Transmission

“Well, maybe you could visit,” Kevin said, but then he caught sight of Professor Brewster’s expression. “I have to go.”

“You should be careful about what you say,” Professor Brewster said when Kevin hung up. “Our work here is supposed to be confidential.”

“I trust Luna,” Kevin said.

“And if all of this turns out to be nonsense, then it damages the reputation that we have worked so hard to build up, which in turn will affect our funding.”

“It’s not nonsense,” Kevin insisted. Why couldn’t Professor Brewster understand that? “I see this.”

“Apparently,” Professor Brewster said. “Although given your condition…”

Kevin stood up. Right then, he felt tired, and not just because of the illness that was slowly eating away at his brain. He felt tired of all this, of not being taken seriously.

“You’re just determined to dismiss this whatever I do,” he said. “I managed to translate the message.”

“Apparently.” That word again. “That reminds me, though. There’s no reason to believe that you started listening at the start of these signals, so we want to have you listen to our archive of signals from other sectors, and see if any more trigger sudden translations.”

He said that as if he hadn’t just barged in, and they weren’t having an argument about it. He said it as if it were already decided that Kevin would do it. Kevin stood there, ready to tell him no. Ready to just walk away.

He couldn’t, though, and not just because he was thirteen, while this was some eminent scientist who probably knew what he was talking about. He couldn’t risk not hearing what the aliens had to say.

“All right,” Kevin said.

Professor Brewster took him, not to the supercomputer pit this time, but to a small lab space where there was nothing but a plain white table, a pair of equally plain headphones, and a pane of two-way glass that suggested dozens of scientists might be waiting just beyond.

“Go inside, put the headphones on, and we’ll see if any of the signals spark translations,” Professor Brewster said in a voice that suggested he knew what the likely outcome would be.

*

The next few hours were among the most boring of Kevin’s life, and that included the time he’d spent in math class. Whoever was in the other room played him noise after noise, signal after signal, all presumably interpreted from light patterns or electromagnetic discharges. Kevin expected one of them to spark something at any moment, but there was nothing, and nothing again, and…

“If anyone receives this, more communications will follow,” he said as he heard one. It hardly sounded like his voice anymore, as though something were speaking through him. It just seemed natural to say it as the sounds hit his ears.

There seemed to be instant activity behind the glass, and Phil’s voice came in on his headphones.

“What was that, Kevin?”

“That last signal, I think it means to wait for more,” Kevin said.

“You’re sure?”

Kevin didn’t know how to answer that. It wasn’t as though he was any kind of expert on what was happening. He probably knew less than the scientists trying to make sense of it all. He just translated what he heard, relying on his altered brain to understand.

“Maybe if we try for more signals taken from that area,” Phil’s voice said over the headphones, and Kevin couldn’t tell if he was talking to him, or himself, or to other scientists.

Either way, more signals followed. Some were just noise. Others, though…

“We are coming, prepare to receive us.”

They were all variations on the same theme, the same message, although none of them seemed to say anything useful. Kevin found himself wondering how long these messages had been pumping out into space, waiting for someone to listen to them. Maybe they’d been striking the Earth for months, even years, and it was only now that someone was able to understand.

Phil seemed to have the same idea. He came in, wearing what looked very much like the same Hawaiian shirt as the day before, looking excited.

“These signals… some of them go back months, maybe longer, all from the region of space we associate with the Trappist 1 system. That means that, if they were sent using light, they’ve taken almost forty years to arrive. And you’re the first person to be able to understand them.” Unlike Dr. Brewster, Phil seemed more than happy about the prospect. He sounded truly excited.

“I think your illness must have changed your brain in ways we don’t understand,” he said. “I think it must have given you the capacity to tune into this in ways we can’t. It would explain why we can’t see anything beyond the progress of your illness. Your illness is doing this.”

Kevin smiled tightly. “So I’m basically a freak.”

“But a very important one,” Phil said with a smile of his own. “We might have missed understanding this completely. More than that, it sounds as though there’s a bigger message coming, something so important that they wanted to be sure no one would miss it.”