The Murder of Jesus Christ

Prologue

Jimmy Morano had expected it would be a boring day of monitoring, just one more in a long string of boring days spanning the Christmas season. Nobody else was working on the project, having all put aside their algorithms and computers to enjoy a week (two for some) with families and turkey.

He took a long sip of his cold Starbucks Americano and set it down on his desk.

The only sound was the sweet hum of the bank of computers lining the room.

To be sure, Jimmy never minded being the only one working. It let him catch up on the data stream that seemed endless and infinitely boring. However, there were occasional bursts of interesting bits in the stream that kept all the astronomers on the project fighting for more.

Today was one of those rare days.

Jimmy was twenty-two years old, a recent graduate of Cal Tech, and he had his whole future ahead of him. He had no way of knowing his life was about to be defined by a single moment.

He stared again at the coffee. “Should have sprung for the cappuccino,” he whispered.

His head ached, no doubt a side effect of the partying the night before with Joanna. He didn’t remember much of the night and chalked that up to both the beer and the monotonous routine of their relationship. He knew it was time to move on. She probably knew it, too.

Beep, beep, beep.

Probably another false alarm.

The data stream was fed by seventeen ground-based telescopes scattered around the world, as well as six in Earth’s orbit and two from even farther out. The data was primarily a by-product of whatever else the telescopes were doing. If a scientist in Japan was focused on a new comet near the Orion nebula or an astronomer in Australia was monitoring radio signals from the center of the Milky Way, they did their thing, but whatever they were looking at also fed the Cosmos supercomputer at Cal Tech. All the feeds were combined, and a series of sophisticated programs sifted through the work, looking for patterns.

It was a cheap way to see everything in the known universe without having to build a single telescope.

Beep, beep, beep.

The supercomputer used predictive analytics as well as more basic pattern-matching algorithms, and if it found anything unusual, it notified the guy in charge. Today that guy was Jimmy Morano.

Jimmy picked up the data feed and found that the power of the computer had been pretty much wasted with this anomaly. It was a single observation that triggered the notification, and it came from the Sunset II satellite.

Sunset II was a small satellite that orbited the sun from twenty million miles away. That meant it was close to the sun and allowed it to monitor solar radio activity at a fine level of detail.

Occasionally, though, the satellite would focus its sight on the planets in the solar system, including Earth. Once in a long while, it would aim its receivers at the Moon.

“Holy shit.”

Jimmy stared at the signals and pressed keys to select a summary.

He had six hours of recording available.

Without hesitating, Jimmy sent a standardized email message to his supervisor, copying other researchers in several labs around the world who were also linked to the project.

His headache was forgotten as he watched the dancing sprites on the graph in front of him.

For the past four hours and six minutes, there had been targeted radio waves emitting from the far side of the moon, the side that humans could never see from Earth.

It was obvious from the repetition that the radio signals were not natural, and they certainly were not made by humans.

There was only one possible cause. There were aliens on the far side of the moon.