Cold Eyes (First Contact), page 13
“Oh,” Sandy says, snuggling in next to him and resting her hand on his chest. “What are they?”
“Don’t ask,” Dali says, resting on a pillow with his hands behind his head. “Seriously. All I know is, if you plug them into a graph, they make shapes that look like butterfly wings.”
“Cool.”
“Kari tells me these lead to an understanding of Relativity, so we’re pretty sure they grasp that concept.”
“And you still think they’re lying to us?” Sandy asks.
“With the exception of when Bee’s on the far side of Luyten, they reply every three hours and forty-three minutes.”
“That’s very specific.”
“It is,” Dali says. “It might seem strange to us, but it’s 1/60th of the time it takes them to orbit Luyten itself.”
“Ah,” Sandy says. “So it’s like their version of an hour or a day or something?”
“Probably.”
“You’re still worried?”
“It’s the frequency,” Dali says. “The exact repetition. It’s like they’ve got everything pre-canned and ready to roll, like they’re running from a playbook. I don’t like it. It’s too clean.”
“Too clean?” Sandy says, turning to him and leaning on his chest.
“There should be misunderstandings, points that need clarification. We should be going down dead-end streets and reversing. But, no. Everything’s going along perfectly. Everything. We’ve even got simple contextual conversations going with them in English.”
“Well, that’s good,” Sandy says, running her fingers through the hair on his chest. “Did you ever think that perhaps you’re trying too hard? I mean, your implant didn’t take. You had to fight to prove yourself with Helios and Kari. Are you sure you’re not reading too much into their responses? Maybe they’re sweating over things too. Maybe they’re paranoid about putting a foot wrong. Like you said, if this goes bad, they have a lot to lose. Maybe they’re trying so hard because they want this to be perfect.”
“Maybe,” Dali says.
“You worry too much,” Sandy says.
“I do,” Dali concedes.
“It can be hard to let go,” she says, resting her arms on his chest and her chin on the back of her hands. “Sometimes you have to trust others—just like I trusted you.”
He’s quiet.
“Not everyone’s out to get us, Dali.”
“I know.” He sighs.
“You’re so tense,” she says. “Roll over. I’ll give you a massage.”
“Oh, no arguments there,” he says, twisting and flopping onto his stomach.
Sandy begins squeezing his shoulder muscles. She gets her thumbs into a steady motion, hitting a constant rhythm, digging in deep. “You are soooo stiff.”
“Isn’t that what you said when we first met?” Dali asks. “Right as I stepped out of that glass vat?”
Sandy laughs, playfully slapping his butt.
Dali tries to relax, but it’s difficult to let go. As it is, his brief life feels as though it’s spiraling out of control. How can they be expected to manage First Contact with an entire planet? This isn’t the one-on-one meeting of sci-fi movies. It’s four clones talking to billions of intelligent creatures, each with their own interests, concerns, desires and needs! Oh, they’ll inevitably end up talking to just a handful of contacts down there. No doubt, the inhabitants of Bee have already picked their negotiators. And that’s what it’ll be—a negotiation. Not for goods or money, for access. Gatekeepers is the term his mind settles on. In some ways, the notion is unavoidable. It would be impossible for everyone to have a voice.
Will the Beebs sanitize their appearance before humanity? Will their speakers be the equivalent of social media influencers curating their image, establishing a brand? Humans are good at preening their feathers. Like a peacock, it’s the plumage that’s important, not anything of any real substance.
Maybe Sandy’s right, and he’s reading too much of his own doubts into First Contact. Vanity might be an affliction on Earth, but even back there, not everyone falls for it. There are plenty of decent folk for whom what you see is what you get.
Dali’s not convinced First Contact will be straightforward. He doubts the crew of the Magellan will ever get to know the real Beebs. Would the UN show visiting aliens a starving child in Ethiopia, or the skulls leftover from the Killing Fields of Cambodia? Dali doesn’t have the heart to confess as much to Sandy. To her, such notions would come across as pessimistic rather than realistic. Given time, she’ll see, he thinks.
“Better?” she asks, straddling his hips and leaning into the massage.
“Really good,” he mumbles, pretending his mind is on nothing else.
Sandy uses her elbow to roll over the knots in his trapezius. Rather than idling along, Dali’s mind is still running at a million miles an hour. How the hell does he know what a trapezius is? He’s not sure, but he’s suddenly aware it stretches from the occipital bone at the base of his skull down his neck and out across his shoulders. From there, it forms a triangle extending down his spine. Some days, Dali wishes he could switch off his mind. Ah, to be able to flick a button and watch as the screen goes black.
“Why did you choose them?” he asks with his face half-buried in the pillow.
“Who?”
“Helios and Kari?” he replies, straining as Sandy tries to push her elbow clear through his back. If he won’t shut down his mind, she will, and he follows with a slight, “Ahhhhhh.”
“Too much?”
“No. Too good.”
With that, she presses harder, feeling for the lump in his muscle fibers. “Why do you ask?”
“I—saw—the—manifest,” he manages through gritted teeth. It seems she’s determined to punish him for fighting against her massage. He should have shut up and simply lay there. By talking, he’s encouraging her to go deeper. Sandy switches elbows, rolling the bone around on his trapezius. It’s only then he realizes there are two of the damn muscles. She’s only worked on his left side. When she finally eases up, it’s only to switch to the right. Ouch. It feels so good and yet so sore.
“I had plenty of time to think about my choice,” she says. “I spent the first month outfitting the torus and running through my options. Originally, I was going to revive Lisa and Daisy Murchison—that was the pre-launch recommendation.”
“But?” he says, unwilling to let go of something that’s important for him to understand.
“But I knew Helios wouldn’t go easy on me.”
“What do you mean?”
“People think leadership is about making the right decision. It’s not. It’s about making the best of a bunch of bad decisions. It’s about sailing through a storm and out the other side.”
“And—Helios?”
“Helios doesn’t let me get away with shit,” she says, putting some extra effort into Dali’s back. She switches to using her knuckles, rocking them over his aching muscles. She might as well be kneading dough before baking bread.
Dali’s drooling on his pillow. “And—me? I—would?”
“Oh, Dali,” she says, leaning forward and kissing him on the side of the neck. “You’d try. I know you would. But Helios is a fighter. If he doesn’t agree with something, I’ll know about it in no uncertain terms.”
“You—wouldn’t—listen,” he says, as she begins karate-chopping his back muscles, “to—me?”
“I’d listen to you, but I’d make my own decision. When I listen to Helios, I make a command decision.”
“Huh,” Dali says, surprised by her reply. Sandy cups her hands. She beats his back like a drum. Each strike resonates within his chest. Somehow, he manages to say, “You’re—good—at—this.”
“At what?” Sandy asks. “Massage? Or leadership?”
“Torture.”
The Art of Learning
Line after line of alphanumeric pairs scroll down the screen, being separated only by spaces. For the most part, they look like regular numbers, but occasionally characters appear, like a seemingly random c, d or e.
54 68 61 6e 6b 20 79 6f 75 20 66 6f 72
20 73 75 70 70 6f 72 74 69 6e 67 20 69
6e 64 65 70 65 6e 64 65 6e 74 20 73 63
69 65 6e 63 65 20 66 69 63 74 69 6f 6e
After progressing to quantum mechanics, the Beebs began sending large chunks of information to the Magellan. At first, there were only a few hundred pairs in each transmission, but then the crew was flooded with over three hundred million characters in one hit. The radio receiver on the Magellan captured the signal, but it couldn’t decipher it, leaving it in a raw binary state. For the sake of convenience, it appears as hexadecimal numbers, but it’s nothing the computer recognizes as intelligible.
“What do you think it is?” Sandy asks, looking at the endlessly scrolling data.
Dali shrugs. “I dunno. There are a few repeating phrases, but there’s no repeating structure, like sentences or paragraphs, page numbers, or chapters. This could be anything. Could be a dictionary. Could be their version of War and Peace.”
Kari says, “Maybe they haven’t invented punctuation yet? Wasn’t the Bible originally one big run-on sentence with no commas or full stops?”
“Yep,” Dali says, resigning himself to the reality it will take a herculean effort to untangle what, to the Beebs, must seem entirely logical and simple.
Sandy says, “I thought you said they were starting to converse in simple English.”
“That was a week ago,” Dali says. “Since then, they’ve gone quiet and stuck to math—until now.”
“So much for conducting First Contact in English,” Helios says.
To which, Sandy says, “Maybe they can’t speak English.”
Kari is blunt. “Maybe they won’t. Maybe they refuse to.”
“What we needed was a few drops of water,” Dali says. “What we got was a fire hose.”
“Where do we start?” Sandy asks, drifting in above him and slipping her hand around his waist so she can peer over his shoulder.
“I’m running a cryptography routine,” Dali says, tapping away at a keyboard. “Language is all about parsing. There are discrete chunks of information in here—words. In theory, all we have to do is identify them, and we can start unraveling this.”
“In theory,” Helios says.
“This is impossible,” Kari says. “It’s going to take years to decipher the first line!”
“Maybe. Maybe not,” Dali replies, trying to be hopeful. “I’m using frequency analysis. Think about the words we use all the time—the, and, for, what, where, there, etc. Not only are these words more frequent in a sentence, the letters within them occur more frequently. In English, the letter e occurs 10% of the time. It’s the most common letter because it forms such a fundamental vowel. By comparison, although it sounds almost the same, z occurs like never. We should see similar patterns with their letters and words.”
Kari and Helios hover nearby, watching as he enters commands into the computer. No pressure, Dali.
“There’s an economy to language,” he says, executing another analysis routine on the console. “As languages evolve, they take on more efficient forms. We should see that on Bee. We may not know what these terms are, but similar patterns should exist.”
“Should,” Helios says as a graph pops up on the screen.
“And?” Sandy asks innocently, staring at the squiggly lines.
“I’m not sure,” Dali says, feeling despondent as the computer fails to pick up any clear patterns. He sighs.
“What’s next?” Helios asks.
“I don’t know.” Dali snaps, getting annoyed by the sniping from over his shoulder. “Would you like some popcorn? Perhaps an ice cream and a coke while you watch this train wreck?”
“That would be nice.”
Dali smolders. Helios doesn’t care. A bit of friction makes for an entertaining afternoon. He seems to relish seeing Dali unwind in frustration. Dali closes his eyes for a moment, focusing. There’s got to be something he’s overlooked.
“What are you doing?” Kari asks as he enters another series of commands. Dali’s tired of providing a running commentary, but she means well. With biological contact off the agenda, it seems she’s keen to inject herself and help where she can.
It seems Helios is fishing for a reaction, though. He throws some bait in front of Dali, hoping for a bite.
“Maybe they sent us pi to several hundred million places.”
Not helpful. Dali ignores him.
“I’m restarting the server without the automated heuristics. Maybe that’s obscuring the results.”
“I’m getting some popcorn,” Helios says. Finally, Dali gets his dry humor. He’s not being malicious, just brutally honest with his frustration.
Dali thinks aloud. “Hmm. Still starting with heuristics. I’m going to have to shut down again and do a hard reset.”
Dali read about this last night. Although most of their computing is controlled via software, there’s a physical reset button at the rear of each of the computer servers. It shouldn’t be needed in the age of automation, but like everything twelve light-years from Earth, it was included just in case. He unscrews the maintenance hatch and swims through the air, effectively crawling into a thin gap behind the server rack.
“Any better?” Dali asks with just his legs protruding from beneath the entrance at the back of the bridge.
“Nope,” Kari says. “Command line is still showing NLL start-up as active.”
“Damn it,” he says. “A reset should have forced my override to be picked up from the config file. Power it down again, and I’ll do a hard disconnect.”
Helios laughs. “So you’re turning it off and on again?”
“Yes,” an annoyed Dali says from within the confines of the maintenance crawlspace.
Sandy laughs as well, asking, “Did someone at a call center tell you to do that?”
“Not funny,” Dali mutters, brushing up against the aluminum rack. He’s already torn a hole in his sleeve and scratched the back of his hands in the tight space.
“I thought you’d want the Natural Language Learning unit switched on,” Sandy says.
“Okay, I’ve powered down again,” Kari says. She’s the only one that’s actually helping. The others are bystanders watching the fire burn with amusement.
“Okay,” Dali says, grunting from behind the rack. His fingers wrap around a thick, black power cord. It’s a stretch to reach it, but he’s got a good hold.
“Don’t unplug anything else,” Sandy says.
“I won’t.”
Dali tugs at the cord. It’s stiff. No one ever intended it to be unplugged. Why would anyone want to pull the power from a computer on a starship trillions upon trillions of miles from Earth? The designers and engineers accounted for every eventuality except one—a stubborn specialist like Dali. The interchangeable parts can all be accessed from the front panel. It’s only the fiber optic wiring loom, reset and power that back into the crawl space.
The cord comes loose. His hand slams back into the bulkhead.
“Easy,” Sandy says, unable to see what’s happening behind the rack. She peers through the gaps, catching a glimpse of his head bobbing back and forth.
“I’m good,” he says.
Kari says, “All LEDs are black, including power.”
In his mind, Dali counts to ten. He needn’t. Any residual bits and bytes held in memory would have faded within a fraction of a second, but he needs this to work.
The rubberized plastic surrounding the power cable is thick and difficult to work with, no doubt as a precaution against the cable shorting out. Dali has to press his back against the bulkhead to get enough leverage to work the power cord back onto the metal prongs and ensure it’s properly seated.
“Okay,” he says. “Power it up.”
Kari switches the blade server back on. LEDs flicker. From the shadows in the crawl space, Dali can see the shimmer of reds, greens and yellows as various core components come online, booting the computer server back to life.
“I’ve got start-up parameters,” Kari says. “Just scrolling back through the run of command lines.”
“And?”
“Natural Language Learning is disabled.”
“Yes!” Dali says. He begins the painstaking process of extricating himself from the crawl space. It’s not possible to turn around, so he inches backward, working his way out onto the bridge again, twisting and contorting his body in weightlessness.
“I don’t get it,” Sandy says when he finally reappears. “I thought you’d want all the help you could get deciphering this.”
She sounds perplexed. They all look a little confused by his actions. Someone on Bee is trying to tell them something important, but Dali has turned off the machine learning algorithm. It doesn’t make sense to anyone other than him.
“I don’t see how you can decipher this without AI,” she says as he drifts at the back of the bridge.
“I need a drink,” he says. He’s in no rush to get back to the data dump. It’s not only the computer server that needs a reboot.
Dali pulls a reusable plastic pouch from the kitchenette beside the tunnel leading to engineering. It’s a ploy. He needs time and space. He’s running on a hunch. The team is looking for him to guide them on First Contact, forgetting he’s winging this without the benefit of his implant working properly. Right now, he needs a caffeine hit and some clarity of thought.
“The problem is—all language is based on context,” he says, making himself a coffee. “Language works because we agree on the meaning of the words we use. And yet no one has actually read a dictionary from cover to cover, right? We understand words based on how they’re used. Oh, occasionally, we might look something up, but 99% of the words we use have never been defined for us. We understand them based on how they’re used by others.”
“Ah,” Sandy says. “But these others.”
“Exactly,” he says. He adds some instant coffee grains and faux-cream powder to the plastic bag along with modestly warm water from a spigot on the hull. To hell with the microwave—it’s warm enough. Rather than soaking in, the powder and water don’t mix. In a weightless environment, they keep to themselves. Dali kneads the bag with his fingers, dissolving the coffee and cream.
