What the Pattern Said

He spent three days working on the pattern before he told anyone.

This was partly because he wanted to be sure and partly because he already knew what would happen if he told his mother before he was sure. She would listen carefully and nod and say something like let us not get ahead of ourselves and suggest several much more ordinary explanations, all of which would probably be correct and would make him feel foolish.

He did not want to feel foolish. He wanted to be right.

He recorded the signal every night for three nights. It was always there, always in the same frequency, always the same pattern. Short short long short long long short. Gap. Repeat. The gap was always exactly four point three seconds, which was too precise to be accidental.

On the second day he looked up everything he could find about that frequency range and that region of space. There was nothing in his grandfather's notes beyond the original anomaly. There was nothing on the astronomy databases his mother subscribed to. There was a paper published seven years ago by a university department that had briefly monitored the same region and noted nothing of interest.

On the third day he started trying to decode the pattern.

He had read enough about signals and codes to know that the simplest interpretation of short and long pulses was binary, ones and zeros, which was the most basic mathematical language there was. If long was one and short was zero, the sequence was zero zero one zero one one zero.

In binary that was the number forty-six.

He stared at forty-six for a long time. Forty-six was not obviously meaningful. He tried other interpretations. He tried converting it to a letter of some alphabet. He tried treating each group of seven as a separate number. He tried reversing the sequence.

Then he tried something else. He looked at where in Sector Nine the signal was coming from and calculated the distance to the nearest star in that direction. He had to ask the database for help with the calculation.

The nearest star was forty-six light years away.

Nico put his pencil down very carefully on the desk and sat completely still for approximately one minute.

Then he went downstairs and knocked on his mother's office door.

She was at her computer doing accounts, which meant she was in a slightly distracted mood, but she looked up when he came in because something in the way he knocked had apparently communicated that this was not a can I have a biscuit situation.

"I need you to look at something," he said. "I have been recording a signal from Sector Nine for three days and I think it might be important."

His mother took off her reading glasses and looked at him properly. "What kind of signal?"

"A repeating pulse on a fixed frequency," he said. "With a pattern. And I think the pattern is telling us how far away it is."

She was quiet for a moment. He could see her working through the ordinary explanations the same way he had.

"Show me," she said.