Proxima Rising

by Brandon Q Morris

  What will Adam and Eve say about it? I am very curious. While I have described the transmitter to them, my words seemed insufficient to me.

  Within half an hour the candle flame turns into a bright glow such as might come from a burning torch. The monitor displays an elongated oval, perhaps two meters high, that seems to hover above the ground.

  “Is it floating?” Eve asks.

  Adam points at the gap between the ground and the oval. “Zoom in on this area so it fills the entire screen.”

  Without the blinding brightness of the oval it becomes clear that there is a connection to the ground, but it radiates much less heat. I readjust the image to show the entire object. Something is bothering me. “There is something wrong here. You notice anything?” I am not sure myself what I am looking for. The whole scene does not feel dangerous, just strange.

  Eve zooms in again and focuses on the transition between the brightness of the oval and the darkness of the water it swims in.

  “Do you mean this?” she says.

  Of course. The water is too dark. It should absorb much more heat from direct contact with the heat source. What we are seeing here would be normal in a vacuum, but on the ocean floor?

  “The source seems to be very well shielded against its environment,” Adam says. “But what’s so unusual about that?”

  “The fact that we can see it so brightly,” Eve says, anticipating my own explanation. “The shielding seems to work only for thermal conduction but not for infrared radiation, which we see as brightness here.”

  “And what’s strange about that?”

  “Thermal conduction works via direct contact,” Eve says, really getting into it. “The particles transfer heat by colliding with each other. While radiation can be blocked quite well by using absorbent or reflective materials, that is more complicated with thermal conduction.”

  “You would have to prevent contact between the source and the outside.”

  “Yes, Adam. But regardless of which material you use for it, that material itself is made up of particles that collide and can conduct heat.”

  “Unless there is a layer containing nothing,” Adam says.

  “A vacuum. Exactly. Without particles there is no thermal conduction. Marchenko, can you calculate for us how thick this layer would have to be here?”

  “No,” I reply. “I am missing too much data to do that. We have to get more precise measurements for the transmitter.”

  A tense silence reigns over the next few kilometers. On the radar display, the transmitter—or what we assume to be one—only appears during the last minute. It is hard to say whether it was deliberately designed this way, since the delicate construction might be responsible for the small radar signature.

  Valkyrie’s searchlights shine on the dish-shaped object. Adam and Eve marvel at it on the monitor. The instruments indicate that the dish is 15.7 meters wide. It sits horizontally on the bottom and no mountings can be seen. In the shine of the searchlights the material appears thin and bright, like porcelain. A mast rises from the center of the dish. It has a thickness of about half a centimeter. We cannot measure this more precisely from inside the vessel, particularly as the mast doesn’t seem to be evenly shaped. There are small bulges at regular intervals, the function of which is not identifiable.

  Most impressively, spheres circle the mast within the radius of the dish. They are concentrated on the side from which we approached the transmitter. At first glance they seem to be made of the same material as the dish. These are precisely-shaped spheres, each with a diameter of 98 centimeters, floating in the water at different heights and distances from the pylon.

  Adam points at one of the spheres. “I wonder what their function is.”

  “I have no idea,” I reply. “Maybe they are ornaments? On...” I start, and then swallow the next word before starting over. “Elsewhere, some structures are just built for esthetic reasons.”

  “The dish alone shows that the inhabitants value beauty,” Eve postulates.

  “Or valued it,” Adam adds, and Eve nods.

  “Sometimes the beauty of an object derives from its purpose,” I say, “but you will have to get out to answer the question.”

  I have to admit I envy the two of them right now. If I only had a body! I wish to myself. While I can see the transmitter on all wavelengths, only Adam and Eve are able to touch it.

  “Done!” Adam is already wearing his pressure suit.

  Eve shuts down her terminal just to be on the safe side. While the hardware is supposed to be waterproof, caution can’t hurt. We have to flood Valkyrie again to allow the two of them to exit. Hopefully for the second-to-last time.

  Eve signals by giving a thumbs-up after she has donned her suit. I let the water flow in, and Valkyrie sinks to the bottom. Then Adam opens the hatch. I imagine the blackness he sees above, and in the camera image I watch him push off and swim outside. Eve follows him, and I accompany both of them with the searchlights. They are real naturals at this. I never managed to give them practical swimming lessons, but they move elegantly toward their destination. Near the dish they let themselves sink to the bottom.

  “Wow,” Eve says. “From close up it is even more impressive than on the screen.”

  Adam carefully touches the edge of the dish, which is about at chest height. I wonder whether I should stop him, but he probably would not listen to me anyways. Nothing can happen, I think, as the dish will hardly give him an electric shock! In slow motion Adam first closes the fingers of his right hand around the edge, then those of his left. Nothing happens. All of a sudden he jerks violently.

  “Hey!” Again I yell, “Hey!” not knowing what else to do in my panic. From here I cannot help him. Eve pulls on Adam’s shoulder, but I already hear his laughter via helmet radio.

  “You! You... ” I shout. “That wasn’t funny at all! Don’t you dare do that again!” I am beside myself and feel my heart beating wildly, even though I don’t have one... anymore.

  “And if I do? Don’t be so touchy,” Adam replies.

  Eve also reaches for the edge of the dish and pulls herself up. I realize what she is planning to do. A bit further inward, and perhaps a meter and a half above her, floats one of these strange spheres. She goes directly for it, arms outstretched. One hand touches the sphere first, then the other. Due to her momentum, the sphere is pushed slightly to the side. I record the exact position. What happens next is something I already suspected. The sphere slowly moves back to its original position, pulling Eve along. Considering that it looks perfectly round, and seems to have no propulsion system, that is a phenomenal achievement. In addition, the sphere must account for Eve’s weight while moving back.

  “Did you see that?” I ask. I'm not sure whether the movement could be seen well from below.

  “Yes, very distinctly. The sphere moved back after I pushed it out of position,” Eve replies.

  “One moment,” Adam says. He turns aside, obviously aiming for another sphere. He pushes off much more strongly than Eve did, also moving his feet. He hits the sphere perfectly and drags it along. One meter, two meters, but he is already slowing. The sphere decelerates, brings both of them to a stop, and then they float back to the sphere’s original position.

  “Not bad,” Adam says. “I wonder what else this sphere can do. Should we try to kidnap it using Valkyrie?”

  “I don’t know,” Eve replies. “This is alien technology we don’t really understand. We’d better not stress it to its limits.”

  Strictly speaking, we shouldn’t have touched anything, I think, but how else are we supposed to find out anything?

  “The positions of the spheres must be very important to the aliens,” Adam says. “This means they are probably more than just decorations. You were here before, Marchenko. Has anything changed?”

  “I did not record the exact positions, but I remember one particular feature concerning the placement of the spheres. If you measure their distances, you get a geometric prog
ression.” I check the numbers again. No, that is not correct. “Sorry, it’s not a single progression. There are several. One might assume that the spheres are arranged in circles around the pylon. There are three circles. The distances between the spheres of a particular circle form one progression. For the innermost circle, for example, this is 1, 1.5, 1.75, 1.875...”

  “And what does this mean?”

  “I don’t know, Adam. It must have meant something to the builders of the transmitter.”

  Now Eve moves from sphere to sphere. She measures each of the distances again using the laser rangefinder from her tool belt. “Marchenko,” she says, "did you notice all these progressions converge on a natural number?”

  I calculate the limits of the three progressions. And indeed they all are fixed values, rather than infinity. That is a strange coincidence. Why didn’t I notice this earlier? “Correct,” I confirm. “But does this mean something?”

  On the camera image I see Eve shrug her shoulders.

  “It is probably due to the fact that mathematics is universal,” I say. “One plus one is always two, on any planet and in any language.”

  “Too bad,” Eve says. “I was hoping we had discovered some kind of code.”

  “Or at least identified its purpose,” Adam adds.

  “Concerning its purpose, we might have a chance to find that out. Please describe the material of the sphere, as well as that of the central mast.”

  “One second. I have an analyzer,” Adam says as he pulls a device that looks like a stubby pistol from his tool bag. The device bombards an object in as many wavelengths as possible and uses the reflected radiation to find out what it is made of. Adam starts with the sphere he is still holding on to. He pushes a few buttons, mumbles something incomprehensible, and then swims down to the transmitter dish. After repeating the procedure he compares the data.

  “It is ceramic,” he says, “so our first impression concerning porcelain wasn’t far off.”

  “What are its components?” I ask.

  “Just a sec, I am going to send you the data.”

  The analysis appears in my memory unit. “Magnesium, calcium, titanium, cobalt,” I read out loud. “What does that remind you of?”

  “Could be some high-temperature superconductor,” Adam says.

  “Perhaps,” I reply, “but unfortunately we only get integrated values instead of an exact structural analysis. There might be several layers of different materials, or a thick layer in which all of these components occur. Those would be two completely different scenarios.”

  “Couldn’t we find out more inside the station?” Eve asks. “Messenger had a scanning tunneling microscope.”

  “There is probably something like that in the station, Eve, but for that purpose we would need to extract some material and take it with us.”

  “Should I break something off?” Adam asks, acting as if he were about to hammer the analyzer against the edge of the dish.

  “Don’t you dare!” I warn him, though I know he couldn’t be that irrational.

  “The sensor is much too pretty to do that,” Eve says. “And what kind of impression would we make if we come here from far away and start smashing their china?”

  “Never mind,” Adam says. He pushes himself off again and swims toward the central mast.

  Oh yes, I think, we haven’t examined it closely yet.

  Adam stretches out his arms in front of him. I am watching him through the camera. He is just about to grab the mast when his hand is suddenly stopped. Adam tries it a second time, but once more he can’t get closer than arm’s length.

  “What is going on?” he yells, and turns toward the Valkyrie as if I could give him an explanation. Eve now also moves toward the mast. Does she think Adam is playing another trick on us? But she is also unable to touch the mast.

  “Remember the infrared images?” I ask.

  “I’ve been thinking of that,” Eve says. “The thermal conduction insulation is probably located inside this layer. But what exactly does it contain, and why is it invisible?”

  “Adam, why don’t you try...” I don’t even have to finish the sentence. Adam takes the analyzer and aims it at the mast underneath the boundary layer. Silence reigns for several seconds. Time seems to stretch on. The device takes much longer than usual for its task. Adam stares intently at its display, though I know there won’t be anything to see there except for the message, ‘Please wait.’

  “The numbers are puzzling,” Adam says after precisely one minute and 37 seconds.

  “How puzzling?”

  “I am sending them to you.” He pushes a button.

  Now I see the data. Adam has not exaggerated. “The numbers really are baffling,” I say in agreement.

  “In what way? Don’t leave me hanging here,” Eve says.

  “The analyzer found nothing,” I say.

  “Nothing? But there certainly is something there. You can see it, and it affects the thermal conduction, doesn’t it?” asks Eve.

  “The device functions by examining reflected radiation at different wavelengths. But it didn’t find any. Either the radiation is completely absorbed by the material around the mast, or it is passed through just as completely,” I surmise.

  “The first case is highly improbable,” Eve says. “Otherwise we wouldn’t have been able to detect the heat signature of the transmitter so clearly from far away. So the material must let anything coming from the inside pass through.”

  “Correct,” I say in agreement. “It is much more likely that any radiation can pass through. We can test this with an experiment. Adam, set the analyzer to the maximum level and repeat the analysis.”

  “What good will that do?” he asks.

  “If all radiation truly goes through the material, it would hit normal materials behind it and be partially reflected by them. This should appear as a background signal in the analysis. We need maximum performance for this. Otherwise the signal would stay below the detection threshold. Normally, the analyzer is not supposed to measure the environment as well.”

  “Okay.” Adam holds the analyzer gun as close to the mast as possible. We wait. This time, the procedure finishes faster. The device might have interpreted the background reflections as a measurement signal. Adam looks at what is happening on the display.

  “Your theory is correct, Marchenko,” he says. “Water, silicon dioxide, various salts, exactly what one would expect of an ocean.” He presses the send button again. “So we know the stuff in there does not shield from radiation. Not one bit. Therefore it could only be a vacuum, or something close to it, right?”

  Eve pushes off and swims upward along the mast, her arms outstretched so she can feel the invisible boundary. She reaches the top.

  “The cover reaches all the way up here and is closed at the tip,” she reports via radio.

  “I don’t understand,” Adam says. “That doesn’t make any sense! A transmitter that does not send, but uses energy? That’s totally inefficient! Why should somebody construct something like that, and even built it to last an eternity?”

  It can’t be denied that the transmitter consumes energy, because it must somehow receive the heat it then radiates. Where does it come from? That is another question for which we do not yet have an answer.

  “Perhaps it is not a transmitter, but rather a receiver that needs energy while waiting for a signal?”

  Eve’s idea cannot be easily dismissed. A switched-on radio uses electricity, even during times when no programming can be heard. “And the spheres?” I ask.

  “Perhaps they serve to adjust the frequency. Like tensioning or pressing guitar strings.”

  Maybe Eve is on to something here. I am not quite convinced, but I feel we are getting closer to an answer.

  “You mean the spheres are like knobs on a radio receiver, adjusting it to a particular frequency?” Adam asks with a laugh. “That sounds so crazy it might actually turn out to be true. But who is supposed to turn them?”r />
  “Maybe they are not meant to be changed. Then the receiver would be tuned to a fixed frequency, set to stay that way. That would explain why the spheres obediently return to their original positions,” Eve says as she slowly sinks down from the top of the mast.

  “I think we are wrong concerning the type of receiver. We are thinking too much in terms of Earth.”

  “What do you mean, Marchenko? I definitely don’t think in terms of Earth,” Adam says.

  “I wanted to say we are thinking in categories like radio communication. What if this has nothing to do with radio waves? Perhaps not even electromagnetic waves, but something altogether different?”

  “You are considering something like sound waves? Not a bad idea,” Eve says. “Sound waves are pressure waves within a medium. If I change the medium—meaning the water—by means of the spheres, that would be a kind of frequency modulation.”

  “But sound waves don’t make sense, because the range is much too short. The antenna is obviously aimed upward. Sound waves would stop at the vacuum and not get past the atmosphere.”

  “The direction of the antenna, Marchenko, that is an important clue. It doesn’t look like it can be changed, so during the orbit of Proxima b around its sun it can reach only certain targets,” Eve says.

  Or be reached by certain targets, I think. I simulate the course of the planet around its central star. I know the position of the antenna, as it sits vertically to the round exterior of the planet. Which planets or stars could it possibly send a signal to or receive one from, at least once a year? My program routines take a while to go through the entire star catalog. Finally, I get a result.

  “Alpha Centauri,” I say.

  “The neighboring star?” Adam asks.

  “Yes, what else?” Eve says. “It is obvious it had to be something nearby. Perhaps that is the star they escaped to?”

  “I don’t know... It could just be a coincidence,” I say.

  “It certainly is,” Adam says. “Just take a look at the dimensions of the antenna. It has a diameter of just under 16 meters, and is even under water. That would never be sufficient to reach Alpha Centauri with a clear signal that could be distinguished from background noise.”