I normally enjoy flying, going through airports is exciting and once I settle into my seat, I just throw in my noise canceling earphones and zone out. Sometimes, I might even sleep as I enjoy seeing the horizon shrink away.
But no; I only have that damn message in my head.
We’re now an hour into the flight, a mile high and soaring through the curvature of the earth. I think about the message; maybe it really is from outer space. My mind begins to play with the fantasy that it could be some kind of civilization meeting its end; a desperate plea for help from someone, anyone who could listen. But why do we hear our own voices? Why do we hear our own languages from the same words? Technology does wonders but it’s science not magic.
I look out past the horizon, into the skies above the clouds. I’ve always wondered what was out there but now, I am truly curious. Or maybe I’m just imagining all of this; a dream where I paint myself the hero of some alien race because I could understand what they were saying.
Another hour goes by and we land and I gather myself as I take my backpack with the hard drive in it and head for the gate exit. I text Jake and Christian in a group chat that I landed and start making my way towards the Boston-Logan entrance.
“We’re outside,” Jake texts me back. I’ve been through here before; through the door into the pickup lanes, jump in and head out. I don’t like hanging around the pickup zone here so I keep to that routine.
I head outside and I spot a white electric car and two vaguely familiar guys waving at me; a big tan guy with a buzz cut and a beard and the other a skinny guy with loose blonde hair. Jake and Christian; have to be.
I approach the car and keep to the routine. I approach them and only say “let’s go”. We all get into the car and I take my backpack into my lap, wanting to make sure it remains secure.
“Shy as ever, aren’t you big Mike?” Jake tells me, trying to lighten the mood.
“I’d just rather get this over with,” I respond while putting my seatbelt on. “This damned thing has been plaguing my mind for too long now; I want to get this sorted out quickly.”
“I can relate to that,” Christian said in the driver’s seat and turned on the car and started to drive.
“What can you tell me?” I asked, wanting to get this all over with.
Christian sighed, as if trying to get some words gathered together. “I run a small amateur astronomy group. Simple stuff; stargaze, record radio signals, the like.”
“I take it you didn’t get a job with NASA?” Jake jumped in.
Christian shook his head. “I work with some engineers there, but I’m mostly an indie guy.”
I can understand. I think between the three of us, only Jake actually got his dream job from when he first went to school with us.
“We’ll have to go over the details once we get there,” Christian continued. “We have a lot of data to go over so I hope you packed toothbrushes.”
After a dizzying drive through afternoon Boston traffic, nearly an hour to get to Concord, we arrive at a small house. The three of us got out of the car and Christian invited us into the house.
Christian closed the door behind us and began his explanation. “A couple of days ago, a dish I set up picked up some strange interference. I logged the interference until it passed and then looked at it later. I was processing the signal when Jake called and I found something strange in it.”
“Weird symbols and a speech recording?” I asked. Christian nodded his head in confirmation. “Let me guess; the speech was your own voice.”
Christian was silent for a moment before letting out a sigh. “So I’m not crazy?”
“I’ve been asking myself that for a while,” I answered, starting to get the big picture.
We walked over to a small study full of various astronomy books, telescope equipment, and three computers of various builds. Christian sat down by one of the computers and pulled the other chairs next to him and we took those seats.
“The interference lasted for about 3 minutes,” Christian explained, pulling up various files and programs on the computer. “However, when I decompressed the transmission, the speech and other data in the interference was sped up, like a lot. I had to slow it down and run it through some filters, some of which are for marine sounds.”
He hit the spacebar and turned up the speakers at the computer. Once again, my voice filled the room. The recording was still imperfect, but way cleaner than what I achieved.
Follow me into the breach! Can you see it? Can you see how this all ends? Can’t you all see our destiny? We must stop this!
Jake rubbed his eyes while hearing the transmission, trying to process what it really means. “What the hell is this?” he asked under his breath.
“What did you hear, Jake?” Christian asked.
The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.
Jake took a deep sigh before answering. “Dude, it sounded…sounded like me. Like I was shouting.”
“Exactly!” Christian exclaimed while slapping the desk. “I have been examining signals for years now and I have never seen that.”
“Just what is it?” I asked, trying to process the words in the message.
Christian shook his head and turned to the monitor and looked at the rest of the data. “I have no idea. It’s a signal of some kind, but it doesn’t make sense.”
“Where did it come from?” Jake asked, finally gathering his composure.
Christian shook his head again. “The dish was pointed towards the star Polaris when the interference came in.”
“So it came from Polaris?” Jake asked.
“I don’t think so,” I jumped in. “When I discovered the signal, it came in through my servers during a firewall update. I doubt it came from space.”
Christian pulled out a bit of equipment from under his desk and turned to show it to us. “This was the amplifier in the radio dish I was using,” he explained. “When the interference hit its peak, the amp was arcing and spitting sparks all over the place. It’s practically burnt out now.”
I thought for a moment before adding to the conversation. “When it came in for me, my servers kept shocking me with some kind of electricity. When I unplugged the power to the whole rack, the servers actually remained powered for a few moments before cutting out.”
Jake thought for a moment. “Signals carry power too; electromagnetism,” he pondered aloud. “If that’s the case, then the signal carried a lot of power when it came in.”
“That’s something that concerns me,” Christian added and put the amplifier away. “It carried enough power to blow an amp and even power an unplugged server rack. But it didn’t cause a blackout? The only thing that happened was a brief internet outage and interference on radio frequencies.”
I had even more questions while running through the theory. “And if it carried that much power, why did we only get static and distortion? If it had enough power to blow an amp, it should have come in with 4k quality.”
Christian nodded, acknowledging the conundrum.
“What if it’s not audio or video?” Jake proposed. “What if the reason it’s static is because we’re examining it wrong. It’s not interference or audio on distorted video. What if the reason Michael got video was because that’s what could pick up the signal and the static and that is what the data really is?”
Christian pondered the question for a moment. “So what you mean is that the static and interference isn’t distortion, but the raw data itself that needs processing?”
I thought about it and the proposal made sense. “When I was working with the video from the cameras, the program actually treated it like it was something else but could be encoded as video.”
It was lining up. We still didn’t know where the signal came from or why but now we were starting to figure out just what we were dealing with.
I clapped my hands with a new determination building up. “Well, we have an astronomer, a mechanical engineer, and a server engineer. I can guarantee we have enough nerds in this room capable of solving this puzzle!”
I take out the hard drive from my backpack and place it on the desk. Christian digs out a few energy drinks for us from a mini fridge under his desk and we have a quick toast before setting off to work, Jake and I taking the other unused computers. I build a quick test NAS machine and hook the corrupted drive into it so we can access it without taking the risk of bricking our machines.
As expected, the NAS machine displayed the ominous ‘it has begun’ text but the drive showed up on the local network. Now the other guys can access the drive’s data. We began our processing.
I was in charge of reverse engineering the data and trying to find any patterns and make the data into usable files. Jake’s job was to diagnose the drive’s raw data to find why it was reporting such a corruption. Christian’s job was to take the noise out of the signal and process the data into something we can understand.
The sun set by the time we finally had any progress; a solid 30 seconds of audio from the first video track called “Endeavor” that, while not clear, is understandable. We gathered around Christian’s computer with anticipation and he hit the spacebar and the sound of our respective voices shouting filled the room.
“You said we could fly, and so we set our sails with desire! Are we alive? Who can tell? Are we dreaming? Who can know? We wander the wilderness, adrift in the lonely scene of an empty sea; I want to be home again, we all do! We’re trapped under a sunless sky, a crystalized sea! Follow me into the breach! Can you see how this all ends? Can’t you all see our destiny? We must stop this! This is the way to destiny!”
The audio track stops and silence fills the room; all of us pondering what we just heard.
Silence.
Silence.
More silence.
A slurp from Jake while he drank his energy drink snapped us out of our trance.
“What the hell does all of this mean?” I ask, rubbing my burning eyes.
“It sounds like some kind of message, a warning,” Christian answered.
“But why is it so vague?” Jake asked. “Wouldn’t it have been easier to just tell us where they are and what’s going on and how to fix it? Like ‘find us here and hit this button; we’ll have cake later’.”
“That’s assuming it’s a cry for help,” Christian wondered. “If this came from space, we have to be careful to not put human assumptions on it. For all we know, this is the alien equivalent of a commercial or a funny prank, like sneaking a cucumber behind a cat so they get spooked by it.”
“They kept asking if we can see something; is there something to that?” I wondered aloud. I went back over to my video and looked at the video with the strange symbol overlaid. The symbol kind of looked like some kind of circle but with little other shapes to it.
I told the other two to order some pizza or something as I looked at the video. My eyes are tired and burning and I keep getting lost in the static. The hard part was that my eyes keep blurring. Right when I thought I could see something, it would fade away. Like trying to focus on the floaters swimming around in your eye.
Wait.
That’s it; I see something when my eyes blur. I made a screenshot of the video and put a blur effect on it and scaled it down. By the time I was done, Jake and Christian came back with pizza so I must have been staring at this for a while now. I show the resulting image to the other guys.
“Huh, kind of looks like a planet,” Jake pondered aloud.
“That’s not just a planet, dude,” Christian said, looking at the shape of the planet and finding familiar features.
We both had the realization when we saw dark patches on the planet’s surface followed by brighter spots. These patches were like puzzle pieces; pieces we were all too familiar with.
The image showed Earth.