Take-Away

2014 September 19 9:13 UTC

The college campuses of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century could seem isolated from the rest of the world. Students would get up, mostly before noon, go to class, eat at cafeterias, do problem sets or research depending on if they were undergrads or grads, stay up into the early morning, and check on the outside world electronically, using cell phones and email to learn what Google, Wikipedia, and TV streamed on iTunes, YouTube, and file-sharing servers could not tell them. Some students didn’t stray beyond the bounds of room, lab, library and lecture hall for a year or more.

And yet there were very definite connections. Electricity, water, food, caffeine, and lab equipment flowed in. Computer traffic, sewage, garbage, research papers, and innovations flowed out. The public derived amusement from the students, and occasional pride from the research. Thus there was considerable confusion and no little grief when the campuses of MIT and Caltech vanished in the middle of the night.

The vanishing was incredibly selective. In less than a tenth of a second, the Caltech student body and the campus, down to the deepest foundation, disappeared. The same happened at MIT, with the water of the Charles River restrained by a wall of rock that had not existed before. Professors and staff found themselves in pits where buildings had been. Those who were seated found themselves on chairs, not always those they started on. A postdoc was starting to drink a cup of coffee at MIT, only to have it disappear along with the all-night coffee shop. A concert outside the Beckman Auditorium at Caltech ended abruptly when the ensemble found that the building, stage, microphones and most of the audience were no longer present.

The faculty’s personal effects remained with them, along with a few older computers. Checkouts on the computers showed that all research-related data that had not been backed up to off-campus servers had been copied into their memories, including files with high-level copy protection. By then more worrisome reports had come in. Students not on campus were also gone. Apartments had been neatly cut out of buildings. A dozen airlines reported passengers disappearing during flight, and many missing pieces of luggage. At a karaoke bar in Boston, a graduate student had vanished in the middle of impersonating Aretha Franklin. His car was no longer in the parking lot.

No one with a doctorate had vanished. Students who had just passed their PhD defense remained; those scheduled to defend next week were nowhere to be found. One other group of students remained. Those who were married or engaged to people who were not also students, or who had children, saw, or did not see, their surroundings vanish while they remained. For a while, it seemed that two graduate students might have been skipped in the vanishing. The reason for their remaining became clear a little less than a month later.

Electronic signals from the colleges had dropped out within microseconds: emails arrived fragmented, gaming avatars froze. The vanishings happened with a complete absence of sound. No one saw buildings fly into the sky or disintegrate. US Space Command reported no unusual radar signals. Satellite imagery showed nothing out of the ordinary. The entire electromagnetic spectrum was clean, from gamma rays down to the Earth-sized oscillations of the magnetosphere. Grasping at straws, the neutrino and cosmic-ray spectra were also undisturbed. The LIGO gravity-wave detectors had switched themselves off ten minutes before the event due to a glitch in the control software, and stayed down for a half-hour, but they saw no gravity anomalies before or afterwards.

The precision of the vanishings, the absence of sound and the re-writing of computer memory ruled out the most obvious methods of making large pieces of matter disappear. This was probably not the result of a run-away arms race in pranks and hacks. Some radical theologians claimed heavenly wrath and enjoyed a temporary resurgence in popularity and revenue. A theoretical physicist proposed that a macroscopic system could suddenly transition to a much different energy state but was unable to explain how.

For several years afterward, conspiracy theorists brought forth “evidence” linking one or another government agency to the disappearances. This was always an obviously fake photo or memo or an ‘I said so’ from someone of doubtful sanity but past government employment, usually referencing short individuals with large eyes and grayish skin and crop destruction in the Australian countryside. The only effect of the conspiracy theories was the revival of two or three publications sold largely at supermarket checkout lanes and an increase in traffic to a few websites. More serious were the small groups of political extremists that falsely claimed responsibility for the Vanishing. The US military went through a phase of shooting first and then asking questions.

Eventually, the problem was effectively deemed unsolvable. Most of the faculty and remaining students went to other schools, the pits were made memorials, and students elsewhere were given strict instructions to not experiment with dangerous substances except under close supervision. The musicians who had been playing at Caltech enjoyed brief fame with their next few recordings. The Institute’s endowments were made into a research foundation; JPL re-negotiated its contract with NASA; the observatories at Palomar and Haystack were taken over by the NSF; and the human race went about its day-to-day business. Physicists mused about possible extensions to physical laws, and gave increasingly difficult-to-test predictions, but that was considered completely normal.

2038 June 28

The latest SETI Array is in the Atacama Desert. Five hundred robotic dishes constantly scan the visible sky over three orders of magnitude of frequency; all are controlled by a central AI and a cluster the equal of the Internet of three decades ago. One building houses the cluster, a control room, and quarters for an operator. Operators alternate two-week shifts at the array, one at a time. There have been proposals to spend the money for extra fiber optics to pipe all of the data and run the array remotely, but the Roswell Union of Hackers believes that faking an alien signal is the highest achievement of their art. After the second picture of Yoda apparently coming from the Whirlpool Galaxy, the Allen Trust decided that it is safer to electronically isolate the array at almost all times, so that it must be operated onsite, and then have the operator telecommute back home.

Kalpana Sarswati, the present operator, was sitting in an armchair, listening to Javanese music while musing on what review to give a proposal for using the wide-field millimeter array, located a hundred kilometers north, to measure the n+1-th correlation coefficient of the microwave background. Then the AI paused the music and played a ringtone.

Sarswati stood up and silenced the computer with a gesture. A glance at a series of ancient flat-panel displays caused her to pick up an even older analog telephone. She dialed the millimeter array and began speaking rapid Spanish.

“Evo, it’s Kal. Can you get Tau Ceti in the hydrogen band? … Now, or as fast as you can slew over and switch the receivers. … Take it out of my disc observations. Ten for one. … If I knew, I wouldn’t tell you. If you see the same thing, I just might believe it.” The astronomer hung up. The millimeter array would use their back-up low frequency receivers to observe the star, completely separate from the AI’s control and the rest of the SETI system, in case this was a hack.

The array had been scanning Cetus. The search pattern covered the entire visible sky daily, but had not yet seen anything convincingly like an alien civilization. Ten thousand pulsars, a few hundred exotic variable stars, but nothing resembling a signal that had not been traced to human-made inference. Then, as Tau Ceti came into view, the AI had noticed something very strange.

Over a one-megahertz bandwidth a little off the 1420-megahertz hydrogen line, the star was far brighter than it should have been. It was not currently prone to outbursts and those would have been broadband. There were no spacecraft in positions that would cause interference. The signal went up in priority. Then the computer measured modulation of the signal, from full strength to the normal background, in an at first random pattern with a frequency of a few hertz. The AI triggered a massive sequence of check-sums and non-standard test measurements. Everything in the system seemed normal. If this was a hack, it was very very good and had hidden itself for the six and a half months since the array was last connected to the net. Ten seconds after first seeing the signal, the AI had passed it to the processing cluster, which usually ran more mundane data analysis, programmed a subarray to monitor the star, and told Kal.

After placing the call to the millimeter array, the operator ran a sequence of hardware checks, including impedance testing of the cabling from the dishes to make sure they hadn’t been tampered with, more radio interference measurements, and low-level tests on the AI and the rest of the cluster. Everything checked out. As she finished, the computer rang her again.

“Subarray confirms that the source is tracking with the star. Suggest that we activate the follow-up arrays and perform VLBI.”

There was a hardware switch to be thrown. This switch connects the Atacama array to other radio telescopes in California and Asia via real-time fiber optic links. Between them, the dishes have sufficient resolution to establish if a signal comes from near any of a stellar system’s planets, if star is within about a hundred lightyears. In 2025, Wiktorowicz’s interferometer found six planets around Tau Ceti, one of which is only a little smaller and colder than Earth and was the object of the Astral Mining’s Gamble of 2034. Kal threw the switch.

Two minutes later the signal-processing computer also began to call for attention. “The signal parses as English Morse, and the slight variations in frequency and amplitude are consistent with a hand operator. None of the interference monitors detect any such signal. The archived signal is transcribed and the continuing data reduced in real-time. Do you want to hear the transcription?”

Kal carefully ran through one more sequence of checks, to insure that the signal-processing software was not compromised. Then she sat down again.

“Play it.” She more than half expected to hear the computer repeating a hacker’s victory oration. But that was not what she heard. Only two things distracted her as the computer recited the message: the AI’s report that VLBI put the location within a twentieth of an AU of the Earth-sized planet and the call from the millimeter array that they heard what she heard. Those only did so briefly.