Chronicle
“We’re not alone,” Marc smiled.
Dana just smiled back and they hugged. Then they laughed. Then they cried.
“This is gonna change everything,” Dana said. “Can you imagine?”
“Yes,” Marc said. “Politics, religion, philosophy. Hell, economy, science. Whatever.”
“Show me,” Dana said.
Marc produced his tablet.
“The signals come from a planet orbiting this star… Well, I’ve come to call it Chuck. That’s its catalogue number. As you see, the coincidences are amazing: the star is basically a twin of ours, and it has four giant planets orbiting it as well, plus a number of rocky ones. At least three, probably more.”
“The signals come from one of those, or a giant’s moon?” Dana asked.
“One of the rockies. Frequency shifts confirm that.” Marc then smiled mischievously. “Wanna see?” he said.
“Yes!”
Marc showed her the signals. Dana stared at them intently. What she was looking at was a collection of electromagnetic data.
“We don’t know what it is,” she said. It wasn’t a question.
“No, of course. Who knows if we ever will. But one can hope. Can you imagine? Real xenobiologists?”
“Barely…” she said. “Have you tried old modulation schemes on these? If they’re among the first electromagnetic signals this civilization transmitted, chances are they’re pretty rudimentary.”
“We cannot really be sure,” Marc said. He knew Dana didn’t need him explaining, but they liked working like that. “Taking into account the distance between our two stars, they must be getting our first signals right now, but that doesn’t guarantee it’s the same for us.”
“Hm. Look at this. And this. Looks like some kind of amplitude modulation to me. But of course, there are… tens of signals mixed in here?”
Marc whistled. “You can just see that? I needed a mathematical analysis.”
Dana pulled her own tablet. “Can I have the data?”
“You already have.”
“We’re gonna be famous!” chirped a third voice from the door.
“Alice!” Dana said. All of them hugged and congratulated each other.
“You’re recording everything that’s coming from Chuck, aren’t you?” Alice asked Marc.
“Yes. D’you think we should make this public? We need permanent coverage throughout the planet. We cannot risk losing any data.”
Alice thought, but only for a second. “Do it. Tell everyone. If we don’t do it one of the other teams will. I’d rather it’s us. To hell with the politicians, we’re scientists.”
“On it,” Marc said, and started tapping.
“Want me to pull some strings with the space telescopes?” Dana asked.
“I knew those contacts of you would come in handy one day,” Alice said. “Do it. We need all the space time we can get. See what you can get us: visual, radio, infrared, UV. You know the drill. I’ll wake up everyone and have them come over.”
Dana nodded and started tapping in turn. She was owed a lot of favours, but after today she had the feeling she was going to end up owing a lot instead. Still, she had a smile plastered on her face as she worked.
++++
“We cannot decode those signals,” Ahmed said. “They make no sense.”
“It seems to me like we’re looking at a huge diversity of languages in this epoch’s data,” Cho said. “We cannot approach this like a common cryptanalysis problem. It’s not just an encrypted message, it’s closer to a… well, I don’t know. It’s a puzzle made up of thousands of pieces, and each one of them is another puzzle.”
“A puzzle within a puzzle,” Hugo said.
“Yes,” Cho conceded.
“Do you all think we need more help?” Amina said from the head of the table. “I can enroll more signal analysis specialists.”
“I don’t think it will hurt,” Ahmed said. “I feel stuck. I don’t know about you, but for every step forward I take, it looks like I take two steps back. And we keep receiving signals all the time!”
“Of course we do, and you know it,” Hugo said. “What we have now are their signals from the past. It will take a long time for us to get a signal sent directly to us.”
Ahmed raised his hands in mock defeat. “I know, I know. If they have detected us, and we have to imagine they have, any direct message from Chuck will reach us by the time our grandchildren are sitting at this table. At least. Everything we can advance by then is a bonus. But it’s so frustrating!”
“We all knew that when we accepted this job,” Amina said. “We’re the best in our fields, that’s why we’re here.”
Ahmed nodded.
“Amina, do you know if we’re going to start sending our own messages?” Cho asked.
Amina looked conspiratorial. “Confidentially?” There were nods around the table. “Yes. Another team is agreeing on the message. It’s sensitive, you know. The authorities insist we stick to maths and science. Funny, because that’s the way it should be, don’t you think?” There were general chuckles. “Anyway, you can imagine. Deciding the frequencies to use, sequences of prime numbers to call their attention in case they haven’t noticed us, maths, basic learning blocks, agreeing on a common language.”
Ahmed started laughing.
“What’s up, Ahmed?” Hugo asked.
“Sorry, sorry. It’s all so absurd!” he said. “Just imagine: we send a message, it takes a lifetime, no, several lifetimes to reach them. We don’t even know if they’re going to be able to understand it, but even if they do, we won’t have an answer for several more lifetimes. At the same time, both parties keep on receiving a deluge of signals. And for all we know, they could be extinct when our signal reaches them, only we don’t know it yet. What kind of conversations can we have like that?”
“I think I need something stronger than this,” Cho said, pointing at her drink.
++++
“They’re moving,” the General said.
“What do you mean?” the President said.
“Ma’am President, their signals no longer come from a single point. Well, a single point orbiting their star.”
“I do have a doctorate, General,” the President said. “I understand you.”
“Excuse me, Ma’am President, not my intention,” she said.
The Presidential Scientific Advisor interjected himself between the two most powerful women on the planet.
“We have it all here, Ma’am,” he said. “At this point in their history they started colonizing their stellar system.”
“When was that?” the President asked. They have reached a point where asking about time again had some sense.
“Well, it was quite some time ago. We’ve made some projections, and we believe they must have already sent interstellar probes.”
“Towards us?”
“We still don’t know for sure if they’ve detected us, as you know. The next generation will be sure of that, if they send any kind of message to us. But we suppose that they indeed have, and that they’ve sent a probe. The message would arrive first, of course.”
“I cannot say I like this,” the President said. She looked at the General. “They have a head start on us, General.”
“We know. We’ll try to be ready.”
The President massaged her temples. What if, what if. Their lives were full of questions, and they had to be ready for anything. The nightmare that awakened her at night was that, no matter what they did, only their descendants would meet the consequences.
“No one should live like this,” she said aloud. There were nods.
++++
“Energy spike detected,” Haien said.
“What is it?” Jamie asked.
“Processing, Jamie,” Haien said. “X-Rays, UV radiation. Collecting data.”
Jamie checked the readouts. Everything was off the scale. Red screens surrounded them.
“I’m sorry, Jamie, but I’ve never seen anything like that,” Haien said. Jamie nodded. What that meant was that such an event had never been recorded. Ever. It was new. And it came from them.
“Send everything to headquarters, please, Haien. Run some simulations for me, will you? I’ll be sending you some parameters in minutes.”
“Certainly, Jamie.”
Jamie connected themself to Haien’s interface and used the downlink to talk directly to Haien’s counterpart on the surface.
“Station here,” they said. “We have just detected an unprecedented phenomenon from the target. Energy readouts are off the scales. Haien is already sending all our data now.”
“Please stand by.”
++++
“They have warp technology,” Chee said, “or however one wants to call it. And they’re coming.”
“We’re sure of that,” Tach said.
“Yes.”
“Weapons?”
“We cannot be sure of their scope.”
“But?”
“But we should be ready for the worse.”
Tach damned the day they had made the definitive discovery and had managed to understand the messages. The hopes of several generations had been crushed then, when they discovered the true intentions of their stellar neighbours.
The warp portal opened and the ship came through. It immediately downed the space station and started transmitting surrender conditions.
The Terrans had arrived.
~~~~
This is my entry for this week’s Chuck Wendig’s Flash Fiction Challenge: Invasive Species. You see, Chuck has this book titled ‘Invasive’ released in paperback this week, so he gave us a 1500-word challenge to write about an invasive species.
Regardless of Chuck’s suggestions, I went for the sci-fi approach, but decided to tell the story a little differently. I hope you like it.
