Factoring Humanity

9

Kyle had a huge demonstration coming up; it was vitally important to the continued funding of his research project. He should have been worrying about that—but he wasn’t. Instead, as always these days, he was preoccupied with Becky’s accusation.

So far, besides Heather and Zack, he’d spoken about it with no one except Cheetah. The only person he’d confided in wasn’t a person at all; he might as well have unburdened himself to Mr. Coffee.

Kyle needed to talk this over with somebody really human. He thought long and hard about whom he could confide in. No one in the Computer Science Department would do; he wanted to leave that pristine, except for his locked talks with Cheetah. In the months ahead, his lab might be the only haven he would know.

Mullin Hall was right next door to the Newman Centre, which housed the Roman Catholic Chaplaincy at U of T. Kyle thought briefly about speaking to the chaplain, but that wouldn’t do, either. The pattern was completely different, but a cassock was black and white. Just like a zebra’s hide.

And then it hit him.

The perfect person.

Kyle didn’t know him well, but they’d served on three or four committees together over the years, and they’d eaten lunch together, or at least as part of the same group, in the Faculty Club from time to time.

Kyle picked up his office phone and spoke the name he wanted. “Internal directory: Bentley, Stone.”

The phone bleeped, then a reedy voice came on. “Hello?”

“Stone? It’s Kyle Graves.”

“Who? Oh—Kyle, sure. Hi.”

“Stone, I wonder if you might be free for drinks tonight.”

“Uh, okay. Sure. The Faculty Club?”

“No, no. Somewhere off campus.”

“How about The Water Hole, on College Street?” said Stone. “Know it?”

“I’ve walked past it before.”

“You’ll be coming from Mullin?”

“That’s right.”

“Stop by my office at five. Persaud Hall, Room Two Twenty-two—just like the old TV show. It’s on the way.”

“I’ll be there.”

Kyle clicked off, wondering what exactly he’d say to Stone.

Heather entered her office at U of T. It wasn’t huge, but at least universities had never adopted cubicles for their academics. Normally, she shared the office with Omar Amir—another associate prof—but he spent all of July and August at his family’s cottage in the Kawarthas. So, for the summer at least, she had total privacy in which to think and work. Indeed, although some of the newer offices had frosted-glass panes running floor-to-ceiling next to their thin doors, Heather and Omar’s office was an old fashioned inner sanctum, with a solid wooden door that squeaked on hinges, and a window that looked east, out over the concrete courtyard between Sid Smith and St. George Street. It also had drapes, once probably a rich burgundy but now a pale brown. In the morning, they had to be drawn to shield her from the rising sun.

Yesterday’s alien radio message was still displayed on her monitor. Since the interval between the beginnings of successive messages was thirty hours and fifty-one minutes, every message began almost eight hours later in the day than the one before. The most recent message had been received at 4:54 AM., Eastern time Wednesday; today’s was expected to begin at 11:45 A.M. The messages were picked up by different nations’ radio telescopes, depending on what part of Earth happened to be pointing at Alpha Centauri at the appropriate time, but they were all posted as they were received to the World Wide Web. An additional orbital receiver was also always aimed at Alpha Centauri.

Heather kept hoping that one day she would look at the latest message and it would all make sense. She missed the simplicity of the first eleven messages: straightforward representations of the Pythagorean theorem and chemical formulas and planetary systems. Although, she had to admit, even those posed some puzzles: the chemicals specified by the formulas had been synthesized on Earth, but no one had ever figured out what they were for.

Heather got herself a mug of coffee and sat down to look again at yesterday’s message.

As always, the message was shown as two rectangular grids. Each message was sent as a string of a hundred thousand or so binary digits, over a period of two or three hours. The total number of digits in each message was always the product of two prime numbers, meaning that the digits could be arrayed in two possible ways. According to the header from the Alien Signal Center in Karachi, Pakistan, this message was 108,197 bits long. That number was the product of the prime numbers 257 and 421, which meant that the digits could be set up either as 257 rows of 421 columns or as 421 rows of 257 columns. Sometimes one image looked more intuitively correct than the other—squares or circles would appear in one, while the alternative decoding would simply result in a mishmash. But since no one had yet determined what the messages were supposed to represent, one couldn’t be certain which was really the correct interpretation.

When the messages had first started arriving in 2007, millions of people had pored over each one. But as the years had passed, the numbers had reduced. Although there was a popular screensaver that downloaded each day’s message from the aliens and magnified various portions of it in turn, Heather knew there were now fewer than three hundred researchers actively analyzing each new message.

The more correct-looking version of today’s message showed three rectangles and two circles in what otherwise seemed to be a random sea of black-and-white squares; the black squares represented zero bits and the white squares represented ones. Heather stared at it, frustrated. She felt sure she had to be missing something simple. Somewhere in the hundreds of millions of bits of data already received from Alpha Centauri there must have been a Rosetta stone—a key that would let all the other messages make sense.

There were dissenting views: one researcher in Portugal had long argued that the key would come as the final message, not as one of the initial ones; that way, the aliens would automatically weed out any races that lacked the patience required for interstellar communication. And others had opined that the alien senders were simply too alien—that we were incapable of communicating. A third camp argued that humanity simply wasn’t bright enough, or advanced enough, to figure out what was being said. The aliens might indeed still be on what they considered basics, but the material had already gone over the collective head of humanity.

Heather was a Jungian psychologist. She believed that all human minds shared a vocabulary of symbols and archetypes that formed the underpinnings of thought. The Centaurs, she felt sure, simply had a different set of underlying metaphors and symbols, and if she could figure out what those were, she could crack the code.

She took a sip of coffee. This message was as baffling as the others. Maybe it was all a giant crossword puzzle, she thought. The grids of black-and-white squares certainly suggested that, although filling in the blanks was a human concept, possibly—if she could wax Freudian for a moment—related to our sexual biology. Still, it wasn’t the first time she’d wondered if the messages might be deliberately incomplete—yin, but no yang—and the aliens were waiting for humanity to provide the complement, to make it all whole.

But, of course, we hadn’t yet replied at all; another popular interpretation was that the Rosetta stone was being withheld until humanity did reply.

There’s an old concept in SETI that said that signals would likely be sent at a group of frequencies called “the water hole”—between the emission frequency for hydrogen, at 1420 megahertz, and for hydroxyl, at 1667 megahertz. Hydrogen (H) and hydroxyl (OH) are the components of water (H₂0), and Earth’s atmosphere is most transparent to radio waves at that range of frequencies, while interstellar space is largely free of interference there. Since all life as we know it began in water, this area of the spectrum seemed a natural gathering place for those species looking to undertake interstellar communications.

But the Centauri signals weren’t anywhere near the water hole—another example of what we expected to be a shared view of reality not turning out to be shared at all.

Could there, Heather wondered, be other water holes—other common grounds that would have to be shared by any being that existed in the same universe we did, regardless of its biology or the nature of its planet?

She was supposed to meet her friend Judy for lunch at the Faculty Club at 12:15. She’d stick around until today’s message began to arrive, then head off.

Still ten minutes to go. Heather wasn’t one to waste time. She had the latest issue of The Journal of Jungian Studies on her datapad; she started working her way through it.

After a while, the phone rang. Heather finished the paragraph in front of her, then absently reached for the handset. “Hello?”

“Heather? Did you forget?”

Heather glanced at her watch. “Oh, God! Sorry, Judy!” She looked over at her computer. “I was waiting for today’s message—I was going to leave as soon as the incoming-message signal sounded.” She moved over to her computer and told it to go directly to the Alien Signal Center homepage. Nothing.

“Judy, I can’t make it. The alien message is late today.”

“Are you sure you’ve got the right time?”

“Positive. Look, I’ve got to go. Maybe lunch tomorrow?”

“Sure, I’ll call you.”

“Thanks.” Heather replaced the handset. As soon as she did, the phone rang again. She picked it up. “Hello?”

“Heather,” said a different female voice, “it’s Salme van Horne.”

“Salme! Where are you? Here in Canada?”

“No, I’m still in Helsinki. Have you tried to download today’s message?”

“Yes. There doesn’t seem to be one coming through.”

“This has never happened before, has it? The Centaurs have never missed a day, have they?”

“Never. They’ve never even been late.”

“Do you suppose the problem is at our end?” asked Salme. “Whose turn is it to receive the message?”

“Arecibo is designated prime, isn’t it? But there are backups, and—oh, wait. Something’s going up on the Web page.”

“I see it, too.”

“Damn holograms—ah, here it is: ‘No technical malfunction at receiving end. Apparently no message was sent.’ ”

“That can’t be the end of the transmissions,” said Salme. “There has to be a key.”

“Maybe they got tired of waiting for us to reply,” said Heather. “Maybe they won’t send again until we do reply.”

“Or maybe—”

“What?” asked Heather.

“Drake equation, final term.”

Heather was quiet for a moment. “Oh,” she said softly.

The Drake equation estimated the number of radio-broadcasting civilizations in the galaxy. It had seven terms:

The rate of star formation, times the fraction of stars with planets, times the number of those planets that are suitable for life, times the fraction of such planets on which life actually appears, times the fraction of life forms that are intelligent, times the fraction of such life forms that actually develop radio, times…

Times big L: the lifetime of such a civilization.

A civilization that had radio probably also had nuclear weapons, or other equally dangerous things.

Civilizations could be wiped out in a matter of moments—certainly in less than a single thirty-one-hour day.

“They can’t be dead,” said Salme.

“They’re either dead, or they voluntarily stopped, or the message is complete.”

There was a knock at the door. Heather covered the mouthpiece. “Come in!”

The departmental assistant stuck his head in. “Sorry to bother you, Professor Davis, but the CBC is on the phone. They want to talk to you about what happened to the aliens.”