Dark World

Chapter 14 - Council of Nerds

Dipper stepped out into a foreign garage that looked just like any garage with matching houses and garages in the neighboring suburban development. Summer hopped through and the portal sealed up as it winked out of existence. They had just come from a world in the middle of the night and the bright light of the setting sun was jarring and harsh as it reflected off the driveway and the neighboring housing in the development. Still, the warm light was welcome after the cold damp night. "Mom and Dad have some sodas in the fridge and for the adults, I'm pretty sure Rick has some beer. Just let me double-check with Rick. Sometimes he keeps weird alien stuff in the fridge. She shot him a text and responded. Summer smiled. Ok, the gold cans are safe just don't drink the purple coolers. He said they really get you tipsy. Summer handed out sodas and beers. Grunkle Stan tried the new beer while Grunkle Ford and everyone else tried the soda.

Dipper Ford and Stanley started talking about what to do to keep Mabel safe. Pacifica now stepped away from the girls and joined the conversation. Her lips pursed with firm determination. "I think your all forgetting one thing." Everyone silently waited a moment for her to answer. Pacifica shifted her weight on her hips. "Whoever is behind this program that captured Mabel is pulling the strings in Gravity Falls. If we want to keep Gravity Falls safe, if we want to ever get it back to normal we have to expose this organization and destroy the page from the journal." Pacifica had filled Summer in on the journal years ago. From what little she knew anyway.

Dipper nodded in agreement. "The problem is despite our resources we don't know where to start looking." Dipper looked around and everyone shook their head. No one knew. Pacifica smiled her teeth showing deviously. "That's where your wrong Pines. As it so happens I pulled data from the servers while you were rescuing Mabel and I was commandeering us a drone escort. I have looked at the data but it will take some time to figure out how to get past the ghost server relay." Ford and Dipper nodded. That was a problem.

"Ghost server," said a voice behind them. They turned around to see an old man. He was still a bit younger than Dipper's grunkles by a good decade at least. "Yes," Pacifica said eyeing Rick up neutrally. "We need to find where this signal originated, but I asked Summer about it and were still working on it." Rick turned to Summer. "Summer," he said and he gestured with his head for her to join them. Summer casually walked over with her soda as Mabel who had been talking with her followed in tow looking cheerful.

Rick asked Summer, "Did you ax the layered authentication?" She nodded and said, "Yeah." Rick continued, "And you stripped the bitstreams and rendered the code in DX5-Redux?" Summer waved her hand and her eyes sarcastically, "Duh...It just seems to lead to the middle of nowhere in space."

Rick looked curious now. "Let me look at it."Rick stood next to the laptop she had placed on the garage workbench and looked at the code on the screen. He did some math and made some adjustments to the code and clicked compile. "Not bad Summer you remembered to compensate for the Earth's magnetic field, but you forgot to compensate for the effects of the ionosphere." The computer showed the trajectory of the signal in red, but now as it recompiled the data it drew a second line. This line was green veering off slightly from the first. It now met up with a satellite in the background next to a few other satellites nearby. It would have been impossible to guess without the math. Summer looked excited. "Was it Irridium or Inmarsat?" Rick grinned. "Close but the transmission frequency profile doesn't fit either of those two satellite communication networks. This one is 50kHz on the dot. That's Milstar. These SOBs are military."

Rick took out a laptop touchscreen stylus and began marking the screen like a dry board. Now if we compensate for the additional inbound cosmic radiation from our star as well as secondary perturbations from other star's nebulas and even the black hole at the center of our galaxy..." He continued to draw complex formulas while Ford and Dipper watched perplexed...practically drooling. Pacifica and Summer were paying attention as well though. "Bingo! Now that we have the exact timestamp of the transmission we can determine where it was sent." Rick ran a trace on the outbound signal after hacking the data network and accessing the outbound signal history. He paged down till he found what he was looking for. "White Sands, New Mexico."