Alien Tongues Read online

  He was grateful that the girls had managed to keep him tolerably sane. As he had weakened, they had grown strong and confident. Fears had been put aside for the moment in favor of their highly deserved sense of accomplishment. They had designed something required by the world's top scientists, and which no one had been sure was even possible. They were now shaping it day to day into a more efficient, fluid, flexible and elegant language, feeding mountains of software which would open up deep mysteries of the human mind. Now able to communicate well with each other on any topic, the girls had bonded more, finding common cause in their life experiences. Séamus was proud of them and their resilience. He made the effort to try and stay upbeat in their company, only drinking after he had finally said goodnight to them. Those relationships were the one pure thing in his life he could feel good about.

  It had been a stroke of luck that the girls had turned out to be a formidable team. Chrissy and Tina had provided the intellectual drive, while Jenny and Phyllis the emotional stability which had gotten them through the rough patches. Tina had been the creative one, while Chrissy had been the gatekeeper, most ready to reject ideas which she suspected of being faulty. Jenny had paid attention to everyone, sincerely seeing a bond between them, not even allowing Chrissy to isolate herself for long. Phyllis had been a quieter source of strength, almost a role model for never quitting, no matter how tough life became. The language they invented was all the richer for these different qualities and perspectives it drew from.

  Alice was still spending about half her nights in Séamus's bed. One night she had asked him if he minded her not wearing the pajama top – she found it was getting too warm unless he stopped hugging her, and she didn't want to stop the hugs. Her request came after they had already settled into bed, and he had gotten out of his "double underwear" habit because contact has ceased to be stimulating to him. Of course he could not refuse, and when she unbuttoned the jacket he saw to his consternation that her breast shape was particularly enticing to him. When he hugged her as usual from behind, trying to disguise his reaction was futile. To make matters worse, she started rubbing herself against him. After a while she said, "I'm so sorry, Séamus, it's very naughty of me to do this, but I have this urge to move. I'll control it, I promise."

  Sleep had finally rescued him, but it had been a long night of mixed emotions. He knew she had really given him permission for a no-string-attached night of enjoyment, and probably before Barbara he would have taken it. But now he dreaded one more confusing layer being added in the morning. And perhaps it was good to feel bodily lust for Alice to help quench his constant desire for his boss. He was grateful at least to know he could be prepared for action with another woman, and didn't want to test just then if he could last the whole course. The next morning Alice had hugged him without the least signs of rejection, so he felt he had made the right decision.

  The day before his boss arrived, Wilkie and two senior civil servants from London came to the facility. Wilkie invited Alice and Séamus to his office and congratulated them warmly on their achievement. As was his habit, he offered them Turkish coffee and lokum as dessert. This day he was dressed in a pale blue suit with pink bow tie. Séamus felt comforted by meeting the professor again. It was as if, since the initial meeting, he and Alice and the girls had been on a long, hazardous voyage and they were now being welcomed home. Shortly after they had settled in, the civil servants joined them. They were introduced as Mr Harris and Mrs Blake, with no further details. Their dress was smart casual, and they greeted Séamus and Alice pleasantly. All sat around the leather sofas, sipping their small cups of coffee or glasses of water, bathed in the early spring sunshine which streaked the facility lawn outside. Where he and Chrissy had run naked. The professor put down his plate of Turkish Delight and began.

  "You are all practical, no-nonsense working people for the government. Your lives are spent dealing with the real-life, messy details of managing a modern society. You're busy people and justifiably have a limited tolerance for grandiose stories which don't seem to have any bearing on what needs to get done today. But this day I am asking you to step back for a while from your busy, practical worlds and try to see everything with fresh eyes. That doesn't mean asking you to take anything I say as dogma, or letting your imagination go wild. Quite the opposite. I am asking you today to think like professional scientists. To think about everything in terms of evidence and logical reasoning."

  Wilkie stood up, clicked on a remote which shut the blinds, dropped a screen and turned on a projector. Breathtaking images taken by the Hubble telescope were shown.

  "It's still less than a hundred years ago that we discovered our galaxy is not the entire universe. What many good scientists believed were clouds within our galaxy were finally shown by Edwin Hubble to be other galaxies. Now we know we are just one of a hundred billion galaxies in the observable universe, and we have no idea what's beyond what we can observe. Many of those galaxies are more than one thousand times the size of our own galaxy, the Milk Way. So you might say," Wilkie added, turning to Séamus, "Since another Fitzgerald wrote The Great Gatsby, the room we humans live in has been found to be about one trillion times larger than we previously thought.

  "These are proven facts, but they are almost unimaginable because our brains are not designed to think on such scales. We cannot even imagine our own Milky Way with half a trillion stars. How can we conceive of all the matter and energy in the observable Universe, of which stars make up less than one percent? How can we fathom its size, which it would take light a hundred billion years to cross, though it could never do so since the whole thing is expanding faster than the speed of light?

  "If we are to accept science, we must sometimes abandon common sense. Imagine trying to explain to F. Scott Fitzgerald that today you can access any one of millions of movies from almost every place on earth. Would you be surprised if he treated you like a wild-eyed dreamer and not a practical, no-nonsense government worker? So if I say to you, it is a mathematical certainly that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the Universe, am I saying anything more controversial than, "every human eventually dies"?

  "An obvious next question is, what are the chances that any of this intelligent life – what we refer to as IL – contacts us? We simply don't know, because we don't know how rare it is that IL is created somewhere. The rarer it is, the further from us it is likely to be found, and therefore the less likely it is that we can contact each other. So the chances may be very high, or they may be, for all practical purposes, zero. You can take your guess but, even with all the science we have today, it is nothing better than a guess. So you might say, the practical folk of this world tend to assume near-zero and the dreamers assume very high. But you would have to include the United States government in the dreamer camp from 1971 until 1993, when it finally stopped funding SETI – that's Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence – projects.

  "Since then, SETI projects have essentially been funded privately, which for the first decade or so were largely shoestring affairs. The usual thing, you know – using a plastic fork to find a needle in a haystack. But later, the technology boom created a large number of what we might call "geek billionaires." Unlike past billionaires, these people tend to fall into the dreamer camp, and they also know a thing or two about the techniques of large-scale search and data analysis. When a group of them put their money together, you might say that SETI took flight. But there's another characteristic of these techies: they don't trust governments to respond in the right way to any results they may get, and they tend to trust their own views on where we fit into the Universe. So the real SETI that goes on today is essentially private and anonymous, outside the control of any government."

  Wilkie's slides showed figures of known funding by universities and other institutions, then his estimates of the billionaires' consortium. The billionaires' spending was probably well over one hundred times greater. And no doubt, he commented, every penny was carefully spent. Such busin
essmen believed the best ideas came out of eighteen-hour days in a converted garage.

  "This consortium also thinks hard about CETI with a C – Contact with Extraterrestrial Intelligence. After all, they are results-oriented businessmen and the results of SETI with an S are CETI with a C. For certain they are not going to hand over their results to governments and say, "call us if you need our help." In fact, I suspect their only reason for contacting us is if they need help they can't otherwise buy, and even then they are going to try to attach as many strings as possible.

  "Well, now let's get to the 'Galileo' moment of my little speech – by that I'm referring to the moment Galileo pointed his new telescope at the Moon and discovered it wasn't the perfect gold sphere it had been believed to be for two thousand years. The moment we almost don't want to believe what we're discovering, because our practical, everyday minds tell us the chances of it being true are too slim, and if we start telling other people they will try to find every possible reason why we are mistaken, and we will forever be branded as a foolish dreamer.

  "This consortium approached me last year, saying it had received two identical radio signals with multiple terabytes of data, coming from the same direction within the space of an hour. The strength of the signal was so low that it would not have been detected by any equipment we know of, so clearly the consortium has something we don't possess, or they are lying. I informed the government and got funding for a team of scientists to check their claim. The team concluded that, with a very high probability, this signal is genuine. Many of the scientists on both sides knew each other, which helped with our confidence in their integrity. Assuming the signal is genuine, there can be no doubt that the duplicate transmission came from IL. I should add that they were not literally duplicates. One was the same as the other if it was sliced at a point and the two pieces reversed. The ratio of the length of the pieces was, to the accuracy of a single data bit, the number pi. In case you've forgotten, that's the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter."

  Wilkie paused. "We refer to these signals by a codename – The Call. We say that the Consortium took The First Call from Outer Space. Imagine the headlines if we spread the word about this. 'Little Green Men Found – Friends or Foe?' Millions of people will prepare for an invasion while millions more will be ready to sign up for a planned voyage to go meet our new cousins. But the truth is likely to be much more mundane. Whoever made The Call is almost certain not going to get a reply within our lifetime. Even assuming the signal came from somewhere within the Milky Way, its average expected time to travel here is some fifty thousand years. If it came from the nearest neighbor galaxy, the time increases to 2.5 million years. And of course we have no way to power a reply that far – sending a signal across such distances requires vast energy resources and unknown technology.

  "I should also point out that there have been no other signals detected since then. Just the two times, the minimum needed for us to verify IL. Whoever sent the two clearly did not want to waste their resources. That suggests they were operating close to the limits of their capacity. Either the IL community could not or did not want to spare more resources, or else a limited group within the IL took this initiative. Either way, they were probably not confident about reaching anyone. There may be no IL left with any record of sending the signal.

  "But none of this necessarily reduces the value of The Call which we already hold in our hands. Think about this. Our galaxy is probably about thirteen billion years old. Our planet is almost five billion years old and life appeared here more than three billion years ago. These are enormous time scales. It would be almost too much of a coincidence that IL less than a million years more advanced than ourselves had sent The Call. Much more likely that they were tens or even hundreds of millions of years more advanced. Now stop to think how fast our technology had increased in only the last fifty years. How far could it advance in one or more million times that period? We cannot possibly imagine, and yet science tells us some IL is likely to have reached that point."

  The periods of time Wilkie was talking about were illustrated on a slide in chart form. Séamus had previously had some vague concept of billions of years but had taken limited interest in science at school. Before that day he would have classified extraterrestrials along with leprechauns and fairies, but what the professor was saying about intelligent life somewhere in the Universe made sense to him. Could this Consortium be trusted not to be faking it? Could they trust a team of scientists not to be fooled by a hoax?

  "Imagine what we could learn from a society one million times more technologically advanced than our own," Wilkie continued, "If only we could decode The Call. The bad news is that we have no known method of translation. The good news is that we know they want us to translate it, so they will have provided clues that they hoped we would guess. We have guessed that the first part of their information consists of a history of the universe, then a description of evolution and living matter – these are subject which we will share in common. So we composed similar texts to what we would have tried to communicate to them, then tried to map our texts to theirs.

  "It didn't work, and we realized why. We are missing a key, which is the grammatical structure of the language they are using. Moreover, we believe they will have deliberately set out the text in such a way as to walk us up through the various layers of that structure, and to expand into series of related words which would develop a working vocabulary. If this IL has evolved like we did, it would have developed a similar language-specific brain function. They no doubt understand that function far better than we do, given their advanced technology. Just like we got our girls here to create a numerical language, they would have done the same, but perhaps with just software alone. Of course it would have been a different language, but its core fundamentals would be the same. That allows us to find basic frameworks within the text where our numerical language fits."

  The next slide showed a key and a lock mechanism.

  "Imagine trying to file a key into a good enough shape to open a lock. First you need to get the shape good enough to fit into the lock, then to turn far enough to see where it actually doesn't fit." Wilkie indicated the marks on the key where it had been scratched inside the lock. "Then we keep filing until we get the right fit. It's a trial-and-error process, but the point is that it provides us with cumulative progress. Our software is using the number-language model to fit hundreds of millions of similar languages to the text and see how much predictive power that gives us within the text."

  "What was the nature of the data in The Call?" Alice asked.

  Wilkie smiled at her knowingly. "Pulses of ten different magnitudes."

  "Ten!" Alice clapped her hands. "Is that a coincidence, or what?"

  "Exactly. Does this IL have two hands with five fingers on each, or one hand with ten fingers, or five hands each with two fingers?"

  Maybe they know we have ten fingers, Séamus thought, but wondered if the comment would sound ridiculous, so he did not voice it.

  "Step back a bit," said one of the civil servants. "You're using 'we' all the time. At what point in this decoding did it cease to be just the Consortium and include you, and when did it escalate to the G8+5? I'd like to know who owns what, and the leverage of this Consortium."

  "Glad you asked," Wilkie replied, and pulled up another slide. "Here's the deal, if you like. Don't ask me too much about it because I'm just a humble, naive scientist. I only think in terms of collaboration to advance the knowledge of mankind. But the Consortium knew they couldn't assemble the brainpower of the girls, and even the G8 needed the informed cooperation of at least five Asian governments other than Japan. The five were chosen based on a mixture of political stability and international engagement, population size, educational level, government data and language diversity. It obviously required strong engagement from the UN. The consortium has given us a sizeable fraction of The Call, and in return they get a direct feed of everything the girls are doing.
Both the G13 and the Consortium are doing independent analyses of the girls' results. As for ownership, there is of course a very lengthy legal document, but who knows if everybody is going to adhere to that."

  Wilkie opened the blinds again and late morning sunshine flooded the room. Séamus thought how normal and familiar the lawn outside looked. Yet it seemed that aliens, unimaginably more advanced than them, had sent them a message. And he had run naked on that lawn with a beautiful woman, watched by another with whom he had fought almost naked. Oh, yes, and he had had wild sex with his boss, and he was famous for a one-night-stand with an East-European girl he met in a pub. Why had he ever imagined he could spend his future weekends mowing a lawn like that one, somewhere in Sheryl's home village?

  "What are we hoping to find in The Call, Professor?" Alice was asking.

  Wilkie dug his hands into his pockets. "We've all seen and read a lot of fiction about contact with extraterrestrials, and unless it's an unprovoked attack then it has to start with some kind of message like The Call. If we put together a calling card for our Earth then it would be a sort of autobiography, wouldn't it? We'd talk about our achievements, like antibiotics, nuclear power and the Internet. So maybe they will talk about a cure for cancer, solutions to world peace, elimination of poverty, long-distance space flight and maybe time machines. That's what governments are interested in. For myself, I'm just thrilled to hear anything they want to tell me."