Flashes

Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation:a highly isotropic radiation with an almost perfect blackbody spectrum permeating the entire universe, at a temperature of approximately [2.7 degrees Kelvin], Although some primitive cultures mistakenly cite this radiation as proof of a commonly found creation myth—specifically, a notion that the universe began as a singularity that burst forth violently—sophisticated races understand that the cosmic microwave background is actually the result of …

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It didn’t help that the same thing was happening elsewhere. It didn’t help one damned bit. I’d been called in to U of T seven times over the past two years, and each time someone had killed himself. It wasn’t always a prof; time before McCharles, it had been a Ph.D. candidate who’d been just about to defend his thesis on some abstruse aspect of evolutionary theory. Oh, evolution happens, all right—but it turns out the mechanisms are way more complex than the ones the Darwinians have been defending for a century and a half. I tried not to get cynical about all this, but I wondered if, as he slit his wrists before reproducing, that student had thought about the irony of what he was doing.

The source of all his troubles—of so many people’s troubles—was a planet orbiting a star called 54 Piscium, some thirty-six light-years away. For two years now, it had been constantly signaling Earth with flashes of intense laser light.

Well, not quite constantly: it signaled for eighteen hours then paused for twenty, and it fell silent once every hundred and twelve days for a period just shy of two weeks. From this, astronomers had worked out what they thought were the lengths of the day and the year of the planet that was signaling us, and the diameter of that planet’s sun. But they weren’t sure; nobody was sure of anything anymore.

At first, all we knew was that the signals were artificial. The early patterns of flashes were various mathematical chains: successively larger primes, then Fibonacci sequences in base eight, then a series that no one has quite worked out the significance of but that was sent repeatedly.

But then real information started flowing in, in amazing detail. Our telecommunications engineers were astonished that they’d missed a technique as simple as fractal nesting for packing huge amounts of information into a very narrow bandwidth. But that realization was just the first of countless blows to our egos.

There was a clip they kept showing on TV for ages after we’d figured out what we were receiving: an astronomer from the last century with a supercilious manner going on about how contact with aliens might plug us into the Encyclopedia Galactica, a repository of the knowledge of beings millions of years ahead of us in science and technology, in philosophy and mathematics. What wonders it would hold! What secrets it would reveal! What mysteries it would solve!

No one was arrogant like that astronomer anymore. No one could be.

Of course, various governments had tried to put the genie back into the bottle, but no nation has a monopoly on signals from the stars. Indeed, anyone with a few hundred dollars worth of equipment could detect the laser flashes. And deciphering the information wasn’t hard; the damned encyclopedia was designed to be read by anyone, after all.

And so the entries were made public—placed on the web by individuals, corporations, and those governments that still thought doing so was a public service. Of course, people tried to verify what the entries said; for some, we simply didn’t have the technology. For others, though, we could run tests, or make observations—and the entries always turned out to be correct, no matter how outlandish their claims seemed on the surface.

I thought about Ethan McCharles, swinging from his fiber-optic noose. The poor bastard.

It was rumored that one group had sent a reply to the senders, begging them to stop the transmission of the encyclopedia. Maybe that was even true—but it was no quick fix. After all, any signal sent from Earth would take thirty-six years to reach them, and even if they replied—or stopped— immediately upon receipt of our message, it would take another thirty-six years for that to have an impact here.

Until then at least, data would rain down on us, poison from the sky.

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