The head of astrophysics took the lectern and told everyone to go to their respective wing of the building. Each head then took charge of their own people and marched them along with men-in-black.

The mathematicians settled in an empty classroom and Morgan Saddler took charge of the whiteboard. The building’s usual security guard entered the room, accompanied by one of the federal agents carrying an equipment case. Harlow discreetly let out a sigh when it turned out the case wasn’t a computer, it just carried one.

A manilla folder accompanied the rugged laptop. Inside were paper documents related to their task: Instructions from NASA, a letter from the President’s office swearing them to secrecy, a second offering vague encouragement, and some paper printouts and miscellanea.

The laptop was juicier. It had full copies of each repetition of the signal, all the analysis that had been done so far, and the means to contact anyone else working on this project securely.

Harlow would have to check exactly what kind of encryption was at play when he had the time. If only so none of them could be blamed for a security breach.

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the Goddard Space Flight Center, Los Alamos, Harlow’s very own MIT, Caltech, Stanford, both the Air Force and the Naval Research Laboratories, the NSA, even Google and IBM. If you named a big player that was related to either space or data analysis, they had a team on this project or they would soon have one. And Cheyenne Mountain would be at the centre of everything.

Roskosmos and the CNSA’s absence didn’t surprise Harlow one bit. Rather, it was all the other missing international organizations that piqued his interest. Europe, the United Kingdom, India, Japan, even Canada. None of their national agencies or their private corporations were on this list. He could probably find out why if he looked into the legalese stacked inside the manilla folder, but that was too far out of his area of expertise.

“Okay everyone,” said Morgan, “let’s start by making sure we’re all on the same page here. NASA and the FBI are asking us to cooperate with them in analysing a potentially extraterrestrial signal they have deemed highly likely to be real. Show of hands. Who wants to leave, and who wants to move to Colorado?”

Half-a-dozen put their hand up for the first option. Reasons ranged from taking a stand against coercion to never growing out of their hippie phase. Two took the second option, one to help pay his mortgage, the other knew themselves as a rumour-mill. Morgan thanked all of them as they left the room.

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“And thank you to everybody else for staying,” he said to the rest. “That’s out of the way. Harlow, get what we have on the projector.”

Harlow plugged the laptop. The projector came to life and displayed a waveform—or rather, 17 identical waveforms. Each of them stayed on the same frequency throughout: exactly 2’718’281’828 Hz.

Harlow recognized Euler’s number—without the decimal point—immediately; logarithms were often very useful in his field. It would have to be a grand cosmic coincidence for a natural phenomenon to emit on that exact frequency.

“The frequency isn’t the only part that stands out,” Morgan continued. “The signal density is comparable to what we’d expect out of communications from inside the solar system. It’s two decimal places above background radiation.”

Harlow thought about what that meant. How strong would the original signal have to be to keep that much strength after travelling 40 light years? If attenuation is proportional to the square of the distance, and the distance is astronomical, then…

The waveform also showed there was some form of complex amplitude modulation or digital modulation at play here. The latter seemed more likely for an advanced alien species.

Harlow spotted something else that stood out. “Is that section in the middle correct? The signal is supposed to fade out?”

“Unless SETI is specifically giving us faulty info, then no…” Morgan said, squinting at the board.

Harlow searched for annotations and put them on the projector. “Looks like SETI’s analysts think it’s meant to be there. Other teams are working on re-confirming that.”

Morgan nodded. “Then we proceed with the assumption it belongs there. Let’s split up. Statistical analysis, differential analysis, correlation analysis, machine learning. Lawrence is head of statistical. DesMarais has differential. Benett is on correlation. I’m taking charge of machine learning. The rest of you know your own fields. I trust you to put yourself where you belong.”

Shortly after figuring out who was working with who, a security guard came around and distributed NDAs for everyone to sign. On his heels, a woman in a NASA jacket delivered five more laptops and promised everyone would get one eventually. Morgan took ownership of the original and distributed the new ones.

Harlow now had to figure out how his team was going to tackle this problem. He would’ve liked to work on the machine learning team more—newer field meant more interesting opportunities—but finding patterns through correlation was more his thing. This situation needed someone familiar with the whole bag of tricks.