As we report for our third shift, I note that the watchroom has a very different atmosphere. The casual expectation of life-as-usual has evaporated, and instead there is a heavy vapour of concern filling the room. Um. I’m not going to keep that metaphor up, that went really strange at the end. As we enter the room, we can very clearly tell that the light conversation at shift-change is not going to occur. That time is over; now is the time to focus.
“Heya, early morning watch!”
... I think Sylvie missed the memo.
Alex looks over to us, his face a mixture of exhaustion and low-burning panic. “You are here!” His words are exultant, but they don’t really come across as a celebration.
“What’s new with that message?”
“Well,” Des turns, and jerks her thumb over her shoulder at the screen, “We’ve definitely decided it is a language, and it is definitely broken into words.”
“Uh huh,” Sylvia nods. “Anytihng more than that?”
“Specifically no.” Des shakes her head, grinning.
“There isn’t enough data for any conclusions about any of the words’ meanings. Though apparently the first word is almost certainly a pronoun or a proper noun,” Alex adds.
“However,” Des adds, “The last shift spent their time looking back at what the outbound gate was doing when the ship arrived. It was, apparently, acting a little bit different to normal even before it geared up to recieve the aliens? They thought it was a side effect of how their drive affected their end of the gateway, before they started jumping. So now we might have a little bit of warning.”
“Not that we can really do anything to react. It’s not even like we have any idea how we want to react! But now we can,” Alex concludes with a dramatic thumbs-up.
I laugh, and let it loose. I realise, somehow, that I’ve never quite let a laugh just be a laugh before? I’ve always held it back, kept it tidy and polite. It feels nice to let a laugh go, and be comfortable with it? Laughing isn’t meant to just be a polite social signal, I guess. “Get some rest, we’ve got the watch.”
They acknowledge the opportunity to exit gladly, with Sylvie taking the moment to give Destiny a supportive hug.
But even with the heightened awareness that the sudden surprise visit of aliens creates, our shift isn’t exactly filled with activity. I revisit the transmission, and follow along on the makeshift transcription in latin letters: “Wuncru spewxcam nahtep, tεrri.” None of the sounds quite match up – for example, the ‘p’ sound of this language is a distinctive click, and the ‘r’ is a rumble that sounds like it is coming from pretty far back in the mouth.
Hearing it again, I’m startled by just how short of a message it was. It had felt longer. But, thinking back, it was just the adrenaline of hearing something so completely foreign.
Thirty minutes into our shift, a watchdog alarm went off: the outbound gate was doing the same thing it had done before the arrival last time, so an alien ship was presumably approaching the far end of the gate pair. Whoever had set up this alarm had also included a function to give a timeline for comparison with the first time, so we could see when various moments might match up, such as the end of the odd behaviour, and the arrival of the incoming ship.
Surprisingly, no ship arrives, even though the timeline seemed to line up until then.
“Is something holding them up?” Sylvie asks.
In the silence of our considering what was going on, a fleet arrived. A full ten ships, all built roughly the same as the first ship had been, arrayed in a 3D v-formation.
They did not move, but they sat there in space just outside of the range of the gate.
For a moment, nothing happened. Then, a pair of incoming data streams hit us, tight radio messages sent directly from their fleet, and both were recognised as speech by the computer. One was in the same language as the previous message, but the other was a rough computer generated translation into English.
“We greet you, Human. We seek peace with Human we find in the universe. We find ignorance of wrongs done against us. This we is the spwihicpεa. We seek to learn about you with eagerness,” their message said, and then ended. The computer had also transcribed the ‘original’ into the makeshift alphabet that had been designed. Curiously, ‘human’ seemed to have the spelling ‘quvεv’. Clearly, what sounds best matched seemed different between us.
“Uh!” Sylvia looks at me. “I don’t think we have the equipment to respond.”
“I’m pretty sure we don’t,” I agree. “We may as well try to send whatever we can, including sending it over to Echo station.”
“We don’t exactly have a second contact message prepared, though,” Syl says nervously. “Can you make a good response on the fly? I might be able to, but I really don’t know.”
“I should be able to manage it,” I nod. “Hm.” I start to pace around one of the couches. “I think they’re trying to make do with whatever words we gave them, so I should keep that in mind. Also, if they’re trying to figure English out as they hear it, I should probably go easy on them with introducing new words a few at a time.” I walk to the wall-screen, and pull up the original message again, noticing just how tightly the aliens had been following the script we gave them.
‘This system is part of Human-settled space. We seek peace, and cooperation with anyone we find in the universe. We greet you with eagerness, to meet you and learn about you. Any wrongs against you were done out of ignorance, and we will attempt to rectify them. Please, respond, so we may work together and achieve more than we could alone’
“So, let’s try this. ‘We greet you, spwihicpéa. I am one of the humans of this system. I am one who watches this system, at the edge of our settled space. As we are called humans, and you are called spwihicpéa, I am called Ash. You say ‘this we’. Are you one of many in cooperation? We may not respond to your message directly. We respond as we can, speaking into this system’s darkness. As you heard our first message, we hope you may also hear this one. Please respond, so we may better learn each other’s language.’”
“I’m not sure about trying to say their name, Ash. But it seems like a pretty smooth effort to add new words slowly.”
“Yeah... Since they also tried to use our name in their native message, I’m not too worried about it.” I breathe deeply. “Should we just go with it, and hope they either hear it or try the same thing as last time?”
“Let’s go with it,” Sylvia nods. “Since you put your name in there, I guess you’re they one who will speak it?”
“I guess!” I cough, and force myself to yawn, and try to roll their name around as close as I can mimic it, with what seems like a very differently-shaped mouth. I guess it is time for me to begin the first real conversation with an alien in this universe. I press a button, and start to read out my message again. “We greet you, spwihicpéa...”
== * ==
Our transmission systems are not up to the task. While some faint evidence of our message certainly made it out to them, the alien ships clearly did not pick it up.
More worryingly, they also did not move closer after a while of this apparent silence.
“There is nothing we can do, right?” I ask, trying to think up any possible way of telling them we are trying to talk to them.
“We’re basically doing our best to flick the light switch already, I don’t think there is anything more we can do,” Syl shakes her head.
“All of our long-range antenna are trying to say the same thing, and in-time with each other for their point of view. We have no construction that is big enough that we could move visibly. Do we have a ship we can send out there?”
“No ships are in this system at the moment. Which is just great, really.”
“Lovely. We were definitely properly prepared for contact, here in the spot we might expect contact. Do we have a drone with an engine? Can we throw a rock with a radio beacon on it? Can we wait until night and flash our streetlights really hard? There has to be some way we can tell them something.”
Sylvia brings up a panel on the screen and explores a database I don’t recognise. “So, we can’t throw stuff, and we don’t have so much city as all that, but we might just... yeah! Okay! We have an explorer probe available. Brutally simple, but we can put a short-range radio transmitter on it. Probably put and extra sentence saying ‘come closer please’ onto your message and it’ll work out pretty well. Except that it will take just under a day to arrive, and we’ll have to send it pretty much straight at them. They might suspect it to be a weapon. We’ll just have to hope their message was honest about ‘seeking peace’.”
“We’ll just have to make it miss them by as much as we can, and hope they notice early enough.”
