The Vostok Revelation

CHAPTER FOUR

July 12, 2014. 2000 Hours. Argo Advanced Communication Technologies, Fairfax Virginia USA.

Brando Cobb sat in his office eyeballing the secure login page on his standalone workstation. At thirty-six, the former naval intelligence officer, was feeling burned out. He’d ridden his staff, an exceptional collection of programmers and cartographers, to identify the ciphers that would unlock the five megabyte segment of code given to him by his superiors at Langley. As ordered, he’d led his people to believe that the code was a portion of a yet-to-be released video game that had been encrypted by a highly skilled programmer who’d become disgruntled and left Rapid Fire Entertainment abruptly.

After six straight weeks of ten hour days and countless gallons of Red Bull, Rockstar and espresso, Walter “Bug Eyes” Henderson strolled into Cobb’s office to stake claim to the RFE bonus: twenty-five thousand dollars, a month long all-expense paid first-class trip to Hawaii, and a digitized controllable avatar in Rapid Fire Entertainment’s next release: Thunder Wars: Rage Against the Old Gods.

Cobb inserted the USB drive into a slot and ran the mysterious sample through the compiler using Henderson’s ciphers. Sixty seconds later the column of binary code stopped scrolling up his screen. Pleased, Cobb congratulated Henderson, shook his hand, and then escorted Henderson back to the ‘pit’ to make the announcement.

Thirty minutes later, Cobb slipped out of the ‘pit’ as the disappointment over Bug Eye’s winning ebbed and the revelry began. He returned to his office, locked his door, and picked up his phone.

July 12, 2014. 2230 Hours. National Security Agency, Langley Virginia.

“We have the binary but the translation is making no sense at all,” Alex Kline told Robert Smith, her supervisor. Kline had been working on the cipher text for more than two hours and was growing agitated.

Smith was about to ask if Alex had considered that the message could be in Russian but thought better of it. The file ended up on Alex’s desk because she was one of only a handful of people in his department that read and spoke Russian fluently. “What have you come up with?”

“Almost nothing. Everything we’ve gotten doesn’t amount to anything in any language I know. The computer is drawing a blank as well,” Alex said as she dragged her mouse to highlight a row of characters.

“s-a-d-h-a-n-a-l-e-k-h-a-h-i-k-e-p-h-a-p-u-s-p-a.” Smith’s face contorted as he tried to make sense of letters on the screen.

“The only thing I can say for sure,” Alex continued, “is that it’s not any variant of any Slavic tongue that I know.”

“I think I may know,” interjected Satish Gavde as he came to abrupt halt outside Alex’s doorway. Without invitation, Gavde strolled into the office, positioned himself over Alex’s shoulder, moved his head uncomfortably beside Alex’s and began studying the highlighted row of letters.

Several seconds crept by before Alex became annoyed and asked, “Do you know what this is?”

Without taking his eyes from the monitor, Satish gently nudged Alex’s desk chair aside, rolling it just far enough to give him unimpeded access to her keyboard. Before Alex could protest, Gavde had parsed the string of characters into four groupings. He then mumbled something incomprehensible beneath his breath before changing the case of a few of the letters and shifting a few letters from one grouping to another.

“Yes, as I thought, this is a form of Sanskrit.” Gavde said with a degree of arrogant smugness that, despite his good looks, always irritated Alex whenever he tried to speak to her. “Sanskrit is a sacred language in Hinduism and also a scholarly language in Buddhism.”

“Can you read it? What does it say?”

“Its a question: ‘dinner at Monte’s steakhouse tonight at 8,’” Satish responded with a wolf’s eyes and wry grin.

“Not a chance,” Alex countered with a spurious smirk.

“Monte’s! Hell, I’ll go,” Robert Smith said quickly. “But it’s only fair to warn you that I’m not a cheap date and I’m not easy.”

July 13, 2014. 0600 Hours. National Security Agency, Langley Virginia.

“Analyst Satish Gavde discovered that the ciphertext was in Sanskrit, a historical Indo-Aryan language. I moved Alexis Kline off the project and handed the ball to Satish.” Robert Smith said into his handset before taking a sip of his tepid coffee, his fifth cup for the night. “No sir, I can see no reason why the Russians would encrypt and use a dead language.” Smith shifted some papers on his desk, found the page he was after, and then crudely attempted to speak the four words: ‘SAdhanalekha- hi- kepha- puSpa.’ Gavbe assured me that this translates to ‘recipe for kepha flower.’ No, he had no idea what a kepha flower is and we’ve been unable to find any record of any kind of a flower by that name now or in history.”

July 13, 2014. 0730 Hours. Somewhere in Austin, Texas.

Sam Granger hung up the receiver. This shit is getting weirder and weirder by the hour. Why the hell would the Russians use and encrypt a message in a long dead language, broadcast it to an orbiting satellite, and then rebroadcast it into empty space?

July 13, 2014. 1930 Hours. National Security Agency, Langley Virginia.

Satish Gavde plopped into his desk chair, entered the password to his computer system and frowned at the lack of progress made by his custom Sanskrit compiler. After working for several hours to interpret as much of the file he was given, he’d grown tired of struggling with the peculiar Sanskrit variant and chose to modify one of his routines to automate the process while he got some rest.

Refreshed from a good day’s sleep and revved-up with a double shot of espresso, he looked on his scripts output file with renewed interest. It was disappointing to see that only 100 megabytes of the 1.3 terabyte file had been analyzed in the fifteen hours he’d been away from his desk. And of that 100 megabytes only sixty-eight percent had been translated into something meaningful.

Undeterred, Gavde constructed a query to seek out the most common words and phrases from what were available in the NSA data-store. A column of words and combinations of three, four and five words quickly filled his screen. While Satish was able to passably understand Sanskrit when he heard it or saw it written, the European letters on his monitor forced him to sound-out what he was seeing in his mind.

SAdhanalekha, recipe, thirty-one references. UpakaraNa, device, twenty-six references. Punarjanma, rebirth, eight references. AgAmi-janmani, next life, five references. Anatarnhas, end of world, five references. anuvAdaka, translator, three references.

Intrigued, Gadve minimized his report and looked over what text was translated. He conducted a word search for anuvAdaka. Three instances were highlighted on the screen. Each of the instances was in the phrase SAdhanalekha hi anuvAdaka UpakaraNa.

Recipe for translator device?

Gavde searched again, this time for Punarjanma. Again the instances of the word came up on the screen connected to other words.

Recipe for rebirth device?