Contact Conclusion

"Hire, come quick!"
Hire started awake. He must have dozed off.
"Hides' discovered something incredible about the disc."
Hire was up and out his office door before Flame had even finished talking.
The lab was still awash in activity, but less so than before. Glancing at a time keeper, Hire realized that he had been in his office for much longer than he thought. He stepped up to the platform where the most people were now gathered, the same where Hides had been working. He gently elbowed his way to the front of the group.
Hides was talking animatedly. "What'd you find, Hides?" Hire interrupted.
Hides looked like he might explode. "It's unbelievable, sir. You won't believe it. This disk? It's not a tablet, like I thought originally. I was studying all the drawings on here, looking for patterns, and then I saw this. I know it's too small for you to see from there, but every picture on here has a series of dots and dashes around it. Every single one, without fail. I thought at first that it was their language, maybe like combinations of these dots and dashes make words or concepts. But there's no breaks between them, so it can't be that. Then I showed them to Carver, and he of course immediately thought of binary. Ones and zeroes. On and off. I thought, obviously it's binary. I mean, what very language is written on our own probes in case of contact? Binary. So I ran the binary through my communicator, but it couldn't translate it. At least, not into Agian."
"Makes sense. It would probably only be able to translate it into whatever language it originated from."
"Right. That's what I thought. But then I thought of our own probes again, and I realized I had been going about it the wrong way. Any creature intelligent enough to launch a probe would know that its finders wouldn't speak their language. Our probes contain messages in binary, but not to be translated into written language. The binary on our probes is meant to be read geometrically. As in, it would be translated into shapes and pictures. So, I ran the binary again, hoping to come up with some pictures. Again, nothing. I then wondered if the beings had included some sort of key, you know, A=dot dash, B=dot dot dash, that sort of thing. It didn't take me long to realize that they had, and that the key was right under my nose." He swept his hand triumphantly over the disk.
Hire moved over to stand behind Hides and focused on the disk, but couldn't see anything that looked like a key. Now that he was closer, he could see the dots and the dashes, but other than that, all he could see were the pictures...
He gasped. "The pictures?"
Hides nodded. "Exactly. Taken together, the binary coding and the pictures represent the message."
"So what does it say?"
"Well, that's the tricky part. I think this big circle here is a picture of the disk, and the binary seems to describe a way in which the disk and the box it was found with interact. Some of this down here is describing different frequencies on the audio spectrum, this over here is describing speed, I'm thinking audio frequencies and speed at which the message is meant to be listened to. We might have to adjust those in case the extraterrestrials speak at a slower speed or lower frequency than we can understand. Anyway, these two are more instructions on how the disk interacts with the box. I'm thinking this square here represents a viewing medium, and this square with the circle in it represents the box with the disk on top of it."
"So how do the disk and the box interact?"
Hides looked sheepish. "That I don't know. I think I can read the diagram here okay, but the directions don't make sense. I think they want the box to spin while the disc is on top of it. but we have no way of making it spin without the disc falling off. I think maybe there were more pieces that held the disc in place while the box spun. I don't know. That's just a theory. But that's not even the really exciting part."
"What is?"
"The pictures and the diagrams are only part of the message. I looked at the disc with a vision expander, and it looks like it's covered in tiny tracks consisting of alternating raised and depressed sections. Again, the dichotomy, which makes me think more binary. Carver's been working on a way to record what binary is in these tracks without visually following each track and just writing down the pattern, which would take weeks. When he's done, we'll be able to retrieve the messages stored on this disk. I think these diagrams are instructions on how to access the real message, which is recorded on the disk in binary."
Hire thought about it. "It's brilliant, really. we've been trying to find ways to store large amounts of binary on our probes without requiring a power source."
"This would do it. The only thing that would destroy this would be colliding with another celestial body, and odds of that are astronomical."
"Incredible." Hire looked over to Carver, seated at another table. "How long until we can read this?" He asked.
"Just minutes. All I'm doing is rewiring a microscopic image spectrometer to follow the tracks on the disk and record the ups and downs. We should get a clear, translatable, binary code in no time."
Hire took those minutes to ensure the lab's visual/audio recorders were functioning, and set his own communicator to record and store everything it heard. This was potentially one of the greatest moments in all of human history, and he wanted to make sure it was properly recorded.
Carver came over with a small spectrometer suspended between a tall tripod, and positioned it over the disk, which Hides had placed carefully on the box that accompanied the disk in the body of the craft. Carver gently pressed the power section of the spectrometer, and it quietly whirred to life. It scanned around itself, catching its bearings, and then zeroed in on the disk. It moved slowly back and forth, laterally to the tracks on the disk, then snapped all the way to one side of the disk and began slowly spinning in a circle, following the tightly spiraling grooves in the disk.
They waited in frantic anticipation. Apart from Flame asking if Carver's communicator was recording the solid stream of digitized binary being recorded by the spectrometer, which he answered with a nod, the room was silent. The hum of the spectrometer was the only noise. After what seemed like an eternity, the spectrometer’s circles became tighter and tighter, then stopped. The spectrometer reset itself, settling back into its passive position.
"It's done," Carver said, after a moment's pause.
Hire gently lifted the disk from its cradle on the alien box. "There's more on the other side. Let's set the spectrometer to record this while we see if we can translate the binary we have." He flipped the disk over, and laid it back down. Carver again set the spectrometer to scan.
As soon as the spectrometer was spinning away, the scientists of the Galactic Outreach Program gathered around a single communicator, preparing to hear the first words of an extraterrestrial ever heard by man.
Hides' communicator, retrieving the data from Carver's, opened a visual display field in the air above itself, preparing to translate the binary it had received. Hides gave the little machine instructions on how fast to play the data stream, based on data inscribed in binary on the outside of the disk itself. Then, the visual display field went from opaque to white.
Hire found his heart thumping madly within his chest as he waited for something to happen. He didn't have long to wait.
A scratchy noise began to emit from the communicator.
"Is that part of the message?"
Hire shook his head. "Unlikely. Probably a result of tiny imperfections in the coding of the binary on the disk. The spectrometer didn't know what to make of them, so it translated them as white noise."
"Can you have your communicator ignore those bits of data?"
"Um...unfortunately, no. There's no way to tell the junk data from the real data at this point."
The white screen flickered hazily, then faded up into a white screen with a plain black circle in the middle of it.
Carver slapped his thigh in triumph. "That's one of the pictures drawn on the disk, right next to the picture of the visual display field. I think this means we coded it right."
The picture again faded to opaque, but the scratchy noise continued. The excitement was almost palpable.
Then, it happened. A quiet, unintelligible voice began speaking from the communicator.
After a few moments, Hides sat back and put his head in his hands. "It's human."
The room erupted in a babble of moans. "Hold on, we don't know that," Flame said, raising her arms to gain attention.
"Come on, Flame. What are the odds that a non-human entity would use such a similar mode of speech to our own?"
"Well, evolutionarily speaking, it's not that far of a stretch. Almost every creature we've ever encountered uses vocalizations of some kind. Besides, even if the extraterrestrials don't use vocalizations, they could just be attempting to copy what they've observed on our own probes and satellites to make it easier for us."
"Everyone shut up, it's changing."
The voice had now changed pitch. This new pitch was used very briefly, and in a few moments, the voice again changed pitch. As they listened, the voice changed pitch both higher and lower several times.
Hire concentrated. "It...sounds like multiple entities talking."
They continued to listen to the different voices. After a few minutes, the message changed completely. A series of whistles, clicks, and moans emanated from the communicator. The hair on the back of Hire's neck stood on end.
Flame looked pale. "Is that...are those voices?"
Hire scrunched his eyes and shook his head, listening harder. The voices had completely stopped now, and the room was filled with an unsettling montage of noise.
"This must be data corruption. None of this means anything."
"To us. Maybe it means something to the beings who sent this."
After a few minutes, the noises faded, and the scratchy silence again filled the room. Hire found himself relieved. Then, sound again began coming from the communicator. This time, it was definitely, inarguably, music.
"My God..." Flame put her hand over her heart and stepped back. "It's music."
"It could be just another form of communication."
"Listen to it. Rhythmic timing, active quick changes in pitch and dynamic...it's music."
The sound of the alien music filled the room, and the audience was too stunned to say more.
They were interrupted by a soft click coming from the spectrometer. "The other side of disk is coded," Carver said softly.
Hire stood in awe, bathed in the wonder of the extraterrestrial music. "Stop this playing. We need to share this with the world."






The Chairman of the Humanities Board, the only person on Agian 7 who could be said to hold any power, stood directly beside Hire, looking down into the main examining area of the Galactic Outreach Program's main lab. Hire had called a stop to all the work with the exception of Carver, Hides, and Flame, and organized the rest in a massive preparation project. They immediately notified the Humanities Board, the acting head of Agian 7's government, who then notified the other Boards and established a communications link with the leaders of nearby planets. Within an hour it had exploded into a near-riot. The people of Agian 7 has streamed into the streets in droves, attempting to gain access to the labs of the GOP to see the alien device themselves. The Board of Knowledge set up an enormous visual display in the streets outside the GOP for the masses to see. The visual recorder that was linked to this massive display was a short distance to Hire's left, currently focused on the entirety of the craft itself, set up in a dramatic display on one of the tiers across the room. In the center of the room, in the main examination area, Carver, Hides, and Flame were setting up the connection to the display that would exhibit the sights and sounds recorded on the disk. The most exciting part was that Carver had taken a look at the data stream from the back side of the disk, and he thought it could be pictures. Actual visual displays.
The event was being broadcast not only across Agia, but across the vast expanse of space to neighboring planets. This was potentially the biggest moment in human history, and it was being treated as such.
The Chairman of the Humanities Board leaned over to Hire. "I think we should start as soon as your technicians are ready."
Hire nodded and waved to Flame, who returned with an affirmative gesture.
"We're ready. Would you like to make a speech?"
The Chairman chuckled. "No, I think I'm the last person anyone wants to hear from right now. Let's just let the non-human entities speak for themselves."
Hire nodded, and signalled Carver, who started the stream.
The now familiar sound of the voice filled the room, and echoed through the streets of a thousand human habitations across multiple worlds. Husbands and wives gathered with their children, young and old alike. Billions stood still, mesmerised by the voice. When the music started, many people shed tears at the sheer wonder of it. A dozen different musical selections played, each unique in its sound. Some sounded remarkably similar to music heard on human worlds in the past, some sounded completely foreign in every way. At the end of the musical selections, a vast silence was heard as the communicator switched data streams and began playing the data from the backside of the disk.
The first thing to appear was a faded image. Hire's heart leaped into his throat. He could barely make out what appeared to be two beings on the image. The image slurred for a moment, then came into sharp focus.
"They're remarkably humanoid," the Chairman muttered.
Hire thought he was going to be sick. "No, Mr. Chairman. They're human."
The image clearly showed a nude man and woman, standing next to a simple scale for comparison. The image flickered and changed, now showing what appeared to be a young family smiling into the recorder. Various pictures appeared and disappeared, each depicting regular humans performing regular tasks. The disappointment was overwhelming. Hire found himself drawn to the images, each causing his heart to sink further and further into despair. In the streets, the crowds slowly began to disperse, parents leading sad children back to their homes to prepare their evening meals. There was nothing more to see.
When the data stream ran dry, Hire sat and stared at the craft across from him. He laughed softly to himself and shook his head. To think he had raised his hopes on such a meaningless and impossible thing. He left the room. Flame, Carver, and Hides still sat quietly, lost in thought. He retrieved his things from his office and began the commute back home to celebrate his daughter's birthday.
The celebration was subdued, but it's hard to suppress the spirit of a child, and soon Whispers was back to her excited, buoyant self. Hire and his small family laughed and played until well after Agian's sun had disappeared behind the horizon. At the end of the day, Hire found himself on a small hill behind his home, looking up into the vast night sky, seeing the swirling cosmos and blinking stars that represented the arm of the galaxy in which Agia twirled. His communicator buzzed gently, informing him of an incoming call. He answered it as Whispers appeared over the crest of the hill, silhouetted in the glowing light of their home. She came to him, and he picked her up in his arms.
"Yes?"
"Hire. It's Carver. I know it's late, but I discovered something you might be interested in."
"What is it?"
"I ran the voices through translation software half a dozen times, and I managed to translate part of the transmission into Agian."
Hire was tired, and he found he really didn't care, but he went along with it. "What does it say?"
"It's not much. I think a lot of it is in different languages, and the translator doesn't have a big enough sample of each language to translate them all. There seems to be one language used more than the others. The biggest segment I could get says something like: 'As the general secretary of the communities which are...together...united, I guess, something about one hundred and forty-seven member states, which represent almost all of the inhabitants of the planet Earth, I send greetings on behalf of the people of our planet.' The rest is too corrupted to make sense."
"I've never heard of any planet close to that name."
"No one has. I don't think it exists. But you remember that painting on the outer shell of the craft?"
"Blue square with red and white stripes next to it?"
"That's the one. We still believe it could be a map. The blue section looks like it could have stars represented on it. The stripes could be some sort of measurement of distance or relationship. And you know the characters next to it? The collection of straight and curved lines? Turns out it's a primitive system of writing. We put the characters through our translation software, assuming that each symbol represents one of the sounds heard in the recording. We had to fill in some gaps, and make some assumptions, but we got it. It says: 'The united states of America.' I think this craft could still be valuable, Hire. I think we should continue to find out what we can about it. I'm going to send it to the guys at the..."
"Carver, I'm tired. I'm going to go to bed. Take tomorrow off if you want to.
"Uh-huh. Okay Hire. See you later."
Hire disconnected the communicator, and drew his daughter in close.
"Were you eavesdropping?" He flicked her nose playfully.
She smiled and lowered her head. "Maybe."
Hire laughed. "How was your birthday, beautiful girl?"
She waited for a moment before answering. "It was fun, but I wish I could have talked to extratellestibles."
Hire hugged her tighter. "I know, sweetheart. I'm sorry."
She smiled at him. "It's okay, daddy. It's not your fault."
They were quiet for a moment, each admiring the celestial parade of twinkling lights above them.
"Daddy?"
"Yes?"
"What's the united states of America?"
Hire shook his head. "I don't know, Whispers, and I guess it doesn't really matter."
Together they stood on that hilltop on a cool Agian night and looked up into the stars, overwhelmed with the knowledge that they were truly, completely, alone.