This is a story I wrote while I was still in high school. In one of the many hard drive crashes I’ve had between then and now, it was lost. It’s interesting: out of all the data that I never backed up and subsequently lost, this is the only piece of information that I’m actually annoyed at losing. For that matter, it’s the only piece of information that I actually remember having been lost. Anyway, the idea itself never left me, so about a year ago, I rewrote it. I have an irrational feeling that the original version of the story was better, but I really don’t remember. I doubt it was, but that still doesn’t leave me satisfied with this version. So it goes.

I think some of you have seen this before, but I don’t think I’ve ever put it on the Not A Blog™. I’ve got a bunch of stories in that situation. They’ll probably find their way on here, eventually.


Neighbors

The night was crisp and arid, the hour the signal arrived. It danced through the atmosphere with little fanfare. The graduate student watching the scopes that night didn’t see anything strange as the data scooted by on the screen. In fact, nobody realized what happened until the next morning, after the computer did the number crunching itself.

The results were clear: the signal was artificial. General analysis revealed an audio waveform encoded within the phase of the electromagnetic waveform. After accounting for the redshift of the signal’s frequency, the computer had no trouble extracting the sound. It was the first communication heard which had not originated on Earth.

One of the technicians wanted to tell the Government, but didn’t know how. The other wanted to tell the public, but was afraid of what the Government might do. The grad student told his girlfriend. He played the clip and showed her the printouts. It never crossed her mind that it could be a fake, and she told a few others. No one involved ever received a visit from any men in black.

The news tore through the internet before the weekend. Most people assumed it was a hoax—and not even an elaborate hoax, at that—even after professors claimed the signal was real. But it was only twenty three hours later that they received another similar signal, and after they divulged the coordinates, radio telescopes around the world began to detect the same. That single point in the sky was covered dozens of times over, twenty four hours a day, and the sound of an alien world streamed down to Earth.

Despite the media’s popularity with the phrase, we never “made contact”. That implies two way communication. We could pick up their broadcasts, but there was little chance of establishing a true dialogue. The point in space where the signal was coming from was empty to the naked eye—we could not even see the broadcasters’ home star.

When another group of astronomers announced that the star was approximately 150,000 light years away, many people were dazzled at the prospect of making contact with a culture approximately 150,000 years more advanced than we were. Others countered by saying they probably already knew about us—the good and the bad—while another mindset said this was proof that there were no shortcuts across immense interstellar distances. Even if the aliens were 150,000 years more advanced, they’re just as stuck in their corner of the universe as we are in ours. Nevertheless, incredible amounts of time and money were spent to broadcast messages of peace back to the star.

The existence of the aliens was both proof for and against the existence of God. Life must be ubiquitous in the universe, said one group. It is mind boggling that one species would be intelligent enough to develop high technology such as radios—but two species doing so implies that the occurrence is more regular than we thought. The universe is a big place, so it must have happened elsewhere. The second group would say that various holy texts claimed the human race as the chosen one of God—and why else would it need to specify this unless there were other races to differentiate humans from? Neither side gained philosophical ground.

Another group which had difficulty gaining ground were linguists. Deciphering a written passage without context is nearly impossible; no progress had been made on Egyptian hieroglyphics until the Rosetta Stone linked it with Greek. But there was no context with which to evaluate the alien language. The fact that it was speech made the task much more difficult. Many people puzzled over the recordings. It got to the point where linguists could categorize the various alien languages—and tell when one was spoken versus another, and even where they shared common roots. But without contextual clues of any sort, it was all meaningless, breathy gibberish.

This was not to say the recordings were worthless. Music transcends language. The purchase of new popular music dropped off almost to nothing for a few months as people listened exclusively to the mysterious alien recordings. The scale they favored was an heptatonic; seven tones in all including all the sharps of the chromatic scale and B and E. It was also heavy in rhythm, giving the music an Asian flavor. Taken out of context as an alien recording, it would have been classified, ironically enough, as World. After the novelty wore off, sales of human-produced music picked up again, but they would never recover.

Even the most fantastic events have a way of becoming mundane over time. Thirty years passed—every day filled with alien voices and music, now taken for granted. All but the most dedicated hobbyists gave up on trying to translate the languages. The brightest talent in these fields moved onto more lucrative careers in archeology. The music spawned several subgenres of its own, but ultimately it became just another category on the shelf.

The plethora of radio waves from outer space faded from the limelight until another, more complex signal, was discovered in the mix. It was highly processed, but again, unmistakably artificial. A series of programs were designed to run the signal through virtual circuits modeled after old television sets, selecting new circuits based on the clarity of the picture from the pool of existing circuits. After a number of false starts, the program stumbled across one that worked, and the first alien face was seen on Earth.

Everyone was surprised at how similar in form they were, yet clearly different. They were bipedal, with bilateral symmetry. They had one head, two legs and two arms—but four fingers with two opposing thumbs. The head had three dark eyes: one in the front and one not quite on either side. The mouth, nose and ears all seemed to be clustered together in the front lower half of the head, and could be hidden or exposed by a hinge of muscle and bone there. It made it appear that their nose, in particular, was within their mouth—although the structure wasn’t analogous to a human mouth.

The first four months of images were broadcast stretched horizontally. It wasn’t until they broadcast a test pattern that we realized the format of their screens was a square, geometrically proper but restrictive. Years later they adapted a two-square format with the width being twice the height.

The interest in alien cultures immediately resurfaced. They went through phases and trends: one period in their history was characterized by strict geometry, the next by amorphous, organic shapes. The clothes they wore served to decorate and protect them, but if the protection wasn’t necessary, there was only minimal decoration, and what was covered did not necessarily correspond to sexual organs.

Their taboos were different, as well. Mating was not hidden nor was it particularly focused on in any particular instance. Eating, however, was always done in private in what could clearly be seen as the upper classes. Lower classes were always shown eating together as if this were some sort of vulgarity—but the actual act of putting food in the mouth never quite seemed to make it on camera.

The first visual images had no color and no accompanying sound, but it was only a few years until simultaneous broadcasts of picture and sound began. It would be another decade until they were contained in the same signal—arriving on the scene about the same time as color.

Moving images opened up another dimension to this alien world. Now it seemed incredibly close—and the aliens weren’t so different. They had religions—which a small percentage of people immediately took up and proceeded to interpret incorrectly. They had science and politics. They had visual art in addition to music. Together, these things spawned a renaissance unlike any the human race had ever seen.

The television signal provided the context and written language necessary to translate what was being said. Millions took on the task of learning the new language, both to translate the past work that had been archived, and in the hope of making a true first contact. Past efforts to contact the aliens were fruitless, but now—speaking in their native tongue—they might listen.

With a new grasp of understanding, it was easier to follow the culture as it played out across scores of channels. There were plays and movies, many of which followed the monomyth—adding credence to the notion that it was a universal underpinning central to any sufficiently developed culture. Others said the claim was intelligencia doublespeak and that any similarities were probably a coincidence.

Although there were many cultures on the planet, they fell into major two groups. One group organized themselves loosely under a blue flag. The others united under a yellow flag and a small war broke out, but stayed contained on a series of islands in the middle of the planet’s smaller sea.

The politics of the situation were complicated, and it involved many words which were used repeatedly but never explained. Opinion was split as to whether these were social and moral issues or whether it was over the allocation of resources and land. Another few years showed that a large portion of the blue aliens had fallen sick and were becoming more disorganized, while the yellow group had turned into one gigantic militaristic state.

But the blue group had a secret which they were able to keep even from the prominent military radio bands that were in use. But when they revealed it publicly, on all television channels, their world reeled at the announcement. Those under the yellow flag broke into a civil war. The reason was not clear, but it was speculated that the blue forces had unveiled a nuclear device. A television science program seemed to indicate that the bomb operated at the quantum level rather than at the subatomic level, but there was debate on Earth as to whether or not it would work as described.

Half of the yellow group wanted to make peace while the other half wanted to strike immediately—and they went to war internally when they couldn’t reach an agreement. Abruptly, the militaristic yellow countries broke off their fighting with the rouge yellow countries—and retreated right into blue territory. They announced that they had their own version of the bomb which they were about to use on anyone who opposed them. In a panic, the weakened blue forces scattered and launched their own series of bombs.

We could not turn our attention from the planet which we now regarded to be our sister world. The aliens all looked alike, and yet they didn’t. They looked like us, yet they didn’t. We collectively gasped as one side slaughtered another, and the first retaliated. Earth stared, transfixed, as every monitor burst with static. Four seconds later, a new star appeared in the sky, with light one hundred and fifty thousand years old.


-Ted