Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation: a highly isotropic radiation with an almost perfect blackbody spectrum permeating the entire universe, at a temperature of approximately [2.7 degrees Kelvin], Although some primitive cultures mistakenly cite this radiation as proof of a commonly found creation myth—specifically, a notion that the universe began as a singularity that burst forth violently—sophisticated races understand that the cosmic microwave background is actually the result of …
It didn’t help that the same thing was happening elsewhere. It didn’t help one damned bit. I’d been called in to U of T seven times over the past two years, and each time someone had killed himself. It wasn’t always a prof; time before McCharles, it had been a Ph.D. candidate who’d been just about to defend his thesis on some abstruse aspect of evolutionary theory. Oh, evolution happens, all right—but it turns out the mechanisms are way more complex than the ones the Darwinians have been defending for a century and a half. I tried not to get cynical about all this, but I wondered if, as he slit his wrists before reproducing, that student had thought about the irony of what he was doing.
The source of all his troubles—of so many people’s troubles—was a planet orbiting a star called 54 Piscium, some thirty-six light-years away. For two years now, it had been constantly signaling Earth with flashes of intense laser light.
Well, not quite constantly: it signaled for eighteen hours then paused for twenty, and it fell silent once every hundred and twelve days for a period just shy of two weeks. From this, astronomers had worked out what they thought were the lengths of the day and the year of the planet that was signaling us, and the diameter of that planet’s sun. But they weren’t sure; nobody was sure of anything anymore.
At first, all we knew was that the signals were artificial. The early patterns of flashes were various mathematical chains: successively larger primes, then Fibonacci sequences in base eight, then a series that no one has quite worked out the significance of but that was sent repeatedly.
But then real information started flowing in, in amazing detail. Our telecommunications engineers were astonished that they’d missed a technique as simple as fractal nesting for packing huge amounts of information into a very narrow bandwidth. But that realization was just the first of countless blows to our egos.
There was a clip they kept showing on TV for ages after we’d figured out what we were receiving: an astronomer from the last century with a supercilious manner going on about how contact with aliens might plug us into the Encyclopedia Galactica, a repository of the knowledge of beings millions of years ahead of us in science and technology, in philosophy and mathematics. What wonders it would hold! What secrets it would reveal! What mysteries it would solve!
No one was arrogant like that astronomer anymore. No one could be.
Of course, various governments had tried to put the genie back into the bottle, but no nation has a monopoly on signals from the stars. Indeed, anyone with a few hundred dollars worth of equipment could detect the laser flashes. And deciphering the information wasn’t hard; the damned encyclopedia was designed to be read by anyone, after all.
And so the entries were made public—placed on the web by individuals, corporations, and those governments that still thought doing so was a public service. Of course, people tried to verify what the entries said; for some, we simply didn’t have the technology. For others, though, we could run tests, or make observations—and the entries always turned out to be correct, no matter how outlandish their claims seemed on the surface.
I thought about Ethan McCharles, swinging from his fiber-optic noose. The poor bastard.
It was rumored that one group had sent a reply to the senders, begging them to stop the transmission of the encyclopedia. Maybe that was even true—but it was no quick fix. After all, any signal sent from Earth would take thirty-six years to reach them, and even if they replied—or stopped— immediately upon receipt of our message, it would take another thirty-six years for that to have an impact here.
Until then at least, data would rain down on us, poison from the sky.
Life After Death: A belief, frequently encountered in unenlightened races, that some self-aware aspect of a given individual survives the death of the body. Although such a belief doubtless gives superstitious primitives a measure of comfort, it is easily proven that no such thing exists. The standard proofs are drawn from (1) moral philosophy, (2) quantum information theory, (3) non-[Untranslatable proper name] hyperparallactic phase-shift phenomenology, and (4) comprehensive symbolic philosologic. We shall explore each of these proofs in turn …
“Ethan was a good man,” said Marilyn Maslankowski. We had left her husbands office—and his corpse—behind. It was getting late, and the campus was mostly empty. Of course, as I’d seen, it was mostly empty earlier, too—who the hell wanted to waste years getting taught things that would soon be proven wrong, or would be rendered hopelessly obsolete?
We’d found a lounge to sit in, filled with vinyl-covered chairs. I bought Marilyn a coffee from a machine; at least I could do that much for her.
“I’m sure he was,” I said. They were always good men—or good women. They’d just backed the wrong horse, and—
No. No, that wasn’t right. They’d backed a horse when there were other, much faster, totally invisible things racing as well. We knew nothing.
“His work was his life,” Marilyn continued. “He was so dedicated. Not just about his research, either, but as a teacher. His students loved him.”
“I’m sure they did,” I said. However few of them there were. “Um, how did you get to work today?”
“TTC,” she replied. Public transit.
“Where abouts do you live?”
“We have a condo near the lake, in Etobicoke.”
We. She’d probably say “we” for months to come.
She’d finished her coffee, and I drained mine in a final gulp. “Come on,” I said. “I’ll give you a lift home.”
We headed down some stairs and out to the street. It was dark, and the sky seemed a uniform black: the glare of street lamps banished the stars. If only it were so easy …
We got into my car, and I started driving. Earlier, she’d called her two adult children. One, her daughter, was rushing back to the city from a skiing trip—artificial snow, of course. The other, her son, was in Los Angeles, but was taking the red-eye, and would be here by morning.
“Why are they doing this?” she asked, as we drove along. “Why are the aliens doing this?”
I moved into the left lane and flicked on my turn signal. Blink, blink, blink.
Off in the distance we could see the tapered needle of the CN Tower, Toronto’s—and, when I was younger—the world’s tallest building, stretching over half a kilometer into the air. Lots of radio and television stations broadcast from it, and so I pointed at it. “Presumably they became aware of us through our radio and TV programs—stuff we leaked out into space.” I tried to make my tone light. “Right now, they’d be getting our shows from the 1970s—have you ever seen any of that stuff? I suppose they think they’re uplif ting us. Bringing us out of the dark ages.”
Marilyn looked out the passenger window. “There’s nothing wrong with darkness,” she said. “It’s comforting.” She didn’t say anything further as we continued along. The city was gray and unpleasant. Christmas had come and gone, and—