Chain of Events

by Fredrik T. Olsson

  ‘Congratulations.’

  The voice made him spin around, unsure how long he’d been standing with his head against the tiles, and for how long someone had been able to watch him from behind without him noticing.

  It was Connors. He was leaning casually against the inside of the open door, his fingers resting on the handle and his head cocked slightly against the frame. The pose was almost friendly, relaxed and informal, and even if that was unexpected in itself, it wasn’t what made William stand straight. Something else had grabbed his attention.

  Connors was wearing his uniform. That was all. No biohazard suit, no mask, no gloves. Just the uniform.

  ‘You’re not infected,’ he said.

  ‘I’m glad to hear it,’ William replied. ‘By what, exactly?’

  Connors smiled. Dodged the question.

  ‘How’s the girl?’

  ‘She’s feeling very much like you. She’s resting, but she’s all right. We didn’t intend for you to talk to each other.’

  ‘We noticed.’ A pause. ‘So, what is it that we’re not allowed to talk about?’

  Connors stood in silence for a few seconds more. There was a minute furrowing of his eyebrows, as if he was giving himself one last chance to reconsider a decision he’d already made. And then:

  ‘What experience do you have of handling classified information?’

  ‘I think you know that already.’

  Connors nodded. Of course he did. They knew everything there was to know about William’s past. And it wasn’t as if there were any real grounds for concern. Or there wouldn’t have been, were it not for the magnitude of what they were up against. Because regardless of what kind of sensitive knowledge William Sandberg had been trusted with before, none of it had come close to what he was about to hear.

  ‘Tell me,’ said William.

  But Connors shook his head. ‘It’s about time you met the others.’

  And with that, he let go of the door, and gestured for William to follow.

  14

  William Sandberg was fifteen years old the first time he heard of the Arecibo message. That didn’t stop him from having an opinion, and that opinion was that the entire thing was without doubt the most dim-witted project ever carried out by human hands in the name of science.

  From the world’s largest radio telescope, built by the same human hands in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, designed to scan the night skies and find out more about the universe’s origins and physics and god-knows-what, from that telescope a message was sent into space on 16 November 1974, purely to inform any alien civilisations of our existence.

  That in itself was enough to provoke an opinion.

  Even as a teenager William had formed a dislike for his neighbours. Just because you happened to share a wall or to trim the same hedge from different sides, it didn’t mean you were friends. Neighbours were people who got in the way, who wanted to make pointless conversation or who complained about things that weren’t their business. And with that in mind, it was completely impossible to fathom why scientists wanted to get in touch with our interstellar neighbours when nobody had any way of knowing who they were or how they would react. Wouldn’t it be more sensible to stay away and not bother one another?

  William thought so. But this wasn’t what annoyed the young William Sandberg the most. What really disturbed him was the message itself.

  The first time he’d had the chance to study it in any detail was in one of the science magazines that lined his teenage bedroom, sorted by year and date and catalogued in a separate notebook to help him find any article he was looking for. And his first thought had been that the scientists must have been smoking something inappropriate.

  The message humanity had fired into space was a picture. Or, to be more precise, it was a collection of incredibly low-resolution pixels in black and white, on or off, intended to show the recipient what humans looked like, what we were made of and where we could be found.

  Intended to show them. Assuming they read it the right way.

  Which was a lot to ask.

  For a start, the alien at the receiving end would have to come up with the idea of rendering the pulses as a collection of dots and non-dots, turning them into the pixels we wanted them to see. They would then have to guess what the pictures represented, which would be far from obvious. Even in 1974 William had seen computer games with better graphics than that.

  But the most ridiculous thing was how the scientists expected our new extraterrestrial friends to succeed in making the pixels into a picture.

  There was only one way to do it.

  By dividing the pixels into 73 rows.

  Not 72. Not 74. Not 11 or a million or anything else, but 73. Only then would each row contain 23 pixels from left to right, and only then would the pixels arrange themselves into the images we wanted to convey. Any other arrangement and the rows of dots and spaces would make no sense.

  But, hey. Surely it would be obvious to any carbon-based being in the universe that an unexpected message from an unknown planet should be grouped that way?

  Clearly, the scientists thought so. They happily sent their hello into space, and sat back and waited for an answer. As far as William knew, they never got one.

  This was what occupied William’s mind as he wandered through the vast server room, an entire labyrinth of modern technology that had been installed far beneath the ancient castle.

  Below the maze of stone passages, Connors had taken him to another network of rooms and corridors, much more recent than the castle above, with metal-clad walls and cast concrete floors. It gave him a new perspective on how incredibly huge the castle must be, and as he breathed the dry, cooled air that circulated to keep the servers’ temperatures down, he hurried to keep up with Connors and the two guards on either side of him. All the while struggling to take in what his own brain was telling him.

  He knew he’d recognised the pattern: 23 pixels wide. 73 pixels high.

  The cuneiform script hidden in the codes he’d been given was arranged in exactly the same way as the message humanity beamed into space forty years ago.

  On the other side of the server hall an automatic glass door slid aside, opening up into a control room, and beyond that a metal door took them to new corridor. They kept walking past endless rows of side doors, corners and staircases, everything in steel and aluminium and glass, and here and there the mountain protruded in over the floor as if someone had poured molten rock through the walls and allowed it to cool there.

  Their walk seemed to go on for ever. And even if William couldn’t say exactly why, he got the impression that everything he saw was decades old. The architecture was typically East European retro-futuristic, a Stasi-cold preparedness for a future that would soon arrive with flying cars and silver suits. He couldn’t decide whether he found it terrifying or wonderfully naïve.

  Nonetheless, it worked. It told him that the Organisation was vast and powerful, and that message came through loud and clear.

  But it also prompted questions.

  In spite of all the doors and control rooms and frosted windows to meeting rooms and offices, there was one thing missing. People. During their entire walk, since after leaving the last wooden door to the old castle behind and until now, he’d counted ten or twenty people at most. But the facilities they passed had been designed to accommodate at least twenty times that number, maybe more. So where were they?

  William kept his questions to himself. They had reached an underground foyer, a huge windowless room with areas for waiting, with airport-like sofas and standing tables in parallel lines, designed for quick conversations between larger meetings. He was no doubt being escorted into an auditorium. Two steel double doors stood open on the far side of the foyer and they continued through without stopping.

  If the meeting room where he first met Franquin had seemed impressively large, it was nothing compared to the one he entered now. At its centre was a huge circular table, surrounded by what must have
been thirty or so chairs. Beyond the table a bank of LED screens were suspended in darkness, edge to edge, and the entire room was flanked with rows of fixed chairs, as if this was a room where the leaders staged huge plenary meetings and where lower-ranked officers and decision-makers could sit and follow along in discussions and reports.

  It looked more like a parliament than a conference room, and William knew they had him where they wanted him. He was impressed and overwhelmed, and it was abundantly clear that they called the shots and he didn’t.

  He was escorted to the table. Ushered into one of the blue, upholstered seats, a cross between an office swivel chair and a recliner.

  Around him sat at least a dozen men in uniform. The rest of the chairs in the auditorium were empty. The only face he recognised beside Connors’ belonged to Franquin.

  ‘Aren’t you a bit old to be running around at night?’ he said to William.

  ‘I’m clearly not old enough for you to tell me the truth.’

  Franquin didn’t dispute this but replied: ‘You have been in my position, haven’t you?’

  ‘I never kidnapped anyone and forced them to work for me, if that’s what you’re asking.’

  ‘You’ve worked with classified material,’ Franquin said, ignoring the sarcasm. ‘You’ve worked with personnel who haven’t been given the whole picture; you’ve assigned different people varying levels of access to information. There’s no shame in that.’

  ‘Two differences,’ William countered. ‘I never led any of my colleagues to believe that they were being given the whole truth.’

  ‘We have been very clear that we haven’t told you everything. You may not like it, but that doesn’t mean we’ve misled you.’

  He was right, of course he was, and William responded with an ambiguous move of his head.

  ‘And the second difference?’ Franquin said.

  ‘I’ve always let my colleagues know everything they needed in order to do their jobs.’

  Franquin shook his head again. Not unfriendly, but tolerant, as if he knew that William knew better but was reluctant to admit it.

  ‘One of the most important tools you brought here, Sandberg? You know what that is, don’t you?’ No reply. ‘A fresh pair of eyes.’

  William snorted. ‘I prefer to be trusted.’

  ‘And we prefer not to take risks. You would have done the same, in our shoes. You’ll be told exactly what you need to know, no more, no less.’

  ‘So why are we sitting here?’

  There was a brief pause before Franquin spoke. ‘What did Miss Haynes tell you?’

  Oh. So that’s what this was about? Damage limitation. Were they here to find out what information she’d given him, and to ensure he didn’t find out anything else?

  ‘She didn’t get too far. You came, we ran. You found us with the lady in the incubator, who didn’t seem too well.’

  He wasn’t sure where it came from, but for a second he sensed that he had the upper hand. They didn’t know what he knew. And he dwelled on the thought, trying to determine the best way to play it. In the end he decided to take the lead.

  ‘Let’s put the games aside for a moment, shall we? You have gone to great lengths to get me here. You seem determined to make me work for you. That’s about the only thing I know.’ He paused for effect, then carried on. ‘That and the fact that what you’ve told me so far doesn’t add up.’

  ‘Is that so?’ Franquin said. ‘How did you come to that conclusion?’

  William was acutely conscious that the hand he’d been dealt wasn’t a strong one, and he didn’t want to lose what leverage he had. But he also knew he wouldn’t win if he didn’t gamble.

  ‘Arecibo,’ he said.

  There was utter silence in the room. William looked from face to face, but it was impossible to tell if their silence implied what he’d said was relevant.

  ‘A city in Puerto Rico,’ said Franquin. It was an invitation to continue.

  ‘Yes. A city in Puerto Rico. A city with a radio telescope, which was used to broadcast a message into space forty years ago. A message consisting of sixteen hundred and seventy-nine pixels. Twenty-three times seventy-three. Exactly like the cuneiform texts you’ve given us.’

  No response. But he had their attention, and that was a positive sign.

  ‘And what do you construe from that?’

  ‘I don’t know. That we never learn?’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  William locked eyes with him. ‘Call me narrow-minded, but wasn’t it a touch presumptuous of us to sit there forty years ago and call out into space and think that whoever heard, whoever caught the message, would know how to read it?’

  Franquin’s eyes darted to Connors, and for a moment William thought he glimpsed a smile. There was a hint of one on Connors’ face too, as if they toyed with him, as if they possessed one extra piece of the puzzle that William hadn’t found.

  ‘What makes you think we were the ones calling?’ said Connors.

  William didn’t grasp what he meant.

  And then he did. And understood even less.

  ‘What are you saying?’ he asked.

  ‘We answered,’ said Connors.

  A chill passed through William’s body when he realised Connors was serious. ‘Bullshit,’ he said. But he said it without conviction. It could well be true. Except for being completely absurd, it was a lot more logical than the other alternative.

  There was no good reason why the astronomers had chosen to structure their message the way they had. No reason whatsoever, except, perhaps, one: that someone else had previously tried to contact us, in the same way.

  He shook his head in disbelief. Was he really sitting in a room with a dozen stone-faced men telling him the code he was working on had been delivered from space? And that the message he was supposed to encrypt was an answer that humanity needed to send back?

  It didn’t add up. There was one key detail unaccounted for.

  ‘In that case,’ he wondered aloud, ‘where does the virus come in?’

  The men around the table looked at him. Not in surprise, but asking for more. Twelve pairs of eyes urging him to explain.

  ‘The quarantine. The woman we saw, in the glass box. It is a virus, isn’t it? And that’s where the texts came from.’

  ‘What makes you think that?’ It was Franquin asking.

  ‘Base four. Who would decide to store something in quaternary code?’

  He heard the eagerness in his own voice, disappointed that he hadn’t managed to suppress it. But the conversation was beginning to annoy him. In front of him sat a group of stiff uniforms who knew it all, but who seemed absolutely determined not give him any facts he couldn’t reveal for himself.

  ‘It’s the only sensible answer,’ he said. ‘Nobody stores anything in base four. Not unless the medium requires it. And I can think of only one such medium.’

  ‘DNA,’ Franquin said. ‘That’s your conclusion?’

  ‘I asked where the codes came from and you wouldn’t tell me. This is the only thing that makes sense: that the texts have been pulled out of genetic material. Someone has contacted us, sent us a virus with a built-in message, and now it’s our turn to send a reply. There’s no other explanation. My only question is who.’

  The advantage he’d enjoyed was gone. He was one step behind again, the conversation steering him instead of the other way around, leaving him no time to arrange his thoughts, forcing him to draw conclusions as he spoke.

  And they were conclusions he didn’t like.

  Somewhere in the back of his mind a thought had started to emerge, and he struggled to ignore it. It couldn’t be, he told himself. It was a dead end.

  Connors watched him. As if he knew exactly what William was thinking.

  ‘You already know the answer,’ he said. ‘Don’t you?’

  William shook his head.

  ‘Where do you think the texts came from?’

  He hesitated. Shook his head again.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

  ‘Try.’

  ‘No. I’m confused. Right now…’ The thought was still there. Fighting for attention from the back of his mind. ‘Right now I can only come up with one way to explain it. The problem is, it’s unthinkable.’

  ‘Everything is, until you think it.’

  William closed his eyes. Tried one last time to put all the pieces together, hoping they would suddenly start to land logic-side up. But no matter how hard he tried, he could only come to the same, impossible conclusion.

  ‘Tell us.’

  ‘Based on what I’ve heard,’ he said, piecing it together in his mind, ‘and going on what I’ve been able to deduce from what I’ve seen and from the conversation we’re having right now, I can see no explanation other than…’ It was so ridiculous, he could hardly bring himself to say it out loud: ‘… no explanation other than that you have discovered a virus.’

  He paused, waiting for objections. But nobody spoke.

  ‘How, or where, I don’t know. But somewhere, somehow, you’ve discovered this virus. And for whatever reason, you’ve concluded that…’ He almost couldn’t bring himself to say it. But he had to. ‘You’ve concluded that this virus is not from our planet.’

  He tried to read their faces. But none of them uttered a word. Nobody stopped him or mocked him for his outlandish theory. So he decided he might as well continue.

  ‘Subsequently, as you studied that virus, you discovered that it had a message embedded in its DNA. And now, we – or rather, you – are trying to work out an encryption key that can be used to send them an answer. Them – whoever they are.’

  He was finished, but the room remained cloaked in silence. He squirmed in his chair, feeling an urge to defend himself.

  ‘It’s preposterous, I know it is, but it’s an explanation that takes all known factors into account. The Aricebo message could have been an early, unsuccessful attempt to answer them, formatted with the right matrix but without knowing how to encrypt it. And now we’re all sitting here with a contagious virus and a message we need to answer, but no idea as to how.’