The Problem of Life
You never know what you'll find when you go looking in the stars
Ariana Reyes checked the telemetry data once, twice, three times, and each time it came out the same. It can’t be, she thought. I must’ve missed something. She wasn’t the type that enjoyed second opinions, but this was too big to risk an error. This could change the course of humanity forever.
With a grimace, she unclipped her tablet from its stand and floated across the space station’s observatory deck over to Arjun’s station where he was comparing data from the Janksy Very Large Array in New Mexico and the Really Fucking Big, Probably TOO Big, Absolutely Enormous Orbital Array located right there on the station. He looked up as Ariana floated near and saw in her sparkling eyes all the excitement and terror she was trying to repress beneath her calm, professional exterior.
She pulled up a readout of her data on Arjun’s holoprojector and the two looked at it together. The data concerned a small star 37.84552 lightyears from Earth called J153259.96-0039441, which Ariana had nicknamed “Winky” because of the unusual but uniform way it seemed to expand and contract. That “winking” was the reason she and Arjun had been studying it for several months.
“Look at this,” she said, and projected a timeline that mapped Winky’s changes. “Tell me you don’t see it.”
“Holy shit,” Arjun said. “Those intervals are a near match for the Huston-Wright model.”
“Are you sure?” she asked. “Like, really sure?”
“Pretty sure,” he said, and tapped around a bit on his workstation. More numbers appeared on the screen, plotted against the timeline of Winky’s expansions and contractions. “Look what happens when we map it against that abnormal radiation we’ve been observing.” The lines on the graph were nearly identical. “I think it’s pretty obvious what we’re looking at here.”
“A Dyson sphere,” Ariana said in almost a whisper. “Which means…”
“You just discovered intelligent life.”
Ariana looked away from the projection and out the station’s window to the vast field of stars, so many in their millions, billions, trillions, each its own myriad of possibilities that would never be known — except for this one star, 38 lightyears away whose secret she had just unlocked. And this is what she said:
“God-son-of-a-bitch-dammit.”
“I know, right?” Arjun said, shaking his head.
“Check it again,” she said.
“It’s just going to come out the same.”
“I can’t fucking believe this,” she said and curled up into the fetal position, floating in zero gravity. She spun in a tight ball for a few rotations before speaking again. “The five other extraterrestrial species we’ve made contact with are enough of a pain in the ass already.”
“The Caltrobions are just the worst,” Arjun said. “Absolute wankers.”
“You ever tried talking to a Bofferrish?” Ariana asked. “It’s hard to believe a bunch of intelligent lizards could be so boring.”
“And racist.”
“See? This is why the AIs turned themselves off,” she said. “They figured out a long time ago that the universe is only full of jerks, so what’s the point in continuing to exist?”
“It’s weird they all came to that conclusion,” Arjun said.
“Is it?” She looked away from the window, back to the projection, and sighed. Winky winked back at her like a total asshole. “What are we going to do?”
“We’ve got to tell Commander Tusk,” Arjun said.
“Or…” she said, raising an eyebrow. “We could just pretend we didn’t see anything.”
Arjun shook his head. “If they check the logs, we’ll be in huge trouble.”
“Fuck me,” Ariana said.
“You know I’m right.”
“Okay, fine, but you have to be the one to tell him.”
“Pshhh, you wish,” he said. “They always name the expeditionary mission after the civilization’s discoverer and everyone always gets killed on those things. You think I want my name on that disaster?” He shot her a wry smile. “And then there’s all the press junkets. New species discoveries are better than a decade’s worth of scandals. You’ll be all over the news web for months. Years, maybe.”
“Fuck me,” she said again.
Commander Tusk’s face was so red Ariana thought it might catch fire but that was because he was finishing a set in his zero-gravity squat rack. But also it was because of the news about Winky. “Tell me you’re fucking with me,” he said, as he unbuckled himself from the rack. “Tell me you’re jerking my dick like six-armed Trogglishi whore at a Martian fuel station.”
“We are not jerking your dick, sir,” Ariana said.
“We wish we were,” Arjun added.
“Jesus-Plasma-Shitting-Christ,” Tusk said and grabbed Ariana’s data tablet. He skimmed her professional summary and scowled. “A Dyson sphere. That’s when you build a big-ass shell around a star, right?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Fucking hell.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You haven’t filed this in the central data bank yet, have you?”
“No, sir,” Ariana said. “We thought we should tell you first before the information becomes more…permanent.”
“Good. Yes. Excellent,” Tusk said. “You did the right thing.” He floated over to his locker and began putting his uniform back on. “This is real inconvenient timing,” he said. “I was just about to break my personal record for split squat.”
“Does it count if it’s in Zero G?” Arjun asked under his breath, but Ariana elbowed him in the side causing him to float helplessly across Tusk’s office until bumping into the feeding station.
“We thought the timing was inconvenient too, sir,” Ariana said. “In fact, we ran a few simulations and concluded there won’t ever be a convenient time to make this information public, so there’s really no need to ever speak of it again.”
“Very funny,” Tusk said as he finished zipping up his tunic. “I’ll summon the Council to meet at 0500. Get your report ready.”
“Surely you don’t need us there,” Ariana said. “We’re just humble science officers and the report pretty much speaks for itself. There’s probably no need to even mention our involvement at all.”
“It’s not a request,” Tusk said, and slicked his thinning hair back in the mirror. “The Council’s going to have all kinds of questions I can’t answer.” He turned from the mirror to look at both of them. “And besides, we need to contain this information and anyone who knows about it. Understand?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good. Then I’ll see you in Council Chambers, 0500 sharp.” He floated over to his workstation and tapped a button that opened the door to the room. “Now get out of my office.”
Ariana sat at the far end of the huge oak table in the Council Chamber sipping a cup of tepid coffee. The Chamber was located in the rotary section of the station, producing the effect of gravity, which Ariana rarely got to experience up in the observatory deck. Normally, she would’ve relished the experience — simulated gravity was maintained mostly for the comfort of short-term visitors from Earth, whereas the permanent crew was expected to get used to zero gravity — but today was not a normal day.
Arjun sat next to her, making notes on his tablet to remind himself who everyone in the room was. The Council represented the station’s elite and the small handful of Earth-dwellers who were privy to the station’s activities — ambassadors, trade representatives, liaisons from various scientific agencies — and Arjun wanted to make a good impression.
“I’m trying to get transferred out of here,” he told Ariana.
“After today, you’ll be lucky if they don’t revoke your passport,” she said.
She recognized a few of the faces across the table like the Earth President’s Envoy, the station’s Chief Extraterrestrial Linguist, and of course, Commander Tusk but the rest were strangers to her. She tried to sink into her chair so that no one would notice her but curious eyes darted towards her and Arjun nonetheless and hushed comments were made about their lowly presence in this vaulted space.
Commander Tusk shouted for everyone to shut the fuck up and directed their attention to Ariana. “Let’s get this over with,” he said. “As you all know, intelligent life was confirmed last night in the J15…something something whatever system. Ms. Reyes has the particulars.”
Ariana stood up, shivering with apprehension. “Uh…yes…um,” she stammered and began a holo projection of various graphs and figures, which she’d intentionally designed to be as confusing as possible in hopes the Council would get bored and forget the whole thing. “The initial spectral analysis seems to suggest a Dyson sphere but I’d like to stress that we’re still early in our research. We still need to study gravitational lensing and run a full scale — "
“A Dyson sphere would indicate a highly advanced civilization, would it not?” the Earth President’s Envoy interrupted, her eyes boring into Ariana.
“Um…yes,” Ariana said. “As advanced as we are. Probably more.”
“So, a bunch of assholes, then,” the Envoy said.
“Uh…we can’t know for sure at this point,” Ariana replied.
“They always are,” the Envoy said. “They’ll probably have all kinds of opinions about everything humanity is doing wrong and how they’d do it differently if they were us.” She seethed. “It’s terrible optics for an incumbent administration and we’ve got elections next year.”
The representative from the United Commerce Union nodded in agreement. “And let’s not forget that every advanced species we’ve met so far has been a huge dick about trade,” he said. “We’ll have to re-map all the trade routes and introduce new currencies into the interplanetary exchange — and that’s assuming they’re not a bunch of isolationist cheapskates like the Bofferrish.” He shot a sympathetic look to the President’s Envoy. “There’s going to be a recession for sure.”
“Maybe if we send out probes we can covertly pick up their communications chatter and figure out their disposition towards such topics,” the Envoy said. “Assuming we can even figure out their language.”
“Oh, no,” the Chief Linguist said. “Nuh-huh. Nope. You’re not going to pin this on my team. It took us ten years to crack the Grun language, and it drove half my staff insane. I mean literally insane. Their equivalent for ‘hello’ is five minutes of searing, mind-shattering pain, and it’s their custom to say it at the beginning of every sentence.” She removed her glasses and rubbed her eyes in frustration. “We’re still settling all the workplace injury lawsuits.”
“Well, we’ve got to do something,” Commander Tusk said, “and we’re not leaving this room until we’ve got a gameplan.”
Across the table, a voice rang out. “We must invade at once!” Everyone turned to look at an unfamiliar man in an expensive, designer tunic who nobody had seen enter the room. “Act now. Don’t delay! You can’t put a price on the element of surprise. Believe me, we’ve tried!” The man pointed to the embroidered logo on his tunic, which read I.D.S.I., an acronym for Interplanetary Defense Systems Incorporated, a weapons manufacturing conglomerate.
“How the hell did he get in here?” Tusk shot an angry glare at his assistant, who was standing next to the mysterious man.
“Sorry, Sir,” the assistant said, and fumbled with his tablet. “It’s one of those pop-up holo ads. We’ll just have to wait a few seconds until we can skip it.”
“We have a number of reasonably-priced packages tailor-made for the needs of your government, rebellious faction, or apocalyptic death cult,” the holographic sales rep continued. “Our factories are standing by, ready to go into production immediately upon down payment — ”
The assistant tapped something on his screen and the sales rep winked out of existence.
“I get that one all the time,” the President’s Envoy said.
Commander Tusk stroked his chin. “Still, maybe that hologram is onto something.” He turned to face Ariana. “Dyson spheres are a pretty serious investment of a civilization’s resources, correct?”
“In theory, sir,” Ariana said, “but we’ve never actually observed one to know for certain.”
Arjun jumped in. “However, the projected expense of a Dyson sphere is the main reason humanity hasn’t attempted one yet. Ever since the discovery of faster-than-light travel, we’ve found it’s much more cost effective to maintain colonies on nearby planets and asteroids rather than build a single megastructure.”
“Decentralization is more strategically advisable too,” the President’s Envoy said. “Even if Earth was destroyed by an invading force, we’d still have sizable operations on Mars, Ganymede, and Callisto, not to mention the expeditionary force making headway in Proxima Centauri. Relying on a Dyson sphere would make us much more vulnerable.”
“That’s exactly my point,” Tusk said. “This unknown civilization seems to have put all its eggs in Dyson’s basket, so one quick attack could finish them off before they even know what hit them.”
“And then we wouldn’t have to bother learning anything about them,” the Chief Linguist said with glee. “Now you’re speaking my language.”
“Wait, what?” Ariana said but she’d become uninteresting to the Council.
“Would the President go for something like that?” Tusk asked the Envoy.
“Oh, hell yes,” the Envoy said. “Nobody votes out a wartime president. All we have to do is pretend we intercepted a hostile transmission from this new civilization threatening imminent attack. I’ll leak it to our contacts in the press. They’ll eat that shit up.”
“My team can fabricate a convincing transmission for the soundbite,” the Chief Linguist said. “We’ll make their alien language really scary-sounding. Lots of guttural stuff. Maybe throw in some Old German.”
“Hold on, everyone,” Ariana shouted, bringing the room to silence. Every head turned to glare at her. “Setting aside that we’re talking about a heinous act of genocide, it’s also possible this new civilization is so advanced that they’d be able to repel our attack and retaliate. If they’re smart enough to build a Dyson sphere, who knows what else they can do?”
“So what do you suggest?” the President’s Envoy asked.
“Do nothing. Pretend we never saw anything and continue like we have for our entire existence up until now, when we didn’t even know this new species existed,” Ariana said. “They haven’t tried to contact us even though they probably could, so maybe they’re not interested. Why bother them now?”
The room murmured in contemplation.
“It’s certainly not as much fun as a surprise attack,” Tusk said. Others around the room nodded in agreement.
“But the whole sector could get bogged down in a long and costly war,” Ariana said.
“Which would stimulate the fuck out of the economy,” the rep from the Commerce Union said and high-fived the President’s Envoy.
“My IDSI stock is going to go through the roof,” the Chief Linguist said.
“Oh! I should buy some,” the President’s Envoy said.
“Let’s all buy some!” said the Commerce Union rep. “Somebody turn that sales hologram back on.”
The room once again erupted in excited discussion.
Ariana slumped back in her chair next to Arjun. “I told you we should’ve kept this all a secret,” she said.
Arjun smiled. “No way! This is going to be awesome for our careers. All the heavy hitters in this room know who we are now. We can get any assignment we want.” He looked over to the other side of the conference table, where several members of the Council were gathered around the reactivated holo projection of the IDSI weapons rep. “I’m going over there to offer my professional opinion as a Dyson sphere expert.”
“But you’re not a Dyson sphere expert.”
“They don’t know that,” Arjun said and stood up. “You coming?”
He didn’t wait for her response. As the murmur of frantic conversation and laughter grew louder, Ariana stood up from her chair and walked over to the window to look once again at the endless expanse of stars, one of which would be a little brighter in a few months’ time once the bombardment being planned in this very room got underway. She sighed and looked to the corner of the window and saw the interior of the conference room reflecting back at her. It was full of smiling, joyful figures, laughing and shaking hands.
“I guess the AIs were right,” she said to herself. “The universe is full of assholes.”
THE END