Usurper of the Sun Read online

  The sequence of pulses had been split by two discrete blank spaces, one longer than the other. Each individual pulsation was punctuated by a short space, and then the digital throbs were separated into groups by a longer attenuation. The pulsations increased as the sequence continued.

  “Using primes for a header?” she asked.

  “Nothing simpler that’s likely to be universal has come along yet. Positive integers, threaded like a heartbeat, empty in-between like a jerky carotid artery. We cribbed it from a medical condition called Corrigan’s pulse where there’s a full expansion and a sudden collapse. We try others too, but we think this is least likely to degrade across the distance.”

  It had long been theorized that a series of primes could communicate proof of intelligence because primes did not occur in natural cosmic electromagnetic waves. It was one of the first concepts put into place by the original SETI researchers.

  The string of ten prime numbers was followed by one larger number. “That’s the first line of the horizontal resolution of the universal facsimile. It explains the compression of the images,” Riggins said. “A facsimile is essentially a drawing divided horizontally into lines, then sent in order one at a time,” he explained, by rote, as if he were proctor for a school trip. Again, Aki observed that he was not as proud of his accomplishments as she would have expected. She imagined that the consistent failure of the project had worn down any appreciation for how well the team had executed the work.

  Next to the 3-D oscillograph, the images being sent were reconstructed on the screen. The first depicted a star chart with the sun and nearby stars displayed as the stars would appear to the Builders based on their estimated current location.

  “We give them the night sky to tell that we know they’re coming. Let’s move ahead. Eventually it uses spaxels.”

  With the mouse Riggins brought up the more fully articulated diagrams embedded in the transmission. The ETICC had included a schematic sky map of the solar system that displayed planetary orbits, close-up views of the inner planets, and several detailed depictions of the Ring. The Ring’s shadow was shown to be intersecting the earth’s orbit from several angles. A succession of twodimensional drawings of animals and plants from Earth followed, then another diagram that attempted to communicate the impact the Ring had on photosynthesis, climate, and the ecosystem. The message ended. There was an extended pause and then the primes reappeared.

  Since the Ring’s destruction, the protocol for interacting with the Builders had been amended. Along with communicating that humans were an intelligent species, three other declarations had been ratified. It was now approved to convey the fact that humans needed sunlight to survive, that the Ring was blocking the sunlight, and that humanity still wished to forge amicable relations with the Builders. Aki saw how the first two had already been encoded in the ETICC’s transmission.

  Compared to the final element of the three more recently approved communiqués, it was not challenging to represent the solar system’s structure and the Ring’s effects on it, regardless of whether the representation used spaxels or spectrographic depictions. Political abstractions and even concepts such as friendship or mutual benevolence were heavily constrained by culture. Even human societies had a difficult time expressing such ideals to other humans.

  “Have there been any new proposals to convey the idea of establishing amicable relations since those that were presented at the conference last year?” Aki asked.

  “There’ve been several. Can we pull together for an impromptu brainstorming session with the team?” The enthusiasm of the suggestion was belied by Riggins’s brooding face.

  “No,” Aki said, hoping she did not sound curt. She wanted a sense of the ETICC, but she had no interest in appearing like a visiting dignitary who had come to survey the staff’s progress.

  The woman swiveled her chair toward Aki anyway.

  “Jill Elsevier,” she pointed at herself absentmindedly. “Dr. Shiraishi, I know you don’t want to come off like top brass or a VIP. Can you check this proposal anyway, just quick, unofficially?”

  “I would be happy to.” Since Elsevier had asked, Aki did not feel like she was insinuating herself into the ongoing project, and as a non-expert. “You said you specialize in xenopsychology?”

  Elsevier, a petite woman with oversized glasses and hair in disheveled ringlets said, “Well, to the extent that anyone can specialize in the psychology of hypothetical entities which may not even have a psychology, sure.”

  Aki opened her mouth, ready to discuss the discontents of the Life-Form and Civilization theories once again, but Elsevier opened her tablet and showed Aki a series of representational slides. The first was a group of people eating breakfast. The people were talking to each other. The next image panned back and showed a second group interacting and exchanging goods and foodstuffs with the first group. The next slide showed both groups eating together and talking. The next picture showed two distinctly different groups clubbing each other, with bloodied bodies lying on the ground.

  “Have I captured friendly and hostile? Because I know I need to be extreme to make the message clear, but I think the Builders won’t know about blood’s color, and I’m not sure if they’ll understand that it comes from inside. It’s certainly problematic.”

  Aki grabbed an empty chair and wheeled it close to the xenopsychologist. “I can call you Jill? Good. For us, you have achieved your meaning, sure, but the Builders are not anything like us. What strikes us as a tenuous or tangential connection might be like the word of God to them. For example, it is no stretch to consider that they might not function in groups. Our presupposing emergent norms or convergence in crowds, for example, holds the potential for getting our message misinterpreted.”

  “You’re so right, Dr. Shiraishi. That’s a drawback to my idea that I hadn’t even considered, and now I’m thinking it through and you’re making sense, but I’m still a proponent of the theory that sociality, at least networks or associations, is what builds intelligence. I’m certain that the Builders would pass a false-belief test. Have you studied capuchins? Capuchins are monkeys. They can do knower-guesser—”

  “I’m sorry, Jill. First, I’m not a doctor. Neither a physician nor a PhD. Now back up to ‘false belief.’”

  “It’s a social cognition concept. Developmental psychology has uncovered that children, around age four, learn to distinguish that other people can have false beliefs. It’s a strong tell for autism because most indigo kids never get it.” Elsevier flashed her fingers as if to make quotation marks around the words “indigo kids.”

  “Here’s the Sally-Anne test.” Jill Elsevier brought her hands up, palms facing Aki. “Sally has a basket and Anne has a box.” Jill made a fist with her left hand and then her right, then continued pantomiming. “Sally puts a marble in her basket and leaves…and then Anne shows up and steals the marble from the basket and puts it in the box. Sally reenters the room; where will she look for the marble? Chimpanzees, toddlers, and many people with autism will answer ‘the box,’ as they have witnessed Anne’s actions. Most neurotypical individuals over a certain age will, of course, say ‘the basket,’ as they are able to understand that they know something Sally doesn’t. Further, they can predict Sally’s behavior based on their own understanding of what Sally knows.”

  Aki nodded.

  “Most of us, of course, get it intuitively, but autistics and toddlers don’t realize that there are other minds involved that might not have access to the same information.”

  “Go on.”

  “It’s the most interesting example because it’s purely visual. If you add in the idea that maybe Anne told Sally what she did by, for example, leaving her a note, it falls apart. You know the Smarties test? It’s like that, you show a box of candy to a kid and you tell them the Smarties box has crayons in it. Then you take the box to a second kid and ask the first what the second will guess is in the box. If they understand that beliefs, like factual awareness, aren
’t always equivalent, they’ll know that the candy box is going to fool the second kid, but a toddler figures everyone knows it’s full of crayons. I love that one because you never even open the box. The Smarties box could be full of antidepressants for all it actually matters.

  “Answering correctly almost always confirms theory of mind. That’s why I love those capuchin monkeys. It looks like they can do it too. They’re the organ grinder monkeys, the ones people put into clothes with the cute hats.” Jill took a quick breath. “Understanding how other people’s minds work, essentially being aware that beliefs or levels of comprehension can be different from your own, it’s evolutionarily advantageous, especially in terms of society. And it’s a prerequisite for self-awareness, at least I think it is. Perceiving that other people, or even another species, are able to know what you don’t and vice versa is a tool of consciousness. It’s the ability to comprehend objectivity and external points of view.”

  “You are convinced that consciousness, sociality, and theory of mind are inseparable, and it is a reasonable assumption,” Aki said, leaning back in her chair but looking Jill in the eye. “I agree that the Builders must possess consciousness, and that does imply the other two traits quite strongly. Which makes some sort of societal structure likely. But it might be so far removed from ours that we look like a beehive or an anthill to the Builders. So much of the pop conjecture ascribes emotions to the Builders, and I think it is riddled with converse fallacies of accident that destroy the exceptions. What about the black swans? What if the Builders simply do not exchange trade goods? What if the Builders have never had a war? What if they wonder why we talk so much while we eat? Or most importantly, what if all we are really doing is taking our views and putting them into their heads?”

  Jill’s face was inexpressive. It was clear that she was considering what she had heard and trying to figure out what to say next, but it did not show on her face. Dan Riggins came over and suggested it was time to go. Aki wondered if he was uncomfortable with her playing the devil’s advocate after all.

  “Ms. Shiraishi? How long do you think it will take to get them to talk to us? I can convey amicable intentions, but I’d like to know what happens after that,” Jill said.

  “I think that is a question for your director.”

  “He doesn’t know. We don’t know.”

  Riggins rubbed his chin and then his eyes. He did not scratch or adjust his tie, but Aki could tell he wanted to.

  “We send an honest signal with observable qualities. Beyond that, I would like to know when it’ll happen even more than you two women combined. There’s no certainty, and any time frame is illusory. We think too long or we jump the gun. The moment passes. Does it really make a difference? All anyone wants is a response. We send and we make sure not to cause confusion, but even if expressing that ‘We stay in peace’ is hard to beam at them, I know the Builders are ignoring us.”

  Aki realized that Riggins was thinking about the Science Subcommittee and how its approval was required to make adjustments or to incorporate new information into the transmission, but she also knew full well that he was talking about something entirely different.

  “I’ll come up with something,” Jill said and swiveled back to face her workstation.

  ACT III: MARCH 11, 2024

  3 PM

  THE RECEIVING CENTER was much larger; this was where the people Aki expected to find in the Transmissions room were working. A matrix of multiscreen setups dominated one wall, displaying real-time graphs and renderings of any anomaly that could possibly be an attempt at communication.

  “I haven’t told you my greatest fear yet,” Riggins said to Aki.

  “You are being replaced by robots?” Aki answered quickly.

  “I worry that they sent a reply and we missed it. The time and energy, what feels like my life, isn’t really wasted, it’s merely dropped phone reception, and I end up feeling like a failure for a tragedy that didn’t actually occur.”

  Aki stopped smiling. To keep Riggins’s nightmare from becoming a reality, the Receiving Center was connected to a gigantic grid of electromagnetic wave receivers pointed toward Orion’s belt. Three were on at any moment. Which ones were in use shifted on a rolling basis that followed the earth’s rotation. Currently, Chile, Guyana, and Arecibo were online.

  “These efforts are not in vain, Director Riggins. Subharmonics, overtones. Those possibilities have all been covered and re-examined to prevent the tragedy of your worst-case scenario. There have not been any governmental restrictions on the receiving end. Further, if you apply systems thinking and imagine the complex interplay of factors, intentionally looking for non-linear feedback loops that give surprising futures, you still hit the truth that the Builders would only send a response if they wanted us to see it. I bet a reply would light up half that wall at once.”

  Aki watched the primary data nodes update. It was like an aerial view of skyscrapers. Despite what she had just said, Aki shared Riggins’s worries. A chill ran through her as she realized that the data crawling by, all the multi-hued graphical renderings of raw and processed assessments of sound, light, frequencies, and vibrations, could potentially contain a missed reply to the signal.

  “It’s a lot of pretty pictures of reasonably flat power spectral density, isn’t it?” Aki said.

  “You don’t miss much.” Riggins cleared his throat, then shouted, “Everybody, get quiet. Dick, can you give us audio channel two, loud?”

  The room filled with the random hiss of white noise. At first, it sounded like waves at the beach, then it sounded like holding a shell over each ear, as if Helmholtz resonance and diminished environmental noise were creating the phenomenon that many people falsely attributed to the amplified ambient noise of blood circulation.

  “Pure static,” Riggins said loudly.

  “This is with noise that might be obscuring wanted signals canceled out?” Aki asked. The sound’s textures were surrounding her. Riggins waved to the technician and the flattened din of the stochastic process subsided.

  “That’s guesswork, but if you go back to your statement about how strong a message they’re likely to broadcast, all it takes is an output as powerful as the proximity sensing lasers the navy uses.” He pointed to a display on the other wall. It had even higher resolution.

  “This one has a dedicated supercomputer for subtleties that might otherwise get drowned out. All it does is crank out Fourier expansion analysis, Lebesgue integration, anything that can use trig or calc to analyze the waveforms and find a pattern that might catch a ghost sound or a stray vibration in wavelength. Eight people or more are in this room at all times, analyzing for patterns, keeping the servers hot and trying to catch anything a computer might miss. Close watch day and night.”

  “Is the public data unadulterated?”

  “Nothing to hide. Can’t you tell, Aki? I’m not letting anybody play turf wars on this. I couldn’t care less if I get the word personally or if someone who is half-drunk and halfway around the world faxes me with ‘Wow!’ We take a closer look if more than three people blog about a specific graph.”

  “How often does that happen?”

  “We’ve done hyperanalysis of pulse height, edges, continuum shapes, even gamma rays, somewhere close to a half a million times. Now I’ll show you the supercomputer. Half the guys who work here would marry her over a real woman,” Riggins said.

  They were within two steps of the door when an alarm began clamoring and strobes flashed.

  “Audio. Segment four-zero-two,” the tech said. One of the central monitors flashed red several times. Then the monitor showed what Aki thought looked like a cross section of a mountain range. Riggins ushered her back to the far wall.

  “How significant is this signal?” she asked.

  “Abnorm level four’s not too unusual. It happens once or twice a week. I was at a five once.”

  The tech rose from his chair and stepped closer to the monitor. A second sound joined the clamo
r of the alarm. The rhythm of the lights changed. “Six, now seven,” said the tech, pointing to an array of numbers and tall orange bars. The tech gritted his teeth, then calmly stated, “This has to be an earthbound spoof. We’re reading a series of primes sixty-eight digits long, longer than what we sent.”

  “How sustainable?” Riggins shouted.

  “Eighty seconds. I’ll secure the backup line.”

  The mood of the dozen or so men changed palpably. Riggins pulled his phone from his pocket. “I’ll call the Op Center down the hall.” Into his phone, he said, “Yeah, you’re seeing it? Seven at this point? Anything that—”

  “Status normal but we’re not triangulating the source well. Abnorm unchanged.”

  A side door that Aki had barely noticed swung open quickly.

  “It’s a breach,” barked a large man who looked upset.

  “Tom, we’re at… oh.” Watching him speak, then watching him lean back against the wall, Aki could imagine how Dan Riggins felt.

  “Phreaked. False positive through an audio channel.”

  The large man waved Director Riggins and Aki toward him, then grunted that they should follow him through the door. Unsure where she was at first, Aki realized it was this man’s office and also where the parallel supercomputer was housed, protected by a soundproof glass partition.

  “You scanned the terminals in the building?”

  “I’m one of three people who’re authorized to go outside the intranet, and there are maybe three others who work in the building and would be able to chew through the security walls,” said the man that Dan had called Tom. Aki concluded that Tom was some sort of sysadmin. “I loaded a sniffer. This was done using a keystroke logger on a news server. It shouldn’t have been able to get in from there but someone squirmed in through a back door. It’s always social engineering. I bet the hacker got multiple morons to divulge their passes and then pretexted or baited.” Tom swore and punched his desk hard. Aki stepped as far away from him as she could considering the small dimensions of the room.