Aliens
Bjok-sal took out a strange component from the craft’s body. It was small and smooth in her large palm, but she felt its cold in the tips of her seven fingers. “Dsek you’re right. I don’t know what it is but it definitely isn’t space debris.”
“I know! It’s — Wait did you just agree with-”
“Anyway, these reports confirm our suspicions. Whatever this metal is, it isn’t from around here. The composition indicates that it’s from a Kelter type planet.”
For once, she thought, Dsek-sand had made a valid discovery. For the longest time he had tried to persuade her to sanction missions to find other planets. Just like their planet, Mer-sal, there must be others and Dsek’s missions hoped to find them. Every time he brought it up, she put it off. Dsek was brilliant, yes, but every time he brought in a mound of space debris as possibly ‘alien’, she realised he was too blindsided by his unfounded beliefs.
Bjok initially thought it was the same case when he asked her to come to the lab even though the star was yet to rise, but he sounded so excited, she didn’t have the heart to refuse.
Dsek’s voice broke her out of her daze, “Oh that makes sense, it has much greater natural integrity than our metals. And this craft has definitely been out for a long time. Look at the micrometeorite damage on this thing.”
“Not meteorite damage Dsek”, she shook her head and pointed along the cold metal surface, “That is meteorite damage.” This was definitely a script.
He cracked his green knuckles and came closer to the surface, “It’s been engraved, then? What do you think it says?”
N A S A
V O Y A G E R
“I’d like to know too. Maybe just a name? Or directions? Locations?”
It was a strange script — sharp, angular and wide apart. Bjok would need more than a small engraving to understand it, however. She walked over to the other compartments that had been prized open. One of them was a compact, square box, accompanied by several shiny discs. All of this made from material not found on Mer-sal.
She took one disc into her hand and studied its smooth golden surface. Her hand ran over more engravings. Except these were different — a mix of loops and sharp lines. She was certain there was a message.
“Bjok-sal?” came Dsek’s voice from behind her.
“Hmmn?”
“We should take this to Prime. This could be ground-breaking! There’s most definitely life out there, like us! This should be proof enough for Prime to sanction the-”
She turned around and held up her hand, “Stop right there.”
Bjok knew where he was getting at and even if he was right this time, she didn’t want to rush through this. Dsek’s track record had been quite bad. “Metal composition? For all we know this is another one of the pranks those aster’s society kids love to play.”
He started to protest, “But you just said-”
She held up her hands, “I know it sounds self-contradictory, Dsek-sand, but this is not sufficient proof for Prime. We need solid, unchallengeable evidence that there is a possibility that aliens exist.”
His hair started to droop and Bjok sighed internally. “And that’s why I’m still here — to see if we can find it. Now help me decode this script”
Dsek gave her a small nod and headed over to her table. Bjok opened the box and placed the disc at its side. These two were packed together, next to data storage units. The zig-zags swam in her mind. Dsek stood next to her trying to sketch them off the disc.
“You know,” Dsek started, “this is one of few components that actually has no contribution towards the functioning of the craft.” He shrugged, “That’s what Alek told me, anyway. Why would you put such a component in a machine?”
“Maybe it was built for a function that we don’t know was necessary for this machine.”
Dsek looked sceptical. “Well it wasn’t linked to anything else, it was just there.”
“What’s your point?”
“I’m saying” he said, looking up from his notes, “that maybe it is for data storage, but not for the data this craft collected.”
That didn’t even make sense. Data cells for storing collected data were important. Why would you launch pre-recorded data to space? “You mean whoever made this kept pre-stored data? That’s useless unless the data could be used by someone at the receiving end.”
“Exactly”, said Dsek, apparently satisfied with that.
“You think someone is trying to send a message?” Bjok’s eyes widened.
He nodded. “Who knows, maybe they were trying to communicate with someone and we ended up intercepting it.”
She rolled her eyes, “Too far-fetched Dsek. We don’t even know if it has any data in it yet.”
“Then let’s find out!”
Bjok wanted to claw at her face. Just find out! Of course! As if it were that simple. “How? Dsek, enlighten me please.”
“I’ve been studying this for a few hours before you came.” Dsek scratched his forehead,
“I think these marks are instructions. If we followed them, we could access the data.”
He had a point. Bjok studied those glyphs. They seemed organised enough, but they were undecipherable. “That is fine, but we don’t know what they say. Clearly, this wasn’t meant for us to find.”
Dsek shook his head and pulled the box towards himself. Unlatched, it revealed a largely hollow interior, with a circular cavity and a needle attached to the circumference. On the side were more glyphs.
VOYAGER PHONOGRAPH: GOLDEN RECORD
“Dsek, these first symbols are the same as those on the outer body!”
“Yes. But forget that. How big is the disc?”
She held up the shiny disc — it was about the same size as the cavity in the box. It took her a moment, but realisation dawned and she turned to Dsek who was staring into the box.
“Put this in now. Let’s see if it works.”
At first, the disc wouldn’t fit. The needle kept taking up too much space. Dsek tried to force it in, but the needle slacked aside loosely. Bjok stared at him in horror, “Dsek, you broke it!”
He quickly shoved the needle on top of the disc that had now fit in. “NO, I didn’t, it just came apart!”
“That’s what breaking something means, idiot.”
He shrugged, “But I was right! It does fit.”
“Yes, and now we have no way of finding out what was in there!”
“That’s a bit of an exagger-”
There was metal screeching and a loud noise that sounded like a worbung being taken to the butchery. CAW! CAW! CAW! CAW! CAW!
Both of them jumped away from the box. It kept blaring, “CAW CAW CAW CAW -”
Bjok shuddered. She hated worbungs — they were ugly, spiky, and noisy and had nasty bites.
“You definitely broke it” Bjok scrambled to see what the problem was and saw the disc turning on its place in the cavity. The needle was slowly running across the surface of the disc and the noise came from the edge of the box.
“Actually,” said Dsek, “I think I got it to work.”
The machine screeched more and changed sound to resemble a deep beeping sound. HOOOOO HOOOO HOOO-
“Okay now find a way to reverse that.”
Dsek gently pulled the needle up and the noise stopped. “What was that?” His hair was upright like it normally was when he was startled. “It was horrible.”
“They recorded audio on this disc and sent it out. A distress signal maybe?”
Dsek scratched his forehead. It was starting to get greener because he’d been doing that a lot. “Why so many discs then? If it was a distress message it’d be shorter, no?”
Bjok snorted, “Well why does it sound so ghastly then? If intelligent life exists and talks like this, I don’t want to find them.”
Dsek suggested they pick out another disc. Bjok didn’t think it would be much of an improvement, but she didn’t refuse. Two of the discs were beyond use anyway — they had blackened and scarred during testing. A third one was put in.
Surprisingly, this was very calm. It started off with combinations of audio signals comprising beeps. They flowed so smoothly it was almost musical. Bjok folded her hands, leaned back on her desk, and listened closely, “That doesn’t sound like a distress call. That doesn’t even sound like a voice.”
Dsek nodded, “Do they even talk? Or is it this beeping nonsense all the time?”
“Whatever the case,” Bjok shrugged, “we’re really not any wiser than we were a while back.”
They stared outside the lab. The first tendrils of light had begun stretching out from the star, gently seeping into the dark sky. The night time plexeon flowers had stopped blooming fluorescent and were now reaching out towards the light. Far over the horizon, the Mer ocean outlined the shores.
What was this machine? If there were beings like the ones on Mer-sal, were they trying to reach someone out there?
She jumped ahead and turned to her colleague, “Dsek-sand! Maybe they were trying to be found.”
His hair stood up again, “What?”
“We’ve been seeing this the wrong way.” She walked back to the box. It was like she was having an epiphany. “We think they were sending this out to a particular receiver, but maybe,” she picked the disc out and held it up, “they sent this out hoping that someone like us would find it.”
Dsek had begun to catch up. “It’s a bit like the data capsule mission I told you about a while back. We send it out and hope intelligent life finds it!”
“Precisely!” She waved the disc up and down in excitement, “If this is true they might also have given us a way to contact them. Or more information!” It was only after she said it out loud that Bjok-sal realised what that could mean. She tossed the disc aside and pried the needle out, and started to move about the wiring. Once the square box was out, she rummaged through the remaining contents.
Dsek hesitated. “But, uh, we still don’t have evidence of that to take to Prime.”
Bjok did not respond. She was too invested in a sleek package she had just found. She pulled out its contents and started examining them as Dsek shuffled ahead to see them too. Some of them were white sheets so thin, Bjok could see and feel her fingers through the material. These were marked with the same strange script. Other sheets were thicker, and smooth, with colours on them.
Dsek pulled out one of those sheets and squinted, “Bjok, this looks like the Mer, don’t you think?”
Bjok turned to look at it. The image was indeed very much like the ocean on their home planet, except it and the atmosphere above was soft blue.
“Yeah, and these,” she pulled out another picture, “look like a few flower species we have.”
“Bjok, but none of these are from here.” He pointed again at the picture of the ocean, “Our star isn’t this small, and the Mer isn’t this colour. This is too much to be a prank or an accident.”
Bjok felt the gears of her mind click into place. It could be a long shot that these aliens were trying to talk specifically to the people of Mer-sal. From the looks of it, they didn’t even know that life like her existed. Maybe there was another fanatic out there thousands of light years away just like Dsek — hell-bent on finding ‘aliens’.
Either way, Dsek was right this time. There was intelligent life out there trying to be found. And Bjok would make sure of that.
“Bjok-sal?”
“Dsek,” she turned to him, “call all the staff — get this script deciphered, metal composition analysed, these images archived and saved. I want a complete report on this by star-set today.”
“Today?”
The glint in Bjok’s eyes could not be missed. “I’m taking this to Prime. Whoever these aliens are, wherever they are, we’re going to find them.”
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —
Far across, in the heart of the galaxy, the star had set a long time back. A young being sat at her desk trying to understand why her machine wasn’t responding.
She squinted at her bright screen as she saw one of NASA’s longest running projects go completely unresponsive. The location did not update. The readings were frozen. Thousands of light years away from her, this machine had suddenly disappeared from existence. How could that be?
She left an audio message to her superior who did not pick up her call. “Sir, this is Astrid from Voyager Mission Control and we need you here right now. About two hours ago, Voyager went offline and unresponsive. We’re still trying to figure out what happened. Grace thinks it’s been found.”
— — — — —
Writer: Akshata Nair
Editor: Veni Khare
