On the south end of the Alex Fraser Bridge, just across the river from Annacis Island was a recreational facility with four ice rinks, aptly named Planet Ice. On a normal Thursday night the place was a bustle of activity for everyone from curlers to hockey players. It offered skating lessons and hosted figure skating championships.
It was still a bustle of activity, but the rinks sat empty in lieu of the facility’s lobby, which had been temporarily converted into a communications centre, with the permission of the facility’s owners.
Miles had claimed a spot in the seating area for the building’s concession and started reviewing the files he’d been assigned to attempt to translate. Colonel Burke had spoken to him directly, defining the importance of quickly finding a way to communicate with the people who had come through the portal.
He said the word with such ease, and even Miles had to admit he struggled with it. Perhaps Burke knew something he didn’t-- or perhaps it came from a place of unbridled pragmatism. Looks like a portal, sounds like a portal, acts like a portal. It’s a portal. Let’s act.
The idea of a portal still bothered him. If the invaders could open a portal in the middle of Vancouver, what’s to stop them from doing the same on the lawn of the White House, or in the bedrooms of Buckingham Palace?
Or worse, what if they could open a portal within an armory, or a secure nuclear facility. It was the what-if of it all that bothered Miles the most.
But at least his orders gave him purpose. Truth told, he wasn’t infantry. He could pick up a gun and shoot at the bad guys all the same, but he would prefer not to. He liked the desk. It was his element, and he found deep meaning in pursuing it.
And so, pursue it, he did. Pausing only briefly when the operation began. He stood with the other officers stationed at the ice rink outside in the parking lot, watching the sky across the river and listening to the sounds of war.
But the sounds were short-lived. One of the other officers had mentioned their objective was achieved in under three minutes. After a few minutes of silence, Miles returned to his work.
Unfortunately, the resources he had were scattered, to say the least. A few recordings gleaned off of social media from the few people who had managed to livestream the event, some audio taken by unknown means. Unfortunately the video he had lacked substance, and the audio lacked context.
Even so, he’d managed to narrow down the definition of a few words here and there, with varying degrees of confidence.
“Lieutenant Brady?” a voice asked from nearby. Miles looked up to see a young Naval Cadet looking at him. He saluted. Miles returned it.
“Can I help you, Cadet?”
“O’Neill, sir. Sub-Lieutenant Jared O’Neill.”
Miles looked to his rank insignia, and gestured to it. It clearly said he was a Naval Cadet.
“Uh, sorry sir. I was only promoted ten minutes ago,” he explained. “I was assigned to your command.”
“I’m sorry, you were what? By whom?”
“Colonel Burke,” came another voice from behind him. He looked back to see Kia walk up behind him and take a seat. “Sub-Lieutenant O’Neill here has a superpower. Isn’t that right, Sub-Lieutenant?”
“Uhh, yes sir-- ma’am,” he stammered. “I have an eidetic memory. Colonel Burke felt I would be a good addition to your team.”
“Hold on, my team?” he looked back at Kia.
“Yeah, that’s sort of why I’m here,” she said, handing him a manilla envelope. “I’m going to be your liaison with Public Affairs for the remainder of the operation, so you’re the man in charge.”
“In charge of what?” Miles asked as he opened the envelope. There was a single piece of paper inside. The letterhead read that it was an official form from the Royal Canadian Armed Forces, and at the bottom of the was Burke’s signature.
The task was simple. Translate a language nobody on the planet knew in an effort to achieve communication with an unknown foreign power. It was right up his alley. But as he read his orders, it became infinitely more complicated. He was also being given personnel, resources, and more.
But the trick is that he was in charge. Miles didn’t get into the Armed Forces for Command. He got in because he felt it was the best way his talents would be put to work.
“Jesus,” he said, leaning back and absorbing it.
“They caught sixteen of them,” Kia explained. They’re being moved to the Burnaby facility right now for quarantine. Sedated.”
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“They reacted to sedation?”
“Is that so strange?” Kia asked.
“Maybe. Maybe not,” Miles wondered aloud.
“You’re thinking maybe they’re not really human, aren’t you?”
Miles shrugged. “I don’t know what I thought.”
“I don’t think any of us do, but it’s our job to find out,” she explained. “Have you figured anything out yet?”
“I’m working off of a few dozen out-of-context recordings, shaky livestreams and scratchy surveillance footage,” Miles said. He looked up to O’Neill, who was standing silently. “Do you really have an eidetic memory?”
O’Neill nodded.
“Then get over here and have a seat,” Miles ordered. “Listen to this one,” Miles said, clicking on one of the sound clips.
“Naia didi es!” the clip announced. It was probably the clearest recording he had, but that particular phrase had been uttered numerous times.
“I have twelve examples of this phrase being used. Two of them on video, and it was accompanied by an expression of surprise or wonder.”
“So what does it mean?” Kia asked.
“Well I can’t be entirely sure what it is they’re referring to, but it seems to be comparable to holy shit. But if I’m right, Naia is a pronoun. A name, and the es at the end I believe to be a possessive. So whatever didi means, it’s something possessed by Naia.”
“Wait. So the first thing you translated from an entirely alien language is a curse word?”
“Maybe, but here’s the crazy part,” he said. “I don’t think the language is as alien as we should assume.” He played another sound clip.
“I’assa! Na! Na! K’yatu,” it said.
“You hear that na?” Miles asked. He played another clip with someone else using the word, then another.
“They use it a lot?”
“They’re saying no, aren’t they?” O’Neill asked.
Miles smiled. “Exactly. The word no is extremely similar in dozens of languages going all the way back through history. And I’d bet you anything that’s what they’re saying.” He pointed at his computer screen.
“So what does that mean?”
“It’s not definitive,” he said. “But it’s possible that we both share a mother tongue. A root language which split off from each other at some point in the past.”
“Well that would mean that--”
Miles nodded. “Whoever this unknown foreign power is, we may have a common history somewhere. Now the question remains on whether or not it’s coincidental.”
“So how do we find out? We can’t just ask them if that’s what it means.”
“Mathematics?” O’Neill asked.
“We should probably start with learning how to say hello,” Kia offered.
“No, he’s right,” Miles said, snapping his fingers. “Numerical systems change depending on culture. We use a base-10 system, The Aztecs used base-20, the Sumerians used base-60, but math itself still works the same. No matter what symbols you use to represent numbers, one plus one is always going to be two.”
“I don’t follow,” Kia replied.
“That’s how we figure out true and false,” Miles stated. “The rest is just a process of discovery. It only takes one of them to cooperate, and we may already have no down.” He looked to Kia. “So what does the Public Affairs Office have to say about all this?”
“That remains to be seen. Unfortunately the whole thing happened a little too publicly. Everyone has a smartphone. If this had happened, say, in a Provincial Park somewhere we might have had very little to say about all this.” She shrugged. “But the fact that of all the places they could have shown up was in front of a live news broadcast in one of the most populated cities on the west coast, that changes matters a bit. We’ve been being contacted by news organizations all over the world since this afternoon, and all we could tell them was that we knew about as much as they did.”
“And now?”
“We reported a successful operation, and are currently investigating the cause and origin of hashtag Annacis Egress,” she explained. “That’s why I’m assigned to Project Babel. This is going to be the ground floor for intelligence, and it was either me or Colonel Stamets himself.”
“And the Colonel assigned you to the project?”
“I requested it,” Kia explained. “I’ll be reporting your findings to the Colonel, and he’ll send it to the higher-ups, then they’re going to figure out what’s in the public interest.”
“And what isn’t, no doubt,” Miles added cynically.
Kia shrugged. “Part of the job,” she said. “But the public is already aware that something happened. World media’s been talking about it all day. Even our allies have a satellite or three parked in orbit up there with eyes trained firmly on Annacis Island, not to mention private enterprise. This whole thing is a lot bigger than Vancouver, or even Canada in general. This is a potential first contact with an alien species, and millions of people saw it. People died. People with connections to the local area. The whole world saw it go down. That won’t stay in the box.”
“So you think they’re going to go full transparency on this?” Miles asked.
Kia shrugged once again. “I’m not here to speculate,” she explained. “If they think it’s necessary to keep things close to heart, it’s not our place to question that. All we have to do is trust they have everyone’s best interests at heart. But if you ask me, there’s going to be a lot of eyes on that portal, and not all of them are going to settle for just looking. Once the United Nations gets involved--”
“You think it’ll come to that?” Miles asked.
“First Contact,” she replied. “Human or not, as best we can figure there’s another world on the other side of that portal. Or another time, another dimension. For all we know those people come from Mount Olympus or Valhalla or a pocket dimension manifested by the dreams of a teenage boy with psychic powers who just read Lord of the Rings. But whatever’s there, it’s something new. New and unexpected. If it’s not the United Nations, we might not like who goes. It could be Amazon or the Communist Party of China. Not because it’s an historic event, but because there may be resources over there that would give powerful people even more power, and a brief look at history shows us why it’s a bad idea to let that happen.”
Miles nodded. The best they could hope for was for U.N. involvement. Canada couldn’t keep an event like this to themselves. It was for the world, for better or worse.
Miles just hoped it was for the better.