Finding Stardust

"We"re done here. I"ve found the clue I"m looking for," the girl said firmly. Haoran just nodded when Emma took his hand and brought him down to the ground.

"Why don"t we just fly to the hotel?" Haoran asked.

"I don"t know the way," Emma said with a shrug. "The view from up there and the view from down here are different."

"Oh .. that"s right," Haoran finally understood. For them, it would be easier to fly towards the Eiffel Tower, for example, because the tower was very tall and could be seen from anywhere in the city center. But, it would be difficult to find Hotel n.o.bel where they were staying from the top of the Eiffel Tower. Their hotel was hidden among so many similar-looking buildings around it.

Finally, the best option was to walk home or take a taxi. They decided to take the latter. In the taxi, the two did not discuss what happened that night. They don"t want the taxi drivers to listen to their conversation.

Only after they arrived back at the hotel lobby did they discuss the clue that Emma had found in the antenna tower.

"I feel doing a scavenger hunt to find pieces to complete a puzzle," Emma said softly. "My father left the coordinates of our home on the moon. He deliberately put it where no one could read it but me."

"Oh .. you mean at the antenna tower earlier?" Haoran asked. "What are the coordinates like?"

Emma pulled out her cellphone and showed him the picture she took. "This."

"Don"t tell me this is the location of your parent"s capsule on the moon ..." Haoran said enthusiastically. "In that case, we only need to give these coordinates to Goose, let her do the search."

"You think so?" asked Emma. "Do you think we can trust Goose?"

"Goose works on a trust basis. She doesn"t care who you are. Before, she wouldn"t even care who hired her services, as long as they could pay. She wouldn"t be able to thrive in her profession without trust between her and her clients. Now, she changed ... she has openly refused any a.s.signments from the underworld. You see, she has agreed to help us twice without asking for payment. I think we can trust her."

Emma stood silently in front of the elevator door. She was eager to trust Goose completely, as Haoran did. But the thing is, she had never been in contact with Goose, so it was hard for her to blindly trust her. She didn"t even know what Goose looked like, or where she lived.

"Haoran ... I don"t think I want to take any risk ..." Emma finally said.

DING

The elevator door opened, and they entered. Haoran pressed the b.u.t.tons for the 5th and 10th floor.

"You don"t want to ask Goose for help?" Haoran asked her. "She can check these coordinates and immediately give the answer you are looking for."

Emma shook her head. "We don"t know who she is or where she is. If she betrayed us and took this information for herself, then I"ll lose our home on the moon. I don"t want to risk it."

"Then what do you want to do?" Haoran asked. "We don"t have the ability like Goose to hack satellites."

Emma clenched her fists, and her face looked determined. "I can learn. I will find out myself, without asking Goose for help. I will be patient. You said yourself that it might take years ..."

Haoran was stunned by Emma"s determination. He finally nodded. "All right, if that"s what you want."

The elevator stopped on the 5th floor, and the door opened, but Emma didn"t come out. She was still busy with her own thoughts.

"This is your floor," Haoran said.

"Hmm ... I know." Emma just looked away and pressed the elevator b.u.t.ton to close. The elevator moved up to the 10th floor. Haoran didn"t say anything anymore when he saw it. He didn"t expect Emma would come to his suite, but he didn"t mind it one bit. When the elevator stopped on the 10th floor, and the door opened, Emma immediately pulled Haoran"s hand out, saying, "I want to discuss something with you."

"Hmm ..." Haoran followed Emma who pulled his hand towards his suite in 1012. After they arrived at the door, the young man opened the door to his suite with his access card, and then both of them walked inside.

Emma immediately sat on the sofa with a serious face. "Take out your laptop."

"Wait a minute," said the young man. He took his laptop from the study and handed it to Emma. "The pa.s.sword is 1204."

Emma nodded in understanding. She opened Haoran"s laptop with the pa.s.sword he gave earlier. Meanwhile, Haoran went to the kitchenette to boil water to make tea.

"There is an incoming message from Goose," Emma said suddenly. She saw a message from Goose username. She felt it had something to do with the task they gave Goose to track the whereabouts of her parents.

"Just open it," Haoran said from the kitchenette. He was busy taking boxes of tea from the cupboard to make their tea. "Do you want fruit tea, earl gray, or chamomile?"

Emma was touched by Haoran"s att.i.tude. The young man really trusted her and didn"t even hesitate to give her the pa.s.sword to open his laptop. Now, he even let Emma open his messages to read the message from Goose.

With a pounding chest, Emma opened the message. She had heard from Haoran many times that Goose was the best hacker in the world. So, she hoped the hacker would really be able to provide additional clues for Emma to find her parents.

[In my whole life, this is the first time I"ve had to admit failure. I have run several hundred searches at the same time for 24 hours, but they didn"t produce any results. I even searched in databases from up to fifteen years ago. This is really unusual. As if wherever they were, they were never recorded by any cameras. I"ve never come across anything like this.]

Goose"s message made Emma feel discouraged. Even Goose, whom Haoran said was the best hacker in the world, couldn"t find her parents" tracks. The girl bit her lip and tried to think.

A moment later, she typed a reply to Goose. She suspected her parents did something so that their faces would not be caught on any cameras anywhere in the world. They did it intentionally because they wanted to be invisible. But there was no way they could keep hiding their bodies.

[They are researchers who worked on secret projects and were accustomed to hiding from surveillance. You might be able to find patterns between photos and videos of a couple whose faces are faint, blurry, or hard to recognize. It"s easy for them to deceive surveillance cameras around the world using infrared. Their faces won"t be caught on camera. But their bodies will still be seen. Maybe, if you could find such patterns on the database, two people, one man and one woman together, whose faces were never caught by camera ... then you might be able to find them. Try checking the surveillance camera database in Paris throughout February 2043.]

After pressing the SEND b.u.t.ton, Emma placed Haoran"s laptop on the table and took a deep breath. She had given a very specific instruction to Goose. She hoped the hacker would be able to narrow down her search and find clues about Emma"s parents" movements in 2043.

She knew that by the end of the winter of 2043, Kaos.h.i.+n and Arreya Stardust were in Paris because they wrote the coordinates for Marie in the Eiffel Tower. Later, they took her to the orphanage. Goose would definitely be able to find their appearance data on the camera surveillance from that month.

Emma wanted to know where her parents were going after leaving her in the orphanage. From there, she would look for their next track.

"What did Goose say?" Haoran asked, carrying a pot of tea and two cups with his hands. He put them on the table in front of Emma and poured tea for them.

Emma took Haoran"s laptop and showed him the message from Goose and her reply. The young man just nodded. Before he could comment, a message came from Goose again.

[This is very helpful! You are right. Humans can easily avoid surveillance cameras with infrared. You are so smart. I will launch new searches with these specifics]

Haoran typed a reply to Goose. [Thank you, Goose.]

He and Emma then exchanged glances.

"Now we just have to wait," Haoran voiced. He then handed a cup of tea to Emma. "Drink first. I thought you wanted to discuss something important."

He looked at his watch and, the gesture unknowingly to him, actually made Emma feel guilty. She felt bad about taking Haoran"s time even though it was already past midnight.

"Are you going to sleep? Am I bothering you?" the girl asked in a shy voice.

Haoran shook his head. "Not at all. Like I said, don"t be a stranger."

"Hmm .. okay." Emma nodded. "Thank you."

She took a sip of her tea and then looked down.

"Looks like something is bothering you," commented Haoran, who also drank his tea. "You can tell me anything."

Emma stared at Haoran for a long time and then placed her cup on the table. "Uhm ... you said, your father invested in s.p.a.ceLab, right? I need to use a connection to s.p.a.ceLab to be able to send messages to the moon using their Deep s.p.a.ce Network*. The s.p.a.ceLab DSN network is the best in the world today. If I can do that, we don"t need to use Goose"s services. I want to be able to send the message myself."

Haoran looked calm when he heard Emma"s words. "What kind of message do you want to send? If it"s just a radio message, you don"t have to use the s.p.a.ceLab connection or even DSN. We can send messages with radio waves to the moon. Many people are doing it for almost a hundred years already. You know Moon Bounce*? A lot of radio amateurs take it as a hobby to send radio waves to the moon using the EME technique, Earth-Moon-Earth. We just have to send radio waves to the moon, and later, the waves will be bounced back by the moon"s surface. It only takes 2.5 seconds to do it."

Emma looked at Haoran with an astonished face. "How do you know all this?"

The young man just shrugged with a happy smile. "I do have an interest in astronomy. Since I knew my father is investing in s.p.a.ceLab, I am determined to get there one day. You didn"t know about moon bounce?"

Emma shook her head. "I had no interest in astronomy before this."

"Ahh ..." Haoran patted his chest and said enthusiastically. "I know a lot about s.p.a.ce. I will help you send your message to the moon."

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[1] Deep s.p.a.ce Network = Worldwide network of U.S. s.p.a.cecraft communication facilities, located in the United States (California), Spain (Madrid), and Australia (Canberra), which supports NASA"s interplanetary s.p.a.cecraft missions. It also carries out radio and radar astronomical observations for the exploration of the Solar System and the universe and supports missions that orbit the Earth. DSN is part of NASA"s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). Similar networks are run by Russia, China, India, j.a.pan and the European s.p.a.ce Agency.

In this novel, the Deep s.p.a.ce Network referred to by Emma is the s.p.a.ce program network owned by s.p.a.ceLab (private s.p.a.ce exploration initiative) in collaboration with all public s.p.a.ce programs in the world.
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[2] Moon Bounce = Earth-Moon-Earth Communication (EME), also known as Moon bounce, is a radio communication technique that relies on radio wave propagation from an earth-based transmitter directed through reflection from the surface of the Moon back to Earth-based receivers.