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by Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff
Science Fiction, 53 pages.
Originally Published in Analog Science Fiction and Fact, 2003
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In the movies, you were slumped at your computer console, fast asleep, surrounded by empty Pepsi cans and candy wrappers, when the system pinged. You woke on a tide of adrenaline, flinging candy wrappers and crumpled cans to the lab floor and, after a moment of disorientation, realized WHAT THAT SOUND MEANT.
In reality, Dr. Santiago Rodriguez was standing in the middle of the lab stuffing his face with nachos when the Signal Detection System spoke—figuratively speaking. What the interface actually did was fire an alarm that played the five-note sequence from Close Encounters of the Third Kind, at Dr. Mukerjee’s whimsy.
When he’d first come to Project Quetzalcoatl, Santiago had jumped out of his skin every time the system pinged. Now, three years and many false alarms later, he didn’t even twitch. Now, he stood chewing like a contented cow, contemplating a response to the summons. Most likely it meant another bogey or that Kev and Roz would have to run diagnostics, which would mean pulling the Spectrum Analyzer and Signal Detection Subsystem offline for a day or two.
He was strolling over to the SDS console when Gita Mukerjee poked her head in the door. “Snag a tire, Sandy?” she asked, but her eyes were hopeful.
Santiago laughed, set aside the nachos, and dusted his hands off on his jeans. “Heck, no, Gita. I got me a live one this time.” He dropped into his chair and swiveled to the display.
“Any of those nachos left?”
“Uh, yeah... Kitchen.” His mind was already occupied with the data. He got a raw read on the left, a waterfall plot of the data on the right. He was still studying the waterfall plot of the side band when Gita returned from the kitchen with a small plate of nachos.
“What have we got?” she asked.
“Not sure. Come look at this.” He felt a peculiar wriggling in his stomach. Nachos were no longer of any interest. He was seeing pulses in the microwave window—pulses that were clearly patterned. They played in series, paused, then picked up again. There was very little drift. But the carrier wave was in the 1500 MHz range and looked familiar. In fact, Santiago could put his hands on any number of archived log entries that had recorded the same signal.
It didn’t look like a glitch. Those were generally more capricious. And the few hackers who’d tried to get bogeys into the system had been unable to get past the first Follow-Up Detection Device or couldn’t resist tapping out “ET phone home” in Morse code or something equally precious.
Santiago looked up at Gita. “What do you think, Dr. Mukerjee?”
“Well, Dr. Rodriguez, I think we need to call a powwow. This looks like a job for the FUDDs.”
* * *
The small conference room was dim and hushed. The handful of scientists sat, expectant, their eyes on the screen at the front of the room where Santiago Rodriguez stood next to the podium that held his laptop.
“The data signal is in the 2GHz range,” Santiago told the gathering. “It’s regular and it repeats in cycles. It seems to be coming from the direction of the constellation Taurus.” He hesitated, allowing himself a bit of wonder at the words he would say next. “At a distance of 100 AU.”
He watched the others’ faces as they digested the information; saw that Gita Mukerjee, seated at the edge of the group, was doing the same.
Their Program Director, Dr. Kurt Costigyan, studied the screen intently, eyes roving over and over the figures there.
“That’s outside the heliosphere,” said one of the Techs, a lanky redhead named Kevin.
Santiago tapped the touch pad on the laptop and the projection on the screen beside him changed to a graphic representation of the signal’s source. He tapped a second time and a waterfall plot from the spectrum analysis opened on the right side of the screen.
“Oh, wow,” said Kevin.
“Here’s the carrier signal...” Santiago switched the display again to show a second waterfall plot.
“I’ll be damned.” Kurt Costigyan sat back in the plastic conference chair. He was a big man; the chair squeaked loudly in protest. “That’s Pioneer 10.”
Santiago didn’t realize he’d leaned so heavily against the podium until it scraped away from him across the floor. He straightened. “That’s what we thought, but...” He glanced over at Gita Mukerjee. “We don’t see how. She’s so far out.”
“And she’s so dead,” said Kevin. “Those old power cells couldn’t possibly send from that distance. Even if she was turned in the right direction.”
“Couldn’t possibly?” asked Gita, gesturing at the screen.
“Okay, shouldn’t be able to.”
Kurt looked up at Santiago. “I didn’t know you were scheduled to ping Pioneer.”
“We weren’t.”
“Then why-?“
Santiago licked his lips. “We didn’t ping her—if this really is her—she pinged us.”
“With this... pattern?”
Santiago -- [End of Preview.]