A Message

Sebastian Lem stared at the flickering screen in front of him. The culmination of a decade’s work was about to manifest in front of him and on every television screen the world over as the “Penulti-mate” computer completed its calculations.

For the past ten years, Lem had been a martyr to his cause and had been in self-imposed exile, away from the corporate world, run by the commercial behemoths and driven by advertising, outside. It was ten years ago that Lem had been sifting through terabytes of data and had found the telltale blip that was to signal the outset of a search for his Holy Grail. The anomaly was one of many millions returned by the myriad home computers running the SETI@HOME client program to his computer for analysis. Invariably these blips would be from areas of the sky known to contain bodies that emitted natural radio signals. They would be checked and this confirmed to be the case. This rogue anomaly did not pass the tests though.

Further analysis of the signal revealed patterns that almost certainly confirmed it as having an artificial source. To confirm this and eliminate the possibility that the signal was not merely terrestrial interference, the Arecibo radio telescope, which had originally picked up the anomaly, was pointed at the source once more and confirmed that the signal was still being transmitted. A further two radio telescopes returned the same findings and the SETI community grew excited.

Lem travelled Europe and the Americas consulting with mathematicians and astronomers from the Independent Collective. The “Indies” was a loosely formed, resource-sharing group of SETI scientists that operated outside of the corporate constraints of the mainstream scientific community to their own ends and for the advancement of the sciences for the benefit of all and not just the behemoths. The financial rewards were poor compared to the conformist scientific community but independence was a price worth paying to be able to live in accommodation other than that provided by the corporates. Corporate accommodation was luxurious in comparison to his own hut, miles from any civilisation but his hut looked out upon the real world and not an artificial “nature scene”, projected onto the wall, complete with corporate logo in the top left-hand corner.

The Indies’ co-operative nature afforded him free berth with his peers whilst he travelled. This was good, as it was beyond his means to pay the premiums demanded by the hotel corporations for an ad-free room. Everywhere that one travelled in this corporate world, advertising was there. Sometimes it was subtle, other times it was sensational. Always it was targeted and effective. Even in his hideaway, the natural scene outside was rendered artificial by the McDonald’s logo, occupying its three-month tenure on the surface of the moon as it was beamed from Earth. Oh, to escape! Lem thought.

Following the initial discovery of the radio signal, two years of study revealed a pattern. The signal was being broadcast for finite periods of time. First for one second, then a pause. Two seconds of transmission and another gap, then three seconds, a gap and five seconds. The lengths of transmissions were prime numbers. Trillions of binary digits made up the transmissions and the equipment receiving them was not powerful enough to receive them over the vast distances that they were travelling in their entirety. There were gaps. Study of the gaps between the transmissions revealed a further fact: that the gaps were growing shorter. The source was moving closer. Further, more powerful radio telescopes were needed and SETI made applications for government funding. The whole phenomenon was being withheld from the public’s attention for fear of mass hysteria and the requests were rebuked.

Against the Indies’ better judgement, finance was secured secretly from the corporations. They got all that they asked for. New telescopes were constructed and the binary signals were eventually received in their entirety. Something was still missing though: if each “1” and “0” represented a square in a grid to be filled in or left blank, they were lacking the formation of that grid and without it, the data was meaningless. Analysis concentrated on the lengths of the transmissions: one second, two, three, five, seven, eleven… Two prime numbers were absent from the eventual data: 17’987 and 25’693: the axes of the grid.

With all of the accumulated information, “Penulti-mate” was now placing each binary digit in its rightful place in the grid to form the image that the world awaited. Lem’s screen blinked and displayed an image, blurred and indecipherable. He zoomed out and it began to become clearer. As he scrolled upwards and zoomed outwards, a word manifested at the top of the image: “enjoy” in stylised white letters on a red background. We will, he thought as he contemplated for a second the importance of this culmination of his work.

Further and further he zoomed out and eventually the whole image was contained within the screen: “Enjoy.” “Coca Cola”.

(C) Steve Laker 2003