Chương 27: Chapter 26: Guardrails

Yanking the rocks away one at a time, I revealed a cave behind the rocky wall of the cliffside. The scent of mercury poured into my nostrils as I crawled through the dark passageway, squeezing my way inside the tunnel. The ship was massive, the beams of my flashlight shining into the cockpit. I closed my eyes, taking a deep breath, and when I opened them, I was surrounded by bright, white light from all the snow around me.

The snow covered dirt path led me through the mountains as my headphones played some soft folk music. In front of me, a large, fallen tree was blocking my path. With a swift, easy jump, I vaulted over it, landing at the base of my treehouse after I jumped from the entrance of it. That brief moment of freefall was always fun. Really, I only ever used the ladder to get up to the treehouse. John was waiting for me, his arms crossed.

The hair on my back rose, ears flattening as I felt an overwhelming sense of fear take over. He had a scowl on his face as he tapped his foot.

"This again, huh?" He asked, tone menacing. Before I had a chance to respond, I felt myself being yanked away, surrounded by a sea of white. My vision soon darkened from the outside in as Gav's basement melted into view. A light beeping noise emanated from the computer and I could hear some shuffling behind me. Gav ran to the computer, setting down some food on the table as he pressed a button, turning the alarm off.

"Man, Guardrails seems to be activating way faster than before." He mused, head turning to the LED boards. Gav had created two Guardrails, one for the final message stored on the crystal and one for the particular memory he was trying to decipher in the most recent round of dream sequences. The new LED board was almost entirely green, but the final one was completely red, with only a few exceptions.

"Luckily, I don't think it'll be a problem for this one." Gav said to the room, now looking at the mostly green LED board.

"I mean, this one might be close enough to finish right now, but if Guardrails keep turning on every…what, twenty minutes?" He asked nobody in particular.

"It's hard to get much information for each round." Over a month had passed since Oliver had gone home, leaving me with Gav and Emily as they tried to create the first decipher. Initially we'd quickly gotten a good bit of the lights to change green with each trip into my dreams. Now, however, what used to last for hours had steadily diminished into small, ten to thirty minute sessions, giving Gav less time to capture memories and emotions. The Guardrails–as he called them–were looking for any encounters with… him…

and would shut everything down the moment the computer saw him.

"... I think he's trying to reach out to me." I said, moving from a flat position to sitting.

"It's not a conscious thing, Tess." Emily said as she came into my view, sitting against Gav's desk, looking back at me.

"How do you know, though? I mean, what if…" I tried to explain, but she stopped me.

"Tess, we can't keep going over this. I know you want to get answers, but we want to take this slow. I mean, what if he's actually able to hurt you in some way? Besides, we're getting more information each time." Gav looked a bit more thoughtful about the idea.

"I think she's right, Emily." He replied.

"I mean, we almost have enough for this smaller memory…" He pointed toward the mostly green panel, "... we'll get a lot more information from it, but this last memory…" He now pointed toward the red LED panel.

"... I don't know. It doesn't seem like an accident, being from a later date, seemingly from another person." He nodded to me, agreeing with the idea the more he thought about it.

"I think this is a message to Tess, and at this rate? Given how quickly the Guardrails are activating, I don't know if we'll ever be able to get this one done unless we change something. Turning the Guardrails off for a bit might be the way to go." Emily quickly shook her head.

"Absolutely not. No. Putting Tess in danger isn't worth it. We should take however long we need and go one step at a time.."

"And what if we don't have time?" I asked, standing on the chair, now eye level with Emily.

"What if we're already out of time? We need to reach them, and if we miss our opportunity because we took it too slow, then what?"

"I don't want to lose you too, Tess!" Emily yelled. She was shaking. We'd been having this argument almost daily for the past few weeks. We glared at each other, tensions high as both of us tried to think of what to say next. Gav cleared his throat.

"What?!" Emily and I bellowed at him, our attention fully on Gav. He seemed to shrink into his chair.

"I…I, um…think we should be able to build the first one here if, uh…I'll just get it started…" He mumbled, turning and typing away at his computer again.

"Ugh." I waved a hand in the air, needing some space.

"I told Oliver I'd call him today." I walked past Emily, heading up the stairs. The whole situation was clearly frustrating for both of us. Quickly making my way to the second floor, I closed the door behind me, walking into the bedroom and sitting at the desk. Gav had cut the legs down on the desk and shortened the chair to make it fit me better. It was a nice gesture. He and Emily had done their best to make this place as accessible for me as possible.

The moment the laptop was ready, the computer started ringing. Oliver must have been waiting for me to hop online. Once I answered, I saw him appear on the screen.

"Tess! Hello!" He smiled. So much of my frustration melted away in that moment, hearing his voice. I turned on my camera as well. To think, not long ago, anything I owned which had a camera had that part of the device intentionally broken, all so I couldn't take pictures of myself and have others see me. Despite the video calls over the past few weeks with Oliver, it still felt odd to see myself on a monitor.

"Oliver! It's so good to see you." I gave a small smile of my own, leaning back slightly in my chair.

"It's barely noon and it already feels like it's been a long day."

"More dream stuff?" I nodded.

"More arguing with Emily?" He continued.

"I…we didn't, um…" I gave a sigh.

"Yes."

"She's just looking out for you." Oliver reassured me.

"She doesn't want to see you get hurt. You know that, right?"

"I know, I know…" I did know, but even so, "... I just feel like we're wasting time. Gav said he thinks he can put together that small memory, the one we've been trying to piece together for the past few weeks. It's the smallest one we could find, so it makes sense, but I don't know…I just don't want to waste any more time, you know?"

"You said his little searching program thing found most of the emotions already, right?" Oliver asked. I nodded.

"Yeah, that panel for the small memory is almost entirely green. Gav was pretty sure that if we have most of it, we can turn it into a memory that will play back for me. Honestly? I'm kind of nervous about it. He's putting it together right now."

"That sounds exciting, though." He grinned.

"I'm excited too, really…but I still wish we could turn off the Guardrails for a bit, just to give it a try, you know?"

"Hey."

"What?" I asked, arms crossed, just in the frame of my camera.

"You guys are all doing great. It might be going slower than you expected, but you're making progress. That's what's important." I nodded.

"You're right…" We both sat in silence for a minute before Oliver spoke.

"You know, I'm proud of you, Tess." He said, smiling warmly.

"Yeah?" I asked, looking down at the keyboard.

"Yeah." He repeated back to me.

"I know you're frustrated with all this. Maybe you haven't noticed, but you've changed a lot over the past few months. You used to be so quiet, never giving any pushback on things. You seemed to be afraid of confrontation and would do anything to avoid it. Now you've been standing up for yourself a lot more. It's really good to see, honestly." My elbow rested on the table, palm on my forehead as I looked down at the corner of the wood.

"Yeah…I have this goal and it's the only thing I've been thinking about lately. I guess all of those social hangups kind of just disappear when you're not thinking about them as much. I don't like getting angry, though…it seems to be happening more. I just want answers, and I wish Emily would stop getting in the way."

"Don't be too hard on yourself, Tess. You've been going through a lot." Oliver said, reassuring as ever. I always felt better when I was talking to him.

"Thanks. I'm working on it." I leaned back in my chair again, eyes sliding shut.

"I heard you've been enjoying the synthesizer." Oliver pointed out, thankfully changing the subject.

"Oh! Yes!" That subject caught my attention much more.

"It's been great! It's my favorite instrument!" Oliver laughed.

"That's the third favorite instrument you've told me about." He said, still chuckling. I laughed with him.

"I know, but seriously! It's so much fun! You can put together all these different tracks, and it's got all these different settings on it. You can create nearly any sound you want! I can make it sound like a violin, or a drum kit, or a keyboard, and I can put all of it together into a song! It's so much fun to hear it all come together!"

"That's how you're putting the dreams together, right?" He asked. Nodding, I explained it a bit more.

"The better I can imagine a situation, the better I can translate it to how I'm feeling and what I'm thinking into music. When we play it back while the flashlight is on, it's like I'm experiencing it all over again, but it's more conscious. Whenever I daydream during those flashlight sequences, everything feels random, like what we were doing today. If I focus on something specifically, though, I can make it do pretty much whatever I want."

"Except for when John shows up?" Oliver asked. I nodded.

"Yeah…he seems to act on his own. I don't have any control over that, but the way I see it…if that last message had a lot of bad thoughts and negative feelings, it makes sense that we can't get any of it to light up on the panel. Every time I start to feel those same things, the Guardrails program turns everything off. Maybe, if we turn it off for a bit, we'll get some answers." Stolen story; please report. Oliver gave a thoughtful look, not too dissimilar to his brother.

"I think Emily might warm up to it, if all the other routes go dry. For now, it sounds like you guys are still making progress. It might not be as much as you want, but I think Emily has the right approach." Much as I hated admitting it, everything Oliver said made sense. The laptop began ringing again. Gav's picture flashed on the screen, so I quickly added him to the call. A moment later, I saw both Oliver and Gav on my computer.

"Tess! I think we've got it!" He grinned excitedly.

"Oh!" I exclaimed, closing the laptop and scampering downstairs. Emly and Gav were setting up the chair once again, and Oliver was on the big screen, watching curiously.

"Six terabytes! It ended up being six terabytes!" Gav exclaimed.

"Wow! But, I think we have this all figured out. I was able to translate about ninety-seven percent of the file, so that should tell us a lot!" Emily nodded in agreement.

"We don't think this one will be very interesting on your side, Tess. Since it's the smallest file, there's probably not anything too significant in it, but we could be able to extract more telemetry information from it, maybe some other metadata that's being hidden behind the obscurity. By seeing exactly what data translates to which thoughts, we should be able to isolate much more of the other information." I slowly nodded.

"Hey, um…Emily, I'm sorry I got mad earlier." Emily shook her head.

"It's fine, it's fine. That's not important right now. I think we're ready to start." Jumping into the chair, I got settled, looking up at the flashlight.

"Okay…I'm ready as I'll ever be." A familiar sound started flowing from the speakers as Gav reached for the light.

"Here we go." He said softly just before everything melted to a new room. The ceilings were short, just tall enough for me to reach up and touch them. It felt nice and cozy. Looking at the door in front of me, I read the number on it: 435. After accidentally going into the wrong door a few days ago, I made a habit to double check I was entering the correct place. Just thinking about it made me feel a bit exhausted. Really, I'd been getting more and more tired with each passing day of these tests.

I knew it was important, but what I was doing while I was inside the assembler was wearing me out more than I cared to admit. I opened the door, stepping inside of the usual empty apartment. Ever since I'd moved out on my own, it felt strange to come back home to nobody. I'd get used to it eventually. I fell back onto the cushions spread onto the floor, feeling something hard smack into my head.

"Gah!" I yelled, shaking my head, forehead stinging from whatever hit me. I turned to see my shard had fallen off my necklace and was bouncing a foot away from me.

"Dammit…" When I reached for it, I accidentally grabbed it by the top, seeing the shard turn a familiar blue color.

"Ah, shit…I didn't mean to save this one…" I mumbled, pulling my hand away from it. I blinked. The basement was coming back into view. Oliver was looking back at me through the monitor while Emily and Gav were hovering over a different screen. Gav had his calculator out, punching several buttons on it and writing a bunch of stuff on a piece of paper.

"Tess, are you okay? What did you see?" Oliver asked me. I sat up from my position, thinking for a moment.

"I…saw a room. The person's memory wasn't made on purpose, so they turned it off as quickly as they could. I guess that's why it was the smallest file out of them all. Oh, and the crystal is called a 'shard', I guess."

"Did you see all of this happen to someone else, or were you the person in the memory?" He asked.

"It was…yeah, it was me. It felt like it was happening to me." I said, trying to remember any other details.

"Did you speak at all, or was it in another language?"

"I talked…a little bit. It was in English for some reason. Beyond that, there was something about tests, but there wasn't much to the memory."

"That makes sense." Emily spun in her chair to face me.

"Whoever this memory belongs to, you weren't seeing their perspective in an exact one-to-one way. You experienced it the same way they did, so the actual speech isn't as important as the meaning behind it. Whatever they said, you understood it as if they were speaking English. Did you say anything important, though? Anything that stood out?" After replaying everything I'd said in my head, I shook my head no.

"It was really short, only about…maybe three minutes? They didn't mean to create that memory so they cut it off, I guess."

"Three minutes?" Oliver repeated as both Emily and Gav looked at me.

"Uh…yeah?" I said. Everyone continued to give me a confused look before Emily gave me an answer.

"You were in there for about five seconds." That was it?

"Huh…strange…" I mumbled while Emily returned to the computer.

"Do…do you guys see what you were looking for at least?" Gav paused for a moment before facing his computer again, looking at a few more notes before rolling his chair next to me. I sat on one side of the chair so he could move next to me, with Emily joining him on his other side.

"Good news, bad news. We did get much better telemetry data from here. It was always there, but it was hard to find inside everything else. This is probably the information the computer generates each time it makes a file–like a timestamp, but with a lot more stuff in it. Since we got all the other data sorted, we can separate the metadata from the actual memories much more effectively." Gav handed me a piece of paper.

"This is what Emily and I have been working on while you were in there." There was a large series of numbers and equations all over the sheet, none of which made any sense to me, but Emily answered my question before I asked.

"We're pretty confident about these numbers here–" She pointed to a large number, one near the top of the sheet, "–this is the amount of seconds that have passed since this memory–the one you just experienced–had originally taken place. Whatever memory you just watched, it was recorded a hundred and six years ago."

"That was…wow, these messages are really old…" My eyes widened a bit.

"Right. This one was recorded in between World War One and World War Two. It goes pretty far back, but we're more interested in these numbers here." Gav said, pointing to a second number.

"What's that?"

"This," he continued, "is the time of the recording of that final message put on…what did you call it, a shard?" I nodded.

"Okay, so the last message on this shard was recorded at this time," again Gav pointed to the number, "which means, given the timing, location data, and the speed of light, if we'd received a messages at this time, arrival on Earth would have been on August 15, 1977." Emily handed me her phone with an article on the screen with the title Wow! Signal. Quickly skimming through the paragraphs, descriptions of a 'narrowband radio signal' continued appearing, seen on August 15, 1977.

Apparently it was one of the main reasons for funding being given to SETI, the 'Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence'.

"It wasn't a message," Gav continued, "instead, it was a large radio burst. There were a lot of attempts to explain it, like a reflecting satellite or passing airplane, but nothing concrete. It seems to have come from space, and it never happened again. No followup, nothing. Here's the thing: there wasn't any modulation, no data, nothing inside the transmission itself. It was just a large burst that lasted over a minute, then it went silent."

"So…what happened?" I asked while I continued reading through the article.

"I have no idea. We're thinking you may have been sent here to see if this planet could support life. I don't know if they knew intelligent life was already here. It's possible the signal was to tell potential life you were on the way." With a shrug, Gav continued.

"I would have expected other signals to come through since then, if that were true."

"That's where we get to the bad news…" Emily scowled a bit. I handed the phone back to her.

"What's the bad news?"

"We know where they were when the memory you just experienced happened, and we also know their trajectory. Unless something happened between then and now, they would have gone through our solar system about a year ago." I frowned, looking to Gav as he raised his eyebrows, as if to agree with Emily.

"So our best guess is that they didn't hear anything in return–from you or the others–and they figured things didn't work out. Their trajectory was already set to bring them through our solar system and onto Alpha Centauri. They're going through the galaxy and probing anything they can, I think. If that happened, they'd have come through here. If they did see us here, it would have been too late for them to stop." Emily stopped, taking a small drink of water, letting Gav continue the train of logic.

"It's possible they can turn around, but over the past few weeks, we've been monitoring everything we can. We haven't found even a hint of them passing through our solar system. They passed through completely silently."

"Unless…" Oliver considered, gathering the attention of all three of us, "they might have changed course. Maybe that radio burst wasn't meant as a message; it could have been them redirecting course. For all we know, they changed their trajectory in order to come here, or maybe they found a different target someplace else."

"Hmmm…" Rubbing her chin, Emily mulled over the idea.

"We couldn't really know for sure, but if they did change course, we'd have a much better idea of that if we could see the information from that final message. If the data we're looking at is old, going to the newest memory could help us find out if anything changed between the old and new messages."

"Sounds like we need to read the last file in the shard, then." I said, giving Emily a knowing look. She crossed her arms.

"We still have other options to explore before we do anything crazy."

"How do you know we have time?" I asked her.

"For all we know, it could already be too late, but what if we're not? What if we're just about to miss them?"

"There's a lot of 'what if's' in there…" She responded.

"If we do anything else, it's a waste of time!" I said, standing on the chair.

"Why won't you just trust me on this?"

"I have an idea." Gav offered.

"I do trust you!" Emily responded, ignoring Gav.

"I just think that maybe there are better ways to figure this out. Maybe we can avoid taking down the Guardrail altogether if we just keep doing what we're doing now."

"I, uh…" Gav tried to get our attention.

"I'm hearing a lot of 'maybe's' in there." I snapped back.

"We only have one chance at this, Emily! If we still have time, there's not much left, so let's just…"

"I have an idea!" Gav yelled over us, catching me off guard enough to stop. Emily and I both looked at him, arms crossed.

"Um, so…" Gav's confidence seemed to falter, but only for a second.

"We have a vague idea of where they might be, right?" We both reluctantly nodded.

"So, if we send a message in that general direction, maybe they'd see it. If we're not too late, maybe it will bring them here." The room was quiet in the minute it took for Emily and I to consider this idea.

"That makes sense…" Emily slowly replied, "... but…let's say we're not too late and they're about to come through our solar system. Wouldn't they know about us already? Wouldn't they have seen other radio transmissions?" Oliver's voice came through the speakers.

"Maybe they know about us, but didn't bother to talk to us at all. They didn't want to disturb us…or maybe they didn't get a signal back from Tess or anyone else, so they decided it wasn't worth causing a commotion and left us be."

"Good point." Emily agreed.

"So, what would we send them to let them know Tess is here?"

"A picture?" Suggested Gav.

"A simple, low resolution, square photo. It'd be something easily turned into a picture on their end. If it was just a four bit picture at about two fifty-six by two fifty-six, it wouldn't be too large of a file to send over a radio telescope and it would give them enough info to know Tess is here."

"How would we send something like that?" I asked.

"Well," Gav continued, "we could try and contact SETI, but they closed down a few years ago. I've got no idea if any of their equipment is still running. I started looking into this stuff a few weeks ago, just in case we'd need it. The last director of the project is some French lady named Nathalie Cabrol, but like I said, the entire program was shut down a few years ago. She doesn't live too far from here now, up in Salt Lake City.

I thought about giving her a call about all of this, but I don't think she'd know anything useful. I don't think they ever found any of you guys." He finished, motioning to me.

"Sounds like you have a second idea." Oliver said. Grinning, Gav turned to his computer, pulling up a large map on the monitor.

"This is the Very Large Array, a big radio telescope, just south of Albuquerque. If we want to send a big radio signal somewhere, this would be the place." The picture on the monitor was filled with a large group of satellite dishes, standing like skyscrapers around an otherwise empty desert.

"It's a big telescope, but it can also send signals just as easily as they can receive them." Gav said.

"So, what? We just waltz in there and ask them to send a photo for us?" Emily raised an eyebrow, skeptical about the idea.

"I mean, yeah. If we bring Tess with us, I think they'd understand the scope of this whole thing." He shrugged.

"Bring…Tess with us? You mean show her to them?!" Even I had to admit, desperate as I was, it was pretty risky.

"That's a terrible idea! We have no idea what they'd do with her!" Thinking of a compromise, I had an idea.

"What if you ask them to send it, and if they can't, you explain the situation to them? You get an idea of what's going on, I'll stay in the car, and then we'll figure out what to do when you're there, based on how they react? Who knows, maybe someone there would be receptive to it."

"It might be our best shot." Gav nodded.

"I…can't say I disagree…" Emily eventually conceded. With a grin, hands on my hips, I addressed everyone.

"Well, it sounds like we're going to Albuquerque."