The Mystery of the Starbook

By Csaba Duzmath and Dorottya Keresztesi

NASA’s computers detect signs of extra-terrestrial life. But the observations must be verified before they are disclosed to the public. Are human reactions predictable? Can such a monumental discovery be revealed to the world? Is mankind ready for this? For Scott and Leonel, the answers to these questions become truly pressing, when the cherished results of their research get into the wrong hands…

• Language: English
• Publisher: Under construction
• Release date: Nov 21, 2018
• ISBN: 9786150030913

Book preview

hands…

1.

Sabina stared down at the ground spread out far below her. Under her feet, the deep lush vegetation of Wilson Hill, and in the further out, Pasadena and the grey city of Los Angeles laid in the distance.

The bridge, on the edge of which she stood holding the railing behind her, sprawled a hundred meters over the valley. As she leaned out to look down, a wild wind whipped her face, and she instinctively turned her head as the cold air hit her head and the tears seemed to scratch her face on their way down. Up on the hill the month of May does not necessarily bring warm weather, and a little further up snow can still be found. But she wouldn't be going any higher.

After blinking the tears from her eyes, she looked along the bridge but saw no one. There wasn't much traffic at this time of year, and in the age of off-road cars and automatic gears people no longer walked, so this little suspension bridge had been left as a lookout for tourists hungry for a view.

When it had been built, no one would have thought that someone would climb up here just to jump down.

Sabina shrugged: it doesn't matter now anyway. She decided to jump, and that was it.

She shuffled forwards carefully. As the toes of her boots crept into the void, her toes wiggled excitedly and she had to command her body to remain taught in anticipation until she decided she was ready to go. She didn't want to fall down, she wanted to decide the moment she fell.

The wind caught her hair again, she nervously tucked it behind her ear, and she did not put her right hand back on the railing, and a little later she let go with her left hand too. She held her balance, her arms spread out, and stared mesmerized into the depths.

Tiny houses, cars and verdant trees around a little stream. A girl jumped from the bridge. Down below everyone went around their programmed lives and no one thought that someone was watching them from the sickening heights above.

Slowly Sabina leaned forward, her back straight, carefully looking for the point of no return. Then gravity took the reins and did its job.

Goodbye people! Goodbye cars!

Before she tumbled off the bridge like a sack of potatoes she gripped the ledge with her toes and pushed out, falling into the deep with outstretched arms.

Adrenalin exploded in her mind like a geyser. A scream tried to force its way up her throat, but she vowed not to scream and she forced it down. Her body fell at a sickening pace into the deep, the wind ripped at her skin, and yet she was grinning. Finally! Finally, she was flying! Panic mixed with euphoria in her blood, and she stared through a numb brain as the people and cars below her grew bigger and bigger, as the trees reached up for her to enclose her in their rough embrace and deliver her to the ground.

Only a few meters left now. It's almost over. Almost...

On the bridge, a tall, broad shouldered man ran to the railing where Sabina had jumped. For a few seconds he could see her body falling, and then he was relieved to see that everything was fine: the bungee rope pulling Sabina back and the continued shrieking with delight as she hung there. Markus Hannighan shook his head grinning: this girl was quite crazy.

Which is exactly why he had hired her to be the figurehead of the ad campaign for his company. As a fan of extreme sports he knew a lot of girls like her, but none of them would look as good on film as Sabina - even like this, hanging upside down, as she waited for Markus to lower her with the winch till she finally reached the ground. Sabina's thin, sporty figure would look good on pictures from a distance, and her kindly face, dark hair and happy, blue eyes would hopefully convince bored couples to come bungee jumping, rafting and tandem jumping as well as other crazy activities. The company could use some really good times, though he had scraped through the hard years with relative ease. Those who were rich before the crisis were still rich - and people of limited means had never spent their money on extreme sports anyway.

When Sabina finally stopped spinning and hung there helplessly, Markus softly started the winch, and Sabina curled up a little so as to look up.

- Was that good? - she called up laughing happily.

Markus was certain the she was expecting an answer in the negative, so that she could jump again - but he would have to disappoint her.

- It was perfect! You can come down! - he added grinning. Sabina went limp with disappointment, and then peacefully examined the swinging world below her.

- That was much better now - Rob, the sound technician slapped Markus' shoulder. - She didn't scream as much this time.

- Yes, I don't think her screaming like a stuck pig would have convinced many housewives to jump - Markus agreed.

- But the whoop at the end was good - Rob added. - We'll keep that, it adds a lot to it. One is almost inclined to believe that it's fun.

- Want to try? - Markus asked cheekily.

- Not for all the money in the world - Rob shook his head, and quickly moved away before someone could snap the belts and ropes onto his ankles and push him off while he wasn’t paying attention.

Markus laughed quietly and then called after Rob.

- Did you get the picture too?

- Yes, the guys said it was all good - he replied.

- The top ones are good too?

- Everything is super Markus - Rob said for the hundredth time nodding his head towards the depths. - That girl is incredible...

They nodded wisely in agreement and then went back to their work. Sabina was true to her form, because, no matter how crazy she was, when she did something she liked to do it well. Perhaps the only trait she had inherited from her father - as far as Markus knew, her father was a well-known astronomer, a learned man who would never touch anything as dangerous as a paddle. In this case the apple seemed to have fallen pretty far from the tree. Markus did not know much about her father, only that he had died quite a few years ago, but Sabina did not like to talk about it. Anyway - it doesn't matter really. Sabina was great the way she was.

When she reached the ground, Markus saw that she was talking animatedly to the technicians who were shaking their heads and laughing; she had clearly failed to convince them that the footage was bad and she had to jump again. Markus grinned and waved at her to give it up, it was getting dark anyway. The day was definitely over.

Down below, Sabina waved back at him and then bent down with a deep sigh to take the belts off her ankles and carefully pack up the ropes. She considered herself lucky to have a job like this, so few people got the opportunity to do what they truly love. Some people may find all the wild action strange, but it made her happy and whole. Others built model boats, did gardening, or were happy to sit in front of a computer all day. Her father had often tried to steer her towards more constrained hobbies, but she couldn't imagine living her life any other way. Everything was perfect the way it was.

2.

Several thousand kilometres from Sabina, in a suburb of Naples, Italy, Tonio Oravelli stirred his coffee and dropped into the comfortable couch in front of his computers with a deep sigh. His sigh was filled with sweet hopefulness combined with a bitter after-taste of tired resignation. It was possible that something very exciting and important would happen today, something that would change his life forever - but there was no way of predicting it, just as there had been no way these past few years.

Tonio looked out the window with a sigh, and seemed not to hear the honking cars on the Via Pozzo below his window. The street was too narrow and full of blind corners, so the cars indicated their presence to the opposing traffic with their horns. Of course, it happened often that both cars thought they had the right of way, and these polite disagreements were always settled with whirring Italian tongues in a heated debate - just such an altercation was going on right now. Tonio stared blankly at the two gesticulating drivers, and then left the window with a heavy sigh. At least they are going somewhere sooner or later.

As he consumed his morning coffee and self-deprecation, the systems booted up and Tonio opened the half completed websites he was working on - his mother liked to call his work staring at the wall all day and doing nothing. His mother had no idea how accurately she had defined it, even on his good days Tonio had to concede that this was indeed what he did. He just sat, waiting for a miracle. On these better days he would shake himself and actually start working - though fixing up a website or two could barely be called work, more like a distraction for his genius mind.

Tonio's father on the other hand! An engineer and construction contractor. He had divorced Tonio's mother some fifteen years ago. They hadn't been able to overcome a long series of disagreements. His father would have like Tonio to become an engineer too - in secret perhaps Mamma was still hoping that her son would follow in his father's footsteps - not as if daddy had been a shining beacon of an example. Only God knows what kind of businesses he got mixed up in and he'd been to the police station a few times too. Sometimes he would come home during the day with a stack of paper under his coat, and a few days later he would come by to pick it up. He would never talk about it though, no matter how they pestered him. At the end of the day: whatever trouble he got himself into, he always managed to wiggle his way out somehow. As a kid, when Tonio and his friends had gotten into trouble, he too had always managed to walk away clean, and his mother had always said: You're just like your father!

As Tonio pondered and worked, he kept an eye on the other monitor, which was on a separate secure system, connected with Big America itself. He had no idea why he kept looking at it, the computer would let him know if he got a message - but still, he was afraid that if he didn't watch the monitor he would miss something.

Just like he had on the plane. Tonio had found out that he was terrified of flying, when the plane left the ground. One only finds out that they can't handle confined spaces after they enter the elevator and press the button - of course, that's an easy situation. One can just get out and take the stairs. But an airplane is not like a lift, you can't just get out. He said nine prayers when the plane stopped shaking after take-off and then he sat blinking at the engines for three hours so as to be the first to notice if the plane caught on fire. He had only sat on a plane once in his life. He had spent all his money on a trip to Frankfurt (he returned by train through Rome), to go to a Leonel Millan lecture at the Frankfurt University. That man was an enormous mind in the astronomical community and his words were like gold. Apart from the curt orders he liked to give to Tonio.

He was still staring at the monitor obsessively at once hopeful and afraid that he would get a message. He already had an insurmountable workload. If he could get just one hit... just one.

When Tonio reached the end of his stream of thought, he felt like it was the perfect dramatic moment for a message to beep - but of course, the computer remained silent.

He turned angrily back to his work, and decided (again) to stop all this stuff with Leonel. Sure, sure what he was doing was pretty cool, but it didn't seem to interest women much. Here he was at twenty nine, with only a few painfully bad online dates to show his grandchild hungry mother. He could spend his whole life chasing his dreams, but then he would waste away alone and eat his mother's cooking for the rest of his days. Italian women are the most beautiful in the world - and they liked to say that he wasn't a bad guy, just kind of strange. It was true that he spent all his free time with his computer, while others played football or went dancing... But there was nothing to be done about that. There was no point in pretending he was someone else. What he was doing made him happy.

Alright, maybe not right now, as his current occupation wasn't much of a challenge to him. He could almost hear the hungry screams of his brain cells when he worked on a website. One could say, he wasn't particularly in tune with it. Naturally, ‘Fiori per tutti’, send flowers to the woman of your heart, who looks like Christina Ricci on the photo, but is so ugly in reality that you wouldn't even want to touch her. No... this would not do. And yet a little devil awoke in him, and he felt compelled to leave the test version with this title, but luckily cooler heads prevailed and instead he stopped the wall staring called work. Time for some social media, where he could at least pretend to be alive. He had some friends too, but it was quite difficult to create a meaningful relationship with someone, if (when Leonel checked in) he would disappear for days without a word and expected no one to ask what he was doing. It was quite difficult to find a partner under these circumstances.

Tonio scrolled through the social media pages, quietly muttering to himself, sometimes responding something witty in the comments section - and so life slowly but surely got underway and his nerves calmed down. When the computer beeped, he glanced nonchalantly at the text, and his cry of Mamma mia! left his lips only after a delay.

- We have another match! - comes the usual greeting from Leonel. - Have a look at what we can do with it please.

Please? What's the matter with this guy?

- Alright, send it through, I'll have a look - Tonio replied, hoping that Leonel would believe that he would drop everything and only do this. It wasn't late on the sender's side, so good old Leonel was once again not playing golf. Perhaps it could be an interesting lead...

- Have a look today, and I'll treat you to dinner - Leonel added.

Are you drunk? - Tonio was tempted to write back, but controlled himself. He didn't even dare to hope that this time they actually found something, it was more likely that Leonel used his fine sense of smell to ascertain that his Italian hero was burning out and needed some motivation.

- Alright, send it, you'll get my silver starred opinion tomorrow, as per which you can add it to the mistakes section in your biography.

Leonel responded with a mockingly grinning smiley (he must be drunk), and Tonio started to mess around on the other system.

While codes were being written and bites spun, Tonio reminisced. He first became interested in astronomy when as a kid he had climbed up to the flat roof of their building to sleep, because it was so hot in the room that he couldn't take it anymore. Clean cool air greeted him up there, and he spread out his blanket and pillow and lay down with a contented sigh. But the air did not stay in him long, because what he saw then changed his life forever. Of course, he had always known that there were a lot of stars in the sky, but how many, and how big they were, he only understood that right then and there. Lying there on the roof, the starlight spilled over him undisturbed, like a blanket. He felt that if he reached his arm out, he could touch them and swirl their shining colours. He almost wept from the beauty, but as boys don't cry, he controlled himself and examined the sky. He lay on his back for about two hours just staring until he understood something that made his stomach clench: he understood what the concept 'small' meant. Not only that he was small, but that the world was small and that the Planet Earth was small. There were so many others out there. No one would ever notice, if the Earth disappeared into nothingness.

The soft blanket of the sky turned into a pressure in his chest, and so he turned onto his stomach and tried to fall asleep instead. He was afraid, but he would never have admitted it to himself - so the next day he pestered his mother for astronomy magazines and the next night he went up to the roof again. He realized, that if he got to know something it wouldn't be as scary.

He got to a point where he no longer had to go the roof. He had a computer, secure lines and the infinite internet. Besides astronomy, Tonio found he had an interest in IT, and since it was easier to be successful in the field, he followed that path instead. At university he studied to be a data-engineer, as this allowed him to link his two passions, stars and computers. Astronomy is the holy grail for data-engineers: data flows in rivers, just waiting for a person skilled in data systems to come along and put them in order.

There was a time when the data from astronomer's telescopes ran unencrypted and wild through the world and it was not difficult to access them. Later they were coded, but Tonio had no problem dealing with them. Finally, the topic became so complicated that the research groups at the responsible companies were divided by different types of encryption, which made Tonio's information source abate, and he was left high and dry.

It became clear to him that he would not become world famous from Garzano, this insignificant little Italian suburb, so he had to do something to progress forwards. This is why he bought the ticket to Frankfurt, for which he placed himself in debt to Mamma for life. After Leonel Millan's lecture, Tonio crept over to the professor to talk, and when it turned out that Tonio was an IT technician (and European), Millan's eyes shone, and he instantly took Tonio aside. This is how their - heretofore meagre - friendship began.

Tonio Oravelli was starving for new information and he was terribly pleased by being one step ahead of the global media (even if secretly) - and Leonel Millan had the keys to the lock of American space research. What Millan did not know, was a secret to the infinite universe, and what he did know, he sent to Tonio to pry some information from. And Tonio was not scared of the possibility of being caught. From the outside he was just a harmless astronomer who got lucky a few times. And anyway, if by some miracle someone triangulated his computer, it would take them a long time to find him: first they would have to battle their way through half of Naples. Tonio lived in the old town of Garzano, which was - thanks to the unquestionable precision of the Italian people - not signposted on any of the main roads.

When all the data were transferred from Los Angeles, Tonio wanted to send a message that everything was fine, but Leonel had disappeared from the internet by then. Millan was a strange cat, but in their own way, all great scientists were. Tonio had followed his works for a while, but later on he didn't have the time to dig around Millan's life. He knew Millan had had some issues at his company, Cosmic, a subsidiary of NASA, but Leonel was probably still getting his information from there. Sure when people hear the word UFO, they immediately imagine large headed green hippies jumping around a camp-fire. But Millan's work was very important indeed. They were searching for