Identity Theft and other stories (collection)

Koppel waited for Fawcett to go on. “I’ve got TMJ—temporomandibular-joint syndrome,” said Fawcett, tapping his temple. “Discomfort where the jaw articulates with the temporal bone; it’s pretty common. Well, last winter, I had an infection in my ear canal—‘swimmer’s ear,’ they called it. Except I didn’t know it for the longest time; I thought the pain was from my TMJ. Why? Because our ears are located right over our jaw joints—and that’s no coincidence. The small bones in our inner ear—the hammer, the anvil, and the stirrup—make our acute hearing possible, and they exist precisely because the skull splits there into the cranium and the jaw. Our earliest vertebrate ancestors were jawless fish—fish with heads very much like the Tailiens still seem to have, consisting of one solid piece of bone.”

Koppel was coming up to speed. “So … so, what? They take in soft food through permanently open mouths? No chewing?”

“Perhaps,” said Fawcett. “Or maybe that slit that runs down their torsos is a feeding orifice. But, either way, I’m willing to bet that they don’t depend on sound for communication.”

* * *

Darren worked with an illustrator from the Las Vegas Review-Journal and a doctor from the UNLV Medical Center coding a series of human-anatomy diagrams, but no one quite knew how to send them. It would take more than a day of flashing the city’s lights on and off—the power could only be cycled so quickly—to send even one of these high-resolution images, and the casinos wouldn’t stand for it. Every minute the power was off cost them tens of thousands of dollars in betting revenues.

But, before they’d figured out how to reply, a new set of messages— batch number four—arrived from the Tailiens.

* * *

Palm-Up-Middle-Fingers-Splayed personally supervised the sending of the next messages, since he’d been the one who had coded them. They were designed to convey a series of simple multiple-choice questions. The messages consisted of 23 rows of 79 columns, much smaller than the anatomical charts. Fist-Held-Sideways had opined that bandwidth might be a problem for the third planet in sending similar messages, which was presumably why no response had yet been received.

The top part of each message showed a simple math problem, and the bottom part showed three possible answers, one of which was correct. The boxes containing these answers were labeled, from left to right, with one pixel, two pixels, and three pixels respectively in their upper right-hand corners.

Palm-Up-Middle-Fingers-Splayed, Fist-Held-Sideways, and the rest awaited the answers from the third planet; nothing less than a perfect score on the test would be morally acceptable before they asked the most important question of all.

* * *

The aliens seemed to have no trouble reading the flashing of Las Vegas’s lights, and so the responses to the math problems were sent by that city winking itself on and off. Many of the hundred thousand people who had come to Nevada to be part of the first signaling effort were still in town, thrilled that an actual dialogue between humans and aliens seemed to be opening up.

Fortunately for the croupiers and pit bosses, the math problems only took seconds to reply to; all that had to be sent was the number of the box containing the correct answer: one flash, two flashes, or three flashes.

* * *

“There’s no doubt,’’ signed Palm-Up-Middle-Fingers-Splayed to Captain Curling-Sixth-Finger, “that the aliens understand our syntax. They clearly know how to give the correct response to a multiple-choice question—and they got all the answers right, even the one about division by zero.”

“Very well,” said Curling-Sixth-Finger, her fingers moving slowly, deliberately. She clearly was steeling herself in case she had to repeat the action she’d been forced to take at the last star system. “Ask them the big one.”

* * *

The next message was, in the words of Larry King, who had Darren Hamasaki on his show to talk about it, “a real poser.”

“It looks,” said King, leaning forward on his desk, his red suspenders straining as he did so, “like they’re asking us something about DNA, isn’t that right, Mr. Hamasaki?”

“That does seem to be the case,” said Darren.

“Now, I don’t know much about genetics,” said King, and he looked briefly into the camera, as if to make clear that he was speaking on behalf of his viewing audience in confessing this ignorance, “but in USA Today this morning there was an article saying that it didn’t make sense that the aliens were talking to us about DNA. I mean, DNA is what life on Earth is based on, but it isn’t necessarily what alien life will be based on, no? Aren’t there other ways to make life?”

“Oh, there might very well indeed be,” said Darren, “although, you know, try as we might, no one has come up with a good computer model for any other form of self-replicating biochemistry. But I don’t think it matters. Life didn’t begin on Earth, after all. It was imported here, and—”