by Morgan Rice
“Keep looking,” Dr. Levin said.
“How, exactly?” he asked. “I’m telling you, I’ve used almost every test it’s possible to do on a human being—fMRI, CAT scan, psych battery, you name it. I’ve fired so many different frequencies at Kevin here that it’s a wonder he isn’t picking up the local radio. Short of subjecting him to radioactive isotopes or actually dissecting him—”
“No,” Kevin’s mother said, firmly. Kevin didn’t like that idea either.
Phil shook his head. “There’s just nothing else there to find.”
Kevin could hear the man’s disappointment. Unlike Professor Brewster, he obviously liked the idea of someone being able to hear alien signals. That disappointment mirrored his own. He’d been sure that these people, with all their brains and their laboratories, would be able to find out what was happening, but it looked—
A man burst into the room, and it took Kevin a moment to recognize the gangly frame of Professor Brewster. He looked, if anything, even more agitated than he had when he’d been throwing them out of the supercomputer pit. He was holding a tablet, gripping it so tightly that Kevin suspected he might crack it.
“David, if this is about the use of resources…” Dr. Levin began.
The tall scientist looked over at her as if trying to work out what she was talking about, then shook his head. “Not that. I just want to know how you did it. How did you know?”
“Know what?” Kevin asked.
“Don’t play dumb,” the scientist said. He held out the tablet for them to look at. “One of our people ran those numbers you gave us through our systems. It turns out that they were the current settings for one of our radio telescopes, just as you said. No one who wasn’t working at the observatory could know that. So how did you know?”
“Know what?” Kevin asked.
“Know what would happen when we changed it!”
Professor Brewster pressed something on his tablet.
“This is a feed from it.”
He thrust the pad at Kevin, holding it out like an accusation. A buzzing, clicking signal came from it, which sounded as though it might just be static, or a mechanical problem, or crickets stuck somewhere in the workings of the machine.
To Kevin, though, the words were clear.
We are coming. Be prepared to accept us.
CHAPTER SEVEN
“We?” Dr. Levin asked. She sounded as though she could barely contain her excitement. “Who is we? Are we talking about some kind of alien civilization?”
“Hold on a second,” Professor Brewster snapped, sounding skeptical. “Maybe Kevin’s is the wrong translation. Maybe there is nothing to even translate—maybe it’s just a bunch of noise. Maybe it’s just a figment of the boy’s imagination.”
“Then how did he know the coordinates?” Dr. Levin asked. “We know that someone sent this signal. Just think of the possibilities…”
She trailed off, as if she couldn’t quite comprehend all the possibilities.
“Maybe no one sent it,” another scientist piped up. “Space is filled with signals that have no sender, or receiver.”
“Still,” Dr. Levin insisted, “you can’t discount the possibility that this truly is a signal sent by another society. And that Kevin did indeed interpret it directly. What if he did? Are you prepared to shut down that possibility? Are you prepared to just walk away from it? To accept the consequences?”
Brewster fell into a grudging silence.
“We need more information,” he finally said. “We need to study Kevin further.”
“Study him further?” his mother said. “This is my son.”
“True,” Dr. Levin countered. “And yet your son may also just be our planet’s sole link to alien life.”
*
Kevin sat in the room they had given him and looked around, wondering what it was for. It looked as though it might have been designed for the observation of people over long periods. Either that, or giant goldfish.
It was comfortable, but it was impossible to forget that it was in the middle of the laboratory. The bed was in the middle of the room, and everything seemed to be a pristine, clinical white. Kevin suspected there might be cameras looking down. There was certainly a length of glass along one wall that was obviously one way. It made him feel a little like a frog waiting to be dissected in someone’s biology class.
“Do you have everything you need?” his mother asked. “Have they even fed you yet?”
Trust his mother to find a way to be embarrassing even in a situation like this.
“Yes, Mom, they’re feeding me,” Kevin said.
“I just worry about you,” she said.
“You have to work,” Kevin said. He understood. His mother couldn’t afford to take more time off. Not even for this. There were too many bills to pay, and Kevin being sick had only added medical bills to the list. He didn’t like hearing the guilt in his mother’s voice, as if she was doing something wrong by taking him to the place where they hunted for aliens.
“This is the best place for you, though,” his mother said. She sounded as though she was trying to convince herself.
“It’s a cool place to be,” Kevin assured her. “They have so many things going on.”
It was amazing being a part of something this important.
“Hi, Kevin,” Phil said, poking his head around the door. He seemed to brighten even more at the sight of Kevin’s mother. “Hi, Ms. McKenzie.”
“Call me Rebecca,” his mother said. There was something strange in that, maybe because it wasn’t something she said very often.
“I thought I would give Kevin the grand tour,” Phil said. “Maybe you’d like to join us?”
“That sounds good,” his mother said, and again, Kevin had a sense of a side to it that was… no, he shouldn’t think like that. That was just gross. Parents weren’t supposed to go around liking people. That was practically… well, it made the idea of alien worlds look normal.
“If you’d both like to come with me,” Phil said, leading the way down the halls. “I mean, officially, I guess we’re not supposed to just wander around, because some of the projects are kind of sensitive, but I sometimes think we kind of overdo that, you know?”
He led the way to a space where scientists appeared to be firing a laser at a blank surface again and again, making minute adjustments between each attempt.
“They’re looking into ways lasers might be used in mining asteroids,” Phil explained. There was something about the look he gave Kevin’s mom that said he was trying to impress her. Kevin found that kind of funny. His mom was his mom. She wasn’t going to be impressed by lasers. Even if they were kind of cool.
After that, he showed them a space where drones flew around in a large room like insects, moving fast but somehow never colliding with one another.
“We’re doing work on using AI to make it so that drones can interact without crashing,” Phil said.
Kevin saw his mother smile at that. “So that there’s less chance of losing the next package I order?”
Phil nodded. “Well, that or they could be used in building work, or for work in extreme environments.”
Kevin wasn’t sure how he felt about his mom and Phil getting along so well. He was probably supposed to feel happy for her or something, but this was his mom. He was sure there were supposed to be rules about that kind of thing. He set off toward another door, hoping to hurry the tour along before the two looked meaningfully into one another’s eyes or something.
He opened it, and found himself staring at a thing out of his nightmares.
Kevin staggered back as he found himself face to face with a robot almost as large as he was, covered in spikes and blades, two great pincers sticking out from the front like a hungry ant. It took him a moment to realize that it wasn’t moving, wasn’t any kind of threat to him in spite of how fierce it looked.
“Is this some kind of weapons project?” Kevin asked. “Something for the military?”
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It looked like the kind of thing that would be terrifying coming toward someone on a battlefield. It managed to look pretty terrifying even standing still.
“It’s for the local robot fighting league,” Phil said. “Some of the grad students from Berkeley come up with vicious stuff.”
He looked over at Kevin’s mom as if hoping she would declare herself to be a huge fan of robot fighting. When she didn’t look particularly impressed, Kevin dared to breathe a sigh of relief. It seemed that the world had returned to normal, kind of.
His mother hugged him. “I have to go, Kevin. I wish I didn’t, but…”
Kevin hugged her back. “I know.”
Even though he knew she would come back soon, it was hard to let her go.
When she was gone, Kevin turned to Phil. “So,” he said. “What now?”
“Now, we have a bunch more tests to get through,” Phil said.
A bunch didn’t cover it. Even though Phil had tried whole batteries of tests on Kevin before, both Professor Brewster and Dr. Levin seemed determined that they should keep going. Dr. Levin seemed to hope that by understanding what Kevin could do better, they might be able to make more contact with alien civilizations. Professor Brewster… well, Kevin suspected that he hoped it would all prove to be nothing, a mistake.
Either way, it meant test after test with different sets of scientists, question after question, most of which Kevin didn’t have the answers to.
“I don’t have any control over what I translate,” Kevin insisted, when one of the scientists wanted to know if he could look around the alien world he saw to give them more data on it. “I don’t even know how I’m doing it. When you play the signals, it’s just… obvious.”
He suspected the scientists weren’t very satisfied with that, but Kevin didn’t know what else to say. He got what he got, and for the moment, that seemed to be mostly the countdown in his head, pulsing away ever faster, along with the memory of a world eclipsed by a bright, all-consuming light. So far, it had been the only image he’d gotten. The signal seemed to be just words.
Kevin, needing a break, found a quiet corner in one of the research center’s recreation rooms and pulled out his phone and Skyped with Luna.
He smiled when he saw her; he hadn’t realized how much he missed seeing her face.
She smiled back.
“Hey, stranger,” she said. “They putting you through the mill?”
“Every test you can imagine.”
“Being poked and prodded must get pretty bad,” Luna said. “But it probably means you’re getting looked at by more doctors than you would otherwise. That has to be good, right?”
“I don’t think it means that they can do anything for me,” Kevin said. He’d thought about this, briefly, but decided he couldn’t afford that kind of hope when it came to his illness. He knew what was going to happen. “Most of them aren’t even that kind of doctor.”
“But some of them must be, and I bet that if there is any research into…” Luna looked down, and Kevin guessed that she’d written it down so she wouldn’t forget it, “… leukodystrophies, it’s going to be somewhere near you.”
“If there is, I haven’t heard about it,” Kevin said. No one had exactly come up to him and told him that there was suddenly a cure for what he had.
“And have you been looking?” Luna asked. She had her determined expression on, the one that meant she wasn’t going to take no for an answer.
“I’ve been too busy trying to translate messages from an alien species,” Kevin pointed out.
“Okay,” Luna said, “as excuses go, I’ll admit that’s pretty good. Just think, when they come here and say ‘Take me to your leader,’ you’ll be the only one who can translate, so you’ll be there. Your name will be in the history books.”
“And when did you last pay attention in history class?” Kevin countered. “I remember trying to help you study for tests, remember?”
“Well, maybe I’d pay more attention if there were more aliens in them.”
“Kevin?” Professor Brewster was standing there, looking impatient. “When you’re ready, the signal is waiting.”
“Looks like I have to go,” Kevin said to Luna.
“I miss you,” she said, and there was a kind of wistful note to it that wasn’t normally there in Luna’s voice.
“Well, maybe you could visit,” Kevin said, but then he caught sight of Professor Brewster’s expression. “I have to go.”
“You should be careful about what you say,” Professor Brewster said when Kevin hung up. “Our work here is supposed to be confidential.”
“I trust Luna,” Kevin said.
“And if all of this turns out to be nonsense, then it damages the reputation that we have worked so hard to build up, which in turn will affect our funding.”
“It’s not nonsense,” Kevin insisted. Why couldn’t Professor Brewster understand that? “I see this.”
“Apparently,” Professor Brewster said. “Although given your condition…”
Kevin stood up. Right then, he felt tired, and not just because of the illness that was slowly eating away at his brain. He felt tired of all this, of not being taken seriously.
“You’re just determined to dismiss this whatever I do,” he said. “I managed to translate the message.”
“Apparently.” That word again. “That reminds me, though. There’s no reason to believe that you started listening at the start of these signals, so we want to have you listen to our archive of signals from other sectors, and see if any more trigger sudden translations.”
He said that as if he hadn’t just barged in, and they weren’t having an argument about it. He said it as if it were already decided that Kevin would do it. Kevin stood there, ready to tell him no. Ready to just walk away.
He couldn’t, though, and not just because he was thirteen, while this was some eminent scientist who probably knew what he was talking about. He couldn’t risk not hearing what the aliens had to say.
“All right,” Kevin said.
Professor Brewster took him, not to the supercomputer pit this time, but to a small lab space where there was nothing but a plain white table, a pair of equally plain headphones, and a pane of two-way glass that suggested dozens of scientists might be waiting just beyond.
“Go inside, put the headphones on, and we’ll see if any of the signals spark translations,” Professor Brewster said in a voice that suggested he knew what the likely outcome would be.
*
The next few hours were among the most boring of Kevin’s life, and that included the time he’d spent in math class. Whoever was in the other room played him noise after noise, signal after signal, all presumably interpreted from light patterns or electromagnetic discharges. Kevin expected one of them to spark something at any moment, but there was nothing, and nothing again, and…
“If anyone receives this, more communications will follow,” he said as he heard one. It hardly sounded like his voice anymore, as though something were speaking through him. It just seemed natural to say it as the sounds hit his ears.
There seemed to be instant activity behind the glass, and Phil’s voice came in on his headphones.
“What was that, Kevin?”
“That last signal, I think it means to wait for more,” Kevin said.
“You’re sure?”
Kevin didn’t know how to answer that. It wasn’t as though he was any kind of expert on what was happening. He probably knew less than the scientists trying to make sense of it all. He just translated what he heard, relying on his altered brain to understand.
“Maybe if we try for more signals taken from that area,” Phil’s voice said over the headphones, and Kevin couldn’t tell if he was talking to him, or himself, or to other scientists.
Either way, more signals followed. Some were just noise. Others, though…
“We are coming, prepare to receive us.”
They were all variations on the same theme,
the same message, although none of them seemed to say anything useful. Kevin found himself wondering how long these messages had been pumping out into space, waiting for someone to listen to them. Maybe they’d been striking the Earth for months, even years, and it was only now that someone was able to understand.
Phil seemed to have the same idea. He came in, wearing what looked very much like the same Hawaiian shirt as the day before, looking excited.
“These signals… some of them go back months, maybe longer, all from the region of space we associate with the Trappist 1 system. That means that, if they were sent using light, they’ve taken almost forty years to arrive. And you’re the first person to be able to understand them.” Unlike Dr. Brewster, Phil seemed more than happy about the prospect. He sounded truly excited.
“I think your illness must have changed your brain in ways we don’t understand,” he said. “I think it must have given you the capacity to tune into this in ways we can’t. It would explain why we can’t see anything beyond the progress of your illness. Your illness is doing this.”
Kevin smiled tightly. “So I’m basically a freak.”
“But a very important one,” Phil said with a smile of his own. “We might have missed understanding this completely. More than that, it sounds as though there’s a bigger message coming, something so important that they wanted to be sure no one would miss it.”
Kevin thought about the countdown. It was getting faster.
Now, he suspected, he knew what it was counting down to.
The only way to test that was to keep going, working in the institute’s testing lab with his headphones on, listening as they pumped in the feed of signals from their listening equipment. He sat there and did his best to translate the signals as Phil sent them through, one by one.
“Nothing with that one,” Kevin said, shaking his head.
“I’d have thought there would be something,” Phil replied, his voice sounding in Kevin’s ears as he worked on the other side of a pane of clear glass.
Kevin had thought so too, with the countdown pulsing so fast inside him. Kevin could feel the pulsing, hummingbird fast within him now, impossible to ignore and suggesting that whatever was coming would be here soon. He was tired of waiting, and tired of people staring at him, and sometimes just tired.
