Outside Context Problem: Book 01 - Outside Context Problem

by Christopher Nuttall

  He saw Sandra wince and smiled to himself. With the consent of the Majority and Minority leaders, Congress wouldn’t raise an effective fuss, but those who did complain would turn it into a real political catfight. The Joint Chiefs would have a collective fit as well. Each of the services had its own space-capable system, in defiance of logic, and they would resent giving it up, even temporarily. In the battles for budget, having such capabilities helped attract more funding. It wasn't something to mock in the current economic climate. The last thing the United States needed was a sudden new drain on its resources, but what other choice did they have?

  “Yes, Mr President,” Sandra said. The two colonels were staring at the paper as if it was a map to hidden treasure. “Ah…has there been any reply to your message?”

  “Nothing from the aliens at all,” the President said. It bothered him. The techs had suggested that the aliens lacked FTL communications, even though they had calculated that the craft that had carried him to their mothership had moved faster than light, and that the message was still heading out to the alien ship, but the President doubted it. The aliens had kept an eye on America – and were still flying their craft through restricted airspace, mocking the defenders, those who knew they were there. They could have easily picked up the message and transported it to the mothership on one of their smaller craft. “They may be still thinking about their response.”

  “Or they may be talking to the Russians, or the Chinese,” Sandra pointed out. “If we rejected their bargain, they might have moved on to someone else.”

  “I know,” the President said. The Russians had been manoeuvring for years to reassume control over Eastern Europe. The aliens could offer them that on a platter. The Chinese wanted Taiwan back, and then perhaps most of the surrounding countries – and the aliens could give them what they wanted. Would they accept a deal that condemned the rest of the world to alien domination?

  The analysts hadn’t been able to decide. The CIA and the other intelligence agencies had been watching for signs of alien contact, but so far they’d found nothing, not even a vague rumour. The Russians and Chinese were far better at keeping secrets than the American Government and it wasn't as if they were short of uninhabited territory that could be used for a secret meeting. The National Reconnaissance Office had been studying satellite footage from the last week, trying to see if the aliens had landed within their territory, but it was useless. The aliens would know when the Americans weren’t watching – if they cared enough to try to hide. It was impossible to prove or disprove one way or the other.

  “There are some advanced concepts I’d like to see get funding, but I doubt we could fund all of them,” Sandra said. “I mean, we could build railgun systems capable of hitting targets in orbit without giving them so much advance warning, yet we haven’t even moved on to producing usable hardware, apart from a test model. I don’t even know how well our fighters stack up against the alien craft, or how they will engage us – or even if they will engage us at all. If they have high-powered lasers, more powerful than our own, they could wipe out the entire USAF in a single afternoon.”

  The President could see it in his mind’s eye. A beam of light flickering from aircraft to aircraft, leaving explosions in its wake as fuel overheated and exploded, or the beam burned through the cockpit and killed the pilot before he could eject. It wasn’t the most depressing possibility, either. Another one had come right out of Independence Day, with human fighters trying desperately to escape invincible alien spacecraft, protected by invulnerable force fields. Somehow, he doubted that a mere computer virus would bring down real aliens.

  “We have to try,” he said. “Tell anyone who argues about the command to come see me and I’ll read him the riot act. We don’t have time for petty disputes, General. The fate of the entire world is at stake.”

  “Yes, Mr President,” Sandra said. She stood to attention. “We won’t let you down.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  SETI Institute, California, USA

  Day 20

  It always disappointed visitors – just as it had disappointed Karen Lawton on her first day – that the headquarters of the SETI institute were so mundane. There were no massive radio telescopes staring into the heavens – they were located out in the desert, or in other countries – or images of extraterrestrials, only a set of computer banks and a handful of technicians to keep an eye on them. Karen, like the others in the massive chamber, was on her internship, unlike the handful of True Believers who ran most of the organisation. If she decided she liked the work, she could apply to SETI for a permanent position, but she’d decided long ago that the work was largely boring. She’d trained as a radio expert and had gone into astronomy because it seemed interesting, but SETI wasn't the place to make great discoveries. If there were aliens out there, they were keeping very quiet.

  She looked down at the console and scowled to herself. The morning shift was just like any other shift to her, as dead as the grave. The vast majority of the work was automated, or handled by thousands of volunteers across the globe who donated some of their computer time to studying the endless input from the stars. The heavens were ablaze with radio signals and howling static, yet all of them had a natural cause, apart from one. She’d studied the odd WOW signal picked up years ago by SETI, but the cause remained unidentified and, as human understanding of the universe deepened, she suspected that it would turn out to have a natural cause. The interstellar navigation beacons SETI had picked up had turned out to be quasars, stray signals had turned out to come from lost or damaged satellites and every hopeful they’d found had had a natural explanation. Even if they did pick up something – anything – there was no guarantee that they would be able to understand it. A lifetime spent in a mixed family had left her convinced that there were cultural barriers even among humans that could never be broken. An alien race might have completely different concepts of how the universe actually worked.

  It had been hard, but she’d already made up her mind to quit at the end of her internship, perhaps even see if the NSA would take her on. She’d been approached by a recruiter before accepting the position at SETI, but as a committed antiwar activist she could hardly have accepted the position at No Such Agency. Her last boyfriend would have had a fit, although seeing as she’d dumped him for trying to cop a feel in the middle of a movie they’d watched together, she found it hard to care about his opinion. He probably hated her now anyway. She hadn’t castrated him, but it hadn’t been for lack of trying. She’d been lucky not to be arrested for assault.

  Ping!

  She blinked in disbelief, which was rapidly replaced by cynicism. The computers scanned every incoming signal, looking for odd patterns that might indicate the presence of alien life, and alerted their human operators to anything interesting. It had been exciting, the first time, until she’d been told that there were hundreds of alerts every month, even with the best filtering software thousands of volunteers could produce. No one, apart from the young and naive, even got interested any longer. How could they when the dream of locating an alien civilisation had been replaced by a desperate struggle to keep being funded, knowing the odds against success?

  Karen leaned down and tapped a pair of keys, putting the incoming signal through a verification process. It compared the signal’s point of origin to any known satellite or chunk of space debris, anything that could serve as a transmitter. SETI had had some excitement three years ago when a dead Russian satellite had suddenly come alive for twenty minutes and started spewing out gibberish – no one knew why or how – that had passed for an alien signal, until someone had verified it as being manmade. The media had made fun of it – and a pair of hoaxes someone else had created – and further dented SETI’s image as serious science. It didn’t help that thousands of UFO reports were forwarded, every year, to SETI. Most of them, too, were hoaxes.

  The signal refused to vanish. Puzzled, feeling an odd trembling deep within her chest, Karen ran throug
h the second set of verification procedures. The signal was coming from deep space! It was unbelievable and she ran through the verification procedure again, yet it was undeniable. The source of the signal was on the very edge of the solar system! She checked again, using the incoming feed from several different telescopes to triangulate the source of the signal, and discovered that there was no mistake. The Voyager and Pioneer space probes had drifted out of the solar system years ago, yet they’d been on a completely different heading. The source of the signal couldn’t be manmade, could it?

  Wonder warred with fear in her chest. Wonder won. She picked up the phone and tapped in a number, half-nervous that one of the others would see her discovery before she had a chance to claim it as hers. SETI was very competitive. Anyone who located an alien signal would instantly become the most famous person on the planet and there were hundreds of True Believers and even Lukewarm Believers who wouldn’t hesitate to try to steal the credit. She copied the data into an email and forwarded it out of the Institute, sealing her claim.

  “Ah, Director,” she said, when the Director finally answered. “I think you should come see this. I’ve got something very interesting on my computer.”

  ***

  Director Daisy Fairchild had been born to a mother – her father remained an unknown, much to her relief – who had fallen in love with the hippy lifestyle so prevalent among her fellow teens. She had followed her calling and moved to live with a naturalistic commune outside San Francisco where they engaged in free love, took as many drugs as they wanted and generally tried to stay away from real life. Daisy had been born on a muddy field and would have grown up with the commune if her grandfather hadn’t taken her away from her mother shortly after she’d been born. A muddy field, her grandfather had said, was no place to bring up a baby and he’d been right. Daisy’s mother had kept her faith and, after the Courts had ruled in her favour, had tried to convince Daisy to remain with her, but Daisy had refused. The hippies were growing older and looked more pathetic every year. Many had left the commune for jobs, marriage, and a life more ordinary.

  It was an irony that her mother’s connections – as a true believer, she had the ear of some quite powerful people – had helped her to obtain the position she held. SETI had plenty of enthusiastic volunteers who were willing to assist with the project, but it had lacked a trained manager who could bring in funding and public support. Daisy had revamped the system completely, banging on as many doors as she could for funding while developing public displays that brought in more funding and lecture opportunities, even though she didn’t really believe in SETI and its mission. Her mother might have talked about aliens coming to save Earth or beaming the chosen up to the mothership, leaving the rest of the human race to wallow in filth, but it had never happened. It was just a job, as far as Daisy was concerned, one that she was good at handling. Who cared if there was alien life or not?

  She walked down the long corridor, silently cursing the intern under her breath. SETI relied upon them and so she couldn’t give them the thrashing they deserved, every time they saw something and thought that it was the big one. Daisy’s predecessor had quit over a report of alien contact that had been proven – too late – to be a hoax signal. The media had picked up on it – someone within SETI had alerted the media without checking the signal – and he’d become a laughing stock. It had been his own stupid fault for believing that the Men in Black were on their way to close SETI down and conceal the truth about alien visits. Daisy suspected that the Men in Black needn’t have bothered.

  “All right,” she said, as she strode into the radio chamber. She’d found it somewhat disappointing at first too, but the original planners had reasoned that keeping SETI as a distributed system made it harder for the government or anyone else to interfere. “What do you have?”

  The intern was dark-haired, pretty enough to be a cheerleader…and grinning from ear to ear. Daisy had only seen her once before and then only from a distance, when she’d welcomed the new interns to SETI, knowing that most of them would be gone within six months. She couldn’t remember the girl’s name. If it hadn’t been on her nametag, she would have had to ask and reveal that she neither knew nor cared. Or at least she hadn’t cared. If Karen had found something real, she would be turned into the most famous person in the world. SETI would promote her and, in doing so, promote the mission. The funding opportunities would be considerable.

  “A signal,” Karen said. “It’s coming in on the hydrogen band wavelength, from a source on the edge of the solar system.”

  There was more technobabble, but Daisy tuned it out as she examined the display, trying to think. She had to admit that the signal looked convincing – none of the Senior Astronomers in the room were trying to squash Karen – and there seemed to be no reason to believe that it was a hoax.

  “We’ve got confirmation from three different observatory stations,” one of the Seniors said. His face was flushed with excitement. As a True Believer, the prospect of alien contact was wonderful. He’d often spoken of how important it would be to greet the aliens peacefully, although Daisy got nervous every time he spoke to the media. He looked like a mad scientist and sometimes talked like one. “It’s real, Director! We’ve found alien life!”

  Daisy ran her hand through her hair, trying to think. The vast majority of SETI scientists would want to proceed with a news release, either to prevent the Men in Black or some other delusional nonsense from preventing the public from being informed, or – more practically – to prevent someone else from claiming credit for the discovery. The news would be flashing through the SETI community already and someone might just jump the gun…and, as the world turned, other telescopes would pick up the signal.

  And yet, if it was a hoax, how could her career survive?

  “Check it,” she ordered, shortly. “Are we entirely certain of the source?”

  “Yes,” Karen said, flatly. The intern looked as if she’d just had a massive orgasm, Daisy reflected, sourly. She probably had. She didn’t know if Karen was a True Believer or not, but her discovery had catapulted her to fame and fortune. She was pretty enough to be a natural on the talk show circuit. “There is nothing that could have produced such a signal.”

  Daisy mentally ran through the briefing papers in her mind. SETI was signed up to a variety of international agreements concerning the detection of an alien signal, yet none of those agreements had any legal power and no one had any illusions as to how well they’d stand up after the discovery of real alien life. The Declaration of Principles Concerning Activities Following the Detection of Extraterrestrial Intelligence was written by True Believers, yet on the verge of the greatest scientific discovery of the century, no one would bother to go through the entire procedure. They’d just shout the news to the skies.

  Her cell phone vibrated. “Director,” her secretary said, “I’ve just had a call from CNN. They’ve heard a rumour that we’ve picked up a signal.”

  Daisy felt her gaze sweeping the room. Someone had sent a note to the media. They probably wouldn’t take it entirely seriously at first – or perhaps they’d run it with a few disclaimers so that the blame would fall entirely on SETI – but the more they pried, the more they’d learn. They’d eventually seek to take control of the dissemination and that could not be allowed, not when SETI had just proved its worth to a universe of doubting sceptics.

  She looked up at an image of ET someone had hung on the wall and made her decision. “Tell them that I will be holding a press conference later today,” she ordered, smoothly. “We’ll hold it…three hours from now. Until then, we’ll hold our cards closely to our chests and wait.”

  The connection broke and she smiled at Karen. “My congratulations,” she said, calmly. “You’re about to be famous.”

  Karen blushed. “Thank you, Director,” she said. “Can I call my parents?”

  “If you wish,” Daisy said. She looked around the room, mentally matching names to faces. “I want a
formal notification sent to everyone on the list that we have detected a signal of unknown origin. Get them to start checking the signal and confirming its source. The senior staff will compose a press release that we’ll issue at the press conference later today. Karen, you’re going to have to get ready to face the baying pack of newshounds. The rest of you, start working on the signal so that I have something to tell the reporters when they arrive, and keep me informed.”

  “Director,” one of the juniors said. “What about the source?”

  Daisy blinked. “What about the source?”

  The young man held his ground. “It’s within the solar system,” he pointed out, very calmly. His face was pale. “We checked it six ways from Sunday and found nothing that could have generated it – nothing human, that is. The source is within the solar system. Director, we could be on the verge of actually meeting the aliens, face-to-face.”

  Daisy stared at him. She’d always assumed that SETI would pick up signals from another planet light-years away, even though she knew that the vast majority of signals that Earth beamed out were too weak to be detected even by a SETI-like project on the nearest star. She’d always considered it a good thing, or at least she had when she’d bothered to think about it at all, for an alien race that watched most of what passed for human entertainment would probably get a very distorted idea of humanity. An alien starship in the solar system was outside her league. The entire world would change overnight.

  “Get me some confirmation on that,” she ordered, thinking hard. Would it be wise to announce that at the press conference? What would the Government say? It wouldn’t remain a secret for much longer anyway. Every observatory in the world would be looking for the signal’s source. “Email it to me through the intranet. I’ll have a look at it once we’ve made the first announcement.”