Alex Gore - The Cube

“Then why don’t they send us a direct message in plain English but waste our time with some stupid songs?!” Ivanov was completely at a loss to understand.

“Yes, but try to step in their shoes…”

“If I have a nuclear submarine and I were in their place, I’d never waste time on music but would attack first. Attack is the best defense…”

Ivanov’s and Hans’s ways of thinking were on the opposite ends of a deep precipice.

“Or you could approach delicately and courteously as elegant communication demands… You would make the effort to explore the other person and would find out that one of the most pleasant forms of communication and, respectively, exchange of information for a man is melody. Thus, our life begins – with a nursery rhyme – and thus it ends…”

“I’d have only rap at my funeral, not any of that burial tunes”, Michael joked.

“You mean, they know everything about us?” Norman asked worried.

“I mean a far more advanced civilization, as theirs seems to be, would know more about us than we about them… Don’t you agree?”

“If we take as an example the representatives of the green euglena and our civilization, does that mean that we know more about unicellular organisms than they about us?” Marcela directed her question at Hans.

“It’s quite relative. We think we know more about the populations of amoebas or ants, for instance, and they know nothing about us as a higher form of life… But maybe amoebas have perceptions of six more dimensions for which we possess no senses and any idea of their existence… Or, the amoeba is just the ‘visible’ for our senses part of a much higher creature, which we are unable to even notice.”

“Or maybe ants understand our words and are even able to read our thoughts, but they are not fitted with speech apparatus and we are totally mistaken in considering them lower forms of life, compared to man”, Marcela offered.

“Yes, but it’s also a fact that the ‘cubic creatures’ from the damn submarine are superior to us, because if they were amoebas or ants, we would hardly listen to hard rock on the speaker and lead this conversation now”, Sergey concluded.

“And they seem to be somehow better in traveling through time and space than we are”, Michael added.

“Please, Hans, go on about the message”, Norman urged him.

“As I said, if you want to start a friendly conversation with a stranger, you begin with something that is familiar to him and definitely in the pleasant mode… It’s called getting on the right side of someone, and what we merely term as ‘good upbringing’…”

“So, we have cool aliens who are on top of it gentlemen”, Alan said and the rest were not sure whether he was joking or trying to pick up on Hans again.

“I feel a little awkward” Hans went on, without reflecting on this, businesslike, as if he were reading a scientific report about laboratory experiments, “but I need to admit that I failed and the understanding of such a simple code took me more than thirty minutes.”

“Hans, what on earth are the fucking aliens saying to us?” Norman raised sharply his voice.

“This here is the introduction of the piece, noted. Two tones sound simultaneously, plus the bass guitar underlining them, of course…”

“The top line is the most important.”

“It actually contains the melody, that we hum.” Hans started singing and pressing simultaneously the keys of the digital keyboard on the screen. They sounded the same: the intro. “I remembered what Bach said: ‘It is quite easy to play the organ, the only thing you must know is which key to press and after how much time to release it’. The most important characteristics of the tone are pitch and duration. From the point of view of Physics, the musical tones that are represented by notes are just sound waves with specified frequency and duration.

G = 392 Hz,

B ♭= 466,16 Hz,

C = 523,25 Hz,

D ♭= 554,37 Hz.

To us they might sound like a favorite song, but basically these are only figures, that are transmitted through the oscillations of the air and are caught by our hearing”, Hans added.

“All right, but what connects these numbers with the code?”

“Since I studied music a little as a boy, though later I chose another field… as you well know I started my career with a doctor’s degree on…”

“Hans, please”, Norman insisted, “focus on the code!”

“For instance, the first tone is G, which is a crotchet, i.e. it has a note value of one, the second is B ♭with the same note value, the third is C, which has a note value of one and a half”, Hans went on and started writing on the screen:

G 1,0

B ♭1,0

C 1,5

“Here is the entire riff, written in this way:

G1,0 B ♭1,0 C1,5 G0,5 G0,5 B ♭0,5 B ♭0,5 D ♭0,5 C2,0 G1,0 B ♭1,0 C1,5 B ♭0,5 B ♭0,5 G0,5 G2,0.”

“You mean that the frequency of the tone plus its duration are the key to the code?”, Marcela asked.

“Yes, that’s right. When we put the note value and abolish the decimal point, we get: G10B ♭10C15G05G05B ♭05B ♭05D ♭05C20 G10B ♭10C15B ♭05B ♭05G05G20 + pause.

And when we replace the musical tone with the respective frequencies in Hertz:

392.10 46616.10 52325.15

392.05 392.0.5 46616.05 46616.05 55437.05 52325.20 392.10 41616.10 52325.15

46616.05 46616.05 392.05 392.20 + pause. Or, written with no points and intervals:

3921046616105232515392053920546616054661605554370

552325203921046616105232515466160546616053920539220 + pause. Did you get it?”

It was as if the endless deep silence of the desert was brought into the control room.

“Pause?” Marcela was the only one who dared to speak.

Hans nodded and went on:

“Yes, it seemed logical to me to present it like a note 00 with value of 1.0, i.e. 0010.”

“So, what is it finally?”, Norman asked.

“Pay attention to the time… 4/4.”

“What time is it? Isn’t 4/4 the same as 1/1, i.e. one?”, Marcela was the next one to pose a question.

“Not quite”, Hans smiled. “4/4 is a time that was imposed in classical music since Guido D’Arezzo till the Holy Trinity – Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven. It consists of first strong time, second weak, third strong and fourth weak again… Suddenly the genius of rock music of the 20 thcentury arrives and turns everything upside down.”

“What are you talking about, Hans? You’ve gone totally insane”, Alan murmured quietly.

“With Richie’s heavy rock the times of the percussion instruments are exchanged and they go respectively like that: first weak, second strong, third weak and fourth strong… which totally changes rhythm and sound. This is a colossal rebellion of a new epoch against the classical order.” Hans’s voice was exalted and shrill.

“I just cannot understand how the juxtaposition of Baroque and hard rock corresponds with our casus here” Marcela expressed her astonishment.

“So, aliens know our alphabet and language, but write to us in a musical code?!” Norman’s logic could not fathom this.

“As I said earlier, the pause is represented as 0010 and the first message that we received, is actually an incessant repetition of the key to the code…”

3921046616105232515392053920546616054661605554370

552325203921046616105232515466160546616053920539220

0010…

Everyone gaped at the stack of figures, nonsensical at first glance, which, with the help of the mathematician, now seemed a little easier to be understood. This time nobody asked a question or urged the plump professor to explain further. After giving them a few seconds to realize what they heard, Hans went on: “Every four figures encode a letter…”