Message in a Bottle
Faulkner’s flight had been delayed by the seasonal fire raging east of San Francisco. Bay fog had mixed with particles from the fire and made a thick chemical soup that rivalled Beijing for toxicity. It also made landing the big planes hazardous and had caused long delays. It was eight in the morning and the airport was packed with travellers arriving or trying to leave by jet plane.
The line at the rental car counter was long. His car was big Dodge coupe. An homage to the horsepower wars of the swinging sixties, it was lime green with a matt black hood. The guy at the counter told him it had the same engine as a firetruck. He’d asked about the gas mileage, been told with a grin, same as a firetruck. Inside it was featured acres of cheap black plastic with fake chrome accents. He remembered driving the real thing. Getting stoned and dropping acid with a girl from Bakersfield in the back seat.
The rental company had thoughtly provided bottled water. Faulker narrowly avoided crushing a tiny Chevy merging onto the freeway, distracted by the bottle’s label. It proudly proclaimed to be bottled at the source in the Fiji Islands. It took him an hour and six minutes to drive the 30 miles from the airport to the NASA Ames Research center.
The executive conference room at Ames normally had a spectacular view over the runway to the blimp hangers and the wetlands beyond them, but today it was a dirty brown haze. Faulker helped himself to coffee, choosing Ethiopian over Columbian. He also grabbed himself a muffin and a bottle of water. This time the water was from somewhere in Alaska. The label had a picture of a polar bear on it.
Faulkner’s project didn’t have a name. It used some of the largest radio telescopes available and rented time on a supercomputer buried under a mountain in Wyoming, but there was no electronic trail. The programs, data and results were all containerised securely so only a handful of people knew they existed. Alexi, one of the two Russian mathematicians swept the room for listening devices.
Faulker had found the first message from Luhman 16. Nobody else had noticed it. The software he’d written had found order in an infinity of chaotic white noise. A simple repeating mathematical sequence where none should exist. Faulkner cashed in a favor with the girl from Bakersfield who now ran budgets at NASA, got himself a big transmitter and replied by extending the sequence and adding a couple of basic elements. Then he waited eight years for a reply.
When it came, Faulkner had been overwhelmed and not just existentially. The data packet was big, it was more data than he could ever hope to unravel. He needed help.
He’d met Dr Huang at a conference in Rotterdam. Huang probably knew more about communication, semiology and data transfer than anyone else alive. Huang had been the first to join Faulkner’s little team. They’d brought the two mathematicians, Alexi and Serge on a couple of years later. Brian was the last to join the team. A hot shot in the new field of machine learning, he turned the theories generated by the mathematicians and the linguist into computer programs that generated results.
Sending lots of small messages out of sequence without expecting a reply had been Huang’s idea. The goal wasn’t to ask or answer questions, it was to build a communication layer where two very different species could communicate. Thirty three years later, that girl from Bakersfield was the mother of his three grown children but even she acknowledged, Faulkners baby was the sheet of paper in Brian’s hand.
Faulkner could hear his heart pounding, felt sick, took a sip of the Alaskan spring water, looked out of the window at the brown soup pocked with sick yellow runway lights like an inverted map of the sky. Was this cosmic dread he was feeling? He’d lived with this feeling most of his life. He knew they weren’t alone. There was no delaying this. He asked Brian to read out the message.
“It’s a distress message basically” Brian began. He frowned at the hardcopy in his hands “They say they… they’ve consumed their sky to make the energy of their culture and now they are poisoned. They ask for help. They know we can’t come to them, but they are seeking the answer to a chemical equation. I think it’s fusion. They are asking how we do nuclear fusion”.
Faulkner’s vision tunneled into the Brazilian hardwood conference table. The Ethiopian coffee burned into his stomach. The polar bear water in his mouth tasted like ash and blood and death. They had no idea how to make fusion work. It was the big question. Fusion could save human civilization, mitigate climate change, let them build for the future, if only they could just get it working but they couldn’t. They’d been asking the same damn question.
Milford Haven, August 2019 (draft)
The line at the rental car counter was long. His car was big Dodge coupe. An homage to the horsepower wars of the swinging sixties, it was lime green with a matt black hood. The guy at the counter told him it had the same engine as a firetruck. He’d asked about the gas mileage, been told with a grin, same as a firetruck. Inside it was featured acres of cheap black plastic with fake chrome accents. He remembered driving the real thing. Getting stoned and dropping acid with a girl from Bakersfield in the back seat.
The rental company had thoughtly provided bottled water. Faulker narrowly avoided crushing a tiny Chevy merging onto the freeway, distracted by the bottle’s label. It proudly proclaimed to be bottled at the source in the Fiji Islands. It took him an hour and six minutes to drive the 30 miles from the airport to the NASA Ames Research center.
The executive conference room at Ames normally had a spectacular view over the runway to the blimp hangers and the wetlands beyond them, but today it was a dirty brown haze. Faulker helped himself to coffee, choosing Ethiopian over Columbian. He also grabbed himself a muffin and a bottle of water. This time the water was from somewhere in Alaska. The label had a picture of a polar bear on it.
Faulkner’s project didn’t have a name. It used some of the largest radio telescopes available and rented time on a supercomputer buried under a mountain in Wyoming, but there was no electronic trail. The programs, data and results were all containerised securely so only a handful of people knew they existed. Alexi, one of the two Russian mathematicians swept the room for listening devices.
Faulker had found the first message from Luhman 16. Nobody else had noticed it. The software he’d written had found order in an infinity of chaotic white noise. A simple repeating mathematical sequence where none should exist. Faulkner cashed in a favor with the girl from Bakersfield who now ran budgets at NASA, got himself a big transmitter and replied by extending the sequence and adding a couple of basic elements. Then he waited eight years for a reply.
When it came, Faulkner had been overwhelmed and not just existentially. The data packet was big, it was more data than he could ever hope to unravel. He needed help.
He’d met Dr Huang at a conference in Rotterdam. Huang probably knew more about communication, semiology and data transfer than anyone else alive. Huang had been the first to join Faulkner’s little team. They’d brought the two mathematicians, Alexi and Serge on a couple of years later. Brian was the last to join the team. A hot shot in the new field of machine learning, he turned the theories generated by the mathematicians and the linguist into computer programs that generated results.
Sending lots of small messages out of sequence without expecting a reply had been Huang’s idea. The goal wasn’t to ask or answer questions, it was to build a communication layer where two very different species could communicate. Thirty three years later, that girl from Bakersfield was the mother of his three grown children but even she acknowledged, Faulkners baby was the sheet of paper in Brian’s hand.
Faulkner could hear his heart pounding, felt sick, took a sip of the Alaskan spring water, looked out of the window at the brown soup pocked with sick yellow runway lights like an inverted map of the sky. Was this cosmic dread he was feeling? He’d lived with this feeling most of his life. He knew they weren’t alone. There was no delaying this. He asked Brian to read out the message.
“It’s a distress message basically” Brian began. He frowned at the hardcopy in his hands “They say they… they’ve consumed their sky to make the energy of their culture and now they are poisoned. They ask for help. They know we can’t come to them, but they are seeking the answer to a chemical equation. I think it’s fusion. They are asking how we do nuclear fusion”.
Faulkner’s vision tunneled into the Brazilian hardwood conference table. The Ethiopian coffee burned into his stomach. The polar bear water in his mouth tasted like ash and blood and death. They had no idea how to make fusion work. It was the big question. Fusion could save human civilization, mitigate climate change, let them build for the future, if only they could just get it working but they couldn’t. They’d been asking the same damn question.
Milford Haven, August 2019 (draft)