Allan Ashinoff - The Vostok Revelation

“Diagnostics complete.” Elena said, oblivious to anyone else in the chamber. “Beginning transformation.”

Moments later, the four foot cylinder, having received its signal from miles above, began to change. A two-foot, quarter-inch strip of the drone’s outer shell thrust outward and angled to create two fins. The aft end of the cylinder split into four equal parts and folded back over its casing. A thick post quickly extended from the center of the drone, the skin of its sides unfolding and locking into position to form the drone’s propeller. Simultaneously, a three inch, foot-long metal post extended out of the nose of the swimmer drone and began to unfold to create the drone’s sturdy arm, complete with a three tined claw. Lastly, from out of the top and bottom of the drone rose four two-inch posts which, once fully extended, bowed forward to initialize the swimmer drone’s fiber optic video cameras.

Elena Babanin’s heart leapt when the first real-time images of Lake Vostok appeared on her laptop screen.

“Time!” Stepan called out as he pressed a button to activate the timer function on his prized Sunnto watch.

Already aware that no other drone had survived more than three minutes in the distant lake, Elena ignored Stepan’s declaration and reached into her hip pocket to produce what appeared to be a pen. She inserted the tip of the pen into a receptacle in center of her keyboard. Two counter-clockwise twists fastened it into place. Elena held down the alternate key and tapped F8 to enable the swimmer drone’s control stick.

The drone, now fully transformed and under Elena’s complete control, began to slow its decent.

“Halting descent.” Elena said and then turned to Stepan, “Pay-out all the slack you have before the bore hole refreezes.”

“We have 260 kilometers of cable spooled throughout the station.”

“Good, I will need all of it,” Babanin replied, pleased that the Academy, despite the enormous expense of fabricating the conductive carbon-nanofiber tether, had delivered more length than she had requested.

Elena tapped on her keyboard and her screen split into four equal quarters. A few more taps and each quarter filled with the real-time images of the drone’s immediate surroundings. Cognizant of the moment’s historical significance, everyone huddled as close as they could to Elena to be among the first humans ever to see Antarctica’s largest subglacial lake.

As the cable continued to pay out, Elena began testing the drone’s vertical and horizontal movement. To ensure the drone’s camera functionality, she tipped its nose upward and shone light on the general location where the bright yellow sheath should be sticking through the ice. The four sections of her monitor filled images of the cloud-like white sheet of ice except camera two, which also contained the protruding yellow spear.

Content, she leveled off the drone, tapped a few keys and stated, “Switching to thermal.” Elena’s pleased grin faded as she repeated the keystrokes she’d done a thousand times — still nothing.

Anton, who was standing to Elena’s left, quickly moved beside her, “Let me have a look.”

After opening a console window and bringing up a list of the active routines running on the drone it didn’t take him long to isolate the problem — critical subroutines had failed to load which caused the thermal imaging module not to initialize.

Anton could feel Elena’s eyes scorching the back of his neck. He knew that his future at the Russian Academy of Science was resting on his ability to fix this problem quickly. Tense seconds passed before his expression eased. He fished a USB drive from his pocket, inserted it into a port on the laptop and entered in his password. He accessed two folders from the grid that populated the entire laptop display and then opened two files, each containing columns of computer code.

“Ah-ha!” Anton exclaimed after twenty-seconds of intense scrutiny. Large segments of code appeared and disappeared in each of the open files. With a cocksure grin, he closed all of the open files and rested a his hands on the bench beside the laptop.

“The problem was in a core module. I have removed the segment. I replaced it with an older version that was a little slower to execute but always reliable.”

“Then the problem is fixed?” Elena’s hazel eyes conveyed her displeasure.

“Yes, I rewrote this section to improv—”

“Will the older code prevent any of the subsystems from running?”

“No, the rewrite was strictly to streamline the code to make it execute faster.”

“Obviously that did not work,” Elena’s eyes locked on him. “When will we be ready?”

“Thirty minutes.” Anton replied, painfully aware of the level of annoyance hiding behind his boss’s placid expression. “Once the drone reboots it must run a full systems check. Provided there are no additional problems, we should be up and running in twenty or thirty minutes.”

“Get it done.” Elena Babanin commanded.

Two hours later, Elena Babanin, the fury in her eyes betraying her placid demeanor, was again standing before her keyboard and in control of her drone. She quickly entered in a series of keyboard command to assure herself of her drone’s integrity. Pleased by the drone’s responses, she activated the outer shell’s carbon-nanofiber differentiator panels. She then waited as the fifty-thousand receptors registered the surrounding water temperature, averaged their numbers for each of the drone’s fifty panels, and then transmitted that average back to her console. The water surrounding the drone was 7°C.

Pleased, Elena entered the commands to initialize the drone’s bathymetric cartography module. While she and the crew of the station were safely moving away from the subcontinent, her drone’s sonar would begin mapping and transmitting the topographical information of Lake Vostok’s northern and southern basins and its dividing ridge. It would be days before sufficient data were collected that would allow for a complete and accurate representation of the largest subglacial lake in Antarctica. Once complete, Elena would locate the hydrothermal vent thought to have created the freshwater lake, provided it actually existed, and assume her place in history.

After a flurry of activity on her keyboard, Elena’s expression softened and a satisfied grin spread across her face, “Gentlemen, the drone is fully operational and the mapping of the lake has begun. We can leave whenever we are rea—”

The lower-right quarter of her display began to flash red.

“What the hell?” Anton asked, his eyes wide and riveted to the red dot on the laptop screen.

“I’m not sure,” Babanin replied, her fingers quickly entering the command that allowed the red quadrant to fill the entire laptop display. Placing her mouse pointer on the red dot in the center of the display, “Sonar has located something solid sixteen meters off the port side and thirty-five meters below the drone.”

Artur Solovyov could only grin like a school boy at the emergence of the Turkic beauty he recognized from the Internet.

“Thirty-five meters? Thats is far short of the lake bottom or any of the valley walls.” Anton said.

“Perhaps it’s the top of a mountain?” Losif suggested.

“It’s too narrow for a mountain top,” Elena said absently as she turned the drone and tipped its nose downward fifteen degrees.

Elena pressed down the button on wall intercom, “Commander Lebedev, sonar has detected an object.”

“Ms. Babanin, I apologize but there is no time for exploration,” the Commander said sternly. “We’ve been tracking a condition-two storm on radar for the last hour. Should that storm strike this station it could seriously impede our ability to safely leave this continent. Set the drone to do its automated mapping, gather your belongings and get to the helicopter. Your exploration can be done from the safety of a warm hotel room in Argentina.”