Flood Rising (Jenna Flood #1)

“If I were going to send a message, though,” Zavada continued, as if Soter’s apparent interest was an invitation, “I would use computer language. Just like we did with the Arecibo Message.”


The Arecibo Message was the reverse of the Wow! Signal. It was a blast of information sent from Earth in 1974—from the very facility where Soter’s team now probed the heavens—into deep space. The message, which had lasted just three minutes, was designed to establish a communication baseline—the numbers one through ten, the atomic number of several elements, the basic nucleotide structure of DNA, and so forth—all rendered into binary code, broadcast at 2,380 MHz—much stronger than the Wow! Signal—and modulated at 10 Hz.

Some people had speculated that the Wow! Signal might be an answer to the Arecibo Message, but this was extremely unlikely. The Arecibo Message had been sent to a different part of space, and had gone out only three years earlier, not nearly enough time to be received by a civilization around a distant star, and answered.

“Frequency modulation is perfect for transmitting binary data,” Zavada continued. “It’s kind of like Morse code, only simpler. Instead of dots and dashes, you just have ones and zeroes—on and off.”

“We tried looking for a binary message,” Soter answered. Contrary to many of the news reports that had been circulated, no one had actually ‘heard’ the Wow! Signal. The only recorded data from the Big Ear was the computer printout, and that was only the mean values of signal strength calculated every few seconds. There was no recording of the signal and no way to know if it had been modulated to contain a message. “Lots of ones, but they were all in the background…”

His voice trailed off as he saw, with the same clarity that had fueled his recognition of a pattern in the Wow! Signal, that they actually had received a binary message. He pushed the newspaper away to reveal the printout of data received from the Gemini-Auriga sky survey. He looked at it and then turned it for Zavada’s inspection. “What do you see?”

“Background noise.”

Soter shook his head. “Think more literally. You see ones. A lot of ones.” As with the data from the Big Ear, the numeral ‘1’ was used to signify a faint pulse of radiation—white noise from stars and other objects that emitted very faint but detectable electro-magnetic radiation. The universe was a noisy place, but most of the noise was at a very low frequency. The radiation the telescope had detected was in the low range, but that was to be expected. It was rare to see anything greater than a four.

“Yeah, and a lot empty spaces in between.”

“Not spaces,” Soter countered. “Zeroes.”

Zavada gaped at him. “Are you saying there’s a binary code hidden in the background noise?” He didn’t wait for a response, but took the thick stack of paper and began studying it with the practiced eye of someone fluent in machine language. After a few seconds, he turned to the next page, then the next. “I’ll be damned.”

Soter moved around the desk to look over Zavada’s shoulder. “What do you see?”

Zavada took out a pen and began scribbling furiously on the margin of the printout. After a few minutes, he straightened and showed Soter what he had produced.



101000011101000110000010000000101000011101000110000010000000101000011101000110000010000000101000011101000110000010000000101000011101000110000010000000101000011101000110000010000000101000011101000110000010000000



“There’s a repeating pattern here. Do you see it?” Zavada added some lines.



101000011101000110000010000000101000011101000110000010000000101000011101000110000010000000101000011101000110000010000000101000011101000110000010000000101000011101000110000010000000101000011101000110000010000000



“It repeats after thirty digits, over and over again.”

“Can you tell what it says?”

“Every binary number starts with one. If the thirty digits are a single number…” Zavada did some calculations on the paper. “Six hundred seventy-eight million, seven hundred fifteen thousand, five hundred and twenty.”

Soter took the pen and wrote the number down.



678,715,520



It was a multiple of ten…nothing helpful there. The prime factorization was interesting though.



2^7 ? 5 ? 7 ? 151499



“It might not be one number,” Zavada cautioned. “See these long strings of zeroes? Four and five at a time? If this were my message, I’d use double-zeroes or triple-zeroes as spaces between individual numbers.”



101000011101000110000010000000101000011101000110000010000000



{20 – 58 – 24 – 32} or {10 – 29 – 12 – 16}



Soter felt a tingling at the base of his neck. There was something important here. He hastily wrote out an alphanumeric key like the one he had used in interpreting the Wow! Signal. The first set of numbers didn’t work. Fifty-eight was beyond the alphanumeric range. The second set however was within the range.



1010 = 10 = A 11101 = 29 = T 1100 = 12 = C 10000 = 16 = G