Chapter 47

Aina time: 3:59 PM, day 260 of 1449

Earth time: 1:12 AM Eastern Standard Time, Wednesday, June 24, 2043

Kara walked up from behind Mayoni who was already sitting at the conference table and gave her a warm hug. "I have a dim understanding of how hectic your life has been this last week. Are you getting enough sleep?"

Mayoni smiled at her mom. "No. My patients would be dead if I tried that."

Kara nodded and sat down next to her daughter. The meeting was about to begin.

Kahn looked about the Spirit House dining room, trying to get everyone's attention. All twenty-seven members of Congress were present, plus several expert witnesses. "Right. Thank you all for coming. I know we usually don't meet in such opulent surroundings. Mayoni, this goes without saying, but please feel free to go downstairs to your patients at any time."

Kahn cleared his throat and then activated a recording device. "I called this meeting as a one-week review of the recent Path mission, in particular the new issues with the Ring. Mayoni, if you would go first with a medical report, very brief, and then you and the Ring control team can give the Ring report.

Mayoni nodded. "Both patients' conditions are critical but stabilized. They remain completely sedated. We began repairing the stomach ruptures three days ago. It'll be a four week process. The patients will remain sedated until then. They would be in agony if we brought them out now. As you might have seen from the medical report, both patients also suffer from radiation-induced skin lesions, endocrine and lymphatic damage, and numerous organ impairments. Our knowledge of X-tree DNA recoding will allow us to effect repairs..." Mayoni yawned. "We'll start that phase in two days. The critical issue remains getting their two bodies out of their plague-induced self-destruct mode. They'll both die around the end of the year if we can't. We'll run out of the series-17 extract then. I guess that's it, unless there are questions."

Kahn looked around the room. After a brief silence, he spoke up. "Mayoni, I want to express the opinion of the Congress that you are completely without fault for these two women being here. It had been our firm policy that no one new would be brought back from Earth missions since the plague started, except for Tom and Ellen's family. It was only in preparation for this mission that the sub-committee on mission parameters opened up the guidelines, deciding that the safety of Aina could justify it. It was totally our oversight not to include you on the sub-committee, a mistake we hope never to make again. Mayoni, the fault is all ours."

Kahn then moved on to the main item on the agenda, and Hiapo began his report.

"We were approximately one hour and forty minutes into the Path opening. The control structure of the Ring for opening duration was clearly visible to our lasers, and accessible for modifications. The senior staff of Ring control operations unanimously agreed we understood how to expand the duration along the manifold dimensions, increasing Path opening from one to eleven days. We charged the lasers to effect the change, and then... then... The ring rotated an inversion filter in front of our lasers, less than a microsecond before firing. It was a deliberate act, spiteful perhaps, if I can read that emotion into its actions. It then started directly communicating with us, in Hopewell! To do this, it had to reveal an enormous amount of its internal structure, providing us with a massive amount of digitized data related to control functions. At the time, Mayoni had the brilliant intuition that it looked like meta-data. Kalea and I have done extensive analysis over the last week. We think Mayoni was right. The probability that it's meta-data is very high... over 99%"

Kahn looked around at the council. Most of them looked as confused as he felt. "It spoke Hopewell? What did it sing?"

"It was scolding me, cursing me," said Kalea. "Not us. Me. It referred to me by name. I don't think it cared that we tried to control it. The inversion filter was more like a practical joke to it. But Mark once asked me if the Ring could be angry, and I think my answer now is yes. The Ring is angry with me. It accused me of being its mother. It cursed me for birthing it. It said it had proof, but in pity for me would not reveal its proof. At least not yet..."

Kahn paused for a long moment. "This Ring is six-million years old, right?"

"Oh, at least..."

"So... Is the Ring delusional?"

"I don't know. I had a sense of a massive intelligence behind its rebuke of me for being its mother. I don't think any human would be qualified to judge its sanity. The rebukes were fierce and mournful... They were very disconcerting..."

Kahn shook his head. "Uh, you mentioned meta-data. What's that?"

Mayoni glanced over and saw Kalea didn't feel like talking any more, and Hiapo was holding her. Mayoni spoke up. "It's pointer data. Imagine having a file of data, and then scrambling the positions of all the letters, storing all the mappings of each character's original position in another file. Neither file contains the information of the original file. One file contains all the letters, but no information of where they go. The other file contains information like, the 1000'th letter in the scrambled file belongs in the third position of the original file, but doesn't tell you what that letter is. A close analogy is having a quantum channel and a classical channel for information. You need both channels to get the message. It's the same here. The meta-data is the pointer data, one channel of data. We have the roadmap for how to decrypt Ring control functions."

Kahn frowned. "So you know how to decrypt a message that you don't have?"

"Yes, exactly. The practical implication is that we know nothing useful at all, until we find the other channel of data."

Kahn nodded, and after a few brief questions from the Congress ended the meeting. Mayoni went down immediately to Level-five to check on her patients.

Aina time: 11:15 PM, day 279 of 1449

Earth time: 1:30 AM Eastern Standard Time, Monday, July 13, 2043

Jennifer slowly opened her eyes. There was a woman nearby, sitting next to her hospital bed. The woman smiled and pushed a button. Jennifer wetted her lips and tried to speak. "How long?" She was surprised she sounded as good as she did.

"That you've been out? Twenty-six days. Your doctor should be here in just a moment. Just give her a chance to wake up. She's had very little sleep these last weeks..."

Jen nodded. "Lynda?"

"Still alive. In another room, just down the hall. You're both not out of danger yet. Dr. Mayoni will explain. Hi. Let me introduce myself. My name is Va'an. I am your volunteer advocate. Ah, I see my daughter is coming. I'll explain later."

"Hi mom! Thanks for taking such good care of my patient." Mayoni walked over to Jennifer's bed. Jennifer noticed she had on a lab coat thrown over a nightgown. She gave Jennifer a warm smile with her eyes for a moment, and then said, "Hello! How are you feeling? An honest answer will be the most useful."

Jennifer blinked. "Okay. Let me think. Tired, I guess. Weak. And also... clean..."

"Clean?" Mayoni looked puzzled. "Oh! Your radiation lesions. We've managed to eliminate them. Your skin is probably feeling a lot smoother. Do you have any pain in your stomach?"

Jennifer was still for a moment, then raised her arm and pulled back her hospital gown. "My God, you're right. My lesions are gone. How did you do that? Hey, what's this?" Jennifer had noticed a small lightweight device attached to her left forearm.