112: COHERENCE

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“What does that mean, a coherent radio message?” Captain Klees asks. “Somebody talking to us? From Earth?”

“Unlikely, with our dish,” Sam says, “although we’re close enough to Hylara that if they were trying to contact us on Hylara, we’d pick it up if the signal were really, really strong. In this case, a coherent signal just means something that the algorithm flagged as probably containing information for someone or something somewhere. Not a random solar flare or other normal space noise.”

Tinera asks what we’re all thinking. “From Hylara?”

“It might be some unknown astral phenomenon. No reason to assume – ”

“Zork’s flaming tumescent cock,” Tal exclaims. “Sam, look at this!”

Sam squints over kes shoulder. “Well nail me to a shelf and call me an elf. That’s not our equipment doing someth – ?”

“No that’s not our fucking equipment. You know our equipment better than I do. Have you ever seen it chop a radio signal like that?”

“Like what?” Captain Klees asks. “What’s going on?”

“Binary.” Sam points at a graph on the screen, of a line jumping up to a certain height and back down to zero, over and over again, irregularly. “It’s not still transmitting, is it?”

“No.”

“Space radio waves don’t do that?” I ask.

“A rotating object can give a signal like that, but it would be a regular, repeating pattern. This isn’t. Tal, is there a discrete time unit?”

“Calculating.” Tal taps a few keys. “Starbleached shitstains.”

“Is it – ?”

“Yep. Thirteen microseconds.”

Denish steps forward excitedly. “You sure?”

“Can’t be coincidence, right?”

“Could be convergent design. Physics is physics everywhere.”

“Well, that assumes similar materials to work with – ”

“Magnetic field, remember? They might – ”

“Hey,” Tinera cuts in loudly. “What the fuck are you three talking about?”

Denish indicates the screen. “See how the line goes up and down? These are ‘on’ and ‘off’ positions for the signal. Binary. These short ones here are each thirteen microseconds long, see? This longer one is ‘on’ for thirty nine microseconds; three ‘on’ signals in a row. Regular binary code. Tal, how many signals?”

“Bet it’s a multiple of sixteen,” Tal says.

“It will definitely not be a multiple of sixteen.”

“Take the bet, then? Winner chooses the loser’s outfits for a week.”

“Done.”

Tal types something. “Ha! Divisible by sixteen. Denish, I’m going to introduce you to the joys of parachute pants.”

“How many characters?”

“Forty two. Huh. Short message.”

“Humanity’s standard is characters of sixteen bits and our equipment’s built to be able to reliably receive bits of thirteen milliseconds in length,” Sam explains for the rest of us. “This strongly suggests that we have indeed received an Earth transmission. Tal, does it translate into anything?”

Tal types something again. A string of forty two apparently random numbers and letters appear onscreen. Tal sits back suddenly; Sam grabs the back of kes chair. Denish swears quietly.

“Full disclosure,” Tal says, “I was not actually expecting that to work.”

“What does it say?” Lina asks. “They just look like random letters and numbers to me.”

“They are, so far as I can tell,” Sam agrees. “Isn’t that amazing? 65,536 possible combinations for each ‘letter’ and every single one of them turns out to be one of the ones that we use to represent a number or Interlinguan letter. That can’t possibly be chance.”

“This was sent to us, from Earth, in a format that the Courageous was built to receive and interpret,” Denish agrees, “in Interlinguan, or a language with a shared alphabet.”

Tal shakes kes head. “Not to us. Not a word salad like that. This was sent to the ship. I’ll try to see if it went anywhere or did anything.” Ke goes back to typing.

“That doesn’t make any sense,” the Friend says. “We’re supposed to be on Hylara by now. So far as Earth knows, the ship should be sent off into space, or be finishing up dropping its cargo, depending on how quickly the colony is being established. There’s no reason to send a code to the ship; they could send it and hope we had dishes on Hylara to get it, but they couldn’t possibly know how our Hylaran comput – ”

“Ah, fuck,” Tal says.

Well. That can’t be good.

“Is that a particularly bad kind of fuck?” Captain Klees asks cautiously.

“That depends, cap. How much do you like answers that raise more questions?”

“Ugh. What did you find.”

“The courageous transmitted a signal.”

“In response to – ?”

“Nope! We transmitted a different forty two character code, then got this back.”

“Earth is… Earth is sixty five light years away,” I point out, stating the obvious. “How long – ?”

“Thirteen hours, forty one minutes and nine seconds between the two signals,” Tal says.

Captain Klees doesn’t look happy. “And our current distance from Hylara is…?”

“A little over seven light hours and fifty light minutes away,” Sam confirms.

The Courageous had sent a code to a computer somewhere around Hylara. And gotten a code back. And we don’t know why.

“What does this mean?” Lina asks. “What can this possibly mean?”

I clear my throat. “I have a thought.”

“Yes. Good.” Captain Klees waves an encouraging hand.

“Well, I think it’s relatively obvious that this is probably the trigger for the engine sabotage, the carbon monoxide, or both. The code’s meant to either kill us, or tell the ship not to kill us. The Javelin Program sent some kind of probe ahead of us, which wouldn’t be hard even if we arrived on time because reasonably sized machines can accelerate much faster than enormous spaceships full of delicate fleshy humans, and when the Courageous’ navigation data tells it that we’re close enough it sends and receives the signal. That’s fairly straightforward, I think.”

“Yeah, that part’s pretty easy to figure out,” Tinera says, “but why?”

“Ozone.”

“What about the ozone?”

I’m pacing, I realise. I don’t force myself to stop. “Ozone. Around Hylara. Earth’s Kleiner data didn’t pick it up, even though it had to have been here when we left; you simply cannot grow an oxygen environment and an ozone layer that quickly. We accepted that it was a mistake on Earth’s part, which is very easy to do at such distances, on the very edge of the Kleiner array’s capabilities. But. What if it wasn’t? This is what the Restrictionists were afraid of. This is what Shia was always afraid of. That humanity would go out and find unique life out there, the rarest possible thing, life that didn’t evolve on our planet, that has an entirely different evolutionary history and unique beginning, and that we’d fuck it up, break it, wipe it out in our desire to put our feet on every vaguely habitable rock in the universe. It’s ridiculous to think that the people who run the Javelin Program wouldn’t also be ardent lovers of life in the stars. They’d also foresee such risks, wouldn’t they? This is a labour of love; there’s no profit or power for Earth in colonising planets so far away. So what if they detected an ozone layer? What would they do?

“One option is to simply leave Hylara alone. And if the Restrictionists were running the program, they’d do that, but if the Restrictionists were running the program then the program would never happen. More likely, I think there was a compromise. A wait-and-see. Send people to colonise it if it’s free game, and it it’s not free game, well, they should do the decent thing and die in space. But they could hardly ask the crew to do that, could they? To let themselves and their five thousand colonists die because there’s grass on their new home planet?

“So, don’t tell them. Send a probe to assess the planet first, by whatever standards made the people involved think colonisation would be unacceptable. Maybe that’s the presence of radio, denoting an intelligent species with decent technology; maybe it’s just the presence of a lot of algae. I don’t know. Whatever standards they settled on. When the ship arrives, it signals the probe, and the probe uses its assessment of the planet to either allow the ship into orbit, or to protect the planet from it by sabotaging the engines so that the ship has no way to slow down in time to pull into orbit.”

“Would that work?” Captain Klees asks.

Tal nods. “I’ve looked at the code, and the misfire near the start of the trip only partly worked. The full process was supposed to take the engine out entirely. Do that to both main engines, and yeah, we’d overshoot Hylara and never return, even if the carbon monoxide didn’t manage to kill us.”

“I hate how well that all fits together,” Tinera grumbles.

“If you’re right,” the Friend says, “it leaves us with just one major question. Was the signal that was sent meant to stop our engines from being destroyed, or to destroy them? Is Hylara a place that the probe decided is safe for colonisation, or one that it decided needs to be protected from us?”

Tinera crosses her arms. “I don’t buy it. If we discovered evidence of extraterrestrial life, nobody would be able to keep it quiet. The news would be shouted from the rooftops. Nobody would do this weird secret colonisation about it. Maybe someone would try to contact them secretly or something, but with a one hundred and thirty year round trip for messages? Nah. It’s too far away for any secret to be useful or practical, and that sort of half-measure of colonisation doesn’t make sense – either they’d commit to colonising, figuring the oxygen might make things easier, or they’d leave the planet alone entirely. Nobody would be that indecisive about something that expensive.”

“Committees can be pretty indecisive,” Lina points out.

“But they can’t be this indecisive and this secretive at the same time. This whole theory relies on a committee of hardcore space colonisers and hardcore extraterrestrial preservationists having to compromise with each other so much that they build a colony ship and sabotage said colony ship together, and of word of what this is all built around, the most amazing news ever discovered in the universe, not leaking out. Nah. The project would’ve fallen apart.”

“You might be right,” Captain Klees says. “But here’s what we do know. Earth sent some kind of probe or satellite or something ahead of us specifically designed to receive a code from the Courageous and send one back. The Courageous included a function to send a code from the right position and received its code. The only reason to do that is if there’s some condition unknown from Earth that would affect what code should be sent, because otherwise they just would’ve included whatever function it triggers on a timer, and not have bothered with an independent piece of machinery. Unless anyone’s discovered yet another layer to all this tangled nonsense, it’s reasonable to assume that it’s probably a code to either sabotage or not sabotage the engines. Aspen might be right or wrong about them knowing about the ozone here specifically, but this we know: the creators of this program decided that they would either kill us or not based on some condition out here, presumably some condition in Hylara.”

“Or some condition on Earth,” Sam says. “We could be hostages. This could be the Antarctic conspiracy that Captain Sands was warned about.”

“This is related to the experimental AI thing?” Tinera asks.

“Maybe, but that’s not what I mean. I mean… they let humanity invest in this big colonisation project. They sneak in this sabotage thing, and launch their own smaller, faster, mechanical satellites to the planets. Once the ships are inconveniently far from Earth, they say to the governments, ‘hey, guess what? The javelin ships are all going to fail. We’ve got systems in place to ensure it. Want us to send the codes to our satellites that’ll stop them from destroying your ships? Here are our demands.’”

“It’d be risky,” Captain Klees points out. “They’d have to deal with the other nations after pulling something like that. It’s hard to see how anyone would trust or forgive them.”

“The governments all trust and deal with Korea,” Lina points out, “despite Korea essentially stealing Mars. Why? Because Korea’s their only gate to Mars. I don’t know much politics, but if whatever Antarctica demanded was worth it…”

“How are things like this still happening?!” Denish groans.

“I don’t know,” Captain Klees says. “But there’s nothing we can do about it now. Tal, are we certain the ship can’t kill us?”

“It can always kill us, captain. But if there’s more sabotage buried in some other life-critical system, it’s a life-critical system I don’t know about.” Ke shrugs. “Besides, if it’s going to activate, it already has by now.”

“Not a remotely reassuring thought, but thanks. Right. I’m going to bed.” He leaves.

The crew start to disperse. I stare at the medbay terminal screen, where the analysis of the radio transmission sits next to my own synnerve scan. I rub at my hand, previously invaded by a synnerve which is now either invisible or, somehow, gone. I look at the string of random characters sent to our ship.

Tal’s long disabled the function which sabotages the engines and combed through every other system ke can think of looking for similar functions while hunting down dangerous bits of the AI. That satellite or probe or whatever can’t hurt us any more. But still, I can’t help wondering what that code means. Did that probe decide that we should live, or die?

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