The First Exoplanet

by T. J. Sedgwick

  Chapter Three

  April 26, 2057 Regency Pacific Hotel near the University of California Berkeley, CA

  Built in 2035, the Regency Pacific Hotel was located in Downtown Berkeley, ten minutes’ walk from the campus of the University of California. Dr Aidan Lemaie had an eighth floor, west-facing room with views overlooking San Francisco Bay, Oakland Bridge and the 120-year-old landmark that was the Golden Gate Bridge. It was 6pm and the sun was soon to set, filling the clear spring sky with warm light and casting long shadows from the buildings and trees in the foreground. Lemaie was already dressed for dinner but caught the view and took a moment to appreciate it. He’d been to San Francisco on many occasions but never tired of the views over the Bay. He stood feeling the first signs of hunger and cracked open the complimentary water on the small coffee table next to him, taking a swig. Lemaie looked forward to the dinner he was going to have shortly with his friend and colleague, Dr Scarlett Hansen. The two WGA Space Astroscientists were considered the co-discoverers of what increasingly looked like life on Avendano-185f. They were due to speak at UC Berkeley the following morning. It was a nice perk to stay in such a lovely hotel on the university’s tab. Lemaie appreciated that. He was a little early and knew that Scarlett would be a little late. He’d worked with her for a long time and noticed that she was a little late for most things. He found this a curious trait given her otherwise highly organised ways. Something to do with makeup Lemaie guessed. Scarlett was also staying at the Regent with her partner, who would join them for dinner. Lemaie’s family remained in Seattle, his two children had school to go to so his wife stayed with them there.

  Lemaie made his way down to the lobby after a call from Scarlett to meet there at 6.30pm. Amazingly, she was actually on time for once, looking elegant in a red, knee length dress and matching shoes. Her partner, Sam, was a large, handsome man with a stubble-covered, chiselled jaw. He looked a little like a stereotypical lumberjack, although better dressed in tan slacks and a smart button down shirt. Sam was a quiet, pleasant man who worked as an IT Manager at a bank in Seattle. Lemaie had met Sam on many social occasions over the decade that he’d worked with Scarlett. There was no attraction between Lemaie and Scarlett, even though both would be considered attractive for their early middle-aged years. Lemaie thought of her as a little sister really. Both respected each other's professionalism and intelligence. They were a great team and the WGA Space establishment knew it. After greetings and some brief chitchat, they went out to the lobby and caught a taxi to the restaurant.

  Yau Min Chang sat alone in what he thought of as an over-elaborate, materialists’ paradise of a hotel lobby. The 83-year-old Chinese-American had grown up seeing the excesses of the go-go nineteen-eighties and the equally money obsessed outlook of his entrepreneurial family. He had increased the size of his wardrobe by a considerable margin to fit in here, buying a pair of pre-loved chinos, shirt and a coat from a charity shop. Taking the two buses over from Sunnydale, where he lived in a low cost unit, he couldn’t help thinking that inequality was something that never seemed to get any better. That was despite everything that research had shown about societies with more equality being happier overall. Yau Min concluded a long time ago that the root cause was money addiction and the way materialists always wanted more. Just like the drug addicts he’d passed earlier that afternoon in the Tenderloin, the money addicts needed bigger and more expensive things to get the same temporary high as they once did. All the people he saw, doing things they hated to buy stuff they didn't need, reinforced his view. To say his time at UC Berkeley changed his attitude as well as the course of his life was a rather large understatement. Yau Min had discovered the pleasure of engaging in his work and achieving the flow of happiness so elusive to the materialists. Okay, maybe that happiness was temporary, but it was never meant to be constant. If you don't have the lows you won’t notice the highs, he thought.

  Yau Min had been sitting in the Regency Pacific lobby for three hours on and off. He was lucky that it was large enough for him to hang around there for this stretch of time. The lean human staff presence helped too. Most things were automated in the hotel industry these days—from automatic porter carts, to the virtual check-in assistants in a small line of booths in the lobby.

  “Hello sir, can I help you in anyway?” asked the tall, smart, young man dressed immaculately in his navy blue two piece suit and red full-Windsor tie. The shiny, golden name badge said, ‘Tyler Carter’ and underneath in smaller font, ‘Security Manager’.

  “No, I’m fine thank you,” replied Yau Min, not making eye contact. He kept his eyes focussed on, but not reading, the news story that his smart glasses displayed.

  “I’ve noticed on the CCTV that you've been here quite a while. What’s your business here today, sir, if you don't mind me asking?” enquired the young security man.

  “Just waiting for a friend; he’s not showed up yet.”

  And there they were! Just coming out the elevator across the lobby were the people he was waiting for. He knew them but they didn't know him. “Damn!” muttered Yau Min under his breath. Lousy luck to have this jerk of a security guy challenging him at the vital moment. After waiting hours for his targets, by time he’d finished they’d been whisked off into the night by a waiting cab.

  “Well, are they staying here, sir? I can check their room if you like.”

  “No, it’s not necessary. I’ll try to call them again. May be they got delayed getting in.” Yau Min replied, trying to disengage from this persistent youngster in a suit.

  “Okay, well feel free to make use of the bar and facilities here while you wait,” said the security manager, walking away.

  Typical, thought Yau Min, they only want you here if you’re paying. He was, at least, satisfied that he’d spotted his targets and confirmed what he’d deduced when he’d heard about Doctors Lemaie and Hansen speaking at Berkeley. It seemed that the department still put their more prestigious guests in the Regency and if they came out of the elevator then they’d be back later. Probably gone out for some eats, he decided. Yau Min calculated a reasonable time they’d be away for. He killed time walking around the hotel environs, going over what he was going to say to them. That was, if he managed to get some time with the now well-known WGA Space scientists.

  Yau Min waited at the side of the canopy two hours later and saw the driverless electric pod taxi pull to a stop outside the hotel.

  “Dr Lemaie, Dr Hansen. Hi there…” called Yau Min, moving closer to them at surprising speed with an outstretched hand. Shaking hands with the two scientists and Sam, Yau Min introduced himself. “Hi, nice to meet you. I’m Yau Min Chang, SETI Institute Researcher over at Mountain View—or was anyway. Retired now, but still keeping tabs,” he said, smiling and trying to be likeable.

  “Nice to meet you too, Yau Min,” replied Scarlett, really wanting to spend some alone time with Sam before her early lights-out. “Hey, I’m sorry but we’ve got to get going. Had a great time at dinner, Aidan, thanks for shouting us, I owe you one. See you at breakfast tomorrow; I’ll give you a call in the morning.”

  Sam shook Aidan’s hand and Scarlett exchanged two kisses on the cheek with her colleague They made their way to the elevator inside the hotel lobby. It was still early and Yau Min looked harmless and affable. Lemaie still had contacts at the SETI Institute, so he was probably a friend of a friend somehow. Lemaie made the decision to hear what this old man had to say and fancied a drink anyway.

  “Hey, would you like to grab a drink in the Sky Bar upstairs?”

  “Yes, that’d be nice, thanks,” said Yau Min as they entered through the sliding glass doors of the swish hotel.

  Wall-to-ceiling glass enclosed the rooftop bar of the hotel on three of its four sides. The deserted outside terrace area was more popular on summer nights than in the February chill; the handful of patrons were sitting in the warmly lit and cosy inside section. Lemaie was buying —a bottle of boutique ale complete with half pint glass for hi
mself and a plain Bud Light for Yau Min. They took the corner two-seater table farthest from the bar, looking out at the twinkling lights of the city. The last vestiges of daylight were now just a weak glow below the western horizon.

  “So what brings you here today, Yau Min? You looked like you were waiting for us outside of the lobby.”

  “Firstly, thank you for agreeing to hear out an old man. I’ve got something that will be very interesting to you related to Avendano.”

  “Okay, I’m listening,” said Lemaie, indicating him to go on.

  “I retired, or, should I say, was forced to retire from the SETI Institute twenty-two years ago in 2035. I remember this hotel opening that same year. I was involved with the programme in one way or another for a good thirty years before that. It started with my research project at Berkeley in the Radio Astronomy Lab. The funding for SETI was always on and off—one year the government believed in what we were doing; the next they’d reduce funding. Anyway, I digress.”

  Lemaie was wishing he’d just cut to the chase.

  “I’m telling you this in confidence, Dr Lemaie: when I left SETI I downloaded a lot of raw radio telescope data. Data not in the public or academic domain. Data I had collected over a long, long period. The ability to store almost limitless data really took off in the twenty-tens. But even with SETI@home and all the resources we had, the ability to interpret and sift the data was always the thorn in our side.”

  “So why’d you take the data?” asked Lemaie.

  “Ah hah! Well, I needed to go back over something specific, something I found in the data once in 2022, which looked, to me at least, like deliberate transmissions. It was faint and fleeting and there are a lot of things that can spoof us—usually the radio noise from Earth. It was dismissed by my colleagues and bosses but I never forgot about it. It kept coming up in my mind in those quiet moments. So in retirement I’ve had the time to look into this raw data and I have seen similar patterns from September 2028 and April 2033 data.”

  “Okay, go on,” said Lemaie, becoming only marginally more interested but choosing to carry on listening out of respect for Yau Min as an elder, fellow scientist.

  “Then I compared the three datasets. Even though the radio signatures varied a lot, you know the one thing they definitely had in common? Their point of origin was the Avendano system.”

  Yau Min fell silent and looked intently at Lemaie for his reaction to what the older man considered seminal news.

  “Ok, so why didn't anyone else see this? Why only three periods of transmission?” questioned Lemaie sceptically, trying to be open-minded but not looking too convinced.

  “As I said before, Dr Lemaie, funding was on and off. Sure, we had constant radio telescope monitoring like at Arecibo, but we only had full sky monitoring for some of my time there. No full sky monitoring means you’ve gotta be looking in the right part of the sky to find what’s there. And look at what I found just working at home with my computer after I left—another two periods of transmission. What does that show? Tell you what it shows—that there was so much data sloshing around that there was not enough capacity to analyse it. Why do you think they set up SETI@home a long time ago? That was still not enough. The search routines I’ve developed myself are the best around, but once these guys discredit you they look for all that’s wrong, even if what you do right is important. Human nature, I’m sad to say, Dr Lemaie, human nature.”

  “Okay, so what do you want from me, Yau Min? Shouldn’t you just go back to the current guys running SETI and let the evidence speak for itself?” said Lemaie.

  “I’ve tried in the past but these guys think I’m a crackpot, just a silly old man. I’m hoping you’ll at least take a look and get them to take a look. You’re a celebrity now, Dr Lemaie, these guys will listen to you.”

  “Alright,” sighed Lemaie, “come down to my room and show me your evidence. But this can’t take all night, I’ve got to speak in the morning.”

  “You won't regret it, I can assure you, Dr Lemaie.” Yau Min sat back in his chair and swigged down the last of his beer. With a wan smile he exhaled with relief at having a foot in the door with Dr Aidan Lemaie.

  Despite Lemaie’s schedule, they talked long into the night. They pored over data, visualisations and reports accessed remotely from Yau Min’s home computer on the hotel room’s interactive panel. Although radio astronomy was not Lemaie’s primary field of expertise, he had done a broadening placement at a British radio telescope lab in his younger days. He knew enough to be discriminating about Yau Min’s findings. The visual representations showed definite repeating patterns that looked neither terrestrial nor naturally occurring. What was quite striking was the similarity in patterns between the 2022, 2028 and 2033 data periods. Strangely, none of them came from full sky monitoring facilities—each only lasted for the time that a directional radio telescope was pointing at Avendano. Yau Min explained that, because the frequency of the broadcasts from Avendano was changing in a particular way, this indicated the sources were on the planet's surface. The rotation of the planet was causing discernible frequency variations.

  “It looks compelling enough for a second opinion,” said Lemaie, smiling his warm smile. “I’m glad we went through this. I didn't want to start wasting people’s time with half-baked theories. But happy to say that I don't think this is. Well, I can certainly see where you're coming from anyway.”

  “Thank you so very much for taking the time to look, Dr Lemaie,” said Yau Min, heartily shaking the younger man’s hand.

  ***

  Having spent the morning speaking at UC Berkeley, Lemaie said goodbye to Scarlett and Sam as they made their way to the airport and on to Seattle. Lemaie had pushed his flight back a day to follow up with Yau Min and go to the SETI Institute over at the tech hotspot of Mountain View, a short taxi ride away. He’d called his old alumnus there, Dr Charles Nicholls. He was pleased to hear from his old friend, especially given his recent high profile, Lemaie suspected, a little cynically. Still, they had got on well all those years ago and seen each other's lives develop from afar with the help of the Facebook. Another San Francisco based product of the technological revolution, he thought. Lemaie, Yau Min and Nicholls spent the rest of the afternoon and into the night going over the Yau Min’s findings.

  The blond, slightly overweight Dr Nicholls looked pensive after listening to Yau Min’s lengthy explanation. There was silence for what seemed like a long time, as Dr Nicholls seemed to be processing all he’d seen and heard.

  “Right, here’s what I suggest we do...” Lemaie liked the ‘we’ - it meant that they’d brought his old alumnus around to their way of thinking. Dr Nicholls continued, “First, we need to take these patterns and do an all-source search of past data from the Avendano coordinates. Second, I think we need to get someone else to work out what these actually mean. That’s if – and it’s still a big ‘if’ – they are what we think they are.”

  ***

  Computing had continued to move apace in the intervening years since Yau Min had left SETI. It was now possible to search for complex signal patterns in volumes of data at speeds unimaginable in past times. It took a mere half an hour to pattern match from over six decades of all the radio telescope signal data they’d ever stored. The snag before Yau Min had arrived on the scene was that they didn't know what patterns they were searching for. The results were simply stunning.

  There were not three periods of signals from Avendano but hundreds and hundreds. Nobody involved in the Dr Nicholl’s small scratch team had any idea what the signals were saying. On the other hand, no one could disagree with Yau Min’s conclusions either—these were not natural and not from Earth sources. What surprised them even more was that the signals dwindled, charting a downward trend since mid-2040. Then they stopped completely by 2045. This was despite there being plenty of opportunity for the signals to be received in the past twelve years since then. But literally nothing—not a single transmission. There was no mistake; the
data did not lie. Radio signals had pumped out from the Avendano system, reached Earth since the first recorded SETI data, and then stopped twelve years ago. Just like that.

  Early the next morning, Dr Nicholls sat in his office with Lemaie and Yau Min and spoke to the holocomm—the holographic communicator. The 3D image of a competent looking, black haired man floated above the holocomm base. The man was sitting 4,000km and three time zones away in Fort Meade, Maryland.

  “Hi Yusuf, thanks for taking my call. Dr Lemaie, Yau Min, this is Captain Yusuf Kaya, Signals Intelligence, S3 Division of the NSA…”

  Chapter Four

  August 21, 2058 Fabrication Module, Alliance Citadel Space Station, Low Earth Orbit

  Two years after what, in the shipbuilding trade, was called ‘cutting first steel’, Pinta was half-complete. She sat affixed to the bow side cylindrical wall of the Assembly Module. Opposite her on the curved stern side wall sat her identical twin, the Santa Maria probe. Started thirteen months after the backup probe Pinta, it would be another two years until she made her way out of the giant launch doors. Santa Maria would be humanity's first foray into interstellar exploration, 569 years after her namesake set sail with Columbus from Europe for the New World.