In the year 2020 you and your astronomer colleagues have just observed radio telescope signals representing human-like responses in a world a million light years away. What was the party like?
Randy shifted his considerable bulk, never taking his eyes off Jill.
She peered at her screen, jotted a note, pulled her long fingers through her hair again and finally turned to him. “I’m sure,” she said quietly. “I’m dead sure.” She slid her notebook toward him. “It’s absolutely an intelligent transmission, and what I told you is the gist of it.”
Randy’s stomach lurched. As an astronomer, he’d spend twenty-five years thinking about the possibility of life in other parts of the galaxy, but none of that speculation had prepared him for this moment.
He took a deep breath and tried to take it in. His new Astronomical Communications Officer had just confirmed that intelligent life existed in a signal that had been tight-beamed to Earth. He stared at her, for once not thinking about the way she tilted her chin or the shape of her smile.
He cleared his throat. “Well, that’s it then. Let’s get the boys and girls together.” He turned to the other three people in the observatory, working at their desks and trying to appear not to be watching what Jill and Randy were doing. He raised his voice. “Hey, everybody, come on over.”
Josh, Lissa and Matthew leapt out of their chairs and bounded toward Randy’s workstation.
Randy hauled himself out of his chair and leaned against the worn edge of his desk. “Well,” he said, “Jill has confirmed what we’ve thought all along -- this is a transmission. An honest-to-God transmission from a civilisation in a star system almost a million light years away.”
“Good old N10357,” Matthew breathed. “Sending us a message!”
“There’s more,” Randy said. “There’s much more. Jill, tell ’em.”
“Hold on just one moment,” interrupted Lissa with a shake of her spiky red hair. “This calls for a party. I’m going to instanuke some pizza and bring out the champagne. Gimme a hand, Matthew.” She tore Matthew from his position next to Jill, though he looked as if wild horses couldn’t drag him away from the next piece of information.
Randy surreptitiously studied Jill. She was too professional to show jubilation, but he’d watched her enough over the last three months to recognise the signs of her excitement: she could hardly wait to share her news.
Moments later Lissa and Matthew emerged from the kitchen area with a big platter of cheesy pizza, five glasses and a bottle of Veuve Clicquot that Lissa had picked up when they first began getting excited about the signals.
Everyone grabbed a piece of pizza while Josh splashed out the champagne.
“Okay,” Jill said. “I explained to you when I first came over that communicating with extraterrestrial intelligence is much trickier than searching for it. We knew that we would be able to recognise a transmission, should it ever come, but that we might maybe never be able to crack it.”
“‘Like dealing with a deck full of wild cards’,” Randy said, quoting what she’d said to them all when he’d first brought her in to work on the signal.
“Yes,” she said, “Well, I’ve cracked it. We know what the message says, at least, the first part of it.”
The air in the room suddenly stood still. Josh’s hand, on the way to his mouth with pizza, stopped in its tracks.
“As we guessed,” Jill continued, “it’s a looping message, repeating itself over and over. And it’s directed straight at us on a tight bandwidth, not broadcast throughout the universe."
“How could they do that?” Matthew breathed. “How could they know we were here?”
“Wait til I tell you more about the message.” She grabbed her notebook off the desk. “I’ve translated the first of what seems to be four sections of it. The gist of the message so far is something like this: They tell us they were here a million years ago and they ‘influenced’ life on the planet to become more like them; more advanced, more humanoid.”
Randy glanced at his crew. It was the first time he’d seen Lissa without words. Matthew’s face was twisted with the effort of integrating what he was hearing.
Jill glanced at Randy, who nodded. “They tell us that they’re just about to leave to visit us again. They’re sending us this message to prepare us, assuming that their experiment has succeeded and we’ve become technologically competent.” She paused. “They tell us that they will travel at 99.997% of the speed of light.”
Randy grabbed his calculator out of the his desk and pounded the keys. “If this signal left a million years ago, that means they’ll be here in…"
“…less than 30 years,” supplied Matthew automatically, looking dazed.
“Yes,” Randy confirmed, finishing his manual calculation. “Less than 30 years. Give or take.”
Matthew stared at Jill. “How did you ever translate it? You said it would be impossible.”
“Because it’s humanoid,” Jill replied. “It’s written in a human compatible style. I tried mathematical languages and pictorial systems but found in the end they were using plain old human-style algorithmic communication systems. Once I started looking closely, I saw there weren’t many wild cards at all in the deck.”
“But how can that BE?" Matthew sputtered. “How can it be humanoid”?
Lissa darted in. “Listen, idiot, what they’re saying is that they’re human, they were here two million years ago, they seeded humanity here. Of COURSE they think like us.”
Matthew clutched his forehead. “But a million years? A MILLION years? That’s inconceivable!”
“Well, not really,” Randy intervened. “A million years is a drop in the bucket of universe time. Africa’s Lucy would have been a million years old already when they were here.”
A gabble of excitement erupted, interrupted when Randy reached for the phone.
Matthew signalled the others. “Quiet, everyone. Randy's phoning the State Department.”
Randy grinned. “Actually, I’m not. I’m phoning a personal trainer. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’ve suddenly got interested in living a long long time.” He glanced at Jill and caught her smile.
“After the important stuff, we can call the State Department and get started on the paperwork. Otherwise I won’t have it done by the time the ancestors get here.”
They laughed euphorically and the gabble resumed. As Randy dialled the trainer Jill had recommended for him, he reflected that it was the only party he’d ever been to where nobody was bothering to eat the pizza or drink the champagne.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
What a terrific imagination. I wonder where all these ideas for stories come from! I really enjoyed the dialogue, as if you really were familiar with extraterrestial speak! I was in the world of the party. The POV is good and I like the way you've developed the characters, just little tit bits like the spiky red hair take me straight to the scene.
I'm not sure about the ending and the personal trainer stuff. It seems to come like a bolt from the blue although I did get the reference back to first sentence and Randy's considerable bulk.
I love the way you research and plan your stories (in your mind I think). It works and you develop such a great structure and complex story. Well done.
PS hows the writing course. Is it finished?
Kerry says:
Very complex story, Heather. And beautifully told.
You take us steadily through the issues and ideas about life from outer space so that the reader is able to comprehend the enormity of the transmission.
I was distracted by Lissa insisting everybody should hold their horses while she got the pizza and champagne. I just wanted to know what the news was.
And Randy phoning his personal trainer was a bit out of character for the situation. Perhaps he could have joked about that when he really was contacting the State Department.
You obviously gave this one a lot of thought and have produced a very convincing story. I like when Randy refers to the 'ancestors'. Made me think of the indigenous creation stories.
What a great yarn. This is a nice little piece of sci-fi with a dash of romance thrown in. I like how you paint the scientists, so wrapped up in their work that they almost forget to celebrate.
I think you might have been overly ambitious for an "up to 500 words" story. The story became less about the party and mostly about the discovery.
I found the personal trainer reference at the end to be too much of an in joke between Randy and Jill and more about them and their developing relationship than about the party. It might have been reduced in size or left out all together.
Post a Comment