Gold Rush, page 30
“Yeah, and what about the 270 million Americans that didn’t?”
Jill raises the stakes further. “And what about the seven thousand nine hundred and twenty million people in other parts of the world who also didn’t vote for him?”
“So we should give this to the UN?”
“Hell, no,” she says, laughing.
“Then who?”
Jill shrugs. “I dunno. We humans love to concentrate power into the hands of a few, and that leaves us vulnerable to abuse.”
“But someone has to lead.”
“Apparently.”
Jill takes another bite of her breakfast. Aaron tries the muesli. For something that looks like a bowl of chum ready to be spread on the ocean to attract sharks, it tastes surprisingly good. A burst of blueberries and strawberries catches his palate. Jill holds her hand out, wanting to see his phone. “Who are you talking to?”
“Professor Andrew McCallum,” Aaron says, opening his phone and turning it around so she can see the email.
“Oh, you don’t want to talk to Andrew,” she says, scanning at the email. “He’s a silverback.”
“A silverback? What? As in a gorilla?”
“Yep. A grey-haired academic ruling his forest troop with grunts and chest thumps.”
Aaron smiles. He’s loving her insights.
“Andy’s a narcissist,” she says with a level of ease that suggests they’ve tangled before. “He’ll play you off against others, using you as a poker chip to up the ante. The guy’s a total jerk.”
“Who should I be talking to?”
Jill hands his phone back to him. She picks up her phone and dials, saying, “Hang on.”
Raising her phone to her ear, she says, “Dominic, it’s Jill Yakov… I’m trying to get hold of Alistair Jorgensen. Do you have his contact details? Yeah, I’ll hold… Oh, you saw that? Yeah, I’m with him now… No, we haven’t fucked, but thanks for asking.” She holds her phone down in front of her and taps the mute button. “Dom’s brutal, but he gets shit done.” Aaron raises his eyebrows as she returns to the call. “Oh, yeah, tonight, probably… Hey, thanks for that. I owe you.”
She ends the call as her phone pings with an incoming notification. Domnique has sent the contact details in a message. She makes another call.
“Alistair, this is Jill Yakov… Yes, that Jill Yakov. We met at the IACA in Vegas last year… Yes… Oh, yeah. You saw that, huh? Well, he’s sitting opposite me… No, not yet… Tonight… Hey, listen, I’m getting stonewalled by McCallum. Can you loop us into the conversation…? Yes, that conversation… I know. I know. We’re meeting with the Senate Intelligence Committee at ten and will be at the White House briefing at eleven. It would be really nice to have the latest insights before them… Oh, yes… Understood. Thank you.”
She ends the call and places her phone face down on the table.
Aaron says, “Why do I get the feeling the scientific community is more interested in our love life than First Contact?”
“You know all those stereotypes about geeks?”
Aaron nods.
“Wrong. All of them are wrong.”
Aaron laughs.
“Scientists are human,” Jill says.
Aaron adds, “And horny.”
“Oh, you don’t know the half of it.”
“So, tonight, huh?” Aaron says, grinning like a school kid.
“Sexy times are coming, baby.”
Aaron bursts out laughing. Hearing Jill talk like that is preposterous and yet invigorating. She goes to say something else, but her phone pings. Jill looks at the message. “Oh, you’re going to love this. Alistair is on the ball. He’s already sent through a Dropbox link with Sec-X encryption tied to each of our IDs.”
“Nice,” Aaron says, noting she pronounced the name of his company with a distinct Sec and X rather than running it together into sex as most people do. She forwards the link to him. He opens it on a tablet computer and props it up on a folding keyboard stand so they can both see the screen at the same time. “What am I looking at?” Aaron asks, opening the first file in a list of hundreds.
“Ah, this is a text dump.”
“Well, that clears things up,” Aaron says, raising an eyebrow as he scans the screen.
\\\\\\\\\\\\
TDRS GLOBAL ACTIVE
\\\\\\\\\\\\
NSTED_DEFAULT_ID
= "VNS"
DATA_CATEGORY
= “EXO_EMR”
TIME_REFERENCE
= “HJD”
PUBLIC
= “N”
FREQ DOWN
= "2295 MHz”
“S-BAND”
= “8415 MHz”
“X-BAND”
HJD
MODULATION
CONTENT
2455059.6261813
BPSK
EMISSARY CONTACT QUESTION
2455059.6261967
BPSK
ABANDON EMISSARY
2455059.6262011
BPSK
EMISSARY SENT OKAY
2455059.6262017
BPSK
AU FAST EMISSARY
2455059.6262024
BPSK
SACRIFICE EMISSARY
“VNS is the scientific notation for Venus,” Jill says.
“And these numbers? The HJD ones?”
“Heliocentric Julian—never mind. So long as they’re in order, we’re reading messages sequentially. Oh, and ignore the public tag.”
“Ignore the N? So this is public?”
“This is plain text.”
“Are you saying anyone can read this?”
“Yes. And everyone probably has.”
“And by everyone, you mean?”
“Russia. China. India. The Brits. The French. I mean, this is tit-driss. It could be intercepted by anyone with a radio antenna.”
“Did you say citrus?”
“Tit-driss—T.D.R.S,” Jill says, spelling out the acronym.”
“Ah, NASA’s Tracking and Data Relay Satellite System,” Aaron says, not having heard it referred to as tit-driss before.
“I don’t know where they’re collecting this from, but it is an open network.”
“How open?”
“Ah, this could be from a satellite, or it could be from the Allen Array. Hell, it could be from the Amundsen-Scott detector at the South Pole. They all use TDRS.”
Aaron shakes his head. “But why? Why would NASA secure this? Why would they allow this to be broadcast in the clear?”
“They’re not,” Jill replies. She points at the line marked FREQ DOWN. “The aliens chose these frequencies. Anyone can listen in. Hang on…”
As she searches for something on her phone, Aaron looks at the comments about EMISSARY. He sips his coffee, trying to decipher what’s unfolding in the conversation.
“And these are the latest comments?”
“Yes,” Jill says, without looking up. Her thumbs ripple across the glass screen of her smartphone. “There are dozens of other files in the same format, so they’ve been talking for a while, but it doesn’t look like there’s been much progress… Oh…”
“Oh, what?”
“The frequencies. These are the coherent downlink frequencies used by Voyager… It seems we weren’t the only ones listening to NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft during its grand tour of the solar system.”
“Indeed,” Aaron says, resting his elbows on the table and pressing his fingers together. He rests his chin lightly on his outstretched thumbs. He’s not so much lost in thought as swept away by the current. His mind is at work, unraveling the cryptic comments in the text file.
“And this is only the inbound conversation, right?” he says.
“Correct. This is us listening to their replies. TDRS will only pick up inbound transmissions.”
“So we have no idea what NASA and SETI are saying, just the response.”
“Ah, the outbound messages will be in one of the other files,” Jill says, reaching for the tablet, but Aaron holds out his hand, signaling for her to wait. He doesn’t need to know what’s been said, just that something is being said, and that this is the latest response. As helpful as it would be to see both sides of the conversation, he knows it would distract him, breaking the tenuously thin strand of logic weaving its way through his neurons. He’s on the verge of a deep sense of awareness breaking through to the surface of his consciousness. He can feel it. He may not understand the problem yet, but the parallel processes of his subconscious mind are firing with far more efficiency than any conscious thought. He needs only to feed his reason with more details.
“It’s one message,” he says, walking himself through what he can see.
“What do you mean?”
“It’s one thought. One idea. Not five ideas.”
“I don’t understand,” Jill says, and Aaron gets the feeling this is a rarity for her.
“The timestamps. They’re responding with five separate comments, right? But they’re separated by mere milliseconds. They’re not intended as five independent statements. They’re one idea expressed in five distinct ways to capture the concept from a variety of angles.”
“Okay, Mr. Tech Bro Genius Billionaire, you’re going to have to explain that to me.”
“Not a billionaire,” Aaron replies, smiling and joking with her, refuting only one of the designations she used.
“So if it’s one thought expressed in five different ways, what does it mean?”
“Look at all the messages. What do you see?”
“Ah, they all repeat the word emissary.”
“Exactly. They’re all talking about the same concept,” he says. “They’re the same idea being expressed in an incremental manner.”
“Ohhh-kay,” Jill says, but from the look on her face, he can see she’s not convinced. “What about sacrifice? Why would they want to sacrifice their emissary? Why send us a representative if they’re going to die? And when, where, and how did they learn about sacrifice? Do they know what it means?”
“Maybe it’s more literal for them,” Aaron says. “We might think of virgins being sacrificed on a stone altar under a blood-red moon, but it may be that sacrifice means something else to them.”
“Maybe.”
“What else do you see?” Aaron asks, wanting to hear her perspective and see the message through her eyes.
“I see them struggling with our language.”
“Struggling?” he says, fascinated by her interpretation of the message. He pauses for a moment on that one word, allowing it to linger in the cool air, wanting to better interrogate his own reasoning. “Are they struggling? Or are they trying to keep things simple to avoid misunderstandings?”
“They’re mixing unrelated concepts,” Jill says, pointing at another part of the message. “AU is a measurement: an astronomical unit. It’s the distance between Earth and the Sun. They said AU FAST, but astronomical units have nothing to do with speed.”
“Hmmm,” Aaron says. “What if they understand more than they’re letting on, but they’re being coy to keep us off balance?”
“Why would they want to keep us off balance?”
“Not all of us,” Aaron says, with a dawning sense of awareness. “They’re talking to everyone—all of us, right? You said so yourself: Americans, Russians, the Chinese. Anyone can listen in. Everyone will. But what if they’re trying to get a message through without everyone else realizing?”
“Why would they want to do that?”
“Because this is not what they expected.”
Jill cocks her head sideways, intrigued by his reasoning. “And what exactly were they expecting?”
“A planet with life,” Aaron replies. “But not intelligent life.”
“Not us?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because they’ve been out there for a long time. Hundreds, probably thousands of years, right? Hell, they may have set out for Earth while we were still painting on cave walls with mud on our fingers.”
Jill nods. She gets it. He can see the glimmer of recognition in her eye.
“They only just realized we’re here,” she says.
“Only within the past hundred years or so, yes.”
“Only after it was too late.”
“Only after they were committed. For them, it must be like driving from Boston to Florida, only to reach Orlando and realize Disney World is overcrowded.”
“And still they came.”
“And still they came,” he says, agreeing with her.
“And the comet?”
“A contingency, perhaps. An alternative. I’m not sure. But I doubt it was always along for the ride. They probably picked up that comet nearby, possibly in the Oort Cloud.”
“So they’ve been out there listening to us for a while,” she says. “Ever since we invented radio.”
Aaron says, “Yes, and they used Voyager’s frequency because they knew we were monitoring that range, but I suspect they were listening to more than just our space probes over the past century as they soared in toward us.”
“So they’re playing dumb?”
“Oh, they’re playing.”
“But why?”
“Because everyone knows they’re here. Everyone wants to talk to them. Imagine a rock star walking into a crowded bar on a Saturday night.”
“Oh, yeah,” Jill says, chuckling, following his reasoning. “They’re happy to talk to someone, but they don’t want to talk to everyone.”
“Exactly.”
“But they came all this way,” Jill says. “Why hold back now?”
Aaron enjoys reasoning the problem through with her. He can see she’s content to indulge him and think more broadly about the cryptic message on the screen beside them.
“Language is more than a collection of words,” he says as his thinking crystallizes. “Language explores intent.”
Jill nods.
“Why speak?” he asks. “Why do any of us ever say anything?”
“I dunno. To express ourselves.”
“To test an idea.”
“Test?”
“Yes. Everything we ever say to anyone is only ever to test an idea.”
Jill’s eyes narrow. She’s not convinced.
“Think about it. What were we talking about before this message came through? We were joking about having sex, right?”
“Right?” she says with a suspicious undertone.
“Only we weren’t joking. We were jesting with each other. We were testing an idea. There’s uncertainty between us. Neither of us knows where this is going. We both hope it’s going somewhere, but we’re unsure. We both want something more, but for now, we linger on the possibility of sex. But sex alone isn’t enough. We want to know if we have a future, right?”
“Right,” she says, conceding that point.
“And so?”
“So we hide behind our words.”
“Exactly,” he says. “We test each other with our words. Nothing is random. Nothing that’s said is ever really haphazard. Our words come from deep inside us. They have purpose, even if we don’t fully understand that purpose ourselves, as we speak from the heart rather than out of reason. Everything that’s said is said to elicit a response from someone else, and that response allows us to understand them. We’re searching, probing. And so are they.”
“Huh. And you think…” Jill points at the message.
“I think they understand more than they are letting on. Just like the two of us being a little ambiguous about sex, dancing around the real issue of a relationship, I think they’re deliberately being understated. They’re feeling us out. They’re trying to get a read on us. They’re testing our response.”
Jill says, “So it’s not what is said, it’s how it is said that’s important.”
“Yes. Think about any argument you’ve ever had with a friend, a parent or a lover. You might get upset about milk being spilled on the counter…”
“But it’s never about the milk.”
He points at her, saying, “Exactly.”
“So this,” she says, swirling her hand in front of the screen. “They’re fishing. It’s not that they’re looking for a response so much as how and why we respond.”
“They’re flexing,” Aaron says. “They’re being cryptic for the same reason you and I are being cryptic.”
“Because sex isn’t about sex,” she says, staring him in the eye and making him feel uncomfortable. Aaron resists the temptation to look away. He matches the intensity of her gaze, unconsciously adding a slight smile.
“Because sex is about more than sex,” he replies.
“And First Contact is about more than First Contact.”
“Yep. It’s about what happens next.”
“So, if this is being said to everyone but is only meant for someone specific, who do they want to talk to and why?”
“The key,” Aaron says, tapping the screen of his tablet to keep it alive, “is this… Emissary.”
“I don’t follow.”
“It’s on every line.”
“But what does it mean?”
Aaron’s still puzzling over the details of the alien communique, so he circles back to their earlier conversation. “What if AU FAST isn’t a confused mix of distance and speed, but rather a cryptic message. What if they’re playing on something they heard recently? If they’ve been deciphering our communication for decades, they understand far more than we give them credit for. What if they’ve been listening to us debate First Contact and they want to subtly send a message, but only to a select few people?”
“But to whom?”
“You.”
“Me?” Jill says, pointing at herself and laughing. “Why would they send a message to me?”
“I think they’ve sent a message to both of us.”
“But they wouldn’t even know we exist.”
“Wouldn’t they? We’ve both been on television. We’ve both done interviews and podcasts. We both spoke at the closing of the conference. Even when we’re not speaking, others are talking about us.”
