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Transmission
He wanted to say more, but he wasn’t sure that more would help right then. His mother was quiet in the way that said she was thinking, and right then, that was the best that Kevin could hope for. She kept thinking, her hand drumming on the kitchen counter, marking time as she made up her mind.
Kevin heard his mother’s sigh.
“All right,” she said. “I’ll do it. I’ll take you, but only because I suspect that, if I don’t, I’ll be getting a call from the police to tell me that my son has collapsed on a bus somewhere.”
“Thanks, Mom,” Kevin said, moving forward to hug her.
He knew she didn’t really believe him, but in a way, that made the show of love even more impressive.
CHAPTER FIVE
It took around an hour to drive from Walnut Creek down to the SETI Institute in Mountain View, but to Kevin, it felt like a lifetime. It wasn’t just that traffic into the city crawled its way through road closures; every moment was something wasted when he could be there, could be finding out what was going on with him. They would know, he was certain of it.
“Try not to get too excited,” his mother warned him, for what seemed like the twentieth time. Kevin knew she was just trying to protect him, but even so, he didn’t want his excitement dampened. He was sure that this would be the place where he found out what was going on. They were scientists who studied aliens. Surely they would know everything?
When they got there, though, the institute wasn’t what he was expecting. 189 Bernardo Avenue looked more like an art gallery or a part of a university than the kind of ultra-high-tech buildings Kevin’s imagination had conjured up. He’d been expecting buildings that looked as though they might be from outer space, but instead, they looked a little like expensive versions of the kind of buildings his school had.
They drove up and parked in front of the buildings. Kevin took a breath. This was it. They walked into a lobby, where a woman smiled over at them, managing to turn that into a question even before she spoke.
“Hello, are you sure that you’re in the right place?”
“I need to talk to someone about alien signals,” Kevin said, before his mother could try to explain.
“I’m sorry,” the woman said. “We don’t really have public tours.”
Kevin shook his head. He knew he needed to get her to understand. “I’m not here for a tour,” he said. “I think… I think I’m receiving some kind of alien signal.”
The woman didn’t look at him with the kind of shock and disbelief that most other people might have, or even with the surprise his mother had at him coming out with it like that. This was more a look of resignation, as if she had to put up with this kind of thing more often than she would like.
“I see,” she said. “Unfortunately, we’re not in a position to talk to people who walk in off the street. If you want to send a message to us through our contact email, we’d be happy to consider it, but for the moment…”
“Come on, Kevin,” his mother said. “We tried.”
To his own surprise as much as anyone’s. Kevin shook his head. “No, I’m not going.”
“Kevin, you have to,” his mother said.
Kevin sat down, right there in the middle of the lobby. The carpet wasn’t very comfortable, but he didn’t care. “I’m not going anywhere until I speak to someone about this.”
“Wait, you can’t do that,” the receptionist said.
“I’m not going anywhere,” Kevin said.
“Kevin…” his mother began.
Kevin shook his head. He knew it was childish, but the way he saw it, he was thirteen, and he was allowed. Besides, this was important. If he walked out and left now, this was over. He couldn’t let it be over.
“Get up, or I’ll have to call security,” the receptionist said. She walked to him and took hold of Kevin’s arm in a firm grip.
Instantly, Kevin’s mother switched her attention from him to the receptionist, her eyes narrowing.
“Take your hands off my son, right now.”
“Then make your son get up and leave before I have to get the police involved.” The receptionist let go anyway, although that might have had something to do with the look his mother gave her. Kevin had the feeling that, now that there was one way she could protect her son, his mother was going to do it, whatever it took.
“Don’t you threaten us with the police. Kevin isn’t doing anyone any harm.”
“You think we don’t get crazies here on a regular basis?”
“Kevin is not crazy!” his mother shouted, at a volume she normally reserved for when Kevin had done something really wrong.
The next couple of minutes featured more arguing than Kevin was happy with. His mother shouted at him to get up. The receptionist shouted that she would call security. They shouted at each other, as Kevin’s mother decided that she didn’t want anyone threatening her son with security, and the woman seemed to assume that his mother would be able to move Kevin. Kevin sat through it all with surprising serenity.
It lulled him down, and in those depths, he saw something…
The cold darkness of space stood around him, stars flickering, with the Earth looking so different from above that it almost took Kevin’s breath away. There was a silvery object floating there in space, just one of so many others hanging in orbit. The words Pioneer 11 were stenciled on the side…
Then he was lying on the SETI Institute’s floor, his mother helping him up, along with the receptionist.
“Is he okay?” the receptionist asked. “Do you need me to call an ambulance?”
“No, I’m fine,” Kevin insisted.
His mother shook her head. “We know what’s wrong. My son is dying. All of this… I thought it would help him to come to terms with the fact that what he was seeing wasn’t real, that it was the illness.”
Put like that, it felt like a betrayal, as if Kevin’s mother had been planning for his dreams to be crushed all along.
“I understand,” the receptionist said. “Okay, let’s get you up, Kevin. Can I get you both anything?”
“I just want to talk to someone,” Kevin said.
The receptionist bit her lip, then nodded. “Okay, I’ll see what I can do.”
Just like that, her whole attitude seemed to have changed.
“Wait here. Take a seat. I’ll go and see if there’s anyone around who can at least talk to you, maybe show you around. Although there really isn’t much to see.”
Kevin sat down with his mother. He wanted to tell her about everything he’d just seen, but he could see from her face that it would only hurt her. He waited in silence instead.
Finally, a woman came out. She was in her early fifties, dressed in a dark suit that suggested she had the kind of meetings where more casual clothes wouldn’t work. There was something about her that said she was an academic—maybe something in the curiosity with which she looked at Kevin. She offered his mother her hand, and then Kevin.
“Hello, Kevin,” she said. “I’m Dr. Elise Levin. I’m the director here at the institute.”
“You’re in charge?” Kevin asked, hope rising in him. “Of all the alien stuff?”
She smiled with amusement. “I think that’s putting it a bit strongly. A lot of the search for extraterrestrial life happens elsewhere. NASA provides data, some universities get involved, and we often borrow time on other people’s telescopes where we can. But yes, I’m in charge of this institute and the things that go on here.”
“Then I need to tell you,” Kevin said. He was speaking quicker than he wanted to, trying to get the words out before this adult had time to disbelieve him. “There’s something happening. I know how strange it sounds, but I’ve been seeing things, there’s a kind of countdown…”
How could he explain the countdown? It wasn’t like numbers, there wasn’t an obvious point he could say marked its end. There was just a faint pulse that came with the signal in his brain, getting steadily, almost imperceptibly faster as it worked its way toward something that Kevin couldn’t guess at.
“Why don’t you tell me about it while we take a look around?” Dr. Levin suggested. “I’ll show you some of what we do here.”
She led Kevin and his mother through the institute’s corridors, and to be honest, Kevin had thought that it would be more exciting. He’d thought it would look less like an office block.
“I thought there would be big telescopes here, or labs full of equipment for testing things from space,” Kevin said.
Dr. Levin shrugged. “We have some laboratories, and we do test materials occasionally, but we don’t have any telescopes. We are working with Berkeley to build a dedicated radio telescope array though.”
“Then how do you look for aliens?” Kevin’s mother said. It seemed that she was as surprised by the lack of giant telescopes and listening equipment as Kevin was.
“We work with other people,” Dr. Levin said. “We ask for, or hire, time on telescopes and sensor arrays. We work with data from NASA. We put in suggestions to them about places they might want to look, or kinds of data they might want to try to gather. I’m sorry, I know it isn’t as exciting as people sometimes think. Here, come with me.”
She led the way to an office that at least looked a bit more interesting than some of the other spaces. It held a couple of computers, a lot of posters relating to the solar system, a few magazines that had mentioned SETI’s work, and some furniture that looked as though it had been especially designed to be ergonomic, stylish, and about as comfortable as a brick.
“Let me show you some of the things we’ve been working on,” Dr. Levin said, calling up images of large telescope arrays in the process of being built. “We’re looking at developing radio telescope arrays that might be powerful enough to pick up ambient radio frequencies rather than just waiting for someone to target us with a signal.”
“But I think someone is signaling to us,” Kevin said. He needed to get her to understand.
Dr. Levin paused. “I was going to ask if you’re referring to the theory that what some people think are high-frequency radio bursts from a pulsar might be intelligible signals, but you’re not, are you?”
“I’ve been seeing things,” Kevin said. He tried to explain about the visions. He told her about the landscape he’d seen, and about the countdown.
“I see,” Dr. Levin said. “But I have to ask something, Kevin. You understand that SETI is about exploring this issue with science, seeking real proof? It’s the only way that we can do this and know that anything we find is real. So, I have to ask you, Kevin, how do you know what you’re seeing is real?”
Kevin had already managed to answer that with Luna. “I saw some numbers. When I looked them up, it turned out that they were the location for something called the Trappist 1 system.”
“One of the more promising candidates for alien life,” Dr. Levin said. “Even so, Kevin, do you understand my problem now? You say you saw these numbers, and I believe you, but maybe you saw them because you’d read them somewhere. I can’t redirect SETI’s resources based on that, and in any case, I’m not sure what else we could do when it comes to the Trappist 1 system. For something like that, I would need something new. Something you couldn’t have gotten another way.”
Kevin could tell that she was trying to let him down as gently as possible, but even so, it hurt. How could he provide them with that? Then he thought about what he’d seen in the lobby. He had to have seen that for a reason, didn’t he?
“I think…” He wasn’t sure whether to say it or not, but he knew he had to. “I think you’re going to get a signal from something called Pioneer 11.”
Dr. Levin looked at him for a couple of seconds. “I’m sorry, Kevin, but that doesn’t seem very likely.”
Kevin saw his mother frown. “What’s Pioneer 11?”
“It’s one of the deep space probes NASA has sent out,” Dr. Levin explained. “It flew through our solar system, sending back data, and had enough velocity to send it out past the limits of the solar system. Unfortunately, the last contact that we had with it was in 1995, so I really don’t think that—”
She stopped as her phone started to ring, taking it out as if to ignore the call. Kevin saw the moment when she stopped and stared.
“I’m sorry, I have to take this,” she said. “Yes, hello, what is it? Can it wait a moment, I’m in the middle of… okay, if it’s that urgent. A signal? You’re calling me because NASA has data coming in? But NASA always has…” She paused again, looking over at Kevin, the disbelief obvious on her face. Even so, she said it. “Can I take a guess?” she said into the phone. “You’ve just had a signal of some kind from Pioneer 11? You have? No, I can’t tell you. I’m not sure you would believe me if I did.”
She put the phone down, staring at Kevin as if seeing him for the first time in that moment.
“How did you do that?” she asked.
Kevin shrugged. “I saw it when I was waiting in the lobby.”
“You saw it? The same way that you ‘saw’ this alien landscape?” Dr. Levin stared at him, and Kevin had the sense she was trying to work something out. Probably trying to work out any way he could have cheated this, or made it happen.
It was almost a minute before she came to a decision.
“I think,” Dr. Levin said, in the careful tones of someone trying to make sure she hadn’t gone crazy, “that you had better come with me.”
CHAPTER SIX
Kevin and his mother followed Dr. Levin from SETI’s facility to a car that seemed far too small to belong to someone in her position.
“It’s very environmentally friendly,” she said, in a tone that suggested she had faced that question a lot. “Come on, it will be easier if I drive you both over. They’re quite strict about security.”
“Who is?” Kevin’s mother asked.
“NASA.”
Kevin’s breath caught at that. They were going to talk to NASA? When it came to aliens, that was even better than SETI.
The drive across Mountain View was only a short one, a few minutes at most. Even so, it was long enough for Kevin to stare out the windows at the high-tech companies spread around the area, obviously drawn there by NASA and Berkeley, the presence of so many clever people in one place pulling them in.
“We’re really going to NASA?” Kevin said. He couldn’t quite believe it, which made no sense, given all the things he’d had to believe in the last few days.
The NASA campus was everything that the SETI building hadn’t been. It was large, spread across several buildings and set in a space that managed to have views of both the surrounding hills and the bay. There was a visitors center that was essentially a tent built on a scale that seemed hard to believe, bright white and painted with the NASA logo. They drove past that, though, to a space that was closed off to the public, behind a chain-link fence and a barrier where Dr. Levin had to show ID to get them in.
“I’m expected,” she said.
“And who are they, ma’am?” the guard asked.
“This is Kevin McKenzie and his mother,” Dr. Levin said. “They’re with me.”
“They’re not on the—”
“They’re with me,” Dr. Levin said again, and for the first time, Kevin had a sense of the kind of toughness involved in her position. The guard hesitated for a moment, then produced a couple of visitors’ passes, which Dr. Levin handed over to them. Kevin hung his around his neck, and it felt like a trophy, a talisman. With this, he could go where he needed. With this, people actually believed him.
“We’ll need to go into the research areas,” Dr. Levin said. “Please be careful not to touch anything, because some of the experiments are delicate.”
She led the way inside a building that appeared to be composed mostly of delicate curves of steel and glass. This was the kind of place Kevin had been expecting when they came down to Mountain View. This was what a place that looked out into space should be. There were laboratories to either side, with the kind of advanced equipment in them that suggested they could test almost anything space threw their way. There were lasers and computers, benches and devices that looked designed for chemistry. There were workshops full of welding equipment and parts that might have been for cars, but that Kevin wanted to believe were for vehicles for use on other planets.
Dr. Levin asked around as they went, apparently trying to find out where everyone was who was connected with the news about Pioneer 11’s message. Whenever they passed someone, she stopped them, and it seemed to Kevin that she knew everyone there. SETI might be separate from all of this, the way she said it was, but it was obvious that Dr. Levin spent a lot of time here.
“Hey, Marvin, where is everybody?” she asked a bearded man in a checked shirt.
“They’re mostly gathered in the center for supercomputer research,” he said. “Something like this, they want to see what the pits will come up with.”
“The pits?” Kevin asked.
Dr. Levin smiled. “You’ll see.”
“Who are they?” the bearded man asked.
“What would you say if I told you that Kevin here can see aliens?” Dr. Levin asked.
Marvin laughed. “You can try to play up to the crazy alien hunter reputation all you want, Elise. You’re as skeptical as the rest of us.”
“Maybe not about this,” Dr. Levin said. She looked back at Kevin and his mother. “This way.”
She led the way to another part of the building, and now Kevin had the sense of extra security, with ID scanners and cameras at almost every turn. More than that, it was probably the cleanest place he had ever been. Much cleaner than, for example, his bedroom. It seemed that not a speck of dust was allowed to intrude on it without permission, let alone the piles of old clothes that filled his space until his mom told him to tidy it.
The labs were mostly empty at the moment, and empty in ways that suggested they’d been left in a hurry because something more exciting was happening. It was easy to see where they had gone. People crowded in the corridors as the three of them got closer to their destination, exchanging gossip that Kevin only caught fragments of.
“There’s a signal, an actual signal.”
“After all this time.”
“It’s not just telemetry data, or even scans. There’s something… else.”
“We’re here,” Dr. Levin said, as they arrived at a room where the door had been left open, obviously to allow for the crowd of people trying to cram inside. “Let us through, please. We need to talk to Sam.”
“Here” turned out to be a large room, filled with blinking lights below and surrounded by walkways that made it seem a bit like a theater where the actors were all computers. Kevin recognized them as computers even though they were nothing like the small, barely working laptop his mother had bought for him to do schoolwork on. These were devices the size of coffee tables, cars, rooms, all matte black and glittering with lights. The people standing or sitting close to them had on suits like the ones forensics people wore on TV shows.
“Impressed?” Dr. Levin asked.
Kevin could only nod. He didn’t have the words for a place like this. It was… incredible.
“What is this place?” his mother asked, and Kevin didn’t know if it was a good or bad thing that even his mother didn’t understand it.
“It’s where NASA does its supercomputer research,” Dr. Levin explained. “Work on AI, quantum computing, more advanced superconductors. It’s also the equipment they use to work on… complex issues. Come on, we need to talk to Sam.”
She led the way through the crowd and Kevin followed, trying to be quick enough to move into the gaps she created before they closed again. He hurried along in her wake until they came to a tall, slightly stooped man standing by one of the computers. Unlike the others, he wasn’t wearing a clean suit. His long, bony fingers seemed to be tying themselves in knots as he typed.
“Professor Brewster,” Dr. Levin said.
“Dr. Levin, I’m glad you could… wait, you’ve brought visitors. This really isn’t the moment for sightseeing, Elise.”
If Dr. Levin was annoyed by that, she didn’t show it. “David, this is Kevin McKenzie, and his mother. They’re not here to sightsee. I think Kevin might prove helpful with this. We need to see Sam.”
Professor Brewster waved a hand at the machine in front of them. It was even taller than he was, with pipes running up the side that were so cold they gave off steam into the air. It was only when Kevin saw the sign on the side, “Signals Analysis Machine,” that he realized Sam wasn’t a person’s name, but an acronym.
“You want to let a child play with a multimillion-dollar piece of engineering?” Professor Brewster asked. “I mean, he’s what? Ten?”
“I’m thirteen,” Kevin said. The difference might not be much to someone Professor Brewster’s age, but to him, it was a fourth of his life. It was more life than he had remaining. Put like that, three years was a huge amount.
“Well, I’m forty-three, I have a doctorate from Princeton, a building full of often frankly impossible geniuses who should be doing their jobs”—he looked around the room pointedly, but no one moved—“and now, apparently a thirteen-year-old who wants to play with my supercomputer just as it is about to get to work on a signal from a probe we thought long dead.”
He seemed like a man who didn’t like stress much. Kevin guessed that was probably a disadvantage in his job.
“Kevin’s here because of the signal,” Dr. Levin said. “He… well, he predicted that it would occur.”
“Impossible,” Professor Brewster said. “Elise, you know I have always respected your efforts to keep SETI research in the realm of serious science, but this seems to run in completely the opposite direction. It’s obviously a trick.”
Dr. Levin sighed. “I know what I saw, David. He told me that there would be something happening with Pioneer 11, and then we got the signal. Will you at least play it for us?”
“Oh, very well,” Professor Brewster said. He gestured to one of the scientists working around the supercomputer. “Play it so that we can get on with our work.”
The scientist nodded and tapped a control interface a few times. Data flashed up on a screen in string after string of numbers, but Kevin was more interested in the audio signal that came with it. It was a strange mechanical chattering that sounded nothing like language, more like the kind of interference that might come from a computer going wrong.
Even so, he understood it. He just didn’t know how.
“You need to adjust one of your radio telescopes,” Kevin said, the knowledge just sitting in his mind. There were numbers too. Two sets of them, one marginally different from the other. “I think… the first seems wrong somehow, and the second is what it should be.”
“What?” Professor Brewster and Dr. Levin asked almost simultaneously, although with very different expressions. Dr. Levin looked amazed. Professor Brewster mostly looked irritated.
“It’s what it means,” Kevin said. He shrugged. “I mean, I guess. I don’t know how I know it.”
“You don’t know it,” Professor Brewster insisted. “If there’s any meaning in there at all, which frankly isn’t likely, it will take SAM hours to decode it, if it’s possible at all.
“I just told you what it means,” Kevin insisted. “I can… it just makes sense to me.”
“You should listen to him, David,” Dr. Levin said. “At least search for the numbers, see if they mean anything. Can you write them down, Kevin?”
She held out a piece of paper and a pen, and Kevin noted them as clearly as he could. He held it out to Professor Brewster, who took it with bad grace.
“We have better things to do than this, Elise,” he said. “Right, that’s enough. Out. We have work to do here.”
He shooed them away, and Dr. Levin didn’t seem inclined to argue. Instead, she took Kevin and his mother out into the corridors of the research facility again.
“Come on,” she said. “David might be too busy to actually use that gigantic brain of his, but there are plenty of people here who owe me favors.”
“What kind of favors?” Kevin’s mother asked.
Dr. Levin looked back at Kevin. “The kind where we find out exactly how Kevin is managing to receive and decode signals from outer space.”
***
“You need to hold still, Kevin,” said an overweight researcher wearing a Hawaiian shirt under his lab coat. He just went by “Phil” even though the nameplate on his door declared that he had at least as many PhDs as anyone else. He seemed to be a friend of Dr. Levin’s, although that might have had something to do with the foot-long sandwich she picked up from the canteen before going to visit him. “It won’t produce a clear image if you move.”
Kevin did his best, lying still in the cramped interior of an MRI machine. It made him feel like a torpedo about to be launched into the ocean, and the confined space was only made worse by a regular dull thudding, which sounded as though someone was hammering on the outside of it while he lay there. His experiences in the hospital told him that was probably normal, and not a sign that the whole thing was about to collapse. Even so, it was hard to hold still for as long as it took for the thing to scan him.
“Almost there,” Phil called. “Just hold your breath for a moment. And relax.”
Kevin wished he could relax. The last couple of hours had been busy ones. There had been scientists, and labs, and tests. Lots of tests. There were cognitive tests and imaging scans, things like X-rays and word association tests while Kevin found various kinds of devices pointed at him, designed to pump different kinds of signals toward his body.
Eventually, even Phil seemed to be getting tired of shooting rays at Kevin.
“Okay, you can come out.”
He helped Kevin from the machine, then led the way over to where Dr. Levin and Kevin’s mother were waiting. The researcher shook his head as he pointed to the screen, and a series of black-and-white images that Kevin guessed must be of the inside of his brain. If so, brains looked weirder than he’d thought.
“I’m sorry, Elise, but there’s no sign of anything different about him that wouldn’t be explained by his illness,” he said.
“Keep looking,” Dr. Levin said.
“How, exactly?” he asked. “I’m telling you, I’ve used almost every test it’s possible to do on a human being—fMRI, CAT scan, psych battery, you name it. I’ve fired so many different frequencies at Kevin here that it’s a wonder he isn’t picking up the local radio. Short of subjecting him to radioactive isotopes or actually dissecting him—”
“No,” Kevin’s mother said, firmly. Kevin didn’t like that idea either.
Phil shook his head. “There’s just nothing else there to find.”
Kevin could hear the man’s disappointment. Unlike Professor Brewster, he obviously liked the idea of someone being able to hear alien signals. That disappointment mirrored his own. He’d been sure that these people, with all their brains and their laboratories, would be able to find out what was happening, but it looked—
A man burst into the room, and it took Kevin a moment to recognize the gangly frame of Professor Brewster. He looked, if anything, even more agitated than he had when he’d been throwing them out of the supercomputer pit. He was holding a tablet, gripping it so tightly that Kevin suspected he might crack it.
“David, if this is about the use of resources…” Dr. Levin began.
The tall scientist looked over at her as if trying to work out what she was talking about, then shook his head. “Not that. I just want to know how you did it. How did you know?”
“Know what?” Kevin asked.
“Don’t play dumb,” the scientist said. He held out the tablet for them to look at. “One of our people ran those numbers you gave us through our systems. It turns out that they were the current settings for one of our radio telescopes, just as you said. No one who wasn’t working at the observatory could know that. So how did you know?”
“Know what?” Kevin asked.
“Know what would happen when we changed it!”
Professor Brewster pressed something on his tablet.
“This is a feed from it.”
He thrust the pad at Kevin, holding it out like an accusation. A buzzing, clicking signal came from it, which sounded as though it might just be static, or a mechanical problem, or crickets stuck somewhere in the workings of the machine.
To Kevin, though, the words were clear.
We are coming. Be prepared to accept us.
