Superstar

June, 2075, in the SETI research a facility, at the Allen Telescope Array, Hat Creek, California:

“Hey Jeremy, do me a favor, read this data for me. I need a second pair of eyes.”

Curiosity turns the monitor towards her colleague.

“Clear signal. Radio spectrum. Oscillating frequencies between wavelengths, between… holy shit. 1.420 and 1.666 GHz! Right there in the Water Hole frequency range, how about that! Curiosity… this… this is exactly what we’ve been looking for, served up on a silver platter!”

She nods. Her face is whiter than ash. She would have expected a thrill of joy— but this level of excitement?

She actually just feels nauseous.

Jeremy laughs. “Holy shit, holy shit! Curiosity, you just made history. Wait a minute, that’s coming from LHS 1140, the red dwarf system! I remember reading about 1140 b, one of the planets there, which the MEearth project identified… it’s likely an ocean world— and smack dab in the habitable zone! Haha, no wonder they used the Water Hole frequencies. Curiosity, this is gonna be world news!”

She cannot muster a nod, or a smile. But she manages a whisper “I know.”

Her mouth feels so dry it hurts.

She hears his hand slap her shoulder but hardly feels it.

He lets out a wild woop.

She shakes her head. “Don’t relay these findings yet. We’ve had false reads before. Keep scanning these coordinates. We need to rule out background radiation, this could be cosmic noise or local RF interference and—“

Jeremy laughs “We’ll run it again. We will run it as many times as you want, but that signal is too clear and loud to be anything other than what you think it is. This band is usually so quiet. And that oscillation? My God! Too regular and steady to be interstellar scintillation, and look at these precise periods and the extended silent pauses between cycles. An unmistakable pattern, this was done deliberately. Do you realize— you’re the very first human to witness a broadcast from an Extraterrestrial Intelligence!”

Curiosity still feels like she’s about to hurl, but finally, after repeat observations, the shock begins to fade and a tight smile cracks her mouth.

*

Once she knows for certain, she makes her first phone call. She does not place her first call to the main headquarters of the SETI institute. She does not place her follow-up calls to any sister stations of the Allen Telescope Array, atleast not right away.

Her first call is to her fiancé.

After a stunned moment, she hears his voice crackle through the landline: “Are you telling me little green men slid into your dms? Should I be jealous?”

Her fiancé laughs, then continues, “congrats babe. You did it! This is so surreal I can’t even believe it.”

She giggles, despite herself and all her professional titles. “I know. God, I know!”

*

6 months later her days are still a whirlwind. She ended up deciding to push back their wedding date— there’s just no time to plan and she doesn’t want to compromise their special day.

Early on, Curiosity and her colleagues determined that the EM radiation they’d picked up on was highly coherent, each wave moving in the same direction. Like a laser but at much shorter wavelengths than visible light, an instance of of Microwave Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation, or a maser. And the oscillating frequency modulation stayed too steady and precise, within specific bandwidths to be from any naturally occurring megamaser. Additionally the system this beam of light came from lacked the massive formations necessary to produce natural masers— no black holes or galaxy centers…

And most telling: the radio waves were coming from a planet in orbit around the LHS 1140, about 50 light years away… and the luminosity or amplitude of this signal actually outshone the star itself!

Opinion after expert opinion confirmed: this signal was real. The team at the ATA found concurrent broadcasts in other radio frequencies all showing the same high coherence ultra bright luminosity, and consistent directionality. They also found a number of broadcasts in in almost every band of radio frequencies— except the S-Band. They even found repeat signals in microwave frequencies— and in each instance the indemnified signals oscillated b by between a range of .246 GHz, with silent pauses. just like the first signal they found, in the Water Hole range.

Within a few nights, the Lick Observatory— equipped with telescopes and instruments focused on searching different wavelengths— identified sister signals from the same coordinates, in infrared and near infrared.

After confirming so many artificial signals from one tiny region of space, all with laser coherence and directionality, teams around the globe began to assume, independently, that whatever intelligence broadcast these signals— they aimed them towards us deliberately.

This wasn’t a case of earth happening to see random evidence of intelligent life 50 light years away— this wasnt even a case of intelligent life deliberately waving hello. This was intelligent life lighting a beacon and aiming it right at our heads.

They wanted us to know they were there.

And they must be trying to say something.

Now all Curiosity’s days are exhausted by an ordered chaos of interviews, press statements, collaborative meetings and phone calls with officials, quantum physicists, researchers, experts, theoretical linguists and fellow astronomers from around the globe.

And everybody is frustrated, because nobody can crack the code— nobody understands what this alien intelligence is trying to say.

*

After another hard day— of the world asking questions and making no progress towards an answer— Curiosity goes home.

She curls up on the couch next to her fiancé, he strokes her hair.

“City, you want a glass of wine?”

She shakes her head.

“Yeah me neither. Wanna bottle of wine?”

She laughs. “Yeah, but I shouldn’t. I’m trying to think.”

He sighs. “I get that, but damn, lady. You gotta give your neurons a break. By poisoning them— let’s go!”

She smiles. “Okay, maybe a sip. Or two. God, 6 months ago, this message felt like a miracle but now I realize it’s a curse. We’re never gonna figure it out.”

“Yes you will.”

“No, there’s literally no sense to it. We found duplicate messages in so many wavelengths, but the message itself is too simple to have any real symbolic meaning. There’s absolutely no room for syntax in a message so brief. The best linguists in the world are pissed. They want to rage-quit. And so do I. This message…. It’s basically the equivalent of an SOS, but without context or any knowledge of Morse.. So a lot less than an SOS, in effect. Just some flashing lights, that don’t say a damn thing. Like they shot up a flare in the distance, but we’re just a bunch of fish, so we don’t know what to make of it.”

Her husband passes her the wine, then rubs her shoulders. “Maybe it’s actually Morse code. Why not?”

She laughs. “The why is obvious, an alien civilization would have no knowledge of Morse code, they might have similar linguistic code, but we’d need an interstellar Rosetta Stone to understand it. And they know that, that we won’t understand their language, so they wouldn’t bother sending anything like that without a key. And there’s no key.”

He smooths her brow with a kiss. “Not to play devils advocate, but what if they’ve been watching us going enough to have learned our language. What if they just took the time to send something they knew we’d understand, so we wouldn’t have to bother dicking around with a key and a decoder.”

She furrows her brow again and pushes the wine away.

Then she shakes her head. “No, the message is too short and too simple to bear any meaning. The reason everybody working on this is so pissed, is because we know deep down there’s no message. Like I said, they just shot uo a flair. It’s great, just knowing they exist. But, well, we’re not satisfied.”

Her husband shrugs. “They say curiosity killed the cat, but it sounds to me like curiosity’s killing Curiosity. I dunno babe, there’s gotta be something you’re missing.”

She groans. “Yeah, but we just don’t know what.”

“What about that S-band stuff you told me about a few weeks ago. That’s kinda weird, isn’t it. For them to broadcast this repeat message in every frequency except the S-band?”

“Yeah, it’s weird. But, again, we can’t make sense of if. Agrowing segment of the research community is obsessed with the S-Band signal. Or lack thereof.”

“I get it. I always tell my students: in music, silence can say as much— or more— than the notes.”

She sighs. “Yeah, but the S-band isn’t silent. It’s full of noise. In fact, it’s full of artificial noise, so we know it’s from an intelligent source. But it’s garbled, degraded. It’s just like what we’d imagine distant planets might see if they used sensitive radio telescopes to look at earth. No clear messages, just leaky communications, a chaotic mess of overlapping broadcasts. We’re pretty sure we’re just picking up their planetary communications.”

He takes her empty glass. “Well, again. Just playing devils advocate here, if they’ve been watching us for a while maybe they know more about us than we know about them. Maybe they’re smarter than we are, maybe they’ve deciphered our leaky data, haha. Perhaps they’re trying to communicate with us on a channel they think we’ll understand. WiFi is on S-band, isn’t it? Try hooking up your phone to the signal, and see if they’re just trying to stream some cute cat videos our way.”

She sits up. “WiFi is primarily S-band, you’re right. But they’re 50 light years away. They sent this signal before we’d even invented WiFi.”

He watches her but says nothing.

She stands. “If— and I’m only saying IF, because this is a long shot— but if they wanted to send something they’d think we’d understand, they’d probably send us something similar to what we were broadcasting in the 1970s. Fifty years for our leaky radio broadcasts to get to them. 50 years for them to send something back. No internet. What the fuck did people watch back then?”

“I don’t know… reality TV?”

“No, well maybe. I dunno. But TV in general. Goddamn it babe.”

He raises his eyes in concern. “What? What is it?”

“You’re getting my hopes up. Why the hell did you have to go and do that?”

He chuckles and pulls her into an embrace. “I was just throwing whatever I could into the machine. Fact is I just think you’re so sexy when you’re thinking big brain stuff. Makes me feel like an idiot, but I don’t mind.”

*

The next day, they cracked the code, with some old analog television sets… deep in the noise of the S-band they found a clear line of data, broadcast via phase modulation and entirely steady amplitude and wavelength, hidden in plain sight.

By the end of the week, the whole world gathered around their tablets, their phones, their computers— and yes, even their digital TVs.

Curiosity gave the intro— dummed down for the masses: “welcome to the future. This is a message for all of humanity, from the only interstellar neighbors we know of so far, the intelligent species that lives on an ocean world orbiting a red dwarf star, 50 light years away from us. They sent this message 50 years ago, in reply to data we accidentally sent them 100 years ago.”

*

The extraterrestrial society of LHS 1140 b sent us a cartoon. The figures resembled humans, and they spoke in synthesized human voices:

“Greetings to the people of Earth! We are your family, from across the stars. We formatted this message in your language, with video accompaniment which we expect you to understand. We would like to share a little bit about ourselves!”

The cartoon images shifted, to allow new figures to walk on screen. Six limbed, furry, with bilateral symmetry. They had gentle looking faces, and many of the people watching felt an impulse to call them adorable.

“We are very similar to you— though on the surface we look quite different. We maintain the same ideals of freedom, individuality, and the pursuit of happiness. We have businesses much like yours, which report and celebrate record breaking sales. We make sure our businesses thrive; and like you, we love to let the market balance itself. Competition drives innovation and quality. Sometimes we have to fight to protect these ideals from those of our kind who would destroy our way of life. In the past we have had to wage wars, against those of our kind who deny the goodness of profit and to allow silly notions like environmental restrictions or animal rights to stand in the way of our progress. We don’t mind pollution if it’s for a good cause, and public health isn’t the biggest Māori stor for us. And sometimes we have had to wage wars against some of our kind to free up vital resources for market expansion. And sometimes we let those wars kill innocents; even our innocent young. But most of our young die of starvation. Surely you understand. Like you we have a surplus, we just don’t care. ”

The screen shows the human cartoon and the alien cartoon shaking hands, and smiling.

“As far as you can tell, we are exactly like you. Would you like to meet us? No? If you are discouraged by our violence and our greed, then use this message as a mirror. We look forward to your response! You do not need to bother sending a specific broadcast in reply. We are already watching the data you leak to the cosmos. If and when you are able to treat your own planet and your own kind the way you’d like to see us treat our own planet and our own kind, we will facilitate a meeting. Get to work.