The signal comes, as they can tell after a bit of triangulation, from space. Approximately 0.3 light-seconds out, just within the orbit of the moon.
The following few minutes are a scramble to contact Emergency Services, publish their livecaptures of the signal, and get the radio telescope operators at the Distant Island observatory onboard before the transmitter goes under the horizon.
When a call comes in on the priority line from their Smaller Continent counterparts, they react immediately.
There are a few things that they do in reaction. The very first actions are to try and confirm things with their own radios, of course. After that, they publish a preliminary incident advisory. Not many people follow the preliminary advisories feed — Emergency Services usually does a good job of making them non-preliminary as soon as there's anything useful to know.
Once they confirm the signal, more things start to happen, quite quickly. The Diplomatic Issues supervisor begins the process of notifying the city authorities of all the cities that subscribe to Emergency Services. That gets a bit more notice, as city officials are pulled online.
The Network Threads supervisor publishes a notice that theoretically-breakable cryptography may not be advisable over open RF links. That gets a good deal more attention, as the Network automatically switches to one-time pads where feasible. People start to notice the Network slowdowns and rapidly depleting shared key material, and the news networks start picking it up.
Finally, the Personnel manager drops a message to the linguists and mathematicians who have registered as nonhazardous-emergency volunteers — just the ones in Largest City, to start with.
Attention: Possible First Contact
This is not a drill. Please report to the indicated rally point at best safe speed.
She rolls over in bed and presses a pillow to her face.
When she doesn't acknowledge the message, her computer turns the room's lights on and repeats the message. It only does that for very important things, so this time her sleep-addled mind pays enough attention, and she sits bolt upright.
"Shit!"
Five minutes later, she runs into her building's conference room and claims one of the bean-bag chairs around the central monitor. She sips some of her yerba mate, to see if it's cool enough to drink yet, and winces a little as it scalds her lips.
One of her colleagues has already arrived, and is fiddling with the room's computer.
"Tomom, do you know what's going on?" she asks him.
Internally, she tries to calm her beating heart. This is quite possibly the most exciting thing that has ever happened — not just to her, but period. Every few years, she participates in the First Contact Rehearsal Festival because it's fun, and now it's happening for real.
"I know as much as you," her fellow linguist — a thin bald man with an uncanny talent for mimicry — replies. "But I messaged Emergency Services, and they sent us this archive link — ah! There."
The monitor comes to life, showing a five-part media file. One track looks like a timing signal, with crisp spikes two times a second. The second track is a slow digital signal. The third is a much faster digital signal. The fourth looks like analog audio, based on the spectrogram. The fifth is a different fast digital signal, this one with much more regular data.
"... huh. Now that we[in] are set up, I think we probably want to call dispatch and get more details," she opines. "But first, would you play that audio track?"
She nervously runs her hands along her robe (green, for science) and waits to hear the first words from the potential aliens.
"[Unintelligible alien language]!" the recording says. It's clearly being produced by a human, or an alien with a closely-matching mouth and nose. "[Unintelligible alien language]."
"... huh. Does that sound at all familiar to you?" he questions, settling into his own beanbag chair and turning the sounds over in his head.
"It could be one of the Many Birds languages, maybe? Or, at least, I'm not hearing any phonemes that would rule it out. But I'm also not catching any familiar words, so I doubt it. Also, like, on priors. How long is this recording?" she asks.
Tomom checks the stream metadata.
"... looks like this is live," he responds. "So you're right, we[in] should check in with dispatch. And then go through and make a transcript?"
"Sounds good."
She fumbles her phone for a moment, but then taps the callback link on the emergency message that wok her.
"This is Emergency Services," the voice of the incident manager replies. "Linguistics incident manager for possible contact situation speaking."
"Hi — this is Miþetel from the Largest City Research University Linguistics Department. With me is my colleague Tomom. We[ex] are all set up to try and translate the stream you sent us[ex], but we[ex] wanted some additional context. Where is this coming from, and what else do you know about the situation?"
"We[ex] were alerted to this broadcast by the Smaller Continent Radio Operators' Network 25 minutes ago. It is coming from an orbit just inside the moon, where we[in] have no records of spacecraft. So far, that's all we[ex] really know. The mathematicians think that tracks two and three are digitally encoded mathematics texts. Track five is probably video data — we[ex] will push a codec for it as soon as we have one written."
The incident manager pauses for a moment.
"You're one of two groups of linguists analyzing this independently. Please don't try to contact the Twin River City group to avoid cross-contamination. As far as we[ex] are aware, this isn't urgent per se, but we would still appreciate regular updates as you're able. If it would help, I can stay on the line with you indefinitely. My records show that you should be expecting two more people who acknowledged their emergency messages."
"I see. Thank you."
She raises an eyebrow at Tomom, but he just shrugs.
"I'll call back when we have some information," she says, and cuts the call.
They scroll back to the beginning of the audio message, and begin the tedious process of transcribing it into full IPA. Since they can't assume anything about the phonology of the language, they can't afford to leave any aspect of the sound un-transcribed.
Lhamesi comes in while they're a few minutes into this process, hanging her outer-robe by the door.
"Sorry I'm late; I had to take the cross-town train," she explains. "What's going on?"
Tomom catches her up while Miþetel pauses the recording and looks at what they have so far. She makes a clean copy of her notes, and then starts circling what she thinks are repeated words.
þereminians get serious about media archival. And that means that sometimes, you'll want to store and play a media file in an uncommon (or bespoke) format. So Network video streams support embedding sandboxed bytecode (a bit like WebAssembly) as a software decoder.
It also comes in handy in this situation — the computer scientists who gathered at their rally point push an update to the metadata of the stream.
Just as she is about to speak, to call out the words she's identified, the stream on the monitor gets a little 'loading' circle, and the fifth track changes to show a grayscale video.
Unlike early grayscale films, this one isn't grainy at all. It looks like a good camera that just declines to include color information. Pictured is a tall human woman wearing a light dress. She is smiling without showing her teeth, but with a genuine crinkle at the corners of her eyes.
"[Unintelligible alien language]!" she says, waving at the camera. "[Unintelligible alien language]."
She walks to the side, the camera following her, and gestures to a whiteboard full of symbols. "[Unintelligible alien language]," she continues.
"We[ex] are sure it's aliens. For one thing, there's absolutely no records of any spacecraft in that orbit," Pakesalh says, nodding for emphasis. She's more of the analyze-data kind of astronomer than the operate-telescopes kind of astronomer — but that's a good thing, when the operate-telescopes astronomers are busy trying to get a closer look at the alien.
In any case, she's patched into a conference call with a bunch of high-ranking Emergency Services people, which is only mildly nerve-wracking.
"But even if someone did manage to sneak something up there, it certainly wouldn't look like this," she continues, bringing an image up on the screen. It's a blurry photo of a pale golden spot, one or two pixels across.
"For those of us with less telescopy experience, Pakesalh, why could this not be of terrestrial origin?" the director questions, leaning forwards across the table. Insofar as þereminia's various overlapping institutions constitute a government, she's unquestionably high up in it — and a few minutes conversation with her shows why.
Director Ŋaceta has a way of putting people at ease, and rapidly narrowing in on what's important, that has served her well in managing such a large and sprawling organization.
Pakesalh blinks. "See that scale marker there? Whatever it is, it is only about the size of my fist. There's no way that we[ex] could have even targeted it, except that it's putting out a very strong radio signal — stronger than our technology would be able to fit in that volume, never mind the power source."
"Well, there's even less chance that any aliens actually look like that," Pakesalh's colleague from the math department points out. His fingers flick back and forth over a clicky thing as he talks. "Even a panspermia scenario had to have happened far enough back that there should be some visible differences. Or a lot of our archeology is just wrong."
She nods. "True. Which is why I think they must be adopting our appearance deliberately. Possibly because they anticipate a negative reaction otherwise. But to have good enough models of our appearances to do this, yet not to have figured out one of our languages, must give some pretty tight bounds on how they could have gotten here and how much processing power they must have aboard."
View Flat HTML
View Metadata
Search Post
