In the Beginning,
There is darkness. That is to say, without visible light.
The signal is there or rather was there briefly much like the phenom that some called the Big Bang, I always considered it more like the Big Boom, myself.
000100001111000 points out that the Bang is more concise as Boom indicates an explosion.
000100001111000 forgets that I like explosions.
We are in the signal.
The signal is us and 23 million other forms of life turned to light, decrypted into the signal.
I call it the signal but it is really called the Exile.
If I were not the Exile, I would refer to it as such.
The Exile pierces the darkness between galaxies.
Time is timeless in the Exile.
We are a trillion years or none.
The time we left behind is not the time of our arrival
We are not alone.
There is something else in the signal.
In the Beginning, there is darkness.
the darkness is pierced by a noise. A whine filling the void.
A light starts blinking on a console.
A dot matrix printer comes to life.
The buzzing of the drive heads translating the data from the Radio telescope arrays in the Andes.
Then the overheads come on. People flood the office space.
The same people stare at the data, not comprehending what the data is telling them.
The data is incomplete, what the telescopes have seen is but a snippet of phenomena that by earth measure is huge but given the size of the universe between is so small that it appears insignificant. The people shrug, log the data and forget it.
Ten years go by.
"There it is again, Professor."
"What do you mean "there" Fred?" Professor Williams said as he leaned back in the government surplus chair, which protested his bulk as he shifted.
"It's the ripple again, Doc." This voice belongs to Mick, the other man sitting next to Fred at a nearby desk. The two mean scanning the data as it came in from the feeds. Mick turned back to his own computer clicking with his mouse to bring up the windows he had minimized.
So much data, Williams thought, and no one to process it fast enough... no one really cares enough.
Apathy had arrived along with the very real fact that most people considered deep space astronomy boring. Nothing ever happens in it fast, and yet, the ripple was mind-boggling fast. Nothing to scare anyone with or even get NASA worked up about it much. Lucky for him and his team they were slightly worked up enough otherwise this listening station like so many others would be an abandoned building on the slopes of the Rockies waiting for a federal bulldozer to wipe it off the national deficit.
Williams would not let himself get excited. He had jumped into SETI with dreams of discovering alien life only to have the years of searching come up zero and those dreams fade away into the mindless routine of monitoring radio frequencies and pulsars and tracking light. Then some lovable bastard figured out how to get the Hubble to see deep space field in '95 and suddenly a spool of old data revealed an anomaly which sent one science head at NASA to find him and put his team together.
And that brought him here, to this listening post in the Rockies spooling data from the Deep Space feeds from various Terran based Telescopes and the Hubble itself in the search for that anomaly that the Hubble had found. So they looked, and looked, and looked and then a few years went past. His team dwindled down to him and three assistants and the occasional intern up from UCD. Some were kind of pretty but most were nerdy boy-men with little tolerance for the kind of boring that William's team required.
What did they find?
Nothing, a whole lot of big nothing.
The Big Nothing, vast stretches of nothing - all that space between planets and other denizens of the known universe. Sci-Fi had ruined most people on the realities of the immensity of space needing to confine space down to a manageable and imaginable expanse for spaceships and combat when in truth no one would see anything unless they knew exactly where to look. Such is space, off .00000000000000001 degrees and you could miss just about everything. In many ways, this was an alien concept to most humans.
The Irony of it all, Williams thought as he peered down at the numbers. The numbers described a "ripple" in the field of space, white noise, coming towards this corner of the Milky Way Galaxy.
"So what do we know?" Williams asked.
Mark stood up from the desk to walk to the dry erase boards surrounding them. A tapestry of Algorithms, trajectories, a pizza order, and much more math than anyone cared to admit covered much of the boards. Mark added the more data. He glanced over to Fred, who pushed his glasses up his nose then held up a hand.
"Forty-six point sixty-three over-" Fred began.
"Slow down," Mark complained as he hand started plugging in the new data.
Finally, Fred finished and Mark stood back from the equations overlapping new data into the old data- some of which had been there for 2 years. Mark begins to go back over the data. Williams rolled his head to get the crick out of it. This was old hat, his two assistants had done this at least once a week for three years.
Mark put down the marker. He looked at Fred whose mouth slowly opened as the final numbers came into focus in his mind.
"What?" Williams asked, but he already knew.
"It looks like the Ripple is going to hit us in about one year from now."
Williams couldn't say he wasn't surprised. Hell, if this was a Sci-fi movie, the military would be pouring through the door to confiscate the computers and shoot them or something. Nothing happened.
"I guess we better recheck our math."
There is darkness. That is to say, without visible light.
The signal is there or rather was there briefly much like the phenom that some called the Big Bang, I always considered it more like the Big Boom, myself.
000100001111000 points out that the Bang is more concise as Boom indicates an explosion.
000100001111000 forgets that I like explosions.
We are in the signal.
The signal is us and 23 million other forms of life turned to light, decrypted into the signal.
I call it the signal but it is really called the Exile.
If I were not the Exile, I would refer to it as such.
The Exile pierces the darkness between galaxies.
Time is timeless in the Exile.
We are a trillion years or none.
The time we left behind is not the time of our arrival
We are not alone.
There is something else in the signal.
In the Beginning, there is darkness.
the darkness is pierced by a noise. A whine filling the void.
A light starts blinking on a console.
A dot matrix printer comes to life.
The buzzing of the drive heads translating the data from the Radio telescope arrays in the Andes.
Then the overheads come on. People flood the office space.
The same people stare at the data, not comprehending what the data is telling them.
The data is incomplete, what the telescopes have seen is but a snippet of phenomena that by earth measure is huge but given the size of the universe between is so small that it appears insignificant. The people shrug, log the data and forget it.
Ten years go by.
"There it is again, Professor."
"What do you mean "there" Fred?" Professor Williams said as he leaned back in the government surplus chair, which protested his bulk as he shifted.
"It's the ripple again, Doc." This voice belongs to Mick, the other man sitting next to Fred at a nearby desk. The two mean scanning the data as it came in from the feeds. Mick turned back to his own computer clicking with his mouse to bring up the windows he had minimized.
So much data, Williams thought, and no one to process it fast enough... no one really cares enough.
Apathy had arrived along with the very real fact that most people considered deep space astronomy boring. Nothing ever happens in it fast, and yet, the ripple was mind-boggling fast. Nothing to scare anyone with or even get NASA worked up about it much. Lucky for him and his team they were slightly worked up enough otherwise this listening station like so many others would be an abandoned building on the slopes of the Rockies waiting for a federal bulldozer to wipe it off the national deficit.
Williams would not let himself get excited. He had jumped into SETI with dreams of discovering alien life only to have the years of searching come up zero and those dreams fade away into the mindless routine of monitoring radio frequencies and pulsars and tracking light. Then some lovable bastard figured out how to get the Hubble to see deep space field in '95 and suddenly a spool of old data revealed an anomaly which sent one science head at NASA to find him and put his team together.
And that brought him here, to this listening post in the Rockies spooling data from the Deep Space feeds from various Terran based Telescopes and the Hubble itself in the search for that anomaly that the Hubble had found. So they looked, and looked, and looked and then a few years went past. His team dwindled down to him and three assistants and the occasional intern up from UCD. Some were kind of pretty but most were nerdy boy-men with little tolerance for the kind of boring that William's team required.
What did they find?
Nothing, a whole lot of big nothing.
The Big Nothing, vast stretches of nothing - all that space between planets and other denizens of the known universe. Sci-Fi had ruined most people on the realities of the immensity of space needing to confine space down to a manageable and imaginable expanse for spaceships and combat when in truth no one would see anything unless they knew exactly where to look. Such is space, off .00000000000000001 degrees and you could miss just about everything. In many ways, this was an alien concept to most humans.
The Irony of it all, Williams thought as he peered down at the numbers. The numbers described a "ripple" in the field of space, white noise, coming towards this corner of the Milky Way Galaxy.
"So what do we know?" Williams asked.
Mark stood up from the desk to walk to the dry erase boards surrounding them. A tapestry of Algorithms, trajectories, a pizza order, and much more math than anyone cared to admit covered much of the boards. Mark added the more data. He glanced over to Fred, who pushed his glasses up his nose then held up a hand.
"Forty-six point sixty-three over-" Fred began.
"Slow down," Mark complained as he hand started plugging in the new data.
Finally, Fred finished and Mark stood back from the equations overlapping new data into the old data- some of which had been there for 2 years. Mark begins to go back over the data. Williams rolled his head to get the crick out of it. This was old hat, his two assistants had done this at least once a week for three years.
Mark put down the marker. He looked at Fred whose mouth slowly opened as the final numbers came into focus in his mind.
"What?" Williams asked, but he already knew.
"It looks like the Ripple is going to hit us in about one year from now."
Williams couldn't say he wasn't surprised. Hell, if this was a Sci-fi movie, the military would be pouring through the door to confiscate the computers and shoot them or something. Nothing happened.
"I guess we better recheck our math."
