Future Games: Anthology Part 32

"What better cover than a game show for a race that devours the data transmission and reception waves of living beings?" she continued. "Your so-called sponsors are these beings and you, Jiminy, are their leader! Not being content to manipulate from behind the scenes, you a.s.sumed the guise of a Nilurian amphibat and sought center stage yourself!"

Jiminy said nothing but through her earphones Shalula heard the scuffle of feet, the futile flap of wings, and the voices of her comrades barking orders.

A moment later her captain's voice reached her. "We're bringing you down now, Shalula."

Her sphere was lowered to the stage and she stepped out. Jiminy was blurring around the edges.

"Aha!" she said. "I was right. For a data-devouring demon, being the host of a show such as this would allow you to satisfy your appet.i.te before any of your fellows. If you had left it at that, Jiminy, or whatever your real name is, you would not have sparked a Galaxy Corps investigation. But six Galaxy Corps troops disappeared after playing your game. We want to know their fate and we want them or their remains returned at once."

Havago's special task force waved weapons at the blurry but still grinning host.

"Calm yourselves," Jiminy said with a flutter of rapidly fading wings. They were morphing into a huge warty hump behind his head, which was also changing shape. The teeth now looked vaguely green and instead of being broad and square, were pointed. "We eat intellectual energy, not the beings that possess it. Your colleagues are all unharmed. We have simply given them the vacation we promised them, though we extended it somewhat. They are safe on one of our farms, hooked up to computers feeding them data indigestible to us in electronic form. They are more like cooks than meals to us. It takes very high-level intellects to absorb some of this material and some of what we are given even so is indigestible. This we recycle as questions for contestants."

"Aha!" Shalula said. "That is how two of our people were able to get their mayday messages to me-one implanted a message within a frost flower holo and one in the pulsing of those lights."

"But that's cheating!" Jiminy said indignantly. "I'm afraid we can't award you any prizes after all, Shalula."

"No need," she said grimly. "Breaking up your operation will be prize enough."

Later, when the contestants, civilian and Galaxy Corpsmen alike, had been rescued, the off-duty members of the Havago's crew sat around the recreation lounge feeling at loose ends. Usually, this was the time when they could tune in for another game of Name That Planet! But now, of course, that was no longer possible. To her dismay, Shalula, who had been hailed as a heroine, now found herself the target of resentful glances. But as a second-voyage replicator technician was flipping frequencies, the ship's intercom crackled to life.

"Lt. Makira, please report to the bridge. We have an incoming communication for you from Corps headquarters."

Shalula arrived on the bridge to see the captain and other personnel standing at attention before the com screen. General Azimblii herself stood beside an amphibat much like the one Jiminy Jimson appeared to be. The amphibat also had large teeth and carried a briefcase. Shalula also snapped to attention in front of the general.

"At ease, Lt. Makira. This is Consul Flaabaat of Flaabaat, Flaabaat, and Smith Attorneys of Intergalactic Law, Incorporated. He is representing the being known to most of us as Jiminy Jimson and the FLOG corporation, who have brought a lawsuit against the corps."

"I thought they would be incarcerated by now, General!" Shalula said indignantly. "Why are they suing us?"

"It's complicated," the general said, "But they have a great deal of power and money and the Galactic Congress has recently cut our own legal budget. Therefore, I hope you will consider FLOG's proposition, which they wished Consul Flaabaat to present to you personally."

"With respect, ma'am, I will not, even for the Corps, become one of FLOG's data-feeding drones."

Consul Flaabaat fluttered his wings in a soothing sort of way that indicated her a.s.sumption of his purpose was unwarranted. "Once your dramatic rescue of your colleagues (which, by the way, caused extreme public humiliation, harm, mental suffering, and const.i.tuted an invasion of privacy) was broadcast, beings throughout the cosmos realized what our sponsors required. All positions for data processors vacated by former contestants have been filled. We have quite a waiting list of applicants, in fact."

"Then what?" Shalula asked.

"Well, our clients wish to invite you to appear as a hostess on another show they have in production. You see, the show on which you appeared garnered the highest ratings Name That Planet! ever enjoyed in its brief history. Viewers simply ate up-if you'll pardon the expression-the drama of a game involving a live rescue. Our clients quickly realized that reality game shows are the wave of the future and you, you intrepid pioneer you, showed them the way. Therefore, they have agreed to drop their suit against Galaxy Corps if you will sign a contract to host the first six episodes of Save That Alien! So what will it be, Lt. Makira? Will you risk losing your commission in Galaxy Corps or go for the big rewards of hosting another popular FLOG TV production?"

Shalula said, in the appropriate communications mode for the situation, "I choose option number two, Consul Flaabaat."

[Editor's Note: A hendiatris is (a) three words used to express one idea. Other examples are "wine, women, and song" and William Shakespeare's "Friends, Romans, countrymen . . . "]

Be a bit patient with this story, sports fans. It's clever scientific mystery will hold your attention, but the sports connection may be, at first, obscure. Once a certain gentleman from British Colombia enters the picture, some readers will, at least, have a good clue about what sport is involved . . . but even once you figure that out, there's still mystery involved. And if it takes a little longer for the rest of you to figure it all out, just remember: In any sport, it may not all be in the numbers, but a great deal of the game is. And since numerals are the closest thing we have to a universal language, then how might others first try to communicate to us . . . ?

Distance.

Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff.

In the movies, you were slumped at your computer console, fast asleep, surrounded by empty Pepsi cans and candy wrappers, when the system pinged. You woke on a tide of adrenaline, flinging candy wrappers and crumpled cans to the lab floor and, after a moment of disorientation, realized WHAT THAT SOUND MEANT.

In reality, Dr. Santiago Rodriguez was standing in the middle of the lab stuffing his face with nachos when the Signal Detection System spoke-figuratively speaking. What the interface actually did was fire an alarm that played the five-note sequence from Close Encounters of the Third Kind, at Dr. Mukerjee's whimsy.

When he'd first come to Project Quetzalcoatl, Santiago had jumped out of his skin every time the system pinged. Now, three years and many false alarms later, he didn't even twitch. Now, he stood chewing like a contented cow, contemplating a response to the summons. Most likely it meant another bogey or that Kev and Roz would have to run diagnostics, which would mean pulling the Spectrum a.n.a.lyzer and Signal Detection Subsystem offline for a day or two.

He was strolling over to the SDS console when Gita Mukerjee poked her head in the door. "Snag a tire, Sandy?" she asked, but her eyes were hopeful.

Santiago laughed, set aside the nachos, and dusted his hands off on his jeans. "Heck, no, Gita. I got me a live one this time." He dropped into his chair and swiveled to the display.

"Any of those nachos left?"

"Uh, yeah . . . Kitchen." His mind was already occupied with the data. He got a raw read on the left, a waterfall plot of the data on the right. He was still studying the waterfall plot of the side band when Gita returned from the kitchen with a small plate of nachos.

"What have we got?" she asked.

"Not sure. Come look at this." He felt a peculiar wriggling in his stomach. Nachos were no longer of any interest. He was seeing pulses in the microwave window-pulses that were clearly patterned. They played in series, paused, then picked up again. There was very little drift. But the carrier wave was in the 1500 MHz range and looked familiar. In fact, Santiago could put his hands on any number of archived log entries that had recorded the same signal.

It didn't look like a glitch. Those were generally more capricious. And the few hackers who'd tried to get bogeys into the system had been unable to get past the first Follow-Up Detection Device or couldn't resist tapping out "ET phone home" in Morse code or something equally precious.

Santiago looked up at Gita. "What do you think, Dr. Mukerjee?"

"Well, Dr. Rodriguez, I think we need to call a powwow. This looks like a job for the FUDDs."

The small conference room was dim and hushed. The handful of scientists sat, expectant, their eyes on the screen at the front of the room where Santiago Rodriguez stood next to the podium that held his laptop.

"The data signal is in the 2 GHz range," Santiago told the gathering. "It's regular and it repeats in cycles. It seems to be coming from the direction of the constellation Taurus." He hesitated, allowing himself a bit of wonder at the words he would say next. "At a distance of 100 AU."

He watched the others' faces as they digested the information; saw that Gita Mukerjee, seated at the edge of the group, was doing the same.

Their Program Director, Dr. Kurt Costigyan, studied the screen intently, eyes roving over and over the figures there.

"That's outside the heliosphere," said one of the Techs, a lanky redhead named Kevin.

Santiago tapped the touch pad on the laptop and the projection on the screen beside him changed to a graphic representation of the signal's source. He tapped a second time and a waterfall plot from the spectrum a.n.a.lysis opened on the right side of the screen.

"Oh, wow," said Kevin.

"Here's the carrier signal . . . " Santiago switched the display again to show a second waterfall plot.

"I'll be d.a.m.ned." Kurt Costigyan sat back in the plastic conference chair. He was a big man; the chair squeaked loudly in protest. "That's Pioneer 10."

Santiago didn't realize he'd leaned so heavily against the podium until it sc.r.a.ped away from him across the floor. He straightened. "That's what we thought, but . . . " He glanced over at Gita Mukerjee. "We don't see how. She's so far out."

"And she's so dead," said Kevin. "Those old power cells couldn't possibly send from that distance. Even if she was turned in the right direction."

"Couldn't possibly?" asked Gita, gesturing at the screen.

"Okay, shouldn't be able to."

Kurt looked up at Santiago. "I didn't know you were scheduled to ping Pioneer."

"We weren't."

"Then why-?"

Santiago licked his lips. "We didn't ping her-if this really is her-she pinged us."

"With this . . . pattern?"

Santiago nodded, then clicked up another screen. This one came with a shower of noise that sounded like a Flamenco dance played at warp-speed. The graphical display showed the pulses as dashes and dots of white on black. The sequence was composed of multiple series of long and short pulses divided by mere seconds of silence.

"Oh, please tell me that's not Morse code," said Kurt.

"Not Morse code," Santiago a.s.sured him. "If you listen real carefully, you might be able to catch the pattern, but I'm glad we're not relying on our ears to decipher this. The spectrum a.n.a.lyzer pulled it apart pretty efficiently, and came up with this." A key press brought up a window atop the display of dashes and dots. This one showed a series of eight numbers: 18.9, 27.44, 27.44, 27.44, 27.44, 103.6, 121.9, 99.1.

Kurt's eyes flickered between the exposed portion of the graphic and the numbers. "Okay, so it's eighteen long pulses and nine short?"

" 'Long' being purely arbitrary," said Gita. "Those pulses can't be more than . . . "

"A quarter-second," said Santiago. "Then there's a half-second pause before the next set starts: twenty-seven long; forty-four short, and so on. Then, there's a three second pause after the last repeat of 27.44. Then there's about a nine second pause after the last number and the whole sequence starts up again with 18.9. It repeats twice per minute, roughly. It's sending steadily-hasn't stopped since we picked it up."

"Without variation?"

"Without variation."

"G.o.d Almighty," said Roz Klein. A software technician, she sat beside Kevin, elbows on her knees, eyes glued to the screen.

"Probably not," said Kevin.

Roz reached out and punched his arm without taking her eyes from the screen.

"Ow! Look, that's a complex signal. Do you think it could possibly be latent? Some piece of programming that's just started regurgitating old messages?"

Gita Mukerjee smiled. "You mean Pioneer is dreaming?"

Kevin chuckled. "You're not going to get all mystical are you, Dr. Mukerjee?"

Gita ignored him. "I'd say our next step would be to set this contact up for follow up and check Pioneer's logs to see if a similar pattern occurred during a previous transmission."

Kurt nodded. "What FUDDs do you want to use?"

"Lick and Parkes," said Gita. "Jodrell Bank is the middle of an equipment upgrade."

"Consider it done." Santiago shut off his laptop, sending the screen into darkness. The roomful of scientists gave up and audible sigh.

"In the meantime," said Kurt, "let's design and prep a return signal." He paused, took a deep breath. "And call NASA."

"Been awhile." Santiago's Aussie counterpart at Parkes Observatory sounded preternaturally perky. "ET not biting much these days?"

"ET's not biting at all," said Santiago.

"Then what's up?"

"We think we've gotten a message from an old friend; we need you to verify. We've got a carrier wave in the 1500 MHz range and pulses that fall inside the microwave window. Distance approximately 100 AU in the direction of Taurus."

"Pioneer? You're kidding."

Santiago chuckled. "Well, if I am, you'll be the first to know."

He called Lick Observatory in Santa Cruz, California next, receiving a similar reception. As he downloaded the contact information, he was amused to find that his palms were sweating. And why not? Pioneer 10 was supposed to be dead, her batteries and fuel cells long exhausted, her antenna eternally locked in whatever direction she happened to have tumbled.

She might have been struck by something that coincidentally aimed her in the right direction, but no amount of coincidence could energize her defunct fuel cells or grant them the power to transmit a coherent sequence of numbers back to Earth.

And they were still transmitting, he discovered upon returning to the lab. He was surprised, too, not by the fact that the sequence of numbers was still repeating, but that Gita had held the huge main radio array trained on that target all afternoon.

"Dr. Mukerjee, this is highly irregular," he teased. "You're neglecting a goodly portion of the heavens."

Gita glanced up from the notepad she was scribbling on and said, "Yeah, well, this is the only portion of the heavens that's interested in conversing at the moment."

Santiago crossed the room and slid into a chair at the console next to her, noticing that the pad was covered with tight clumps of numbers. "Composing a reply?"

"No, actually, I was trying to make something out of these numbers." She grinned ruefully, tucking a strand of ebony hair behind one ear. "For all the good it's doing. There's clearly a pattern, I just don't get it."

Santiago looked at the top row of figures. "Divisible by anything constant?"

"This figure that repeats is divisible by 13.72. Ring any bells?"

Santiago smiled. "No."

Gita dropped her pen onto the pad. "I like your idea better. What should we send?"

"Uh, well . . . I'd say we should probably send one of her old command sequences. See if we can't get her to wiggle her ears at us."

"Makes sense. Or we could send a one to ten count, then count down from ten to one."

He stared at her for a moment. "Why would we send that? It wouldn't mean anything to Pioneer."

She dropped her eyes to the note pad. "I suppose not."