Andrew Mackay - Infinity Claws

Jamie sat on the tiny brick wall in his back garden, holding his mini-telescope in his hands.

He extended it and held the small end to his eye. “There’s the moon.”

Jamie adjusted the lens and a series of craters, came into focus. “The man on the moon.”

“Jamie, poppet,” his mother’s voice drifted from the kitchen door. “Come in for your dinner.”

“Yes, mom.”

“And can you collect your sister’s bottle from the counter, please?”

“Okay, mom,” Jamie tapped the thick end of the telescope in his hand. “You’ll be there by now, Jelly.”

He moved the small end of the device to his eye and settled on a shimmering blue dot amongst the stars. “I have a new daddy, now. Just like you.”

He removed the telescope and held it between his legs. He pursed his lips and considered the events of the past twelve months.

“I’ll wait for you, Jelly.” He stood up and took one final look at the starry sky. A lump formed in his throat. “I should never have let you go. I miss you…”

The entire crew took their seats around the table.

“We have the results from Pure Genius,” Tor said.

“So, what’s the skinny?” Bonnie asked.

Tor waved his hand. A string of numbers displayed over the conference table.

Androgyne was the last crew member to enter the room, dressed in her USARIC outer-skin. “Captain Katz?”

“Yes, Androgyne?”

“I am ready to board Opera Alpha.”

“So I see,” Katz turned to Tor, who waited for the chance to present his findings. “We have an update. Please listen carefully.”

Tripp took Jelly from Wool and cradled her in his arms. “What did we find?”

“Take a look at these numbers,” Tor said.

“Okay?” Wool said, “What of them?”

“This is what we flushed into Pure Genius. Along with Manuel, she scanned for every known linguistic permutation we are aware of. It took Pure Genius less than ten minutes to run its algorithm.”

“Why?” Katz asked.

“Because the answer was staring us in the face all along. Unusually simple, which may or may not reflect the intelligence of whatever we’re dealing with.”

Tor pushed the tops of his hands together and spread the numbers out.

“Twelve individual numbers,” Tor explained. “Can anyone see the pattern, here?”

The crew looked along the string. It didn’t take Androgyne very long to figure out what it meant. “Oh, yes. It is simple.”

“Exactly,” Tor smiled. “Anyone else?”

“Eleven,” Haloo smiled and picked out the relevant numbers, “Nineteen and thirteen. Primary numbers?”

“True, but that’s not the point,” Tor said, “But you’re looking in the wrong place. Take a step back and look at them again.”

“I don’t understand?” Haloo said, dismayed by her lack of understand. “Step back?”

“Androgyne?” Tor turned to her and pointed at the numbers. “Would you like to explain?”

“Certainly.”

She walked over to the table and pointed at the first two-digit number. “The sixteenth letter of the alphabet. P.”

“Oh,” Bonnie now understood the answer. “What’s the ninth letter?”

“I,” said Tripp. “Which means fourteen is N.”

“And there you have it,” Tor snapped his finger. Each number spun around revealing their corresponding letter.

Baldron joined Tor and snapped his fingers. “Pink Symphony. It explains the color of the waveform we saw while Jelly was in Pure Genius extracting the data.”

“Yes, it was pink,” Katz said.

“What does Pink Symphony mean?” Jaycee asked.

“We don’t know.”

“So what use is it to us?”

Tor turned to Baldron. “I’ll let my colleague explain.”

Baldron pushed the test aside and brought up a live visual feed of Enceladus. A live visual feed of Enceladus appeared in an inset in at the top of the screen. “How long till we reach Alpha, Katz?”

“A little under an hour.”

“Okay,” Baldron pointed at the live feed of Enceladus. “Here, one of USARIC’s Star Drones currently orbiting Enceladus. This image is live but on a two-minute delay. If you look closely at the dark side, you may see something occurring right in the middle.”

Baldron enlarged the image, revealing a small pink dot. It appeared to breathe in and out from within the darkness.

“It’s pink,” Tripp dropped Jelly to the conference table. “Is that something to do with the deciphering of the message?”

“Again, we don’t know,” Baldron offered.

Bonnie felt her patience reach an end. “Well, what do you know?”

A vector image of Enceladus appeared next to the visual representation of Alpha. A dotted line shot out from the center of the moon and marched its way to the transmitter on Opera Alpha.

“We know that Enceladus is using Alpha as a transmitter,” Baldron explained. “Somewhere deep in her core. It’s sending the source signal to Alpha and using her as a sort of repeater to strengthen its message.”

Tor stepped forward and pointed at the vector of Enceladus. “Before Alpha went to investigate Enceladus, the message received by IMS and Corpus Claudius was just a bunch of noise. Now, with the Saturn Cry going through Alpha, the signal is stronger and filtered.”

“Let me see if I have this correct,” Katz tried to make sense of what he was hearing. “The original message was designed to get Alpha to go to Enceladus. To figure out what was going on?”

“Yes,” Baldron said.

“With the express purpose of using Alpha as a transmitter to send a strengthened signal?”

“It seems so.”

“Why would it do that?” Katz asked.

“Who knows,” Tor said. “What we do know is that we got a response. A response that enabled us to get Anderson up here to make sense of the message. And it worked.”

Androgyne thought over the information for a second. “Whatever, or whoever, is sending that message clearly knows English. Numbers.”

“And music,” Wool added. “Could we have found life out here?”

“The probability of life out here is beyond calculation,” Androgyne said. “Even in this vicinity. Extended to neighboring galaxies. It’s not possible. And even if it were true, they wouldn’t know English.”

The team were perplexed. Faced with the daunting fact that Saturn Cry originated from a place where numbers and, more bizarrely, the English language was a known quantity.

“It’s futile to speculate any further,” Baldron said. “We’re due to dock with Alpha shortly. We’ll ask questions when we get there. The most likely explanation is that whoever, or whatever, is using Alpha to transmit their message has done so from what they’ve learned about her.”

“It explains why the code was so simple and easy to decrypt,” Tor rubbed his chin, thinking over his answer. “Yes, it makes sense. What we have here, Pink Symphony, is an answer to a question we do not know.”

“It is remarkable just how simple it was to decipher,” Baldron said as the rest of the crew turned to Jelly. She licked her private parts in full view of them with nary a care in the world.

Or the galaxy.

“I’m sure one of us would have figured out given enough time,” Wool offered the crew. “It wouldn’t have taken a genius.”

Tor and Baldron looked at Jelly, who stopped licking herself and looked up at them.

“It didn’t,” Tor quipped.