Harlow’s plane touched down in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

He had presented his hypothesis to Morgan the morning he’d conceived it. Equally convinced, his friend passed it on to NASA and Cavanaugh. A mere half an hour later, an Air Force officer picked him up from MIT and took him to the nearest base. There, he was strapped into a two-seater fighter jet and flown straight to Houston.

He presented his calculations and ideas to a committee. Somehow, the boardroom was a more challenging speaking environment than the lecture hall. It reminded him of when he had to defend his doctorate thesis all these years ago.

Harlow must’ve made a good impression there, too. Because, two hours after he was done, he boarded another plane with Cavanaugh. And that’s how he ended up in Oak Ridge.

This town hosted the most powerful supercomputer in the United States. Frontier could perform a magnitude more operations per second than its predecessor, which is why it was now instrumental in proving—or disproving—Harlow’s theory.

Over 14 days, Harlow worked with Frontier’s crew to do just that.

The science was intricate and incomplete. Test runs took between hours and days to complete. He needed a handful to feel his way towards the correct solution, and then even more runs to perfect it.

These were long days of work, starting before sunrise and ending after sunset. The only light he saw for those two weeks was the white neon illumination of the lab and the dull orange glow of his motel room lamp.

When he closed his eyes to go to sleep, he could see the numbers he was working on and he could hear the whir of computer fans. Keeping in touch with Anabelle and Sean kept him sane.

But at the end of those 14 days, Harlow’s hypothesis came out triumphant: there was a precise logarithmic equation that could be applied to the message’s first symbol, the copy of the Earth signal. When using the sequence of five primes that stood out in the message—and no other prime or number would work in the equation—the first symbol would be transformed into the second symbol.

The symbol that had nagged at the corner of Harlow’s mind was a complex transformation of the first.

Every piece fits together.

But that’s not the only thing Frontier found out. Beyond its use as a puzzle mechanic, this equation had far-reaching potential. Quite literally, as it turned out.

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A radio wave transformed by this process seemed to glide through space rather than force its way through. Simulations showed long distances had minimal effect on signal strength, and neither did dense materials or magnetic fields.

On top of that, the formula allowed huge gains in terms of power conservation. A typical local FM radio station used about 100 watts to broadcast over a radius of 20 miles. Frontier thought this new type of signal could cover that distance on as little as one watt and still be recognizable by cheap homemade receivers.

And with just enough power, you could maintain high signal density over astronomical distances.

When the results came in, the lab exploded into cheers and celebration. Cavanaugh was especially enthusiastic about how NASA could benefit from what he coined the “Benett Radio Process”.

Harlow wasn’t sure how happy he was. Oh sure, it was a discovery that would put his name in textbooks and maybe in the public eye.

But how did that help him put meaning to the message? The long sequences of zeroes and the fade out were still unknowns.

Lost in thought, he hadn’t realized the laboratory director brough in champagne and was finishing an impromptu speech to the team.

“…We truly stand on the shoulders of giants. Let’s toast these aliens, whoever they are, for their generous gift.”

The closing statement struck Harlow. And not with the sense of awe and grandeur it was probably meant to inspire. Apprehension was what came to him instead. Is this a gift? Or rather, was it intended to be a gift?

Harlow and Cavanaugh exchanged a knowing look. The two of them seemingly communicated the idea to one another without speaking a word and picked it back up in Cavanaugh’s motel room that evening.

“They sent us a gift, Harlow. I don’t see how it could be anything but generous.”

“I don’t think that’s the case,” replied Harlow. “Remember the lecture I gave? What we know about them is just as limited as what they know about us. At multiple points, we had to sit down and make assumptions, or brute force a piece into place.”

“What are you assuming they’re assuming, then?” Asked Cavanaugh.

“We never showed them we can use this process. What we showed them is we could use a specific type of radio patterns. It took 40 years for that proof to get to them. Without considering the time it took them to create the message, then it’s another 40 years on top of that to get back to us. Because I see meticulousness in them, I think they expected us to be past this point after 80 years.”

“Isn’t that a bridge too far?” Questioned Cavanaugh. “None of our physicists predicted something like this could be out there. Not 80 years ago, not 40, not last week. This is new territory. We’ll have to change our models to account for this. Can you assume a breakthrough like this if you’re being meticulous?”

“They could’ve misjudged based on their own history.”

“We’d have to assume that. So far, you’ve done all the work showing us this is a basic message anyone is meant to understand. The way I see it, they just handed us a phone so we could stop using snail mail.”

Harlow let out a tired sigh. “I don’t know. I’m just worried that… under all the gift wrap, what we’ve just opened is actually Pandora’s box.”