Creation Rings

Part 17 - Data cracking

For the first time since this had all started, the Control Room was crawling with Q-SIS agents.

The base and the soldiers were under the direct command of the General but any threat not directly related to war fell under the purview of Q-SIS. Since the base itself had everything required to deal with the situation at hand and there wasn't any value in having a large Q-SIS presence, the Head Director had decided not to have any of his personnel on-site, safe for one liaison. But everybody knew he had absolute authority over this, more so now that they were using Q-SIS technology. 

An unscheduled submarine had arrived earlier that night. The base had been alerted moments before their radars picked it up and it had transmitted access codes that overrode all the security logs in an unexpected show of green lights. A minute later they received a communication that the submarine was Q-SIS property and that's when they first learned what might be going on.

The General understood the need for secrecy, the fact that he knew about this technology had been mere chance: a drunk admiral had unwittingly admitted to working for Q-SIS during an officer's poker game the General had attended. 

During the last planetary conflict between the domed cities, the need to monitor enemy fleet movements had been paramount to victory. In a surprising turn of events, one of the smaller cities had invented a device that created fake acoustic signals, in effect, pretending that they had more and bigger ships than their enemy's intel suggested. Qualiak and its allies had to research a way of seeing through these fake signals and, unexpectedly, the same mathematical algorithms this technology used had yielded ways to encrypt and decrypt information, particularly information that translated to visual files.  Knowing this and that said Admiral had specialized in aquatic acoustic-encryption, General Erontar had surmised what Q-SIS might have technology that could sift through the base's video feeds and that might be their best hope to find something; if there was something to find.

Given the situation, the Head Director had to use every resource available to him, but that didn't mean he was going to entrust Q-SIS secrets to the military. The General had alerted his man to allow the Q-SIS people every courtesy and to keep him informed before he retired to his quarters.

Before an entire compliment of Q-SIS agents had disembarked from the submarine, they had requested their route to the Control Room be cleared of any and all personnel. The Control Room was allowed minimal staff to continue monitoring and Q-SIS even handpicked who would stay. The two soldiers that had been allowed to stay watched as the first six Q-SIS agents left the submarine. They were wearing long coats, but they couldn't hide that they were wearing a lighter version of battle suits that the base's teams possessed. These first six agents made their way to the control room at a brisk pace, one of them carrying a metal briefcase. When they arrived they proceeded to assemble the technology they were carrying, the soldiers could only surmise they were analyzing the flow of information within the base itself. When they deemed it safe the rest of the Q-SIS team disembarked. Several scientists and technicians, all escorted but other agents wearing trench coats.

Soon the Control Room was abuzz. The previously empty desks, behind the security monitoring station, were now crawling with technology and cables running everywhere.

The agents requested the video data from both events was uploaded to their devices and started to work on analyzing it.

One of the soldiers kept the General appraised of what was happening but, as it turns out, Q-SIS knew this would happen and counted on it. That's why they had chosen him specifically. What he didn't know was that all this machinery was showing him false readings, the real use for these machines was to connect to Q-SIS servers directly so that they could use their superior computational power to analyze the data.

That kept Q-SIS secrets protect from any potential leak and excluded any potential sabotage that might be happening on site. The side-effect of this was that the soldiers that were supposed to be keeping an eye on the usually very tame alien, were now more interested in what was going on around them than in what was happening on the monitors in front of them. So the encounter of a certain frustrated astrobiologist had gone unnoticed.

On the Q-SIS side, the Head Director had been meeting with his staff while his agents on the base uploaded the data.

"From what we have so far, can we estimate any outcome?" the Head Director asked his Science Division Chief.

"From the raw video footage I can't tell whats going on" the Chief replied "but, spectral analysis of the first few microseconds before the image goes out, shows the image slowly 'folding itself  'or 'packing itself up'  for lack of a better terms."

"What do you make of that?"

"We haven't seen this phenomenon before, so I can't make any promises but the soldier that compared it to encryption made a good guess. It doesn't seem random and if we can find a pattern anywhere in the wave spectrum, we might be able to reverse whatever this is."

"How long until we have some results?"

"The data upload should be completed in the next few minutes. Finding a pattern will depend on how evident the pattern, the more complex the pattern the longer it will take. I can't give you an estimate, the pattern could be immensely long for all I know, and without even knowing what cause this phenomenon I can't even begin to guess."

"I really hate when you guys try to cover your asses" the Head Director sighed "Alright, everyone back to your stations. Chief, could you please hang back a minute?"

The Chief looked around in hesitation and nodded sitting back down.

"Ell I have known you for a while now, you know I don't like guessing..." the Chief anticipated

 "I will not hold you accountable for being wrong, I just need to have an idea of how to plan my next steps."

"Given everything I have seen and everything I know at this very moment," the Chief qualified to try to and underline the tenous amount of information he had to go on "knowing that it is very unlikely any external entity has penetrate the base's security without our detection, I would have to assume this phenomenon is caused by the alien."

The Head Director nodded in agreeance.

"The second time it happened, the alien was in a different location and yet the radius of the phenomenon was the same, which could confirm it but it could also be an external attack target at the vicinity of the alien." the Science Division Chief carefully continued. "Assuming it was the alien, I don't know how he is doing but there are only two probable options: technologically and biologically.

Technology that could garble communications like that is decades ahead of what we have and could produce interference patterns that alternate at random time intervals and the patterns of interference themselves could be randomized. The complexity of the pattern could be astronomical depending on the computational capabilities of such a device. 

However, there are no signs it carries technology with him; either on or in him. It has no signs of any biotechnology embedded in its body so I think its relatively safe to assume its something it can do biologically rather than through the use of technology. And here is where I cannot make any other safe assumptions. "

"Because?" Ell encouraged the Chief.

"Since it has no other organs that are significantly different to ours, I have to assume this phenomenon is produced by its brain and we know nothing about its brain. I could assume it has a limited capacity and therefore any interference pattern it produces won't be overly complex and our system will be able to find it within a few hours BUT, not only don't we know how smart or advanced it is, we don't know how it thinks. Its thought patterns could be so vastly different that we or our computers will never see a pattern."

"So, between a few hours and never?"

"Exactly."