Soter clapped his hands together. “Enough about that. We can give you the full tour later, but for now let us focus on the task at hand.”
He leaned over one of the computers and inserted a flash drive into the USB port. After a few keystrokes, he stepped back and gestured for Jenna to sit.
As the screen began to fill up with data, ones and zeroes on one side, and an endless string of just four letters on the other, Jenna felt a growing apprehension. Those numbers and letters were the blueprint for creating her, transmitted across space by some unknown alien intelligence. She wanted to turn and run, but instead, as if compelled by an invisible force, she took a seat and began to read.
46
The computer hard drive whirred as it struggled to download and open the enormous file. Jenna recalled learning that the entire human genome could be expressed in less than a gigabyte of drive space. That had probably seemed like a mountain of data in 1977, but by modern computing standards, it was the same size as a two hour movie. It was a little disconcerting to think that a person — and not just any person, but Jenna herself — could be reduced to bits and bytes of information. As she scanned the procession of letters — A,T,C and G — she found herself wondering which part had determined her hair color? The color of her eyes? Which parts made her into the unique entity that she was?
Only I’m not unique, am I? There are others out there, others like Kelli Foster and Jarrod Chu, and God only knows how many more.
No, not God. Soter knows.
“Ideally, I would ask you to read the entire message, but at over three billion characters, that would require weeks of reading, even with your extraordinary mental abilities.” Soter said the last bit as if speaking from experience.
So the others have read the message, Jenna thought, but Soter was still speaking. “Once the file finishes loading, you can skip to the end. That is where the ‘signature’ is located.”
Despite his admonition, Jenna found herself fascinated by the contents of the file. She scrolled down a page, reading every single number and letter on the screen, downloading it into her brain almost as fast as the computer could read it from the flash drive. As she read, she began to get the sense that, with just a little more information, she might be able to interpret what she was seeing.
As a young girl, she had once seen an advertisement written in Spanish. She had not learned how to speak that language — though she later would — but she remembered it, just as she remembered everything she saw and heard. When the opportunity arose to get a translation, she saw the sign again in her mind’s eye, perfectly comprehensible. That was how she felt now. Even though there was only an endless stream of letters, not divided by spaces, punctuation or any sort of pattern that would be recognizable to the average person, she felt sure that with just a little bit more knowledge, she would be able to read it from her memory like a book.
Page down.
Page down.
Page down.
She scanned faster and faster…two pages per second…three. Yet, as Soter had indicated, the file was enormous, and the scroll bar registered no visible movement with each click. The file was over three million pages long, and even if she had been able to read five pages per second, it would require seven days of non-stop reading to finish.
“There,” Soter announced. “It’s finished. You can skip to the end. It’s still in binary I’m afraid. We were never able to differentiate values. But I believe you will see the pattern.”
Almost reluctantly, as if scrolling to the end of the message would be like skipping to the last page in a mystery novel, Jenna did as Soter suggested. The computer lagged in protest at the size of the file, and another interminable wait followed before the screen filled up again. Here, there were no corresponding letters of the DNA sequence. Only ones and zeroes.
This new message was different somehow. With the genetic information, even in binary, she knew there was a purpose and pattern to it all, but there was no contextual framework for the last part of the message. Though she recognized the digits, their random arrangement left her feeling muddled. She struggled to read the numbers. When she was done, she discovered she could not recall them with any degree of confidence. They had slipped from her memory. It was a new experience for her. She tried reading it again.
00000011110000…
As she fought through the message a third time, the individual numbers fell out of her consciousness as quickly as they left her sight. She paused reading, but didn’t look away from the page as Cray approached Soter and whispered in his ear. From the corner of her eye, she could see Soter’s look of alarm, but it wasn’t quite enough to draw her away from her task. She returned to reading. The numbers were almost hypnotic in their slippery resistance to assimilation. She kept looking, afraid to even blink, lest the message disappear or change.
Jenna had not truly appreciated how unique her gift of memory was until a classmate had challenged her to ‘prove it.’ She had always assumed that lots of people possessed eidetic memories, but later research had revealed that even among those who claimed to possess the gift, there were limits to the ability. No one truly possessed what was mistakenly termed ‘photographic memory’ or perfect recall. And yet, she always had. She could read something and remember it line by line, or recall startling details from images or places she had visited, without any effort.
Only now did she realize that she had taken the ability for granted. It wasn’t just that her memory was letting her down. Her brain seemed to be lagging, just as the computer had when loading the file.
000000111100001001000010100000…
Soter gave a low harrumph of displeasure, then followed Cray to a side door that opened onto a balcony just outside the control room. The rumble of the transmitter increased again, but was oddly muted by the rain.
“Stay where you are!” Jenna recognized the voice as Soter’s, though his strident shout was different than his soft conversational tone.
“I’m unarmed.” The answering voice was barely audible over the tumult of the transmitter, but there was something familiar about it. The magnetism of curiosity pulled at her, even as her eyes refused to let go of the strange numerical sequence.
000000111100001001000010100000111110001010001101000010100…
“What do you want?” Soter called.
Like a stubborn puzzle piece finally oriented correctly, the pattern emerged.
000000111100001001000010100000111110001010001101000010100100010101000111111001000100011110001000100010110100010011100010000001010100001010100001001100001100000000001000010001100100011101000110000001001000010000001101100010110000010111100011100000100011000000110100001000000001010001010000001111000011001000011001100000001011000100011010001101000111000001100000011010001000000001000000000111010001000100001000101000001000000001011000010000001011100010101000100001000010001000100110001011100011011000100010001000000001000000100101000101100000100101011111001110001100000001111000011100000110000010001000010011000111010001101000110010000111010000000011100001110100010000010000001101000101100010110000111100001000100001100010000001000000101000110000011010001010000110100011111000111001000110100010001111000011101000110100011100000100100000100011000100111000111111000000011110000100100001000000011000110110001011000010100100011000100010110000010010000111100010001111100011011000101000110110001001100001101000001111000001110010001010100010001011000111000011101000100100001111000110010001100010010100010001000011010000111100010000100000000101100001011000011010001100010001101110001010000111100001111000100001111000110100001011000010111000101100000100010000