The Many Worlds of Dean: Book 1 - Mars by Eric Hodgkinson Read Free Book Online

repeating pattern.”
    Bill grunted and asked, “So what do we do
about it?”
    “I want you and Stacy to work with the
computer and try to find out if there is a coherent message in the
signal. In the meantime, I am going to send a message to mission
control and find out what they would like us to do about it.”
    “What about me?” Dean asked. “Can I
help?”
    The Captain scratched absently at his cheek
as he thought for a moment before replying, “You can do the same
thing as Bill and Stacy, but I want you to work alone so that you
don’t follow the same methodology as the other two. If we attack it
from different directions, we have a better chance of deciphering
any meaning that may exist.”
    Dean watched as Bill rolled his eyes,
clearly unimpressed with the Captain’s logic.
    “Perhaps we should just send Dean down to
the surface by himself to solve the entire mystery,” Bill
quipped.
    “I’d be happy to, if you’re too scared to
go,” Dean replied bluntly.
    “Enough!” Captain Rogers took a breath while
shaking his head. “You two have got to figure out how to get along.
Now get busy before I kick both of you off the landing
mission.”
    Dean turned and made his way to his room,
where he could use his private terminal. He realized he shouldn’t
have said what he did, but Bill seemed to bring out the worst in
him. Well, he thought to himself, if he could figure out the signal
before Bill, maybe the engineer would finally see him as an equal.
Sitting at the small desk attached to the wall in his room, he
entered the commands necessary to bring up the information the
computer had on the signal.
    He studied what the computer had already
deduced and began applying different algorithms to the signal to
see what happened. Once he had exhausted every program the computer
had available, he began to write his own.
    It wasn’t until two days later that one of
his programs had a small amount of success.

Chapter 13
     
    “The Path? What are you talking about?”
Captain Rogers asked Dean.
    Dean was again in the common room with the
others. He had notified the Captain that he had made progress with
the radio transmission and the Captain had ordered everyone to
assemble in the common room. Now Dean was trying to explain what he
had found, even though he didn’t really understand it himself.
    “Let me start at the beginning,” he began.
“Due to the repeating nature of the signal, I started working with
the assumption that it was encrypted. I ran every decryption
algorithm the computer had and not one of them worked. I began
writing my own programs and testing them on the signal. Finally one
of my programs was able to show the pattern hidden in the signal.
What it showed was four separate parts, each with its own
encryption scheme. The first part, I was able to unencrypt. The
others appear to get more and more complicated as you go down the
list. So far, I haven’t been able to crack the second one and I
have absolutely no hope of getting into the last two.”
    The Captain grabbed ahold of Dean’s arm and
said, “Forget the others; tell us again what the first one
said.”
    “As far as I can tell, the first one is
simply an introduction by something calling itself ‘The Path’.”
    “What in the world does that mean?” Bill
asked.
    “I have no idea,” Dean said with obvious
frustration laced through his voice. “All I know is that the
message says, ‘Beings of the fourth world, I am The Path’.”
    Captain Rogers asked, “There’s nothing more
than that?”
    “No, that’s the entire message in the first
part. You should know, however, the other three parts contain
considerably more data than the first one. Especially the last
part; it’s four times bigger than the other three put
together.”
    “Do you think you will be able to open the
second part?” Sarah asked.
    “Honestly, I don’t know. I will keep trying,
but I’ve gone through all the information in the database on
encryption