Alien Message_Alien Romance Read online

  “Put these on,” Tom said, pulling the headphones off of the hook and handing them to her. Becca pulled the chair out from the metal desk and sat, sliding the headphones onto her ears. Tom leaned past her for a moment and flipped a switch on the computer. The screen glowed dark green, and came to life, a line of code appearing and scrolling downwards, and then changing to a blank green background. Tom typed in a command, and there was a slight hiss in the headphones.

  Then, the hiss was gone, and Becca’s mouth fell open when she heard what replaced it; tones, one after the other, and almost musical. They played for a minute, and then two, and Becca realized that a pattern was repeating. She looked up at Tom with wonder on her face.

  “Right?” he asked, as she pulled the headphones off and set them on the hook.

  “How long does it go on?”

  “Half an hour; a minute less actually. There’s a recording in my office, we can listen to it again. I just thought you should hear it for the first time on the actual equipment.”

  “Where was it taken?” Becca asked, meaning in what direction the microphone had been focused. Space was large, but scientists had divided it into easily mapped quadrants and sectors, using letters and numbers to keep it all straight.

  This was a big discovery. Tom didn’t even have to wrack his brains to remember where it had been recorded.

  “H-A-2-11,” he said.

  “I want to hear it again,” she said.

  Tom nodded. “Come on.”

  They hurried out of the larger room, back into the office proper, rushing through the sea of cubicles to his office with the frosted glass. Once inside he opened his laptop as she sat across from him, and he turned the computer so that it more or less faced them both. He played the recording again, loudly at first and then turning it down so they could speak after a few minutes.

  “Did anyone else hear it?” Becca asked. Again, space was big, and there was a chance that another company had been training their microphones on exactly the same spot as Becca’s department had luckily been doing.

  “We don’t know yet. No one has been reaching out to us, and we sure aren’t reaching out either. If anyone else had this, they would want to work it out. Sit on it for a while. This is big, no one will want to jump the gun and be made a fool of.” Something like this, it could get a lot of support. A lot of outside funding. It was a narrow tightrope. Go public too early, and it could turn out to be nothing, and you are ridiculed for seeming like alien-obsessed nerds. Go too late, and you’re the second or third company with the news, and your thunder has been stolen.

  “So ... aliens?” Becca asked. She had to, and to her great relief, Tom didn’t laugh. He looked at her seriously, and he shrugged his shoulders.

  “It could be, right?”

  “I guess so. It’s ... specific. Half an hour of a minute or so long ... what, musical number being played ... it seems like it’s not just random.”

  “Right. It definitely doesn’t seem random.”

  “You’re recording in the same spot?” Becca asked.

  “Of course,” Tom said, and then there was a faint ding from his cell phone and he pulled it from his pocket.

  “Food is here,” he said with a smile, and he stood and left his office.

  The night passed more quickly than Becca could imagine, and suddenly it was nearly ten and she found herself yawning, something which her boss did not miss.

  “I’ve kept you late enough,” he said.

  “No, this is huge. We can work all night.”

  They had been working, both of them agreeing that it was a message, the notes seemed too carefully chosen to be anything else, and they had listened to the recording, first as they ate, and then more seriously, hunched over the desk with pens in their hands and paper before them, scribbling down any sort of cypher which came to mind. Unfortunately, nothing had come from their session. Anything that either of them had written down they had subsequently crossed out.

  “Here, take a recording,” Tom said, sliding a USB stick across to her. “I don’t think I need to mention that this stick needs to stay in your possession. And no one hears it: best friend, mom, grandma, whoever.”

  “Yeah. Got it.”

  Becca took the stick and slid it into her purse. She was about to argue against leaving once again, but she yawned, unable to keep herself from doing so, and she knew it was time to head home. Tom walked out with her, walking her to her car before turning and heading to his, parked much closer to the building in a spot reserved for a manager. Becca was tired, but she was fine to drive. The excitement of hearing the musical tones, which had come from space, was enough to keep her up on the drive, and then for an hour longer after she had climbed into bed.

  Chapter Four

  “Dude. Where the hells were you last night?” Gia asked when Becca came into the kitchen. Gia was at the table, eating a bowl of cereal.

  “Worked late. Didn’t you get my text?”

  “Yeah, I was just trying not to play your mom or anything,’ Gia said with a giggle. “So - you and your sexy boss got it on?”

  Becca grinned. It seemed silly, now, that she had been worried about hooking up with Tom. What had happened was so much more ... interesting.

  “Not quite,” Becca admitted. “It was actually work-related.”

  Gia looked to her friend. “Are you serious?”

  “Yeah,” Becca said, with a shrug of her shoulders. “But it was awesome.”

  “Because he got a little fresh?”

  Becca laughed and shook her head. “No. No freshness. Uh ... look, I’m really not supposed to tell anyone this, and I won’t tell you everything, but something big happened.”

  “At work?”

  “In space.”

  That had Gia’s attention, even though she didn’t quite know what the hell her friend did, everyone was interested in space, weren’t they? It was Saturday, and Becca had been planning on sleeping in, but she was too excited, and she wanted to share her excitement with someone ... anyone ... even though she had been told not to.

  “In space? Like, what, a new planet?”

  “No,” Becca said, pouring herself a bowl of cereal at the counter and then taking it to the table, sitting across from Gia. “Sounds.”

  “Sounds? In space.”

  “In space, from space, who knows,” Becca said.

  “Like, what, an alien? A group of aliens?”

  Becca shrugged, and Gia smiled and slapped her hand on the tabletop. “Shut. Up. Aliens?”

  Becca laughed. “I’m not saying it’s aliens for sure.”

  Gia read between the lines. “But you’re not saying it’s not aliens.”

  “Right,” Becca said. “I’m not saying it’s not. Honestly, I don’t know what it is.”

  “How is this not on the news?”

  “You have to keep it quiet. Seriously. You can’t tell anyone,” Becca said. “I could get fired.”

  Gia laughed. “Who am I going to tell? I don’t know any space nerds. Well, I know one space nerd. You.”

  “I’m just saying,’ Becca said. “Alright? I’m just saying. No one. Can’t even mention it.”

  “Why are you mentioning it?” Gia asked.

  “I had to tell someone!” Becca said, making her friend laugh. “Hey, want to hear it?”

  “Sure,” Gia said with a shrug. She was interested, but surely not as much as Becca had been. Her new roommate stood up from her barely touched bowl of cereal and disappeared into her room, returning with her laptop. She slid a USB stick into it and turned tapped a few keys on the keyboard.

  “It’s a song,’ Gia said, after the tones had played for twenty or so seconds. “Right?”

  “Sounds like one. Kind of,” Becca admitted. “I don’t know. We don’t know.”

  “So everyone at your work knows about this?”

  “No. My boss does, and his boss, and probably anyone important there, but that’s it.”

  “Why did they tell you?�
�� Gia asked, not unkindly, but wondering nonetheless.

  “Tom wanted someone new to hear it. He said they’ve had stuff like this before, which turned out to be nothing.”

  “How in the hell could a song from space turn out to be nothing?”

  “I don’t think they’ve ever had anything quite like this,” Becca said, reaching out and tapping the keyboard, so that the tones fells silent. She shut the laptop and took a few bites of cereal.

  “Wow,” Gia said, sitting back in her chair. “This is insane.”

  “I know,” Becca said.

  “So what are you going to do?” Gia asked.

  “I’m going to figure this out, I guess,” Becca said, and then she grinned. “I’m going to see what this is saying.”

  “You think it’s saying something?”

  “I think there’s a good chance that it is,” Becca said truthfully. “I’m going to listen to it until I know what it is, or until my ears bleed.”

  “Just don’t get it on the sheets, alright?”

  Becca laughed, and her friend got up to clean up her bowl.

  Gia showered and went out to do some grocery shopping, leaving Becca to set up in the living room, sitting back on the couch with a notepad on her lap, and the sounds from space playing once more on her laptop.

  Saturday passed in a haze. Gia left her friend alone for the most part, only reminding her to eat something around six. Other than that small break, Becca listened to the twenty-nine minutes of tones, repeating the same sounds in minute long loops, over and over. She wrote and scribbled, and finally, just after Gia had gone to bed she had a break through. The notes were indeed a message, and Becca was pretty sure she had cracked it.

  It had been basically like a cryptogram when she had listened to the notes and realized that many were different, though some were repeated. She wondered if they were letters, and she had written them out as random letters, making sure to use the same letter for any that had a repeating sound. From there it was trial and error. There were tones which didn’t quite fit, harsh blasts of crackly almost static, and Becca figured those for spaces between words, and so it had begun. The sentence started with just one letter, either I or A, since those were the most common single letter words in the English language.

  Of course, it was certainly a wild thought that the beeping from space could be representative of the English language, but it was all Becca had to go on, so she went with it. As late night turned to early morning, she was glad she had. She looked down at her notebook, where after pages and pages of mistakes, she had a readable sentence.

  I AM IN NEED OF ASSISTANCE PLEASE HELP ME

  Becca read the sentence over and over, her heart pounding within her chest. She had to tell Tom.

  But, she had no way of reaching him. There was a chance he would be at the office over the weekend, working on figuring out the hidden code to the message from space, but it was just as likely that he had been working from home, the same as her. She could wait for Monday. She would force herself. And really, she needed sleep. She gathered her things and vacated her post in the living room, retiring to her room and somehow managing to sleep as soon as she laid down, despite the excitement which she was sure would have kept her awake.

  When she woke just before lunch the sound was in her mind. It was Sunday. She only had to get through one day and then she could compare notes with her boss. She was excited, and needed to busy herself, or else she was sure she would go crazy.

  A strange thought came to her after lunch, as she was sitting with Gia, trying to pay attention to whatever her friend was saying. She smiled and shook her head when there was a break in the conversation.

  “Gia, this ... sound ... it has me thinking. Excuse me.”

  With that she was gone, rushing to her room. She had always been a tinkerer, and she began to tinker. She had been a bright kid, taking things apart to see how they worked, and then putting them back together, often in a way which made them work even better than they had. It didn’t take much time for Becca to make what she needed, and then she was climbing on the roof of the house she now shared with Gia right at three in the afternoon.

  “I’m not even going to ask,” Gia said, following her outside and watching her shimmy up the water spout.

  “We’re in ‘I-really-can’t-tell-you territory,” Becca said with a hint of apology on her face.

  “So is it aliens?”

  “I don’t know, but I really shouldn’t have told you anything.”

  Gia could tell by her friends face that she wouldn’t budge, and so she shrugged her shoulders. “You’re the science super spy,” she said with a grin, and went back in, leaving Becca to pull the backpack she had worn outside, knowing she needed her hands to climb, off of her shoulders and unzipping it quickly.

  Becca pulled her laptop from her bag and then a small circular item. It was a homemade satellite dish. A wire ending in an HDMI connector dangled from it, and she plugged it into her computer. From there she set it on the roof, typing in coordinates on her keypad. The dish whirred and hummed, only the size of a cantaloupe, and then moved.

  Immediately, the strange tone began to play through her laptop speakers. She recognized it easily, knew that it had not changed. The only difference between this and the one she had spent all of yesterday listening to was that this one was live. Becca hesitated just for a moment, and then she began to type again. She had rigged up a quick program to convert her words into the tones, the same ones the original message had used for each different letter. Of course, the sentence hadn’t used every letter in the alphabet, so any unused letters would be given new tones, and she expected whoever, or whatever, she was communicating would have to decipher the meaning, the same way she had.

  She typed slowly; not wanting to make any mistakes, for the tone was transmitted as soon as she pressed a key.

  I AM HERE.

  Becca bit her lip and waited, hoping against hope that a new message would play. But long seconds stretched into minutes, and those became an hour, and then two, and Becca climbed down off of the roof. She went to her room and unpacked the equipment from her backpack, setting the dish on her windowsill and plugging it once more into her laptop. Then, she tried to get on with her day, though she checked her computer every half hour or so, and went to bed disappointed.

  Chapter Five

  Becca woke to a quiet beeping, pleasant and melodic-like. She blinked sleep from her eyes and sat up looking over to her laptop, which sat on the small table beside her bed. Her eyes widened despite the glare of the screen in the otherwise dark room.

  A reply.

  She looked over at the screen. She had set up the same program which converted her keystrokes into tones, to convert the tones into keystrokes, or rather letters. A message was typing out slowly onto her screen.

  IS THIS EARTH

  Becca waited a moment to make sure nothing else was coming, but then the same tones came once more and the same question was listed again on her screen. She answered.

  YES

  She waited. This time, it didn’t take hours. She wondered how close whoever she was talking to was. It seemed as though they were now speaking without delay, as though she was just texting a friend who lived in the same neighborhood.

  THANK YOU I REQUIRE ASSISTANCE

  She typed.

  WHAT KIND OF ASSISTANCE

  I AM THE LAST OF MY KIND I AM RUNNING OUT OF TIME

  Becca’s breath caught in her chest. The last of its kind? An alien. This could all be some sort of ridiculous prank, Becca knew, but she shoved that thought to the back of her mind. She glanced at the clock in the corner of her screen. It was two-thirty-four in the morning. She didn’t feel tired.

  WHO ARE YOU

  As she waited, she realized she was shaking, but not in a frightened way, but out of pure excitement. She was conversing with an alien. Somehow, she knew it was true. This was no prank. This was real; she could feel it inside her. She was as sure of it as sh
e was sure of anything.

  IN YOUR LANGUAGE YOU MAY CALL ME KEY YOU CANNOT SPEAK MY LANGUAGE

  Becca typed furiously now, ignoring the chance for mistakes, sure she would type perfectly. There was too much riding on this not to. She didn’t want to confuse Key.

  HOW DO YOU KNOW ENGLISH

  A moment, and then the tones came through, and the words appeared on her screen.

  WE KNOW ALL ABOUT EARTH WE HAVE BEEN WATCHING FOR A LONG TIME NOW MY HOME IS GONE AND I AM THE LAST

  Becca felt as though she was in a daze. She was speaking with an alien, one who was the last of their kind. A thought came quickly to her.

  HAS ANYONE ELSE CONTACTED YOU

  A moment, and then:

  NO WHO ARE YOU

  Becca typed her name.

  BECCA

  The pauses were no so slight, the young woman felt sure the alien was close.

  CAN YOU ASSIST ME

  Becca typed.

  WHAT DO YOU NEED

  The answer came more quickly than any other had, so far.

  BRING ME TO YOU

  Becca was confused. Bring him to her?

  HOW

  A slight pause. Then:

  WORM HOLE IT IS HOW WE ARE TALKING BUT THIS IS TO UNSTABLE FOR ME TO TRAVEL THROUGH

  Becca took a moment to process what Key had said. A wormhole? That explained how her messages were getting to them so quickly, though it meant they were further away than she had thought. She realized that the alien needed a wormhole to bring them to Earth, and she had no way of doing that. She couldn’t create a wormhole. No one on Earth could. They were hundreds, if not thousands of years from that sort of technology.

  WHY DO YOU NEED TO COME HERE

  They replied quickly:

  MY PLANET IS GONE EARTH IS ONLY ONE I CAN LIVE ON

  She understood immediately. Key (what a strange name, though she remembered that it was not their actual name) was telling her that their planet had somehow been destroyed, and that Earth was the only planet they knew of with an atmosphere that they could exist in. It was like something out of a sci-fi movie.