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

it, but the Internet knew this text. It came from John Keats, a British poet. Peter read on—and came across more poems. More Rilke, more Keats, but also other poets. Some he knew, most he didn’t. He had never cared much for poetry.

In school they’d had to interpret poems. What was the poet trying to say? A silly question. But what he read sounded beautiful. It made him think. It made him want to share some of the lines with Franziska. They should read them together. A few years ago, they used to read to each other. The practice had fallen by the wayside. Too bad.

He digressed—no surprise, given what he’d found here. But what was it? He’d have to ask the AI’s programmers. Email and chat support were both provided. The company was based in the United States, so he had a good chance of reaching someone there.

“A question about interpreting the results,” he typed into the chat window.

“Of course, Peter. What can I do for you? My name is John.”

Peter flinched when he heard his own name. But it was clear that John knew who he was, because he was logged in.

“I have invented my own language. Now when I write texts in it and enter them into your software, I get a language model.”

If he told John about his extraterrestrial signals, John would immediately write him off as a weirdo.

“That’s great, Peter. You see how perfectly our AI works.”

“Absolutely, yes, I can see that. The translation that the algorithm makes doesn’t seem very close to the original to me, though.”

“That’s normal, Peter. You must know that with the help of the language model, we primarily capture the meaning of the original content as best we can. The algorithm then tries to express this in the target language. To do this, the program falls back on set pieces that it finds in its huge text memory and that have yielded a similar meaning during the analysis.”

“So you couldn’t reconstruct the original text?”

“No, that’s impossible. The language model has nothing to do with the original character set. It only contains meaning relationships, and only those that are statistically probable.”

“If I write a longing prose text in my invented language, could your system translate it as a poem by John Keats?”

“That’s right, Peter. You can think of it like a Black Forest cake. The cake is the input text. It is broken down into its components until you couldn’t even guess that it used to be a cake. In the process, however, the AI extracts the concepts that are in the cake. The sweetness of the sugar, the fruitiness of the cherries, the rich fat of the cream, the chocolaty cocoa flavor. Then the AI puts something back together from these concepts. It certainly won’t come up with a car, and it won’t come up with a dog, but it probably won’t come up with a cake either, but maybe a cherry strudel with a cup of cocoa to go with it. Do you understand? We construct a new shell for the concepts contained in the old shell. But the old shell remains unknown and cannot be reconstructed.”

“Thank you, John. That helps a lot.”

March 24, 2026 – Passau

“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.”

Peter read the verse over and over again. It left a sadness in him that he couldn’t quite grasp. Of course, he knew that he would die someday. He hoped he had at least 20 more years before then. His father died at 75, so he probably had that much time anyway. But so far, the inevitable end had not been worth a thought to him. After all, it was unproductive and didn’t suit him at all. Maybe it was just because he had more time to think at the moment.

He flipped open the oven door and pulled out the hot pizza, using his fork to maneuver it onto his plate. His students had been surprisingly well-behaved today. They must have been looking forward to Easter vacation. Three more days. It suited him just fine, because SigmaLaunch had checked in this morning. His CubeSat was on its way to Sweden, and he’d confirmed his permission to observe the launch. He could hardly have chosen better timing. The launch would take place on Monday morning.

Peter divided the pizza, which measured about 30 centimeters across, into six segments of 60 degrees each and turned it into a math problem, of course. How many people could each have a slice if nothing was to be left over and each eater needed at least 60 square centimeters of pizza to be satisfied? “Who would feel full enough with only 60 square centimeters of pizza,” Matthias from the 6th grade would say. And he’d be right, of course.

As if to prove it, Peter ate the segments, each 117 square centimeters in size, one after the other. He left only the last one. Franziska always said he had to watch his weight. She was probably right, too. After 50, the risk of cardiovascular disease increased, especially for men who lived alone, he had read, while for women, marriage tended to be rather detrimental to health. Hmm. So, in theory, it would be better for Franziska if she separated from him.

He washed his greasy fingers with the soapy rag in the sink and wiped the residual water first on his jeans, then on his handkerchief. He put the plate into the dishwasher, which was already growing full—and stinky. I really should start it up again sometime, he thought.

But not now. If he was to be in Sweden by Monday morning, it was best to start the dishwasher on Saturday. Peter got the notebook. The launch site was near the northern Swedish town of Kiruna. There was a flight connection via Stockholm directly to Kiruna, but only on Mondays and Fridays.