The Signal

by William Young

  “Jesus, what the hell else do I need? Didn’t anyone else on the frickin’ planet record any of it?” Peter said to the monitor.

  From behind him, there was a polite laugh.

  “You’re chasing your white whale, I see,” Carla said.

  Peter turned in his chair and shrugged. “I guess so.”

  Carla tried to remain soft. “Peter, it’s nothing.”

  “Well, probably, but it just doesn’t make sense that the SETI computers would pick up a radio broadcast originating from Earth. Aren’t they programmed against that?” Peter asked.

  “No, but the software screens them out, normally,” Carla said. “That’s why it was hackers: they cracked the software. I’m sure that’s been fixed by now.”

  “Yeah, sure, but that little bot I found is still in there, though.”

  Carla shrugged. “There’s a lot of code to be gone through, I’m sure. Either they missed it or haven’t gotten to it, yet.”

  “Or, it’s still there on purpose. Who do you think wrote it in there, and where does it send the information? It’s a real-time bot, meaning somebody wants access to all the SETI monitoring anybody does when they’re doing it,” Peter said.

  “Well, you put in a similar bot, so I’d have to say it’s someone like you, somewhere else, with a burning curiosity about what everyone else is doing,” Carla said. “Peter, come on, if it was an alien signal intended for us, it would’ve lasted longer than a couple of hours. If it was a prankster, it would’ve lasted until he got bored and pulled the plug. You know, about a couple of hours.”

  “Yeah, I know, Occam’s Razor,” Peter said.

  Chapter 22

  Dante wore headphones and tinkered with dialog boxes on his mixing program, adjusting levels, pausing, and re-adjusting. On the couch behind him, Kaylinne sat watching music videos on the television, occasionally flitting her eyes over to Dante to check his progress, but mostly to analyze his posture. She could tell he was excited by the way he sat hunched forward over the keyboard and mouse, constantly pressing buttons and clicking the mouse.

  This was the way it always went with Dante. He’d call Kaylinne to announce he’d finished a song, and then when she arrived to listen to his cut, he’d be back to work jiggering some aspect of it. It could be hours before his “finished” track was finished, and Kaylinne had learned to bide the time with the television. She’d learned long ago that, for whatever reason, he worked best in the final moments of mixing when she was there in the room, as if she were his muse and he needed her on hand for inspiration.

  Whether it was this way for any of the other singers Dante worked with, Kaylinne did not know. She had never asked.

  Dante listened to something in his headset and muttered under his breath. “I think that’s it.”

  He clicked a few more buttons, changed a few more onscreen settings, clicked play and listened for a while, his eyes closed. “Aww, yeah, that’s it alright.”

  Dante turned in the chair, removed the headphones and stood up. “Yo, Kaylinne, listen to this.”

  Kaylinne glanced at the clock – ninety minutes had gone by – and muted the television with the remote. She turned to face Dante and Dante made a tiny public demonstration of glancing at the clock, too, before giving Kaylinne a look that said, “aww, man, c’mon.” Kaylinne half-rolled her eyes and Dante turned back to the computers, clicked a button and turned the speakers up.

  The room was filled with music the likes of which nobody had ever heard, a harmonious cacophony of melody and rhythm that rose and fell in gentle waves, quickening by the second into a dance club groove for many long seconds, a tribal sound of vaguely-drum-like noises topped by a raging symphony of unidentifiable instruments. Then Kaylinne’s vocals cut in, and she leaned forward, awestruck by what she heard.

  The song burst into full force just after the forty second mark, and both Dante and Kaylinne found themselves subtly dancing in place, Kaylinne nodding her head with the beat and tapping her right foot softly. Dante stood and swayed slightly in place, his eyes closed, his head tilted upward. And then, after four minutes and seven seconds, the song quickly faded out to silence.

  Dante opened his eyes and looked hesitantly at Kaylinne.

  “Scots, that’s brilliant,” Kaylinne said, standing up off the couch and closing the gap between them. “Where’d you come up with that melody? What instruments are those? Where did you get that idea? I mean, the music I sang to was totally different than this.”

  Dante shrugged. “I didn’t come up with any of it.”

  “What are you talking about?” Kaylinne asked.

  “Well, I mean, sure, I made the song and put all the sounds together and all, but all the sounds and melody, everything musical are sounds I recorded off the ham radio a couple of months ago.”

  “I didn’t think there was music on ham radio,” Kaylinne said absent-mindedly.

  “I don’t know about that, but there was music on it in the summer, so I recorded a couple hours of it,” Dante said. “It was the strangest music you’ve ever heard played on instruments I couldn’t recognize, but if you listened to it, it was … I dunno, kinda mystical in a weird, primitive sense.

  “Hell, the music barely sounded like music at first, but after I listened to it a couple of times, I started to find the beat, the melody, everything. After that, I just figured out how to cut it into pieces on the computer and separate the different parts. Then it was just a matter of mixing it the right way.”

  Kaylinne stared at Dante in mild disbelief. “You telling me that you didn’t write this music on your keyboard or sample somebody else’s stuff?”

  Dante nodded.

  “So what’s the source music sound like?” Kaylinne asked.

  Dante turned to his computer and clicked through several window options, highlighted Radio Song #1 and clicked play. A strange, unmusical sound coursed from the speakers, a sound unlike any music either of them had heard before. Dante let it play and looked at Kaylinne, who made a face of bewildered disbelief.

  “You’re telling me that’s a song?” Kaylinne said.

  Dante nodded. “Yeah.”

  Kaylinne shook her head. “That’s not music, Scots, that’s … I don’t know, industrial noise or the sound of a construction site working while a children’s orchestra is playing nearby.”

  Dante smiled. “Like I said, it took a couple of listens for me to start making sense of it, but there’s a musical structure to it. I have no clue what the instruments are they’re using, but they’re clearly homemade and experimental. I mean, they make sounds you just don’t hear anywhere else.”

  Dante clicked off the music and highlighted Weird Radio Noise #1 and selected play. An entirely different sort of sounds emitted from the speakers. Dante gave Kaylinne a curious look as he watched her listen.

  “Now, this isn’t music,” Dante said. “I don’t know what it is, but music it ain’t. It sort of sounds like someone trying to play a pipe organ made out of wood and cheese cloth, but there’s no rhythm, no melody, there’s nothing musical to it. Unless that’s the point. But if that’s the point, then, why bother?”

  “So, you have no idea who made this stuff?” Kaylinne asked.

  “Nope,” Dante said.

  “That’s weird stuff,” Kaylinne said.

  “Yeah, it sucks the way it is, but I figured out how to make it cool,” Dante said. “It’s going to suck if it somebody’s real music and they come looking for royalties, though. This song is going to drop big.”

  Chapter 23

  Colonel John Hibbens stood in the parking area outside his unit headquarters puffing on a cigar, watching the work crews erecting a razor-wire topped fence around the perimeter of his building. The fence separating his outfit from the main base had been taken down, and a new, modern structure was being erected behind his dilapidated World War II era building. He fingered the new security badge on his uniform, one granting more access to the Area 51 facilities than he and his staff
had previously had. In a weird sort of way, he had hit the big time inside the Air Force.

  Hibbens stared down the access road that brought him to and from the base every day, an out-of-the-way and seldom used road except by those in his unit. At any moment, he was expecting his commander to drive down that road and inspect his unit, the first time in the history of the unit that a higher up would visit the outpost, though Hibbens didn’t know that. He suspected it, but there was no way for him to know.

  Hibbens played with the cigar stub, rolling it through his fingers and pressing its sides, and wondered if his commander knew how to get to the unit. Hibbens only met with his commander once a year, and only then as a formality and at his commander’s office. All three times had been essentially the same conversation, and Hibbens had assumed his primary role in running the unit was to make sure the unit remained black, unheard of, anonymous. Now, various elements of the Air Force command structure were requesting daily briefs on the progress his unit was making with the signal, and Hibbens could tell that Forrestal was deeply irritated with having to write the reports.

  Hibbens noticed a two-car motorcade appear in the distance down the road, a small dust plume erupting behind it. He took a large puff of the cigar, held it for several seconds, and exhaled a cloud of smoke into the air. He flicked the cigar stub pinwheeling through the air and watched as it crashed onto the asphalt with a small spray of orange ashes. He fished through his pocket for a packet of mints and popped one into his mouth and then walked into the listening station.

  Hibbens walked into the main bay of the building and stopped, watching his staff work vigorously at their computer terminals, trying to figure out from where the signal had originated. The staff had doubled in the last few months, and the sign at the head of the room now read “ET Say What? - ?” This is not how Hibbens wanted his career to end, hijacked by a computer prankster looking to make a fool of some university professor by hacking into a secure computer system and broadcasting hideously unlistenable music for hours before vanishing into thin air.

  Forrestal walked up to Hibbens and, for a moment, Hibbens again realized how his failure was a boon for others: Forrestal had been promoted to major and his staff now consisted of two captains and four lieutenants as well as a doubling of the enlisted men. The Air Force was taking this seriously, even if, so far, his unit had produced nothing to merit it.

  “I take it the general is on his way?” Forrestal asked.

  “Yeah.”

  Forrestal looked around quickly. “What are you going to tell him?

  Hibbens gave Forrestal a bewildered look, barely shrugging his shoulders and turning his palms out. “That depends on what he wants to know.”

  Chapter 24

  Brigadier General Michael Bardem walked into the main bay area of Unidentified Extraterrestrial Intrusions Unit 1 and immediately signaled with a quick wave of his hand to the airman in charge not to announce his arrival. Bardem wanted no fanfare, no acknowledgment of this visit. Bardem had seen some pretty under-equipped units in the Air Force in his twenty-three years, and this one easily ranked among them. It rankled him that he had had to suddenly divert funds to build the unit a newer facility, but now that he saw the converted barracks, he wondered how the unit had not been disbanded in earlier years, and replaced with something more plausible. Nobody would believe this building housed a top-secret extra-terrestrial monitoring unit, not even the crazies who populated the Internet with oddball conspiracies that the Air Force had extra-terrestrials in captivity on Area 51.

  Bardem surveyed the room and noticed Hibbens was bent over a computer, conferring with an airman. The other staffers in the room were similarly at work, doing whatever it was the unit did. Bardem didn’t know. He had always assumed the men assigned to this unit took it as a joke, a weird holiday post where they didn’t have to do anything for their tour, but watching them now, he realized they took it seriously. Maybe that was Hibbens’ work ethic expressed through his men, although the few times he had met with Hibbens, he had gotten the vibe that Hibbens thought the unit was a sleight-of-hand joke. It was, but Bardem had made sure he hadn’t let on to that appreciation.

  Hibbens looked up and walked briskly over to the general, motioning for him toward a small office nearby. The two officers walked into Hibbens’ office and Bardem closed the door behind them.

  “So, how are you doing, John?” Bardem asked.

  “I’m not getting much sleep, general,” Hibbens said matter-of-factly. “Other than that, everyone here is overworked and frazzled.”

  Bardem was fully up to date on the status of the unit’s work, but he wasted no time, still, in pressing his subordinate for an answer to the question everyone in the know was asking.

  “So, where did the signal come from?”

  “We don’t know, sir,” Hibbens said, “but everything’s a guess until we can get a good, long listen. Even better would be some data from some other site on the planet that monitored it so we can triangulate a point of origin. Until then, general, all we can do is guess.”

  “Colonel, it’s time to best guess this, then,” Bardem said. “I’ve got a dozen senators asking me questions, and me telling them it might be a computer hacker isn’t going to work much longer, because they expect us to be better and smarter than that, given the money we spend.

  “Worse, the press is onto this, although they don’t know what they’re looking for. So, before they find someone who tells them something outrageous or accurate, I need your best guess as to where this signal came from.”

  Hibbens walked away from his desk and paused, suddenly thinking about his career. He glanced out the window and realized this was the last stop for him in the Air Force. He looked at Bardem.

  “General, the best we can tell, based on what we actually know, is that the signal came from somewhere in outer space,” Hibbens said.

  “Outer space?” Bardem said. “Where in outer space, exactly?”

  “Yeah. That’s the problem,” Hibbens said. “Or, should I say, the problem is there’s nobody who can figure out which, if any, satellite was hacked.

  “We already know which satellites were where, and we’ve gone through all the ones that were in a position and capable of transmitting such a signal, but nobody has been able to find the slightest fingerprint of a hijacked transmission.

  “Plus, the transmission came in on a frequency that’s reserved for ham radio, so nobody’s sure what to make of it, since that kind of transmission wouldn’t normally have come from outside the atmosphere. But the real problem making hacking an issue is that we discovered an unofficial monitoring bot in the software at the SETI site run by CalTech, and nobody knows who installed it or when, although it seems likely some CalTech person put it in there for some reason.

  “We left it in to see what happens to it, since whoever put it there presumably knows our software is there, although they wouldn’t know it was put there by us.”

  “Okay, so like I asked, what’s the best guess?” Bardem asked.

  Hibbens paused, considering.

  “I’m asking you to guess, colonel,” Bardem said. “You don’t have to be certain, and you don’t have to be right, but you can guess, can’t you?”

  Hibbens knew there was no safe guess to give, that either way, there was no way of knowing, for sure, where the signal had come from.

  “Well, yes, general, but what I really need to explain is that I think it was a hacker, but my gut tells me it was from up there, somewhere,” Hibbens said, pointing up.

  Bardem had known he wouldn’t get an answer, and he smiled wickedly, briefly, at what he had just been told.

  “Okay, your CYA explanation is it was a hacker, but your best guess is that it came from outer space,” Bardem said. “I got that right?”

  Hibbens nodded. “That would be about right.”

  “So, are you fifty-fifty on that?” Bardem asked.

  “I’d say more like seventy-thirty,” Hibbens said, “in favor
of outer space.”

  Bardem gave Hibbens a long look. Hibbens’ career had been solid and unnoticeable to this point, and Bardem respected Hibbens for not wanting to go out on a limb and risk his career on refereeing a call on where the signal had come from. Bardem knew that the scientific community thought it a fraud, but Bardem also knew that nobody could prove it to be a fraud, which meant there was a chance it was legitimate. Bardem also knew that Hibbens’ unit was never supposed to really be able to figure out the answer to this problem, because this was never supposed to be a problem. That it was had changed everything, and there were suddenly-interested parties in various constituencies trying to figure out what the signal meant and how to respond to it. If the signal was the result of a hacker, then more needed to be done on computer security; if the signal was the result of alien broadcast, well, then, nobody knew what to do, but those that didn’t know what to do knew something needed to be done.

  Bardem reached into his trouser pocket and pulled out a small box. He tossed it onto the table. Hibbens looked down and saw a pair of silver stars through the cellophane wrapper. He gave Bardem an astounded look.

  “Well, general, you’d better figure out some answers, because you’re going to have to answer to more than just me from now on,” Bardem said. “There are a few senators who’d like to know what’s going on. Since you’re an unofficial secret unit, you couldn’t be promoted in public, although the Air Force will put you on the list of new generals when whoever does that figures out how to do it. It’s effective immediately, so pin your stars on, John. I don’t envy your situation, especially if word of this signal gets out of our community.”

  Hibbens was stunned. He stared at the box of general’s stars on his desk, then looked up to Bardem.

  “I thought you were coming here to relieve me,” Hibbens said.

  “Relieve you?” Bardem said. “Hell, John, there’s not another officer in the Air Force who’d want to have to figure this out. Well, not another officer in the force who knows about this unit, that is. You’re going to have some unforeseen resources pouring in here pretty quickly, so you might want to figure out how you’re going to use them, because if this signal is nothing, there are other people out there who will cry murder to get their funding back.