The Signal

by William Young

  Dante tilted his head in disbelief and pushed through the doors and into the shop. Kendell looked around for a moment and then glanced up into the sky.

  “The sun makes sound? Why the hell does nobody hear nothing, then?”

  Chapter 12

  Hibbens walked quickly into the room and surveyed the team at work. This could be a nightmare, Hibbens thought, as he watched the various crew members working furiously at their work stations. Hibbens was so sure he’d never have to deal with this moment that he’d never really spent any time wondering what it would be like to deal with this moment, and, yet, here he was, in the moment. Hibbens spotted Captain Forrestal and approached him.

  “What’ve we got?” Hibbens asked.

  Forrestal raised his eyebrows curiously. “Signal.”

  Hibbens nodded sagely, indicating that he was on top of the situation, although he knew he wasn’t, that he was weeks behind where he should be if only he’d bothered to actually consider the possibility that ET might return the phone call. ET phone home. Hibbens shook his head unnoticeably and wondered if he should take a cigar break.

  “Is it fake?” Hibbens asked.

  Forrestal shrugged. “We don’t know.”

  “Are the lines running?”

  “Yes, sir, we’re on three at the moment,” Forrestal said.

  “And?”

  “It’ll be a while until we know.”

  Hibbens shook his head, this time noticeably. “We don’t have a while. If this isn’t already all over the Internet, we’re lucky, but we won’t be lucky for long. Start the other three lines”

  Forrestal regarded Hibbens curiously. “Of course, but, sir, protocol is to run-“

  Hibbens cut him off. “I know, Jim, but this is the first time we’ve ever had to run a single line, let alone three, outside of an in-house simulation, which means we need to err on the side of the getting-our-shit-straight-quickly, Hibbens said. “We aren’t the only ones who got this signal, and some of the people who got it are going to rush to judgment PDQ, so we’re going to need the semblance of an answer to the question I’m going to be asked in a vanishingly small amount of time.

  “And I have to be able to answer that question with something other than an ‘I don’t know,’” Hibbens said, his brain roiling with uncertainty. “And you’re sure, absolutely sure, it’s not some geek astronaut on the international space station?”

  Forrestal didn’t know what to make of the sudden hyper-complexity of his superior, but he suppressed his emotions and listened. “We ruled that out within the first thirty seconds, but, still, Colonel, this could be some jerk bag in Denmark hacking into a satellite feed and seeing who he can screw with.”

  “Which is why we need to know, now,” Hibbens said.

  Hibbens looked around the room, realized nobody had heard anything, and motioned Forrestal to a corner of the room.

  “This isn’t about us looking like idiots for over-reacting or under-reacting. This is about dollars. We’re listed in the Air Force budget as a routine intelligence gathering unit, but our strength is listed as wing size, not the flight we really are. That’s the only way they can justify us,” Hibbens said. “That’s also why there are no enlisted men below E-6 on staff. We’re a cadre, a ‘break glass in case of emergency’ unit. If we can’t figure this out quickly, then we’re going to have a shitstorm of Air Force constituencies arguing over whether to send us the men and equipment needed to solve this signal, and nobody is going to want to do that because all that extra money in our so-called unit’s budget currently gets spent elsewhere on this base.”

  Forrestal paused. He had never thought about the unit as anything other than some weird, oddball leftover remnant from an earlier time when serious people took the idea of intergalactic UFOs seriously. It had never occurred to him that the unit was a useful line-item in the Air Force budget that allowed for black operations to be funded.

  “You mean we’re not a real unit really looking for signal?” Forrestal asked.

  Hibbens shook his head, “No.” He paused for a moment and then said, “Yes.”

  Hibbens looked around to see if anyone was in ear shot, and motioned to Forrestal to take a few steps further away from the nearby work stations.

  “Listen, we’re a backdoor money channel for the really secret stuff, but for verisimilitude, we monitor organizations looking for signal, just in case there’s anybody in Congress who wants to come and check us out,” Hibbens said. “But the protocols in place had to allow for a real plan to react to an actual signal if one ever showed up, and if one does, then people in Congress and the Pentagon are going to want to know what this unit is doing, and we’re suddenly going to have to look like a real unit.”

  “So, we’re not really looking for signals from aliens?” Forrestal asked.

  “We? Hell, Jim, all we do is monitor the people who are looking so that we don’t get caught with our pants down. The US Air Force doesn’t give a crap about flying saucers aside from the ones it builds and tests here,” Hibbens said. “But all those UFO kooks who hang out trying to get a peek at what we do here on the base think that the Air Force is looking for aliens in the sky, and since people think we do that, the Air Force pretends we do that.

  “But I’m sure you’ve noticed we don’t have any kinds of telescopes or radio equipment here in our comfy little shack, and that’s because we’re not actually looking for anything,” Hibbens said. “If we actually get a legitimate extraterrestrial radio signal intercept, we’re going to be the proverbial dog that caught the car it was chasing.”

  “How’s that, sir?” Forrestal asked.

  “What’re we going to do with it now that we’ve got it?” Hibbens said.

  Chapter 13

  Carla Lombard sat on a chair in her living room, reading a thriller. Thrillers were the only novels she read anymore, aside from the early drafts of her husband’s mid-list science fiction novels, because they were easy reads and easily forgotten afterword. If they had any hidden meaning, any metaphor, she didn’t care and didn’t look for them. She had long ago given up reading fiction for anything other than idle pleasure, a way to kill a set amount of time and escape to a different place. And, since her life was anything other than that of the stuff of thrillers, she filled her brain’s downtime with car chases, gun fights and intrigue. It wouldn’t be long before her primary reading material was the often-dull papers generated by her students, and she needed some outlet to live vicariously.

  The phone rang. She ignored it, certain Bill, Jenny or one of her boys would bounce to the nearest handset, as it was likely any of them would be the intended call recipient. The phone rang twice more and she realized nobody was going to get it, so she dropped her book and walked to the nearest handset, examined the caller ID and wondered who the hell was calling.

  “Hello?” she said disinterestedly into the phone.

  “Doctor Lombard, we’ve got signal,” said a breathless Peter on the other end of the line, his voice infused with excitement.

  “Peter?” Carla asked.

  “Yeah. The site is picking up ET signal right now,” Peter said. “Has been for two hours.”

  Carla looked around her living room, trying to make sure she was still living in her own reality. “Peter, what are you talking about?”

  “Owens Valley, its recording signal from somewhere outside our system,” Peter said, the words crushed together into one long multi-syllabic word.

  Carla had no idea what Peter could be talking about. She walked over to her laptop on the coffee table and pressed the space bar to bring it to life.

  “Hold on a second,” she said as the screen came to life and she clicked her way to a schedule of Owens Valley users. “Peter, There’s nobody at the site monitoring signal. It’s on maintenance.”

  “I know,” Peter said. “It’s a long story, but a couple of the days we were there, after you left, I would hack into the system and set up a bot to monitor what the other teams were getti
ng—“

  Carla was annoyed and cut Peter off. “We already get that data automatically. Everybody posts it on the Web just like we do.”

  “Yeah, I know, but not in real time,” Peter said. “Anyway, I was trying to figure out how to put a bot in there that would send the system results directly to my home computer-“

  “What the hell for?” Carla asked, cutting Peter off, again. “You’re not supposed to tamper with the system, who knows what the hell you could do to the software, Peter.”

  This had no affect on Peter’s enthusiasm. “I know, I know, but while I was snooping around I found an invisible directory totally by accident, and I managed to open it an there was a bot in there already, sending out the information in real time,” Peter said.

  Carla cocked her head to the side. “What?”

  “Yeah. Somebody else already did it, not that I’m surprised too much, but a little, sure,” Peter said. “So, about ten minutes ago I checked and found out that the site has been getting a signal for the past two hours.”

  Carla gazed around the room, unsure what to make of what Peter was telling her. That one of her prize students was manipulating the facility’s software was a major concern to her that could get him expelled, that he was admitting it to her and telling her that the site was picking up off-world signal was bewildering in its ridiculousness, but that there was someone else who had previously done the same thing for whatever unknowable reason astounded her. Who, outside of an overly-excited grad student, would want the real-time information from the site, when there would be nothing that the information could be used for until it had been analyzed? It would be nothing more than raw data, and the data might be nothing more than a solar flare or some other noise-producing stellar bit of insignificance.

  “Who else is getting the data?” Carla asked.

  “No idea,” Peter said, “but it’s going somewhere, encrypted beyond belief.”

  Encrypted? Who’d encrypt radio telescope observations, Carla wondered, especially since anybody who observed such data published it if it was anything worth something.

  “NASA, probably,” Carla said into the phone, thinking out loud.

  “What?” Peter asked.

  Carla regained her composure. “You’re getting it on your computer?”

  “Yeah,” Peter said. “What do you want to do about the signal?”

  “Give me your address and I’ll Mapquest it and be there in however long it takes to get there,” Carla said.

  Chapter 14

  Peter Jenkins lived in a typical graduate student’s apartment: it was small, cluttered with books, and strewn with clothes and random non-garbage debris. He had no idea he lived in disorder, and no female had ever visited his apartment so as to be able to express an opinion on it. His few male friends that visited were incapable of noticing the level of disarray in Peter’s apartment because their own apartments looked similar.

  If his mother hadn’t instilled in him knowledge that kitchens are cleaned after every use, his kitchen would’ve likely been piled high with dishes, flatware and pots and pans. That Peter most of the time ate ready-made microwave meals in easily disposable containers saved him from the onus of a filthy kitchen. The only room cleaned with any regularity was the bathroom, and that was because Peter had a curious fixation with cleanliness in that room, a clarity of purpose that public restrooms only reinforced, so he cleaned it every Saturday morning. He was naked in there, after all, and even his bodily requirements weren’t oblivious to him in their effects on the space.

  The one obsession obvious to anybody entering the living room was how it was centered on Peter’s computer system, a first-class set-up networked to a pair of console gaming systems and a 22-inch LCD flat panel computer monitor. Next to that, his bookshelf of digital media held only a handful of actual compact disks, but scores of video games and movie DVDs.

  After Professor Lombard had been buzzed in the apartment’s security door, Peter looked around the room for the first time in ages and wondered if he should tidy up. Right after thinking that, he was unsure what to tidy up and comforted himself that the bathroom was clean, should his professor need to use it. Probably clean, anyway.

  Peter let his professor into his apartment after she knocked, and she took a few steps in and stopped to survey the room.

  “My husband lived like this when I met him,” Carla said, staring at the disarray. “Only, he had a much bigger music collection than you have. You’re not much into music, are you?”

  Peter sat down at his computer and began clicking his mouse through a maze of log-ins, entering passwords and user names. “Whaddya mean?”

  Carla motioned to his CD collection. “You’ve got nothing, and nothing to listen to it on.”

  Peter looked over for a moment out of distraction, unsure what his professor was referring to, and saw the small array of compact music disks on the shelf.

  “Oh, I download everything off the net and my PC has a kickin’ sound system,” Peter said. “Although I mostly listen to tunes on my iPod.”

  Carla looked around at the room, again, and noticed there were wireless 5.1 surround speakers mounted to the walls, a subwoofer stashed in a corner. Peter was a typical male in prioritizing the important aspects of his life, and his entertainment system trumped the room’s appearance. Maybe, she thought, he wasn’t as scatterbrained as he came across.

  Peter entered a few more commands on his keyboard and the room was suddenly filled with a very strange sounding idea of music. Or melodic noise. Carla was startled by the initial sounds that came from the speakers surrounding her, and she turned quickly toward Peter, who obviously didn’t realize how loud his speakers were set at. Carla mimed turning a knob down and Peter adjusted the volume.

  “What the heck is this?” Carla asked.

  “This is the signal,” Peter said, closing his eyes for a second to listen to it.

  Carla paused and listened. It was anything other than what she thought “signal” would sound like, and she’d thought long and hard over the years about what to expect, before she stopped expecting, before she realized the distances in space were too great, the obstacles too severe, for anyone on Earth to listen to intentional alien sound.

  “This is,” Carla paused for the word, trying to attach some sort of aural definition to the sounds her ears were processing, “music.”

  She listened a moment more. “Really bad music, or really avante garde music or whatever you want to call it, but it’s not signal.”

  Peter turned the sound down a bit further and turned in his chair. “Doctor Lombard, I’m telling you this is what Owens is picking up. This is the signal. This is signal.”

  Carla shook her head softly, as if her entire life’s work had suddenly been made a joke. She looked around the room at the speakers as they pulsed out the strange sounds, and shrugged. She listened for a few seconds more and realized she had wasted a trip to her student’s apartment on the vague, long-dormant hope that maybe, somewhere in the heavens, somebody was trying to get a message through to Earth. She knew Peter wasn’t lying to her, but she also knew that Peter didn’t know enough, yet, to know that he was being played.

  “No, Peter, this is not signal,” Carla said, using a voice mothers use to console children over first failed relationships. “This is some hacker piping his personal music collection into the SETI computers. This is some kid in Irvine or Antwerp who figured out how to hack the system and import some – I don’t know – some ‘music’ experiment he wants to get famous from.

  “This is Kraftwerk remixed.”

  Peter thought for a second about what “Kraftwerk” was, and then muttered under his breath, “Chemical Brothers, maybe,” before he pointed to his computer monitor.

  “Yeah, but Doctor Lombard, this is coming right from the site, right from the equipment, and the equipment says its coming from up there,” Peter said, pointing through his ceiling.

  Carla deflated. “Aww, Peter … Jesus. We’re
not looking for music, Peter. That’s not what we’re looking for. We’re looking for alien signal. You know, something alien. This,” Carla paused and motioned to the sounds around them, “this is some DJ in Europe trying to really screw with all the concepts of melody and harmony that thousand of composers over hundreds of years have established as musical laws.

  “This,” she pointed at a speaker, “this is a prank.”

  Peter paused the sound.

  “I’ll see you in class, Peter,” Carla said.

  Peter watched as his professor turned and exited his apartment, and he waited a moment before turning the sound up on the speakers. He listened for a few moments and stared up through his ceiling, wondering why Carla would have been so hostile to the idea that this noise, this whatever-it-was, could be signal. He drummed his fingers on the desk and stared at the information coming from the radio site, indicating the signal was from off-world.

  Chapter 15

  Lincoln Feathers sat before his bank of radios smoking a cigar, fiddling with one of the sets. There was something wrong, and he was trying to figure out what it was. He tuned through several frequencies and made a couple of communications checks with far-off operators, trying to determine if any of the people he usually talked with were listening. So far, nothing. It was as if his radio friends were taking the day off, worldwide. Then he tuned back to the station he was wondering about and paused.

  “What the heck is this?” Lincoln said, puffing cigar smoke into the air.

  He sat back in the chair and listened, again, to the weird, strange, non-melodic “music” pouring from the speakers. This wasn’t permitted on the ham radio wavelengths, although it did happen, usually when some anti-amateur radio activist tried jamming a frequency for some idiotic reason. Lincoln hated those people, usually super-tech-savvy computer geeks who thought ham radio was an obsolete, antiquated hobby. Why this bothered anybody was beyond Lincoln’s ability to ken.

  “Now, that’s just not right,” Lincoln muttered. “Who the hell’s broadcasting crappy classical music on licensed airwaves?”