wuhan.”

“Yes, I see that. That’s very interesting. And it started earlier than it did last night. So my first impression of this would be that it’s an individual. I would expect a more regular pattern if it were centrally occurring via SO-Land AI.”

“Ok, that makes sense.”

“Mr. Kohler?” an assistant announces.

“Yes?”

“Mr. Satoshi Smith is on the line.”

“Did we notify him? I didn’t put him on the notification list.”

“No sir, we did not.”

“Put him through.”

“Hello?”

“Satoshi? What can I do for you?” Fabian was now sounding irritated.

“Oh... Oh... I’m sorry; I had one of your assistants make sure they called me if anything new happened.”

“Ahh, Ok,” Fabian replied.

“Well, real quickly, the signal came back at the exact location from last night but earlier, which you know by now. The other interesting thing is that it follows what used to be a highway into Wuhan.

“Interesting. I mean, to me, that would seem to indicate it’s an individual.” Satoshi comments.

“Yes, Ms. Cortez made the same assessment.”

“Oh, hello, Ms. Cortez.”

“Hello, Satoshi.”

“AI merge!” Fabian commands the calls be merged so Laura and Satoshi can see each other and the data from the VC.

“I was doing some more research on the capsule and time stamp. I thought that it might have been one of the space missions. But our space missions have been pretty safe over the last eighty or so years. We’ve had several mission ‘failures’ but nothing close to this time stamp. So I started looking at other anomalous activity. The only thing that I could find that was even remotely close was a planned mission to Mars. But there were no ‘failures.’ So then I looked at the different companies that had missions to Mars. There were several then, but SpaceX had more missions to mars than all the other companies combined. So I keyed in on the mission that would correspond to the time stamp, and I went a little deeper into the launch AND recovery of the initial stage rocket. SpaceX deployed one of its autonomous ships to retrieve the rocket. They called them autonomous spaceport drone ships or (ASDS). The name of the ship was Raw Spirit. Raw Spirit was deployed in the south Pacific off the island of Palau to recover a rocket. The recovery was fine, with no issues, so I was stumped. However, I dug a little deeper into the manifest and travel log. There was a volcanic eruption and earthquake on the Indonesian Island of Sulawesi. The earthquake was 8.3. A Tsunami warning was issued for the entire south Pacific, including the west coast of South America. There were no follow on Tsunamis reported, but there is an entry for Raw Spirit about rough seas or a rouge wave at about that time. That still doesn’t make sense to me. The ship made it back to port with no issues. So I dug a little deeper. I reviewed the ship’s manifest, and it appears that some non-essential cargo was washed out to sea. That also didn’t make sense to me, so I dug more into each item of the manifest. I didn’t know this little detail, but the recovery ships carried the same Hope or Freedom capsules as the mission it was recovering. I guess the thinking was that if the ship ever went down, there would be a means to identify wreckage, or maybe it was one of those quirky things. The founder of SpaceX was known to be a little quirky, brilliant, but quirky. It may be one of those things he wanted on the ships. I mean, that’s the best explanation I have for how that capsule with that time stamp could be synching.”

“I still haven’t figured out how cargo from the south Pacific would find its way to the middle of China. If you look at the wave and current patterns from where the possible rogue wave hit, it’s possible that the cargo could have ended up in the East China Sea, but it still doesn’t answer how it ended up in central China.”

Laura Cortez pipes in, “That’s very interesting indeed. We know from historical data that SO-Land AI used the ocean as a buffer zone and discouraged its citizens from being on coastal beaches. Early on, they wanted to limit asylum seekers from leaving the mainland. This was especially true around Taiwan. Taiwan eventually fell to SO-Land, but there was a time that if you could make it to Taiwan, you could make it to the FreeLands. The same is true on the western frontier of SO-Land.”

As they were discussing the possible scenarios, someone on the floor in the VC said, “Look, it’s stopped.”

Everyone looked up at the monitors and saw that the blinking was now centered in Wuhan when it stopped.

“Maybe that’s where whoever this is works?” Fabian asked inquisitively.

Laura said, “That would be my guess.”

“Ok, team, let’s keep tracking this and see where this goes.”

Fabian hears “Yes, sir!” throughout the VC.

“Ms. Cortez. Satoshi. Thank you for your time, again.”

“Of course, I’ll keep working on the problem. Bye.” Satoshi answers.

“You’re welcome, Fabian,” Patricia replies.

“All right, I think I’m still good with her for the ride.” Fabian thinks.

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