Ciao, SETI! Intro & Part 1/8

Unofficial Katy's First Misadventure

Welcome to some more Paschat stuff. Specifically, these are the misadventures of a Miss Katy Major, known officially as, erm, Unofficial Katy. Don’t ask. It just happened.

Let’s see what the Great Image Generator can conjure up.

Well, after far too much time with the GIG in the sky I’ll leave it at that one for now. We’ll see if it comes up with some better ones later. But it got the mischief right in this one, and the weirdness of the background stuff provokes a generous degree of cognitive dissonance in the viewer. So that’s good enough for her for now.

Anyhow, I’m not going to tell you anything about her at this stage as the story does that. As stories sort of should, you know. Still, if you have already read Katy’s McGuffin, which I published not so long ago, then you will have met her already. At least in a different incarnation. That aspect of her isn’t explained in this story, by the way. That comes a bit later.

So this one, Ciao, SETI! is the first story in which this new character appears. In the later ones it does kind of help if you’ve read this one, as I don’t bother with as much exposition, other than mischievous in-jokes.

If I am honest, which I often am (no, honest, I am), Katy is probably the one of my characters who is most unashamedly like me (partly because she’s the same age as I am, and English). I guess one of the only major differences (no, I do not excuse the pun), is that she is far more publicly confident than I am. I prefer to as it were skulk in the shadows, or withdraw from the world, and let my writing do the work, as that is the only thing people will ever get from me. It is how I wish to be judged. Not on anything else.

One of the purposes of this first Katy story (which also comes out in the next four of them), was to reach a wider audience with the Wow! Signal decipherment (for this see Katrina’s DEXOS Part V), as well as a certain date which may or may not be encoded into that signal. Let’s call that Event Day, for want of a better name. As I post this on 03 October 2024, I make that 44 days precisely until the fateful day. If this is true, rather than some whimsy, then I shall have to speculate a little as we get closer as to what might or might not happen. Although at this stage I would suggest it depends entirely on the situation humans have made for themselves when the time comes. At the moment, looking out into this world, it doesn’t bode well. The Katy stories do kind of take that into account, as you’ll see. Especially the second one, which is just pure overkill.

Another aspect to these Katy stories is that they are deliberately written to be cinematic. That’s to say I am hoping they read like movies, and were meant, in large part, to be visualised, as much as purely ‘read’.

Anyhow, I suppose that’s not too bad for an intro. It’ll have to do. Perhaps I’ll just shush now and let you jump right in.

This one is around the 16k words mark, so I’ve split it into 8 parts. I’ll hope to do one a week for the next two months. Then there will be a break, before I subject you to the mischievous, postmodern, slightly mad, but undeniably fun Pinko Commie Superbunker, which is Katy’s second misadventure.

So here we go with Katy’s first outing from American Visidramas, feat. Unofficial Katy & the Starseeds. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I did writing it.

I may even, although I haven’t decided yet, give it an alternate ending.

Or maybe even give you both… now that would be mischievous.

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Ciao, SETI!

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Unofficial Katy was one year to the day precisely into her long sentence for blasphemy and sedition when SETI received the signal.

I say a year, but they didn’t notice it straight away – as is somewhat typical in cases like this. Unsurprisingly, a woeful lack of funding ensured a continuous backlog. It would be a further five months before the obvious spike in the data screamed off the screen, dead centre in the waterhole, prompting a certain sassy young astronomy postgrad to utter that immortal word, ‘Wow!’.

Actually, the truth is that’s not the word she really burst out with. But in a world in which censorship has become the new normal, the truth would be better unrepeated.

It would be another two months before the analysis was complete. And before they thought of Katy.

For she had been aware of it from the very day it arrived. She was expecting it. And when the Visitor came for her, she was expecting that too.

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Her name was Phoebe and she came from smalltown America that doesn’t exist anymore. Picket fences and mom and pop businesses. Hallowe’en scares and high school prom queens. Phoebe was lucky. Her house was on the outskirts, with fields of farmland stretching as far as eyes could see. And she had very good eyes. On cloudless nights when the moon was new she could see Pleione.

Her father, who maybe had those same blue eyes the Sisters had, died when she was twelve. But not before he’d built the observatory in the backyard. So yeah, of course she would escape that place one day and of course she’d end up working with a radio telescope in the middle of nowhere halfway round the world.

I say working with a radio telescope – the advantage of being a Professor is you get your students to do all the tedious jobs. Like just stay there in front of that computer screen and you sort out the data, then I get to do the analysis and take all the credit. Well, more fool the Professor. It was always going to be a student whose name is forever remembered as the receiver of first contact.

And her name was Phoebe and it was just as well. The media thought so too – far better a sexy country girl with an intelligence to match than some midlife crisis Professor. The sassy smile completed the telegenic thing and, well, I don’t remember the Professor’s name. Do you?

As I say, dead in the centre of the waterhole. 1541 MHz. You can’t exactly miss something like that. To the untrained eye the graph doesn’t mean anything, of course – it may as well be a picture of some mountains, with peaks and troughs, but to you and me, that spike is pregnant.

It fluctuated in intensity between 8 and 42 standard deviations beyond the background noise level, starting with a single 24-second sequence, then a pause of two seconds, then continuing through 24 72-second segments with further two second breaks to delineate each segment. It shouldn’t take a genius to decode that using an alphanumeric system (I’ll give you a clue – just deduct seven). Phoebe knew it was ETI the moment she did that. Everyone in SETI knew the famous 6EQUJ5 sequence from the Wow! signal. And it was repeated here near the beginning, as if just for show. Forty-seven years and three months later. 16 November 2024. Or 332 divided by seven, if you prefer. According to the clock, 11:26 UTC precisely when the message began.

Katy had predicted that. To the minute. She wrote about it.

But she was guilty of blasphemy. And she was in prison.

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Phoebe was aware of this, by the way. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that, well, let’s say maybe 50 percent of astronomers are science fiction fans. So that means 50 percent of SETI too. Phoebe was a member of that half. She’d read Katy’s books, on recommendation from a (now, regretfully) ex-girlfriend. Katy had been nominated a few times for Hugo and Nebula awards. Then she became controversial and shunned by the community. One of her most scandalous stories was about an adolescent alien who steals her cousin’s ship, joyrides it through the atmosphere one fine summer’s day then hovers above Number Ten Downing Street, as if waiting for a greeting party. In due course the Prime Minister arrives for this historic occasion, all smug and self-important, whereupon the alien girl, firehose-style, opens up a porthole in the underbelly of the ship from which spews forth a huge load of stinking excrement, covering the politician head to toe, having infused it with some chemical or other to make it permanent, so the stench can never wash off. The meaning of this symbolic gesture couldn’t have been more obvious – this is what we think of your fascist leader and this is what you, humans, should think of him too.

So that was effectively the final straw as far as the authorities were concerned. They had more than enough evidence from everything else she’d written for charges of blasphemy and sedition. They would’ve thrown in treason too only Katy had been careful not to say nasty things about King Charles. So, unlike the aforementioned excrement, that one wouldn’t stick. But two out of three was sufficient. Her books were duly removed from the shelves and the E-books deleted. There were pirate copies of course, but most people didn’t know where to look for that stuff and besides, the intelligence services knew all about it, allowed it to flourish and used it as a honeypot to compile their growing list of dissidents.

A part of Phoebe felt sad for her when she heard about the verdict. She didn’t disagree with it – at least not officially – but she did disagree with the sentence. Five years is far too harsh simply for having an opinion. It wasn’t as if Katy was a threat to the public, after all.

Likewise, as with many other of her avid readers, Phoebe thought it best to keep her fanaticism to herself, and left the books concealed back home in New England.

The conditions in Holloway Women’s Prison in North London, England, weren’t too bad, though. She was, at least, permitted the means to write, even if everything she wrote was carefully inspected, and censored arbitrarily. Katy decided to write something as uncontroversial as one might imagine. Danuih Fade. A knowingly self-indulgent novel apparently set hundreds of thousands of years into the future, when the very idea of blasphemy had become (literally) an alien concept, not even in the dictionary anymore. She deliberately didn’t mention the word. The story was a reminiscence, a kind of imagined biography of a woman who travels as far away as possible from her homeworld, almost to the point of no return. The meaning of that was pretty clear. If you can’t escape in space, then do it in time instead.

Besides, she didn’t have any reference materials to work with. Not allowed to use the Internet in this prison. No point anyway, in this censored day and age. This post-truth dystopia. It took her eleven months to write. By the time the signal arrived, she was halfway through her first revision.

By the time the Visitor came for her, her foreign publisher had it (the real version carefully smuggled out, obviously).

And then she was gone from that place.

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The fact that the signal was thirty minutes precisely was telling. Because that’s thirty minutes as humans measure things. So either the ETI, in some impossible coincidence, uses the same system, or, well, they know more about humans than humans would like them to know. Likewise, the telescope had been pointing at Tau Ceti at the time, so that was not a little unnerving.

Phoebe was a smart girl. She took the nightshift, and kept the news from everyone else until the following day. She used that meantime wisely. First, she copied the intensity vs. time chart onto a storage device, and also uploaded it to her cloud. Later, she borrowed a friend’s phone without them knowing and made a further copy, which she hid in a safe place. The storage device she just deposited in her desk drawer at home. She knew perfectly well the observatory computer’s log would record the fact that data had been copied and transferred to a device, at a time when she was on shift. So when they questioned her sternly she’d do her best to look all dejected and defeated and then forlornly tell them where the device was. They’d easily hack into her cloud too and delete it all there. Someone who didn’t cover their tracks can’t know much about espionage or computers, they would think. And that’s the impression she would give them. They’d feel smug and triumphant about that.

Like I said, she was a smart girl. She understood what they were like.

Maybe they’d just fire her. No matter. Once she completed her thesis she could work anywhere in the world.

And she’d have the data.

After displaying the graph on her screen she sat back and just stared at it, letting her unconscious do the work. The solution would pop into her head soon enough.

Despite Phoebe creating the impression she was no adept when it came to computers, she certainly knew enough basic programming to write a little code to translate the intensity fluctuations into alphanumerics. She started with the first, 24-second sequence. At that initial stage most of it was gobbledygook, but there were a few clear patterns discernible. After the 6EQUJ5 opener, there were, well, repetitions.

Phoebe liked music.

Her father had been particularly fond of Bach.

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When nothing apparently happened on 16 November 2024 at 11:26 UTC there were quite a few people who breathed a furtive sigh of relief when no one was watching. Some of them joined everyone else in a heightened burst of ridicule hurled in Katy’s direction.

It happened in the prison, too. The other women were quite well aware of who she was and what she’d said. The jeers started the day after.

“Ah, your friends abandoned you have they?” said sarcastically.

“Aww, little miss ETI’s all on her own.”

“Maybe she could ask for a special phone call?”

“Yeah, and reverse the charges!”

Katy endured it without much hardship. Sometimes she even went along with it. In many ways she was grateful the deadline had passed. She knew this jeering would be short-lived, and she looked forward to her impending anonymity. No need to worry about what her enemies might do to her.

For there were those within the hidden depths of the totalitarian apparatus who believed every word she said. They felt more secure with her behind bars, yet they could not completely escape the gnawing anxiety that something might happen on the appointed day.

And Katy knew it was that anxiety which protected her. “I’m not human,” she had said. “I’m from Sirius.”

She had, as it were, come out in public. She knew full well there would be ridicule, but that ridicule would act like a shield, give the bad guys something to throw at her without having to take the chance that resorting to violence or murder just might incur the wrath of her own kind. Seems to work for the likes of David Icke, she surmised. It was quite a wonder people like that were still alive and hadn’t been bumped off years ago, given some of the things they said.

But Katy wasn’t like them. She seemed perfectly rational. She didn’t constantly bang on about being a so-called starseed – an extraterrestrial incarnated in human form. Most of them, interestingly, said they were from the Pleiades.

“Well,” Katy muttered idly, “I don’t know anything about that.” Then added, “If they are from the Pleiades they must be infants.”

The starseeds – or those who called themselves that – for their part loved her. Ironically they looked up to her. “Has your species really been spacefaring for 250,000 years?” they asked her at one particular sci-fi convention.

“Something like that,” she answered with typical nonchalance.

“Wow!”

Katy chuckled.

Others were understandably more sceptical. “I’m sorry but you can’t possibly be from Sirius. It’s too young a system to have an evolved set of planets, let alone with advanced life on them. No more than, what, 240 million years or so. Plus the fact that the star you say your planet orbited, Sirius B, became a white dwarf 120 million years ago.”

Katy had an answer to that one. “Haven’t you heard of planetary system engineering?”

Her interlocuter frowned.

“How about time travel? You must’ve heard of that one?”

“So how do you get around the paradox problem?”

She shot him a sly ironic smile. “Easy,” she said, “I just studiously avoid my grandfather.”

He couldn’t help laughing. Whatever she was, mad or postmodern, he had to admit he liked her.

And her stories were pretty good too.

At least until she started rewriting human history. And then it suddenly got serious. Some of the psychologists tried to say she was kind of hiding behind an alter ego to say the controversial things that her human persona couldn’t get away with. But she denied that.

“Maybe,” she stated for the record, returning a steely, unblinking gaze at the interviewer, “you need to come to terms with the fact that we don’t think like you do.”

He looked ashen. She paused. For effect.

“Get used to it.”

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Click ye here for part 2!

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Oh, and this story has been very groovily included in Top in Fiction #13! I’ve got a cool medallion to prove it! See!

How cool is that! Thank you very much,

Erica Drayton

!

See you next episode…

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