Third Contact

by James Wilson

  “What do you plan to do this evening while I am programming my telescopes, my beautiful bride-to-be?” he asked Kayla.

  “I brought three projects with me. Tonight I plan to start on a new quilt for my mother. The one she has now is falling apart,” she replied.

  The first thing Alexei wanted to do after arriving at the cabin was start his scan of the sky with the wide-angle telescope. Next, he would program all the coordinates of the 157 new objects to look at with the narrow field scope, in addition to the list of the thirty-seven objects he was continuing to monitor and the eleven stars suspected of starting to go dim. So far, a star had never been photographed just before it went dim, with the exception of the star system that generated the First Contact signal. Alexei’s father was also a sky watcher and had the good sense to build two telescopes into the roof of the cabin. Out of their twenty-one nights on the mountain, there were only five in which the weather prevented any data collection. After sixteen nights of data collection, it would probably take Alexei a year to analyze it all.

  Once Alexei returned home, it was three months before he found the time to take his first look at the photographs from the 157 objects originally discovered by the PSS. One object stood out from all the rest: it was of a suspected comet discovered about a year ago by PSS1. This did not look like any ordinary comet to Alexei. It was smooth, round, and moving fast towards us. He knew he had to inform the IPDC.

  CHAPTER 19

  DEFENSE

  Christeen Huntington had retired from her position of director at the heavy weapons research facility over seven years ago. Sometime after her retirement, she started working part time as the assistant to the director general of the IPDC. This particular day started off like most days, but as soon as she took her first glance at her terminal, things would never be the same. First, she relayed the message to both the head of the IPDC and the head of the PSS, knowing that the general would need to confirm the finding before doing anything else.

  Despite the fact that the Earth had not seen any war for hundreds of years, most of General Joe Joiner’s family was involved with the military in one form or another. He was visiting his elder daughter who worked for SolarCore, a defense contractor in region A. She was working on a new project at their solar concentration lab when he received the message from Christeen. He immediately called his old friend and now head of the PSS, Denny Brown.

  “Denny, I hope all is well. Have you seen the message yet?”

  “I was just reading it as you called. I’m sure it’s nothing, but I’ll get some photos of the object and send them to you later in the day,” Denny said. He knew there would be at least two satellites in the Sun’s outer orbits and several ground-based and Earth orbit observatories that should be able to quickly generate some good data.

  “I have an orbiter out in that region that should be able to get some very good photos of our mysterious object,” he added.

  “Great,” said the general. “Maybe we can put this one to bed quickly.”

  Less than an hour later, Joe received a link to a folder from Denny. In the folder were eight sub folders, each with a graph indicating how much data was within. Only three of them had any data so far. It would take at least a day or two to get information back from the deep space observers. Looking at the first picture from the ground-based scope, it was clear that this was not any kind of interplanetary debris. He was seeing the first alien ship ever photographed, and it appeared to be approaching the Earth.

  First, Joe had to inform the leaders of the seven regions. He would recommend that they follow the protocol that had been in place for centuries. The whole planet would go into martial law, under which he would probably be the supreme commander. Only a unanimous decision by the regional directors appointing someone else could unseat him. Not very likely, as he had always enjoyed all of their support for his entire tenure at IPDC.

  Before a meeting of the leaders could even be scheduled, his mind raced to the list of things he would need to get started on right away. A reconnaissance team would need to be assembled with Denny Brown assigned to run it. He would need a full report on the state of our weapons systems, particularly the neutron bomb arsenal and its ability to be deployed. Neutron bombs had thousands of times the destructive power of twentieth-century weapons. They contained a small amount of material as dense as a neutron star called neutronium. When neutronium is detonated, it converts over seventy-five percent of its mass to energy. He would also increase by ten times the efforts going into the new black hole bomb. The new bomb uses a material even more dense than neutronium, approaching that of a black hole. The material is so heavy that development could not take place on Earth because it would sink to the core. The lab where research was being conducted was at the core of a hollowed-out asteroid in the solar system’s asteroid belt, past the orbit of Mars. This weapon system had the potential of being millions of times as powerful as the H bomb.

  CHAPTER 20

  THE SECOND SHIP

  In the few years since the discovery of the first vessel, Earth had undergone some significant changes. The most difficult change to implement was relocating almost all of the people that lived on the surface into underground housing. Only a few surface dwellers remained, and they were put under strict regulations not to emit any kind of radiation that the approaching aliens could potentially detect. No light, no radio frequency signals, or any type of signals were allowed.

  Another major change on the planet was that terraforming had completely stopped. Early in the forty-first century, the first satellite to collect solar radiation and reflect it back to earth was deployed. It was very limited in the amount of power that it could collect. The area over which it could reflect that radiance back to earth was also very limited, but it proved a concept that would later allow Earth’s human population to begin to rebound.

  Before the discovery of the vessel, there were three large and very powerful orbital solar collectors reflecting solar power back to Earth. One was still used strictly to power the electrical grid. It collected solar radiation and converted all the energy to microwaves, which was subsequently beamed to one or more of several receiving stations on the ground that provided power to the grid. The other two, previously dedicated to warming the planet, had now both been redeployed to power the generation of weapons. One went to Mercury to power the new facility there, and the other went to the asteroid belt where there were a number of military installations.

  Soon after the discovery, the IPDC formed the Bureau of Alien Observation, which took over the PSS system that made the initial discovery. One of their first objectives was to add to the array of observational satellites three new platforms, two of which would observe the vessel twenty-four hours a day; the third would look for anything else coming our direction. A few years after its launch, the new Long Distance Observer (the LDO5) confirmed another vessel just like the first one approaching Earth on the same trajectory as the first.

  CHAPTER 21

  EARTH HISTORY

  The twenty-first century was one in which the measured global average temperature along with the amount of greenhouse gas emissions increased almost every year because of the burning of fossil fuels. Droughts, floods, severe weather, and rising sea levels plagued the people of the Earth while they continued to increase the rate of fossil fuel consumption without restriction. No serious efforts to reduce emissions were put forth until the drought of 2034. Food production fell over twelve percent that year alone. For the first time in recorded human history, the global population declined. Lack of water resources became common and the reason for several wars around the planet.

  By 2047, the global average temperature had increased 2.2 degrees Centigrade above what it was before the Industrial Revolution. At that temperature, methane gas escaping from both the ocean floor and peat moss bogs around the world became the primary source of greenhouse gas emissions. Methane is twenty times more efficient at trapping heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide.
Despite the fact that humans were finally emitting less greenhouse gas, the rate of release as well as the total amount released into the atmosphere continued to increase for many years.

  At the end of the twenty first century, the global average temperature had climbed to 4.5 degrees Centigrade above pre-Industrial temperatures. Human population had declined from its peak of 10.2 billion in 2033 to fewer than two hundred thousand in 2100. Living conditions on the surface were unbearable, forcing the population underground. Over 75% percent of all species of plants and animals on the planet had gone extinct. Naturally occurring ice had disappeared from the planet, and fresh water was a rarity.

  These hellish conditions persisted for hundreds of years. The temperature finally peaked in the early twenty-sixth century at 7.8 degrees Centigrade above pre-industrial temperatures. Twenty-seven years of war over resources starting in 2572 brought Earth’s population down to about seventy thousand.

  The twenty-seventh century saw a total reversal in global climate. With the entire world’s ice melted and dumped into the ocean, the ocean currents that circulated heat from the equator toward the poles shut down due to the change in salinity. Slowly, the planet began to cool again, and the temperature continued to drop until the year 3013, when a global minimum temperature of -8.1 degrees below pre-Industrial temperatures was reached. Earth’s population also continued to fall, reaching its minimum of about four and a half thousand in the year 3151. Things slowly started to improve beginning in the thirty-second century with the global temperature rebounding and technological breakthroughs in solar cell efficiency improving underground farming techniques, including better methods of piping light from the surface to the crops below.

  CHAPTER 22

  FIRST CONTACT

  With the global temperature steadily rising, the situation started to get better in the thirty-second century. After a thousand years of decline and stagnation, technological developments began to move forward again. Advances were made in underground transportation, solar energy, and underground food production that helped to start a renewed interest in global trade. People gradually started moving back to the surface in a few areas near the equator where much of the permanent snow pack was beginning to melt. The first attempts at terraforming were also beginning to help.

  The first orbital solar collector was launched in 3287. It used a very wide and thin space-based solar panel to collect the Sun’s energy and convert that power to microwave radiation. The microwaves could be sent back to solar power plants for use in generating electrical power or to designated places to simply add heat to the planet. With all these improvements, the Thousand-Year Depression, as it was called, seemed to be coming to an end, and a period of growth was taking its place.

  After hundreds of years with almost no ground- or space-based observations occurring, there was a push for the development of new telescopes and the refurbishment of the few old telescopes that had survived over a century of neglect. There was also a great deal of interest in a renewed search for extraterrestrial life.

  In 3296, a new program modeled after the twentieth century’s SETI program was initiated, called ELQ, the Extraterrestrial Life Quest. ELQ launched their first piece of hardware in 3301. It was the first of three ultra-low-noise, high-gain receivers that would be positioned in orbit around the globe. The three receivers would work in tandem as one giant receiver. Unlike the original SETI program, which did not find any extraterrestrial intelligence, the ELQ program was successful the first year after getting its third receiver into orbit. A signal was discovered in 3303, emanating from a planet orbiting a previously unknown average star near the Lagoon Nebula. The star was named the Red Surfer because it looked like it was riding on a wave of red gas from the Nebula. For the first time in human history, we knew that we were not alone in the universe.

  In 3307, the third of three new mountaintop observatories was completed. They were dedicated to observing the Red Surfer signal twenty-four hours a day. It turned out that the planet generating the signal orbited its star at an angle that was always visible from our perspective. It never went behind its star; therefore, its annual orbit did not interrupt the signal. The three observatories were positioned around the globe so that as the earth rotated, at least one would always be in range to receive the Red Surfer signal. The daily recordings were stored on a server and connected to SubNet so that anyone could look at the data.

  No one knew how to interpret the Red Surfer signal. They simply could not make sense of the data. It was impossible to tell if it was sound information, video, weather data, or something else. If one looked at long periods of the data, semi-repeatable patterns could be observed. The most notable was a nineteen-hour cycle that showed up in several different analyses. Another group found a ten-day cycle where patterns would repeat. For over 150 years, that was about the most they could get from the data.

  In the year 3479, Louis Zarek, a businessman who developed software to help move goods around the world on ships and trains, began studying the Red Surfer data. He wrote a program that would organize that data into sets of different sizes. He discovered that a small percentage of the data collected in the years after 3410 had recurring patterns. From the way the patterns were structured, he was able to break up the data into pages, with two sections per page.

  When he took the first section of each page and filtered it through a moderately complex algorithm, he could generate a crude video. Most of the data didn’t seem to fit the two-page pattern at all. Some that did, when rendered to video, produced only noise.

  Some of the data did fit well with the two-page pattern where the video images were of different figures making complex and sometimes repeating movements. Certain figures would show up in data from different days and others would only show up once or twice. A few sections looked a little like text, but the resolution simply was not good enough to get enough detail.

  Louis tried to find a way to encode the second section of each page into sound. He came up with several ways of decoding the data, but everything he tried, when converted to sound, made only noise. He could not find any way to make sense of it and finally gave up on trying to use this part of the data.

  After published his findings, Louis received lots of attention. He was contracted to star in a show where he presented some of the more fascinating sections of several of the videos. He also did a few programs on the methods he used to decode the signal. After a couple years, most of the attention faded away, and all that was left was a sort of alien cult that developed a religion from what they found in the videos from space.

  About twenty years after the alien videos came out, the signal from the Red Surfer suddenly stopped. It was not the first time the signal was lost, but it had always come back, usually within a few hours. A few times over the 200 years of observations, the signal had gone out for a few days. The longest outage was just over three days. Other times the signal became very weak or noisy; this also lasted up to several days. This time, the signal had been strong and clear for the last twenty years with little or no interruption. Then in early 3499, the signal disappeared once and for all. The three dedicated Earth observatories that were recording the signal were kept in place and continued to monitor the Red Surfer in case the signal ever returned.

  CHAPTER 23

  STELLAR DIMMING

  The signal from the Red Surfer system did not return. For 150 years, the observatories kept watching the system. Starting in 3712 and continuing over the course of about fifteen years, the star faded away until it was no longer visible. Its brightness first declined by about ten percent and for the next several years slowly declined by about five percent more each year. In the year 3727, the Red Surfer had an output of about fifteen percent of its original output; three months later it could no longer be detected. The Red Surfer was gone without explanation.

  Before it faded away, the star that was the Red Surfer was a little bit smaller than the sun. It was only about halfway through its estimated thirte
en billion year life. It had plenty of hydrogen fuel left to keep its nuclear fusion reaction going for billions of years before it started to diminish. It was not part of a binary system nor did it have any close neighbors that could have caused an interference with its life span. There was no explanation for why the star went dim.

  Eugene Nelson was the manager of the machine shop at EarthBore, one of the top four underground train manufacturers in the world. He was also an amateur astrophotographer who often took pictures of the old Messier objects and was always interested in M8, the Lagoon Nebula. His interest stemmed from his childhood when he learned that M8 was the only other known place besides Earth where there was life. When he heard that the Red Surfer had gone dim, he couldn’t believe it. He compared several old photographs with new ones until he was convinced it was true. While he was overlaying images, he noticed that another star in that same area had also disappeared from the newer prints. After studying the images in more detail, he found eight stars in all that had disappeared since the twenty-first century’s Hubble images were taken.

  After Nelson’s is findings, other astronomers started to look for additional stars that had disappeared. As more and more vanished stars were identified, it soon became apparent that stars further away from the center of the galaxy than our system were not experiencing the dimming phenomenon. It was only happening to stars much closer to the center of the Milky Way. Ten years after Eugene Nelson’s article on Stellar Dimming appeared in The Journal of Astrophysics, the list of dimmed stars had grown to 273.

  CHAPTER 24