Allan Ashinoff - The Vostok Revelation

Now, after millions of years with no sign that anything survived Anatarnhas, because of this signal, humanity’s first world could perhaps be salvaged.

Pleased, the Emperor’s mood quickly changed as he looked down on the groveling adviser. Pathetic. He comes into my chamber, casts his filthy body down on my crystalline floor, and assaults my ears with his wretched ethnic language.

“Get up and get out of here before I have you flogged for speaking Bicara in my presence.”

The adviser, still averting his eyes, bowed deeply several times as he quickly backed his way out of the audience room.

An armada of rockets sliced through the planet’s nebulous atmosphere, marring a virgin sky with thousands of billowing gray-white contrails. The fleet divided into clusters of fifty and one hundred rockets which, guided by coordinates entered into their navigation systems eons ago, accelerated before piercing through the planets shallow aqueous covering and embedding themselves deeply into its seafloor. As a yellow sun set on Day One, a loose forest of charred, steaming, down-turned obelisks claimed ownership to a thousand square kilometer parcel of the vacant aqueous world.

It began to rain.

Many years passed before sufficient liquid was absorbed to soften the solid core of each rocket. Engorged with fluid, the obelisks expanded, ancient seams hydrated to create channels throughout the spongy mass. Gradually, long dormant mechanisms, powered by a chemical reaction provoked by the saturation of its surrounding material, began to move within the crevices and cavities of each obelisk, repairing damage caused by space travel and planetary insertion.

Extracting minerals and elements for decades, the one-time rockets developed a hardened black outer crust. Gradually, as they expanded, these shells began to fracture and chunks of the organic debris fell into the sea around the base of each rocket. Exposed to the elements, the raw surface area of the obelisks reacted by excreting a thin oily coating. Within a century, the many layers of excretion formed into a protective malleable coating.

Centuries of precision erosion wore away the supports that fastened the long-dormant engine compartments and depleted fuel tanks to the rockets. Gradually, over the span of several decades, these large structures broke off and fell into the sea, adding to the pile of debris that had already formed at the base of each of the interplanetary vehicles. Far below the waterline, extending down from the spiked nose of each rocket, tendrils snaked deep into the seabed to seek out and feed on minerals.

Exposed to an atmosphere for the first time, re-hydrated tubular ducts passively permitted atmospheric gasses to meander deep into the core the towers. Throughout the labyrinth of ductwork reactions began to occur. Long dormant ancient organic mechanisms, responding appropriately to introduction of the new elements, slowly began to go about the tasks for which they were designed. For two hundred thousand years, scores of maintenance drones worked diligently to prepare each of the ancient rockets for its next evolutionary stage.

Millions of years of excreted waste gradually forced the great ocean away from each tower until a thousand-square-kilometer continent had formed. Phosphorescent green flora, seeded from the biodegraded remains of the rocket fuel storage compartments, populated the long, wide tracts of land between the structures. Two parallel rows of gigantic poppy stalks, their bulbous heads tipped downward, cast white light across a wide black pebbled path to create a grid of light that connected all of the towers.

In their adolescent phase, the inside of each tower had been hollowed into columns and rows of variably sized chambers. These spaces were connected by arched channels and segmented by membrane valves. Externally, every centimeter of each towers skin had formed into perfectly aligned, translucent square indentations that allowed daylight, and warmth, into the chambers.

It was several hours before sunrise when the patch of gray rafflesia covering the rooftop of one of the high-rises absorbed the signal it had waited more than twenty million years to receive. Dutifully, the organic computer ingested the entire transmission, parsed it into its individual packages, and then broadcast each of the twenty-five million schematics to the appropriate tower to begin manufacture.

In a matter of hours, the first batch of prokaryotic bacteria was introduced into the once lifeless world. In less than a day, other, more complex organisms began to be constructed. Every building on the planet was at last doing exactly what they were engineered to do.

July 12, 2014. 2000 Hours. Argo Advanced Communication Technologies, Fairfax Virginia USA.

Brando Cobb sat in his office eyeballing the secure login page on his standalone workstation. At thirty-six, the former naval intelligence officer, was feeling burned out. He’d ridden his staff, an exceptional collection of programmers and cartographers, to identify the ciphers that would unlock the five megabyte segment of code given to him by his superiors at Langley. As ordered, he’d led his people to believe that the code was a portion of a yet-to-be released video game that had been encrypted by a highly skilled programmer who’d become disgruntled and left Rapid Fire Entertainment abruptly.

After six straight weeks of ten hour days and countless gallons of Red Bull, Rockstar and espresso, Walter “Bug Eyes” Henderson strolled into Cobb’s office to stake claim to the RFE bonus: twenty-five thousand dollars, a month long all-expense paid first-class trip to Hawaii, and a digitized controllable avatar in Rapid Fire Entertainment’s next release: Thunder Wars: Rage Against the Old Gods.

Cobb inserted the USB drive into a slot and ran the mysterious sample through the compiler using Henderson’s ciphers. Sixty seconds later the column of binary code stopped scrolling up his screen. Pleased, Cobb congratulated Henderson, shook his hand, and then escorted Henderson back to the ‘pit’ to make the announcement.

Thirty minutes later, Cobb slipped out of the ‘pit’ as the disappointment over Bug Eye’s winning ebbed and the revelry began. He returned to his office, locked his door, and picked up his phone.

July 12, 2014. 2230 Hours. National Security Agency, Langley Virginia.

“We have the binary but the translation is making no sense at all,” Alex Kline told Robert Smith, her supervisor. Kline had been working on the cipher text for more than two hours and was growing agitated.

Smith was about to ask if Alex had considered that the message could be in Russian but thought better of it. The file ended up on Alex’s desk because she was one of only a handful of people in his department that read and spoke Russian fluently. “What have you come up with?”

“Almost nothing. Everything we’ve gotten doesn’t amount to anything in any language I know. The computer is drawing a blank as well,” Alex said as she dragged her mouse to highlight a row of characters.

“s-a-d-h-a-n-a-l-e-k-h-a-h-i-k-e-p-h-a-p-u-s-p-a.” Smith’s face contorted as he tried to make sense of letters on the screen.

“The only thing I can say for sure,” Alex continued, “is that it’s not any variant of any Slavic tongue that I know.”

“I think I may know,” interjected Satish Gavde as he came to abrupt halt outside Alex’s doorway. Without invitation, Gavde strolled into the office, positioned himself over Alex’s shoulder, moved his head uncomfortably beside Alex’s and began studying the highlighted row of letters.