The Filter Trap

by Lorentz, A. L.

  Lee knew from training that if she had any chance of surviving the impact, it had to be feet-first. As she looked up, grasping for a stronger grip on the flopping parachute, she realized she was close enough to the ground that she could see debris rising up in her peripheral vision. The dust was not as thick down here and the spikes towered up into the dark, debris-laden sky. Other things, moving things, legs perhaps, moved through the dust like shadows of giant spiders.

  She saw all of it in a fraction of a second. Not her life flashing before her eyes, but what her eyes could see slowing down, her well-oxygenated brain doing heavy lifting in a desperate attempt to find some way out from the impending crash.

  Time sped up again. A snap. Her legs went limp and her head pushed sideways with the dust and strange swirling lines, seemingly all at once. The black void took over even the dust, vanishing all light, all sense.

  Chapter 15

  “Thank you for joining us, Doctors,” Franks whispered with as much cordiality as he could muster, before taking a seat at the other end of the rounded room. The scientists found seats close to the door, each assuming that more important dignitaries would sit closer to the president.

  Old soldiers with passport-sized medals pinned to their chests casually walked in. Jill felt strange, that as one of few women, the onus was on her to represent her gender, though she hoped it wouldn’t be up to her to argue for intergalactic peace. Despite their mixed feelings towards her, Kam and Allan should support her when the hawks began to crow. Logic should trump emotion.

  Angled translucent panes jutted from the center of the table, nearly high enough to touch the ceiling of a room so dark it obscured the walls. Jill leaned in to study the centerpiece.

  “Crystal?”

  Franks nodded. “Holograms.”

  Can lights in the ceiling cast a warm glow on the heads of the twenty men and women seated at the table, an even mix of politicians in tailored suits and military in pressed dress. They exchanged familiarities amongst themselves, deliberately avoiding the scientists, the only plebeians allowed in the president’s War Room under Cheyenne Mountain.

  Bolton broke with his peers and strongly said, “Welcome, Doctors. Looking forward to hearing your keen insights again.”

  Each thanked the senator in turn, hoping his statement was genuine, as so often politicians are not.

  The president strode in and calmly took his seat. The most noticeable thing wasn’t that the president had entered the room, but that he wore track pants and a runner’s jacket. The worst-dressed man in the room still exuded the command of his office, pointing to a stern, neckless, decorated military man. “Let’s go, General. I wasn’t running down here for my health. I’m aware we have a developing situation.”

  “As you all know, we won’t be able to get a good look at the mother ships with the Chinese satellite for another few hours. You’ve been gathered here because we may not have another few hours. The purpose of the alien attack—”

  “But—” Jill interrupted.

  Pith glared with enmity.

  “Easy, General,” the president calmly cautioned. “The intent of our planet’s newest guests is still up for debate.”

  “Fine! The aliens’ activities in the Mojave and elsewhere remain unclear since our eyes in the sky can’t see through the dust clouds. Radar reports confirm what Lieutenant Green radioed before her plane crashed. She ejected after her aircraft entered an uncontrollable spin when caught in the dust cloud after the objects impacted. Her whereabouts are unknown.

  “However, radar of the objects still in geosynchronous orbit above the desert gives us a clearer picture—this picture.”

  The panels in the middle of the table lit and a large monochrome grouping of shapes rotated in front of everyone. Looking at first like moons or meteors, the view zoomed to show ships reminiscent of yawning clamshells, with spikes connecting the gaps.

  “Devil’s mouth,” said one of the politicians.

  “Thank you, General,” the president said. “The Joint Chiefs have put the option of a nuclear strike on the table. I want the most well-informed opinion possible before I put everyone on Earth at risk. I know the Joint Chiefs think what we see here is an invasion force.”

  The president looked at the scientists and clasped his hands together on the table. “What do you see?”

  “We’ve seen no reason to believe these are hostile beings,” Allan insisted.

  “‘No reason?’ We lost another two damn good Raptor pilots today!” Pith protested.

  “I’m very sorry, General, but I’m not convinced that was an intentional act. You just told me that Lee ejected after losing control. It doesn’t sound like they targeted her or that they were even aware of her. I’m convinced what happened was an automated and benign process.”

  “The flu is an automatic process, and hardly benign!”

  “Mr. President, when we sent the Apollo missions to the Moon did we consider the rights of life forms that were in the way? Were we careful not to crush microbes under our lander when we sent the Viking to Mars? Do we warn bugs to stay out of the way before we drive?”

  “I can see your point, Dr. Sands, but it’s my job to make sure humanity isn’t splattered on an alien’s windscreen, regardless of its intent.”

  Pith didn’t buy it. “The Moon is a dead rock; any alien could see we have life here.”

  “But the Earth teems with life. Could they discern the difference in importance between a man and a tree? At the very least you have to admit they picked a spot where there was hardly anything to kill until we went out to investigate. As the Lieutenant reported, most of their structure hovers above the ground and absorbs heat, literally minimizing the impact of their actions on the local environment. Unless we’re directly fired upon I see no malevolence implied in their actions.”

  “They’ve already killed pilots and trees, which you suggest they can’t tell between. That makes them hostile in my book,” Pith surmised.

  Kam whispered, “He who strikes first admits he’s lost the argument.”

  Pith growled in a low monotone, “A pint of sweat will save a gallon of blood. Save your Chinese proverbs for yoga class, Doctor Douglass.”

  “No need to quote Patton, General,” the president said. “Let’s focus for a minute on what they’re doing. I’ve collated all available data into this projection. I know your intelligence folks had a crack at it already, but our civilian brains haven’t. Doctors?”

  “You said this is radar?” Allan asked. “Do you have infrared?”

  The president didn’t answer, but the view switched to a red and blue false image. The shells of the ships were blue, almost invisible against the background of space. The innards, however, were gleaming with smooth strips of yellow and red going round in concentric circles, heat signatures undulating along the lines of the irregular gland-looking appendage emerging from the shell.

  “That heat signature is indicative of animal life, of living quarters,” Jill said.

  “She’s right, sir,” Pith agreed. “This is just about how a battleship looks from a sub’s infrared, people running around inside. The recommendation from the Army is that we strike while they’re still in orbit and the radiation damage to the Earth is minimized.”

  “My laptop gives off a lot of heat too,” Bolton stated.

  Jill answered, “It could be robots, but the heat signatures are too large. Even our own primitive robots don’t give off that much. I doubt their ship-building technology outpaced ours but their robots didn’t.”

  “What about miniature reactors?” a politician asked.

  “Popular in movies, but extremely inefficient and dangerous in practice. I doubt an advanced society would send thousands of miniature bombs into space. The heat alone would present a large problem on a journey from planet to planet. We’ve seen no evidence of large heat discharges from the orbiting structures, which means the heat signatures are more likely biological and essential to operation, not a byprod
uct.”

  “You said thousands,” Bolton said. “Do you know how many we’re talking about?”

  “That tongue is about a mile long,” Pith answered.

  “Assuming the concentric rings are floors, they might be roughly our size,” Kam added. “If it were an aircraft carrier, how many could you fit?”

  General Pith squared his jaw. “We got about 6,000 on our carriers, and those are about a fifth of a mile and not nearly as wide. If these things are our size I’d say each of those ships has at least 50,000 of ‘em’”

  A hush came over the room.

  “I count twelve ships, are there more?” asked Allan.

  “Yes, there are more,” answered another general.

  The hologram shifted, backing out to a view encompassing the Earth. At several points over the globe the objects followed the Earth’s rotation.

  “They’re starting orbits over Australia and Mongolia. At least ten in each formation.”

  “That’s millions,” the president said. “Docs, I know what the generals are going to tell me. Can you give me one good reason that a peace mission would need two million people to make first contact?”

  Jill was the first to respond. “Refugees.”

  “I’d be afraid to learn from what if that were the case, Doctor. Do we know anything more about them?”

  “Yes,” Allan responded. “We identified very early on that the two signals we detected in Hawaii came from different locations. The Chinese have since verified this as well. Since then we’ve scanned a much broader spectrum and detected many more signals, tens of thousands, possibly millions.”

  Jill took over, as her specialty lay in studying the content of extraplanetary signals.

  “Much of what we’ve received are digital codes, ternary and binary, not direct transmissions of vocal or noise recording, though there are some of those as well. The interesting thing is that some of the uncoded transmissions may be language communications.”

  Pith looked at Kam. “Glad to see Dr. Douglass will finally have something to do.”

  “Yes, well, translating an alien language is virtually impossible without any frame of reference. However, we were able to discern possible usage of numbers. Our best guess at translation is that they were coordinates and flight plans for Earth.

  “We may have completely different social structures, bodies, and so on, but you can’t build spacefaring ships without math. They have to have an understanding of numbers to get here. We’ve also calibrated the timing of the messages with changes in activity, the last of which is the final approach. It’s extremely unlikely that any intelligence could navigate to a specific spot on a spinning planet in orbit without operating on a numerical system of measurement. If aliens listened to ten of our satellite launches they’d figure out pretty quickly which sounds were higher numbers and which lower. We’re just doing that in reverse.”

  The president turned. “How do you know what alien numbers sound like?”

  “In those terms, we don’t. We’re looking at repetition in the signals, not a ‘sound’ per se.”

  “But our communications, even a lot of civilian stuff, is encrypted. How do you know theirs isn’t?” Bolton asked.

  “Yes, we tried to account for that. With the general’s help, we programmed these signals into Neutrino, DARPA’s highest active intelligence mainframe. It collected and matched them on common sounds. From this we matched them against a composite of all human languages, which we know reference certain things more than any other. For example, across all major languages certain descriptive words indicating personage or possession come up far more often.”

  “Wait, so you think we share common speech patterns?”

  “No, we simply wanted to see on a macro level if their signals contained the kind of patterning that all human communications do. We obviously can’t ‘hear’ how the sound is intended since we don’t know how the original sound was encoded or amplified, but we can recognize that it is packets of information—or light, rather—that’s invisible to us. We have instruments that can detect the electrons this light disturbs on contact.”

  Kam wished Natalie could be there. He was now in the awkward position of explaining electromagnetism to generals with fewer stars on their shoulders than decades since their last physics class. She had a great way of simplifying it all, especially when she started talking about the encryption in her father’s company’s radio chips. Ironically, they both sort of had the same profession: translating signals. Kam hoped nobody brought up encryption again because he wasn’t sure if what he’d said was technically correct; he’d only tried to repeat what the Air Force technicians had said to him when they studied the data together.

  Honestly, until they could figure out how to properly listen to or read the signals, they weren’t of much use to Kam. He needed to keep up his standing in front of the president, Pith and others, if only to justify the corporal that helped rescue him, who may now be just as dead as the lieutenant that rescued Jill and Allan. He had to word it just right. He was a linguist, so if he couldn't craft a convincing few sentences then maybe he shouldn't be here after all.

  “These disturbances in electrons by the electromagnetic radiation are regular and correspond to events in space and time from multiple transmission sources, so we doubt they are random results of encrypted data. We are intercepting intentionally transmitted non-random information.”

  Allan spoke up again. “Which we believe is further proof they’re benign organisms; they have nothing to hide from us.”

  “Doctor, you’ve used your own penchant for analogy to undo your logic. Remember your bug on the windshield? Do you think the driver cared whether the bug could understand his GPS directions? I don’t mean to dismiss all the hard work you’ve done on these signals in such a short amount of time, but all you’ve shown is that these harbor some type of intelligence, a mobile intelligence.

  “However, we’ve got folks on the ground and in the air that need an answer. Does any of your work tell us anything useful about these aliens?”

  “Yes. After our last meeting we were able to use the Wenchang satellite to learn more about our new solar system. We’ve identified multiple large objects in interior and exterior orbits to us around the same Sun. What’s more, the signals we’ve been observing are coming both from the craft in orbit, and from planets in higher and lower orbits than Earth. Orbital simulations can now show that our visitors may have started their journey from the higher of the two.”

  Jill took it from there. “Mr. President, part of SETI’s search for intelligent life elsewhere in the universe was to recognize pollution current or former civilizations might leave behind. One of the solutions to Fermi’s Paradox suggests that all intelligent species tend to destroy themselves through nuclear annihilation or environmental pollution.”

  “The Galactic Filter,” Bolton interrupted.

  “Yes, Robin Hanson’s Great Filter Hypothesis. A series of gates, the last of which being an apocalyptic event or economic depletion that would stop a species from colonizing the galaxy. Since we came all the way up to that last gate, it has always been assumed either mankind is an exception to the filter, or it still lies just in front of us.”

  “Sounds more like we stumbled into a great big trap than a filter,” Pith puffed and pointed at a bottle of water on the table. “Filters let the good stuff through.”

  The president raised an eyebrow. “Not to be unpatriotic, General, but God, guns, and country might not be the universe’s idea of ‘good stuff.’”

  “Well, I think Doctor Tarmor was just telling us about how these guys up in orbit might be made of even worse stuff. Did I guess that right?”

  “Sort of, General. At SETI we became very good at postulating on potential markers for those filtering causes, but never found them in spectral analyses of identified exoplanets. Until now.

  “I would stake my professional reputation that our early readings of this planet in exterior orbit to the
Earth, where our visitors may come from, show massive quantities of what we’d consider pollution, maybe even nuclear radiation. It’s possible that the inhabitants require this kind of atmosphere to survive, or adapted to it, but in light of Fermi’s Paradox and the Great Filter Hypothesis we have to consider the alternative—”

  “They never avoided world war three,” the president finished Jill’s sentence. “That doesn’t bode well for their intentions here.”

  “Maybe it builds a further case they’re refugees?” Bolton noted and pointed at Jill.

  “Then why the silence?” Pith asked. “Refugees wave a white flag; have any of these signals been broadcast directly toward us?”

  “Although it would be hard to answer definitively,” Kam responded, “there have been no apparent positive attempts at contact.”

  “Doctor Tarmor,” Bolton continued, “you wrote the president’s rules of engagement for first contact. Did you not say that the lack of an announcement and number of beings would indicate a harmful intent?”

  “Yes, I did,” Jill said coldly, her own research being used against her.

  “Well, that’s enough for me,” Bolton said, folding his arms and leaning back in his chair.

  “Dr. Sands, you said we’ve received signals from another planet as well?”

  “Correct, Mr. President. There appear to be a series of much weaker repeating transmissions coming from another planet interior to our orbit. The transmission was thought to be code at first, but it seems more likely now to be a monotone repeating set of phrases sent in a wide range of frequencies.”

  “A planet of monks?” asked Pith.

  “You’re focusing on the wrong part, I think,” the president said, turned on to something. “I’m not immune to the intrigue of SETI’s mission. There’s a reason I already knew what names to put on my safe list before we found out other intelligences were behind all this. A wide range of frequencies is what we’d expect from aliens that wanted to be heard, right? Maximize your exposure across different types of receivers. Like emailing, texting and calling someone at the same time, you’re bound to get through somehow.”