Flood Rising (Jenna Flood #1)

Soter approached one of the men working in the room and shook his hand. After a brief exchange, the man turned to his co-workers and said simply, “Lunch time.”


After the events of the last two days, Jenna didn’t trust her internal clock, but she was fairly certain that it was only about ten in the morning. That the men were ceding the room to Soter bore testimony to his influence, and made Jenna wonder again about the source of his funding. Cort’s assertion that the project had been run by the Soviet Union, and then later by the Russian government, seemed less likely here on American soil, but she couldn’t rule it out completely. Foreign or domestic, Soter would have had to cover his tracks very well, especially with the CIA gunning for him.

When they were alone, Soter gestured for Jenna to join him at a desk near the window. As she approached, she caught a glimpse of the panorama that lay beyond the glass.

“Whoa. Now I see what all the fuss is about.”

Soter grinned. “Quite impressive, isn’t it?”

Impressive was one word for it. Spread out before them, directly below the hanging structure, and hovering next to and above the surrounding treetops, was a vast bowl-shaped depression, silvery-gray like exposed concrete, stained a darker shade in some places, presumably from long years of exposure. Jenna knew there would be a satellite reflector dish of some kind, but nothing on this scale. “It looks like God dropped a contact lens.”

“An apt simile,” Soter said, “since it is a lens of a sort—our lens for gazing back into the heavens.”

There was something familiar about it, and Jenna recalled Soter’s comment about the observatory being featured in several movies. The dish, or something very nearly identical to it, had appeared in a James Bond movie, one of Noah’s favorites from the series, though as was his custom, he found plenty to complain about. Noah had been a real James Bond, after all.

“The reflector is a thousand feet across, and the antenna assembly is suspended four hundred and thirty feet above it. The dish itself comprises almost thirty-nine thousand aluminum panels, all perfectly machined to create a spherical reflector. The location was chosen because of a naturally occurring sinkhole crater, but the dish is suspended above it.”

Jenna looked at it more closely and could just make out the square lines where the individual panels were joined—not solid concrete like in the movie. They totally got that wrong, she thought, and then realized that it was exactly the sort of thing Noah would have said.

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



10:24 a.m.



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.”