“Big enough to receive an electronic impulse?” asked Carlos.
“I would never have seen them if I hadn’t used a microscope, and we were not supposed to use microscopes to dissect the new parts, just eyesight. I got curious and wanted to look through the powerful microscope on my desk and saw the antenna sticking out, but was nearly caught. The miniature part dropped on the floor and broke. I gathered it up, put it in a piece of paper, and looked at it again through my own microscope when I got home.”
One of the soldiers came over. They had been patiently waiting by the front door, eating cookies out of the observatory’s food dispenser, and had made some tea after Lee had shown them where it was.
“It’s time to go,” the soldier said.
“We can’t go now,” replied Carlos. “We are about to get important feedback. Lee and I need to stay here overnight. We brought enough gas for the generator for at least 12 hours and it is starting to warm up in here. The temperature in here must be at least 40 degrees. I recommend you return to the base and either tell General Allen to come up here or come back and pick us up at dawn tomorrow morning. What does the weather look like?”
“It’s getting overcast, but I don’t believe it is going to snow tonight, sir. The clouds are high clouds, the ones that show change, but not immediate change. I think it will snow tomorrow sometime, but not tonight.”
“Good. Go down the mountain and tell General Allen to look for any old military computers at the base. I mean old junk like this Amiga here,” Carlos showed the sergeant the computer Lee was pulling apart. “Tell him ‘Zedong Electronics’ are to blame for all our woes, got that?” The man nodded. “Amiga computers pre-1985 and tell him to get over to the local television station. I want him to get one of those mobile television trucks—you know, the ones that have the satellite-feed dishes on top?” The sergeant nodded again. “Somehow get it loaded onto a trailer or whatever. If there are six of the satellite-feed trucks, take all six. Get every one he can, because I think Lee and I can reroute the electronics to give us a satellite feed from one truck to another somewhere else in the country. The TV trucks should fit into a C-130 and be moved around the country.”
“Yes, sir,” smiled the sergeant, now understanding what Carlos was trying to do.
“We will need to have constant generator power up here, so bring up more fuel in the morning in case we need to stay longer. Lee and I are going to try and work out a permanent connection here and then bounce the feed back to Hill Air Force Base, and then hopefully to any other place in the country that we want. If we can do that, we can use one of the television trucks as a mobile head quarters. But, we need these old Amiga computers and the dishes on the television vehicles to work together. Tell the general that I need to move the satellite into position where it is directly over us here and that will hopefully give us simple but viewable pictures of both our coastlines, understand?”
“Yes, sir,” and he was gone.
“I have the Amiga operational,” Lee spoke up. “It had an ancient burned-out fuse, and I just re-routed the feed past the old fuse. Not a Zedong Electronics fuse—it says ‘Made in America.’”
For the next couple of hours, Carlos and Lee worked, downgrading the whole system. It got dark outside and much colder, and they put on extra jackets to keep warm.
By 10:00 pm that night, Carlos pushed the ‘A’ command for Navistar P and a dark picture of the Earth—a very poor-quality picture—flickered on and was displayed on the old Amiga screen. Carlos could just see the dark outline of what looked like the North Pole, the northern area of Canada and the top of the United States with the sun’s rays off to one side and a quarter of the dark planet in the bottom right corner of the computer screen. Carlos typed in new coordinates so that the satellite would reposition itself directly over Salt Lake City.
Navistar P was already moving in a fixed orbit at 241 miles above Earth, but was rotating a mile a year slower than it was meant to so it wouldn’t keep a constant position. The readout from the computer stated that it would need several hours to perfect its rotation speed, complete the repositioning process, and asked for permission to move. Carlos gave it the necessary permission and the latitude and longitude coordinates on the screen slowly started to change.
“That’s all we can do for now,” Carlos said to Lee. Lee nodded. “Now tell me your story, Lee. I want to know everything.”
Lee did. It took two hours, several of cups of tea, and several packages of junk food from the food dispenser the soldiers had broken into. Lee told Carlos about his studies, his degrees, the old man who met him in the corridor one day, their family’s new home on the island that looked like America. Then he told him about his work in America—how he stole plans for new PC computers from Microsoft, sent over many new software programs, motherboards from several companies Microsoft was working with. Microsoft had themselves stolen parts from IBM, Acer, and all the other major computer manufacturers to make their new programs compatible.
Lee then worked for several smaller companies that were in the forefront of new communication technology. Nokia was a big one. He even worked for Intel, cleaning floors for a year until he got a new job with Apple. With Apple, he became a sales agent for Zedong Electronics.
Until 1998, he had cleaned floors and downloaded plans from computers belonging to directors, designers, and scientists. After 1998, he wore a suit, used his knowledge, and sold several firms on producing everything they needed to be made in China—the whole product from computer chips to cell phones. He was the one who got the contract for everything Apple was about to design to be made by Zedong Electronics in China “I never thought that it was for anything bad,” added Lee, over his second cup of tea.
They glanced at the screen. The Earth was still there, still very dark, and the center of the planet had moved an inch closer to the middle of the screen. If it had been daylight, they would have been able to make out Salt Lake City’s position faintly in the bottom right corner.
“I never thought for a second that something bad was going to come from all our work and selling for Zedong Electronics. The Russians were stealing technology from you. America was blind to it all. America was trying to steal technology from the Japanese and when we came out with the first parts, I’m sure the Japanese then tried to steal it from us. Even a few American spies went over to China. I met a couple of them, and unbeknownst to them, they tried to steal their own technology back!”
“It was nothing new, just a copy of what was stolen, and a cheaper price that nobody could refuse. For years I tried to understand the logic of selling parts at cost or even below cost, but once they started making whole units, the profits must have risen quickly. Zedong Electronics must have lost billions of dollars in the first couple of decades and then got it all back and a lot more by the third decade. It was genius, I thought. The only bank that could have loaned them enough for those two decades would have been the Chinese government—or another country’s government, like Russia or America—nobody else was big enough.”
“Why did you end up here?” asked Carlos. “There’s nothing to steal from here, not from this observatory anyway.”
“I think that after Microsoft, Acer, Intel, Nokia and Apple, and all the information I had gathered, I was relocated to a place that would hide me from the people in Silicon Valley. I think they were scared that employees from those different companies would remember me and put two and two together. I was getting old, my daughter was about to go to university, and my assistance was not necessary any more. I was a liability to them,” Lee replied bluntly.