Lagrange Point

[OTMES:TI=68|M=(58,45,30)|N=(34,25,70)|K=(0.3,0.5,0.2)|A=315|TL=0.3|STYLE=Literary_Science_Fiction|]

Dr. Mei Lin had been at Lagrange Point 4 for six months when the signal arrived, and in those six months she had learned three things: space was quieter than anyone ever told you, the food was significantly worse than the brochure had implied, and if you stared at Earth through the observation port for too long, you started to feel like the universe was trying to tell you something and you werent smart enough to understand it.

The signal changed everything.

It came in at 03:17 station time, a pulse of radio waves that lit up the instruments like a Christmas tree. Mei was on duty—she was always on duty, being the only doctor and the only scientist and, since last Tuesday, the only everything after Commander Okonkwo had broken his arm in a zero-G accident that was impressive in its stupidity. She was sitting in the galley drinking coffee that tasted like battery acid when the alarm went off.

"Station, this is Control," the voice from Earth said. "We're seeing an anomaly in your telemetry. Something's pinging you. Hard. Can you confirm?"

Mei set down her coffee. "Confirmed, Control. I'm looking at it now. The frequency—it's not natural. It's structured. It's..."

She stopped. She couldnt finish the sentence because she didnt have the words. The signal wasnt just structured. It was beautiful. It was a mathematical poem, a sequence of prime numbers wrapped in golden-ratio spirals wrapped in harmonies that shouldnt be possible in radio waves. It was, Mei realized with a feeling like falling, intelligent.

"Control," Mei said. "You need to get someone else on this. I'm a doctor, not a radiologist. I dont know what I'm looking at."

"Copy that, Station. We're routing you Dr. Sarah Okonkwo—no, wait, shes on the surface. We're routing you Dr. James Chen at JPL. ETA on the link is... nine minutes. Mei, can you record the signal? We need to capture the full sequence."

"On it."

Mei spent the next nine minutes doing the only thing she could think of: she hit record. She hit record on every instrument on the station. She captured the signal in radio, in optical, in infrared, in god-knows-what-else. She was a doctor, not an astronomer, but she knew enough to know that you didnt let a signal like this slip through your fingers.

When Dr. James Chen came on the line, he sounded like hed been woken up from a very deep sleep and then immediately injected with pure adrenaline.

"Mei, this is James. I'm looking at your data. Mei, this isnt from the solar system. I've run the doppler. The signal is coming from... god, Mei, its coming from the L4 point of the Alpha Centauri system. That's four-point-three light-years away."

Mei sat down. Hard. "Four light-years? Then this signal has been traveling for... James, its been traveling for four years. The source transmitted before we even launched this station."

"Exactly. Which means they've known about us for at least four years. Mei, we have to answer. We have to send something back."

"Send what?"

"We'll figure that out. But Mei—I need you to keep recording. I need you to capture everything. This is the biggest discovery in human history, and you're the only one there."

Mei kept recording.

She kept recording for three days. The signal continued—a steady, rhythmic pulse that never varied, never stopped, never gave any indication that it was anything other than a beacon. A lighthouse in the dark, calling to the only other ship it could find.

On the third day, the signal changed.

It wasnt a beacon anymore. It was a message.

The math was too complex for Mei to follow, but James Chen could, and he spent twelve hours on the link explainning it to her. The message was a sequence of images encoded in radio waves. The images showed a star system—two stars, actualy, a binary pair—and around the second star, a planet. A green planet, with oceans and continents and clouds. And on the planet, things that looked like cities. Not our cities, not glass towers and highways, but something organic, something that grew out of the ground like coral or trees.

And then, the final image. The aliens themselves.

They werent what Mei had expected. She had expected... she didnt know what she had expected. Little green men? Grey beings with big eyes? The Hollywood version of first contact?

What the image showed was this: a being that looked like a cross between a jellyfish and a cathedral. It was translucent, it was massive—the scale indicated it was forty feet tall—and it was beautiful. It was the most beautiful thing Mei had ever seen, and she was looking at it through a radio signal from four light-years away, and she was crying.

"James," Mei said. "We have to answer."

"I know."

"I mean it, James. We have to tell them that we're here. That we heard them. That they're not alone."

James was quiet for a long time. "Mei, there are people on the surface who are going to tell us not to answer. They're going to say that we dont know if the aliens are friendly. That we could be inviting an invasion."

"James, look at that image. That... that being. Does that look like an invader to you?"

"No," James said softly. "It looks like a prayer."

They spent the next month building the response.

It wasnt easy. Mei was a doctor, James was a radiologist, and neither of them was a linguist or a diplomat or a poet, which was what they needed. They needed to say: We are here. We heard you. You are beautiful. We are not a threat. We are small and we are young and we are afraid but we are also hopeful.

They encoded the message in mathematics—primes, golden ratios, the fibonacci sequence. They sent images of Earth: the blue marble from Apollo 8, the Great Wall, a baby being born, a violin being played. They sent the sound of wind and rain and human laughter. They sent everything that said: This is what we are.

Mei transmitted the message on a Tuesday.

She hit the button and watched the antenna swing toward Alpha Centauri, and she felt... something. She didnt know what to call it. Awe? Terror? Hope? It was all three, and it was also something else, something that didnt have a name yet because human beings hadnt needed a word for it until now.

The message would take four years to arrive. And then—if the aliens answered—it would take four more years for the answer to come back.

Eight years. Mei would be thirty-six years old. She would probably be back on Earth by then, practicing medicine in a hospital somewhere, telling her patients about the time she had sent a message to the stars.

She hoped she would be alive to get the answer.

She also hoped the answer would be friendly.

Mei spent the next six months at L4, waiting. The signal from Alpha Centauri had stopped after they transmitted the response—they were waiting too, probably, just as the humans were waiting. It was a strange, symmetrical kind of patience. Two species, separated by four light-years of void, waiting for a message that was already eight years in the making.

Mei left the station in November. Her rotation was over, her replacement had arrived, and she had to go back to Earth. She packed her things, said goodbye to Commander Okonkwo (whose arm had healed), and boarded the transport capsule back to the surface.

As the capsule fell away from L4, Mei looked out the window at the station growing smaller, and then at Earth growing larger, and she thought about the message. Somewhere out there, four light-years away, an alien being that looked like a jellyfish-cathedral was maybe, possibly, looking at pictures of human babies and violin players and trying to figure out whether to say hello back.

Mei closed her eyes. She fell toward Earth, and she waited.

She would be waiting for a long time.

[END OTMES:TI=68|STORY=Lagrange_Point|VARIANT=V07|]

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