Nobody made much progress in the first three days. Everything was still just beginning.

The FBI had handed out cover stories to him and his team. The fabricated details gave him enough excuses to stay on campus and keep working. For those three days at least.

But covers were made to avoid attention. Harlow knew he didn’t have an infinite well of urgency to exploit. So, on that third day, he went home. Besides, he only had so much energy to pour into the project himself.

A quick shower rid him of the dust and sweat that clung to him, and then a nice dinner with his family reinvigorated him.

Annabelle and Sean were curious about what he was doing, but they were used to not getting the details. Harlow was happy to explain his work in-depth to anyone who would listen. He didn’t always have the luxury of being allowed to, however.

Harlow said what he could, and he felt that much satisfied them.

After dinner, they moved to the couch and watched a movie. An old school spy flick. They’d seen that one a million times, and the three of them likely knew the plot by heart. It was the time together that mattered to Harlow.

And maybe a movie would bring some sort of epiphany. He welcomed the cliché right now. But it didn’t come.

After the movie ended, he happened to look out the window into the street. An unmarked black car was parked across from his house, and he had the distinct feeling it had followed him here from the university.

He wasn’t a fan of being watched, but what Cavanaugh had said turned out to be at least partially true. The FBI was helping them, not just watching them. Harlow had reconsidered his opinion.

Sure, there was a part of the surveillance meant to keep word of the project from spreading. Which was close to impossible, given how leaky civilians could be.

That same reason also meant it was very easy for other interested parties to spy on them. He’d seen that script a thousand times already.

Harlow’s interests probably made him more tolerant to this situation than others. But knowing someone kept an eye out for the real bad actors helped.

*

The days and the hours melted together in an unrecognizable mush of passing time. Phasing, correlating, tuning, referencing, distorting, analysing. Harlow and his team spent every waking hour working.

Those on his team that were also teachers had a reduced lecture load. Those that had chosen to step down from the project took over much of that work and maintained an air of normalcy in the department.

Every shred of data the team uncovered was documented meticulously. That data was passed on to other researchers around the US through the secure network—or the very-much-less-than-secure-network, as Harlow thought of it after he took the time to check the specific security measures in place. Everything passed around would be double and triple-checked.

A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

Slowly, very slowly, but surely, a pile of evidence was being built. And, so far, everything pointed to the same conclusion. As days passed, the chances for the transmission—because nobody called it an emission anymore—to be natural decreased, decimal point by decimal point. Likewise, the certainty that this was a message with an intelligent design grew ever more certain.

Work he did also became more training data for the machine learning crew. The neural network then fed results back to his team, which led to more rounds of analysis and correlation, and then back into the machine in an infinite loop.

Round and round the information went, until, in the dark hours of an unidentified night, a proverbial ding rang out through the lab. Harlow looked up from his third cup of coffee. There it was, just sitting on the screen: a pattern identified with an infinitesimal margin of error. He took a moment to clean his glasses, to make sure what he was looking at was real.

He approached the keyboard cautiously, as if any sudden movement could make the result disappear into mist. Gingerly, he double-checked the results, and everything came back the same. He woke up one of his colleagues and urged them to do the same. The same pattern appeared.

Word spread around the room, then around the department, then around the building. One by one, the researchers repeated the calculations, tried to poke holes in the method. Every time, the same pattern.

Convinced, they passed it on to the SETI network. Through the night and the morning, every other institution came up with the same pattern.

Everyone patted everyone else on the back, but a single pattern did not make a full message. Or so they thought: By the end of the day, Caltech uploaded another piece of the puzzle. As it turned out, every part between repetitions of the first pattern simply made up a second pattern.

And that was it. The transmission was only two patterns; it encoded information using only two symbols. Plain binary or was some deeper modulation at play here?

New orders soon came through from NASA and Cheyenne Mountain. They would divert most of their resources into pursuing the binary lead, whilst keeping a minimum on confirmation and pattern finding still. Of course, congratulations also came through, if somewhat more muted than the new orders.

MIT and Caltech came to an agreement: MIT would go forward assuming the MIT Pattern was the binary One, and Caltech would assume the Caltech Pattern was the binary One. Everybody else chose a side, shook hands, and raced to the finish line.

*

There were two issues to overcome in this race: The problem of bit groupings, and the problem of ambiguous bits. Human binary relied on everyone following the same rules for both of those problems.

Harlow didn’t think they were likely to make the first decryption if they just blindly followed human rules. But with enough coordination, they could probably brute force their way through the permutations in a timely manner.

“Why don’t we pick a bit grouping at random, tell everyone that’s on our side of the race to pick different groupings, and just have the supercomputer do the rest?” He asked Morgan.

“It’s the beginning of an idea,” answered his department head. “But we don’t know what we’re looking for. The binary could express language or numbers, and—“

Harlow interrupted him. “Euler’s number. The frequency of the signal is exactly Euler’s number. They’ve used it once to make us notice this message. Wouldn’t it make sense for them to use it again? And if it’s not that, then it’ll be something equally attention grabbing.”

“Huh. That’s sensible. Even brilliant, maybe. Just for that, you get to choose our grouping.”

“Let’s go with… six?” Harlow chose at random.