There had to be some way of figuring out how long ago this all happened. If the meteors were in a specific section of the galaxy and the Earth passed through that section, it could happen again.
I typed, What was the location in the galaxy where this happened?
I received a set of coordinates from the robot’s head, but none of it made any sense. It was in a system totally unknown to me. I typed a request for alignments of various stars and celestial objects related to the coordinates provided. The robot’s head provided a substantial list of alignments. This was going to take some research to figure out. Fortunately, NASA was the place to do precisely that.
I knew Woolser would have a flag on my regular login, but I also had a covert login he didn’t know about thanks to the people who placed me at NASA. I logged in covertly and accessed the celestial mapping program. After inputting the alignment of Polaris, Vega, and several other stars I recognized the program provided the other alignments and a date: 61,285 BCE.
So the robot’s head was 63,000 years old, not 10,000. Somebody built it to last. If the robot was on the moon when the meteor storm struck, it would be hard to estimate its age. In the vacuum on the surface of the moon there would be no oxygen; nothing would rust or oxidize, so all of the time markers we use to date things on the Earth, like oxidation, wouldn’t apply. And if the robot’s head was buried in a collapsed building, it would have been protected from small meteor impacts and radiation. It would have been perfectly preserved, at least until the impact that created the crater in which it was found, and who knows when that was?
“Are you shittin’ me, man?” Leroy said from behind me. “61,000 BC?”
“Yep,” I replied, “over 63,000 years ago. Look at the percentage of match.”
“98 %?” Leroy said. “What does that mean?”
“Let me try something,” I replied. I typed the date of 61,280 BCE into the program. It would take increments of only five years at this time range. Comparing the position to our current galactic position gave us a 96.7 % match. I entered 61,290 BCE and ran a comparison: 97 % match.
“That’s less both times. Why is it doing that?” Leroy asked.
“Five years ago the match was 96.7 %,” I explained. “Right now it’s 98 %. In five years it will move away from a positional match and be at 97 %. That means the true matching position will peak either this year or next year. We’re right back in the path of the meteor storm. It will hit this year or next year at the latest.”
“So you’re saying the stars move and this thing doesn’t?” Leroy asked.
“You catch on fast,” I replied. “What I learned from NASA is that stars move in the galaxy because they have mass, weight, and they have magnetic fields. That’s what creates gravity. The meteor cloud has very little mass and no magnetic field, so it’ll stay in the same place. The Sun and the Earth will pass through the same place in the galaxy. That meteor cloud is going to be there, and we’re headed right back into it.”
“So we’re all gonna die?” Leroy asked.
“Not if I can help it.”
CHAPTER 4
I spent the night pacing back and forth inside my apartment. What if the information from the robot’s head wasn’t correct? What if the meteor cloud had moved and we were in no danger at all? What if it was there and no one would listen? Would people believe what came out of a 63,000 year old piece of hardware that shouldn’t exist, or that there was an advanced civilization that long ago that was millennia ahead of ours and all but disappeared in a cataclysmic event leaving almost nothing behind? Is this even believable to me? There were so many questions and so few answers.
At about four in the morning, I realized it all came down to how deeply I believed the information. If I had any doubts at all, then how could I convince anyone else? And if I doubted the information, then what business did I have trying to convince anyone else? I reviewed everything I had learned from the robot’s head. It had been a stretch for me to firmly believe all of the information, but it did have its own logic to it. And if it was all true, it answered a lot of questions about our distant past as human beings and why we lived in caves. It was just so different from what we normally believe that I knew there would be a lot of resistance to accepting all of it. I had resisted believing all of it. But deep in my heart I knew it was real. Once I realized that, I knew what I had to do.
I don’t consider myself to be the heroic type. I learned a long and painful lesson from that; fighting the system ends in failure, so I don’t do it anymore. But here I am, back in the same place again, realizing the system is wrong and I am the only one with the knowledge and the skills to actually do something that will make a difference. Woolser wasn’t going to stick his neck out to help anyone but himself, so that’s out. I texted some friends asking how they would get a critical message out to the world. It was a tossup between YouTube and the Cy Cobb Show, which I had never seen. I thought television might have more credibility than YouTube, so I called early in the morning. Besides, placing myself squarely in the public eye would be the only protection I would get from the people who would want me back in prison, or worse. The risk to me personally was extreme, but the risk to the planet from the meteor storm was even more extreme.
I explained what I wanted to a receptionist, an assistant in production, and then to Cyrus Cobb’s assistant. “Can you hold?” she asked, “I think he is going to want to talk to you.”
“Sure.” What else was I going to do?
“This is Cy, what’s your background?” He had a pleasant, almost charming quality to his voice with a slight Australian accent to it.
“I graduated from MIT with a degree in Electrical Engineering and a Master’s in Computer Science. I’ve been an engineer at NASA for the past three years. I write programs for the Mars Rovers.”
“Great,” Cy replied, “And you think the world is going to end?” He came across as sincere and caring. I felt comfortable sharing details with him, even though I didn’t really know him.
“I came across reliable information about a meteor cloud that will impact the Earth within the next year or two. It has the potential to destroy everything on the planet.” My heart was thumping in my chest. What I was telling him was really out there, idea-wise. My hope was that he would take a chance and believe me.
“And this can be verified?” he asked. I couldn’t tell him about the robot’s head without sounding like a complete lunatic, so I relied on the next best piece of information I had. “It’s not showing up on our long distance space radar yet, but that isn’t surprising because the objects are small by astronomical standards, but by the time they do show up, it’ll be too late. People need to be warned now while there is still time to prepare.”
“Are you a regular viewer of my show?” he asked.
Here it comes, I thought, he’s going to discount everything I said to him. “No, sorry to say, I’m not. Does that matter to you?”
“No, no, not at all. This is exactly the kind of information my show was created to find and get out to the public. Could you be in the studio at six tomorrow morning for my show? I want people to hear this directly from you, the source.”
Relief flooded through me. He believes me. “I don’t know. I’m in California and I don’t even know where you and your studio are located.”
“Oh, that’s no problem. We’re in Atlanta. I can have you on a plane this afternoon and you can stay in a nice hotel tonight, limo to the studio in the morning, all our expense. Deal?”