Factoring Humanity

“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.