Transmission

by Morgan Rice

  She led Kevin and his mother through the institute’s corridors, and to be honest, Kevin had thought that it would be more exciting. He’d thought it would look less like an office block.

  “I thought there would be big telescopes here, or labs full of equipment for testing things from space,” Kevin said.

  Dr. Levin shrugged. “We have some laboratories, and we do test materials occasionally, but we don’t have any telescopes. We are working with Berkeley to build a dedicated radio telescope array though.”

  “Then how do you look for aliens?” Kevin’s mother said. It seemed that she was as surprised by the lack of giant telescopes and listening equipment as Kevin was.

  “We work with other people,” Dr. Levin said. “We ask for, or hire, time on telescopes and sensor arrays. We work with data from NASA. We put in suggestions to them about places they might want to look, or kinds of data they might want to try to gather. I’m sorry, I know it isn’t as exciting as people sometimes think. Here, come with me.”

  She led the way to an office that at least looked a bit more interesting than some of the other spaces. It held a couple of computers, a lot of posters relating to the solar system, a few magazines that had mentioned SETI’s work, and some furniture that looked as though it had been especially designed to be ergonomic, stylish, and about as comfortable as a brick.

  “Let me show you some of the things we’ve been working on,” Dr. Levin said, calling up images of large telescope arrays in the process of being built. “We’re looking at developing radio telescope arrays that might be powerful enough to pick up ambient radio frequencies rather than just waiting for someone to target us with a signal.”

  “But I think someone is signaling to us,” Kevin said. He needed to get her to understand.

  Dr. Levin paused. “I was going to ask if you’re referring to the theory that what some people think are high-frequency radio bursts from a pulsar might be intelligible signals, but you’re not, are you?”

  “I’ve been seeing things,” Kevin said. He tried to explain about the visions. He told her about the landscape he’d seen, and about the countdown.

  “I see,” Dr. Levin said. “But I have to ask something, Kevin. You understand that SETI is about exploring this issue with science, seeking real proof? It’s the only way that we can do this and know that anything we find is real. So, I have to ask you, Kevin, how do you know what you’re seeing is real?”

  Kevin had already managed to answer that with Luna. “I saw some numbers. When I looked them up, it turned out that they were the location for something called the Trappist 1 system.”

  “One of the more promising candidates for alien life,” Dr. Levin said. “Even so, Kevin, do you understand my problem now? You say you saw these numbers, and I believe you, but maybe you saw them because you’d read them somewhere. I can’t redirect SETI’s resources based on that, and in any case, I’m not sure what else we could do when it comes to the Trappist 1 system. For something like that, I would need something new. Something you couldn’t have gotten another way.”

  Kevin could tell that she was trying to let him down as gently as possible, but even so, it hurt. How could he provide them with that? Then he thought about what he’d seen in the lobby. He had to have seen that for a reason, didn’t he?

  “I think…” He wasn’t sure whether to say it or not, but he knew he had to. “I think you’re going to get a signal from something called Pioneer 11.”

  Dr. Levin looked at him for a couple of seconds. “I’m sorry, Kevin, but that doesn’t seem very likely.”

  Kevin saw his mother frown. “What’s Pioneer 11?”

  “It’s one of the deep space probes NASA has sent out,” Dr. Levin explained. “It flew through our solar system, sending back data, and had enough velocity to send it out past the limits of the solar system. Unfortunately, the last contact that we had with it was in 1995, so I really don’t think that—”

  She stopped as her phone started to ring, taking it out as if to ignore the call. Kevin saw the moment when she stopped and stared.

  “I’m sorry, I have to take this,” she said. “Yes, hello, what is it? Can it wait a moment, I’m in the middle of… okay, if it’s that urgent. A signal? You’re calling me because NASA has data coming in? But NASA always has…” She paused again, looking over at Kevin, the disbelief obvious on her face. Even so, she said it. “Can I take a guess?” she said into the phone. “You’ve just had a signal of some kind from Pioneer 11? You have? No, I can’t tell you. I’m not sure you would believe me if I did.”

  She put the phone down, staring at Kevin as if seeing him for the first time in that moment.

  “How did you do that?” she asked.

  Kevin shrugged. “I saw it when I was waiting in the lobby.”

  “You saw it? The same way that you ‘saw’ this alien landscape?” Dr. Levin stared at him, and Kevin had the sense she was trying to work something out. Probably trying to work out any way he could have cheated this, or made it happen.

  It was almost a minute before she came to a decision.

  “I think,” Dr. Levin said, in the careful tones of someone trying to make sure she hadn’t gone crazy, “that you had better come with me.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  Kevin and his mother followed Dr. Levin from SETI’s facility to a car that seemed far too small to belong to someone in her position.

  “It’s very environmentally friendly,” she said, in a tone that suggested she had faced that question a lot. “Come on, it will be easier if I drive you both over. They’re quite strict about security.”

  “Who is?” Kevin’s mother asked.

  “NASA.”

  Kevin’s breath caught at that. They were going to talk to NASA? When it came to aliens, that was even better than SETI.

  The drive across Mountain View was only a short one, a few minutes at most. Even so, it was long enough for Kevin to stare out the windows at the high-tech companies spread around the area, obviously drawn there by NASA and Berkeley, the presence of so many clever people in one place pulling them in.

  “We’re really going to NASA?” Kevin said. He couldn’t quite believe it, which made no sense, given all the things he’d had to believe in the last few days.

  The NASA campus was everything that the SETI building hadn’t been. It was large, spread across several buildings and set in a space that managed to have views of both the surrounding hills and the bay. There was a visitors center that was essentially a tent built on a scale that seemed hard to believe, bright white and painted with the NASA logo. They drove past that, though, to a space that was closed off to the public, behind a chain-link fence and a barrier where Dr. Levin had to show ID to get them in.

  “I’m expected,” she said.

  “And who are they, ma’am?” the guard asked.

  “This is Kevin McKenzie and his mother,” Dr. Levin said. “They’re with me.”

  “They’re not on the—”

  “They’re with me,” Dr. Levin said again, and for the first time, Kevin had a sense of the kind of toughness involved in her position. The guard hesitated for a moment, then produced a couple of visitors’ passes, which Dr. Levin handed over to them. Kevin hung his around his neck, and it felt like a trophy, a talisman. With this, he could go where he needed. With this, people actually believed him.

  “We’ll need to go into the research areas,” Dr. Levin said. “Please be careful not to touch anything, because some of the experiments are delicate.”

  She led the way inside a building that appeared to be composed mostly of delicate curves of steel and glass. This was the kind of place Kevin had been expecting when they came down to Mountain View. This was what a place that looked out into space should be. There were laboratories to either side, with the kind of advanced equipment in them that suggested they could test almost anything space threw their way. There were lasers and computers, benches and devices that looked designed for chemistry. There were workshops
full of welding equipment and parts that might have been for cars, but that Kevin wanted to believe were for vehicles for use on other planets.

  Dr. Levin asked around as they went, apparently trying to find out where everyone was who was connected with the news about Pioneer 11’s message. Whenever they passed someone, she stopped them, and it seemed to Kevin that she knew everyone there. SETI might be separate from all of this, the way she said it was, but it was obvious that Dr. Levin spent a lot of time here.

  “Hey, Marvin, where is everybody?” she asked a bearded man in a checked shirt.

  “They’re mostly gathered in the center for supercomputer research,” he said. “Something like this, they want to see what the pits will come up with.”

  “The pits?” Kevin asked.

  Dr. Levin smiled. “You’ll see.”

  “Who are they?” the bearded man asked.

  “What would you say if I told you that Kevin here can see aliens?” Dr. Levin asked.

  Marvin laughed. “You can try to play up to the crazy alien hunter reputation all you want, Elise. You’re as skeptical as the rest of us.”

  “Maybe not about this,” Dr. Levin said. She looked back at Kevin and his mother. “This way.”

  She led the way to another part of the building, and now Kevin had the sense of extra security, with ID scanners and cameras at almost every turn. More than that, it was probably the cleanest place he had ever been. Much cleaner than, for example, his bedroom. It seemed that not a speck of dust was allowed to intrude on it without permission, let alone the piles of old clothes that filled his space until his mom told him to tidy it.

  The labs were mostly empty at the moment, and empty in ways that suggested they’d been left in a hurry because something more exciting was happening. It was easy to see where they had gone. People crowded in the corridors as the three of them got closer to their destination, exchanging gossip that Kevin only caught fragments of.

  “There’s a signal, an actual signal.”

  “After all this time.”

  “It’s not just telemetry data, or even scans. There’s something… else.”

  “We’re here,” Dr. Levin said, as they arrived at a room where the door had been left open, obviously to allow for the crowd of people trying to cram inside. “Let us through, please. We need to talk to Sam.”

  “Here” turned out to be a large room, filled with blinking lights below and surrounded by walkways that made it seem a bit like a theater where the actors were all computers. Kevin recognized them as computers even though they were nothing like the small, barely working laptop his mother had bought for him to do schoolwork on. These were devices the size of coffee tables, cars, rooms, all matte black and glittering with lights. The people standing or sitting close to them had on suits like the ones forensics people wore on TV shows.

  “Impressed?” Dr. Levin asked.

  Kevin could only nod. He didn’t have the words for a place like this. It was… incredible.

  “What is this place?” his mother asked, and Kevin didn’t know if it was a good or bad thing that even his mother didn’t understand it.

  “It’s where NASA does its supercomputer research,” Dr. Levin explained. “Work on AI, quantum computing, more advanced superconductors. It’s also the equipment they use to work on… complex issues. Come on, we need to talk to Sam.”

  She led the way through the crowd and Kevin followed, trying to be quick enough to move into the gaps she created before they closed again. He hurried along in her wake until they came to a tall, slightly stooped man standing by one of the computers. Unlike the others, he wasn’t wearing a clean suit. His long, bony fingers seemed to be tying themselves in knots as he typed.

  “Professor Brewster,” Dr. Levin said.

  “Dr. Levin, I’m glad you could… wait, you’ve brought visitors. This really isn’t the moment for sightseeing, Elise.”

  If Dr. Levin was annoyed by that, she didn’t show it. “David, this is Kevin McKenzie, and his mother. They’re not here to sightsee. I think Kevin might prove helpful with this. We need to see Sam.”

  Professor Brewster waved a hand at the machine in front of them. It was even taller than he was, with pipes running up the side that were so cold they gave off steam into the air. It was only when Kevin saw the sign on the side, “Signals Analysis Machine,” that he realized Sam wasn’t a person’s name, but an acronym.

  “You want to let a child play with a multimillion-dollar piece of engineering?” Professor Brewster asked. “I mean, he’s what? Ten?”

  “I’m thirteen,” Kevin said. The difference might not be much to someone Professor Brewster’s age, but to him, it was a fourth of his life. It was more life than he had remaining. Put like that, three years was a huge amount.

  “Well, I’m forty-three, I have a doctorate from Princeton, a building full of often frankly impossible geniuses who should be doing their jobs”—he looked around the room pointedly, but no one moved—“and now, apparently a thirteen-year-old who wants to play with my supercomputer just as it is about to get to work on a signal from a probe we thought long dead.”

  He seemed like a man who didn’t like stress much. Kevin guessed that was probably a disadvantage in his job.

  “Kevin’s here because of the signal,” Dr. Levin said. “He… well, he predicted that it would occur.”

  “Impossible,” Professor Brewster said. “Elise, you know I have always respected your efforts to keep SETI research in the realm of serious science, but this seems to run in completely the opposite direction. It’s obviously a trick.”

  Dr. Levin sighed. “I know what I saw, David. He told me that there would be something happening with Pioneer 11, and then we got the signal. Will you at least play it for us?”

  “Oh, very well,” Professor Brewster said. He gestured to one of the scientists working around the supercomputer. “Play it so that we can get on with our work.”

  The scientist nodded and tapped a control interface a few times. Data flashed up on a screen in string after string of numbers, but Kevin was more interested in the audio signal that came with it. It was a strange mechanical chattering that sounded nothing like language, more like the kind of interference that might come from a computer going wrong.

  Even so, he understood it. He just didn’t know how.

  “You need to adjust one of your radio telescopes,” Kevin said, the knowledge just sitting in his mind. There were numbers too. Two sets of them, one marginally different from the other. “I think… the first seems wrong somehow, and the second is what it should be.”

  “What?” Professor Brewster and Dr. Levin asked almost simultaneously, although with very different expressions. Dr. Levin looked amazed. Professor Brewster mostly looked irritated.

  “It’s what it means,” Kevin said. He shrugged. “I mean, I guess. I don’t know how I know it.”

  “You don’t know it,” Professor Brewster insisted. “If there’s any meaning in there at all, which frankly isn’t likely, it will take SAM hours to decode it, if it’s possible at all.

  “I just told you what it means,” Kevin insisted. “I can… it just makes sense to me.”

  “You should listen to him, David,” Dr. Levin said. “At least search for the numbers, see if they mean anything. Can you write them down, Kevin?”

  She held out a piece of paper and a pen, and Kevin noted them as clearly as he could. He held it out to Professor Brewster, who took it with bad grace.

  “We have better things to do than this, Elise,” he said. “Right, that’s enough. Out. We have work to do here.”

  He shooed them away, and Dr. Levin didn’t seem inclined to argue. Instead, she took Kevin and his mother out into the corridors of the research facility again.

  “Come on,” she said. “David might be too busy to actually use that gigantic brain of his, but there are plenty of people here who owe me favors.”

  “What kind of favors?” Kevin’s mother asked.

  D
r. Levin looked back at Kevin. “The kind where we find out exactly how Kevin is managing to receive and decode signals from outer space.”

  ***

  “You need to hold still, Kevin,” said an overweight researcher wearing a Hawaiian shirt under his lab coat. He just went by “Phil” even though the nameplate on his door declared that he had at least as many PhDs as anyone else. He seemed to be a friend of Dr. Levin’s, although that might have had something to do with the foot-long sandwich she picked up from the canteen before going to visit him. “It won’t produce a clear image if you move.”

  Kevin did his best, lying still in the cramped interior of an MRI machine. It made him feel like a torpedo about to be launched into the ocean, and the confined space was only made worse by a regular dull thudding, which sounded as though someone was hammering on the outside of it while he lay there. His experiences in the hospital told him that was probably normal, and not a sign that the whole thing was about to collapse. Even so, it was hard to hold still for as long as it took for the thing to scan him.

  “Almost there,” Phil called. “Just hold your breath for a moment. And relax.”

  Kevin wished he could relax. The last couple of hours had been busy ones. There had been scientists, and labs, and tests. Lots of tests. There were cognitive tests and imaging scans, things like X-rays and word association tests while Kevin found various kinds of devices pointed at him, designed to pump different kinds of signals toward his body.

  Eventually, even Phil seemed to be getting tired of shooting rays at Kevin.

  “Okay, you can come out.”

  He helped Kevin from the machine, then led the way over to where Dr. Levin and Kevin’s mother were waiting. The researcher shook his head as he pointed to the screen, and a series of black-and-white images that Kevin guessed must be of the inside of his brain. If so, brains looked weirder than he’d thought.

  “I’m sorry, Elise, but there’s no sign of anything different about him that wouldn’t be explained by his illness,” he said.