The Signal

by William Young

  “Our default thinking mode on this is to assume somebody hacked into a broadcast satellite and hijacked a signal, but we’re not going to insist on that as orthodoxy. If it’s something else, it’s something else, and any hints, clues or guesses as to what it might be are welcomed,” Hibbens said, pausing to fix them both with his eyes. “Wild guesses are encouraged.”

  This last sentiment was not lost on Hibbens, who was merely passing on the advice of General Bardem. So far, nobody had wanted to guess wildly, especially Hibbens, because pinning the signal on an alien intelligence and later finding out it was a Swedish computer hacker with a hatred of ham radio would ruin the career of anyone who stood on that ground. Hibbens had no real hope that either of his two new colonels would risk their careers in such a way, especially after having just been cleared for the highest security the Air Force had to offer and finding themselves in one of the worst buildings the Air Force had to offer. Hibbens assumed they wanted to find a way to explain the signal in a terrestrial way as quickly as possible, thereby avoiding any harm to their careers, and expediting their return to reassignment elsewhere.

  At least now they knew what it was they were up against, having spent the last few hours listening to the signal and getting briefed about it. Neither colonel could possibly be sitting before him enthusiastic about the opportunity to crack the signal, as Hibbens was not, and that task was already in his lap.

  “Colonel Thibideaux, your unit will continue to monitor all available monitoring stations to determine if anything else has been compromised, as well as continued analysis of the information coming in live.

  “Colonel Taylor, your unit has been analyzing the data we’ve stored and is trying to make sense of it. Keep making sense of it, even if it doesn’t make any.”

  Hibbens paused and looked at his two new subordinates, unsure if they were stunned by their new jobs. They both stared at him stoically.

  “Questions?” Hibbens asked.

  The two colonels – one male, one female – stared back at him. They had been plucked from premier units in Air Force intelligence and sent here, at a moment’s notice, and now that they knew the game, they weren’t sure of the rules. Hibbens understood this implicitly, having been the subject to the same circumstance only a few years earlier. Only then, he had been told to manage a top secret unit that did nothing. He was now asking other professionals to do something.

  Thibideaux spoke first. “Well, general, how many sites is my unit monitoring? And, what are we looking for?”

  Hibbens nodded thoughtfully. “Every known SETI radio, x-ray, and telescope site on the planet. You’re looking for something that might seem to come from somewhere other than planet Earth.”

  “Every site?” Thibideaux asked.

  “Every,” Hibbens said flatly, “including a top secret monitoring site in China and an open-secret site in Siberia. Major Forrestal can fill you in on the details.”

  Thibideaux rolled his eyes unconsciously before speaking, and Hibbens let it slide. “How are we monitoring a secret site in China?”

  Hibbens shrugged. “I don’t know, colonel, I just know we are. They don’t tell me everything, either.”

  Hibbens glanced at his two new colonels and could tell they were overwhelmed by the odd nature of their new jobs. Hibbens nodded encouragingly.

  “I understand you’ll have a lot of questions. Come. Ask,” Hibbens said. “We’re a loose collar unit here, so don’t think there’s a boat to rock if you have an idea that sounds unorthodox or at odds with the current thinking. You’re going to find yourselves asking a lot questions about things you never thought you’d have to ask questions about, so ask them. But right now, I need some answers.”

  Thibideaux and Taylor closed the door behind them and slowly made their way down the hallway, each thinking similar thoughts about what they had just been told.

  “I’ve been in the Air Force for eighteen years and I’ve never heard a peep about this unit, and now I’m in it,” Taylor said. “You’d have thought that that many years in code breaking and I’d have heard some rumor from somebody.”

  Thibideaux nodded. “Yeah, you’d think. I’m not sure I want to know how they keep a lid on this place. Everybody on the planet knows this base does top secret stuff, but nobody knows what kind of stuff. You surely can’t believe what you read – I don’t – and I really don’t now that I know this.”

  “If our government is spending this much money making sure we aren’t surprised by aliens from other planets, you have to wonder what else it’s up to,” Taylor said.

  Thibideaux laughed. “Yeah, and if we’re spending this much money looking for aliens in outer space, it makes you wonder what we’re missing down here.”

  Chapter 29

  Colonel Taylor drummed her fingers on her desk and stared at the pair of officers standing on the other side of her desk, amazed at their now-finished presentation.

  “You’re sure?” Taylor asked.

  Captain Don Ferguson nodded his head and said, “Absolutely, ma’am.

  “Stay right here and get your briefing ready. I’m going to get the general,” Taylor said.

  Taylor picked up her phone and punched in the numbers, waited a moment and was surprised when General Hibbens answered his own phone. This made her pause for a half-moment as she had expected a non-commissioned officer to deal with. Without that barrier, she was suddenly unsure of the protocol at work.

  “General Hibbens, I think I’ve got something you’re going to want to hear right now,” Taylor said.

  “What is it?” Hibbens asked.

  “My code breakers think they’ve made a discovery that I think you should hear,” Taylor said.

  “Where are you?” Hibbens asked.

  “Conference room one,” Taylor said.

  “I’ll be there in a moment,” Hibbens said.

  Taylor waited for Hibbens to hang up on her, put her phone down, and surveyed the team before her. “Get your presentation ready, the general will be here in a minute.”

  In his office, Hibbens hung up his phone and shook his head in exasperation. For months, his team of code breakers and analysts had been poring over the data and had discovered nothing. Now, four days into her position, his new colonel was claiming to have made some sort of breakthrough warranting his immediate attention.

  “Holy Christ,” Hibbens said to the room. “Four days on the job and she has something urgent for me to see. Four days? This kind of crap is going to have to end.”

  Hibbens stood out of his chair and walked out of his office into the main bay area and motioned Forrestal over to him.

  “General?” Forrestal said.

  “Major, I have a colonel problem,” Hibbens said.

  “A colonel problem?” Forrestal asked.

  “Yes. Colonel Taylor has just urgently requested my attention to some piece of analysis her team has come up with, and she’s only been here four days. So, from now on, I want an initial finding to be vetted through you, first, and if you think it warrants my attention, then you bring it to me and I’ll call the meeting with them.”

  Forrestal furrowed his eyebrows for a split second. “Starting now?”

  Hibbens shook his head. “No, after this. We’ve been doing this a while, so not much excites us. They’re brand new and excitable,” Hibbens said. “We need to calm them down a bit.”

  Forrestal smiled slightly. “Yes, sir.”

  Hibbens entered Conference Room One and took a seat at the table. He immediately could tell that the people about to brief him were both nervous and excited, and somewhere deep inside of him, Hibbens felt excited. He knew it would end up being nothing, but he was suddenly interested in hearing a new explanation of what the signal might be. So far, he’d listened to forty-seven briefings where he had been told what the signal could be, and in every instance, nobody had been able to make the prediction come true.

  None of the failures mattered, though, at least not for the moment. If his uni
t were ultimately unable to parse the signal into something useful, the money and manpower would quickly dry up, and he’d leave the unit for civilian life much the way he had entered it years earlier: an under-staffed black line item in the Air Force budget. On the plus side, though, he’d at least have retired as a general, something that seemed highly unlikely to him just a few months ago, when he figured he’d be lucky to find himself transferred to a real posting and not shuttled off to another bureaucratic office position where he would wait out his years and retire in anonymity.

  Hibbens tapped the table and looked at the staff standing before him. He turned to Taylor and said, “Okay, colonel, what have you got?”

  Taylor motioned to Ferguson to begin.

  “Well, general, we’ve been going over the content of the transmission and we’ve broken it down into two elements,” Ferguson said, tapping a button on a laptop networked to a large flat screen computer monitor.

  “The first element is unintelligible. It’s random and apparently meaningless and sounds like arrhythmic noise, but the second element, which appears less frequently and at random points for various lengths of time, well, general, we’ve identified that element as a language,” Ferguson said.

  Hibbens leaned forward slightly. “A language? Which one?”

  “We don’t know,” Ferguson said, suppressing a shrug. “So far as we can tell, it’s not any of the major spoken tongues known on the planet, though it could be some aboriginal language, or a dead tongue or a dialect of some lesser-known language that we’re not familiar with. That’ll take weeks to figure out, or, maybe, months or years.”

  “Well, then how did you figure out that it was even a language?” Hibbens asked.

  “The sound patterns replicate in a discernable pattern, indicating that they must be words, and there are definite signs of rules in play which determine how the sounds relate to other sounds,” Ferguson said. “Basically, words and sentences.”

  Ferguson clicked a button on the laptop and maneuvered a mouse for a moment, and suddenly the room was filled with sounds from the speakers. While the sounds played, Ferguson made hand gestures to indicate where the patterns existed, punctuating the sounds with points of a finger into the air as if he were a music conductor. After a minute, Ferguson stopped the playback and returned his focus on Hibbens.

  “The sounds in those clips have most of the same elements in them, transmitting to the listener the same idea, only slightly different each time,” Ferguson said.

  Hibbens glanced at Taylor quickly before looking back to Ferguson. “How do you mean, captain?”

  Ferguson turned the palms of his hands up and shrugged slightly. “Well, not knowing what it really says, I can only analogize.”

  Ferguson tapped on the laptop for a moment and two English transcriptions of sound patterns displayed on the monitor. The words were not actual words, but phonics-like depictions of sounds. Hibbens suddenly realized he was wasting his time.

  “The first bit is sort of like hearing the sentence ‘My dog is brown and furry’ and the second sentence would be a re-working along the lines of ‘I have a furry brown dog,’” Ferguson said, tapping the laptop and letting the two sound clips play one after the other. “It’s the same information, just related differently.”

  Hibbens had suddenly changed his mind. Maybe this captain was on to something. It was the first bit of actual logical analysis of the signal he’d heard to date and it still didn’t tell him anything about what the signal was.

  “Well, that’s interesting,” Hibbens said, “but why no luck with the other element?”

  “Well, sir, the other elements, they, too, are of various lengths and sound patterns, but they follow a more complex set of rules, inasmuch as they follow rules at all,” Ferguson said. “The elements are much longer, and while you can almost determine a logic to them, that logic can’t be translated into speech patterns or a recognizable language known to us at this juncture.

  “It could be some sort of harmonic interference with the transmission, an intentional effort to confuse the listener with illogical information, overlapping various data streams through simultaneous broadcasting to a single frequency, or, well anything. Or, nothing,” Ferguson said. “Somebody could simply have taken some actual sound patterns and mixed them together in an attempt to create jibberish based on actual language.”

  Hibbens absorbed this and stared at the faces looking toward him, wondering what kinds of questions he should ask. He turned to another captain standing to the side and asked him a question.

  “You agree with this analysis?” Hibbens asked.

  Captain Ron Tugel stepped forward and nodded. “I do, sir.”

  Hibbens looked around the room again; reasonably assured he had just been told, again, that nobody knew what the hell it was they were listening to. He returned to Tugel.

  “Captain, all the experts have told me that we should be looking for some sort of decipherable numerical code in any alien-based signal, something that would establish intelligence and intent on the part of the sender, and yet you guys are all telling me you think this is words,” Hibbens said. “Why are we doing language instead of math?”

  Tugel flitted his eyes to the other members of the team for a slight second, hoping someone would take the question away from him before answering.

  “Well, sir, there is a general belief that that would be the case, that any alien signal would contain some basic and easily decodable cipher,” Tugel said. “But we’re just not seeing that in the data. If there are numbers in there, they’re extremely well hidden, which means that they aren’t meant to be decoded, which means that this signal isn’t a numbers-based transmission.

  “Maybe the words we’re seeing are numbers, but we won’t know that until we have a better understanding of the rules set that’s at work with the words,” Tugel said.

  Hibbens nodded and turned his attention to Taylor.

  “What kind of staff increase are we going to need to change weeks, months and years into days or weeks?” Hibbens asked.

  “Well, general, we’d need to tap just about everyone at any language department at any major university. The language isn’t Spanish or Chinese or Mongolian or even a known made-up language like Klingon,” Taylor said. “We’ve ruled out more than 200 languages so far –“

  Hibbens leaned forward in his chair, astounded, and cut Taylor off abruptly. “In four days you’ve ruled out 200 languages?”

  Ferguson said, “Two-hundred and thirty eight, general.”

  Hibbens glanced at Ferguson, opting not to interject protocol into the meeting, and turned back to Taylor. “How?”

  “Just by running the signal through the database,” Taylor said. “And, that’s all of the languages in the database, so, at this point, we’re talking about physically taking copies of the sound pattern to various experts and playing it for them.”

  Hibbens sighed, exasperated at the sudden nature of the challenge. Outsourcing the signal to academics was not exactly what he or his superiors wanted to do. It would make the signal legitimate, somehow, if the experts realized what they were dealing with.

  “So, what needs to happen?” Hibbens asked.

  Taylor picked up a sheet of paper from near the laptop and put it on the table before Hibbens.

  “We have a list of 347 linguists trained in various languages and language analysis,” Taylor said.

  “Theoretically, if we could get all of them a copy of the speech pattern this week, we’d know if it was any known or knowable language in however long it took them to do the work.”

  Hibbens scratched his chin. “What’s the best guess on that?”

  “Well, it’s academia, general, so you’re talking weeks or months, depending on the person,” Taylor said. “Plus, there’s the presumed need for secrecy, so we’d have to come up with a cover story for why we need this analyzed so quickly, and no matter what we tell them, some of them will not eagerly work with us because, while they’re
on our list, they don’t know they’re on our list, so a military request for a translation will be met with some measure of disdain, at best.”

  Hibbens rose from the chair and paced the room. He looked out a window at the desert and wondered if anybody else on the base ever had to deal with real life intruding on their top secret projects. He felt a sudden intense need for a cigar.

  “Major Forrestal, get Colonel Taylor 347 copies of the recognized language sections of the transmission in whatever formats she thinks she needs,” Hibbens said, turning and nodding to Taylor before turning his gaze to Forrestal, “by 1600 hours tomorrow.”

  Hibbens strode across the room and exited without another word.

  Chapter 30

  Dante and Kendell sat before Dante’s computers, listening to Dante’s latest three songs, all based on the captured sounds from the signal. They both had headphones on and had been paying attention to the sounds in the songs, and how Dante had managed to make them musical. Kendell was impressed, and as the final song finished, he kept his eyes closed as he took off the headphones and composed his thoughts.

  Kendell waited for Dante to take off his headphones and then stared in disbelief at his friend.

  “Scots, those are maybe the most unique, innovative and ground-breaking songs I think I’ve ever heard,” Kendell said. “Kaylinne told me about the one she did, but who the hell is that on the other two?”

  Dante smiled. “Me.”

  “You!”

  “Yeah, I tweaked my vocals to try to match the source material,” Dante said, playing down his sense of pride that he’d impressed his friend.

  “It’s awesome,” Kendell said, “but it’s weird. It sounds like you’re some sort of … I don’t know. It’s almost like you’re singing like English isn’t your normal language.”