Mon­sters in the Dark

By Torn MacAlester

“Mis­ter Baird,” said the Direc­tor at the inquiry. “There is a famous quote from the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry. It states: ‘extra­or­di­nary claims require extra­or­di­nary evi­dence.’ We have exact­ly that situation.”

Ian noticed the shift­ed hon­orif­ic. Offi­cials had referred to him as Can­di­date Baird in all dis­cus­sions up to that point, indi­cat­ing that he had been a can­di­date for a doc­tor­ate. Dur­ing the inquiry, the sub­tle shift sug­gest­ed they had already decid­ed about the sig­nal. It had been the con­tention of sev­er­al of the Sat­urn Sci­ence Coun­cil that Ian had failed to pro­vide evi­dence of the detec­tion of an alien civilization.

“Direc­tor,” said Ian as he pushed back all his anger. “The evi­dence is what it is. I real­ize we don’t have the five-sig­ma lev­el of con­fi­dence we need for detec­tion. The result falls just below it.”

“You state you applied no non-stan­dard tech­niques to the analysis.”

“That is true. I have made no attempts at cre­ative sta­tis­tics or noise sup­pres­sion to achieve this result. I want­ed to make sure we had noth­ing con­tro­ver­sial about this.”

“But there is a con­tro­ver­sy,” said the Direc­tor. “A big one.”

The oth­er fac­ul­ty shift­ed uncom­fort­ably in their seats.

“Yes,” said Ian. “I hope you can sep­a­rate the con­tro­ver­sy from the research on the data.”

“But there is a con­nec­tion between them.”

“I dis­agree.”

“But you admit to tak­ing the stimulant.”

“Yes.”

“Then you aren’t able to sep­a­rate it from the analy­sis,” said the Director.

“All the analy­sis took place after I dumped it.”

“But you could have still been under its influence.”

“I doubt it.”

“Direc­tor,” said Jean Kaga, a senior mem­ber of the fac­ul­ty. “Giv­en that we all know that Can­di­date Baird has had dif­fi­cul­ties. Shouldn’t we focus on the evi­dence of the claim rather than dis­miss it out of a technicality?”

“What do you sug­gest?” asked the Director.

“That we give the evi­dence a fair hear­ing before we ques­tion the integri­ty of the col­lec­tor,” said Jean. “We know the auto­mat­ed Kuiper array is inde­pen­dent of the care­tak­er’s actions.”

“Grant­ed,” answered the Direc­tor. “Please continue.”

“We even insist­ed upon a human care­tak­er instead of a robot­ic one, giv­en that a robot would like­ly con­clude the same thing as the automa­tion and make the same deci­sion. Can­di­date Baird was the care­tak­er that we sent up there to give a per­spec­tive dif­fer­ent from the machines.”

*****

The dark­ness in the Kuiper belt had been far more intense than Ian had imag­ined. It was impos­ing, and every shad­ow held the beasts of his imag­i­na­tion. The longer he had been there, the more the mon­sters had crept into his con­scious­ness. The small­er anten­na point­ed to Sat­urn over a hun­dred AUs away, lost in the glare of the bright­est star in the sky, the Sun. On the oth­er side of the ice world, anoth­er big­ger anten­na scanned the cos­mos look­ing for sig­nals from aliens. The Kuiper belt became the place to shield that anten­na from the noise cre­at­ed by the rest of humanity.

Ian Baird looked at the clock. There were anoth­er eight hours before his con­ver­sa­tion could con­tin­ue. It was mad­den­ing, wait­ing near­ly 28 hours for a reply. Even though he could talk for hours dur­ing each mes­sage, the inter­ac­tions for those con­ver­sa­tions would take for­ev­er to accu­mu­late. Ian lis­tened to those in the hours pri­or to the mes­sage’s expect­ed arrival, so he would catch up with the con­ti­nu­ity of the message.

It was far too soon for the mes­sage to arrive, so he thought he could read. He tried his best to con­cen­trate, turn­ing up the light­ing to elim­i­nate the shad­ows and the mon­sters in the darkness.

The extreme dis­tance from the sun left the icy object in dark­ness most of the time. The grav­i­ty had been so weak, the spin­ning torus pro­vid­ed a sixth of Earth’s stan­dard grav­i­ty for him. It also act­ed as one of two gyros sta­bi­liz­ing the icy object and the mas­sive anten­na point­ing to the cos­mos. To keep the heat from leak­ing away, there were very few win­dows in the torus, leav­ing the inte­ri­or with no nat­ur­al light. Frus­trat­ing­ly, the auto­mat­ic sys­tems dimmed lights too often, leav­ing deep­en­ing shad­ows and the mon­sters his imag­i­na­tion would fill them with.

But they always were there, just beyond the edge of the shad­ows. The dis­trac­tion of the read­ing helped, but his mind always fell back onto the zap and the won­der­ful feel­ing he would get. Zap always made the mon­sters go away. Zap would be relax­ing, and zap would enable him to hear the music.

He pushed the notions of the addic­tive chem­i­cal from his mind. Light con­trolled the mon­sters. Deep down, Ian knew they weren’t real, and the light proved it. But the light also gave way to the intense dark­ness of the Kuiper belt. But zap could push away the dark­ness and enable the music. He had a few more from the last batch he made.

It had been sev­er­al hours since the mes­sage from Sat­urn had arrived when Ian woke. The zap had seen to it, push­ing him into the music, this time more unusu­al than the last. The sounds had since fad­ed away when he rolled out of the bed, feel­ing the sick­ness that inevitably would fol­low. He looked at the logs, see­ing that some unknown source had inter­rupt­ed again the scan of the heav­ens, and the anten­na dwelled on the same part of the sky. It had hap­pened before, so once again, he set the com­put­ers to ana­lyze the signal.

Turn­ing to the mes­sage, Ian played it with­out first lis­ten­ing to the pre­vi­ous conversation.

“Ian,” said Jean Kaga. “It’s good to hear from you. We were won­der­ing what you’ve been doing with the anten­na for the past few days. We are get­ting a very odd sig­nal. You’ve been get­ting some music. Is one of the side lobes of the anten­na pick­ing up one of the Kuiper con­struc­tion sites? I think the array should receive none of this. I want you to do a full analy­sis on the receiv­er and the antenna…”

At 13.9 hours trav­el time at light speed from Sat­urn, it meant they sent it before his last sleep. But the strange ques­tion also sug­gest­ed they had heard music.

Why are they hear­ing the music? I thought it was from zap.

*****

The mon­ster retreat­ed fur­ther into the dark. I could not make out its fea­tures in the cor­ner’s dark­ness. It couldn’t be that big, but it felt huge. The eyes looked alien, lack­ing the sim­ple design of every eye he had seen for the crea­tures on Earth. It was com­plex, though not even ele­gant­ly arrayed like an insect. Those eyes pierced my soul, tak­ing each breath from me as if it were a ball of fuzz from a worn fabric.

*****

Ian looked at the clock, fig­ur­ing out when he’d last tak­en the dose. It would have been about ten hours before. He turned up the light­ing, push­ing back the shad­ows and went down the hall­way to the con­sole. He felt the eyes of the mon­sters upon him regard­less, but he pushed them aside, fear­ing the ques­tion more than the unknown. It was because the ques­tion pushed the edges of the fears he faced. If the music was not from the zap, then it was real.

Could that also make the mon­sters real?

He pulled up the sig­nal logs from the deep array. There were a dozen stars that were observed through the win­dow when he’d been sleep­ing. The pro­grammed obser­va­tions had turned the anten­na towards a dozen places in the cos­mos. It would mean that there would be a dozen side lobes point­ing off in odd direc­tions from the main beam. He looked at the logs, see­ing that there seemed to be a sig­nal from a star 700 par­secs away. It was the tar­get. It was a sig­nal at 9.2 Giga­hertz, at least three-sig­ma above the noise. Not a detec­tion for sure, but tan­ta­liz­ing­ly strong. The pow­er spec­trum con­tained both har­mon­ic and non-har­mon­ic ele­ments, but clear­ly were part of a fre­quen­cy mod­u­lat­ed carrier.

It has structure!

After the sig­nal logs, he lis­tened to the sounds, try­ing to tune them in.

What the hell?

It was the music he remem­bered, fill­ing his head­set with the alien sounds of some melody flanked by har­mo­niz­ing beats and unusu­al counter points. The sound caught him in a near trance. Then sud­den­ly Ian real­ized what it meant.

It’s real!

Ian quick­ly moved to the kitchen and flushed all the zap down the sink. He knew it had dis­tort­ed his views. It made it impos­si­ble to rec­og­nize what the cur­rent data rep­re­sent­ed. If it came from the stars like the data had sug­gest­ed, it would mean that the tele­scope had been a success.

The deep array moved the radio dish­es as far as pos­si­ble from the rest of human­i­ty. At over 100 AU dis­tance from the Earth, the deep array put sig­nif­i­cant dis­tance between the anten­na and the rest of the solar system.

Ian had agreed to over­see the dish for a year. The time would be relax­ing for him. Get­ting away from his trou­bles to spend his time relax­ing, he hoped to spend his time going through some study to improve his stand­ing at the university.

He fin­ished up his analy­sis of the sig­nal, prepar­ing his report to send back to Sat­urn. He found the sig­nal. Ian pre­pared his report and pre­pared the anten­na move­ment pro­gram­ming to look again for the sig­nal and prove its existence.

*****

As I dimmed the lights, con­serv­ing the pow­er, the mon­ster returned. Its maw drooled flu­id into the dark cor­ner. I heard its breath hiss­ing as it breathed. It almost sound­ed labored as I pushed away from the dark­ness, seek­ing as much light as pos­si­ble. Was it hun­gry? Was it plan­ning to destroy me? I shud­dered as it hissed. 

*****

“So you decid­ed the sig­nal was a legit­i­mate can­di­date?” asked Jean Kaga.

“Yes,” answered Ian after check­ing his notes. “The point­ing was con­sis­tent; the sta­tis­ti­cal analy­sis con­tra­dict­ed ran­dom sam­pling. I con­clud­ed I had some­thing that wasn’t mere­ly a kind of noise.”

“Can you explain that?”

“I did a spec­tral analy­sis of the sig­nal,” he answered. “If it were noise, I’d have it dis­persed over the spec­trum, where the sig­nal would have a struc­ture if it was information.”

“Struc­ture mean­ing peaks?”

“Yes.”

“How did you proceed?”

“I start­ed look­ing off axis to the tar­get, try­ing to show it was a point source. It was.”

“And then?” asked Kaga.

“The pos­si­bil­i­ty of noise com­ing from one of the side lobes was always pos­si­ble. I tilt­ed the anten­na in var­i­ous direc­tions to make sure it wasn’t some kind of reflec­tion from some­where in the solar system.”

“You seem to have a good sense of issues.”

“Yeah, I was ahead of the mes­sages from you all.”

*****

It moved for­ward, but only to the edge of the shad­ow. Its bulk filled the dark­ness of the cor­ner as it reached out with a gnarled ten­ta­cle. It pen­e­trat­ed the edge of the dark­ness with the appendage, but it did not touch the light. I backed away from the cor­ner, look­ing for the light switch. It seemed to reach for me. I fum­bled, look­ing for that damn switch. Clos­er and clos­er. Then…

*****

Ian lis­tened to the lat­est message.

“Baird,” said the Direc­tor. “Thanks for look­ing into that data. We agree that you have a pos­si­ble detec­tion. I like the pro­to­col you have decid­ed. Get­ting off axis from the source will cer­tain­ly have a lot of impact on deter­min­ing if this is some kind of reflec­tion or a side lobe from the antenna.”

“Of course it will,” said Ian to the 14-hour old record­ing. “In fact, I’ve already done it.”

“—and the team thinks it is pos­si­ble that this side lobe is being reflect­ed off of Oort cloud.”

“What the hell are you talk­ing about?”

“—we want you to try this again in about twelve days, since the Earth will move sig­nif­i­cant­ly in that amount of time. Research done on Zodi­a­cal light from the Sun sug­gest­ed that the same might hap­pen from the radio noise from Earth—”

“This would have been in the lit­er­a­ture from when we did this from the far side of the Moon in the last cen­tu­ry. Did you for­get to use the library?”

“—should be suf­fi­cient for your cor­re­spon­dence. We don’t need you to report on each mea­sure­ment. But we need you to per­form a diag­nos­tic again on Thurs­day. There is an obser­va­tion hia­tus sched­uled for fourteen–”

I need to take a break. They’ve got me buzzing with all this work.

“Anoth­er delay,” Ian said, and shut off the message.

He had reduced the light­ing since his pow­er usage was going up into the amber lev­els. He’d been mak­ing long trans­mis­sions to Sat­urn between data trans­mis­sions. The com­put­ers were being used at twice their nor­mal rate to do all the sim­u­la­tions that Ian was run­ning on the data to pick up the struc­ture. The results were get­ting close to what he was hop­ing for: the detec­tion of an alien civilization.

He checked the kitchen, look­ing for some food. His appetite had not set­tled since flush­ing the zap. Most report­ed a crazy appetite for days after their last dose. He made two piz­zas and downed almost all the food.

*****

The mon­sters and the music returned to my dreams. I couldn’t escape the icy dark­ness of the deep shad­ows. Here at the edge of human civ­i­liza­tion, near the bound­ary of the cos­mos, the mon­sters ruled. I had no defense against them except the light. But the light was a lim­it­ed quan­ti­ty, so I could not shine into every crevice. The nois­es of its hiss­ing now took on a dif­fer­ent tone. It was answer­ing the music–answering in near harmony.

*****

As he woke again from the sights and sounds of the dream, he won­dered if the music was some­thing oth­er than music. Could it be tru­ly music? Or was it lan­guage or data that sound­ed like music to a human ear? 

The nature of the sig­nal made for some inter­est­ing spec­u­la­tion. First off, it was a nar­row band. The sig­nal only con­tains the music, not some­thing to pass mas­sive amounts of data. Once human­i­ty devel­oped wide band com­mu­ni­ca­tions, the nar­row bands dwin­dled in util­i­ty. There was always a desire for more data. The wider the bands became, the more it would look like noise. So, most SETI became look­ing for tech­no-sig­na­tures rather than nar­row band signals.

*****

“So, I see you were con­cerned that there was no asso­ci­at­ed tech­no sig­na­ture,” said the director.

“Yes,” said Ian. “I found this musi­cal-sound­ing sig­nal’s iso­la­tion per­plex­ing. It would dis­ap­pear for approx­i­mate­ly 8 hours, then it would reap­pear. I guessed a rotat­ing body, such as a plan­et, was caus­ing it. That formed the basis for my modeling.”

“How about rep­e­ti­tion?” asked Jean.

“Phras­es would be repeat­ed, but the mes­sage would not restart,” Ian answered.

“That is an inter­est­ing result itself,” said the Director.

“Can you elab­o­rate on the dis­ap­pear­ance?” asked Jean.

“That dis­ap­pear­ance helped me estab­lish a rota­tion rate of approx­i­mate­ly 27.3 hours. The Doppler helped estab­lish a rota­tion veloc­i­ty at about 800 km per hour. Both val­ues have been deter­mined to be about three-sig­ma. Not a detec­tion, but com­pelling. The plan­e­tary sur­face mod­el hypoth­e­sizes a sin­gle dipole anten­na on a plan­et surface.”

“Yes, inter­est­ing, if it weren’t for the stim­u­lant,” said the Direc­tor. The room fell silent, let­ting those words hang in the air.

*****

It hissed at me again. This time, it formed words instead of har­mo­ny. It took me a moment to real­ize that it was speak­ing to me.

“You’ve for­got­ten about me,” it said.

“No,” I answered, not know­ing if it real­ly meant to speak to me.

“You have. I’m right over here.”

A ten­ta­cle moved in the dark­ness. Instinc­tive­ly, I moved back.

“You won’t sur­vive here with­out me,” it taunted.

*****

Ian worked fever­ous­ly. There were hours of data, but the real mea­sure­ments that could con­firm the sig­nal were frus­trat­ing­ly out of reach. Each rota­tion of the source could improve the sta­tis­tics of the rota­tion rate. The Doppler of the sig­nal improved his mea­sure­ment of the rota­tion velocity.

Ide­al­ly, all he would need was to col­lect more data. How­ev­er, his allot­ted dis­cre­tionary time restrict­ed his use of the obser­va­to­ry. He’d already used so much of it on the dis­tant quasar. At near­ly five bil­lion light years dis­tant, it required its own sig­nif­i­cant amount of time to col­lect what he need­ed. Now the first con­tact source had eclipsed half of his allot­ted time, he was going to fall short of the data need­ed for his dissertation.

The Sat­urn Sci­ence Coun­cil was the hard­est of the insti­tu­tions that still offered astro­physics as a career path, so their stan­dards had been some of the high­est. His dis­ser­ta­tion would need to be near per­fect for him to pass.

He had two choic­es. The safe route would be to con­tin­ue the exam­i­na­tion of the quasar. He’d still fall short of the observ­ing time allot­ment that he esti­mat­ed that he’d need to achieve by about half, but it was over four times the data he already had. The option would be to near­ly dou­ble the data he’d already col­lect­ed for first contact. 

Tak­ing the safe route would still be risky, but less so. It would mean that his sig­nal to noise would improve by a fac­tor of four. The dou­bling of the first con­tact data would be only a forty per­cent improvement.

Damn, it’s not enough.

In anoth­er era, Ian could have been able to get away with the three-sig­ma result, but in the cur­rent era, five sig­ma was a requirement.

Face it, you need to col­lect the quasar data.

******

For the first time, it remained qui­et. I could still hear it slith­er­ing in the shad­ows, but it did not speak again. It seemed resigned to its pur­pose of threat­en­ing me. The threat remained real. I felt it could leap out of the shad­ows at any moment. Every time I turned away, I felt a ten­ta­cle reach­ing for me. But when I turned back, it had with­drawn into the dark­ness. The mon­ster was from the dark, and I knew the light would keep it away. 

******

“So that became the point where you made more of the stim­u­lant?” asked the Direc­tor. “It was when you real­ized you need­ed to col­lect the quasar data for your dissertation.”

“Yes Direc­tor,” said Ian. “Once I repro­grammed the com­put­ers to take the data for the quasar.”

“And you nev­er con­sid­ered the increase in data for the first contact?”

“No. As I indi­cat­ed, the forty per­cent increase would like­ly be unac­cept­able to get any­thing close to five sig­ma levels.”

“Here is the prob­lem,” said Jean Kaga. “You’ve left your­self with two very insuf­fi­cient results. Nei­ther suf­fices to make your dis­ser­ta­tion satisfactory.”

“Yes,” said Ian. “I’m afraid that is the case.”

“That has left us with the unfor­tu­nate deci­sion to not pass your dis­ser­ta­tion,” said Jean.

“How­ev­er,” said the Direc­tor. “Giv­en the sit­u­a­tion, we want you to return to the Kuiper array and resume the data col­lec­tions until you can present us with sig­nif­i­cant results.” 

*****

Ian recal­i­brat­ed the obser­va­to­ry to turn its atten­tion to the quasar after lis­ten­ing to the music for suf­fi­cient time to know for sure. Now that the quasar data was being col­lect­ed, he would ana­lyze the music being radi­at­ed from the plan­et. He would fill his day with the inter­est­ing work of draft­ing his dis­ser­ta­tion and ensur­ing the obser­va­to­ry ran effec­tive­ly. Music became the top­ic, fill­ing his mind with the pos­si­bil­i­ty of alien life. But for now, it would be silent, though the mon­sters would still roam in the dark.

*****

“Wel­come back,” it hissed.

 

The End