Post by scintor on Apr 10, 2008 23:25:04 GMT -5
I am rewriting the prologue and it is a bit lengthy so here is a smaller sample than my last posts. I am trying to transition the reader from our world to the world of the story. As always, brutal hoinesty is appreciated.
Prologue:
A Voice From the Heavens
“Hello.”
“Bob you’ve got to get down here! It’s finally happened!”
“Do you have any idea what time it is?”
“Yeah it’s ... 3:23 in the morning, but that not important.”
“What, did we lose the main hard drive or did you make immortal on World of Wonder?”
“No, no, it’s the real thing! I ran the data ten times. It’s finally happened. We’ve got honest to God communication from an alien intelligence!”
“You’re sure? Holy crap! I’ll be down there right away, Charlie.”
“Who do we call? Who can we talk to?”
“Let me get down there. We’ve got procedures for this,” Reaching for the lamp in the darkness, he managed to knock both it and his glasses to the floor. “We are going to call the people at NASA, they will get in touch with the right people once they have confirmed it. I’ll be there in 15 minutes. Alright?”
“It feels like a dream come true.”
“Lets hope so.”
***************
Two days later in NASA headquarters.
Gary Griffin, Director of NASA, sat down at an emergency meeting of all his department heads. “So John, what’s the big news?”
John Norman, head of SETI, stood up uncomfortably, took a deep breath and said, “The SETI program has been searching the skies for alien signals for decades now. Although we now have the world’s largest collection of buzzes and static, verifiable extra-terrestrial communication has eluded us ... until now.”
“You saying you’ve got something concrete?”
“More than that. The signal itself is perfect. It’s clear, it’s strong, and it has passed every test we could come up with to prove it came from an intelligent source, while ruling out a man-made signal. We were having quite the party in my department, until we started trying to figure out where the signal is coming from. That’s when things stopped making sense.”
“So, where’s the problem?”
“The signal is too clear and strong to have come from another star.” Mr. Norman took another audible deep breath. “We did some preliminary triangulation, and we think it is coming from within the solar system.”
“Could be one of our signals bouncing off of something?”
“No, we checked that first. There are no planets or known objects in that section of the sky right now.”
“So, what can it be?”
“It’s a non human communication signal coming from deep space somewhere within the solar system. If you want to know anything more, we need additional resources to investigate it further.”
“What kind of resources are you talking about?”
“We need radio telescope time, super computer priority and cryptanalyst people from the NSA. We basically need top priority for everything until we figure out what is going on with this signal.”
“That’s an awful lot of resources, John.”
“Gary, we have an alien transmission coming from within our solar system. If I wasn’t sure of that, I wouldn’t have asked for everything and risked flushing my career. As soon as this gets out, there are going to be a lot of people wanting answers, and if we don’t have them we darn well better be looking for them using everything at our disposal.”
“John, if you’re wrong about this, I’m going to skin you personally. Colonel Mather, do we have a plan for this?”
“Um, well I think so. I’d have to look it up. I mean, we have plans for alien contact, but I don’t think any of them cover this specifically. It’s been a while since I read through them, but I can tell you that in all of them, as soon as alien contact is confirmed, everything becomes top secret and top priority.”
“OK, we’ll run with that. John, all of NASA is at you disposal. Any request he has gets priority over everything else. No one says anything to anyone who doesn’t need to know and doesn’t have security clearance. All of us will meet here at 1:00 every day until we figure out what this thing is or it turns out to be a hoax and I go to jail for strangling John.”
***************
Three days later in a briefing room in the pentagon.
The room is filled with men and women in uniform. Some of them wear the uniforms of the military, but most wear the uniform business suits of high government office or bureaucracy. Joseph Paulson, the Secretary of Homeland Security, came to the podium and the room immediately quieted down. “Ladies and Gentlemen we have a situation unlike any we have ever had before. Five days ago, Mr. Norman’s organization, the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, found what they were looking for in the form of alien communication. NASA confirmed that the signal is alien in both origin and content, and began looking for the source. They triangulated the source and discovered two important facts: The signal was coming from an empty area in the outer portion of our own solar system, and the signal is moving on a course that will eventually take it to Earth.
General Samuel Masters, Head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff piped up, “Are you saying they have found real, honest to God aliens?”
“That is exactly what I am saying, General . . . and they’re coming here.” He tried to meet the eyes of as many people as he could as he spoke. “The other thing that has become obvious, is that they’re not trying to communicate with us. We are just picking us noise of them talking amongst themselves.”
“How long until they get here?”
“NASA and the NSA are still working on that. The best estimate that they have so far is between ten and fifteen years.”
“At least that gives us some breathing space.”
“And we better use the time we have wisely. The Department of Homeland Security has in its charter the authority to deal with aliens, but they were talking about people from other countries, not creatures from outer space. It’s going to take a combined effort from everyone here to find out everything we can about our visitors, and more importantly, what to do about them.”
Director Terrence Stone of the CIA raised a hand, “How long do you think we can keep a lid on this kind of information?”
“Secrecy is not the biggest problem we face, panic is. It’s not going to take long for this to get out to the general public, and when it does, they will have a lot of questions. If we don’t have good, solid answers people will die and lives will be ruined. If we can do our jobs right, an awful lot of grief can be avoided.”
***************
Two weeks later the Counsel on Alien Relations meets in a high security bunker under Andrews Air Force Base
“Mr. Griffin, what does NASA have to report?”
“It’s been a really busy week for us Mr Secretary. We can finally lay to rest the question of whether this is a hoax or not. Three of our orbital telescopes have conclusively linked the some of the signals to visible objects. This completely rules out any kind of hoax or mistake; They’re real.”
“So, there’s more than one?”
“Many, many more. There are entire fleets of these things.”
“What do you mean by fleets? How many are there and what do they look like?”
“OK, let me back up for a minute and go through this in a clear and thorough manner. Up to this point we had been assuming that it was a single object or possibly a group of objects. That turned out to be wrong. There are three distinct groups of widely separated objects.”
“How did you miss that?”
“The last group, which is the farthest away, but it’s putting out 99% of the signals. This group is 22 AUs out by the orbit of Uranus. We can’t see anything smaller than 100 kilometers at that distance unless it’s really bright, and so we weren’t surprised when we didn’t see anything out there. The radio telescopes are picking up plenty of signals, even if we can’t see them yet. I have some of my people giving me numbers as high as 2,000 broadcast sources, but we won’t know for sure until they get a lot closer.”
“Why is that?”
“They are moving in relation to us, and they might be moving in relation to each other. Trying to count them now is like trying to count a school of swimming fish. Once they get close enough to see, we should be able to get a better head count. Their course and speed will put this ‘main fleet’ near Earth in twelve years.
“The ‘second fleet’ were the guys who were throwing all of our calculations off. They don’t make much noise as compared to the ‘main fleet,’ but they are much closer at 12 AUs. The problem was that they were exactly in a straight lone between earth and the ‘main fleet’ when we first discovered the signal. They have since moved a bit more out of line which has made them much easier to distinguish. These are the ones that one of our orbital telescopes saw three days ago.”
“Do we know what they look like?”
“Not really. They are still too far out to show up as anything more than really faint smudges on even the best optical telescope. If we didn’t know where to look because of the signals, we still wouldn’t have noticed them yet. Our current best guess as to how many are in this fleet is around 300 transmission sources. They should arrive in about 10 years.”
“If they are so far apart, how come they will arrive so close together?”
“The ‘second fleet’ is heading straight for us and is right now moving much faster than the ‘main fleet.’ The ‘main fleet’ is on a different course that looks like it will use some of the outer planets to speed them up like we have with our space probes. If they do the same thing that we would do, they should be able to reach us in twelve years while saving huge amounts of fuel.”
“Isn’t that assuming a lot?”
“Yeah, but what else are we going to do? We can only guess and then watch to see if they do it. We don’t have a lot to work with right now, but we can only do our best and tell you when we see anything that means we guessed wrong.”
“So, is that all of them?”
“No. Just yesterday, an American team of astronomers in Chile noticed a group of objects near the Asteroid belt whose course might take them near Earth. We checked them out and are pretty sure that they are alien craft. They are following the same path as the ‘second fleet,’ only they are moving much faster and should be near Earth in only five years. There are only eight to ten of them and my people can decide between calling them the ‘scout fleet’ or the ‘third fleet.’ Anyway, they aren’t sending out any signals we can detect, and they’re still too far away to get a good picture.”
“Are there any more?”
“Not so far, but believe me, we are searching constantly now. We’ll check the most likely areas first and then do a full scan of the heavens, but it will take time before we’re sure.
“How long?”
“A few months to cover the whole sky and then a few years to do a thorough search.”
“Years? We may not have years!”
“We only have so many telescopes and so many people to do the work. New people and equipment will help cut down the time, but even then, the solar system is an unimaginably big place and it takes time to look everywhere.”
“Gentlemen, that’s enough. NASA will be doing the best possible job and we will all give them as much support as we can. The same will be expected of everyone here when they are called upon.” Secretary Paulson’s outburst seemed to be enough to keep things under control, so he continued, “Mr Griffin, have we learned anything from their signals yet?”
“We have analyzed the signals with the help of the NSA, and so far, have found out very little. The communication seems to be high speed data transfer, of the type that computers use to communicate with each other. It is not a spoken language, nor video transmission of any type, as far as we can tell. We are nowhere close to being able to read this data yet, but we are starting to get little things like ‘start of message’ and ‘end of message’ and just possibly individual craft designations.”
“So you’re saying that there’s no chance of communicating with them?”
“Not exactly, there are a series of mathematical protocols that have been designed by scientists to theoretically talk to an alien race. Unfortunately, this requires both parties to be co-operating on the task. We’ve started sending the signals, but so far they have not replied.”
“So what if they don’t respond?”
“Then it is out of my hands, and it becomes your job to decide if they are hostile or not.”
“How the heck can we know if they’re hostile.”
“It’s still pretty early to make such a decision, but the military and the scientists at NASA agree that it doesn’t look good so far. The sheer number of ships is a very bad sign, which is made worse by the fact that they haven’t tried to talk to us as far as we can tell. There is always the possibility that they are traders, nomads or refugees, but I would have expected them to have been trying to talk to us long before we found them.”
“So, what are the other possibilities?”
“Migration or invasion, and either of these almost guarantee war.”
Prologue:
A Voice From the Heavens
“Hello.”
“Bob you’ve got to get down here! It’s finally happened!”
“Do you have any idea what time it is?”
“Yeah it’s ... 3:23 in the morning, but that not important.”
“What, did we lose the main hard drive or did you make immortal on World of Wonder?”
“No, no, it’s the real thing! I ran the data ten times. It’s finally happened. We’ve got honest to God communication from an alien intelligence!”
“You’re sure? Holy crap! I’ll be down there right away, Charlie.”
“Who do we call? Who can we talk to?”
“Let me get down there. We’ve got procedures for this,” Reaching for the lamp in the darkness, he managed to knock both it and his glasses to the floor. “We are going to call the people at NASA, they will get in touch with the right people once they have confirmed it. I’ll be there in 15 minutes. Alright?”
“It feels like a dream come true.”
“Lets hope so.”
***************
Two days later in NASA headquarters.
Gary Griffin, Director of NASA, sat down at an emergency meeting of all his department heads. “So John, what’s the big news?”
John Norman, head of SETI, stood up uncomfortably, took a deep breath and said, “The SETI program has been searching the skies for alien signals for decades now. Although we now have the world’s largest collection of buzzes and static, verifiable extra-terrestrial communication has eluded us ... until now.”
“You saying you’ve got something concrete?”
“More than that. The signal itself is perfect. It’s clear, it’s strong, and it has passed every test we could come up with to prove it came from an intelligent source, while ruling out a man-made signal. We were having quite the party in my department, until we started trying to figure out where the signal is coming from. That’s when things stopped making sense.”
“So, where’s the problem?”
“The signal is too clear and strong to have come from another star.” Mr. Norman took another audible deep breath. “We did some preliminary triangulation, and we think it is coming from within the solar system.”
“Could be one of our signals bouncing off of something?”
“No, we checked that first. There are no planets or known objects in that section of the sky right now.”
“So, what can it be?”
“It’s a non human communication signal coming from deep space somewhere within the solar system. If you want to know anything more, we need additional resources to investigate it further.”
“What kind of resources are you talking about?”
“We need radio telescope time, super computer priority and cryptanalyst people from the NSA. We basically need top priority for everything until we figure out what is going on with this signal.”
“That’s an awful lot of resources, John.”
“Gary, we have an alien transmission coming from within our solar system. If I wasn’t sure of that, I wouldn’t have asked for everything and risked flushing my career. As soon as this gets out, there are going to be a lot of people wanting answers, and if we don’t have them we darn well better be looking for them using everything at our disposal.”
“John, if you’re wrong about this, I’m going to skin you personally. Colonel Mather, do we have a plan for this?”
“Um, well I think so. I’d have to look it up. I mean, we have plans for alien contact, but I don’t think any of them cover this specifically. It’s been a while since I read through them, but I can tell you that in all of them, as soon as alien contact is confirmed, everything becomes top secret and top priority.”
“OK, we’ll run with that. John, all of NASA is at you disposal. Any request he has gets priority over everything else. No one says anything to anyone who doesn’t need to know and doesn’t have security clearance. All of us will meet here at 1:00 every day until we figure out what this thing is or it turns out to be a hoax and I go to jail for strangling John.”
***************
Three days later in a briefing room in the pentagon.
The room is filled with men and women in uniform. Some of them wear the uniforms of the military, but most wear the uniform business suits of high government office or bureaucracy. Joseph Paulson, the Secretary of Homeland Security, came to the podium and the room immediately quieted down. “Ladies and Gentlemen we have a situation unlike any we have ever had before. Five days ago, Mr. Norman’s organization, the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, found what they were looking for in the form of alien communication. NASA confirmed that the signal is alien in both origin and content, and began looking for the source. They triangulated the source and discovered two important facts: The signal was coming from an empty area in the outer portion of our own solar system, and the signal is moving on a course that will eventually take it to Earth.
General Samuel Masters, Head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff piped up, “Are you saying they have found real, honest to God aliens?”
“That is exactly what I am saying, General . . . and they’re coming here.” He tried to meet the eyes of as many people as he could as he spoke. “The other thing that has become obvious, is that they’re not trying to communicate with us. We are just picking us noise of them talking amongst themselves.”
“How long until they get here?”
“NASA and the NSA are still working on that. The best estimate that they have so far is between ten and fifteen years.”
“At least that gives us some breathing space.”
“And we better use the time we have wisely. The Department of Homeland Security has in its charter the authority to deal with aliens, but they were talking about people from other countries, not creatures from outer space. It’s going to take a combined effort from everyone here to find out everything we can about our visitors, and more importantly, what to do about them.”
Director Terrence Stone of the CIA raised a hand, “How long do you think we can keep a lid on this kind of information?”
“Secrecy is not the biggest problem we face, panic is. It’s not going to take long for this to get out to the general public, and when it does, they will have a lot of questions. If we don’t have good, solid answers people will die and lives will be ruined. If we can do our jobs right, an awful lot of grief can be avoided.”
***************
Two weeks later the Counsel on Alien Relations meets in a high security bunker under Andrews Air Force Base
“Mr. Griffin, what does NASA have to report?”
“It’s been a really busy week for us Mr Secretary. We can finally lay to rest the question of whether this is a hoax or not. Three of our orbital telescopes have conclusively linked the some of the signals to visible objects. This completely rules out any kind of hoax or mistake; They’re real.”
“So, there’s more than one?”
“Many, many more. There are entire fleets of these things.”
“What do you mean by fleets? How many are there and what do they look like?”
“OK, let me back up for a minute and go through this in a clear and thorough manner. Up to this point we had been assuming that it was a single object or possibly a group of objects. That turned out to be wrong. There are three distinct groups of widely separated objects.”
“How did you miss that?”
“The last group, which is the farthest away, but it’s putting out 99% of the signals. This group is 22 AUs out by the orbit of Uranus. We can’t see anything smaller than 100 kilometers at that distance unless it’s really bright, and so we weren’t surprised when we didn’t see anything out there. The radio telescopes are picking up plenty of signals, even if we can’t see them yet. I have some of my people giving me numbers as high as 2,000 broadcast sources, but we won’t know for sure until they get a lot closer.”
“Why is that?”
“They are moving in relation to us, and they might be moving in relation to each other. Trying to count them now is like trying to count a school of swimming fish. Once they get close enough to see, we should be able to get a better head count. Their course and speed will put this ‘main fleet’ near Earth in twelve years.
“The ‘second fleet’ were the guys who were throwing all of our calculations off. They don’t make much noise as compared to the ‘main fleet,’ but they are much closer at 12 AUs. The problem was that they were exactly in a straight lone between earth and the ‘main fleet’ when we first discovered the signal. They have since moved a bit more out of line which has made them much easier to distinguish. These are the ones that one of our orbital telescopes saw three days ago.”
“Do we know what they look like?”
“Not really. They are still too far out to show up as anything more than really faint smudges on even the best optical telescope. If we didn’t know where to look because of the signals, we still wouldn’t have noticed them yet. Our current best guess as to how many are in this fleet is around 300 transmission sources. They should arrive in about 10 years.”
“If they are so far apart, how come they will arrive so close together?”
“The ‘second fleet’ is heading straight for us and is right now moving much faster than the ‘main fleet.’ The ‘main fleet’ is on a different course that looks like it will use some of the outer planets to speed them up like we have with our space probes. If they do the same thing that we would do, they should be able to reach us in twelve years while saving huge amounts of fuel.”
“Isn’t that assuming a lot?”
“Yeah, but what else are we going to do? We can only guess and then watch to see if they do it. We don’t have a lot to work with right now, but we can only do our best and tell you when we see anything that means we guessed wrong.”
“So, is that all of them?”
“No. Just yesterday, an American team of astronomers in Chile noticed a group of objects near the Asteroid belt whose course might take them near Earth. We checked them out and are pretty sure that they are alien craft. They are following the same path as the ‘second fleet,’ only they are moving much faster and should be near Earth in only five years. There are only eight to ten of them and my people can decide between calling them the ‘scout fleet’ or the ‘third fleet.’ Anyway, they aren’t sending out any signals we can detect, and they’re still too far away to get a good picture.”
“Are there any more?”
“Not so far, but believe me, we are searching constantly now. We’ll check the most likely areas first and then do a full scan of the heavens, but it will take time before we’re sure.
“How long?”
“A few months to cover the whole sky and then a few years to do a thorough search.”
“Years? We may not have years!”
“We only have so many telescopes and so many people to do the work. New people and equipment will help cut down the time, but even then, the solar system is an unimaginably big place and it takes time to look everywhere.”
“Gentlemen, that’s enough. NASA will be doing the best possible job and we will all give them as much support as we can. The same will be expected of everyone here when they are called upon.” Secretary Paulson’s outburst seemed to be enough to keep things under control, so he continued, “Mr Griffin, have we learned anything from their signals yet?”
“We have analyzed the signals with the help of the NSA, and so far, have found out very little. The communication seems to be high speed data transfer, of the type that computers use to communicate with each other. It is not a spoken language, nor video transmission of any type, as far as we can tell. We are nowhere close to being able to read this data yet, but we are starting to get little things like ‘start of message’ and ‘end of message’ and just possibly individual craft designations.”
“So you’re saying that there’s no chance of communicating with them?”
“Not exactly, there are a series of mathematical protocols that have been designed by scientists to theoretically talk to an alien race. Unfortunately, this requires both parties to be co-operating on the task. We’ve started sending the signals, but so far they have not replied.”
“So what if they don’t respond?”
“Then it is out of my hands, and it becomes your job to decide if they are hostile or not.”
“How the heck can we know if they’re hostile.”
“It’s still pretty early to make such a decision, but the military and the scientists at NASA agree that it doesn’t look good so far. The sheer number of ships is a very bad sign, which is made worse by the fact that they haven’t tried to talk to us as far as we can tell. There is always the possibility that they are traders, nomads or refugees, but I would have expected them to have been trying to talk to us long before we found them.”
“So, what are the other possibilities?”
“Migration or invasion, and either of these almost guarantee war.”