Message Management

I had several inspirations for this one. I can't recall all of them.

Message management

Harold Sims woke up in his apartment with a headache, most likely caused by spending too many hours on the computer the previous night.

The alarm continued to beep at him in the little bedroom incessantly until he finally shut it off and then sat in bed, trying to remember what it was he was so intent on doing when he got up today.

"It's my day off. I should be sleeping in but...." he glanced over at his laptop in the corner and saw the image still emblazoned on the screen and remembered.

"Got it"

He got up out of the bed, took a shower and got dressed in some jeans and shirt, coffee and sat down at his desk, eagerly reading the contents of the screen. 

Last week Harold had been given an old file from the archives that an old friend from the university given to him. David Haskins had asked him to meet with him at a bar nearby and to take this old file and see if it can be translated into ...well something intelligible anyway

"Harold, come on...I know that if anyone can solve this, it's you. You're the best hacker and coder, I know"

Harold looked rather dubiously at this old file which had been placed in an old thumb drive, while, holding the glass in his right hand. Then he glanced at his old friend.

" Look it, David, I dabble here and there but that's all. I don't do this sort of cloak and dagger stuff. I just do a job and I game. Pretty much that's it."

"It's not cloak and dagger, buddy. It's just a file that's about 30 years old and it could use some work. "

"Okay so where did you find this and what is it supposed to be?"

David took a long breath and let it out and pushed his round rimmed glasses up to the bridge of girl Love.

"No one knows what it is exactly. When it was first found, several scientists, cryptologists had a crack at this thing. In the end, they all gave up and the file was just forgotten and put away in a closet.

As I understood it, this file made it to our university by accident and it was put away in a closet and forgotten as well."

Harold shook his head at his friend. " That's all very interesting but it still doesn't explain much. Forget the fact that thumb drives didn't even exist 30 years ago, it's still a rather fantastic tale. And you still haven't told me where it originally came from and why you're so gung ho on my help with it."

"SETI"

A long pause floated between them. 

"So your saying that this is old SETI file that had information that no one could understand and you think I might be able to crack this for you"

"Well?"

Harold sighed. He had to admit, he was very curious about this and it would probably be the most exciting thing he would do with his life. He rolled the thumb drive in his fingers for a while and smiled.

"Okay, Dave. I'll give it a shot and I will keep you posted."

That night, Harold went home and started the preliminary work of studying the file itself. He inserted the drive into into his laptop and sat down in his office chair.  

The first part played the SETI logo for a few minutes and then a woman with long dark hair that was worn in a tight bun. She appeared to be giving an introduction to the content.

"I am Dr. Kelly Raymond of SETI. The content of this file is a signal from a quadrant of our galaxy that was previously unknown.  

We received it on September 8, 1975 and we have been trying to understand the message since that time."

She paused a moment and looked down and looked back towards the camera, her eyes seemingly glistening with tears.

"Last year, the powers that be decided to cut off our funding abruptly and our project had to be abandoned. Many of my colleagues were relocated. Some of them haven't even been seen since then and I sometimes wonder if ….. if something had happened to them because of the file. I don't know....

That's all I have right now.

Whoever you are, if you have found this I wish you good luck."

That had been 3 nights ago and he had felt as if he was no closer to answer than she was. It was frustrating

Harold continued to look at the contents of the file itself. It appeared to be an audio file with video content but he had to view the video content separately from the audio. 

The first time he ran through it, after the introduction, the audio was a garbled cacophony of various sounds that seemed to stretch out into a full 10 minutes.

The video was a jumble of black and white pixels that seemed to have no relation to anything

He ran the audio file through several algorithms and used the old equalizer to improve the quality. It was a very long process of extracting sounds from other sounds but it was worth the effort he concluded.

 He thought about trying to find this Dr. Raymond to see if she had any further insight. Unfortunately, in his search, he found that Dr. Raymond had been confined to an institution somewhere in Maryland and had no visitors. Evidently, she would be in no condition to help him. He was on his own.

It was also disturbing to know that the other researchers of the file had disappeared and he wondered if he might be making a mistake trying to decode this file

"Yeah any moment now, the NSA is going come crashing through that door and take the file and then me!". He took a another drink, shook his head and laughed

Today he had something. Today, the file would make sense.

He sat down at his computer and looked at file eagerly and pressed play on the file and low, rumbling voice gave a greeting.

"Humans!"

"This is a warning to you all"

"You have been searching the stars for intelligence beyond your planet.  This must stop immediately for your own good. Do not seek for knowledge beyond your own earth. "

"This message was sent to in a subliminal format so that you would only hear this subconsciously. Should anyone learn the true content of this message, then a signal will be sent to our world and we would have no choice but come a seal your world for the rest of the universe..Your world will be subjugated under our rule."

Harold sat back in his chair and drank his coffee and thought that this message must have been some kind of joke that SETI researchers played on each other...then he looked out his bedroom window and saw massive ships hovering in the sky and the people below scattering in fear.