Authors: Jack McDonald Burnett
Conn took a copy of the animation home that evening, first promising Peo that she would remember her NDA. She deliberately did not watch it as soon as she got back to her apartment. She made dinner. She watched a show. She was trying to sneak up on the problem. Finally, she played it again.
It jumped right out at her. The bird’s-eye orbit of the “Earth” around the “sun,” the partial one. It was shorter than the first time she had seen it. But it looked the same in each iteration Conn put it through that night.
She synced her Wear with the monitor she was watching the animation on, and called up an app she used for math homework involving geometry. First, she verified that the third orbit was following a circle exactly. She then measured the orbit: 57.404 millimeters. She realized if she was measuring on a different device next time, the circle would be a different size, and she wouldn’t get a useful result to compare. So she measured the orbit as a percentage of the circumference of the circle: 53.662. A little more than halfway. That tracked with her memory of how it looked the first time, watching with Peo, but she was certain this orbit was shorter now.
It was Monday night. She decided to force herself to set it aside, and to pick it back up again on Wednesday.
That day, she played the animation again. It didn’t look discernibly shorter. But then she synced with her Wear and measured the orbit again: 53.114.
So she wasn’t losing her mind. The engineer in her cautioned that she should measure it again in a couple days before she went around thinking she’d proved the orbit was shrinking.
Two days later, with another measurement under her belt, she told Peo about the shrinking orbit.
“I measured it again this morning—52.567 percent. It’s definitely getting shorter.”
“How strange,” Peo said. “Maybe it’s a countdown. To a particular day of the year.”
“I thought of that,” Conn said. “But there are so many better ways to communicate that. Like, I don’t know, numbers that get smaller.”
“Arabic numbers? Hindi numbers? Chinese numbers? All of the above?” Peo said. “This may be a way to communicate a countdown in any language. There’s one way to find out—or at least be fairly certain. Does each measurement times three hundred sixty-five equal a whole number?”
When Conn was done beating herself up for not thinking of that, she multiplied three hundred sixty-five by each of her percentages of the orbits. She got 195.866, 193.866, and 191.870.
“Not whole numbers,” Conn said. “But look at the numbers to the right of the decimal points. They’re all three almost the same distance from the next integer up.”
“Try three sixty-five and a quarter.” Which was actually how many days there were in a year, accounting for the leap year every four years.
Conn got 196.000, 193.999, 192.001.
“That’s it! The orbit represents a year, and it’s shrinking by a day every day. How is it reading the current day? From the device running it?”
“What’s a hundred ninety-two days from now?”
Conn called up a calendar and figured. “September second.”
“Great,” Peo said, warming to the challenge. “What happens on September second?” Conn Googled, both the full date and just “September 2.” She spent twenty minutes sifting through the results, but there was nothing of significance. Googling “FALCON” in conjunction with the date put her even farther into the weeds. She promised Peo she would look into it more over the weekend.
The weekend came and went, Conn brooding over the animation, Grant asking her what was wrong, Conn not telling him, and feeling a little smug at knowing something he didn’t know. School and work conspired to keep Conn’s mind off the animation the first couple of days of the week. Her classes, including Heat and Mass Transfer with Professor Peo Haskell, were rushing through material to make up for class time lost to the weather. When Peo asked her while they ate lunch (alone) in her office if she had made any headway, she confessed she hadn’t, but brainstormed:
“If the Chinese got this, and took it seriously, whatever is happening must have meaning to them,” she said. “It might be that we won’t be able to figure it out, a couple Westerners like us.”
“If Gale says the US and India got this, too, then they did,” Peo said. “Unless each animation is different, and Gale didn’t know that.”
“If each country, or language or whatever, was to get custom animations, then the countdown could have easily been expressed as numbers, getting smaller,” Conn said, because that was still bothering her. “Or just ‘September second.’ Why didn’t they just do that? Nobody at the US government can read Chinese? Or also, you could just take a picture of it, and Google would tell you what it said. Same in China if it’s English with Arabic numerals.”
“So is it a puzzle? I mean, intentionally?” Peo asked.
“Could be. But whatever is supposed to happen September second, I think it’s represented by the rest—the zoom-in on the ‘moon.’ If we can figure out what in the world ‘FALCON’ means, we probably solve the puzzle.”
“Something is going to happen to the moon September second?” Peo asked. “Another moon shower, maybe?”
“See, but here’s the thing,” Conn said, swiping away at her Wear. “The phase of the moon on September second is going to be a tiny crescent. It’s right before a new moon.”
“Not waning gibbous, like in the animation,” Peo said.
“Maybe zooming in and showing it football-shaped is just supposed to say, ‘this represents the moon. And: FALCON!’” Conn giggled.
“Could be, I guess,” Peo said. “If I were trying to say ‘this is the moon—’”
“FALCON!”
“‘FALCON,’ I would show it as a crescent. Isn’t that a more universal representation of the moon?”
“And that would match the phase of the moon September second.”
“Could it be a different September second? Not the one coming up this year?” Peo motioned to Conn’s Wear. “Look up the phases of the moon on the next few September seconds. See if any of them are waning gibbous.”
“Next year’s is...first quarter. Exactly half is illuminated.”
“Thank you for playing, 2033.”
“September second, 2034...Ooh. Waning gibbous!”
Peo cried out, so urgently that Conn thought she was having a heart attack. “Conn!” she said. “There are two full orbits in the animation before the partial one.”
“It’s supposed to be
two years and
one hundred blahbedy blah days!”
“That’s it!” Peo cried, and gave Conn a high-five.
February, 2032
The sense of triumph was short lived. They had a date, but they didn’t know what was going to happen on it.
If the message was that on September 2, 2034, something was going to happen to, or on, the moon, then the origin of the message was probably extraterrestrial. The list of earthbound countries that could make something happen on the moon was drastically short, and none were likely to be coy about it—they would either tell the world what they were doing, or keep it entirely to themselves. So most likely, the human race had been contacted by an alien intelligence. But what was that alien intelligence saying?
Peo recruited one of her Washington lobbyists to quietly ask around and see whether anyone she had access to in the government had received the animation—starting with the Senate Science and Space Subcommittee. From there, the lobbyist was to try NASA.
A few days later, the lobbyist reported in. Yes, he was almost sure the government had another copy of the animation. His sources spoke obliquely about a “puzzle” sent to them by NASA that they weren’t allowed to talk about. It sounded like what Peo had described to the lobbyist—as much information as she would give him.
Peo was right: it was with the Senate subcommittee with oversight of NASA and science funding. What threw Peo was that NASA was the original recipient of the animation. “NASA got it, and turned it over to the Senate subcommittee,” Peo said. “Why would they do that?”
“I’m sure they kept a copy,” Conn said.
“I’m sure they did. Look, the people at NASA, a lot of them—too many of them—are bureaucrats, but to a man and woman, if you asked one of them what they should do with a possible message from an alien intelligence, not one of them would say ‘Send it to the Senate subcommittee. They’ll know what to do.’”
“Ask Gale who in the Chinese government actually received the animation,” Conn suggested. Peo did, but Gale didn’t know.
“What about ‘FALCON?’” Gale asked.
“We don’t know what ‘FALCON’ means,” Peo said.
“Put your heads together,” Gale said. “Bring in others if you need to.”
They showed Grant the animation next. Now they had three bright minds working the problem. But a solution still eluded them.
Some nights later, there was a late winter chill in the air outside, and Conn was enduring restless sleep, She was just dozing back off when suddenly she gasped and sat bolt upright in bed. She knew the answer,
knew
it. With shaking hands she swiped away at her Wear and double checked.
It was three thirty in the morning. She called Peo and Grant anyway. They grumbled about it, but agreed to meet at Peo’s office. Conn and a sleepy Grant were at Peo’s office door when she arrived. Conn had a moment of uncertainty. Her life may actually be in danger if this was a false alarm—Peo would kill her. But no, she had it, and it was big. She hustled Peo and Grant inside and shut the door behind them.
“It’s an invitation,” Conn said, gooseflesh blooming as she said it out loud. “September second, 2034 is the time. FALCON is the place.”
“And where is FALCON?”
Conn swiped at her Wear. “Apollo 11 left a plaque at their landing site that said, ‘Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the moon.’ Apollo 17 left one that said, ‘Here man completed his first explorations of the moon.’” Peo nodded impatiently. “Except for Apollo 12, all the Apollo missions in the middle left plaques that were similar.” Conn showed Peo a picture on her Wear. “Apollo 14’s says
APOLLO 14
ANTARES
FEBRUARY 1971
“Followed by the astronauts’ signatures.
“Antares was the name of their lander. Look, here’s Apollo 13’s, the one they didn’t get to put on the moon:”
APOLLO 13
AQUARIUS
APRIL 1970
“We had a plaque made up along those lines,” Peo said. For her moonshot, she meant.
“Right.” Conn swiped to a ready picture of Peo’s plaque, a replica of the Apollo markers, which likewise didn’t end up on the moon:
DYNAMIC AEROSPACE TECHNOLOGIES
HIPPEIA
NOVEMBER 2022
Conn waited for Peo to get it.
“Apollo 15’s lander,” Peo said, eyes widening. Conn nodded, and showed Peo the picture:
APOLLO 15
FALCON
JULY 1971
“That has to be it,” said Peo, almost breathless. “FALCON. The Apollo 15 plaque.” She looked at Conn, who could barely contain herself. “We’ve been invited to the moon on September second, 2034. We meet where Apollo 15 landed, at the foot of Mount Hadley. That’s it. You did it!”
“
We
did it,” Conn said.
“Would have been a lot easier if they’d said Apollo 15 instead of FALCON. Or both,” Grant said.
“I think the solution was intentionally difficult,” Peo said. “Don’t ask me why they would do it that way, though.”
“Or maybe it’s like the hospital,” Conn offered. “It has a street address, but you don’t say to meet at the street address, you call it
the hospital
. You don’t meet at the street address of the mediastore, you meet at the mediastore. They, whoever they are, might have thought Apollo 15
was like the street address and FALCON
was the real name of the place.”
Grant shook his head. “It’s going to be a blast thinking through the implications, isn’t it? I wonder why they didn’t pick the Apollo 11 site. Assuming they could pick anywhere.”
Conn thought about it. “It wouldn’t be that easy to find,” she offered. “The flag got knocked down when the lunar module took off from the surface. But with Apollo 15, 16, and 17, not only are the flags still up, as far as we know, but they all left lunar rovers at the sites. Still a needle in a haystack, but compared to the Apollo 11 site, those would have stuck out like sore thumbs.”
Peo called her US lobbyist with instructions to find out what the subcommittee recommended the US do about the animation.
“I hope they send somebody,” Conn said.
“I almost don’t,” Peo confessed. “I would love to send a mission of my own.”
“With you on it?”
Peo smiled. “I’m sixty years old, and a cancer survivor. My doctor will tell you I’m not going to be able to get myself in shape to go to the moon.”
“You could send somebody even if NASA does, too,” Grant said.
“It might be worth it,” Peo said. “Under any other circumstances I wouldn’t want to horn in on their spotlight—people there have long, long memories. But maybe in this case...”
The three went to Franco’s, a chop house, for dinner to celebrate cracking the alien code. Consensus was it would be best to keep the information close to the vest, at least until they found out whether NASA deciphered the message behind the animation and decided to send anybody to meet the moon shower-makers. “NASA has taken a beating over the years,” Peo explained. “They deserve to make the announcement, if it’s going to be Americans who do.”
Conn made a noise and then swiped at her Wear with vigor. If the Chinese were sending people to the moon in September, 2034... “The Chinese moon mission. It’s set for...”
“September second, 2034?”
“...no.” Conn frowned. “They haven’t set a date yet. I was sure they would be going September second, 2034.”
“Maybe they haven’t figured out the animation yet.”
“Maybe they have set the date but don’t want to tell anybody,” Conn said.
Conn spent the next two days on pins and needles. News that an alien race had contacted governments of Earth and invited them to a meeting was tectonic, and difficult to keep inside.