The Beholding Eye

"The Beholding Eye" is included as prelude No. 8 in *The Juno Contingency (novel).*

## Teaser

Scientists work to uncover the function of an ancient alien device that is found buried within the Himalayan mountains.

## Plot

### Prologue

In 2025 an extremely powerful electromagnetic pulse originates from somewhere in the Himalayas, destroying nearby infrastructure as well as all satellites within a hundred-kilometer–wide column radiating out into space. Many international science teams are dispatched to the region to locate its source. One eventually discovers an engineered shell under a kilometer of rock that houses a microsingularity, all apparently of alien construction and tens of millennia old.

### 1. New Meat

By 2028, a massive international science mission has been formed to study the Himalayan singularity, dubbed H\*. Many advances in materials science and quantum gravity have come from studying the black hole, but so far no one has deduced the intended function of the alien device.

Dr. Gale Turin, an arrogant British cryptologist, arrives at the Himalayan base camp. He is met by Japanese–American journalist Chloe Kobayashi, as well as Russian scientist Dr. Kuibyshev, who leads a rival research team. They board a funicular car that leads down to the research lab abutting H\*'s alien containment vessel.

Kuibyshev discusses his theory that H\* is a quantum computer and how his team is working to decode its data storage mechanism. Turin openly ridicules this work, stating that if H\* were a digital computer then humans have no more chance of deciphering it than of a caveman presented with a thumb drive. He defends his competing theory that H\* is not a digital but rather an analog device, like a vinyl record instead of a compact disc. He has been funded for a one-year project to test his theories by using virtual particle synthetic aperture radar to image H\*'s event horizon.

Turin sets himself up in the subterranean H\* lab, which is about the size of a nuclear submarine with a complement of forty researchers. His experiments are plagued by equipment failures and software glitches, and they are further set back by Turin's own tetchy outbursts to his staff.

Kobayashi eventually interviews Turin about his research, though Turin asks why she has been given such a dead-end assignment. Kobayashi admits that, while H\* enjoys unquenchable interest from academia, it has otherwise exhausted the public to apathy. She has been "exiled" here for digging too deeply into a conspiracy theory about US President Bild and how one of his business partners died in China under mysterious circumstances. Kobayashi was investigating the President's shady business dealing with Chinese SOEs before her story was canned.

### 2. The Labors of Slartibartfast

Months into his research mission, Turin has made no headway; meanwhile Kuibyshev's team has produced a continuous stream of lauded research. Turin hasn't left the lab in months, so Kobayashi takes him out for a hike in the Himalayas. She asks him about the obstacle he faces, and Turin describes his theory that there is analogue information embedded on the event horizon, but however he samples it he just gets whitenoise. He likens the problem to a radio antenna: the signals from every radio station are hitting an antenna all the time, so radios use bandpass filters to extract only one station at a time. He suspects the alien technology uses some similar multiplexing scheme, but until he discerns it all his scans will just return noise.

Turin asks Kobayashi about her own work and she describes her continued investigations of President Bild. While he was Secretary of State, he made a state visit to China but went missing for eight hours one afternoon. She has tried to piece together the missing time but there is no official US record of the visit, and even Chinese social media from that location and time window is heavily redacted.

In the intervening months, geopolitical tensions rise in the Middle East where American and Russian forces are facing each other. Kobayashi leaves several times to cover that story. On one of her visits back, a frustrated Turin makes a pass at her and the two begin a sexual liaison. Kobayashi jokes with him that all the pent-up sexual energy he releases on her is really directed at Kuibyshev.

Turin is reaching the end of his research mission with nothing to show for it. With defeat looming, he deigns to read through one of Kuibyshev's papers, which analyzes H\*'s neutrino flavor oscillations. Turin has an insight that—while all of Kuibyshev's hypotheses are wrong—the mechanism he examined could be the multiplexing key he has sought. He and Kobayashi rush to his equipment and run an experiment at a precise neutrino flavor mix. He samples a small portion of the event horizon and, while the image is still noisy, it now contains definite features. He marshals the rest of his team to help run more experiments, vary the parameters, and clean up the image.

Kuibyshev's team is also alerted and comes first to observe and later to help Turin. The combined teams work for two days to render sharper images, but no one recognizes their contents. Finally Kobayashi feeds one into a search engine, and it returns a matching image of the Norwegian coastline from before sea level rise. The team is stunned to discover that H\* is an analogue device that is recording the Earth itself.

### 3. Once More Unto the Breach

A year later the science mission around H\* has vastly expanded. The event horizon is now understood as recording time slices of the Earth's quantum wavefunction with atomic precision. Researchers have recovered images of the world from as recent as 1952 to as far back as 5,000 BC. The predominant theory is that in the distant past an alien species found Earth to be of interest and planted this device here to record the planet's evolution to arbitrary precision. The 2025 EM pulse could have been a distress call or perhaps a routine data dump back to its creators.

Dr. Turin has ascended to Einsteinian levels of celebrity in the Western world, while in the East Dr. Kuibyshev is given all credit for the discovery. In Beijing, Turin gives a talk about his goal to decipher the exact time encoding the alien's used, which would allow them to move from sampling time slices randomly to being able to localize exact places and moments in H\*'s world record. His outlandish speech culminates in suggesting that H\*'s event horizon stores so much data that it will allow them to image any historical event, from the death of Confucius to the very conception of Jesus Christ.

After his speech, Turin is outraged to learn that Kuibyshev has received multiple awards for "his" discovery, while Turin has simultaneously been rejected by the Nobel Prize Committee, which he blames on his "political and scientific nemeses." Back at the lab, Kuibyshev himself apologizes for the politics of the decision, but Turin decides to cut him out of all further research lest he continue arrogating credit. He is determined to make a breakthrough so extreme that it will bridge even the world's geopolitical divides.

As he works, gradually two new sections are added to the facility, one inhabited by the American CIA and the other by the Russian FSB. Turin objects but Kobayashi takes him aside and explains that the governments are getting nervous that someone will solve the time encoding problem. Once they do, whoever controls H\* will be able to read every document and see every secret that's ever existed on Earth. New rules are put in place that the lab cannot function without representatives from both the American and Russian governments present, and both have veto powers over all activities. Turin continues his work but chafes at the encroachments.

### 4. Prying the Lid

Turin works for months in isolation, sharing only scant insights with the rest of his team while voraciously devouring his rivals' research. His attitude ultimately hobbles his team's productivity while that of Kuibyshev's team surges.

Turin is inspired by another random paper to try a new sequence of experiments on H\*. He quickly develops this into a method to target exact time and location slices from the event horizon's record, and he shares the information with Kobayashi. She asks him to test it by imaging certain coordinates of interest to her, and Turin realizes that these are for her investigation into the President. He rebuffs her that he won't do anything to get himself removed from the project.

News of Turin's breakthrough spreads up the chain of command and is independently verified by Kuibyshev. As Turin is gloating, the CIA and KGB agents seize control of the facility. The research staff are all restrained in the mess hall while an outraged Turin, Kuibyshev, and Kobayashi are instructed to stay in the control room.

The intelligence agents establish video connections to the US and Russian Presidents. With the world leaders watching, the agents recover a safe hidden in the control room and open it using a two-person rule system. Inside it is a paper listing a precise GPS location and ISO timestamp. They instruct Turin to image the provided coordinates, which he does. The image he produces shows a doubly locked safe with two pieces of paper inside, and Turin reads off the codewords written on both slips of paper.

After the codewords are confirmed, US President Bild explains that, as the potential for a breakthrough in H\* imaging loomed, he and the Russian President agreed to an experiment. Months ago they each placed a secret codeword into a safe, which neither knew of, and the safe was destroyed after 24 hours. Turin had been instructed to read the contents of that safe out of the past using H\*'s event horizon record. Since he has been successful, the world leaders had pre-agreed that H\* is too dangerous for anyone to possess. They order a combined tactical nuclear missile strike on the base for the next day at noon so as to seal H\* away under a blanket of radioactivity.

Turin and Kuibyshev object strenuously, insisting that humanity cannot afford to lose access to the world record. Turin raises concerns that a direct attack on the singularity could break its confinement and allow it to consume the planet. President Bild dismisses these fears as unfounded, and the intelligence agents begin evacuating the staff from the base.

*Read the conclusion "5. The Beholding Eye" on Amazon.*