Obelisk

by Stephen Baxter

  I wasn’t surprised he wouldn’t know. ‘That’s British Sign Language. We’ve all been learning it for years – actually since Dad’s funeral, when we hooked up with Barry and his wife, and we found out they had a little deaf girl. Hannah, do you remember? She’s eight now. We’ve all been learning to talk to her. The kids find it fun, I think. You know, it’s an irony that you’re involved in a billion-pound project to talk to aliens six thousand light years away, yet it doesn’t trouble you that you can’t speak to a little girl in your own family.’

  He looked at me blankly. I was mouthing words that obviously meant nothing to him, intellectually or emotionally. That was Wilson.

  He just started talking about work. ‘We’ve got six years’ worth of data now – six pulses, each a second long. There’s a lot of information in there. They use a technique like our own wavelength-division multiplexing, with the signal divided into sections each a kilohertz or so wide. We’ve extracted gigabytes …’

  I gave up. I went and made a pot of coffee, and brought it back to the study. When I returned he was still standing where I’d left him, like a switched-off robot. He took a coffee and sat down.

  I prompted, ‘Gigabytes?’

  ‘Gigabytes. By comparison the whole Encyclopaedia Britannica is just one gigabyte. The problem is we can’t make sense of it.’

  ‘How do you know it’s not just noise?’

  ‘We have techniques to test for that. Information theory. Based on experiments to do with talking to dolphins, actually.’ He dug a tablet out of his pocket and showed me some of the results.

  The first was simple enough, called a ‘Zipf graph’. You break your message up into what look like components – maybe words, letters, phonemes in English. Then you do a frequency count: how many letter As, how many Es, how many Rs. If you have random noise you’d expect roughly equal numbers of the letters, so you’d get a flat distribution. If you have a clean signal without information content, a string of identical letters, A, A, A, you’d get a graph with a spike. Meaningful information gives you a slope, somewhere in between those horizontal and vertical extremes.

  ‘And we get a beautiful log-scale minus one power law,’ he said, showing me. ‘There’s information in there all right. But there is a lot of controversy over identifying the elements themselves. The Eaglets did not send down neat binary code. The data is frequency modulated, their language full of growths and decays. More like a movie of a garden growing on fast-forward than any human narrative. I wonder if it has something to do with that young sky of theirs. Anyhow, after the Zipf, we tried a Shannon entropy analysis.’

  This is about looking for relationships between the signal elements. You work out conditional probabilities: given pairs of elements, how likely is it that you’ll see U following Q? Then you go on to higher-order ‘entropy levels’, in the jargon, starting with triples: how likely is it to find G following I and N?

  ‘As a comparison, dolphin languages get to third- or fourth-order entropy. We humans get to eighth or ninth.’

  ‘And the Eaglets?’

  ‘The entropy level breaks our assessment routines. We think it’s around order thirty.’ He regarded me, seeing if I understood. ‘It is information, but much more complex than any human language. It might be like English sentences with a fantastically convoluted structure – triple or quadruple negatives, overlapping clauses, tense changes.’ He grinned. ‘Or triple entendres.’

  ‘They’re smarter than us.’

  ‘Oh, yes. And this is proof, if we needed it, that the message isn’t meant specifically for us.’

  I got it. ‘Because if it were, they’d have dumbed it down. How smart do you think they are? Smarter than us, certainly, but—’

  ‘Are there limits? Well, maybe. You might imagine that an older culture would plateau, once they’ve figured out the essential truths of the universe, and a technology optimal for their needs … There’s no reason to think progress need be onward and upward forever. Then again, perhaps there are fundamental limits to information processing. Perhaps a brain that gets too complex is prone to crashes and overloads. There may be a trade-off between complexity and stability.’

  I poured him more coffee. ‘Am I supposed to feel demoralised? I went to Cambridge, remember. I’m used to being surrounded by entities smarter than I am.’

  He grinned. ‘That’s up to you. But the Eaglets are a new category of being for us. This isn’t like the Incas meeting the Spaniards, a mere technological gap. They had a basic humanity in common. We may find the gulf between us and the Eaglets is forever unbridgeable. Remember how Dad used to read Gulliver’s Travels to us?’

  The memory made me smile. ‘Those talking horses used to scare the wits out of me.’

  ‘Yeah. They were genuinely smarter than us. And how did Gulliver react to them? He was totally overawed. He tried to imitate them, and even after they kicked him out he always despised his own kind, because they weren’t as good as the horses.’

  ‘The revenge of Mister Ed,’ I said.

  He just looked at me blankly. ‘Maybe that will be the way for us – we’ll ape the Eaglets or defy them. Maybe the mere knowledge of the existence of a race smarter than your own is death.’

  ‘Is all this being released to the public?’

  ‘Oh, yes. We’re affiliated to NASA, and they have an explicit open-book policy. Besides, the Institute is as leaky as hell. There’s no point even trying to keep it quiet. But we’re releasing the news gradually and soberly. Nobody’s noticing much. You hadn’t, had you?’

  ‘So what do you think the signal is? Some kind of super-encyclopaedia?’

  He snorted. ‘Maybe. That’s the fond hope among the contact optimists. But when the European colonists turned up on foreign shores, their first impulse wasn’t to hand over encyclopaedias or histories, but—’

  ‘Bibles.’

  ‘Yes. It could be something less disruptive than that. A vast work of art, for instance. But why would they send such a thing? Maybe it’s a funeral pyre. Or a pharaoh’s funerary monument. Look what I built.’

  ‘So what do you want of me?’

  He faced me. I thought it was clear he was trying to figure out, in his clumsy way, how to get me to do whatever it was he wanted. ‘Well, what do you think? This makes translating the most obscure human language a cakewalk, and we’ve got nothing like a Rosetta stone. Look, Jack, our information processing suites at the Institute are pretty smart theoretically, but they are limited. Running off processors and memory store not much beefier than this.’ He waved his tablet. ‘Whereas the software brutes that do your data mining are an order of magnitude more powerful.’

  The software I developed and maintained mined the endless torrents of data culled on every individual in the country, from your minute-to-minute movements on private or public transport to the porn you accessed and how you hid it from your partner. We tracked your patterns of behaviour, and deviations from those patterns. The terrorists and other trouble-makers were needles in a haystack, of which the rest of us were the millions of straws.

  This continual live data mining took up monstrous memory storage and processing power. A few times I’d visited the big Home Office computers in their hardened bunkers under New Scotland Yard: giant superconducting neural nets suspended in rooms so cold your breath crackled. There was nothing like it in the private sector, or in academia.

  Which, I realised, was why Wilson had come to me today.

  ‘You want me to run your ET signal through my data mining suites.’ He immediately had me hooked, but I wasn’t about to admit it. I might have rejected the academic life, but curiosity burned in me as strongly as it ever did in Wilson. I had to put up a token fight, though. ‘How do you imagine I’d get permission for that?’

  He waved that away as a technicality of no interest. ‘What we’re looking for is patterns embedded deep in the dat
a, layers down, any kind of recognisable starter for us in decoding the whole thing … Obviously software designed to look for patterns in the way I use my travel cards is going to have to be adapted to seek useful correlations in the Eaglet data. It will be an unprecedented technical challenge.

  ‘In a way that’s a good thing. It will likely take generations to decode this stuff, if we ever do, the way it took the Renaissance Europeans generations to make sense of the legacy of antiquity. The sheer time factor is a culture-shock prophylactic.

  ‘So are you going to bend the rules for me, Jack? Come on, man. Remember what Dad said. We both ate Turing’s apples … Solving puzzles like this is what we do.’

  He wasn’t entirely without guile. He knew how to entice me. He turned out to be wrong about the culture shock, however.

  2036 AD

  Two armed coppers escorted me through the Institute building. The big glass box was entirely empty save for me and the coppers and a sniffer dog. The morning outside was bright, a cold spring day, the sky a serene blue, elevated from Wilson’s latest madness.

  Wilson was sitting in the Clarke project office, beside a screen across which data displays flickered. He had big slabs of Semtex strapped around his waist, and some kind of dead man’s trigger in his hand. My brother, reduced at last to a cliché suicide bomber. The coppers stayed safely outside.

  ‘We’re secure.’ Wilson glanced around. ‘They can see us but they can’t hear us. I’m confident of that. My firewalls—’ When I walked towards him he held up his hands. ‘No closer. I’ll blow it, I swear.’

  ‘Christ, Wilson.’ But I stood still, shut up, and deliberately calmed down.

  I knew that my boys, now in their teens, would be watching every move on the spy-hack news channels. Maybe nobody could hear us, but Hannah, now a beautiful eleven-year-old, had plenty of friends who could read lips. That would never occur to Wilson. But it determined how I was going to play this. If I was to die today, here with my lunatic of a brother, I wasn’t going to let my boys remember their father broken by fear.

  I sat down. There was a six-pack of warm soda on the bench. I think I’ll always associate warm soda with Wilson. I took one, popped the tab and sipped; I could taste nothing. ‘You want one?’

  ‘No,’ he said bitterly. ‘Make yourself at home, though.’

  ‘What a fucking idiot you are, Wilson. How did it ever come to this?’

  ‘You should know. You helped me.’

  ‘And by God I’ve regretted it ever since,’ I snarled back at him. ‘You got me sacked, you moron. And since France, every nut job on the planet has me targeted, and my kids. We have police protection.’

  ‘Don’t blame me. You chose to help me.’

  I stared at him. ‘That’s called loyalty. A quality which you, entirely lacking it yourself, see only as a weakness to exploit.’

  ‘Well, whatever. What does it matter now? Look, Jack, I need your help.’

  ‘This is turning into a pattern.’

  He glanced at his screen. ‘I need you to buy me time, to give me a chance to complete this project.’

  ‘Why should I care about your project?’

  ‘It’s not my project. It never has been. Surely you understand that much. It’s the Eaglets’ …’

  Everything had changed in the three years since I had begun to run Wilson’s message through the big Home Office computers beneath New Scotland Yard – all under the radar of my bosses; they’d never have dared risk exposing their precious supercooled brains to such unknowns. Well, Wilson had been right. My data mining had quickly turned up recurring segments, chunks of organised data differing only in detail.

  And it had been Wilson’s intuition that these things were bits of executable code: programs you could run. Even as expressed in the Eaglets’ odd flowing language, he thought he recognised logical loops, start and stop statements. Mathematics may or may not be universal, but computing seems to be – and my brother had found Turing machines, buried deep in an alien database.

  Wilson translated the segments into a human mathematical programming language, and set them to run on a dedicated processor. They turned out to be like viruses. Once downloaded on almost any computer substrate they organised themselves, investigated their environment, started to multiply, and quickly grew, accessing the data banks that had been downloaded from the stars with them. Then they started asking questions of the operators: simple yes-no, true-false exchanges that soon built up a common language.

  ‘The Eaglets didn’t send us a message,’ Wilson had whispered to me on the phone in the small hours; at the height of it he had worked twenty-four seven. ‘They downloaded an AI. And now the AI is learning to speak to us.’

  It was a way to resolve a ferocious communications challenge. The Eaglets were sending their message to the whole Galaxy; they knew nothing about the intelligence, cultural development, or even the physical form of their audiences. So they sent an all-purpose artificial mind embedded in the information stream itself, able to learn and start a local dialogue with the receivers. Any receivers.

  This above all else proved to me how smart the Eaglets must be. It didn’t comfort me at all that some commentators pointed out that this ‘Hoyle strategy’ had been anticipated by some human thinkers; it’s one thing to anticipate, another to build. I wondered in fact if those viruses found it a challenge to dumb down their message for creatures capable of only ninth-order Shannon entropy, as we were.

  And of course the news that there was information in the Eaglets’ beeps leaked almost immediately. For running the Eaglet data through the Home Office mining suites I was sacked, arrested – but, such was the evident priority of the project, I was bailed on condition I went back to work on the Eaglet stuff under police and Home Office supervision.

  Because only the Clarke telescope could pick up the signal, the scientists at the Clarke Institute and the consortium of governments they answered to were able to keep control of the information itself. And that information soon looked as if it would become extremely valuable. Even the Eaglets’ programming and data compression techniques, what we could make of them, had immediate commercial value. When patented by the UK government and licensed, an information revolution began that added a hundred billion euros to Britain’s balance of payments in the first year. Governments and corporations outside the loop jumped up and down with fury.

  Then Wilson and his team, through a variety of channels, started to publish what they were learning of the Eaglets themselves.

  We still don’t know anything about what they look like, how they live – or even if they’re corporeal or not. But they are old, vastly old compared to us. Their cultural records go back a million years, maybe ten times as long as we’ve been human, and even then they built their civilisation on the ruins of others. But they regard themselves as a young species. They live in awe of even older ones, whose presence they have glimpsed deep in the turbulent core of the Galaxy.

  Not surprisingly, the Eaglets are fascinated by time and its processes. One of Wilson’s team foolishly speculated that the Eaglets actually made a religion of time, deifying the one universal that will erode us all in the end. That caused a lot of trouble. Some people took up the time creed with enthusiasm, and they looked for parallels in human philosophies, the Hindu and the Mayan. If the Eaglets really were smarter than us, they said, they must be closer to the true god, and we should follow them. Others, led by the conventional religions, moved sharply in the opposite direction. Minor wars broke out over a creed that had been entirely unknown to humanity five years before, and which nobody on Earth remotely understood.

  Then the economic dislocations began, as those new techniques for data handling made whole industries obsolescent. That was predictable; it was as if the aliens had invaded cyberspace. Luddite types began sabotaging the software houses turning out the new-generation systems, and battles broke out in th
e corporate universe, themselves on the economic scale of small wars.

  Amid all the economic, political, religious and philosophical turbulence, it was evident that if anybody had dreamed that encountering the alien would unite us around our common humanity, they were dead wrong.

  ‘This is the danger of speed,’ Wilson had said to me, just weeks before he wired himself up with Semtex. ‘If we’d been able to take it slow, unwrapping the message would have been more like an exercise in normal science, and we could have absorbed it. Grown with it. Instead, thanks to the viruses, it’s been like a revelation, a pouring of holy knowledge into our heads. Revelations tend to be destabilising. Look at Jesus. Just three centuries after the Crucifixion, Christianity had taken over the whole Roman empire …’

  Then it got worse. A bunch of Algerian patriots used pirated copies of the Eaglet viruses to hammer the electronic infrastructure of France’s major cities. As everything from sewage to air traffic control crashed, the country was simultaneously assaulted with train bombs, bugs in the water supply, a dirty nuke in Orleans. It was a force-multiplier attack, in the jargon; the toll of death and injury was a shock, even by the standards of the fourth decade of the bloody twenty-first century. And our counter-measures were useless in the face of the ETI viruses.

  That was when the governments decided the Eaglet project had to be shut down, or at the very least put under tight control. But my brother wasn’t having any of that.

  ‘None of this is the fault of the Eaglets,’ he said now, an alien apologist with Semtex strapped to his waist. ‘They didn’t mean to harm us in any way.’

  ‘Then what do they want?’

  ‘Our help …’

  And he was going to provide it. With, in turn, my help.

  ‘Why me? I was sacked, remember.’

  ‘They’ll listen to you. The police. Because you’re my brother. You’re useful.’

  ‘Useful?’ At times Wilson seemed unable to see people as anything other than assets, even his own family. I sighed. ‘Tell me what you want.’