1420 MHz

“Speak now.” The interviewer sat back in their seat, letting the camera run.

“It’s hard to describe. To paraphrase Dickens, it was the best time of my life, it was the shittiest time of my life. Maybe both and neither at the same time, like Shrödinger’s cat. I guess we can open the box now and see which way the waveform collapses.

“Not that I’d change anything. The lack of sleep, the shitty little room I could barely afford on my part-time wages, meals consisting of whatever I could scrounge from the kitchen at work. No one tells you how hard it is to live and pursue a doctorate at the same time.

“I might’ve been able to work more hours if I didn’t volunteer at the observatory to pay back the time I’d used up in gathering the data for my research. I mean, I didn’t have to, but it only felt right.”

The interviewer cocked their head to one side. “Perhaps it would be easier to start at the moment you became aware of the contact?” It waved a tentacle in a ‘carry on’ sort of gesture.

Ally brushed her straight, lank, not-quite-blonde hair back from a pink, sun-burned cheek. She stared at the camera with light brown eyes. “Yeah, I can do that.”

She took a deep breath and leaned forward. “I was on overnight duty at the radio observatory….”

----------

Ally usually had plenty of time during her shift to work on her doctoral thesis. She was on her final revision; spelling and transcription errors solved, graphs and graphics finalized. It was down to making the language as smooth and readable as possible.

An alarm went off on the main dish. Not like the movies, with flashing lights and blaring klaxons, just a repeated chime like the dishwasher letting you know it was done.

She turned from her laptop to the terminal and turned off the chime. Scrolling back through the data, she found a spike in the 1420 MHz range. It continued for seventy-two seconds then stopped.

After checking the area of the sky the dish was observing, she picked up her phone and called her advisor.

“Very funny, Kelly. How much did it cost to rent a plane and fly a transmitter?”

“Huh?” Kelly’s voice was muffled, having been woken in the middle of the night. “Who is this? What is…Ally?”

“Yeah. You know I’ve been interested in the comet hypothesis on the Wow signal and tonight I just happen to get the same signal for the same seventy-two seconds?”

“What?” Kelly cleared her throat. “You know I wouldn’t prank the observatory.”

“Well, this looks an awful lot like the Wow signal. Same narrow band, same time, and…hold on.”

“What is it?”

“It’s starting again.” Ally checked for known air traffic, satellite overflights, any other possible cause. The signal stopped and she logged the time; thirty-six seconds.

“Well?”

“Sorry, Kelly. This one was thirty-six seconds, starting twelve minutes after the first…so 720 seconds…I’ve gotta go.”

“I’m on my way in.” Kelly hung up before Ally could respond.

Ally began to notify other radio telescopes around the globe, looking for verification. Within minutes, she had four others online that had seen the two bursts, one that had seen only the second, and three more coming online.

What she found most odd was that no two of the telescopes were pointed in the same direction. Whatever was making the signal, it seemed to be coming from the entire universe, in every direction at the same time.

As she had guessed, 720 seconds after the last pulse, another came in for eighteen seconds. She agreed with the others she was talking to online; this was not natural. That’s where agreement ended, though.

Ally wasn’t sure what she believed about it. Was it a simple “hello” or trying to encode some mathematical basis like we might do with simple counting or a Fibonacci sequence? Could it be a countdown? To what?

When the next signal came in 720 seconds later, every radio telescope she could reach was online and received the nine second burst. Kelly had entered just as it had started and took over coordination between the observatories.

Ally was glad for that, as it meant that Kelly could handle the call from the Department of Defense, and NORAD. The US wasn’t the only country to scramble their air defenses and air forces.

She imagined the hotlines between nations were burning up with chatter that amounted to, “It isn’t us, is it you?”

The 4.5 second burst was picked up by every radio telescope observatory and thousands of amateur astronomers with a 1420 MHz receiver. Ally found herself leaning toward the countdown version of the hypotheses, as, it seemed, did most of the non-professionals discussing it online as it happened.

Every major country had, by then, fighters in the air. Politicians were live on television trying to calm the populace and assure everyone they were not under attack, while at the same time putting their military on the highest level of alert.

The 2.25 second burst was live on every major network, while pundits gave their own theories on how dangerous or not the aliens would be. Ally heard her name several times on the television that Kelly had turned on. Nothing else they said caught her attention in the same way as the data she was seeing.

When the 1.125 second burst came, it was followed immediately by a voice transmission that began, sentence by sentence, in English, then Mandarin, then Hindi, Spanish, French, Arabic, Bengali, Russian, Portuguese, and Urdu.

“Greetings to the people of Earth. We do not wish conflict. We, the larger Collective of the galaxy wish to extend an invitation. You are invited to send representatives to speak for your world and people to the Collective.

“We have monitored your transmissions, and wish to speak to scientists, linguists, and doctors in addition to any political representatives you choose to send.

“Our science branch would like to extend a personal invitation to Ally Reeser to attend as well.”

----------

Ally leaned back. “I mean, can you imagine how that felt? Not only did aliens contact us, they asked for me?”

The interviewer rolled a tentacle in a gesture of questioning. “I cannot imagine how that felt. What did you do?”

Ally cleared her throat. “I—I uh, acted rashly. I connected the test transmitter and sent a voice message back that said, ‘Pick me up, I’m ready.’”

The interviewer made a nodding gesture. “You were the first, right?”

“I was. Imagine how surprised I was when fighter jets started flying a pattern over the observatory and patched in their communications to the 1420 channel. I didn’t know the military could transmit on that channel, never mind that it’s reserved for radio astronomy.”

----------

“Leuschner Observatory, this is Guard Alpha One. We have contact with ATC and the aliens who wish to land near your location, over.”

“Um, yeah, this is Ally,” she transmitted. “They can, uh, land here, I guess, if there’s room…over?”

“Ally, Alpha One, roger. Be advised, we have clearance to fire at any sign of hostile intent, over.”

“Please don’t,” she said. “Um, over.”

“We have our orders, ma’am. We’ll try to keep our shorts untwisted. Out.”

She didn’t know how to respond to that, so she turned off the test transmitter. Kelly was busy flipping back and forth between channels, all of them showing live the news about the aliens.

The alien ship followed what seemed to Ally like proper ATC communication procedures, getting clearance to land at the observatory. They also communicated with the military aircraft, keeping them apprised of their position as the dropped from 72,000 feet.

When the military aircraft and ATC both said they had nothing on radar, the aliens turned on some sort of device that made them show up. The air traffic controller sounded relieved when their signal showed up, while the ‘Alpha One’ pilot kept a level calm throughout the whole thing.

Ally stepped outside, Kelly following close behind, filming with her phone. The fighters flew overhead before splitting off in opposite directions to make another pass.

Kelly filmed the jets, then turned toward Ally with the camera. “We’re streaming live. Ally, you’re about to meet aliens. Anything to say?”

“Uh, I’m fucking scared. And excited. Oh! My thesis is done, except for one paragraph that feels a little clunky, but at this point, I don’t even care. It’s on the USB stick plugged into my laptop. Just in case I can’t…I don’t….”

“You’ll have to come back for your defense. If anyone can convince the aliens that humans are okay, it’s you.”

“Thanks for your vote of confidence, Dr. Simmons, but I feel like I’m going to throw up.”

“That’s just nerves, or ga—,” Kelly cut off as she swung the camera up to film the descent of the alien ship. The size of a bus, and of a similar shape, it settled down on a shimmering pillar.

The closer it came to the ground, the larger the dust and stones that floated lazily up from the ground, only to fall back when the ship touched down and turned off its engines.

Overhead, the jets were taking turns overflying the location. Kelly kept the camera fixed on the blocky ship. A door opened, moving inward where there had been no visible seam and sliding to the side.

Ally walked toward the ship, then found herself frozen in place. Curiosity kept her from running, and fear kept her from stepping forward, until a ramp extended from the door.

The creatures that walked out looked like a Hollywood invention. Four sturdy tentacles carried a roundish trunk, from which four smaller tentacles extended. They had four obvious eyes set aside and in front of a head that rose from the trunk and could be extended higher or brought almost entirely inside the trunk.

“Hello, Ally. My Earth name is Sarah, and my friend’s Earth name is Jack.”

“Hi, Sarah and uh, Jack.” Ally stood dumbfounded.

Sarah lowered their head nearly inside their body. “I’m sorry that appearance is frightening to you,” they said. “We mean you no harm at all. The atmosphere inside is tailored for you, and free of any microbes that might affect your physiology.”

Kelly was still streaming, and stepped forward to Ally and handed her a cold soda. “Take this and enjoy the ride.” She turned toward the aliens with a slight bow and said, “It was an absolute pleasure to meet you, and I hope we meet again soon.”

Ally boarded the ship followed by the aliens, the door closed, and it lifted off again. It rose so fast that the phone camera could only catch a blur of it. “I hope that’s anti-gravity tech of some sort,” Kelly said, “or Ally’s paste now. That was at least a thirty-gee takeoff.”

----------

Ally chuckled. “Would’ve been paste for sure. I saw the end of Kelly’s livestream from within the ship. I didn’t feel any movement at all, but it did feel like the gravity within the ship was a lot lower than what I was used to.”

She leaned forward again. “As I’m sure everyone watching knows, I was whisked aboard one of your science vessels where Sarah and Jack took me to meet their peers.”

The interviewer raised a tentacle to interrupt. “Your peers, too, correct?”

“Well, I didn’t feel like it at the time. I felt like a kid with no education trying to understand advanced calculus being taught in Mandarin. At least, with all the ‘basics’ of gravity control they were showing me.

“I was floored that the wider galactic scientific community hadn’t even considered the possibility of Hawking radiation and black hole evaporation. When they looked at me every bit as confused as I had just been, I felt a little better about the place of humans among the travelers of the galaxy.”

Ally laughed. “When I finally caught on to what they were trying to explain about gravity, I saw how simple the solution to combining General Relativity and Quantum Field Theory was. Not that it was easy, but it was simple.

“Unlike the short and sweet formulae that Einstein and Shrödinger gave us for General Relativity and QFT respectively, the formula takes half of an A4 sheet when printed large enough to read.

“Faster-than-light travel and gravity control are two things that we long considered to be theoretically possible, but in reality, nothing more than fantasy. In fact, they both play a huge part in human fiction.

“Of the two, though, control over gravity has to be the biggest breakthrough in the galaxy. Need an engine? Not anymore…use gravity. Need a way to accelerate at twenty or thirty gees without killing everyone? Use gravity. Need to fly regardless of atmospheric density or shape of the vessel? Use gravity. My mind was blown.” Ally made a gesture like her head exploding.

“Anyway, that was the point where I decided I needed to move to the Galactic University and do some more studies.”

“Have you returned to Earth since then?” the interviewer asked. “You finished your doctorate.”

“I went to Earth for my oral defense, got my doctorate, then came right back here to the University. I haven’t left in the twelve years since.

“We’re currently working on determining the math behind a negative gravity well strong enough to put a camera inside the event horizon of a supermassive black hole and bring it back again.”

“Do you think you’ll be able to construct such a device?”

Ally laughed. “I’ll leave that to the engineering folks. We’re just trying to figure out if there’s a possible way the math can work without those pesky infinities popping up.”

The interviewer leaned forward and extended a tentacle. “Thanks for your time, Dr. Reeser.”

“Thank you, Jane. Xkrthzgnd, right?”

“Yes,” the interviewer said, “your pronunciation is very good.”

Ally waited until the light on the camera facing her was off before standing to leave, and gave a wave to the interviewer and the crew. Her colleagues were waiting in the hall outside for her, and she was eager to get back to work.

“I’m Xkrthzgnd — Earth name Jane — and this is ‘Galactic Leaders One on One.’ Next cycle we’ll be talking with the musical group My Name is Not a Slur, who have taken their music beyond Earth into the galaxy at large and have integrated the styles of almost every member species of the Collective.”