by Jack Ziebell
Then the tweets started on the ‘members only’ @SETIInstitute page.
STARGEEZER42: ‘The silence in grid 164x678y790z – it’s movin.’
Final_Frontier: ‘Moving gap in static 165x677y790z, anyone else see this?’
Life@LibertySHIP: ‘Yep S.E.T.I. HQ are you getting this?’
STARGEEZER42: ‘S.E.T.I.? Brian u on duty?’
STARGEEZER42: ‘Brian….’
STARGEEZER42: ‘BRIAN OMFG RU F*#%$# AWAKE!?????????????????’
Brian jump-started his brain and switched on everything that had a switch.
Brian2@SETI: ‘Getting - thanks.’
STARGEEZER42: ‘I’m claimin this 1!’
Brian2@SETI: ‘Don’t get ahead of yourself STARG – remember 2013? Prob nothing, what you got?’
STARGEEZER42: ‘Dnt know – like said - just BIG space in background noise – but movin! – am mapping – CALL UR PEOPLE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!’
Brian called Marius; it wasn’t quite time to call the entire cavalry, especially after last time. “Marius! Marius? Are you logged in? Check this shit out! What the fuck is it?”
Brian could hear Marius knocking over glasses, drop his phone and apologise to a muffled female voice somewhere in the background as he clambered to his workstation.
“Marius, you there?”
Marius answered in his half-German-half-British accent. “Yeah Brian, I’m seeing this for sure – but I’m a flying fucking whale if I could tell you what it is. It is not broadcasting, but it is blocking right? Which means it is either very big or very close, but hopefully not both, yah?”
“What should I do?” Brian asked, knowing what the answer would be.
“Call everybody.”
Chapter 11
Within an hour Brian was in the S.E.T.I main meeting room, surrounded by people both in person and dialled in on secure videoconference. Some had made the effort to don dishevelled suits; Marius had turned up in jeans and a slightly German looking leather jacket - he might have come on his motorbike but he was still a geek.
A microphone clicked on over the teleconference. “So what do we have here?” said one of the non-scientists, with a voice like a senator.
“We’re still trying to figure that out sir,” said Brian’s boss weakly; a man who had been wearing the same faded brown suit since Brian joined the office. Was this who he was aspiring to be? Time to chip in and redeem some reputation.
Before he could speak Marius interjected. “We’re calling it the swathe sir.”
The swathe? Nobody had mentioned that word until Marius had just said it. Brian’s father had once told him that everybody blags it, but Marius took this to the extreme and annoyingly always seemed to get away with it.
“The swathe?” said the man who sounded like a senator, “What the hell does that mean and it better mean something - should we be concerned?”
Brian’s boss looked at him and Marius, willing them to speak but also willing them not say anything that would get him into trouble later.
This time Brian made sure he spoke first. “Sir, this… ‘swathe’… our array picked it up a few hours ago. People monitoring our signals on the web as part of our cloud observation team spotted it first. We’ve been tracking it since. If I show you on here…” He pulled up a 3D matrix of dots on the conference room monitor. “Sir, this model was sent to us by one of our web observers. It’s a little crude but I believe accurate. It represents the sectors we’ve been monitoring for signals over the past week. Most of what we pick up is static but this is strange. Normally the spread of static is even but what we’ve picked up is this,” he clicked his mouse and a gap in the 3D dot matrix was visible moving across the screen. “This silence, or swathe, is cutting through the static. If it hadn’t been moving, we wouldn’t have noticed it. But it is moving and it is moving this way.”
“So at gone midnight on a Friday we should be concerned by a moving patch of silence?” said the man on the teleconference, sounding tired and slightly irritated.
“The problem is,” Marius pulled the table microphone towards him, “...is that we don’t know what this silence is. All we know is that it’s big and moving this way.”
The man on the teleconference looked confused. “But we were told that the chance of a sizeable celestial object impacting on earth was millions to one? How likely is it to make contact?”
“That is correct sir,” said Brian’s boss, “The chances of an asteroid of any consequence hitting the earth are infinitely small. And this may well not be an object at all sir.”
Brian did his best to lean towards the now inconveniently placed microphone. “That’s the problem sir – it is highly likely. I should have explained the scale of the model. The silence is one light-year wide, two high and of unknown depth. The chances of it hitting the earth would be as likely as a marble balanced on a pier being hit by an approaching tidal wave. But we don’t know what the tidal wave is made of or what it will do when it reaches us. It might be nothing more than a moving gap in the static, or…”
“Or what?”
Brian’s boss took over again. “A worst case scenario would be a cloud of radioactive particles powerful enough to wipe out life on earth. Or as Brian said it could be nothing. We have always known about the potential for an event like this, we just never thought we would see it before it hit us.”
“Well that is reassuring,” said the Senator.
Marius stepped in. “You see sir, we are being hit by radioactive waves all the time – most of these come from the Sun and most of those are reflected or absorbed by the Earth’s atmosphere. The Northern Lights are one beautiful example of this phenomenon, caused by EMP – sorry Electro Magnetic Pulses, caused by solar flares. The UV radiation that causes skin cancer is another. What we are facing could be something similar, only this phenomenon, this swathe, has come from outside of our solar system, possibly from outside our galaxy.”
“From another Sun?”
“It could have been generated in any number of ways,” Marius continued, “And as we don’t know what it is, it’s impossible to say. It’s not travelling fast enough to be pure radioactive energy, or the first we would have known about it would be when it hit us - so it has to have some sort of mass, I don’t know, like the tail of a giant comet, only much, much bigger. It could have come from a star collapsing in on itself, or colliding with another celestial body of comparable size. What people don’t understand, sir, are the comparative sizes of the universe; if the Earth is a peanut, then our Sun is a beachball, and if our Sun is a beachball then some other stars would be the size of the actual earth in comparison, or bigger – big stuff sir. Whatever it is, it took a tremendous amount of energy to produce. Whether it is harmful to us is another matter. My guess is we will feel it.”
“How long until we know more?”
“When it hits us.”
“And how long is that?”
“One, maybe two hours at most sir.”
Chapter 12
The cream SUV skidded to a halt at the entrance to the mine. Children with no shoes and dressed in rags ran to the car shouting and laughing, “You! Pen. Mister. You pen. Pen. Money, money. Hungry, hungry. No food.”
Tim knew that those who could dance around the car were never the ones who needed help the most. These kids were probably run by some Fagin lurking somewhere in the background. Asefa tried unsuccessfully to shoo them away but that only made them laugh harder and turn their begging into a game. Tim raised his hand to stop the children from grabbing at it but they mistook his action and instinctively cowered, a reaction clearly ingrained in them from a short life of beatings from strangers and guardians alike. He felt guilty and pulled out a pack of gum which he gave them. The children cheered and immediately started fighting over the prize, allowing he and Asefa to break free.
Asefa smiled shaking his head. “Timmy, you gave in. I thought your years in the field would have turned that soft heart to stone by now!”
; “The compassion fatigue hasn’t robbed me of all my charity just yet, you mean old bastard.”
They walked towards the mine. Mine workers in ragged clothes ambled about carrying improvised tools, scavenged from a range of industries. He noticed that nobody was smiling; unusual for people who had grown up accustomed to hardship and making the best of a harsh existence. Things must have been pretty bad.
The copper mine was a legacy of the colonial era but had been abandoned for most of the last century. With the rising price of copper, due to China’s economic boom and the need for copper wiring in every electronic device, from iPads to power lines, the mine had reopened. Reopened was a loose term. The mine needed heavy investment and there was talk of a Chinese takeover. The Chinese were crawling all over Africa, they didn’t call it colonialism, they called it ‘development’. But development was a loose term too; the development they meant was China’s development and one day Africa would wake up and realize that all new roads lead to China. No doubt the Chinese were creating jobs, but there was a feeling amongst western aid workers that there was some kind of unspoken long-term agenda that would one day become apparent. The Chinese kept apart from the rest of the development community, spoke their own language and ate in their own restaurants. They had a reputation amongst the locals of being harsh managers, bad tenants and veracious johns. There was a joke among the Ethiopian working girls that a Chinese labourer would pay for a girl, finish, go to the bathroom and swap T-shirts with one of his ten friends hiding inside. Ten trips to the bathroom later the girl starts getting suspicious about her client’s atomic stamina. It was perhaps unfair to compare Chinese road workers to the diplomats, PhD researchers and development workers who comprised the rest of the expat community. Tim was pretty sure if it had been English road workers on a jolly working holiday abroad they would’ve been worse, hell some of the aid workers were worse. He’d lost count of the number of alcoholic, middle-aged, divorced aid workers who’d ‘fallen in love’ with a local working-girl and just poured another drink or run off to some other warzone every time they thought they were lying to themselves.
But if Britain’s days of plundering the world as a nation were over, China’s were just beginning, and after three-thousand years of continuous Chinese civilization you could see why they were a little anxious to get moving.
The Chinese takeover of the mine was why Tim was here. He specialized in value chain analysis and corporate social responsibility and had been tasked by the Institute with advising the Ethiopian government and the local community on how to handle the deal. For the locals it meant getting them a fair share; which meant jobs and not imported Chinese labourers. It also meant making sure people understood the potential impact of an industrial scale copper mine on their land so they could make a mildly informed choice about what would happen to them. For the Ethiopian government, it meant advising them how best not to get ripped off by the Chinese, ensuring a fair proportion of the wealth generated by the mine went into the state coffers and ideally on to help fund services for the local community. Tim knew that was unlikely to happen. He had seen it before in Afghanistan and elsewhere; weak governments, corrupt officials and ambiguous land law did not mix well with big money and great, undemocratic powers. It was likely that a deal would be done for a pittance over cocktails in some bar in the capital, where a connected Ministry man got a suitcase of cash and a girl on his arm and the village next to the mine got poisoned. Tim was hoping the fact that the British Embassy had also been approached by a British mining company might lead to some pressure for a more transparent deal being struck. This was just his initial fact-finding mission; he would return with mining industry consultants and Embassy officials if and when they were required.
Why was he still in this business? He knew he had got in to fight injustice. The little guys couldn’t stand up to the big guys in this world, so someone had to help them fight their corner. He just wasn’t sure how good at fighting those corners he was. He remembered the first time he had felt the abuse of authority; he’d been eight years old and a lunch-lady had pulled him out of the lunch line. ‘You were talking!’ she’d yelled. He hadn’t said a word and told her so, but in the world of the lunch-lady, the woman with the green apron is king; might is right and the protest of a schoolboy goes unheeded. Somehow the experience had stuck with him, and that compiled with the multiple safety nets of his middle-class upbringing compelled him to feel he had a duty to help others. A family friend had once told him, ‘Tim, you are a white, able-bodied, middle-class, man – the guilt of the world is placed upon your shoulders. But perhaps the guilt is offset by the many benefits of being a white, able-bodied, middle-class man?’ - followed by an ironic yet hearty slap on the back.
Tim and Asefa met with the local foreman, a portly fellow for whom the mine’s paltry income was a small fortune, making him the local big man. Tim could see the foreman didn’t want to lose his fiefdom and was more worried about the Chinese takeover than anyone.
“Asefa,” said the foreman, with open arms, “It is good to be meeting you again my friend!” He turned to direct his pleasantries towards Tim, no doubt because he was the white one. “Welcome to the Asanti Copper Mine, my name is Mustaffa Mohamed, but my friends call me Mahmood. You are my guest and your help with the matters we are facing at the mine is most welcome. Please come to my office and take tea my guests.”
Tim and Asefa followed the foreman to a run-down shipping container with make-shift windows roughly cut into the metal and a dusty awning out front. Tim noticed a large sweat patch on the man’s back as he waddled in front of them. Was it any worse to help this local charlatan than the Chinese? Tim doubted it and wondered how the man had come by the concession for the mine; no doubt via means that were as bad as anything that would happen in a bar in the capital.
Development workers were too often trying to create socialist utopias out of squalid mud pies. In the West you would never expect development to work the way it was preached with such simple certainty to wide-eyed African beneficiaries. You would not go to the north of England and say, ‘Hey let’s reopen the great British coal pits as a workers co-op. What do you mean the coal is too expensive to sell and we are not making enough to pay the workers once the grant runs out? Hey we’ll just set up a weaving group for the miners’ wives – yes I know, women’s rights, they should be allowed to work in the coal pit too – but they can sell the clothes they make and use the money to buy the coal from the men. What do you mean clothes are cheaper and better made in India?’ At this point if you were a politician you would get lynched, but in development world, you finish your project, write a report and off you go with your bag of gold, never to be seen in those parts again. In the West you would bring together the local business men and women, no matter how distasteful the wealth gap, and say, ‘Hey we need a new high speed rail link to Birmingham – we can work together like this, create this many jobs and we all benefit like so, cha-ching.’ The absence of strong government in developing countries meant it was all the more important to work in partnership with the local fat cats, making them see it was better for them to plough most of their earnings back into their own country, instead of a Swiss bank account. Mahmood was just the type of man who could make a difference to his area, as long as he saw his own bread was being buttered by doing so. He might be a bastard, but he was their bastard, and in that respect he was better than the Chinese.
Tim looked at the tea as Mahmood poured, trying to see how translucent it was. The water in the area was bad, particularly due to the recent drought and people never boiled it for long enough. Was this the cup that would get him? For such a paranoidly fastidious guy he certainly chose the wrong profession; it was a real effort to throw caution to the wind, even just to get in a car with Asefa, and he was one of the good drivers.
Tim placed his cup down on the low circular brass table in front of him. “Mahmood, thank you for your hospitality. I’m sure Asefa has explained to you why we’re here.”
“Yes,” said Mahmood, “The Chinese and the government want to rob us from our mine and you will protect us, God willing.”
He tried to think of a way of keeping the conversation grounded in reality. “Well not exactly. We will do our best but what I want to start off by saying is that if the local community is organized in its demands, it stands a much better chance of getting a fairer deal from the whole situation.”
Mahmood fidgeted uncomfortably. “That is not true Mister Tim, not true at all. If the government wants, it will take, like it did the Ogadenee’s oil. We are just a small people and cannot stand against the will of such men. But with the help of the British and Allah in his wisdom, we will prevail.” He didn’t sound convinced.
What Mahmood was trying to achieve was unclear and Tim knew this would be difficult. As always, he couldn’t promise him anything, so he gave the answer he always gave: “We’ll see what we can do,” and for good measure added, “Enshallah.”
They finished their tea and Mahmood offered to show them the mine. Tim was apprehensive about the tour; health and safety left these parts with the last colonial canary, but like the driving, it was a risk that came with the job.
The mine was a labyrinth of tunnels, dug into the rock over hundreds, maybe thousands of years. After a minute’s descent in a fragile lift, suspended by a single cable, they arrived in the entrance tunnel, curving gently downwards and lined with cheap lamps, a tangle of wires and dirt. Along one side ran a rickety conveyer belt that carried lumps of native copper up to the lift and the belching soviet era trucks waiting outside. They followed the tunnel down and down, passing Somali workers, white from the dust and red in the eyes.
“They chew the khat to help them work, it keeps them awake, but now they go up for prayer,” said Mahmood, gesturing at the men as they downed tools and headed for the surface. “Much, much copper here, you see, you see Mister Tim.”