Chloe was still uncertain what to make of the turn of events, having expected the night to turn differently once the dating aspect had been revealed, and responded rather matter-of-factly.
“It’s probably just some DJ remix of something you know,” Chloe said.
Peter was now in a different world, oblivious to the people around him, unaware of the dance club. He was focused on the music blaring from the speakers, trying to make some sense of the sounds he was hearing, divorcing them from the actual song and into their individual elements.
“Yeah, but this is different,” Peter said absent-mindedly to Chloe, listening, his eyebrows furrowed in concentration. “No, I mean-“
Peter suddenly looked up at Chloe as if he had been struck by lightening or the flash of inspiration. Chloe looked back at him with curiosity, but was sure the date was a bust.
“Holy shit, it’s the signal,” Peter said abruptly.
“The signal? Is that the band or the name of the song?” Chloe asked.
Peter said, “Hunh?”
The two stared at each other for a second.
“It’s a really long story, so I’ll have to summarize,” Peter said.
For some reason, this amused Chloe and she smiled. Peter took a sip from his drink and thought about how to explain something he was fairly certain Chloe was both uninterested in and unaware of.
“Okay, last summer I was out at a SETI site monitoring,” Peter paused, catching himself. “Do you know what a SETI site is?”
Chloe shook her head.
“Well, it stands for ‘search for extraterrestrial intelligence,’ and researchers like me spend part of our time every year using certain kinds of telescopes – radio telescopes in this case – to try and find signs of life somewhere else in the universe,” Peter said. “So, last summer, we were out at a site and, like usual, we got nothing.
“And, well, a couple of weeks later, we got a hit on a frequency and the source data indicated that it was, or, I mean, it could be, who knows, non-terran in origin-“
Chloe furrowed her brows. “Where’s nonterran?”
The question was so odd to Peter that it didn’t occur to him to laugh. In his world, everyone would have known what he meant, and he had never considered the term to be scientific or proprietary in nature.
“Umm, it means the source of the radio signal wasn’t here on Earth,” Peter said. “The transmission we got lasted a couple of hours and made no sense and then suddenly cut out, so everyone thinks it came from some hacker somewhere since it was broadcast on a frequency used by ham radio and there are, apparently, anti-ham radio people out there in the world agitating for the use of those frequencies for other purposes.
“Now, my professor said she thought it was a hacker or a DJ pulling a publicity stunt or something, and…”
Peter said the words and the epiphany hit him like a ton of bricks. Here he stood, in a dance club with a beautiful girl, and he had just heard a dance-mix version of the signal. And, for a few moments, he had thought the opposite of Occam’s Razor, that the signal had been real, not that some musician had gamed the system for hype, had gotten noticed, in odd circles, and was now capitalizing on that with a song played in a dance club.
“And I guess she was right,” Peter said softly. “I’ve listened to that broadcast a thousand times and this song is just a remix of that broadcast. The signal. Dammit. I thought it was real.”
Chloe was totally confused. Peter’s story had not made sense to her.
“Uh, Peter, it is real. You’re listening to it,” Chloe said.
“Yeah,” Peter said absent-mindedly, listening to the song. “I mean, no, I thought this song was an actual extraterrestrial signal, not … this. It’s just a dance song.”
Chloe suddenly realized what Peter was talking about and felt sorry for him. It also confirmed her earlier assessment of him as someone in need of a friend outside of his circle of science nerds.
“You thought this song came from outer space?” Chloe asked.
Peter was embarrassed beyond all belief. “Well, … yeah.”
Peter drained his glass of its drink and set it on the bar.
“Do you want to dance to it?” Chloe asked.
Peter smiled. “Let’s.”
Chloe grabbed Peter’s hand and led him to the dance floor. They squeezed through the crowd and onto the huddled dance floor and started moving, when it occurred to Peter that this was the opportunity to put the signal to the lie.
“Is there any way I can find out who this song is by?” Peter shouted as he and Chloe danced.
Chloe pulled in close and put an arm around Peter. “Sure. After we’re done dancing, I’ll take you up to the DJ booth,” Chloe whispered in Peter’s ear. “My friend Keith is spinning.”
Chloe pulled away into her own space and Peter shook his head and absently said out loud, though unheard by anybody, “Dr. Lombard will be so pleased to know it’s only a song.”
Chapter 33
Carla sat in her living room, drink in hand, finishing a catch-up conversation with her daughter, Jenny. Carla missed Jenny’s presence in the house, though she always knew it would end, that her children would, over the years, ebb into the world and become their own selves. Carla liked the conversations, though, because they were now about something she had any experience in: living as an adult. The conversations she had had with her daughter previously had all been negotiations, and Carla had never been taught how to raise a child, so everything had been a white-knuckle off-the-cuff foray into a brave new world.
The thing she and Bill had realized too late was in the spacing of their children. When they’d become pregnant with Jennifer – Bill still refused to consider himself pregnant with her but had stopped arguing about the nature of a “we” pregnancy – they had wanted to see how they adapted to having a child before thinking about expanding the family. By the time Jenny was two, Bill wanted another child, but she hadn’t, remembering the burdens Jenny had placed on her body. It wasn’t until Bill sold his first novel that she realized they weren’t going to have to rely solely on her salary that she agreed, if that could be said to be the term, to get pregnant again. And, by then, Jenny was already twelve, so they were going to be the parents of young children well into their fifties.
Carla smiled as she listened to Jenny on the other end of the phone, trying to figure out one of the basics of life: laundry.
“Separating laundry is sort of a myth, honey,” Carla said. “Most of the time, you can just lump it all in there and wash it on warm and everything will come out fine. But, with new clothes in certain colors, you have to be careful because, if you mix a new red blouse in with your whites, there’s a chance it’ll all end up pink. Otherwise, don’t worry about it. The info on the tags are guidelines, not rules.”
Carla listened and rolled her eyes.
“Well, just make sure you don’t put anything wool into a dryer,” Carla said, “because it’ll shrink. For me, as a rule, since I can never remember to look at the tag to see what a sweater is made out of, I drape them all over a line in the basement. When they’re dry, you just fluff them on the air cycle in the dryer and they’re fine.”
Carla listened to her daughter and laughed.
“Yeah, I know,” Carla said. “Doing laundry on a Saturday night isn’t something anyone ever told me I would ever do in my life, either, but, believe me, you’ll do a lot of things on Saturday nights that you never thought you would do. The sad truth is that Saturday nights aren’t all that special, at least, not after a while.”
The two chatted on the phone for a few more minutes and then they ended the conversation. Carla set the phone down and sat quietly for a moment, took a sip from her drink, and let herself miss her daughter’s presence in the house. It was weird to her that someone so close to you would leave to live their own life, even though she always knew that that’s what she had wanted and had always known that’s what her daughter – indeed, and her sons – would w
ant. In the end, only her husband would remain with her.
She stood from the chair and walked to the base of the stairs and cocked an ear upward, listening for sounds from Bill’s study, expecting to hear him wasting time on a video game but instead hearing nothing. She walked quietly up the steps for no reason she could fathom, asking herself why she was avoiding the creaky steps, and tip-toed to the threshold of the doorway into her husband’s study. Bill was sitting at his computer, typing busily, oblivious to the world that existed outside of the fictional world he was creating on his computer monitor.
“You don’t usually work on Saturday nights,” Carla said.
Bill typed a few more words and then turned in his chair.
“It’s not a rule, you know,” Bill said.
“I know.”
“I was outside earlier toiling over a cigar and something hit me and I had to start writing,” Bill said.
Carla smiled. “What hit you?”
“I was just thinking about that signal we listened to online a couple of months ago, that crappy song-noise thing, and I thought that would make a great idea for the next novel,” Bill said.
Carla walked into the room and peered over Bill’s shoulders at the monitor.
“You’re on page three,” Carla said.
“Yeah, it just hit me,” Bill said. “It may fizzle out in a few pages and be a nothing story, or not, but I thought I’d try it out.”
“What’s the idea?” Carla asked.
“I don’t know, yet. I’m thinking a story about a normal astronomy professor who intercepts a broadcast on an unusual frequency and determines it’s from a distant solar system and how she, ultimately, decodes the signal, which is a warning that there are evil extra-galactic forces invading the various solar systems of the galaxy,” Bill said, “and, as a result, she has to get the government and the UN to get Earth ready for a fight sometime in the future.”
Carla was surprised. “She?”
Bill bobbed his head in acknowledgment. “You always wanted to be the hero of one of my stories.”
“And to think it only took twenty-one years.”
“Better late than never,” Bill said.
Chapter 34
Peter stood in the hallway outside Dr. Lombard’s office and wondered, again, if this was such a good idea. She already didn’t believe the signal was authentic so there was no reason for him to admit to her that he had not given up the ghost until just recently. He didn’t want to come across as some sort of believer, someone who would take an irrational position and stick with it just because he wanted to believe it. And that’s what he had done, more or less, with the signal. Now that he knew it wasn’t real, he felt foolish for having pursued it for so long, so certain of its authenticity.
He knocked lightly on the frame of the open door and walked into the room quietly. Dr. Lombard had paperwork spread out before her, marking some of it with a pen, and when she looked and saw Peter she put the pen down.
“Doctor Lombard,” Peter said as acknowledgement.
Carla smiled up at him. “Peter, I skimmed the first couple pages of your paper but I haven’t read it or graded it, yet.”
This took Peter unawares. “My paper,” he said, thinking hard about what she might be talking about until he remembered. “Oh, right.”
Then he remembered the subject of his paper – the signal – and his stomach sank with embarrassment. He had tried to make an argument about the nature of any alien signal not being an intentional broadcast to an intentional recipient, but, rather, random noise accidentally intercepted by the receiver. Peter waved his hand through the air as if he were dismissing the subject.
“I’m going to need some more time to re-work it, if that’s okay,” Peter said. “I, umm, came across some new evidence that would change the nature of it from actual to theoretical.”
Carla suppressed a laugh and smiled up at Peter.
“New evidence?” Carla asked. “I don’t know that there’s going to be any evidence in there at all, just speculation.”
Peter shrugged in defeat. “Yeah, that’s why I’m here.”
“Oh?”
Peter slipped out of his backpack and placed it on Carla’s desk, rummaged through it for a few seconds and pulled out a compact disk. He handed to Dr. Lombard with no fanfare or explanation.
“Put it in your CD drive and play it,” Peter said, his voice flat and devoid of emotion.
Carla gave him a curious look. “And this is?”
Peter shrugged again. “You tell me.”
Carla stared in disbelief at Peter for a moment before taking the disk, unsure what possible reason there could be for this exchange and his request. Still, curiosity got to her and she put the disk into her computer, waited for the autoload to bring up the relevant program, and then clicked play. Soon, a dance song began playing from the speakers near the computer monitor. Carla glanced at Peter with disbelief and, after a few moments of listening, stopped the song playback.
“It’s a song, Peter,” Carla said
Peter nodded. “It’s the song.”
Peter’s obtuseness, though only a couple of minutes old, was beginning to wear thin with Carla. She had better things to do than play games with a grad student.
“Which song would that be?” she asked.
Peter closed his eyes. “The one I thought was the signal,” he said, opening his eyes and fixing them on Dr. Lombard. “You were right; it was just some club DJ, apparently. Some guy called Scots Tape in New York City. He released it on the Web a couple of weeks ago, and it’s breaking into the clubs right now as a hot dance track.”
Carla drummed her fingers on her desk for a moment, unsure how to proceed. The song she had just listened to was not the signal from the summer, to her ears, and now her most signal-interested student was saying it was. Clearly, he had transferred his interest in the signal to a dance club song for a reason, she thought, though she wasn’t convinced she wanted to know the reason.
“Peter, this sounds like music, not like that weird noise we captured at the site,” Carla said.
Peter nodded. “I know, I know, but it’s the same source material. Only, here the material has been mixed down and edited, and there’s extra music layered in and some vocal tracks, but, trust me, I’ve listened to that weird sound enough times to know that the sample edited in this song is the same as what we heard playing through the SETI site.”
Carla was curious. She clicked play on the computer and listened for a couple more moments, wondering if this latest explanation were plausible, and then stopped the playback.
“So, you were right, I guess, about it being just a hacker,” Peter said.
“How’d you come to this conclusion?” Carla asked.
“I was at a club on Saturday night with my girlfriend, and she knew the club DJ so he told me who the track was by and I downloaded it yesterday and compared it to the signal.”
Carla regarded Peter for a moment before speaking, not wanting to belittle him. “I’m sure your Internet friends were disappointed to find out they were fooled.”
Peter rolled his eyes. “Eh, I don’t think anybody thinks we were fooled. I think we all kinda knew it was unlikely. I mean, nobody could find a primer or any other structure to the signal, so…”
Peter stood there groping for words for a second, trying to find a way back to a respectable scientific position on the proposition that the signal they had heard had always been an implausible and unlikely conclusion.
“I mean, if it was an actual signal, there would have been some sort of decodable message in there, right? I mean, that’s the point of sending a signal, isn’t it?” Peter asked.
Carla ejected the disk from her computer and handed it toward Peter. “Well, at least you’ve solved your mystery.”
Peter turned his palms up at the disk. He wanted nothing more to do with it. “Keep it. Consider it the first signal of unknown origin to be solved by a SETI team.”
Chapter
35
Kendell and Dante were standing in an aisle of music equipment at the music store, hiding from potential customers by pretending to be busy with the equipment on the shelves. They had been talking about the unexpected underground success of Dante’s most recent song release, but mostly they were in shock that Kaylinne had attracted the attention of record producers.
“I told you Kaylinne would get some sort of deal before us if we kept using her all the time, and now here she is with a record offer,” Kendell said.
Dante had grown exasperated with Kendell’s inability to accept reality. Kaylinne had just been offered a small-time contract to record an album on an independent label, and Kendell was upset because it wasn’t he or Dante that had been signed, not happy that Kaylinne had been signed.
“It’s not like she didn’t earn it,” Dante said, moving some boxes of guitars around on the shelf and scouting the store for the manager. “She must be on like a hundred tracks produced by everyone within fifty miles of here. It was only a matter of time.”
Kendell nodded. “Yeah, but it was your song that did it. You know it, Scots, you know.”
Dante thought about this for a moment. His latest track featuring Kaylinne had gone big, for him, and the song had been downloaded thousands of times. There was a smallish amount of money to be had in all those downloads, but there was no way to know if it was his song writing or Kaylinne’s vocals that had sold the song.
“No, I don’t know,” Dante said. “Maybe it was one of your tracks, or maybe it was that killer one she did last summer with Delux.”
Kendell was flabbergasted. “With Delux? That was two summers ago, man. That song you just put out is everywhere and you know that’s why she got a record.”
Dante considered that for a moment. “Maybe, but so what? She ain’t going to forget us. Something will happen. All we got to do is sit still and not complain. I got faith in the girl, she’ll keep the door open for us.”
Kendell stared at his friend in disbelief, unsure where Dante’s faith in Kaylinne and the music industry originated. People were screwed by the industry all the time, and it was a small measure to forget those who got you where you were. Kendell wasn’t sure if Dante was naïve or if Dante knew something about Kaylinne that Kendell didn’t. Kendell changed the subject.
The Signal Page 10