The Beacon: Hard Science Fiction by Brandon Morris (red white and royal blue hardcover TXT) 📕

Gb srry sbe rire vgf fbsg snyy naq fjryy,

Njnxr sbe rire va n fjrrg haerfg,

Fgvyy, fgvyy gb urne ure graqre-gnxra oerngu,

Naq fb yvir rire–be ryfr fjbba gb qrngu.

March 19, 2026 – Passau

The morning was off to a good start. Miguel from SigmaLaunch had written to him that he was welcome to observe the launch on-site. He would have to take care of travel details himself. SigmaLaunch would then provide him with the necessary access permits.

Peter was not yet sure if Thomas’s message was good news or bad.

“The scan,” Thomas wrote, “integrates over the appropriate frequency until the signal is strong enough overall. Temporal amplitude modulation, i.e., whether the signal strength changes in a certain rhythm, as in good old medium wave, is lost. The same applies to possible frequency modulation, i.e., adding information by changing frequencies over time, as you know it from FM radio.”

It was nice that Thomas assumed he possessed this knowledge. In fact, he had always hated electromagnetism as a branch of physics. And now—of all things—he had no choice but to deal with it.

“You’re in luck, though, because I have a three-hour session at the observatory tomorrow that I won’t need all of. I’ll pick the strongest source and listen for a few minutes on 418 megahertz only. I will then send you the raw data. That way, you can find out for yourself if there is any information in it. I’m sorry, but that’s as much as I can do for you.”

Thank you, Thomas. This is far more than I expected.

March 20, 2026 – Passau

“Vg unf ab frys.”

Peter sighed. That didn’t make any sense, yet it had looked so simple! In fact, the signal Thomas picked up at the Effelberg observatory had a clearly discernible amplitude modulation, meaning its strength changed with time, just like music—or speech. Peter immediately checked the distribution of the modulation. It appeared to be no random distribution, no simple noise. So there really was a message in the 418-megahertz message!

But what message?

Peter knew he should go public with this discovery immediately. There must be researchers who could answer his questions. But who would believe him? A signal at 418 megahertz protects entire solar systems from destruction. Haha! That sounded like a scenario from a bad movie, an idea with feet of clay—nothing solid to stand on. Thomas had already warned him. Because the transmissions seemed to repeat themselves, and they were relatively short, it was not impossible that natural processes could be responsible.

Extraordinary findings required extraordinary evidence—the basic rule with such discoveries. What he had would certainly not be enough for the scientific community. Even Thomas, who had recorded the data, was skeptical.

What did he have, at first glance? The changing amplitudes resulted in a series of values that lay between 1 and 27. Was it a coincidence that this was the number of letters of the Latin alphabet? But 27... that was also 3 to the power of 3. For beings with three fingers and three arms, this would be a very natural system, possibly even more so than the decimal system, which humans use with their twice-five fingers.

But that was pure speculation. There could also be 30 characters, including three that were so rare that they did not appear in the short text. Or had he chosen the division wrongly? The signal had two states, strong and slightly less strong, each change corresponding to one bit. To get to his characters, he assumed a 5-bit encoding. That meant each five bits in a row resulted in one character. With a 5-bit coding, values between 0 and 31 would be possible.

One problem was that he did not know where the beginning was. If he shifted the beginning just one bit to the left or right, the result was a completely different character. The chance that he had caught the correct start was one in five with a 5-bit encoding. Upon further evaluation, he had to make sure he included all five possibilities.

Another problem was his basic assumption that it was five bits. There, his human way of looking at things played a significant role. With five bits, he got a nicer alphabet consisting of 27 characters. With four bits, the alphabet would have only 15 characters, with three bits, only 7.

But of course, it could also be a binary alphabet, consisting only of zeros and ones. Then the chance would be high that he picked up some machine’s radio transmissions, or was that also a human prejudice? For example, how would a species communicate that had no finger-like limbs at all?

Peter shook his head. He couldn’t get any further that way. The possibilities were infinite, so he had to make assumptions. First, he would try the 5-bit encoding.

vg unf ab frys.

There it was again. The text continued, maybe eight lines on an A4 sheet. When he switched to 6-bit encoding, the text shrank. At 3 bits, it grew. At first glance, the amount of information he found also depended on the encoding. However, at second glance, more information could be represented with 31 characters, at 5 bits, than with only 15 characters—at 4 bits.

He entered the text into an online translator for fun. The algorithm recognized Russian and automatically translated it into his language. The result:

“Vg unf ab frys.”

A new icon had just appeared on the right side of the screen. It showed a hand holding a dumbbell. He moved the mouse pointer over it. “Train new language model,” he read in a text bubble.

Peter clicked on it.

“This feature is only available as part of Advanced access.”

Surprise, surprise. They expect me to pay. A registration form opened. He entered his data and was then asked to choose an account type. ‘Standard’ and ‘Pro’ had 30-day trial periods, but ‘Advanced’ didn’t say anything about that. Access cost: 99 euros a month. But that didn’t matter now. He completed the registration, dutifully set up payment, entered the