Transmission

“We’re here,” Dr. Levin said, as they arrived at a room where the door had been left open, obviously to allow for the crowd of people trying to cram inside. “Let us through, please. We need to talk to Sam.”

“Here” turned out to be a large room, filled with blinking lights below and surrounded by walkways that made it seem a bit like a theater where the actors were all computers. Kevin recognized them as computers even though they were nothing like the small, barely working laptop his mother had bought for him to do schoolwork on. These were devices the size of coffee tables, cars, rooms, all matte black and glittering with lights. The people standing or sitting close to them had on suits like the ones forensics people wore on TV shows.

“Impressed?” Dr. Levin asked.

Kevin could only nod. He didn’t have the words for a place like this. It was… incredible.

“What is this place?” his mother asked, and Kevin didn’t know if it was a good or bad thing that even his mother didn’t understand it.

“It’s where NASA does its supercomputer research,” Dr. Levin explained. “Work on AI, quantum computing, more advanced superconductors. It’s also the equipment they use to work on… complex issues. Come on, we need to talk to Sam.”

She led the way through the crowd and Kevin followed, trying to be quick enough to move into the gaps she created before they closed again. He hurried along in her wake until they came to a tall, slightly stooped man standing by one of the computers. Unlike the others, he wasn’t wearing a clean suit. His long, bony fingers seemed to be tying themselves in knots as he typed.

“Professor Brewster,” Dr. Levin said.

“Dr. Levin, I’m glad you could… wait, you’ve brought visitors. This really isn’t the moment for sightseeing, Elise.”

If Dr. Levin was annoyed by that, she didn’t show it. “David, this is Kevin McKenzie, and his mother. They’re not here to sightsee. I think Kevin might prove helpful with this. We need to see Sam.”

Professor Brewster waved a hand at the machine in front of them. It was even taller than he was, with pipes running up the side that were so cold they gave off steam into the air. It was only when Kevin saw the sign on the side, “Signals Analysis Machine,” that he realized Sam wasn’t a person’s name, but an acronym.

“You want to let a child play with a multimillion-dollar piece of engineering?” Professor Brewster asked. “I mean, he’s what? Ten?”

“I’m thirteen,” Kevin said. The difference might not be much to someone Professor Brewster’s age, but to him, it was a fourth of his life. It was more life than he had remaining. Put like that, three years was a huge amount.

“Well, I’m forty-three, I have a doctorate from Princeton, a building full of often frankly impossible geniuses who should be doing their jobs”—he looked around the room pointedly, but no one moved—“and now, apparently a thirteen-year-old who wants to play with my supercomputer just as it is about to get to work on a signal from a probe we thought long dead.”

He seemed like a man who didn’t like stress much. Kevin guessed that was probably a disadvantage in his job.

“Kevin’s here because of the signal,” Dr. Levin said. “He… well, he predicted that it would occur.”

“Impossible,” Professor Brewster said. “Elise, you know I have always respected your efforts to keep SETI research in the realm of serious science, but this seems to run in completely the opposite direction. It’s obviously a trick.”

Dr. Levin sighed. “I know what I saw, David. He told me that there would be something happening with Pioneer 11, and then we got the signal. Will you at least play it for us?”

“Oh, very well,” Professor Brewster said. He gestured to one of the scientists working around the supercomputer. “Play it so that we can get on with our work.”

The scientist nodded and tapped a control interface a few times. Data flashed up on a screen in string after string of numbers, but Kevin was more interested in the audio signal that came with it. It was a strange mechanical chattering that sounded nothing like language, more like the kind of interference that might come from a computer going wrong.

Even so, he understood it. He just didn’t know how.

“You need to adjust one of your radio telescopes,” Kevin said, the knowledge just sitting in his mind. There were numbers too. Two sets of them, one marginally different from the other. “I think… the first seems wrong somehow, and the second is what it should be.”

“What?” Professor Brewster and Dr. Levin asked almost simultaneously, although with very different expressions. Dr. Levin looked amazed. Professor Brewster mostly looked irritated.

“It’s what it means,” Kevin said. He shrugged. “I mean, I guess. I don’t know how I know it.”

“You don’t know it,” Professor Brewster insisted. “If there’s any meaning in there at all, which frankly isn’t likely, it will take SAM hours to decode it, if it’s possible at all.