Orbital Cloud Page 8

  “Sorry, Jamshed. I was out of line. So anyways, this ‘iron hammer’ …”

  “It has to be North Korea. Just another one of their bluffs probably. Putting weapons in orbit and attacking orbital objects are prohibited by international treaties to begin with. And America isn’t going to stay quiet about this. I’m guessing China will make the first move. If North Koreans start playing with fire in orbit where their inhabited space station, Tiangong-2, is, China will bring down the ‘iron hammer’ of a food embargo.”

  “But they could just hide it, couldn’t they? Like, they could break it down into small parts, launch them one by one, and assemble the whole thing in orbit or—”

  “Not going to happen. A debris defense system has been constructed up there. There’s no chance it would miss a weapon that large. Even private services can tell you the location of debris only a few centimeters in length.”

  Jamshed spun his chair so he was facing the computer on his desk and opened Meteor News’s “Debris Corner” to show Alef. Some hundreds of thousands of pieces of debris were indicated with small green dots, and the ones with some likelihood of falling into the atmosphere were highlighted red.

  “This is an online service from Japan. See how much you can learn even with just the information that’s been made public? There’s just no way an object big enough to smash into the Earth would go undetected.”

  “Wow, that’s incredible. I can’t believe this is all done by a private company …”

  Jamshed was about to point out that it was, in fact, done by an individual, but then he noticed how intensely Alef was staring at the 3-D display on Meteor News and was reminded of how remarkable it was. With every single piece of debris and satellite on one screen, the amount of information was surely immense, but it was never tiring to look at, and following a particular orbital object that interested you was almost effortless. The service was so well designed it wasn’t surprising that Alef would assume it was a much bigger operation than it actually was.

  “This service depends a lot on the Internet too, doesn’t it?”

  “It must,” Jamshed replied, an instant before realizing the direction in which Alef wanted to steer the conversation. He braced himself.

  “You need Internet too, Jamshed. Why don’t you come to the rally next week? We—”

  “It’s got nothing to do with me.”

  “Don’t just brush me off like that. Having no access to American sites is just as big a problem for you as the rest of us. Not even the guys in the architecture department are using calculators and paper anymore. I’m sure there are countless free tools online for you space people too.”

  “We can’t connect, and that’s just the way it is. I’ll find a way to work around it. There were no computers a hundred years ago, and space hasn’t changed a bit since then. You’re the one who should be concerned. You must’ve heard that some tricky characters are going to be there.”

  Jamshed had heard that several antigovernmental organizations were planning to co-opt the demonstration that Alef was promoting, “Azadi Interanet. Internet Freedom.” It was unlikely that such rumors had failed to reach Alef’s ears, but it was difficult for someone with the sort of privileged upbringing Alef had enjoyed to wrap his head around the possibility of such malignant intentions.

  Whether he had grasped Jamshed’s concerns or not, Alef stroked his neat mustache and smiled. “It’ll be fine. What we’re after isn’t so outrageous. Just free Internet access of the kind already enjoyed by foreign companies expanding their business in Iran. Democracy and Islam are highly compatible in essence. If our imams were to see the Internet too—”

  Jamshed waved his hand dismissively with a fed-up smile to show he was tired of hearing this.

  “I want you to be there, Jamshed. You may not realize this, but the students really respect you.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “They say you have a backbone. They say if you joined us, then even a few of the guys from the astronautical engineering department, who think about nothing but ‘the jump’ or ‘the leap,’ or whatever it is, might join us too.”

  “A few? If it’s just a few, then what’s the point? And it’s like I told you earlier. My research is coming along. So you take care of your business and I’ll take care of mine.”

  “How disappointing to hear you say that, Jamshed. We’ll be at the student center if you change your mind.”

  Jamshed watched Alef brush aside threads of spiderweb as he made his way toward the exit and then shifted his gaze to the drafting board. To the blueprint and formula. The laws that govern the universe might not have changed, but if only he had free rein to use computers, this calculation would be done in an instant. If only he could read the latest academic articles … The manager of Meteor News mentioned again and again in various articles that he wasn’t a specialist. Jamshed guessed he was just being modest but was still amazed that an individual could create a service of such quality. Without a doubt, the total quantity of knowledge buried in the Internet was just incredible.

  Jamshed sighed deeply and added a new line to his drawing. Just how far advanced were the people on the outside?

  Sat, 12 Dec 2020, 15:00 +0900 (2020-12-12T06:00 GMT)

  Shibuya, Fool’s Launchpad

  … In closing, thanks for your honest words.

  Regards,

  Kazumi Kimura

  Meteor News

  Kazumi hesitated for a moment, wondering if his English was okay, and then pressed Send. The English specialist at Fool’s Launchpad, Mary, to whom everyone outsourced their language queries, had messed up a translation. Her bottom-of-the-barrel prices were attractive—¥30,000 monthly retainer and ¥3,000 per translation into Japanese—but her translations frequently caused problems because she knew little about IT.

  Akari was spreading out her equipment beside Kazumi when she heard him sigh and asked, “What’s wrong?”

  “Our English whiz screwed me over. Want to a have a look? It’s pretty long.”

  Kazumi chat messaged Akari an email sent to him by someone named Ozzy Cunningham along with Mary’s translation of it. The message’s subject, “Fuckin TLE!” had been rendered as “Splendid telephone!” and three full screens of biting sarcasm had transformed into a fan letter. Ozzy’s mail wasn’t just long, it was crammed with technical words related to astronomy and IT jargon. So hardly an easy read, but Kazumi wished Mary would lay off on her stream-of-consciousness translations informed by limited understanding.

  By the time she had finished reading the message, Akari’s shoulders were shaking with laughter. “Kimura-san. You should take care of English yourself. Mary’s is junior high level at best.”

  Without thinking, Kazumi swept his gaze around the room. Many of his office mates at Fool’s Launchpad trusted the services provided by Mary. Akari, with her bizarre style and spectacular skills, had developed enough of a reputation in the office for her strong sense of individuality that she could get away with saying such things, probably even to Mary herself. But Kazumi didn’t like the idea of being made her accomplice. Kazumi sighed. Aside from him and Akari, only a handful of their colleagues were present, racing the clock to finish a web creation project. All of them wore headphones and were fully absorbed in their tasks. Luckily, it seemed, there was little chance anyone had overheard the conversation.

  “What’s the mistake this Cunningham guy’s on about?” asked Akari.

  “That the TLEs on Meteor News are wrong. According to him, there’s something fishy about the ones for SAFIR 3.” Kazumi clicked the link in the signature at the bottom of Ozzy’s email and the home page for Seychelles Eye appeared on the screen. “Oh. I know this guy. He’s famous.” Kazumi realized this as soon as he saw the orbital-weapon illustration at the top. The Ozzy Cunningham who was complaining to Meteor News was X-Man, the guy who had contributed the Rod from God article to Geeple
that was making a stir. Kazumi had had no idea he was a paying subscriber to Meteor News.

  “Wow. Can I have a look too?” said Akari.

  “Of course,” Kazumi replied, messaging her the URL for Seychelles Eye and then taking a close look at the article. If Meteor News is being slandered here, we’ll have to make a complaint of our own, Kazumi thought as he began to read the article, but he soon found himself enthralled by the many beautiful photographs. Their resolution was phenomenal. Definitely taken with an optical telescope in the meter class. Their metadata said that they had been taken at Seychelles Eye, surely the eponymous location used as the blog’s title. This meant that X-Man no doubt personally owned observatory-quality astronomical devices.

  As Kazumi was concentrating on reading the article, orange fingernails leaped in front of the screen. Without his noticing, Akari had come around behind him.

  “Kimura-san. Are you listening to me? What’s this about ‘observational data’?”

  Her fingernail, painted to match her hair, was pointing at a bunch of numbers near the end of the article. Kazumi immediately clicked the link without thinking, and the browser window filled with numerals broken up by commas.

  “If you don’t close the tab, your browser’s going to crash. I’m downloading it by cURL, but there has to be 150 gigs there—about three hundred million lines.”

  Kazumi hurriedly closed the browser.

  “Here’s the data I have so far,” said Akari, and put her tablet beside Kazumi. The screen was completely filled with text, each line containing five pieces of data broken up by commas:

  00001, 01:55:02.0201 GMT Friday 11 Dec, 2103020.135308, 4.782202, 0.003021

  00002, 01:55:02.0201 GMT Friday 11 Dec, 2106932.396025, 4.782674, 0.014942

  00003, 01:55:02.0201 GMT Friday 11 Dec, 2101959.492682, 4.784925, 0.023065

  00004, 01:55:02.0201 GMT Friday 11 Dec, …

  “Hmm. What could this be?” Kazumi wondered. “The number at the beginning definitely indicates the sequence, and the next is the time.”

  “I got that much. But what about the three pieces of data after that?”

  “I have no idea. Hold on a second. I think there’s a guide to reading X-Man’s data somewhere.”

  Kazumi tried searching within the Seychelles Eye blog. In an entry submitted by an account called “Friday,” he found something that said “radar observation data,” but technical words were used in an amateurish way throughout the site, so he knew better than to take this description at face value. “I think this data is from observations made with a radio telescope. But there doesn’t seem to be a guide to interpreting it. If he’s going to put this up online, he should at least tell us how to—”

  “Data from a telescope, you say? Sounds like fun. Do you think it’s okay to read this however we like?” Akari’s eyes were positively sparkling. Apparently there were some things in this world that even she found exciting. Kazumi was amazed.

  “It’s posted on his blog for everyone to see, so I’m sure it’s fine, but what are you thinking?”

  “Pattern analysis. The parameter that you said is the sequence number goes up to 1,024 before repeating. It’s a 10-bit number. And the time moves forward by one thousandth of a second every time the sequence repeats. That tells me this data has to represent successive changes in a set of values. I want to feed the rest of the data through this little guy.”

  Akari took a palm-sized electronic substrate from her pocket and dangled it from her fingertips. Kazumi could see USB and Ethernet connectors on a chip wrapped in clear plastic. It was the mysterious device that she had tossed on the table the day before.

  “This is the latest Raspberry. It’s a miniature Linux machine with a built-in programmable chip. I want to try out parallel computing with him. I won’t understand what the data means even after the analysis is finished, so I’d appreciate if you could help me out at that point.”

  In other words, she had acquired a new toy and wanted to play with it. Kazumi supposed that this was how Akari had cultivated her matchless skills.

  “Okay. Just let me know when the analysis is finished. This site has tons of data just like this. We might find something to write about for Meteor News in here,” Kazumi said, pointing at the Seychelles Eye page. Suddenly an animated kitten appeared on top of the illustration for the Rod from God. It was an overlay advertisement of the kind growing popular of late.

  Akari shrugged. “I see the Kitten Master is here too. It’s been on our site ever since yesterday.”

  “Wha-what? Are you … sure?”

  “Kimura-san. Don’t tell me you only ever look at the site in administrator mode with the advertisements off. There should be a good amount of money coming in from those ads for the past few days.”

  “Sorry. I’ll check right now.”

  Kazumi clicked on his bookmark for the ad management page. On the control panel was a number higher than he’d ever seen there: ¥300,000.

  “See,” said Akari. “It’s already over ¥300,000 just from yesterday.”

  “Huh?”

  “It looks like Kitten Master has hijacked the pay-per-click advertisements on sites related to the Rod from God. I’ll try clicking once, so just tell me how the ad revenue changes.”

  When Akari brought Meteor News up on her tablet and tapped on the kitten banner, a cat food retail site appeared. It sold a new product marketed as non-GMO and organic. The price was thirty dollars for one hundred ounces, about 3 kg. Not having a cat, Kazumi had no idea if this was a good deal or not. When he saw the number added to the ad revenue, he gasped.

  “Five thousand … yen?”

  This made no sense to him at all. An advertisement that offered ¥5,000 for every click in order to sell cat food for ¥3,000 a pop was inconceivable. The issue of how to post an ad on the web often came up during the AMX hosted by Watanabe, and according to him, a rough target for the conversion rate, representing the ratio of the number of people who clicked on the advertisement to the portion of those people who bought the product, was 3 percent. This meant that to recoup on an advertisement paying ¥5,000, the product should cost approximately ¥1,700,000.

  Moreover, this cat had been appearing on Geeple too, which was supposed to get something like 1,500,000 pageviews daily. If 1 percent of the visitors clicked the banner by mistake, the advertiser would have to pay out ¥75 million per day.

  “Someone must have made a mistake with the advertisement settings,” said Kazumi, “but if you add in the amount for Geeple, it has to run to … 100 million—what’s wrong?”

  Akari was frowning and glowering at the advertisement account displayed on Kazumi’s screen, lightly biting her lip. Only then did Kazumi realize she was wearing lipstick of the same orange as her manicure and Afro.

  “Numata-san,” Kazumi addressed Akari. “Do you know anything about this?”

  “… No, it’s nothing. Nice to get an unexpected bonus.” Akari shook her head and smiled at Kazumi. He could now see that she was absolutely right. The ¥300,000 was income for Meteor News, of which Akari would take 20 percent.

  “It looks like that data is finished downloading,” she said. “I’m going to start the analysis.”

  Returning to the seat across from Kazumi, Akari picked up a monocular display from among the gadgets on her desk, mounted it on her head, and twisted earphones into her ears. With gadgets growing out from her orange Afro and all sorts of devices like the bare substrate in front of her, she looked like a character from an old science fiction movie.

  “While you’re dealing with that, I’m going to ask if anyone on the Meteor News blog knows how to read this,” said Kazumi. “We can’t count on Cunningham-san and … Are you coming in tomorrow too? It’s Sunday, you know.”

  “Of course. The only time I can lay out all my devices like this is when no one’s here, you know.” Akari put a sma
ll keyboard on her left upper arm and strapped it on. “Also, getting fully decked out like this is way over the top. I can’t let anyone see me like this.”

  Fri, 11 Dec 2020, 23:35 -0500 (2020-12-12T04:35 GMT)

  Project Wyvern

  Wind dripping with Gulf Stream humidity flutters my hood and blows toward the pure-white rocket lit up by countless LEDs. Am I moved or afraid? Before I know it, I’m hugging my own shoulders.

  Seeing me shiver, my father, Ronnie Smark, puts a parka over me. “Behold, Judy. See how far humankind has come!”

  Nice literary way to start off, don’t you think? No? Okay. I know, I know. But seeing that rocket just moments before takeoff, I just had to write it, though I know I’m no novelist. If only I had Tiptree Jr.’s talent.

  Tomorrow, the white tower looming thirty meters tall before me will shake off gravity to carry my father and me to a height of 350 kilometers.

  Have you ever tried to imagine such a great distance? I’m five foot eight, and when I stand on the beach looking out to sea, the distance to the farthest visible horizon is a mere 4.5 km. If I were to stand at the highest point on Earth, the peak

  of Mount Everest, the horizon would be 356 km away. In other words, it is the farthest distance you can see on the surface of the Earth. Can you picture it? Try to see that distance going straight up. That’s where I’m going.

  I’m sorry my units of measurement are all mixed up. The Project Wyvern space people refuse to count the distance for me in the miles and yards that I’m familiar with. In this blog, I’m hoping to give you a sense of what it’s actually like being here.

  I have one more thing to apologize for. I’ve taken some dramatic liberties with the words of my father in the introduction. Father forgot I was even there, and raising his hands to the sky, he screamed, “Look! See how far the power of the market has come.”