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

five minutes the mini-program had finished its work. Now came the more difficult part. He had to upload the total files one by one to have a language model generated from each of them. Uploading in the web browser would be too cumbersome.

Fortunately, the service also had an application program interface, through which he could make automated requests. To be on the safe side, he checked whether his 99-euro subscription included the use of this API and found, fortunately, that it was included.

He had already named the individual files so that he could upload them one after the other. However, the service did not provide instant responses. Rather, he got a unique number for each upload, under which he could download the results later. Unfortunately, the list of common questions didn’t reveal how long the process would take, so he prepared himself to have to wait until the next day.

He wrote the second script. It worked on the first test.

Peter leaned back. Should he start the upload? What was to stop him? Nothing would come out of it anyway, except that he had once again exercised his programming skills.

He clicked the start button.

March 23, 2026 – Passau

“You have new results,” the AI had told him by e-mail in the morning. But he’d had to wait to open it, as today he’d really had to go to school. The 7th grade students hadn’t been pleased about his trip into combinatorics, but he liked to take them on such side trips. The little darlings wanted to quickly forget what they had learned, especially when it was from the previous school term. And then, next time around, he had to teach them combinatorics from scratch.

He threw his jacket into the corner and ran up the stairs. In the hallway, two pairs of underpants he didn’t remember dropping were lying on the floor. Before Franziska came home, if she came home, he had to clean up.

The computer was still running. He logged into the voice AI. The results of the calculations were presented in a long list. The AI had utterly failed in only about every tenth case. That was good and bad. Good, because the amount of data was apparently sufficient. Bad, because he now would have to look at many ‘translations,’ most of which would consist of nonsense. The main problem with this was: how did he determine what of it actually made sense? What if he couldn’t pull out any meaning?

It didn’t help to dwell on it. He just had to get started. But first he got himself a glass of water from the bathroom.

It was exhausting to read through such a mountain of nonsense. The AI must have a lot of imagination. How could it get the idea that the sentences it produced made any sense? It took Peter ten minutes to understand the small annotations that were found under each text. The learning algorithm revealed how confident it was of its translations.

Peter searched for help. Of course—it was his own fault. He could have specified a higher level of confidence which would produce much less output. Without such a specification, everything that did not cause an error message had been spit out for him. But with all the texts he’d read so far, the AI stated the probability of having encountered a real language was less than five percent.

Surely there must be a way to hide these suggestions? It didn’t look like he’d miss anything by doing that. Peter checked one menu after another and finally found the right filter. What value should he set? He tried 90 percent. One mouse click, and the list shrank before his eyes.

A single entry remained. Peter took a deep breath. It was certain to be a coordinate specification, he thought. That would be very exciting, because the way a being described a place automatically said something about how it thought. It would give insight into the consciousness of a non-terrestrial identity. That would be tremendously exciting, even if no one believed him—of which he was certainly 90 percent confident.

He clicked on the entry.

“For we are but the husk and the leaf: the great death which each has within himself, that is the fruit around which everything revolves.”

That was... He knew that! Somewhere... He knew he had read it before. It was a quote from... by... Arrrgh—he could not think of the name. So he copied the text and entered it into a search engine.

Rilke. It was Rilke. Rainer Maria Rilke. This couldn’t be true! It was the content of the first signal, sent by Asterion, the star in the constellation of Hunting Dogs—93 percent probability. There it was. That was pretty certain. But what did it mean? He looked it up on the help pages of the language AI, but they didn’t say a word about interpretation.

Peter continued reading. What happened to the “vg unf ab frys” that Thomas was making fun of yesterday? It was in the second message. The new language model translated it like this:

“it has no self—it is everything and nothing. It has no character—it enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated. It has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen. What shocks the virtuous philosopher delights the chameleon poet. It does no harm from its relish of the dark side of things any more than from its taste for the bright one, because they both end in speculation. A poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence because he has no identity—he is continually informing and filling some other body. The sun, the moon, the sea and men and women who are creatures of impulse are poetical and have about them an unchangeable attribute—the poet has none, no identity. He is certainly the most unpoetical of all god’s creatures.”

That sounded poetic and philosophical at the same time. He didn’t recognize