And McKay wasn’t going to like it. Not one bit.
Chapter Eight
Insecurity
Radek Zelenka was alone in the ZPM lab when he heard the voices.
He hadn’t intended to stay in the lab so late. Like every member of the expedition he kept long hours, and certainly wasn’t adverse to working through the night when the situation demanded it. But the problem that was occupying him now had hardly seemed urgent. The fluctuation in the Atlantis power grid was puzzling, but in terms of actual voltage close to unnoticeable. The strange, rhythmic dips in electricity amounted to half a percent of the city’s regular output at most. It wasn’t even enough to make the lights flicker.
However, there were elements of the phenomenon that intrigued him, to a point where he had become thoroughly engrossed in cataloguing them. He had started to notice the anomalies at around six in the evening, Atlantis time, and had promised himself a couple of hours work on them before closing down his programs and heading out. Several of the tech staff who worked the later shift were due to head out then anyway, and Zelenka had planned to leave with them and join them for a meal in the mess hall. There had been talk of a movie. But, as the daylight outside had reddened into darkness, and the city lights had grown bright and golden in response, Zelenka had stayed at his terminal. Gradually, the rest of the tech team had left him; the group at first, no doubt following up on their meal and movie plans, and then other, less social members of the science staff. As each had gone Zelenka had muttered his goodnights, promising, without looking up from his screen, to be just a few more minutes. Another couple of cycles, just to confirm his readings, he would say absently, and then he would be done.
Eventually, there was no-one left to listen.
It was probably close to midnight when Zelenka became fully aware of his solitude. The ZPM lab was not a particularly large room, but complicated in form, and it was possible to sit in one part of it and be wholly out of sight of someone quite close by. For a few moments, as he leaned back and looked around, he wondered if anyone was still there, around one of the corners or behind a pillar, but he quickly realized he was totally alone.
He glanced at his watch, and smiled to himself. The movie was over anyway. Apart from the city’s night staff — marines on guard, sensor operators on one of their constant shifts, anyone unlucky enough to have gotten cleaning duty — he was probably one of the last awake. There were few night-owls on the expedition. Work started early on Atlantis, and late nights were discouraged.
Zelenka shrugged, and went back to his work. If he was honest with himself, he rather enjoyed being alone here. The stillness helped him concentrate.
And the work required his concentration, there could be no doubt of that. Atlantis was big. Compared to cities on Earth, maybe, it wasn’t exceptional — just over four kilometers from the tip of any pier to that of its opposite twin. Taken as a single structure, though, it was enormous, and ferociously complex. If every building in Manhattan, every streetlight, every hydrant and taxicab and TV and electrical socket, every single part of that entire conurbation was part of one single system, and controlled by one electronic authority, then it might rival Atlantis as a work of technological wonder. Such complexity was what made studying the place so endlessly fascinating, but also frustrating in the extreme. The power distribution grid alone had something close to six million output nodes.
Trying to find the source of the drain had seemed, at first, to be like looking for a single leaky pipe in a city-sized plumbing system, and when Colonel Carter had given Zelenka the task of tracking that leak down he had despaired. From the first few huge and unexplainable power drops, the problem had shrunk to its present, nearly-undetectable levels, which made hunting it seem even more hopeless. Zelenka had decided that his only hope of finding the drain was from the ZPM lab itself: it was directly connected to the main power chamber, and had uninterrupted access to the battery of Ancient devices monitoring the city’s three Zero Point Modules. Each of those tiny power sources, despite being no bigger than a man’s thigh, could power Atlantis for decades — or, if their energies were released all at once, reduce a planet to fast-moving rubble. Little wonder, then, that so much of the city’s resident computing power was devoted to watching over them.
Zelenka had been siphoning off a fraction of that electronic attention to try and track down the drain for most of the day. One of his first ideas had been to poll a scattering of output nodes to see which were hit by the power drains earlier than others, and from this locate the source of the problem. The polling system uploaded its data to a core file: Zelenka, while running other tests at the same time, had watched the file grow in size for half a day, populating a series of graphs and maps and diagrams with its contents.
He had given up on that when he decided that the graphs were going to stay as flat as they started, and the maps as undifferentiated. There was no measurable lag between nodes at opposite ends of the city: the pulse was, quite literally, happening everywhere at once.
The exercise had not been a complete waste of time, though. While the data from the nodes showed no timing differences, they did show something else. Something that had filled the rest of Zelenka’s day, and left him here alone in the lab.
There was a pattern to the drops in power that went beyond a regular forty-one second cycle, an underlying structure of breathtaking fractal complexity. It was subtle — as the pulses themselves had been almost too small to detect, so this structure was smaller still by a factor of a hundred. Only when the sensitivity of the node-sensors had been set as high as the grid would allow could it be properly seen. Zelenka had spent hours trying to filter the pattern out, writing algorithms to flatten any hint of electrical noise. System use, feedback from the sensors, even the microscopic flexion of the city’s structure due to wave motion had to be eliminated.
The pattern remained. Now that he had found it, Zelenka couldn’t make it go away.
Visually, it told him nothing. There was something of an eerie beauty to it, he couldn’t deny that, and he found himself watching its slow, rippling fluctuations for several minutes. But there was a signal component to the structure that promised to be of far more use. Zelenka had spent the last half an hour, just before noticing he was alone, setting up a series of frequency analyzers and pattern-recognitions systems to try and make sense of what he had found.
The lab was very quiet. There was a faint humming from the city’s air system, and the whirring of computer fans from the tech team’s terminals and laptops, but apart from that there was nothing.
Perhaps that silence was what gave him the idea of translating the signal component to an audio output and listening to it.
The process was simple, a conversion of data that he accomplished almost reflexively. Then, with one more quick glance about to make sure no-one was around to hear this folly, he turned up his terminal’s speakers and triggered the signal.
Breathy, sibilant sounds began to whisper out into the lab.
“Hovno,” swore Zelenka. He had expected to hear static, or some meaningless pulsation, but the audio signal was something else entirely. It ebbed and flowed like waves on a distant shore, rising slowly in pitch and volume, then falling away in a series of melancholy echoes, only to hover at the edge of hearing for several long seconds before starting its inexorable climb again.
Zelenka leaned close to the terminal speakers, listening hard. There was another level to the sound, hidden by that lonely rushing, something more complex, more structured. The underlying pattern of the signal, he guessed, but even as that rational thought entered his mind it was swept aside. What lay beneath the sound, beneath the waves, was no mere pattern.