Another Message

2050 June 4 14:00 UT
Post-Test Year 0, Day 1
Tau, Caltech, Screamer Lab

The plan for this day had been formulated for a very long time. Will had set up hand Morse controls like he’d used on the first day. He sat at a table with a gigahertz generator; cables ran over to the same dish he had used just after landing. But the generator had been built by Sarah and various other electrical engineering students, using components made on Tau.

Morbidini, Zhang, and Nick Larson, the last of the surviving Four Physicists, watched over a video feed from the Forge. Mina was next to Will, Z and Karen stood behind them with Vesna. From the White Towers, Townsend and Hildenstoy watched. At MIT, Delbert and his aides also waited. Back on the roof of Moore, Sarah stood with Melinda and the ninjas. Noriega and the Gamblers were in full dress uniforms, at her insistence. All of this was being automatically uplinked to the starship and transmitted via tightbeam laser to the Group receiver at Vesta. That included the outrageously alien shapes of the Examiner shades that stood on air above the crowd. It had been a long night talking to them and listening to the first message from Kal at the SETI Array, narrowly followed by Group transmissions.

Will began to tap out the message, reciting it as he went. “This will be the last message I will send as Screamer for the Institutes. We have passed the Examiner’s Test for humanity.

“In memory of all of those that cannot be here, but most especially Julian Marriner, we charge you to not betray the trust they have shown in us. You all have a choice between self destruction and survival. Please choose survival. We have done so, and those of us who would return to Earth will follow this message as soon as we can.

“Now, here are the instructions of Kevin Zhang, Julia Morbidini, Rob Lessik, and Nick Larson, whom you have known as the Four Physicists. To make negative mass …”