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

chirping. He’d paid no attention earlier. In front of the house was a large apple tree, which was vigorously leafing out. It was a real paradise out there. How might Franziska be feeling right now? he wondered. Normally she’d be in the garden from sunrise to sunset on a day like this. He should call her today, as he’d promised Thomas.

Now would be the perfect time for that. Unlike him, Franziska had certainly eaten breakfast before now. He was pretty much an early riser, but she was like a rooster, awake at the crack of dawn.

First, though, the data. There were eight files. And the one he already had. Thomas put the coordinates in the file name. He looked up the first object, 12 33 44.55 +41 21 26.9, in the SIMBAD database, where pretty much every celestial object could be found. To do this, he clicked on ‘By Coordinates’ under ‘Queries’ and copied the line into the search box.

‘SDSS J123348,82+550037,1 -- Quasar,’ the website told him.

The result could not be correct. Or had Thomas made a mistake? Quasars were distant, active galaxies. They did not interest him.

Hold it, Peter. Thomas is the professional. You are the layman here.

He replaced the commas in the coordinates with periods, as was customary in English. Then he pressed ‘Submit Query’ again.

“* bet CVn -- Double or multiple star”

The result started with an asterisk, so there was also a question of it being one or a multiple star. Peter scrolled down to the ‘Identifiers.’ The list contained all the names astronomers had given to this star during their sky surveys.

The star had a number in the HD catalog—a good sign, as it would have been included in the Henry Draper catalog, which was first published back in the beginning of the 20th century. The Internet could give him more information about HD 109358, as it was called. It was Asterion, a star very similar to the Sun, located 27 light-years away from us in the constellation of Hunting Dogs. The emitter was a yellow dwarf. Very good. Thomas really paid attention.

The signal that was in the file was 27 years old. When it was sent, Peter was in the final stages of his studies. He had not yet met Franziska. It had been a stressful time, as he had been ashamed to settle for becoming a teacher rather than a physicist. That had somehow seemed like a failure to him. Today he saw things differently. He had managed to get children interested in physics—not all of them, but some.

Come on, Asterion, let’s see what you have to tell us.

He encoded the bitstream of the file by combining five consecutive bits into one character. The result was, he reminded himself, dependent on which bit he started with. No one could help him with that. He simply had to create five versions of the file for now, and later on, combine them with the five versions of each of the other eight files to generate the language model.

Peter sighed. The further he went with this task, the less likely it seemed to him that he would get a meaningful result. After all, he’d seen the language model that the program suggested to him yesterday. All the files might have been repetitions of the same random content, over and over again.

“Sbe jr ner bayl gur furyy naq gur yrns”

Hmm. That sounded as pointless as yesterday’s “vg unf ab frys.” But he couldn’t let that intimidate him. The letters he assigned to each character were utterly arbitrary. He could have used the Base64 ‘winker’ character set or Morse code. Then he’d at least not have had the feeling of having to recognize meaning in the text because that was impossible. For that, he would need the help of a self-learning AI.

Ten years ago, what he was up against would have been impossible. Back then, so-called artificial intelligence still needed precise rules to learn something new. But that had changed. The new agents were not smarter per se, but they no longer need rules. Rather, they recognized the inherent rules for solving a problem and approached them in a step-by-step process.

That was what the AI had done when he asked it to build a language model. If his assumption was correct that the signals were messages, then those messages must have been composed according to certain rules. And, those rules could be determined by the AI, and then applied to translate the messages for him into his own language according to its own inherent grammatical context.

Of course, there was no guarantee that this would work. The software had run through it with all human languages, but here he was dealing with non-human utterances. Perhaps they were purely machine-based. They could be, for example, coordinates or simple descriptions of the system from which the transmission came, written in the language of mathematics. Peter hoped, of course, to learn something about the senders. That would be fascinating. He’d be the first person to hear the thoughts of extraterrestrials.

No. He must not burden himself with too many hopes. Peter decoded the next texts. He had always been a dreamer, which had been a hindrance more than once in his life. It had even prevented him from going into physics, because he’d have wanted to revolutionize science, of course. However, he was also a realist and had always known that he was not talented enough.

The computer gave a ‘plong’ sound, so the nine-by-five files were ready. Now he had to combine each of them with all five variations of the other files in every possible way. He made a note on his school notepad. This was a nice math problem for his 7th grade class. How many total files would result from combining nine individual files, each with five variants, if the order didn’t matter?

There were too many to create the files by hand, so he wrote a small script that took over the task. The process was simple: two loops, and within