Starwink, page 1
Starwink
by Hannah Blume (as Alicorn)
A commissioned re-write of Eliezer Yudkowsky's That Alien Message.
* * *
Haruto was running late, a thermos of tea in one hand and a shoe he hadn’t gotten on yet in the other as he stepped into the elevator. His phone started buzzing, and he ignored it. It started ringing, which it was only allowed to do for select people, and he wrestled his shoe on and checked who it was. It was his old professor, not someone who would be calling to tell him that his father was in the hospital. Tanaka-sensei hadn’t contacted him in years. He only still had the ability to ring the phone because Haruto had never bothered to change it, not since he was waiting for updates about his thesis. He stuffed the phone back in his pocket and speedwalked out of his apartment building, making for the subway.
Over the course of the subway ride Haruto noticed that everyone else was looking at their phone, too. This was such a mundane observation that at first he didn’t know what he was noticing. Of course everyone was on their phone.
He added it up, between the second and third stops. He didn’t hear any of the little mobile games that people refused to mute. People were showing their phones to their neighbors. There were collisions, as people exited and entered without looking where they were going instead of politely cramming themselves in where there least failed to be space.
Haruto pulled out his phone rather than shoulder-surf his neighbor, and had a lot of accumulated messages and news alerts.
The stars are winking! It’s aliens! read a text from his ex-girlfriend.
Mystery in the sky, said a headline brought up by an algorithm’s understanding of his list of interest topics.
Tanaka-sensei’s text, sent after the call hadn’t gone through, just said Check the school’s astronomy channel.
Haruto wished the old man had been more explanatory - he had to download the app the school used for departmental discussions, since he’d never had it on this phone - but by the time he got off at his stop, he was catching up on the last eight hours of astronomy department chatter.
Apparently, as seen from all around the globe, the stars were, in fact… winking.
The first several had to be identified in retrospect from telescopic recordings, and many were of stars in the daylight direction of the Earth as it turned and the stars winked irrespectively, but a few were spotted with the naked eye. Someone had gone to their amateur astronomy forum about two conveniently in the same constellation only thirty seconds apart, and someone else had confirmed that those stars had respectively brightened and dimmed at about those times, and two independent reports was enough to get a few other people poking around. The news had gained speed until it was confirmed by astronomers with serious telescopes, redundant recordings checked against each other. Here someone’s aesthetic timelapse, there someone’s staging of UFO footage.
One star per second had been winking, bright or dim, star after star, for hours now, and Haruto couldn’t shake the sense he was being pranked, even after source upon source made it clear that none of the people actually sending him messages were the pranksters. These people didn’t know each other. The people he was passing on the street, looking at videos of flashing stars on their phones, were not in on a conspiracy. But the alternative was so preposterous -
He reached his sister’s apartment ten minutes late, didn’t bring up the stars with anyone else there - if they’d heard about it, they were choosing to set it aside to greet his newborn niece instead. He held the baby for an appropriate amount of time, handed her off when she fussed. Hugged his sister. Accepted a snack, since he hadn’t had much breakfast.
And went back out onto the street to look at his phone a bit more, for more clues.
Haruto could guess why his ex-girlfriend had thought to text him. And he knew what he’d been reading that gave the news algorithms the idea that he’d like to hear about the stars (if they weren’t just telling literally everyone). What he wasn’t sure of was Tanaka-sensei’s intent. He looked for a quiet place, but there was nowhere he’d be able to hear a phone call clearly enough. He texted back, grumbling his way to the subway station again.
Sensei, why are you telling me?
The reply didn’t come until Haruto was back home, debating taking a shower to get all the subway residue off of himself. The phone chirped.
A funder wants to get the drop on founding an organization dedicated to figuring it all out, in case it’s strange enough that it’s not in any existing wheelhouse. He doesn’t think NASA or whoever is going to figure this out in the next week and wants to look cool if his people get it instead, but he doesn’t have people on tap for this. Asked me for suggestions. I don’t know what you’re doing these days but I didn’t find you on any university’s faculty list, Kobayashi. Busy?
Haruto ground his teeth. Decided in favor of a shower. Popped out five minutes later and, still toweling water out of his hair with one hand, replied with the other:
How much funding?
* * *
“Hajimemashite,” said Shelley. “Namae wa, um, Sheri. Douzo yor-”
“I speak English, Ms. Katz,” said Haruto. “Everyone here does. We start it in elementary school.” His accent was substantial, but she could understand him with a little extra effort, and didn’t have to pause to fumble for particles and wait until the end of every sentence for a verb, this way.
“Oh, thank God,” she said. “They said Japanese was a nice to have and not a requirement, but -”
“You’re in math, you peak in five years. We’d like to use this time on the real problem. I am confident the messengers do not speak Japanese. I hope you did not waste too much of your time on it.”
“Not… too much time,” said Shelley sheepishly.
“Well, stop. If you’re good at languages, then you can pick it up by exposure in your spare time. If you don’t, you don’t. Have you seen the sequence?”
“Uh.”
“A lot of people have. It is not very hard to find if you look for it. Is that an ‘um, yes, even though I wasn’t supposed to’ or an ‘um, no, I followed the rules and now I’m wondering if that was a test of my initiative’?”
“The second one,” said Shelley. “All I’ve seen was one actual starwink during the second message. It was Ashlesha. Epsilon Hydrae.”
“I’ll stick you in group 2 of your cohort, then, though being in a group doesn’t affect much of your preliminary work since the idea for signal-naive cryptographers is that you’re to look at it with fresh eyes. You are not to contaminate each other with any observations until we’ve wrung all the freshness out of those eyes, do you understand? Don’t even tell them about Epsilon Hydrae.”
“Yes, Mr. Kobayashi.”
“Welcome to Starwink. Come with me.”
She followed him through the corridor to the elevator; it brought them up to his office. The place wasn’t much to look at. Rented office space, boring plants no one would be allergic to, tasteful neutral carpet and wallpaper. They spent money on personnel, not on frontage and architecture. Shelley’s HR onboarding meeting, before she’d even been sent to meet Mr. Kobayashi, had included strict instructions that if she found herself fretting about any financial, bureaucratic, or logistical problem, she was to immediately take it to the Starwink concierge department, explain in full, and expect it to be resolved satisfactorily on her behalf without any further drain on her mental resources. Her take-home pay was substantial, but the real perk was how badly they wanted her brain freed up to work on the most important problem in the world.
Haruto sat down behind his desk. Shelley sat opposite him. “Describe to me the Starwink project as you understand it, as though I am a bright high schooler,” he said. “No need to get very detailed; I’m looking for what angle you use to approach the problem, not how many Wikipedia articles you’ve memorized.”
Shelley had been expecting this question. “Eleven years ago, stars started winking. It went on for about a month and a half, then stopped. The winking stars were all over the galaxy but every one was visible before brightening or dimming to the naked eye under ideal light and weather conditions from the surface of the Earth. The light conditions weren’t ideal and actually about half the stars winked from the daylight direction of Earth as it was at the time they did so, but there aren’t any gaps that might belong to stars we don’t have a clear line of sight to because of the moon or anything - gaps in the pattern of one star winking per second, I mean. Slightly more than a second.”
“Does it matter that it’s not exactly a second?” asked Haruto innocently.
“It might,” said Shelley. “The message - it has to be a message - was sent by someone or something, and whether that someone or something knows what a second is could matter. So it matters that it’s not exact - because that’s evidence that they don’t - but it also matters that it’s really close, because that could mean that it does know. Which could mean lots of things, like that it’s using an old - or even future - reckoning of a second that’s slightly longer, or that there’s some technical reason why this was as fast as they could go but they didn’t choose longer intervals because this interval was so close to one of our measurements.”
“Why does it have to be a message?”
“Light travels at a speed and the stars all winked at Earth on the same schedule. The timing isn’t regular even from elsewhere in the Solar system, let alone from another star. To get to us on such strict intervals, the light from those stars has to have been altered with us in mind from the beginning. I
“Tell me about that.”
“Well, I haven’t looked at it yet,” she cast him a slightly annoyed look, “since you guys and all the others all have a conspiracy going where you say there’s too much value in looking at it without preconceptions to have it flying around…”
“Mm-hm,” Haruto said, unruffled.
“…so I don’t have an angle specific to the starwink message’s content, but I’m interested in coming up with creative ways to present the data, with various factors highlighted or smoothed out - for example, we don’t yet know for sure if it matters which stars, is my understanding, so in the case that it doesn’t you’ll be able to get more flexible visualizations or audializations by treating it just as a string of bits, but I’ve come up with a few things for also displaying star-specific facts so something could pop out if there’s anything there. I’ve worked with toy datasets that are actually encodings of episodes of My Little Pony and stuff like that.”
“You do these yourself?”
“My brother helps me with some of the coding. He’s a programmer, works for HMCF. But I generate all the spec myself, I can tell your guys just as easily how I want things to look.”
“I don’t know the acronym -?” said Haruto.
“I bet they have an equivalent organization in Japan but I don’t - uh, it’s Halt Melt Catch Fire, they study that thing that happens if you try to run a program that could make itself smarter and the computer slags itself, but so far I think their only public-facing result is the power plant and it’s not actually more efficient than nuclear.”
Haruto nodded. “All right. My assistant will show you to your office and get you set up and introduce you to the concierges and such.”
“Thank you, Mr. Kobayashi.”
“You will use the concierges,” he told her firmly. “You will tell them as soon as you are inconvenienced. I don’t care if you are inconvenienced by the air conditioning, your commute, our hardware, the time zone, your podiatrist, the government, or your bagel slicer. We hired you for your brain, we don’t want to drive you insane, and that means that instead of taking extra hours out of your leisure time - let alone your sleep - we are taking them out of anything else that bothers you. The concierge department’s job is to fix your problems. Complain to them.”
“Thank you,” repeated Shelley, and she let his assistant lead her away.
* * *
Shelley couldn’t stop cackling in triumph. She knew it was immature, she knew it wasn’t academically responsible, she knew that the people who’d thought the message was a cellular automaton were contributing a valuable diversity of perspective, but they’d been wrong and she was right. During the fourth day of the third message, she made the concierge department have cake and champagne and balloons ready for her in her apartment by the time she got home and invited over six Team 5-D Image co-workers. Two cakes, one for her and the other folks with globalized taste, and one for Jun and Yuuto who would prefer something with about a teaspoon of sugar in it.
Shelley cut the cakes and whooped with everyone else as the bits kept pouring in and her visualization, ticking along once every 1005 milliseconds on the screen that dominated her west wall, confirmed with each new starwink: it was a match for the theory that the messengers were sending frames of a video feed, projected down from five asymmetrical spatial dimensions. It wasn’t “glorified Conway’s Game of Life”, as Yuuto’d derisively called the competing family of theories.
“You gotta wonder, though,” said her colleague Okafor, “you gotta wonder, even more - the one thing the Conway people had going for them is that you could sort of wrap your head around why, if they were doing a cellular automaton, they’d do it with stars. Doesn’t answer the question of why we’re in the middle of it. But maybe stars would make a good automated substrate for it somehow if you nailed down star to star… ansibles, or something.”
“And if they’re just doing pictures why not send us physical media or even, if they really like the bitstream approach, aim a big flashlight?” said Shelley. “Yeah. Well, we’ll -” She swigged her champagne. “We’ll figure out what the pictures are of, and that’ll help, I bet.”
“If the gap’s ten years again?” said Okafor. “How’re we going to figure anything out at one frame a decade?”
“Well, maybe you and I’ll be dead,” said Shelley, “but somebody’ll be around. You know how much money Starwink got dumped on it as soon as the second frame started up? Our endowment’s not going anywhere. We’ll figure it out. Humanity will.”
“Yeah,” he replied, “but… I wanted to figure it out.”
“Yeah,” she acknowledged. “That’s a bummer. We can get pretty far on a few frames, though, with this much time to crunch them. Hey, did my brother get back to you about your cute algorithm idea?”
“Yeah,” said Okafor. “He says it’ll probably melt as I described it, but they might be able to tweak it so it doesn’t, at least at the kinds of price points we can sling now, they’ve gotten better at predicting that for edge cases. If this message lasts as long as the last one did, we should be able to start assessing the forces that might be at work in Fiveworld as soon as the winks stop.”
“I’m going to be so annoyed if Jun wins that bet,” Shelley whispered.
Okafor clinked his glass to hers, but said, “I don’t know, it’d simplify our lives, wouldn’t it?”
“It’d be boring.”
“Nah, we could move on to figuring out what all the stuff in the pictures is. Are you going to send the leftover cake to the Fresh Eyes team?”
“What, as an ironic taunt? It wouldn’t be very good irony. They’re not getting leftovers. I respect them. I mean, I wouldn’t want to be in data quarantine with them -”
“Of course not -”
“- but I’m glad they’re doing it, like other people were glad I showed up on my first day and hadn’t seen the bitstream.”
* * *
“- so, welcome to Starwink,” Shelley told the new guy, setting her cane down. “Do you have any questions?”
“Uh,” said the new guy, “I understood why you don’t necessarily put a really complete job description out in public, could be sensitive and all, but I got my more-complete job description and it’s… sparse.”
“Yes,” said Shelley. “Your job’s sparse. We get one new frame every ten years. They haven’t surprised us with physics details since I was in my fifties. The organization doesn’t have to be the big fancy think tank it once was. The Starwink I’m retiring from is more of an intellectual generation ship.”
“Oh,” he said.
“Your job - everyone remaining’s job - is to make sure it can still be around in thousands or hundreds of thousands or maybe millions of years. You keep the tech up to date with the times, and make actually sure that all the old data makes the transition - you hire redundant data-entry drones and parity check their work, if that’s what it takes to get stuff moved - and that all the software ports forward functionally. You maintain backups like one day seventy things will all go wrong at once, because in that much time they will. You protect the organizational continuity - you move out of Japan if you have to, you clone the org if that ever looks like the best plan for all of our work surviving and continuing, you play politics if anyone starts looking threateningly at our endowment.”
“I - right. Okay. Yes.”
“This is hard. It has in point of fact never been done. By the time this organization is as old as Kongo Gumi, the oldest company ever in the world, had become at the time of its absorption in 2006? That is to say, in about fourteen hundred years? We’ll have about a minute of video. And that’s if the messengers like their frame rates the way silent films used to - physics team thinks they like it faster, so it might be thirty seconds of video by then, or less. The job is very hard and I hope to hell you can do it but it is - yes - very, very sparse. You will have a lot of down time. You were hired because we think you can do your job right even when on most days all it requires of you is that you pay the bills and knock off early.”
