New Eden

by Kishore Tipirneni

  As far as he was concerned, the existence of entangled spookyons totally validated his theorem. At least one kind of subatomic particle could communicate in a highly sophisticated manner, and if that wasn’t proof of a naturally-occurring information network, then Ronnie Van Zant of Lynyrd Skynyrd hadn’t written “Free Bird.”

  Communicating with extraterrestrials was way beyond cool. Hell, it was beyond comprehension itself, and yet here he was, about to interface his algorithm if all went well with a spookyon that would shatter mankind’s beliefs about physics and life in the universe. As icing on the cake, it would corroborate years of his own research into information theory and prove beyond any reasonable doubt that communication was embedded in the fabric of the universe as intricately as a thread woven into a Medieval tapestry.

  His sound system moved on to “Layla” by Derek and the Dominos. Layla was programmed to play its namesake at least once every four hours because . . . well, for obvious reasons to anyone who knew him. As lines of code appeared on his three computer screens, he pushed back his rolling desk chair and glanced at a bookshelf in the corner where a picture of his Derek had been placed in a silver frame. He still missed his cherished boyfriend, and the pain of losing him to a hang-gliding accident two years earlier was still palpable. One year younger than Vinod, Derek had had an upper-class British accent even though he’d grown up in Liverpool. They had met at SETI, where the two had made a bet as to when the first signal from intelligent life would be received from deep space. Derek had predicted that the signal would come on the narrow-width hydrogen band within ten years. Vinod hadn’t bought into such an optimistic scenario, claiming that a conventional radio signal would never arrive since any extraterrestrial civilization would likely have advanced far beyond radio transmission technology soon after their atomic and digital ages, assuming they survived what mankind was now wrestling with: real estate wars that threatened to destroy the entire planet with nuclear weapons. If they were wise enough to master their technology, they would almost certainly have other ways of transmitting information that were infinitely more sophisticated than using radio telescopes.

  Vinod and Derek decided that the winner of the bet would pay for a week-long vacation to the Bahamas. Vinod hadn’t intended to wait the full ten years to see who won the wager, of course. He’d made hotel reservations and bought airline tickets to Nassau a few days before Derek’s hang-gliding accident.

  “It would have been a great getaway, dude,” Vinod said wistfully while gazing at the photograph. “Sorry. I meant to say Sir Derek.” The appellation had been used to tease his significant other about what Vinod regarded as his affectatious manner of speech even though he knew it was genuine since his parents were from London. “And I wish you were here for what might be my crowning achievement. You see, Rach brought this guy over who—” Vinod paused, choking back sentiment. “Never mind. Tell ya later. I’m on a deadline. But just between you and me, I would’ve won the bet.”

  Believing that no signal was forthcoming, Vinod had resigned from SETI, and as much as he’d respected his colleagues, it had been the right choice, for he could now devote his energy full-time to information theory and all of its various applications. The code that he was most partial to was the one his friends wanted to run that very night, an algorithm that would progress from mathematical constants to the ability, via language, to learn not just that aliens existed, but to discover their cultural identity, an aspiration that the astronomers at SETI dared not dream of. His heart was beating so fast that he got up, went to the kitchen, and grabbed a cold bottle of Dos Equis.

  “I’m the most interesting man in the world,” he said, twisting off the cap and taking a large swig, head tilted back, before returning to his study. “When aliens want to talk to someone on Earth, they speak me, Vinod Bhakti. You’ll have to get over it, Zuckerberg. Your platform isn’t the only one people use to network.”

  Vinod glanced at the screen as data continued to stream, waiting for the compiler to finish compiling his latest code.

  As he drank his beer, his thoughts drifted to the young man Rachael had brought to his inner sanctum. Joshua Andrews seemed an affable enough young man, he thought. But Rachael was always so absorbed in her work that he wondered if she noticed how Joshua looked at her—and how often. Probably so since nothing escaped the scrutiny of one of the rising stars at Scientific American. She could have made far more money, he laughed, as a private investigator since her powers of observation and perception were unrivalled. She absorbed information almost as fast as the Bradley Cooper character in Limitless. If she ever married, heaven help the guy if he ran around on her since she’d discern it in a heartbeat—assuming he, Vinod, didn’t kill the man first.

  Vinod wanted to know more about the good doctor since he was very protective of Rachael, who he regarded as a little sister. After a five-year friendship, the depth of which he’d never experienced, he’d do anything for her. The task at hand was proof. She’d shown up at the door with an outrageous story and a man in tow who carried a glass sphere that he claimed had communicated with someone or something at an unknown location in the universe. It was something that he would expect to hear on Art Bell’s late-night radio program Dark Matter, a cult broadcast for insomniacs, eccentrics, and lonely truck drivers who’d seen lights in the sky. If Joshua would have shown up alone, Vinod would have slammed the door in his face. But if Rachael vouched for him, that was good enough for him.

  It was back to work as Vinod instructed Layla to play Long Distance Voyager by the Moody Blues. It seemed entirely appropriate, both because of the album title and one of its tracks: “Veteran Cosmic Rocker.” That was him, wasn’t it?

  He’d been hurriedly writing lines of code basic to any interface program, the kind of protocols necessary for a computer to connect to almost any external piece of hardware—screen, printer, keyboard, disk drives—the whole array of devices that could conceivably be called upon to receive communication from a conventional computer. Shooting a quick look at the digital clock on his screen, he saw forty minutes had passed, and he knew he would need to write more code specific to the detector, and quickly. But first he would have to connect the detector to his computer.

  “Ya know,” Vinod said with frustration, “the doc there could have told me how to hook this damn thing up before he went drooling out the door behind Rachael. Typical academic.”

  He inspected the detector and found the Thunderbolt 3 interface cable. There was no power cable connection on the detector, so he figured that the device must be bus-powered. “This thing looks expensive, so I hope I don’t fry it,” Vinod said aloud as he connected the cable to his computer. The LEDs on the detector cycled once through red, yellow, blue, and green and then went dark. Must have run a boot-up self-check he thought. Vinod checked the Thunderbolt bus on his computer and saw that a new device had been detected. The vendor name listed was BPRC – UCB and the device name was listed as PARTICLE SPIN DETECTOR. Yup, that’s the right device. Now I need low-level access.

  The detector communicated at the bit level. It used the spin direction of a spookyon to represents bits. Vinod would need direct access to the detection and the locking of bits in the detector in order to interface with his algorithm. He pulled up a pinout diagram for Thunderbolt 3 from an Internet search on his computer. The diagram showed that there were four high speed transmit pins, along with four high speed receive pins. He started testing the transmit pins one by one. When he signaled the second transmit pin, the detector lit up blue. Nice, Found one. Signaling the fourth transmit pin caused the detector to light up yellow. Okay, got the second one.

  Having found the transmission pins, he started polling the reception pins. Again, pins two and four seemed to be live. When he had polled these, the LEDs glowed red. He figured that they were glowing red since there was no sphere in the detector, but if the sphere was in place, he could read data off of these pins. Now that he had low-level access to the detector, he needed
to code a more efficient communication mode.

  Vinod took a long sip of the Dos Equis and then exclaimed, “I need to teach these guys about packets.”

  The aliens were using timing of the spin changes to communicate. Vinod realized that time would continue to be a factor in their transmission protocol, but he needed to make a significant change. Presently, transmission and reception were given equal time. Each party had a defined amount of time in which they could send and receive information. Vinod knew that he needed to change this. His algorithm was created to teach the other party English, not to learn their language so therefore more data needed to be sent rather than being received. The easiest way to accomplish this was to use packets, small blocks of data with additional information at the beginning called headers, which indicated how many bits were in the packet.

  Vinod decided that he would start by sending test packets of varying numbers of bits. The bits themselves would be sent at one bit for each time interval. The packets would only contain zeros except the first eight bits of the packet, which would be the packet header. The header was a number in binary that represented the total number of bits in the packet. These beings must be intelligent enough to figure out this highly simplified packet structure. He would continue to send the varying length packets until he got a response back in the same format. At this point, he would know that the aliens had understood his packet protocol.

  Once the packet protocol was established, he would start shortening the time interval needed for each bit transmission in the packet in order to increase bandwidth. I wonder how short I can make the time interval? What’s the ultimate bandwidth of spookyons? Finally, he would start increasing the size of the packet header such that the total length of the packet could be enlarged. With an eight-bit header, packets could be only 255 bits long. Bits. Why bits? Surely I should be able to teach them about bytes. He modified his code so that the number sent in the header represented the number of bits sent divided by eight, and he also made sure that the number of bits sent was always a multiple of eight. There—now they should know about bytes.

  “Sometimes I simply amaze myself—not!” he exclaimed after he finished writing the packet protocol. “Now then, the final step is to interface the detector’s low-level code with my algorithm.”

  After a few minutes, he seemed satisfied. “Okay. I think it’s going to work. Vinod’s Theorem rides again! Maybe.”

  The sphere was another piece of the puzzle altogether. The detector seemed to like his style of programming, but would the spookyon or the metal cap on top of the glass that held it? He noticed that there were nodes inside the circular band on the detector that obviously represented connection points to the sphere that fit snugly into the black rim. Hopefully, the sphere was synced perfectly with the detector—and why wouldn’t it be? Vinod settled back and looked at his watch.

  “One hour and forty-seven minutes. Engineering to bridge. Warp drive is online, captain. Wanna talk with some Vulcans . . . or will they be more like Klingons? Now that’s unsettling.” He finished his beer, placed the bottle on the table, and said, “Who the hell cares? They’re extraterrestrials!”

  He supposed Rachael and Joshua would be back soon. They were, after all, in a hurry to make a phone call.

  14

  Cairns

  The rain had subsided to a steady drizzle when Rachael pulled into the small lot adjacent to Angelino’s Italian Restaurant. Joshua carried the case with the sphere inside, which drew more than a few stares from the hostess and those waiting for a table, but he wasn’t going to let a primordial particle created by the Big Bang—one with extraordinary capabilities—sit in an empty car while he ate dinner. Under normal circumstances, the sphere would have been confined to the Bowman Particle Research Center and protected by more than a few security protocols.

  The restaurant was surprisingly busy given the constant rain inundating the area for two days, but Rachael and Joshua were shown to a table for two at the rear that afforded them some degree of privacy even though it was too close to the kitchen for Joshua’s liking. There was, he claimed, too much foot traffic near the carrying case. The establishment nevertheless had more than its share of Old-World charm and atmosphere, unlike more modern Italian restaurants. The light was low, and the mandatory candles sat in small glass bowls on red tablecloths. The couple was given menus and glasses of red wine by Gianni, their waiter.

  “Pretty nice place,” Joshua remarked, glancing at the pictures on the walls. The renderings were rough but appealing sketches of St. Mark’s Cathedral, the canals of Venice, the Vatican, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, and a stretch of the Amalfi Coast. “A bit stereotypical, though.”

  “Like I told you,” Rachael said, “Vinod is a combination of old school and new. He’s on the cutting edge of technology, but he likes vintage items. As you’ve already seen—and heard—he’s passionate about classic rock, and he only collects vinyl albums. His taste in stores, clothes, restaurants, and the like is no different. I really like that about him. He doesn’t blindly follow tradition. He’s very much an individualist.”

  “Then I can see why the two of you get on so well,” Joshua said as he nudged the case between his feet under the table, where he’d be able to feel it the entire time they were seated. “You’re nothing if not an individualist.”

  “I’ll take that as a compliment.” Rachael casually surveyed her surroundings with a turn of her head. “A far cry from the bat cave and scientific instruments that, if the truth be told, are about as farfetched as anything I ever saw in a Batman film. Pretty nice place.”

  “This place is definitely retro, but I suppose we both needed a change in scenery and a chance to decompress for a while.”

  “Abbondanza,” Rachael said, lifting her glass. “What shall we toast to?”

  “I’d envisioned uncorking a bottle of champagne with my staff this evening after creating a pair of entangled spookyons, but that obviously didn’t come to pass. I guess we have something far more significant to consider, however.” He looked around guardedly at the surrounding tables, wary of those who might be able to overhear his remarks. “We just discovered alien life,” he whispered. “How cool is that?”

  “It’s definitely been a wild ride for the past several hours,” Rachael admitted.

  “Say, why don’t we raise a glass to Henry, without whom none of this would have come to pass?” Joshua suggested.

  “To Henry,” Rachael agreed. “God rest his soul.”

  “To Henry.”

  The pair touched glasses and sipped their chianti.

  Joshua did a double-take. His eyes drifted to a small purple and red tattoo of a Byzantine cross on Rachael’s right wrist. “So, are you a believer?” he asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I noticed the cross tattoo on your wrist.”

  Rachael lifted up her forearm and twisted it left and right so that the cross was more visible to both of them. “Not many people notice it.”

  “It’s not just reporters who are observant,” Joshua said. “You can’t conduct good experiments without observing and recording data.”

  “Touché. And yes, I am indeed a believer. Does that surprise you?”

  Joshua raised his eyebrows. “As a matter of fact, it does. I don’t know many scientists—or science writers, for that matter—who are very religious these days. Quite the opposite, in fact.”

  “I suppose that’s true. People like Sagan and Hawking were strict rationalists. So are Dawkins and deGrasse Tyson, and they speak for a large segment of the population.”

  Gianni—a thin young man with a black moustache—interrupted the conversation to take their orders. Rachael selected chicken cacciatore; Joshua chose pasta with marinara sauce.

  “I assume then that you’re not religious,” Rachael said after their menus had been collected by Gianni.

  “Not really. Disappointed?”

  “People are who they are. I don’t judge since that’s in the inst
ruction manual for believers.”

  Joshua, more relaxed than he’d been for the past two days, laughed at the allusion to the Bible.

  “Speaking of religion,” Rachael said, “how can someone with the last name of Andrews lay claim to being Jewish? There’s got to be a story there somewhere.”

  “Not much of one, really. My dad was Christian—Protestant, to be exact, although he didn’t attend church—and my mother was Jewish. She took her faith quite seriously, so my parents agreed to raise me Jewish. I was bar mitzvahed and everything, but I’m non-practicing. My mother is a fabulous person, and I respect her beliefs, but the Hebrew lessons with our rabbi were like a vaccination that didn’t take.”

  “Then you’re an atheist?” Rachael asked.

  Joshua thought about the question as he watched the hostess seat a nearby couple while waiters and waitresses passed, large platters of food balanced on their upraised palms. In the background was the clanking sound of cutlery and glasses.

  “Hmm. More of an agnostic, I’d say. As a scientist, I need proof of whatever lies beyond the here and now, assuming there is anything.”

  Rachael took a sip of wine, leaned forward, and clasped her hands on the table. “Agnostic? That’s such a total copout.”

  Joshua was taken aback by the candor of his dinner companion despite his growing familiarity with her outspoken manner. “Really now. Why?”

  Rachael looked at Joshua’s soft brown eyes—they were very alluring—as she explained her statement. “Because atheists are firm in their belief that there’s no God. Believers absolutely believe in God. Agnostics, on the other hand, sit on the fence, not wanting to make a decision either way.”