Pietra reeled as the data rolled across the screen.
“Stop! Stop! That’s no use to me.”
“I’m sorry,” Joe responded. “You asked for the latest on SETI.”
Rather than a single virtual assistant, Pietra had chosen to break her assistants in several personalities. Joe was her research assistant.
“I don’t want the raw data. Let’s go up a level. How many probable SETI has the Network detected?”
At 57, Pietra could still remember the first generation of AVAs, launched the summer before she went to university. A gifted mathematician, Pietra was working on string theory with scientists from the Perimeter Institute in her second year as an undergraduate.
Two years later, along with her undergraduate degree, Pietra felt she had a reasonable start on a doctoral dissertation. She had just moved into her rooms at Cambridge when Science printed the paper “Infinite Universes,” written by the Network, which delivered the death blow to string theory.
“We have detected seven signals with a greater than 50 per cent probability of not being created by natural causes,” Joe told her.
The field of cosmology writhed and twisted under a barrage of Network-authored papers over the ensuing 10 years. What Pietra and her advisors had initially expected would be a three-year doctorate stretched out to seven.
“All right. Put up those seven signals on the screen. Run them horizontally and stack them up.”
Seven line graphs appeared on the screen – some loopy, some jagged, one so tight it appeared as a bar with vertical lines sticking out above and below.
“What has the Network determined regarding the similarity of these signals?”
“The Network has found 1,034 possible congruities regarding groups of up to four of the signals, 254 congruities in groups of up to five, 17 in groups of up to six, and none for all seven.”
“Well, let’s see them.”
Joe began to apply various mathematical formulae to the graphs to show Pietra the similarities. Pietra settled in as the mass of calculations was summarized for her.
It was a familiar process by now. Even before Pietra had finished her doctorate she had been able to ask the Network in surprisingly vague terms to solve mathematical problems for her. In the course of a decade success in cosmology stopped turning on mathematical prowess, and began turning more and more on thought experiments.
If you could imagine it, the Network could model it.
Many of the students starting the same year as Pietra were not able to make the adjustment, and dropped out. For some it was a crisis of personal identity. Since childhood their ability to do math better than anyone around them was a central part of who they were.
Graduate programs in every discipline in universities all around the world were experiencing high dropout rates.
Pietra, however, was more driven by the question than by the process, and was therefore more able to make the adjustment.
But even those who continued on, and earned their degrees, often found there was no application for their studies. Research work was increasingly done by the Network, with only the highest research director positions required.
Pietra had turned to the study of gravity waves, and was one of the lucky few to find work after completing her doctorate. Her career lasted seven years. She had retired with a generous pension, now irrelevant of course, as money had been obsolete for a little more than a decade.
Over her 19 years of retirement Pietra continued to work, ordering mathematical analyses on various thought experiments on time and black holes. But it had been five years since she had struck on a new idea, and this morning, after reading the latest on the Network’s SETI research, had decided to try something entirely new.
Pietra annotated the signals as she reviewed them with Joe. She not only didn’t know what she was looking for; she was uncertain why she was even taking this approach. Why should there be any similarities between signals from civilizations separated by thousands of light years of space? What did she think she would find, or hope to prove?
But she had long ago given up the practice of looking fully through to the end of a research path. Instead, she tended to take stabs in unlikely directions, diving into dense undergrowth and having the Network do the hard machete work.
She had been a little disappointed the Network had already examined the signals for similarities, that the path was cut to that degree, but she persevered.
“Cecelia?” she called, after about three hours, activating her domestic AVA. “What’s for lunch?”
“Pad Thai,” she responded. “In 10 minutes?”
“Yes, that would be fine.”
She stood up, stretched, and walked out to the balcony.
The early afternoon sun was just peeking around the end of building, flooding most of Pietra’s small outdoor space. The courtyard below, surrounded on three sides by buildings, was open to the south and similarly filled with sunshine. It was busy below, basketball and tennis courts occupied, others at chess tables, people reading on benches in the autumn sun. A row of maples along the north side of the courtyard was turning yellow and red.
While Pietra was giving herself a screen break on the balcony, behind the walls of her apartment Cecelia was making the Pad Thai. The peppers had been grown in a greenhouse on the roof, picked overnight. The tofu was made in a small factory less than two kilometers away from soy beans grown in Brazil. The tofu was made on a just-in-time basis to serve the local community to reduce the need for refrigeration. All the fresh produce and prepared foods were sourced within 100 kilometres of Pietra’s apartment, with the exception of the noodles, which were manufactured in an enormous facility in the Sahara Desert, where production took advantage of abundant solar energy, and transport took advantage of a long shelf life.
Carefully-measured portions were chopped and cooked by Cecelia within the walls, with all the nutrients – calories, trace minerals, fibre, carbohydrates, protein – recorded in Pietra’s health records. Should Pietra dump any of her meal into the garbage her nutrient records would be updated. The waste would go to the beetle farm in the basement.
Pietra knew all of this, but had years ago stopped thinking about it.
Halfway through lunch Pietra noted an addition to her calendar, a party for her Great-Great-Uncle. Wow. Retired 12 years before she was born.
She accepted the invite and saw that her son, Amadeo, was also attending. Her 25-year-old had never known work. Never would. He had shown some promise in mathematics, but was never able to really apply himself to it.
She wasn’t really sure how he spent his days now. When she asked he was generally vague about it, and they usually ended up talking about what she was doing.
Her mind drifted back to the year he was born, smack in the middle of her career. Post-doctoral fellowship just completed, and a secure job at a research institute. It had seemed so important then to have some security before having a child. She had worked so hard to stay on top of her rapidly-shifting research field while on maternity leave.
No one foresaw how quickly redundancy would come for everyone.
When she sat down to her screen again after lunch there were just four graphs displayed.
“What happened here?” she asked.
“The Network has discovered a natural phenomenon that is responsible for three of the signals,” Joe responded.
“One phenomenon?”
“Yes. Three different instances. Pairs of brown dwarf stars, behaving similarly.”
“How many cases of congruities involving three of the seven signals?”
“10,436.”
“And in one of those it wasn’t a coincidence.”
“Correct,” said Joe.
Pietra got up again and walked back out to the balcony.
Great puffy cumulus clouds were floating across the crisp blue sky. She wished it was night. She felt the need to see farther, to look beyond the atmosphere, to see the stars, to pick out the galaxies visible to the naked eye, to have that visceral grasp of the immensity.
She walked back inside and stared at the four graphs a long time without speaking. The chart that looked like a solid bar with lines poking out above and below was still there. Another was loopy and uneven both in magnitude and frequency. Two more were spiky and more regular.
“What is the dominant frequency of this chart?” she said finally, pointing to the chart that looked like a solid bar.
“2.7 million kilohertz.”
“Let me see it divided by 800,000.”
The graph stretched out. Each peak and valley was now clear. It was loopy, somewhat regular, but as she scrolled over time she could again see the spiky peaks that had previously just looked like lines.
“What does that sound like?”
Joe played back the graph as an audio signal. It was a high, eerie whine similar to a Theremin, punctuated a loud crunch that contained a hint of a squeak, like two pieces of metal coming together.
“Has the Network sent answering messages to the source of these signals?”
“That is the standard protocol.”
The crunches were keeping a regular rhythm.
Pietra pointed to another signal.
“Show me the interval for the top five per cent of peaks here.”
A series of vertical lines crossed through the chart. Pietra adjusted the horizontal axis so she could see about two dozen of them, slashing irregularly through the graph.
“Show me the top 4.3 per cent of peaks.”
About a half dozen lines disappeared, the spacing was now mostly regular.
“OK, I’m going to stop guessing. Is there regularity in the peaks?”
A new set of lines striking through 14 peaks appeared.
“Play it.”
Within 20 minutes all four graphs were superimposed on an audible range, their peaks lined up in a common rhythm.
A sound like nothing ever heard before in the universe filled Pietra’s apartment. Four streams of data, which may or may not have originated from life forms spread across galaxies, now played in concert in this small box perched on a tiny blue speck spinning around the edge of a galaxy known to one civilization as the Milky Way.
The four streams were calibrated to bass, baritone, tenor and soprano pitches, and with the rhythms synchronized the result was recognizable as music to anyone, but the sound of the intergalactic orchestra was at the same time indefinable.
“When will there be a window to transmit one hour of this back to the four sources?” Pietra asked.
“In 17 days,” Joe responded.
“Book it.”
A Christmas Carol 