It had been months since the government presented the message to the public. Lack of news had made the movers and shakers worried some other country was getting the upper hand.
The UN had organized an international commission to continue the research. Russia and China followed the American example, alternating between helping everyone else and working on their own private project.
News of the Benett Radio Process made waves around the globe. Along with it, the idea that this was a generous gift also spread like wildfire.
A large part of the scientific community, both in the States and around the world, agreed with Harlow that this wasn’t the end of the puzzle. The public, the military, and those less in the know rather liked the positive spin the news put on it, however.
Most of them couldn’t be blamed; the news of intelligent alien life had upset the stock market and angered many fundamentalist communities around the globe. Bombs had blown up over the matter. Promises of a friendly first contact could help smooth things over.
But others, the military in particular, were just burying their heads in the sand. Easier to go on with things as they were before the signal arrived.
Once the gift was out of the box, it didn’t take long for some people to start talking about a response. At the very least, shouldn’t we send them a thank-you card? It would only be polite since they gave us the means to do it.
Someone at the UN was ready, because when the idea was proposed, Russia and China were sitting at the same table as the US. Neither of them wanted the West to control the narrative of what was being sent to these aliens, and the US didn’t want either of them sending clandestine messages.
With a Benett Radio Transmitter, every country and a lot of private corporations would have the ability to send their own reply. They could undermine one another, throw chaos and confusion into a very delicate political situation. It didn’t take much for every UN member nation to agree to a very strict communication protocol on this matter.
As the inventor of this new means of communication, Harlow was invited to talk at the UN general assembly on the matter. He nearly refused because he didn’t believe in the benevolent gift narrative, but Morgan convinced him it might be better to voice that sentiment directly. And so he did, even if it didn’t change the course of events in the end.
Since a response seemed inevitable to him, he involved himself in the process to make sure humanity wasn’t shooting itself in the foot. Maybe it was the mild paranoia that came with being well-versed in encryption. Maybe it was the spy movies finally rotting his brain. But Harlow was convinced that a response was the opposite of what humanity should do right now.
He had mentioned Pandora’s Box to Cavanaugh, and he thought the analogy was fitting. Who knew what could happen once they shouted “We’re here!” across the void? And if these aliens wouldn’t be the ones that sealed humanity’s fate, chances were they weren’t alone in that dark jungle.
Harlow refused to do nothing about it.
After more months than it had taken his team to decipher the message, the response was ready. He crafted his message in the same style as the signal: he used the same two symbols to act as ones and zeroes, modulated it to a constant frequency equal to Euler’s number, grouped everything in 12-bit groupings, started with a one-zero, and ended with a zero-zero.
Instead of using the same ascending and descending orders of primes, he chose the next progression. Harlow thought this would conclusively show them humans had the brains to understand them.
The meaningful contents of the message were harder to figure out. They couldn’t just send a plain English “Thank You”. And not just because the French would insist on a “Merci” and the Russians on a “Спасибо” to go along with it. The aliens at the other end of the line would likely have as much trouble understanding Harlow as he had understanding them.
So it had to be something more symbolic, yet simple. There were a couple of options, but Harlow steered the project towards something that had been done before: the atoms and molecules that made up human DNA had been encoded in the Arecibo Message in the past.
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Everyone could put their reason as to why this would be the reply, which made objections few and far between. To Harlow though, the best reason was prudence. The information was already out in the void; better to not send anything new.
*
“C’mon Harlow,” said Morgan, standing in the lit doorway of the cryptographer’s dark office. “It’s late. You keep going home late. And you’re not even working on what you’re supposed to.”
Harlow hadn’t realized how late it was already. He didn’t get up and put on his coat. Instead, he just leaned over and turned on his desk lamp.
“Benett,” Morgan the friend was now Morgan the department head. “You can’t think straight and you’re clearly not getting enough sleep. Give yourself a little rest. Go on vacation somewhere quiet, like—”
“Quiet. That’s what I think too. Shut off your radios. Be quiet. If you’re quiet, and stay quiet, things will turn out good. Things will turn out One-Zero, you get me?”
“Harlow… Are you okay, pal?”
“I keep coming back to the same idea.” He turned to his friend. “All I have are assumptions based on a tenuous possibility we might share a meaning for zero. I don’t have any proof, but I also can’t give it up.”
In the light of his desk lamp and the glow of his computer monitor, Harlow looked aged and ragged. Some of that would still be there in daylight, too. Despite that, Harlow’s eyes were still sharp, with a solid mind behind them. There was nothing wrong with him, but just like the spies in the movies he watched, Harlow couldn’t just let go when he still had pieces to fit into the puzzle.
Morgan turned on the lights and took off his coat. “There’s been similar ideas floated around the project in the past. If you don’t have any proof, what do you have to make it likely?” He asked, taking a seat opposite him.
“Why use an active symbol for a zero instead of just transmitting nothing? It’s what we do, after all. But we also have problems with that in high noise environments.”
“Right,” Morgan followed his friend’s thought. “It would just pick up background radiation and that’d make the message harder to detect and decipher. Sure.”
Harlow let out a laugh that turned into a cough. “We’d be ripping our hair out trying to come up with what could’ve been there but was lost or filtered out. And that makes me think they really want us to see those Zeroes, that it’s an important part of the meaning.”
“The fade out isn’t immediately followed by a One-Zero,” Harlow continued. “There’s thirty-four Zeroes before it. Emphasis? Logical pattern? Doesn’t matter, they just didn’t want us to miss it or misinterpret it. My hypothesis is it should be read as: full power, two-thirds, one-third, no power, no power, no power.”
“And the One-Zero?” Asked Morgan.
“It could mean ‘positive’. It could mean they’ll send another message if we comply. It could mean we just hear something. The precise meaning is likely lost to us, but it breaks up the sequence with their message opener, so I think it’s meant to be positive.”
“That’s in the realm of sociology. There’s no convincing evidence that One-Zero is positive, neutral, or negative. How are you so convinced, Harlow?”
Harlow took a moment to gather his thoughts. Half his process had been intuition, and he needed to get his thoughts into words.
“Because One is our signal,” he said. “The proof we exist. Zero isn’t even theirs, it’s just a contrast to what they chose to use for One. Maybe ‘positive’ is a little far-fetched, but I think you could read it as something like ‘In the silence, You remain.’ As in us, humanity, Earth.”
It was Morgan’s turn to be quiet for a beat. “Before we move on to the second series of Zeroes, what did you mean earlier by ‘comply’?”
“I—I’ve said it before. I don’t think this message is a benevolent gift. That we didn’t have this technology before was either chance, or a miscalculation on their part, or divergent evolution. The reason’s not really important in the end.”
Harlow paused. “The five primes that led me to this technology could be interpreted as a symbol meaning radio or this specific type of radio. In which case, they’re asking for or demanding radio silence, under the promise we’ll remain—.”
“Or the threat we won’t,” Morgan concluded.
“I got to that interpretation with the help of the other series,” Harlow went on. “Symbolic radio. No drop in power. A silence that is never broken by One-Zero.”
“I think you’ve thought things through. I also think it’s as pessimistic as it gets. You’ll have a hard time convincing anyone important that not only we can’t use this fantastic new technology, but we might also have to turn off every form of radio communication we have.”
“And guess what?” Asked Harlow with a wry smile. “We just shouted back across the interstellar void at a group of people who just told us to ‘keep quiet, or else’.”
Morgan sucked in air through clenched teeth. “That’s not a good first impression.”
“It’s really not.” Harlow nodded empathically. “We’re both pretty old. What would your parents do if you shouted back at them after they told you to keep quiet?”