Ciao, SETI! Part 4/8
It was the Ayleens!
For part 3, click there. If you’ve only just joined us then you’ll want to start at the beginning, because it’s a very good place to start. In which case, click there.
In part 3, Phoebe, our sassy young astronomy postgrad, hatched a cunning plan. Then there was an amusing courtroom flashback to Katy’s trial for sedition etc., then we met her in prison having a sinister visitor called Alex (think X-Files).
In this part, we’ll start with a press conference, then the unnamed Professor will arrive, then there’s a short scene in the Waterhole, then we continue Katy’s flashback conversation with the mysterious Alex (also think X-Files).
Kylie did, indeed, do her work well.
An intrusion of reporters came to see Phoebe and Bryn at the dish the following evening. The next day it was on the front page. Kylie had clearly managed to spread the gossip around the smalltown quickly enough for it to be in the Friday local press.
Obviously, the Professor was not happy.
Still, what do you expect when you get your underlings to do all the hard work while you’re swanning yourself at some SETI convention in the Sunshine State, eh? Serves you right, Bryn thought.
The Professor, together with another gaggle of SETI types (no, I don’t know what the collective noun for SETI people is; an ‘interference’, perhaps?), told the two miscreants sharply that they were immediately getting on a plane and would be there within 24 hours and they weren’t to touch anything and so on and so forth.
Phoebe and Bryn ignored the last command and continued to discount RFI. Fortunately, after the BLC-1 fiasco the computer had a new piece of software designed to run an auto-check through a list of possible sources of RFI, especially of the electronic variety. It would take a while, sure, but it had become part of the protocol.
Another, more annoying part of the protocol was that old scientific method chestnut of ‘repeatability’. Meaning if the dish was pointed at the same location on the same day of the year and the signal didn’t reappear then they could introduce reasonable doubt into the mix. It worked with the famous ‘Wow!’ signal, after all. Naturally at that time they hadn’t invented all the different types of possible RFI so no one could ever say, in true Holmesian style, they’d excluded all the prosaic explanations meaning whatever possibility was left – a message from ayleens, that is – however unlikely, must be the truth.
The irritating thing was they’d have to wait another six months to try that verification. It was almost like they didn’t want to know they weren’t alone.
Still, Phoebe had her trump card. For the time being, at least, she would keep it to herself.
Click click flash flash. Like I said, the photographers loved her. Especially with that huge dish in the backdrop.
“…and with regards to the metadata, I can confirm that the signal was received at 11.26 UTC precisely on 16 November 2024.”
“So you’re pretty sure this is a genu-wine message from ayleens, Miss Drake?”
“I’m convinced, yes.”
“How so?”
“Well, that’s kind of a technical question, but as you may know there’s been a spate of signals in recent years, all of which have been dismissed as electronic RFI of one kind or another. That’s enabled us to write some initial analysis software, so we simply run the signal together with its surrounding data through the program to check and, hopefully, eliminate all those sources of eRFI.”
“Which you’ve done in this case?”
“Yes. It doesn’t take that long so we got it done overnight.”
“Ya look pretty good for not havin’ any sleep, if I may say so.”
“That’s very kind of you. Thanks.”
“Just one last question if I may, Miss Drake?”
“Go ahead.”
“D’ya have a boyfriend?”
Phoebe sniggers. “No, I do not have a boyfriend.”
“So you and this handsome colleague o’ yours ain’t an item, then?”
Bryn looks across at her and joins in the sniggering. “Nope,” he says, “more’s the pity, mate.”
“Ah wouldn’t say that from our perspective, if she’s single that is.”
Bryn turns to her, cups his hand and whispers in her ear, “Are you gonna tell ‘im or should I?”
“I think we’ll leave that one hanging,” she smiles.
“And what about you, mate? I’m sure the Sheilas’ll wanna know what your relationship status is, Mister?”
“Bradman.”
“Bradman? Oh fair dinkum, mate.”
“If you don’t mind I think I’ll keep my relationship status to meself for now.”
“As you wish, mate. So you can’t tell us what the ayleens have to say for themselves? What this message says I mean?”
“I’m afraid not,” Phoebe lied, “right now it just seems like a series of pulses fluctuating in intensity. We’ll have to work out how to decipher it later.”
“So what happens now then, about the signal, I mean?” asks another reporter.
“Well,” Bryn explains, “the Professor will be here sometime tomorrow and presumably we’ll just have to run through a whole load more analysis stuff.”
“And how long before ya can safely say it’s ayleens?”
“Difficult to say. Maybe a few months?”
“A few months! What kinda checks d’ya have to do now?”
Bryn shrugs, equally disappointed. “Protocols,” he sighs.
“Well that’s just one great crock o’ sh-.”
Predictably, the potentially genuine signal from ETI had been trending constantly on social media by the time the Professor and his coven of SETI arrived. Phoebe’s cunning little ruse with the local press saw to that. The corporate censors couldn’t stop it. And so by the Saturday even the mainstream outlets had picked up that ball and run with it. Even if this one didn’t turn out to be genuine – which is to say, if SETI concluded it was, as usual, ‘undecided’ – as far as she was concerned the important thing was to get people thinking about it. But even so, she knew that wouldn’t be enough to prompt a change in humanity’s attitude. It needed to be undeniable. It needed to be true.
It would be the most profound event in modern history. It would change everything.
And the bad guys wouldn’t survive.
Equally predictably, the forever to be unnamed Professor was furious. “You know you’re lucky we don’t fire you on the spot! Those protocols are there for a reason!”
“What are you worried about?”
“How about a mass global panic! Civil unrest! I read all about it on X (formerly Twitter) on the way over! Even the Pope’s made a statement!”
“And what if that’s ETI’s intention? Shake humanity up a bit. Besides,” Phoebe responded with her own severity, “SETI doesn’t own the message. It wasn’t intended solely for us. It’s for everyone.”
“Not until it’s verified it isn’t. So now we’re taking over and we’ll deal with it from now on. You’re suspended. Both of you!”
Phoebe looked up at him sternly and defiantly, but chose not to say anything. Instead she turned sharply and walked away.
The Professor shouted after her. “And you’re forbidden from talking to the media! We’ll deal with them too.”
Bryn plonked another round of beers on the table in the Waterhole and took a mighty gulp. It was their third so far.
“This is so totally bogus,” he said, also for the third time.
Phoebe, for her part, didn’t seem all that bothered. Which confused him a little.
She could tell, and offered him an explanation. “Remember we have a copy of the data. We’ll just watch what they do then compare their end results to our original. If my suspicions are right, whatever they present to the public as the signal will not be the same as ours. And there’ll be eRFI.”
“But then what? Even if we put ours on the Internet they’d just say we made it up.”
“Possibly. But I think we’ll let the people decide that.”
“That doesn’t bode well, on past form.”
Phoebe took a gulp of her own and then smiled. “I think you should have more faith in humanity, Bryn. They’re crying out for hope, all across the world. Humanity wants to believe. And they really, really hate disappointment.”
“Are you aware of the experiments the American Deep State did at their secret research facilities in the late sixties and early seventies?”
Katy raised her eyebrows curiously. “MK-Ultra, you mean? It depends which experiments you’re referring to.”
“Abducting starseeds – sorry, Visitors – and incarcerating them in cells with electromagnetic containment fields.”
“Ah, that. As well as torturing and hypnotising information out of them.”
“I can assure you that was nothing to do with my group,” Alex protested, convincingly.
“I believe you. But yes, I am aware of that. And I do hope you’re not about to threaten me with an EM containment field?”
“Absolutely not, that would be a stupid thing to do. I also doubt it would work.”
“It wouldn’t. And it would provoke a serious reprisal. Although I am wondering whether the bad guys want a reprisal to happen, which explains what’s happening to me. Provoke a response. They could use it to convince humanity that we’re hostile.”
“That’s possible, yes. Operation Bluebeam. They’re mad enough to try it.”
“Are you trying to tell me you’re opposed to them? Not actually affiliated?”
He shook his head. “We like to think of ourselves as more enlightened than that. We understand what you’ve said in your books about humanity’s place in this galactic sector. And we accept the fact that we’re under quarantine, essentially confined to our own solar system unless and until things change. So this really is about the future of my species.”
“Hmm. So I should think of this as a case of my enemy’s enemy is my friend?”
“I hope so. Obviously we can’t get you out of here because that would reveal our existence, but I’m sure you’ll be one for good behaviour so you’ll not only get a few years off for that but after a while you could be moved to an open prison.”
“I’d be very grateful for that. In advance.”
“Thank you. So you are aware of what eventually happened with these experiments?”
“Yes. Summer 1973. A young woman who was a Visitor was abducted from Laurel Canyon and incarcerated in an EM containment field. They thought it could prevent telepathic communication as well as what you might call astral travel. So the Visitor would be cut off from her own kind. And the soul would be trapped, or so they thought.”
“That’s what I was getting to, yes.”
“And of course this explains Musk’s Skynet contract with the DoD, right?”
He laughed. “Presumably.”
“It seems to me they think they can prevent Visitors from incarnating on this planet.”
“Would they be right in thinking that?”
“Absolutely not. The soul is not composed of electromagnetic waves. It’s, well, deeper than that, shall we say.”
“But they can prevent signals from ETIs getting through?”
“Yes and no. They can certainly corrupt those signals and present a reasonable case for RFI, so the public would be kept in the dark.”
“I see. Is there any way round that?”
“Quantum teleportation. Insert the signal directly into the observatory’s computer. Like the Wow! signal.”
“They could just pass that off as human hacking, though?”
“Unfortunately, that is true. But the real issue is whether the people believe it or not. That’s the crucial factor.”
“Would an electromagnetic shield around the planet disrupt extraterrestrial craft? Prevent them from entering?”
“I don’t think so. The ship’s protective shielding would deal with it. However, it would reveal their presence if they passed through the grid, because it would be disrupted.”
“What about nanoprobes?”
“Ah, the nanosurveillance issue. I don’t know enough about the technical details of whatever 7G is going to look like to answer that one. It depends if there are any small enough gaps in the EM field, if you see what I mean. Again, it wouldn’t stop them, I don’t think, only detect.”
Alex paused for a moment, then said, “Going back to 1973, this is the point where they got really scared, isn’t it?”
“Of my species, you mean? I would say so, yes. Seeing us in our true form is, well, seeing is believing, isn’t it?”
“That wasn’t you, by any chance?”
Katy chuckled. “No, not me. I was already incarnated here at that time. I was about six months old and only just recovered from my illness.”
“Illness?”
“I was very seriously ill when I was a baby. I put it down to a kind of xenotransplant rejection syndrome. My soul is not hominid like yours, so there are compatibility issues, if you see what I mean?”
“I think so. You’re leonine.”
“Sure. It’s why there aren’t that many of us. Most Visitors are also hominids because of the compatibility issue. It’s easier for them incarnating into the same evolutionary stream. Pleiadians mainly, I believe.”
“Hmm. That would mean they’re from the future then, because the Pleiades are young stars?”
“I believe so. I believe they’ve come here to learn in advance of the evolution of their own civilisations. This is a planet of music and healing, so by experiencing a dystopia they, I don’t know, get it out of their system already so they end up with a utopia on their worlds right from the start.”
“That’ll take some time to get my head around.”
Katy smiled again. “You’re not alone. It took me a while too if I’m honest. I believe that we’re taking a serious interest in the Pleiades precisely so we can make that entire sector a utopia and prevent any possible conflict. Then they’ll take over. That’s what our interventions are all about, remember. But of course I’m also in a different time-zone. It’s been 120 million years since we called this planet our second home so we’re effectively on the other side of the galaxy now. It’s disorienting, and it takes a bit of getting used to.”
“I see. So how did she do it? The Visitor, I mean?”
“Have you read Asimov?”
He smiled. “I’ve read Foundation, I, Robot and The End of Eternity.”
“The latter being required reading in your line of work, obviously.”
“Obviously.”
“Well, those are his most famous ones of course. But one of his more obscure short stories is about how to escape from a four-dimensional room.”
“Ah, I think I can see where you’re going with this.”
“The Visitor simply travelled forward in time with her mind to a point where the EM containment field was no longer there. She was very surprised to find it was less than 24 hours, and one of our cousins was there, outside the cell. So she communicated with our cousin, telling her what was going on, then our cousin, well, gave the necessary demonstration to the humans, the EM shield was shut down and the prisoner was released. Thus, the circuit in time was completed.”
“So her cousin would not have been there if she hadn’t gone forwards in time?”
“And vice versa. Don’t ask me to explain the vagaries of time travel. I’m an exo-psychologist, not a metaphysicist.”
“Pity,” he smiled.
Katy chuckled. “All you need to know is there are gaps in the spacetime continuum that can be used for navigation, like a quasi-crystal lattice, and for inserting new stuff of one kind or another, without causing any significant disruption to the underlying fate of things. And it all connects up in the end, anyway, thanks to the gravity of the timeline.”
“I’ll take your word for it.”
“And that, of course, was the final abduction.”
“Yes. After that, they just decided to study the Visitor phenomenon. Not interfere.”
“Abductions were a stupid thing to do anyway. They could’ve just asked. We have nothing to hide. And most of us do not know how to engineer advanced technology. Nor do we remember everything about our sector, like what all the other spacefaring lifeforms are, which systems they inhabit and so on. I don’t need to remember that to fulfil my purpose here. I can give you a kind of impression of what it’s like, politically speaking, but nothing really specific.”
“So we’ll get more out of you if we treat you with respect, is what you’re saying?”
“That’s what I’m saying, yes.”
He lowered his eyes thoughtfully as she studied him, and then smiled and looked back up at her again. “Then,” he said, “I’ll make sure to get you that word processor.”
Next episode next week…
im loving this Evelyn! hope theres more soon?