“Here’s the theory: to make sure the deceleration laser is functioning, they must be able to check its beam of light, in case it’s blocked by a comet or even a meteoroid. No amount of scatterplotting can predict that stuff with enough accuracy. They monitor their beam, or any beam that matches, right?”
“It is likely.”
“They discover our signal is intermittent, it wavers and creates a regular pulse. Any chance they ignore it?”
“I do not see why they would.”
“Some natural energy sources emit simple repetitive pulses, but ours is much more complex and spans a broad range of frequencies,” Riggins said.
Aki could see how a human scientist would be curious enough to want to investigate and find the cause of the phenomenon by recording the pulse, placing it on a time axis, and then uncovering the embedded information, but she was not sure that the Builders would react in the same way.
Why are they disinterested in a civilization that is calling out to them? How can advanced intelligence coexist with an absence of curiosity? Can the Builders simply be cosmic apathists?
How could the Builders have gone to such extremes to undertake this incredible journey and yet be completely unconcerned with who might be waiting to greet them at their destination?
“What is the best theory for explaining the Builders’ apparent indifference then?”
The director shook his head and scratched the back of his neck. “We’ve bounced it around. Damage to their ship?”
“From the size of the deceleration array,” Aki said, “it looks like a fleet of ships.”
“I know, I know. Even if it’s one, their nanobots would repair it.”
Aki nodded and finally took a sip from her water.
“Any other potential explanations?”
“The next best is sadness from a loss of morale. I admit that I wouldn’t blame them.”
Aki said, “Oh? Go on.”
“The Builders have been traveling over six hundred years. No matter what their life span, the mission gets handed down from generation to generation. After centuries of passing through empty space, they’ve lost their purpose. Morale drops, partially from the lack of stimuli. After that, our guess is an onboard catastrophe and the ship is empty and either operating on autopilot or even unguided and drifting.”
“Hardware and tech durable enough to run for centuries is not going to be inhabited by a crew that is unprepared for the emptiness or likely to die from a plague,” Aki said. “Turning their graser back on them was possible because the Builders had not considered implementing heuristics. The Builders would have approached that problem differently if they had a clearer understanding of the variables involved. They did not even consider our existence when designing and deploying the Ring. Perhaps we are just beyond their perceptions, or perhaps even their conceptions, somehow.”
“Then extended hibernation, maybe,” Riggins said. “The passengers are in deep sleep and computers operate the ship. Instructing the computer to ignore a simple yet significantly anomalous signal—or not even programming in the capability to detect such signals. Such programming reveals apathy to other forms of life that may be encountered, but it makes some sense. The computers see us but the computers aren’t authorized to be proactive. The Builders seem like they didn’t consider encountering another species, but perhaps they were actually more concerned about a species more advanced than they are, and we’re so far behind that we’re missing the nuances.” He shrugged. “I don’t like that one because, even if the computers aren’t supposed to interact with a species on their own, for example, I figure the computers would be programmed to rouse one of their masters if it looked like communication was being attempted. Maybe the builders are just extreme fatalists, and concepts like morale and curiosity don’t mean much at all to them.”
Dan Riggins sighed, then folded his arms slowly. “I’m glad you’ve come. I wanted to meet you. None of the theories explain enough or predict enough about Builder behavior; they’re not convincing. The Builders know damn well that we’re here. The Builders are choosing to ignore us.”
“That might be the case.”
Their deceleration lasers did not arrive as planned. Instead, a weak yet steadily pulsing laser with an electromagnetic signal embedded within it showed up on various wavelengths. Their uninhabited island has turned out to be ruled by hostile natives who have made it impossible for them to dock or even stop. Instead, they will sail into a never-ending void, alone.
A familiar pain grew in Aki’s chest.
Should the Builders reply to the belligerent indigenous inhabitants who destroyed their only chance for survival? They probably do not believe in trying to negotiate with their enemies.
“You look as lost as I sometimes feel, and I know what you’re thinking. Let me tell you that I’ve never met a person who isn’t grateful for what you did.” Riggins rose from the sofa and walked to his desk. He turned around a framed picture. Aki expected a wife, kids, or a dog. It was a picture of Aki and all three of her crewmates from the Vulcan Mission standing in front of the blue field of a large United Nations flag. Aki bowed subtly. As often as she felt conflicted by these expressions of gratitude, she wanted to acknowledge Dan Riggins’s thanks at least. Unsure what to say, she did not speak for a minute. She had learned to understand how Americans thought and she had learned to ape their body language cues, but for the moment, she decided to let Director Riggins find her inscrutable.
Interpersonal or interspecies, judging a being’s character based on its ability to communicate was as foolish as determining the size of an iceberg from a casual glance at the visible peak. In between the inferences and the guesses, she had found enough of the answers she had been looking for.
“What should we be saying?” Aki asked.
“Sorry? I didn’t mind the quiet.”
“To the Builders, I mean,” she said. “We need to tell them something. We need to send a message that the Builders have no choice but to answer.”
Riggins understood what she meant.
“Aki Shiraishi, you know the message we’ve been sending. Let me show you our transmission facilities.”
THE TRANSMISSION CENTER
was in a small room in the back corner of the third floor. Its simple setup was somewhat disappointing to Aki. It was low-tech, except for the retinal-scan security lock. There were no large wall-mounted monitors and no team of specialists running around with headphones on. Instead, there were two men and a woman in casual business attire at workstations, as there might be in any office building. The interdisciplinary team who created the messages to be sent to the Builders might have already been dissolved, or at least had its offices elsewhere.
Riggins introduced Aki around, though of course the savior of the world was recognized on sight. Each stood, shook her hand, and expressed what an honor it was to meet her. Riggins led Aki to an empty cubicle as the other three went back to work. The nameplate said Director of Transmissions. The monitor was running a 3-D display reminiscent of the waves of an oscillograph. A sequence of rectangular pulses changed amplitude as they scrolled across the screen.
“There is the gap. It is recycling,” she said.
The sequence of pulses had been split by two discrete blank spaces, one longer than the other. Each individual pulsation was punctuated by a short space, and then the digital throbs were separated into groups by a longer attenuation. The pulsations increased as the sequence continued.
“Using primes for a header?” she asked.
“Nothing simpler that’s likely to be universal has come along yet. Positive integers, threaded like a heartbeat, empty in-between like a jerky carotid artery. We cribbed it from a medical condition called Corrigan’s pulse where there’s a full expansion and a sudden collapse. We try others too, but we think this is least likely to degrade across the distance.”
It had long been theorized that a series of primes could communicate proof of intelligence because primes did not occur in natural cosmic electromagnetic waves. It was one of the first concepts put into place by the original SETI researchers.
The string of ten prime numbers was followed by one larger number. “That’s the first line of the horizontal resolution of the universal facsimile. It explains the compression of the images,” Riggins said. “A facsimile is essentially a drawing divided horizontally into lines, then sent in order one at a time,” he explained, by rote, as if he were proctor for a school trip. Again, Aki observed that he was not as proud of his accomplishments as she would have expected. She imagined that the consistent failure of the project had worn down any appreciation for how well the team had executed the work.
Next to the 3-D oscillograph, the images being sent were reconstructed on the screen. The first depicted a star chart with the sun and nearby stars displayed as the stars would appear to the Builders based on their estimated current location.
“We give them the night sky to tell that we know they’re coming. Let’s move ahead. Eventually it uses spaxels.”
With the mouse Riggins brought up the more fully articulated diagrams embedded in the transmission. The ETICC had included a schematic sky map of the solar system that displayed planetary orbits, close-up views of the inner planets, and several detailed depictions of the Ring. The Ring’s shadow was shown to be intersecting the earth’s orbit from several angles. A succession of twodimensional drawings of animals and plants from Earth followed, then another diagram that attempted to communicate the impact the Ring had on photosynthesis, climate, and the ecosystem. The message ended. There was an extended pause and then the primes reappeared.
Since the Ring’s destruction, the protocol for interacting with the Builders had been amended. Along with communicating that humans were an intelligent species, three other declarations had been ratified. It was now approved to convey the fact that humans needed sunlight to survive, that the Ring was blocking the sunlight, and that humanity still wished to forge amicable relations with the Builders. Aki saw how the first two had already been encoded in the ETICC’s transmission.
Compared to the final element of the three more recently approved communiqués, it was not challenging to represent the solar system’s structure and the Ring’s effects on it, regardless of whether the representation used spaxels or spectrographic depictions. Political abstractions and even concepts such as friendship or mutual benevolence were heavily constrained by culture. Even human societies had a difficult time expressing such ideals to other humans.
“Have there been any new proposals to convey the idea of establishing amicable relations since those that were presented at the conference last year?” Aki asked.
“There’ve been several. Can we pull together for an impromptu brainstorming session with the team?” The enthusiasm of the suggestion was belied by Riggins’s brooding face.
“No,” Aki said, hoping she did not sound curt. She wanted a sense of the ETICC, but she had no interest in appearing like a visiting dignitary who had come to survey the staff’s progress.
The woman swiveled her chair toward Aki anyway.
“Jill Elsevier,” she pointed at herself absentmindedly. “Dr. Shiraishi, I know you don’t want to come off like top brass or a VIP. Can you check this proposal anyway, just quick, unofficially?”
“I would be happy to.” Since Elsevier had asked, Aki did not feel like she was insinuating herself into the ongoing project, and as a non-expert. “You said you specialize in xenopsychology?”
Elsevier, a petite woman with oversized glasses and hair in disheveled ringlets said, “Well, to the extent that anyone can specialize in the psychology of hypothetical entities which may not even have a psychology, sure.”
Aki opened her mouth, ready to discuss the discontents of the Life-Form and Civilization theories once again, but Elsevier opened her tablet and showed Aki a series of representational slides. The first was a group of people eating breakfast. The people were talking to each other. The next image panned back and showed a second group interacting and exchanging goods and foodstuffs with the first group. The next slide showed both groups eating together and talking. The next picture showed two distinctly different groups clubbing each other, with bloodied bodies lying on the ground.
“Have I captured friendly and hostile? Because I know I need to be extreme to make the message clear, but I think the Builders won’t know about blood’s color, and I’m not sure if they’ll understand that it comes from inside. It’s certainly problematic.”
Aki grabbed an empty chair and wheeled it close to the xenopsychologist. “I can call you Jill? Good. For us, you have achieved your meaning, sure, but the Builders are not anything like us. What strikes us as a tenuous or tangential connection might be like the word of God to them. For example, it is no stretch to consider that they might not function in groups. Our presupposing emergent norms or convergence in crowds, for example, holds the potential for getting our message misinterpreted.”
“You’re so right, Dr. Shiraishi. That’s a drawback to my idea that I hadn’t even considered, and now I’m thinking it through and you’re making sense, but I’m still a proponent of the theory that sociality, at least networks or associations, is what builds intelligence. I’m certain that the Builders would pass a false-belief test. Have you studied capuchins? Capuchins are monkeys. They can do knower-guesser—”