Read the Prologue to The Cloud below:

Prologue

April 2033

When it finally came, the alien contact was so weak, so minuscule among the noises of the great universe, that it was almost overlooked. Had it not been for the success of SETI’s ten-year fund-raising campaign to build a listening post on the far side of the moon, humankind might never have learned that other forms of intelligence exist in the cosmos.

The director, council members and regional representatives of the SETI Institute (the loose grouping of maverick scientists and astronomers who made up the organization known as the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) had raised almost $7 billion for the massive lunar construction project, mostly from public donations. Even then they were forced to beg passenger rides and cargo space from NASA, the European Space Agency, the Chinese and a few of the many private aerospace corporations who were now busily building habitats, launch sites, maintenance facilities, fuel dumps and even tourist accommodation on the Earth-facing side of the moon.

But it was the far side of the lunar surface that attracted SETI – the side which always faces away from Earth, the side which is shielded from the mother planet’s massive outpouring of radio and television signals, laser beams, electromechanical transmissions and all of the other electronic ‘noise’ that is produced by a young but rapidly advancing technological society and which spills out heedlessly into surrounding space.

Uniquely among the 138 major moons that circle the sun’s planets, Earth’s satellite is the only one to have a permanently shielded surface. In radio terms, it is the quietest place in the entire solar system, and it was the perfect location for the manned research outpost that had become known as ‘Setiville’. 

‘Come on, come on!’ shouted Desmond Yates impatiently as he stared up at the main communications screen, willing it to flicker into life. ‘What are they doing? What’s taking so long?’

Joan Ryder, a more mature and more seasoned SETI warrior, laid a calming hand on the young astrophysicist’s shoulder.

‘What do you think they’re doing, Des?’ she reasoned, as she too stared up at the blank screen. ‘They’re checking and double checking, just as we would. This is far too big for them to risk making a mistake.’

Yates nodded, ran his fingers impatiently through his thick dark hair and gently pushed himself up out of his low-gravity chair. As a twenty-five-year-old researcher, only one year out of his doctorate course at Stanford and a member of the SETI lunar team for less than three months, he would normally have been merely assisting his two more experienced colleagues. But it was he who had discovered the strange signal – a transmission that he now firmly believed to be both electronically generated and of genuine alien origin.

Strictly speaking, it was SETI’s powerful analysing computers that had identified the unusual signal amongst all the myriad noises produced by the galaxies. But it was Des Yates who had chosen to target that particular patch of sky, Yates who had selected which range of frequencies to scan and Yates who had opted to pursue, amplify and home in on the ‘possible contact’ that the computer systems themselves ranked as being only of ‘ETI Category 22 (minor interest)’. This ‘contact’ – now hastily reclassified as ‘ETI Category 1 (most promising)’ – was all Des’s, and his two SETI colleagues agonised for him as they all waited to hear back from the Parkes radio telescope in Australia and England’s Jodrell Bank Observatory.

Soon after its first informal establishment in 1960, SETI laid down strict checking and verification procedures to be followed whenever a signal was detected that might possibly be of alien origin. The organization’s founders had been far-sighted. Over the seventy years during which the search had been conducted there had been no fewer than 635 ‘strong’ false alarms, seventeen of them so convincing that SETI had been on the verge of announcing ‘contact’ to the world before the mundane truth of each of these signal’s man-made origin was finally discovered. 

Recently the Institute’s ‘ETI signal verification procedure’ as laid down in the SETI operating manual had been strengthened, as if the organization’s elders had anticipated that their new lunar research centre might produce a rash of supposedly positive contacts. Now, once the three Setiville duty scientists in the lunar observatory had all agreed that a contact was a ‘strong possible’, a copy of the signals received along with all of the relevant computer records and astronomical location information were to be sent for verification to two SETI-affiliated but independent observatories in opposing hemispheres of the Earth.

Yates and the SETI computers had first identified the strange transmission ten days earlier. He had been alone, working a ‘night shift’ – the habitat’s lighting and internal environment were set up to mimic the Earth’s own circadian rhythms – when he saw the frequency graph spike at the same point on three repeated sweeps of the micro-spectrum he had chosen to explore.

For the rest of his life Desmond Yates would be unable to tell questioners what it was that prompted him to investigate this particular minor spike – especially when there were so many other larger peaks on the graph that seemed more worthy of exploration – but that is one key difference between humans and machines: Yates was working on a hunch.

For no reason other than fulfilling his romantic notions of the hunt for extra-terrestrial intelligence, the youthful researcher had then switched on the audio circuits so that he could hear the faint narrow-band signal on which he was instructing the computers and the sixty-four-metre dish outside to focus. He had watched too many science fiction movies.

The small control room – in which almost every wall surface was covered by high-definition 3-D screens – was suddenly filled with a jumbled cacophony. Yates could hear a low roar, like the sea, and higher notes that seemed to pulse with irregular and complex rhythms, but it was hard to pick out any detail.

He reached forward and set the parameters of a mathematical analysis he wanted the systems to run on the mysterious signals. Then, as his hunch suddenly grew, he asked the system to run a directional trace on the origin of the transmission and display the result in the small holo-theatre that occupied the centre of the control-room floor.

Seven minutes later Yates was on his feet circling a laser-projected hologram which shimmered as it hung in space in the centre of the holo-display area. From all around came the low roaring, interspersed with the shrill higher notes.

The holo-image displayed was a computer-generated rendition of H-712256X, an ‘Earth-like planet’ (known to astronomers as an ELP), that was 14.8 light years away in the constellation of Aquarius.

Yates had never before known a signal trace to point so clearly to a particular planet. But he quickly reminded himself that he was less than a year into his career as a SETI researcher and a total new boy to lunar-based observations. Perhaps such apparently interesting traces had occurred many times before.

Suddenly an alarm sounded and Yates spun on his heel to scan the display behind him.

SIGNAL IS NARROW-BAND – SIGNAL IS MODULATED read the screen, the red underlined capitals flashing as they were supposed to do when such an unusual transmission was identified.

‘Narrow-band’ and ‘modulated’ were the key words when it came to any radio signal that might possibly be of extra-terrestrial origin. ‘Narrow-band’ meant that the signal was produced by some form of electronics or machine. ‘Modulated’ meant that the radio signals had a coherent pattern to them, a pattern that could not occur in nature, but could only have been created artificially by an intelligence for the purposes of meaningful communication.

‘Holy shit!’ Yates said out loud, and he moon-bounded out of the control room and along the short corridor to the residential quarters where his two colleagues were sleeping. A few minutes later, they too were staring open-mouthed at the computer announcement and the shimmering hologram of a planet that looked something like Earth, but was almost fifteen light years away – or about 142 trillion kilometres.

Their first task had been to eliminate all possible radio signals and electromagnetic interference that could be of man-made origin. Although ‘modulated’ was the most exciting alert they could be given by their analysing computers, it was also the most worrying. Usually it meant that the supposed narrow-band ETI signal was very much man-made; perhaps a transmission from a passing spacecraft, signals being beamed back home by a probe launched decades before or even stray signals from one of the deep-space telescopes that were now parked in locations well beyond the Earth-moon solar orbits.

But the SETI computers were able to dismiss such suspicions quickly. Their database had files on every commercial spacecraft launched by all of the world’s nations in the last eighty years and, by a combination of careful observation and tip-offs from sympathetic scientists around the world, it also contained details on almost every ‘covert’ space craft, satellite and weapons systems any of the world’s nations had launched. Within thirty-six hours of first receiving the alien signals the three members of the SETI lunar staff were all convinced that they were receiving genuine alien signals which were both ‘ultramundane’ (originating from beyond the solar system) and of clearly of mechanical origin.

What really convinced Kim Mukerjee that young Des had made a genuine ETI contact was the fact that whilst the SETI computers could identify regular frequency shifts and amplitude variations that clearly indicated modulation in the radio signal, there were in no way able to decipher any of its content. At forty-eight years old, Mukerjee was the senior member of the Setiville lunar team and he had been employed by the SETI Institute for over twenty years. He had also been present in various Earth-based observatories when three previous ‘positive contacts’ had been made, all of which had finally turned out to be of man-made origin. He understood that the quantum encryption techniques used by the world’s governments for their military satellites and weapons systems were totally impenetrable, but SETI’s computers were always able to detect that quantum encryption was in use, even though they were unable to make any sense out of the constantly altering states of the signal itself.

But this signal was completely different. The computers did not identify the oscillating natural randomness that is the signature of quantum-encrypted transmissions, but neither could they suggest any form or shape for the content that was being transmitted. What was clear, however, was that the signals were both artificial and deliberately transmitted.

Now, ten days after the signal had first been identified and continuous recording begun, Des Yates and his two co-workers were all on edge as they waited for a response and the verdicts from the Parkes Observatory and from Jodrell Bank in the UK.

The protocol was clear. The Parkes and Jodrell Bank astronomers were checking copies of Setiville’s signals, running their own analyses of them and attempting to pick up the signals for themselves (despite the appalling radio pollution in Earth’s dense atmosphere). But neither group would say anything publicly about the contact, negative or positive, until and if SETI itself decided to make an announcement.

Contact with an alien intelligence was what every astronomer, astrophysicist, cosmologist and imaginative person in the street dreamed off, whether the professionals wanted to admit it or not. Proof that there was another form of technologically capable intelligence in the universe was what an increasingly irreligious world fantasized about. For many, the concept was a replacement for God.

‘Setiville, this is Gus Wilson at Parkes,’ boomed a voice from a wall speaker.

All three members of the lunar team spun round as the main communication screen came to life and revealed the features of a middle-aged man with a bald head and a red, weather-beaten face. They all knew the image and formidable reputation of Professor Gus Wilson, Director of the Parkes Observatory.

At a nod from Mukerjee, Des Yates responded, hardly able to get his greeting out of his mouth.

‘We confirm your signal ST86901XT as positive, repeat positive, Dr Yates’ said Wilson, an excited, intense look on his rugged face. ‘We’ve been able to pick up the signal ourselves, although it was worse than minus 600 – so faint we’d never have noticed it down here on Earth. We’ve also eliminated every possible known man-made source and we’ve enquired about that particular frequency range with all government, academic and commercial regulatory bodies – nobody is using the 17.655 gigahertz frequency band. We too confirm that the signal is modulated, and that your presumed point of origin, ELP H-712256X, is correct as proved by the Doppler drift – although why the hell it should have come from somewhere so relatively close, somewhere that we’ve all looked at many times before, beats us.’

The Australian scientist paused for a deep breath, then delivered his organization’s formal pronouncement.

‘Our unanimous vote is that this signal is a positive contact with an unknown but demonstrably intelligent alien source. Written confirmation of our decision should be with you by now. Congratulations – and we all hope you get a second confirmation.’

‘Yes! YES!!’ yelled Yates, punching the air as the comms screen faded to black.

‘Hold on, Des, hold on,’ said Mukerjee. ‘You know we’ve got to—’

‘Setiville, this is Jodrell Bank,’ said another voice as the screen flashed back to life.

The three SETI scientists turned again and saw the severe, pinched features of Sir Kevin Kelly, the director of Jodrell bank and Britain’s Astronomer Royal. Mukerjee nodded at Yates once more.

‘Good day, Sir Kevin,’ stammered Yates, hardly able to contain his excitement. Dread filled him suddenly; was this internationally famous astronomer about to reveal him as a stupid geek, an over-obsessed enthusiast who had confused alien-chasing with the pursuit of real, scientifically based research?

The Astronomer Royal straightened his tie and cleared his throat, as though he were preparing to make a public announcement.

‘We are able to confirm that your signal meets the three internationally agreed criteria and should be treated as a confirmed reception of a modulated signal generated by an intelligent extra-terrestrial source,’ he said carefully.

‘First, we have been able to pick up the signal ourselves, here at Jodrell Bank, albeit very weakly. Second, we confirm that it is modulated by electro-mechanical or other artificial means. Third, we agree with your identification of the planet H-712256X as the most likely point of origin and, finally, we have been able to eliminate all known forms of human-originated radio transmissions.’

‘YES!’ yelled Des once more, punching the air and leaping from the ground so hard that he was catapulted upwards and hit his head on the habitat’s soft roof lining.

Sir Kevin’s severe expression creased into a smile at this display.

‘I understand that you’ve already received a confirmation from Gus Wilson at Parkes – he and I have been speaking about this for some days. We think this is the real thing, Dr Yates. Congratulations to you – and to the rest of the team at Setiville. I look forward to your announcement.’

‘Thank you, thank you very much Sir Kevin,’ Des managed to blurt as the screen image faded.

Now even Mukerjee was excited. He grabbed both Yates and Joan Ryder and hugged them to his slight frame, the three of them moon-bouncing around the control room, making footmarks on the polished floor of the holo-theatre and fending themselves off from the soft walls and ceiling as their low-gravity dance produced numerous collisions.

‘Quick, get the champagne,’ Mukerjee told Joan, as he finally released his dancing partners. But she was already heading for the refrigerated cabinet which held the sole bottle of alcohol that was officially allowed to be kept on the far side of the moon.

Yates gabbed three plastic cups and as Mukerjee popped the cork the fountain of champagne shot right up to the ceiling. The senior team member quickly directed the remaining wine into the plastic containers and, as their celebratory drinks were poured, the small group suddenly became subdued and solemn. 

The trio of scientists stood in a little semicircle, still flushed and breathing heavily from their dancing, but now sobered by the realization that others had confirmed their momentous discovery. It had suddenly become real. They glanced at each other, unsure what to drink to, and Des’s colleagues both nodded to him to make the toast.

The first human being to make confirmed contact with alien intelligence raised his paper cup to head height. ‘To ET,’ he said.

‘To ET,’ echoed Mukerjee and Joan Ryder, lifting their cups in turn.

As soon as they had drunk what little of the wine they had managed to salvage, their serious mood returned once again. They all had the feeling that they were present at a momentous event, something they would later have to describe over and over again for the benefit of strangers.

‘Well, we know what the manual says we must do now,’ said Mukerjee, breaking the silence. ‘I think you should be the one to make the call, Des – it’s about eleven a.m. in California.’

Des Yates nodded once, drained the dregs from his plastic cup, allowed it to float down into a waste basket, and then, with a deep breath, he seated himself in the mains comms chair.

‘Thank you for calling the SETI Institute,’ said a female voice and image as the screen lit up. ‘How may I direct your call?’

‘Please connect me personally with Professor Jackson,’ said Yates.

‘I’m sorry, the director is in a trustees meeting all morning, Dr Yates,’ said the operator. ‘May I take a message?’

‘Please interrupt him immediately,’ said Yates as Kim Mukerjee leaned over his shoulder to point out the relevant paragraph in the manual. ‘Please tell him that this is a Code 42 call. I repeat, a Code 42 call. I’ll hold the line.’

*

NEW YORK TIMES

SPECIAL EDITION July 26th, 2033

WE ARE
NOT ALONE!

SETI astronomers pick up
confirmed alien transmissions.

*

To Des Yates’s growing fury, the main board directors of the SETI Institute had delayed announcing the discovery of confirmed alien signals for nearly three months. 

At first Director Jackson told the lunar team that he wanted to personally check out the signals for himself, as did several other SETI board members. He reminded the excited Setiville researchers that irreparable damage could be done to the Institute – and its hopes for future fund-raising – if a premature announcement were made and the signals turned out to be non-alien after all.

‘We only get one shot at such an important announcement,’ Jackson told the lunar team forty-eight hours after they had first reported their success to the SETI Institute. ‘We’re going to advance the Setiville duty rota and relieve you early. We want you down here with us next week while we discuss how best to proceed.’

‘But he has seen the independent confirmations!’ fumed Yates to his colleagues when the connection to the director’s office was closed. ‘What else does he want, pictures of little green men?’

Mukerjee calmed his younger colleague, patiently explaining the sort of political wrangling that was probably taking place at the highest levels of the Institute’s administration. He warned the discoverer of the alien signals that things were no longer going to be so straightforward for him

While they were waiting for their replacement duty team to be ferried up from Earth, Mukerjee and Joan Ryder urged Yates to occupy himself by thinking up a name for the Earth-like planet from which the signals originated. They couldn’t use ‘H-712256X’, the planet’s astronomical designation, in a press release; people would want a simple name that they could understand and latch on to.

Yates spent his free time scouring on-line dictionaries and reference works, his study filled with the low roar of the alien signals that he kept patched through to his personal quarters from the control room. He wanted to be sure that the transmissions were still being received.

The astrophysicist finally decided upon the name ‘Iso’ ­– from the Greek word meaning ‘equal’ – as the planet H-712256X was about the same size as the Earth and had a biological ‘signature’ which was also very similar. From the composition of its atmosphere, it seemed likely that Iso also supported abundant biological life and Yates found himself fantasizing – even doodling – about the sort of creatures who might inhabit the planet and who might be sending such complex radio signals out into space.

Back on Earth and visiting the SETI Institute building in Mountain View, Northern California, Dr Yates was treated to a crash course in senior management politics. The first row was over when to make the momentous announcement.

Professor Jackson wanted to wait until the content of the alien signals had been decoded. Three independent cryptanalysis laboratories had been hired. Without being told that the signals on which they were working might be of alien origin, they were given copies of the transmission and charged with extracting its meaning. Two weeks into their work, all three were reporting that the encryption appeared to be of an unknown type, but they were sure they would soon be able to make progress in at least identifying the type of security used.

Other members of the SETI board argued that an announcement about the signals should be made as soon as SETI had completed its own internal investigation. This should not take very long, Desmond Yates and the other members of his lunar roster were assured. SETI’s own in-house specialists had already reconfirmed what had been vouched for by the Parkes and Jodrell Bank facilities, but the Institute team was now devoting huge effort to ensuring that there wasn’t even the slightest chance that the signals could have some obscure man-made origin.

‘What about the national security implications?’ asked one board member, during an emergency meeting to which Yates and his colleagues had been invited. ‘Won’t the Pentagon want to slap a National Secrecy Order on us and impound the recordings for themselves?’

‘They might very well try to classify it,’ admitted Director Jackson, ‘which is why I would really prefer to have the message decrypted and the content available to all. Then it would be too late for the government to try to keep it for themselves.’

‘Our major announcement protocol has been clearly laid down for over fifty years,’ broke in Dr Denise Logan, the Institute’s Director of Publicity and Corporate Affairs. ‘SETI was established to bring the benefits of communication with an alien intelligence to all humankind, not for the benefit of just one nation, let alone one government. I insist that we must make the announcement by the procedures we have established and that it must be made simultaneously around the world.’

Eventually SETI’s hand was forced. The pressure within the scientific community for an announcement to be made became acute, with both the Parkes and Jodrell bank directors doubting how much longer they could rely on their own teams to keep silent about such an important and exciting discovery. Then it became clear that the three decryption labs were not going to make fast progress in cracking the alien code. All were reporting a security system of previously unknown design and all were asking for more time to work on the problem.

Finally the SETI board agreed that the formal announcement of first contact with an alien intelligence would be made at press conferences on Saturday, 26 July 2033 at twelve p.m. Pacific Time – nine p.m. GMT – and that the announcement would be made simultaneously in Washington, London and Sydney. Des Yates would speak at the Washington afternoon press conference, Dr Mukerjee would appear in London in the evening and Dr Ryder would make the breakfast-time announcement in Sydney.

Copies of the press release would be flashed simultaneously to all international news agencies along with video, photographs and biographies of the discoverers, sound recordings of the alien signals, copies of the independent confirmations, and computer-generated ‘best-guess’ images of what the planet Iso looked like. Interviews would then be immediately set up for Des Yates and his colleagues while the directors of Jodrell Bank and the Parkes Observatory would add their own contributions to keep their local press happy.

The media went wild. The headline WE ARE NOT ALONE occupied almost all of the front page of a special edition of the New York Times which was both posted on the web and rushed onto the streets as a souvenir print publication.

ALIEN SPACE SIGNAL DETECTED trumpeted the London Times and images of Des Yates, and to a lesser extent those of his co-discoverers, appeared on every news bulletin around the world. Talk shows were filled with instant experts who pontificated about the likely nature of the aliens, what the planet Iso might be like, how quickly Earth could get a message back to the Isonians, and what technology could be used to allow humans to travel through space on a mission to visit Iso. The fact that such a journey would in reality take hundreds of years only added to the romance of the story. Suddenly space exploration made sense to everybody.

The story of alien contact was treated as the ultimate good-news story all over the world. In America, the White House announced that President Don Randall would make a presidential address to the nation.

In Britain, seventy-year-old Sir Charles Hodgeson, the internationally famous best-selling science fiction author and futurology guru, told the British media that the discovery of the alien signals ‘is an historic first encounter with the cosmic community, just as I predicted in my very first book, Signature of Life.’

In Italy the Pope called on all Christians to pray for peaceful and fruitful dialogue with the aliens.

‘This is God’s voice sending us clear instructions,’ said Archbishop Tyrone Underfield as he addressed a specially convened meeting of the Alabama Chapter of the Rastamendolian Church of the True God.

All over the world, special services were held in churches, mosques and temples, and prayers were offered giving thanks and welcoming contact with the new intelligent beings.

Des Yates almost lost his voice. In the first three weeks after the official announcement, he flew 100,000 miles and made almost ninety network television broadcasts around the world. On the flights and during transfers in between TV appearances he was accompanied constantly by television crews and print reporters. Even though he could do little except simply repeat how he came across the signal and how it felt when it was first confirmed to be of alien origin, his questioners never seemed to tire of hearing the same stuff over and over again.

On some TV shows animation artists produced renderings of possible aliens for him to comment on; on others he was asked to speculate about what it was that the aliens might be trying to communicate to the inhabitants of Earth. Even his mother and father were rooted out of their suburban home in Denver to provide accounts of how the young Des had first fallen in love with the stars by gazing up at the heavens through the clear air of his high-altitude home city.

It was during an evening talk show in Chicago that the words ‘Nobel Prize’ were first uttered in Yates’s presence. ‘There are rumours that you are to be nominated for a Nobel Prize,’ said the anchorman. ‘How do you feel about that, Dr Yates?’

*

Eight months after the public announcement, Desmond Yates’s life had changed beyond all recognition. He had been given his own office at SETI’s Mountain View headquarters along with a full-time assistant. Her job was to deal with the huge volume of requests for media interviews, enquiries from fellow scientists and invitations for her boss to give lectures, attend meetings and make celebrity appearances.

Yates’s new office window looked out onto a building site where a large extension to the main SETI building was now under construction. The news of positive contact with aliens had led to a flood of new money pouring into the Institute.

US Congress members keen to display their forward-thinking, their proactive engagement with space technology and their awareness of the benefits that knowledge of alien technologies might bring to the nation, voted to provide SETI with annual research funds so large that even NASA was made jealous. This ongoing grant was enthusiastically endorsed by a public that had suddenly become space-mad. Every teenage boy – and many girls – now wanted to be astronomers, cosmologists, astronauts or ‘alien hunters,’ as the media had dubbed the SETI researchers.

Overseas governments – keen to buy into any knowledge that could be gleaned from alien communications – also donated significant funds and thousands of rich individuals made gifts, planned legacies or set up trusts to further SETI’s endeavours to put humankind into useful contact with alien civilizations.

Director Jackson found that his working life had also been changed completely by the announcement. He now spent most of his time closeted with the fund managers who looked after the Institute’s new wealth or with rich potential donors who wanted personal tours of the Institute – and a handshake with Desmond Yates himself – before finally parting with their money.

A new director of research had been hired and SETI was already using its increased resources to expand its lunar listening base on the far side of the moon. As well as adding two new ultra-large radio dishes to the Setiville complex they were also building a ten-metre optical telescope to take advantage of the superb lunar viewing conditions. None of the new money was being spent on building or developing Earth-based observatory facilities.

Immediately after SETI made the public announcement that alien signals had been received from the planet Iso, every radio-telescope observatory in the world had started to scour its own records to see why it had failed to spot the extra-terrestrial radio transmissions. No fewer than nine observatories subsequently announced that they too had been receiving the Isonian signals all along, but the transmissions had been so faint that their computers had categorized them as merely being part of the universe’s background noise. Within the astronomical scientific community it was agreed that the alien transmissions would never have been noticed by any radio-dish observatory on Earth. From that moment on, all new money and development plans were switched to lunar and space-based observatories.

Des Yates was made a Fellow of the SETI Institute and, despite his youth, was given the singular honour of being invested as the ‘Howard Regis Professor of Extra-Terrestrial Communication’. He wasn’t expected to teach, or to conduct new research; his job was to oversee the decryption of the Isonian signals and to direct the Setiville teams who were continuing to monitor and record every bit of information being received from Iso.

Now thirty-six different decryption laboratories had been given copies of the alien transmissions to work on. A dozen of these were commercial forensic computing establishments, a further ten were labs located in the world’s leading universities and the remainder were secret government computer-science establishments dotted around the world.

But the newly-promoted Professor Yates had one private worry that he couldn’t shake off: he kept wondering whether a government-owned computer laboratory would be honourable enough to disclose any success it might have in deciphering the alien transmissions. He knew that governments possessed the most powerful and advanced computer networks in the world, some so powerful that there was already an international protest movement calling for limits and treaties to control computer development and proliferation – much like those that were in place to limit the development of nuclear weapons – and he knew that any government offered the opportunity to read the alien signals would face a tremendous temptation to keep such potentially advantageous knowledge to itself. Statistically, the Isonian community was almost certain to be thousands or even millions of years ahead of Earth’s civilization and would be very likely to possess technologies that would be of immense military, commercial or economic benefit. Who could resist?

The US government had already made its own position clear. The administration had been completely wrong-footed by SETI’s simultaneous international announcement and by its liberal distribution of digital copies of the alien transmissions. 

In a private phone call to Director Jackson, the US Secretary of State had told the SETI chief that many in the White House and the Pentagon were furious that the Institute had not been sufficiently patriotic to provide its mother nation with a private preview of such an important discovery. Jackson had politely reminded the Secretary that SETI was an international organization, with affiliations to the United Nations rather than to any single country. The call had ended on a decidedly chilly note.

Yates had ensured that each laboratory entrusted with the complete alien data stream had signed an undertaking that any knowledge extracted from the signals belonged in the public domain. But he still had the nagging suspicion that perhaps one of the government labs had already made sense of the transmissions and had secretly passed the knowledge on to its military or political masters.

But all of the lab directors he spoke to were telling him the same thing: their cryptologists had established that there was a clear but unfamiliar mathematical base to the signals and there appeared to be ‘boundary lines’ which might possibly indicate that some form of software was embedded in the data. But without knowledge of the alien radio technology, languages, software codes or its computer architecture it was going to take more time to make any sense out of the signals.

*

If governments were peeved that they had no exclusive rights to the alien transmissions and the potential treasures they might contain, their electorates made it abundantly clear that they were very happy that at least one other form of technologically capable intelligence existed in what had seemed up until then to be a vast, hostile and empty universe. Suddenly humankind belonged to a family, even though it had yet to meet the relatives.

There was a fundamental change in the world Zeitgeist; science fiction, space fiction, futurology, astronomy and cosmology, previously uneasy bedfellows and the preserve of geeks, now became part of mainstream popular culture. Sir Charles Hodgeson, already the doyen of great science-fiction storytellers, became the unofficial figurehead of this quasi-religious movement, appearing on TV shows, internet forums and magazine covers in almost every country in the world. He had been confidently predicting such contact for decades.

To celebrate the momentous discovery, Hodgeson had completed a new novella called The Isonian Window which his publishers rushed onto the web and into print, and which now topped the best-seller book charts in most English-speaking countries. Translation editions were being produced as quickly as possible and a film adaptation was already in production.

Then, on an American combined TV network show and internet broadcast, Sir Charles called on his millions of fellow alien-life enthusiasts to take future communications with the planet Iso into their own hands.

‘I want everybody who owns a radio transmitter, no matter how low-powered, to transmit greetings of welcome and peace to the planet Iso over the coming week,’ he told the viewers. ‘The Earth is currently in a favourable position for radio communication with the constellation of Aquarius and if people broadcast UHF signals just two degrees south of Pegasus, we can be sure that the Isonians will receive our friendly messages in less than fifteen years’ time.’

Hodgeson hit a public nerve. Amateur radio enthusiasts throughout the world trained their directional and even non-directional antennae approximately on the dim constellation and broadcast whatever messages they felt like sending to the alien civilization. Many people who had never owned radio equipment before went out and bought UHF transmitters and rigged up transmitting aerials, few of them worrying about licences or controlled radio spectrums, and broadcast wildly across all frequencies, as if they were bellowing into the night sky.

From an ancient Winnebago in an Arizona trailer park, a group of alien-life enthusiasts created a network of 287 separate radio transmitters around the state and then started to beam such powerful UHF signals out into the night sky that all flights had to be diverted away from the central-southern states of America until police could be dispatched to forcibly shut down the endlessly repeating transmissions.

‘Hello people of Iso,’ their message ran. ‘We send greetings of peace from the planet Earth. Please come and visit with us.’

*

‘On behalf of the people of the United States, I am proud to present you with the Presidential Medal of Freedom,’ said President Don Randall as he shook Des Yates’s hand.

About eighty people were present to witness the ceremony being conducted in The East Room at the White House; SETI board members and scientists mingled with NASA officials, administration personnel and favoured politicians. Yates’s parents stood proudly at the front of the group as the official photographer asked the President and the latest recipient of the nation’s highest civilian honour to shake hands once again for the benefit of the cameras.

When the formal part of the ceremony was concluded, President Randall greeted Yates’s parents, complimented them on their son’s achievement and then, to the surprise of his aides, quietly asked the young SETI celebrity if he could spare a further few minutes of his valuable time to join him in the Oval Office for a private discussion.

Almost a year had passed since the moment when Des Yates had first selected the weak Isonian signals for further investigation, but no further progress had been made in deciphering their content. Now some of the cryptanalysts were even questioning whether the alien signals were encrypted at all. ‘It might just be that their own spoken language and electronic designs are so different from ours that we don’t know where to start,’ the director of the Rand Laboratory in Berkeley told Yates. ‘We’ve thrown petabytes of networked power at the task, but we’re not making any progress.’

‘Well, young man, what should we do now about these alien signals of yours?’ asked President Randall, once he, Yates and a handful of advisers were ensconced in the Oval Office’s comfortable couches. 

‘Well, sir, I think we should respond officially,’ replied Yates, still somewhat overawed by his surroundings and the august company he was keeping these days.

‘At least the decision about whether or not to respond to the signal has been taken out of our hands,’ interjected one of the senior NASA officials to whom Yates had been introduced earlier. ‘Thousands of crazy dingbats all over the world are already pumping out their own greetings.’

The President nodded thoughtfully, then turned back to Yates. ‘So what should I say?’ he asked.

The newly honoured, recently promoted, international celebrity scientist swallowed as he steeled himself to make the only reply that he knew was correct.

‘With respect, sir,’ he began, ‘it isn’t for the United States to respond officially. This has to be an international diplomatic response, one that is made on behalf of all the world’s people.’

‘Oh God, not the UN,’ groaned Randall as he glanced across at his Chief of Staff.

*

For all of the public’s excitement about the world’s first confirmed contact with aliens, it took the United Nations organization a further ten months to agree on and to compose Earth’s first official response to the signals that were still being received from the planet Iso. Much discussion and preparation had taken place before the historic meeting of the General Assembly during which the greeting would be formally transmitted.

Back in 1977, in the very earliest days of space exploration, NASA had optimistically prepared for contact with forms of extra-terrestrial intelligence by attaching twelve-inch gold audio discs to the sides of the twin space probes Voyagers 1 and 2, a pair of spacecraft that were due to explore the local solar system and then head out into wholly unknown deep space. The discs had included 115 images of Earth, recordings of human languages, diagrams of the human form, local star maps and, because it was the 1970s, even samples of whale songs.

But the international group of scientists, linguists, mathematicians, philosophers and anthropologists charged with composing the new radio communication felt a far heavier weight on their shoulders than had the NASA team responsible for composing the Voyager message. Now Earth’s communication was to be beamed towards a specific intelligent life form, and one living not too far away. 

The arguments about what to include in the greeting, and how to say it, were intense. It was agreed that although this was Earth’s first contact with an extra-terrestrial civilization, it would almost certainly not be the Isonians’ first contact with other alien intelligences. Earth’s technological civilization was very young indeed and statistically it was extremely likely that the more advanced Isonians would have made contact with many other cultures before. It was possible, indeed likely, that there was a galactic protocol established for this kind of communication and information interchange. But those on Earth would have no chance of knowing the correct way to respond and introduce themselves; they would just have to say ‘hello’ politely, and hope that as newcomers to the galactic community they didn’t cause any offence. 

In the end it was agreed that a first initial message lasting about twenty minutes should be broadcast, to be followed by a series of regular daily transmissions which would explain and amplify further details of Earth’s civilization. The first programme of signals to be beamed to the Isonians would take almost two years.

Basdeo Panday, the United Nations Secretary-General, stood at the large lectern facing the General Assembly and the world’s TV cameras. Beside him was a clear plastic column surmounted by a large red button.

‘Samples of every major language used on Earth, along with their grammatical rules, are included in our message of peace and greeting,’ the Secretary General told the UN Assembly representatives and the worldwide viewing public. ‘We have also provided examples of our mathematics. In addition we are sending video streams which show the beauties of our own home planet – as viewed from the surface and from space – and we have included detailed star maps and locators which will pinpoint our precise position in the galaxy, relative to Iso’s own location in the Aquarian constellation. We have also included a variety of intelligent software tools to help the Isonians read our message. I only wish they had done the same for us.’

There was widespread laughter in the Assembly Chamber. Almost two years after the continuous stream of alien signals had first been detected, Earth’s most distinguished cryptanalysts were still unable to decipher what it was that the Isonians were trying to communicate.

‘Later transmissions to Iso will include a full set of encyclopaedias, geographical and historical information about our planet, details of our own solar system and samples of non-proprietorial technology designs.’

Panday paused, partly for effect and partly because as the time approached he too felt the immensity of the moment. He moved across from the lectern to stand at the elevated push-button.

The Secretary-General cleared his throat, and then announced clearly, ‘On behalf of all the world’s peoples, we send this message in a spirit of peace and with the hope of mutual and beneficial cooperation between our worlds in the years to come.’

His hand fell onto the large red mushroom-shaped button and simultaneously eighteen international radio observatories and 187 military radio-transmitting stations on Earth and in space began to transmit the laser-pulsed message at maximum power. It was the most powerful synchronized radio signal ever transmitted from Earth and travelling at the speed of light it would take fourteen years and eight months to reach its intended destination.

*

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