David Brin - Existence

As it was, so far, with the Artifact. For days, he and Saleh had presented it with a long series of “SETI messages,” prepared by enthusiasts across six decades, ranging from simple, mathematical pulse codes all the way to animated slide shows, cleverly designed to illustrate laws of scale. Laws of physics and chemistry. Laws of nature and laws of humanity. Frustrated by the murky response-a swirl of ambiguous symbologies-they had moved on to basic tutorial programs. The kind made for children learning a second language…

… when, abruptly, a command came for Gerald to come down. To bring the object home for study in proper facilities.

Fine, terrific. Except for the accompanying gag order.

Ganesh had complained: “There are international protocols on this very subject. There must be open sharing of all discoveries that might deal with life and intelligence beyond the Earth. It is a treaty.”

To which a NASA attorney replied- “There is no obligation to go public with a hoax.”

Which it could be, after all. There was even a betting pool, among the members of General Hideoshi’s team. Top wager? That Carlos Ventana, the Peruvian industrialist, living aboard the station as a paid guest, might have smuggled the thing in his private luggage and somehow released it overboard, for Gerald to “discover.” Ventana certainly had access to world-class gimmickry, and was well-known for a puckish personality.

But no. The Artifact couldn’t have simply been tossed overboard. Its glitter had been on debris monitors for months, orbiting more than a thousand klicks higher, where only the tether-grabber could reach. A hoax? Maybe. But someone else, with bountiful ingenuity and prodigious resources, would have to sneak the thing into a steep trajectory, in some unknown way. Maybe years ago.

“We’ve done a simulation, using one of the big mainds at Plexco,” Akana continued, when the static let up briefly. “So far, the object has displayed two traits that can’t be mimicked with known technology-the lack of a clear power source… and that layered optical effect. The illusion of infinite depth from any angle. If it weren’t for that…”

Akana’s voice crackled away for the last time as Gerald’s reentry capsule passed through MDL-maximum dynamical load-an especially gut-wrenching phase. Just to his left, on a nearby data display, the capsule’s ai blithely recalculated a low-but-significant chance of catastrophic failure. Better, far better, to seek distraction. With his teeth rattling, Gerald subvocalized a command.

“Music! Theme based on something by Elfman. Free-improv modulo, matching tempo to ambient sonic rhythms.”

A blare of horns and thumping of percussion suddenly pealed forth, interwoven with wild violin sweeps, taken from the composer’s 2025 theme score of Mars Needs Women , but ai-libbed in order to crescendo with the capsule’s reverberations. You could only do this with a few human composers. Anyway, if you have to live for a while inside a beating drum…

That helped a bit, letting Gerald turn his attention away from the hot plasma, centimeters from his head, and back onto the Artifact in his lap. An array of swirling vortices appeared to descend into its milky depths, underlapping and dividing endlessly into a quasi-fractal abyss.

Could this really be a messenger from some alien civilization? Gerald had always pictured first-contact happening the way it did in movies and virts-via some spectacular starship, with enigmatic beings stepping down a ramp… or else through a less lurid, but still exciting blip on some radio telescope’s detector screen.

“Actually,” Saleh had explained at one point, “this method always seemed a lot more likely to many of us.”

When Gerald and Ganesh asked him to, the Malaysian astronaut let his body float horizontal, and explained. “ About forty years ago, two New Jersey physicists, Rose and Wright, calculated that it would generally be cheaper for advanced civilizations to send messages in the form of physical tablets, inscribed with vast amounts of information, than beaming radio to faraway planets.”

“How can that be?” Ganesh protested. “Radio waves have no mass. They travel at lightspeed. But a physical object needs vast energy input, just to reach a tenth of that velocity. And it takes much longer to arrive.”

“That only matters if time is an issue-say, if you want a two way conversation,” Saleh had replied. “But suppose distance precludes that. Or you just want to send lots of information one-way, say as a gift? Then message bottles have big advantages.”

“Like what?”

“Total energy expended, for example. Radiation spreads out as it travels through space, diluting the signal below detection levels unless the beam is both powerful and coherent to begin with. Wright and Rose calculated that just beaming a brief radio signal strong enough to be detected ten thousand light-years away would take a million billion times as much energy as shooting the same data, embedded in coded bits upon a little pellet.”

“Assuming you don’t care when it arrives.”

“Oh but the physical message is better even with regard to time! Sure, it arrives later. But if it ’ s targeted right, to be captured by the destination star system, it might linger in orbit for centuries, even eons, long after any radio message passed onward to oblivion. Picture such a message tablet, silently orbiting on and on, waiting for the day that someone happens along to read what it has to say. Greetings from a distant race.”

“You ’ re talking about the lurker scenario,” Gerald had commented. “It’s been discussed for almost a century. Machines waiting out there for the Earth to develop life forms capable of-”

“I would’t exactly call the Wright-Rose message-tablet a ‘machine.’ And the word ‘lurk’ has an active, even malevolent connotation. What we’re talking about is a yoohoo memo, inscribed on a tiny lump of matter. Come on. What harm could something so passive and innocent possibly do?”

Only now, Gerald pondered Saleh’s explanation for this object on his lap. His suit instruments got no more response than Ganesh managed to provoke aboard the station, drawing sporadic bursts of mysterious symbology. Prompting brief glimpses of enigmatic globes, or hints of shrouded figures-sometimes approaching in groups of two or three-only to fade again, dissolving into a fog.

And yet, this time there was some difference. A warmth, now that the cylinder lay on his thigh, rather than a cool workbench. Even more interesting, patterns seemed to gather under the portion that he gripped with his gloved hand. As the reentry capsule juttered and shook, meeting higher pressure air, he clutched the Artifact tightly-

– and saw what seemed like technicolor pressure waves ripple round where he clasped. They appeared to pulse with urgent purpose, as if plucking at his fingers, attempting to peel something away.

Peel away what? My grip?

Or the glove?

How long did he stare, getting lost in patterns, abandoning both fear and time? Seconds? Minutes? One, at most two… enough to bridge the worst part of reentry. The fearsome bronco ride eased, no longer rattling Gerald’s joints and teeth, letting them unclench at last. Fluorescent flames receded from the narrow window…

The drogue parachute fired free with a pop, followed by a thud that jerked his seat straps…

… and where there had been starry blackness, then fierce flame, he now saw blue of sky. And status displays shone optimistic green.