“With that kind of mathematical precision?” Joshua replied. “Virtually impossible. The odds would be greater than winning the lottery.”
“This is absolutely wild, so what do we do next?” Rachael asked. “I mean, we have a discernible pattern, which is what scientists live for.”
Not one to ignore a challenge, Joshua closed his eyes again. What Rachael had said about equal parts transmitting and not transmitting triggered something in his thinking. After a moment, he held up his index finger, as if signaling that he had an idea. “Try dividing the blue time by the yellow time in your calculator. I want to see what the ratio is between the two.”
“What are you expecting to find?”
“Indulge me.”
Rachael performed the calculation and gasped. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” she said, her eyes wide and glued to the small screen.
“What? What’s the ratio?”
Rachael looked up, astonishment in her eyes as she turned the phone in her hand so that Joshua could see the results for himself. “It’s pi. Exactly.”
“Pi? That can’t be. You must have hit a wrong key. Do it again.”
Rachael’s heart started beating faster as she complied and held the phone screen before Joshua’s eyes a second time.
“No, it’s pi, Josh. And you’re absolutely sure no natural phenomenon can cause this? Nature is full of unusual symmetries, such as fractals.”
Joshua’s heart also was beating quickly now. “Fractals faithfully duplicate geometric patterns on large and small scales, but this is about pure communication, not geometric patterns. No, nothing natural could cause this.”
He paused, as if experiencing an epiphany, and turned to Rachael, nodding.
The words echoed in Rachael’s mind. Nothing natural could cause this. “Then . . .” The impact of what Joshua had said suddenly struck her. “Are you telling me that some form of intelligence is trying to communicate with us using a spookyon?”
Joshua faced Rachael and spoke slowly and deliberately.
“I can’t think of any other reasonable explanation,” he said. “The repeating sequence of colors was to get our attention. It did—in a big way. It’s communication, pure and simple. And I think I know what the red is for.”
“Which is?”
“They—someone—is leaving us time to respond.”
“You lost me.”
Joshua typed as he spoke, his speech now accelerated, emotional. “Remember that entangled particles use half-duplex to communicate, which means they’re connected, but only one party at a time can send data. In this case, only one particle at a time can communicate its binary information—left or right, yellow or blue. Timing has to be factored in to allow two-way communication for both particles. It’s exactly what Henry and I did when sending signals to the Martian Rover. The red is essentially a time when they’re not sending.” Joshua turned to look at Rachael. “They’re leaving us time to send a reply.”
Rachael raised her eyebrows. The implications of Joshua’s last statement were slowly sinking in. “Whoever is on the other end of this long-distance call has refined the art of measurement to a high degree of sophistication in order to speak in mathematical constants that hinge on fractions of a second.”
“No argument there.”
“What kind of reply should we send?” Rachael asked.
“I have an idea. Get on the other computer over there and search the Internet for a mathematical constant.”
“Which one?”
Joshua casually waved his hand in the air, his system coursing with adrenaline. “Doesn’t matter. Something universal.”
“Okay,” Rachael said as she started typing on the other computer. “How about Avogadro’s number, which is 6.022 times ten to the twenty-third? It’s the number of atoms an element contains within a basic unit of measurement called a mole.”
“No, we can’t have exponents. Choose a simpler number—something between one and ten.”
“You said any number,” Rachael muttered under her breath as she resumed typing. “What about Euler’s number, 2.71828?”
“Perfect! I’m programming the detector during its red phase to hold left spin for a certain time period, and then to hold right spin for a certain time period. If they divide the two time periods, they should come up with Euler’s number. We’re sending a reply.”
“They? Who the hell are we talking to?”
“Beats the hell out of me, but we may be in the process of leapfrogging Project Breakthrough Starshot. My mouth is as dry as cotton.” He paused to take a sip of bottled water. “Okay, here goes,” he stated as he hit one last key.
The pattern of blue, yellow, and red ceased, replaced immediately by alternations between blue and yellow only.
“Whoa! That was awfully fast,” Rachael commented, crossing her arms and placing her hands on opposite shoulders, as if trying to warm herself from a chill. “I know this sounds silly, but it feels like Halloween. It’s dark down here, and I—I don’t know—I feel like we’re not alone, like that sphere is grinning at us like a jack-o-lantern. So why is the red gone?”
“Because we’re now transmitting during the red time. But look—their timing has changed as well,” Joshua said as he looked at his computer. “I believe Euler’s number got their attention. Their blue is reading 9.2554 and yellow is 5.7201.”
“I’m on it,” Rachael said, entering the new numbers into the calculator on her phone. “The ratio between those two numbers is . . . 1.6180. Let me look it up.” She went to the second computer and rapidly typed the ratio into a search engine. Though neither was consciously aware of it, Joshua and Rachael shared an enthusiasm and excitement that were in total sync.
“My God!” Rachael cried. “It’s phi, the Golden Ratio, which correlates with the Fibonacci Sequence of 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21—on and on. Add the two previous numbers to get the next. This is definitely a display of intelligence.”
“Agreed. No phenomenon I’m aware of in nature could mimic this. It’s not an aberration. No way.”
“Who could they be?”
“I haven’t a clue. Logically, it should be someone on Earth, but we’ve already ruled out that another lab’s particle could be entangled with the spookyon in sphere 1. We created it, and nobody else could have been part of what we did in the tokamak. This goes beyond anything I learned in grad school or my post doc research with Henry. It’s off the scale weird.”
“What do we do now?” asked Rachael.
“I don’t know,” Joshua said staring at the constantly blinking sphere. “This is completely out of my league.”
Rachael thought for a moment and then uncrossed her arms and approached the director. She intuitively sensed that her next suggestion was going to be summarily challenged.
“I know the perfect person for this. I have a friend who might be able to solve this riddle, or at least make sense of what we’re seeing. This is right up his alley.”
“What? You want to invite someone else down here?”
“No, I think we need to take the sphere and detector to him.”
“No,” Joshua shot back immediately. “I can’t allow the sphere to be removed from this facility. It’s too big a risk.”
“I see where you’re coming from,” Rachael admitted, “but you’re sitting on top of what might be the most important discovery in history. What if whoever is communicating with us decides to stop? This window of opportunity might close really fast.”
Joshua appeared anguished at the question that was posed. His mind was racing. “As usual, your logic is disquieting but correct.” Joshua stared blankly at the blinking sphere. “Alright then, but I hope your friend knows what he’s doing—and is discreet. I’m putting a lot of trust in you, Rachael.”
“I know, and I appreciate it. Let me give him a call.” Rachael held her phone in her right hand. “Shit! Airplane mode.”
“You wouldn’t get a signal down here even if it wasn’t on airplane mode.
Use the landline,” Joshua said pointing to the phone on his desk.
Rachael hurriedly picked up the landline and dialed her friend’s number. A brief moment elapsed before someone answered.
“Vinod? It’s Rachael. Hey, are you at home?” She paused. “Great, because I have something extraordinary to show you. Gonna blow your mind.” She covered the mouthpiece with the palm of her hand and looked at Joshua. “We’ll have to use his computers. He’s an information theorist and created an algorithm that is perfect for this.”
“Whatever,” Joshua said as he began to disconnect the sphere from the detector. He was reluctant to admit it, but he knew that he had no choice. Time was of the essence.
“I’ll be over in forty-five minutes,” Rachael said. “Have your latest language algorithm ready. I’ll explain later.”
Rachael hung up and watched Joshua, who was now standing. “Why disconnect the sphere from the detector?”
“They have to be disconnected when they go in the case. Besides, whoever is communicating with us might change the sequence again, and we’d lose valuable data they’re trying to send. Who knows where they’re trying to take this conversation? If we disconnect the sphere from the detector, they might deduce that we’re not transmitting or receiving. Might figure we’re deciding what to do next—and they’d be right.”
“Risky call, but okay.”
Joshua was still shaking a little from nervous excitement. As he moved towards the carrying case with the sphere, he tripped on the leg of the nearest table, stumbled, and began to fall. His hands instinctively lifted higher in an effort to protect the sphere. The sphere, however, slipped from his grasp and was thrown into the air as he fell to the ground. For agonizing seconds, the glass sphere moved in an arc, heading for the floor. Rachael lunged forward and dropped to one knee, extending her right hand, and caught the orb.
“Oh my God!” Joshua exclaimed from the floor. “Nice save! It would have been all over if that sphere would’ve hit the floor.”
“Definitely lucky,” Rachael said. “You okay?”
Joshua got up from the floor. “Embarrassed, but okay.”
Rachael handed the sphere to Joshua, who then positioned it and the detector snugly in the case before closing the lid.
“Ready?” Rachael asked.
“Yeah. I hope this guy is the best damn information theorist in the world. I’m taking a big risk here.”
“Apparently less of a risk than just walking across the floor,” Rachael said with a smile.
“Point taken.”
“Vinod’s the best. He’s perfect for this job. Now let’s haul ass.”
11
In the Beginning
Standing in the atrium, Rachael and Joshua saw that the rain was still slanting in silver lines across the campus. The parking lot was strewn with puddles where the elevation of the asphalt wasn’t uniform, each one a mirror of the dull gray clouds overhead.
“So much for sunny California,” Joshua said. “I feel like I’m living on the rain planet in Star Wars.”
“The case is waterproof, right?” Rachael asked.
“Yeah, but I was hoping to ride my Harley today, but that looks like a no-go.”
“My car again then,” Rachael replied. “Let’s make a run for it.” She grabbed Joshua’s hand, pulled him in the direction of the Prius, and broke into a sprint.
“Hop in,” Rachael said, hitting the unlock button on her key. They hurried into the car and shut the doors. Rachael glanced at Joshua. “Wait—we may be talking to ET, and you were actually thinking of transporting the sphere on your motorcycle if the weather was dry?”
“I’m awfully good on a bike,” Joshua replied with confidence. “But you’re right, not my best idea.”
“No Harleys or land speeders from Star Wars today—even if you’re good at it.”
Joshua buckled his seatbelt and thought that the very outgoing reporter had an answer for everything, usually laced with wit and insight. He’d only known her for two days, but he was starting to enjoy her company.
Rachael brushed away strands of wet hair with her left hand as she turned the key in the ignition with her right and pulled out of the parking lot. Joshua wiped the moisture from his face with the back of his hand, the case wedged between his feet in the passenger well. Rachael navigated through the Berkeley traffic and accelerated quickly as she steered toward the Interstate on-ramp. They both sat quietly, lost in their own thoughts of what had just transpired. Rachael finally broke the silence.
“Josh, I’m trying to figure out how the spookyon in that case could be entangled with some intelligence. How could this even be possible?”
“I have no idea,” Joshua replied. “It’s a mystery to me.”
“You told me that Henry suspected spookyons existed because of a faint particle signature he noticed in other tokamaks,” Rachael said as she eased the car up to a safe cruising speed of sixty miles an hour since they were now traversing the bay bridge, and the rain had grown heavier. She switched the wipers to high, but they still had difficulty clearing the heavy rain from the windshield.
“It’s what spurred his quest for what he considered the Holy Grail of subatomic particles. And it’s why there’s a research center named after him. There’s a granite block in front of the atrium with an engraving that looks like an oversized comma. The squiggle is a representation of the particle’s signature, which became the logo for the center.”
“Spookyons are artificial particles that you create in your tokamak, right?”
“That’s right. Henry conjured them up with mathematical calculations from what he had observed. What’s your point?”
“I’m wondering if there can be a natural source of spookyons. There are far greater energies in the universe—outright explosions—that cause nuclei to smash into one another. It logically follows that there could be natural phenomena that can create spookyons.”
“I suppose,” Joshua replied. “My thoughts never really went down that avenue since Henry focused on creating them in the lab. Even if natural sources of spookyons exist, the closest star, Proxima Centauri is twenty years away using Hawking’s theoretical ideas. How would we ever have been able to capture some random spookyon in distant interstellar space?”
“Then make it a thought experiment,” Rachael continued. “What kind of event would produce a spookyon if you could indeed magically reach out and grab one? Let’s say the universe is your oyster, and all you have to do is be in the right location.”
Joshua pondered her question for a while. “For starters, any natural event that could create spookyons would have to be one of cosmic proportions and yield enormous amounts of energy.”
“Such as?” Rachael queried.
“I guess a nova or supernova could theoretically generate enough energy to create spookyons.”
“But stars are mostly hydrogen and helium with only trace amounts of heavier elements. Don’t you need heavy elements to create spookyons?” Rachael asked.
“Not necessarily,” Joshua replied. “It depends on the energy level. According to Henry’s calculations, the higher the energy level of the plasma, the less massive the nuclei have to be. We can only generate a relatively small level of energy in our plasma, so we have to use heavier elements. At the energy levels of a supernova, which also creates heavy elements, by the way, I suppose spookyons could form from lighter elements.”
“So could our spookyon have been formed in a supernova?” Rachael asked.
“Possible, but highly unlikely,” Joshua answered. “Supernovas are relatively rare events given that the average life of a star is quite long. Spookyons would be around, but not very plentiful, so it would be highly unlikely that we would capture one even if we had a mechanism to do so.”
“But it’s theoretically possible that they could be created naturally?”
“Yeah, but everything is theoretically possible if you appeal to quantum mechanics. It’s the multiverse theory. Everything
that can happen does happen. All possibilities branch off into infinite versions of reality. So yes—maybe there are naturally-occurring spookyons, but once again you’re overlooking that spookyons have to be created at the same place and at the same time in order to become entangled. For there to be a significant number of entangled spookyons—enough, in fact, that we would randomly capture one—would mean that there has to be an enormous number of them. I don’t think, given the rarity of supernovas, it would be probable that we would have captured one.”
“In essence what you’re saying is that we need a high-energy event that could simultaneously cause the production of a large number of spookyons,” Rachael summarized.
“Correct, and only—” Joshua stopped as a thought entered his mind. His face became ashen, and his mouth was slightly agape. He turned and looked at Rachael and then the case on the floor of the automobile.
“And only what?” she asked.
Joshua didn’t answer. His mind was occupied with an idea reverberating in his mind and what its repercussions might be.
“What? What is it?” Rachael asked again.
Joshua finally responded, “Only one thing would have almost endless energy, something that would account for the creation of entangled particles plentiful enough to be spread uniformly throughout the universe.”
“What are you referring to? Quasars—the massive black holes at the center of galaxies?”
Joshua shook his head. “No, not things, plural. I’m talking about an event—a single event.” He turned to look directly at Rachael. “The Big Bang.”
For several seconds there was no sound in the car except raindrops hitting the windshield as the car’s wipers rhythmically brushed them away. Rachael, processing her passenger’s last statement, merely mouthed the words: Big Bang.
“Wait a minute,” she said. “Are you telling me that spookyons may have been around since the beginning of the universe—that they may have been created by the Big Bang?”
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