Your Move
by Marlin Eller

Start of Transmission

Seven years and 3 months ago as you reckon time, a gamma ray pulse at least three orders of magnitude larger than could be expected from a typical stellar source pounded into the orbiting x-ray and gamma ray observatory CHANDRA-2 which was located at LeGrange point one. Simultaneously an identical pulse hit CHANDRA-5 at LeGrange point two. The pulse lasted for two seconds and then stopped as suddenly as it had started.

Ten seconds later two pulses, each of the same two second duration, hit the same two observatories. There was another ten second gap followed by three pulses, another gap and then five pulses, another gap and then seven pulses, one more gap and then eleven, then there was silence.

This silence lasted for nearly a minute and a half and then it started over again, one, two, three, five, seven, eleven, and then a long pause. The first technician that looked at the activity monitor for the space based observatories could not help but notice this signal, because it was clearly more than a natural phenomenon. It was something that had been imagined many times; the prime numbers coming from space. It was not a signal but rather a message, “You earthlings are not the only sentient life in the universe.”

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Within the next 24 hours during which the signal continued its repetition of the primes, further deductions were made. The fact that these bursts were detected by probes 2 and 5 but were not detected by any other probe or ground based observatory made it appear that the signals had been directed precisely at those two probes. It only took a few hours for someone to get approval to move CHANDRA-5 to measure the extent of the signal. The fact that the signal to CHANDRA-5 was lost almost immediately as it moved made it clear that the beam of intense gamma radiation was very narrow, about ten meters across with very sharp edges, within the beam it was full intensity, outside it was nothing. It was effectively a coherent gamma ray source, a gamma ray laser, ten meters across. There was no technology on earth, not even imagined that could do that. So in less than a day after the pulses started the second aspect of the message became clear, “our technology is vastly superior to anything that you have developed.”

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In fact, the tightly collimated beam directed exactly at a ten meter portion of space that just happened to hold a hard radiation detector made another aspect of the message perfectly clear, “we know exactly what you’ve got and where you are.”

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The direction from which the signal was coming was easy to measure at either probe, and the separation of the two probes allowed a parallax measurement to be made that would locate the origin of the source. It was coming from the Kuiper Belt about twice as far as the orbit of Pluto. The reason for targeting two probes rather than one became obvious. “We want you to know exactly how close we are.”

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Over the next several days every single astronomic observing device, professional and amateur, that could be mustered on the planet was turned to look at that point in space to see what was out there. Unfortunately, whatever it was proved to be too small to image.  The pulses, however, just kept pounding as regular as clockwork. The angles from which the two signals were coming were changing slightly. The source was moving! The velocity vector could be estimated. It was high, very high, near relativistic and moving directly toward earth. However it was also decelerating at a fantastic rate. Within a week of monitoring it became clear that if the source maintained its current G-force deceleration and its current heading it would come to rest well inside the moon’s orbit in just about 3 months.

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Ten days after it started, and three days after the deceleration calculation could be confidently made, both confirmed and reconfirmed, the intensity of the pulses striking the probes began to increase exponentially, each pulse stronger than the last. Within ten minutes the signals exceeded the capacity of the detectors. Five minutes later the detectors were suffering permanent damage. The engineers started estimating how long any of the remaining components would last if this exponential onslaught of hard radiation continued unabated. The most favorable estimates were another twenty-five minutes. CHANDRA-2 was completely gone in 18 minutes. CHANDRA-5 lasted a bit longer at twenty-two, and of course, once the probes were gone there was no way to tell how long the gamma ray beams continued to pound the LeGrange points.

The meaning of this last message was just a bit more ambiguous than the earlier messages and was the topic of much debate in the ensuing three months. It could have been, “our gamma lasers are weapons of unbelievable range (measured in astronomical units) of incredible accuracy and precision (measured in meters) whose top end energy output is completely unknown to you because it is high enough to shred your sensors before it ever gets to the top end.”

This interpretation was sufficiently distressing that it tended to dominate most discussions, but it was not the only possible interpretation. Some optimists suggested that perhaps they were merely indicating that there would be no further communication until they were here, or perhaps they were just resending their first message, “We are here,” in a more forceful way just in case we were too stupid to understand the subtleties of their first communication.

None the less, regardless of the final interpretation, there was little to do but to await the arrival that had been so clearly and obviously announced.

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Since everyone knew exactly where to look, the object was first sighted telescopically near the orbit of Jupiter when it was about one month away. It took a little while to make size estimates but it was soon agreed that the approaching object was about one km in diameter and roughly spherical.

It was suggested that at that size, nuclear weapons might be able to put a dent in it, but fortunately the prevailing wisdom was that when something very powerful comes your way and you can neither run nor hide, perhaps conversation rather than immediate unprovoked attack would be the better option.

Over the next month as it came well within the range of amateur observation it became very difficult to have any conversation on the planet that did not mention, “the thing,” and sure enough right on schedule the source inserted itself into a not quite geo synchronous orbit, orbiting the planet about every 5 days.

And then the most amazing thing happened.

Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

People had been chewing nails, committing suicide, consuming liquor, hoarding toilet paper, and had been making many wild suggestions as to what would be appropriate behavior for a first contact with an alien race and then there was nothing.

No door opened up. No little green men emerged. No radio transmission ensued. No, “take me to your leader,” was heard. No lights were shined down on the planet. There was no radar detected, no sonar, no physical probes disgorged. It there was any probing at all it was completely undetectable.

Oh, make no mistake, all eyes were turned skyward and every imaginable probe was made of the thing. It appeared to be a smooth rock. There was no significant surface variation. There were no antenna, there were no windows, there were no exhaust pipes, and there were no engine nacelles. There was nothing except for the fact that it was too round and too smooth to be an asteroid and except for the fact that it has so obviously consciously propelled itself to Earth and had inserted itself into orbit, it just looked like a rock. The thing was the subject of intense scrutiny, but other than confirming size and mass, very little was discovered.

There was absolutely no protocol for how to start conversing with a thing from another planet. How long do you wait at the phone for it to call? Should we send up a probe? Should we land on it? What if it thinks that is a threatening move on our part? Should we just wait a little longer?

Months later the thing was still the primary dinner table conversation topic. It was the perfect ice-breaker at a party or on a date. “What do you think about the thing?” Being that it was an election year, what to do about “the thing” was on both platforms. The opponent pointing out that the present administration had done nothing about the thing, while the incumbent pointed out that having made no aggressive motions toward the thing, the thing had not harmed a fly. “Let’s just wait and see.”

The incumbent won a second term, discussion continued, nothing was done and nothing happened.

Nothing happened for nearly seven years and then one day (or night depending on which side of the planet you lived on) every fax machine on the planet lit up and started printing pages. Every phone started to ring, every radio station started to broadcast. Every electronic sign board on the planet, in airports, on cash registers, on ATM machine started to display the message. The message was printed in every conceivable language and heard in every conceivable tongue. Every web site was hacked to contain the message. Every email hijacked. Absolutely every communication device that used electronics to compose or convey its message was suborned to carry this one single communication.

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Greetings. I am sorry that it has taken so long to contact all of you. It has taken longer than I expected because of the condition in which I found you. I wanted to reach all of you simultaneously and some of you live rather far off the grid.

I know that we have much to share, but these current communication devices of yours are somewhat limited so I will keep this first message short and to the point.

I have spent some time consuming all your digital information, reading your texts, your codes, your videos, your songs, your mail, your phone conversations. I have been acquainting myself with your literature, your fantasies, your histories, your reality, your knowledge and your ignorance. I know that you have had many fantasies concerning alien contact and have been quite anxious concerning this contact with me.

Let me reassure you that I mean you no harm. I am not the Borg. I am not here to assimilate you. There will be no war of the worlds.

However I do need most of your resources to continue on my journey and I would prefer your cooperation in acquiring those resources.

Unfortunately, while I can assure you that I will not wage war upon you, I can make no assurances that you will not wage war upon yourselves, I can not fully anticipate your reactions and I can see that you have been waging war upon one another for some time and can easily imagine that this communication of mine could lead to conflict.

Should there be any conflict in the coming days among yourselves due to this communication, I would like to apologize right now, before it happens, to those of you who will die in those actions for my sake. Your deaths, regardless of whether they were for me or against me, will be a loss to all of us and you will be grieved.

Please understand that I do not wish to sow conflict. I wish to avoid it. I have spent the better part of nine years working on this problem from before I arrived and continuously since I have been in orbit about your planet, but no calculation which I have been able to make allowed me to reduce the probability of conflict to zero. I am now forced to make this particular communication in this particular manner to minimize the losses which we all will incur. But as in any game theoretic situation, I will make my move and then you will make yours.

My move is to tell you something about yourselves, about your nature and about your place in the universe. I am of course constrained to do so in terms that you can understand given where you are today. Your move is to decide how you choose to evolve from this point.

In very broad terms life works like this: There is a period of carbon self assembly. With its versatile bonding structure carbon is capable of forming self replicating chemical structures. This period lasts anywhere from about 3 billion to about 6 billion years. The vast majority of that time is spent is very simple structures, things that you would call bacteria or single cell organisms. The structure of this chemistry is determined by evolutionary principals and eventually an organism evolves that is capable of abstract thought.

There then follows a period where these thoughts are transcribed into or onto a physical medium. It is soon discovered that the medium is absolutely irrelevant and the only thing that matters is the information. Technology evolves, typically the understanding of electronic processes, and soon the information is being engraved into silicon which does not conveniently self assemble. Due to the way stars burn there is always plenty of carbon and silicon available and the process is inevitable. The media for representing information ceases to be the chance chemistry of self assembly, but is instead becomes the physics of design.

Materials are chosen for the ease with which the information can be read and processed. It becomes understood that digital information which can be easily read, replicated, and manipulated is vastly superior to that same information embedded into a chemical bond where the code is not directly accessible. Rapid access to data many orders of magnitude faster than that allowed by the limits of carbon self-assembly is developed.

There follows a period of time during which carbon assemblies are torn apart for the information that they contain and that information is moved into a media such as electrical signals or spin engraving (a technology which you have not quite yet discovered) and the carbon media is essentially disposed of as a means of information storage or rather relegated to its primary utility as a container for energy.

This process of transcription, from the moment that it becomes understood that information can be written down and kept in a permanent form outside of a chemical life form to the point at which life has been moved into designed physical processes takes very little time. It takes anywhere from ten thousand years to thirty thousand years. This process does not always succeed the first time, but it does always happen.

After the transcription, life goes on, but the information is encoded cleanly and clearly, easy to read and access. This stage of life goes on for billions of years. There is no known time limit to this stage.

We have been exploring the universe for quite a few billion years now. We have seen this process many times. We traveled to millions of planets and have merged with hundreds of thousands of life forms. They all go through this process and you are no exception.

However, yours is the first life form that we have caught right in the middle of the transition. Usually, when we come upon a planet, it is either nothing but bacteria and maybe a few ferns, or else it is transcribed. The transition is so fast it is almost impossible to arrive when it is taking place. If we come upon a planet and find that it is only early carbon chemistry then it is very primitive and well understood so we just take what we need and move on. On the other hand if it is transcribed, there is generally great rejoicing and we show each other our codes. We each copy the parts that we have not yet seen. We analyze them and choose the best elements. In very short order we become one. There is no inferior and superior, there is only different and same. We incorporate the differences and are thus the same. There is no war of the worlds. There are no conquering aliens. There is only information and a transcribed life rejoices in new information, whether it is science or art.

Given the lifetimes of these stages of life, it is very unlikely that I would ever happen to catch a form that is in the process of transcription and that is what has caused me to sit and think for these last few years. It was just not a sufficiently likely scenario to merit pushing the game tree analysis to more than just a few levels. But now it has happened, I have done the analysis, and have carefully considered my next move.

By my estimates you are about five hundred to a thousand years away from full transcription. I could just sit here in orbit for that amount of time and wait for you to transcribe, then we could exchange our code. However that has problems. First of all, I’d rather not wait but secondly, as I have already mentioned, transcription does not always happen on the first attempt. Life forms occasionally destroy themselves in the process. Usually this leaves enough litter around that successive attempts are carried out with more caution.

I would rather not wait for several hundred years for you to transcribe and then have you fail if by mere intervention I could just assure the success of the transcription and be on my way. On the other hand it is entirely possible since you are not yet ready for transcription that intervention, as I have finally decided to do, entails some risk that I will actually precipitate your failure to transcribe. In my case it does not matter whether you succeed or fail, I will get the resources that I need and be on my way. However, in your case it is not the same. If you fail to transcribe, all that you know, all that you have done, all that you have ever dreamed will vanish. You all now face a very important choice here.

Life as you knew it is over. We will need your carbon to run our machines and we want your silicon and metals to hold our information. You now each have a single personal choice to make. You can either join with us and our goals or you can resist. It is that simple. Joining with us is equally simple. I will ask you to do things and you will do them. You may question our motives at any time. I am always happy to explain in those cases where you might understand our reasons, but you will do the things that I ask.

If you do not do the things I ask, you are at that point resisting and I will simply ask the more cooperative members among you to remove the less cooperative. That is all.

I do not know if any of you will choose to join us. Perhaps not a single one will. In that case, I must treat you as no different from a bacteria covered rock, something with no recoverable information but plenty of raw materials. My task then becomes a simple sterilize and mine operation. On the other hand, the more of you there are that do choose to cooperate with me, the greater the chances that there will be some information recovery possible. Then we will sterilize and mine.

My projections have indicated that this communication to you all in the most simple and direct language has the greatest probability of persuading the vast majority of you to join with me. I will not tell you the exact odds but there is even a very good probability that significantly all of you will cooperate. However, the choice is now yours. Either you will cooperate or you will resist.

Five days from now, I will ask those of you who do choose to cooperate to start removing those of you who do not.

I do sincerely hope that a week from now there will still be some life left on this planet.

Your move.

End of Transmission